Revelation
There’s one way to get rich in this universe, and that is to sell stories. Not your book variety. Not movies. No, those are outdated, and any common peddler can do that. No, you are better than that. You are good at selling stories and altering the needs of your customers. It’s your silver tongue. The way you let your words drop out. And it is in how you posture yourself that people think you know what you are saying.
It started small. You called it Revelation. You got the Galactic Bureau to approve it. You said it came from the lab. You weren’t lying. It did, but it was more than that. It was an alien egg you stumbled across when you enlisted in the Galaxy Corps, and you watched it take the minds of your fellow soldiers. You knew instantly what it could be used for, and Revelation was born.
Now you own the biggest dream corporation in the entire universe. The Galactic Bureau and others come to you when they want a way into the hearts and minds of men. You can do that through the altered egg. You can tune people’s wavelengths while they dream into almost anything you want. You have done that. They think they are their own ideas, wishes, wants, and thoughts, but they aren’t. They are your suggestions, and your silver tongue is good at it. There are still some kinks to be worked out. You can quite make them obedient. The effect of Revelation wore off once enough time had passed after taking it. So you need to be careful. Make the stories something to come back to.
You marvel at the empire you have built. You are glad that you no longer have to worry about money. No one remembers where you came from. That you are just a common kid from backyard Earth. You are great. They love you because you tell them all they want to hear.
Yet, there is an emptiness you can’t quite put a finger on. You watch people on Revelation, even those close to you—those who should know better—and you wonder if their dream world is better than yours. You have never taken an egg. You’ve never seen the need for it, but now the temptation is there as you sit alone in your office. You know most of your life is behind you. You have funded every project on immortality, but there’s been no breakthrough. All there are are your words and the stories you made up, and you want to believe them.
You put the original egg inside your mouth. The ones you saw your fellow soldiers take and lose their minds. You speak to yourself slowly, telling about the world where you are important, valued, loved, connected. The egg melts in your mouth. The worms inside it latch onto your tongue, and you feel a sharp pain as they hook onto your flesh. The world shifts. The walls are melting around you. Your office is no longer there in the most expensive high-rise in the known universe. Only morphed colors coil as you spin around in nothingness.
Then everything stops. You see yourself coming toward you. The version of you who never created Revelation. His lines are softer. His lines are around his eyes and mouth. He has a smile on his face. You cannot remember the last time you smiled. When he speaks, your heart melts. His voice has a softness to it. Not the command you always carry around, so uncertainty yields to your will; so you don’t have to fear what is behind the next corner.
“We had it good, didn’t we?” you say. Not you, who knows nothing but command and power.
You saw in his eyes all the soldiers you let die when you experimented with the eggs. But he never did. He helped them instead. Used his soothing tone to help them through the alien dreams they were having. You see in his eyes how he has not lost touch with them, how they still eat together every month.
“No, we didn’t,” you say. It’s all a lie. It never happened. You were never that man. You were always the alien who never smiled or laughed. The worms inside your head try to lie to you.
“You are not real,” you say.
The other version of you doesn’t argue back. He knows, as you do, that arguing gets you nowhere. He gently touches you, and you recoil. The skin under his hand ripples, and you watch as black worms shoot out from under your skin. They hook onto his hand, pulling the two of you together. The other version of you remains calm while you scream.
“I’m a dream you wished to be,” he says.
And Revelation is gone. The room stops coiling, and you sit in the darkness as the automatic lights go off. You taste the rotten, sour taste of the original Revelation inside your mouth, your test groups stated there to be. Only the taste and the darkness remain, and the soldiers and the man you could have been are gone. When you die, all that you became becomes a carcass to be devoured, and no tears to be shed.
—
I wanted a different sort of ending, maybe something more macabre, but it didn’t come. I didn’t want to push myself to go past the sorrowful. I didn’t have an aliens-bursting-out-of-his-stomach kind of ending in mind. No, more like the destruction of his body as he dissolves because of the alien egg, but it didn’t come.
What I got today was a lyrical science fiction story about rags-to-riches done in the second person. As I wrote, I kept hearing Ren’s “Money Ties.”
Thank you for reading! Have a day of connections, and see you tomorrow ❤
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