by Christopher Barr
I had a dream where I was
underwater; it was milky and shady in spots. My breathing or lack thereof
seemed to be not a problem. I was swimming barefoot in blue jeans and a white
t-shirt under this massive object above me that was blocking the sun from lighting
the water. As I approached this thing it was big like a whale floating,
but upon a closer inspection, to my dismay and disbelief, it was a brain, a
human brain, the size of a blue whale - just floating there.
After recovering from the shock
of what I was looking at, I found myself quickly shifting to asking the
question why. Why was I there swimming around in the water and why was there
a massive human brain there too? I swam along the right hemisphere of the
brain as thoughts of the vastness of creativity and the art that it can produce
when channeled properly. I was swimming by the area of the brain where
imagination is ignited. I thought of my university philosophy professor
talking about the brain-in-a-vat, instantly thinking, was I in the vat with the
brain? Was it really that huge or was I somehow really this small?
I swam over to the left
hemisphere to ascertain some logic and mathematical reasoning for such a
find. This brain was not connected to anything, it’s just floating with
no skull to protect its fragile fleshy surface from the worldly elements and it
had no body or nervous system to support it. Water is a conductor I
thought, electrical pulses travel through water, so what if the water was the
relaying system for the brain to give its orders? That’s preposterous
because biology has no record of such an organism. But that doesn’t mean
such an organism still can’t exist outside the purview of biology.
At the Frontal Lobe I stared at
its mass, it started to shiver or vibrate as if suddenly becoming cold or
possibly excited for some reason. I
reached out and touched it, calmly rubbing its jelly-like skin. The shivering stopped up until I let go, then
it started to shiver again while backing away from me. I swam down and under it passing the
Pituitary Gland when I noticed small fish all swimming around the Medulla
Oblongata, the brainstem severed three feet down from the Pons. The brain stopped shivering as I floated
underneath the Cerebellum. I was
thinking about how oddly bizarre this all was but I was also surprisingly not
as shocked as I imagined I should be.
There was sudden transparency
while looking up at the brain. I was
able to see through the outer flesh and view the Limbic System, with the
Hippocampus and the Hypothalamus easily visible. How was I able to do this and to what
purpose?
Then I woke up, strapped to a
table; thinking was I even awake because this place felt equally
bizarre. A shaded creature approached me
and inserted a black needle into my arm.
I looked at its figure, its shape and was a bit mystified. It had arms, a face, and eyes, it had skin and
fingers but yet it wasn’t human. I don’t
know if I was experiencing some form of Aphasia or was I still dreaming. Telling the difference appeared to be troublesome
because unlike the water with the massive floating brain, this all seemed
oddly…real.
I looked down at my body and noticed
that I was strapped to the table but not by straps because straps don’t
pulsate. The more I focused on whatever
was holding me to the table, the more I could feel that it was rough skin on
mine, a scaly skin, a cold skin. I tried
to lift my right hand when a painful feeling of a hundred needles was piercing
my skin. When I stopped pulling and
relaxed my hand the pain and needles went away.
What was happening to me and what
was I doing there, strapped to this table?
The creature walked over to a number of other shaded figures. I could hear clicks and slurs, was that a
language or was that a machine I was hearing?
Looking around the room I couldn’t see much, there was a skylight so I
could see that it was night because the stars were out. To my left were machines of some sort, they
sat upon one another but weren’t actually touching like one would expect, they
looked as if a magnetic field existed between them and kept them from
touching. The floor was liquid and
little beads of light traveled around it like traffic and often would travel
up and into the bodies of the creatures.
Was it some kind of internetworking system where information was moving
around like microscopic cells would or was it an energy system that was passing
on nutrients to these creatures?
I looked down and the needle in
my arm retracted into a device and then folded up into the ceiling. Three creatures came over and surrounded me;
they all placed their hands on my stomach and looked at me, staring. My mind felt like I was being hit with
powerful waves of hot water smashing against its shores. I thought to myself,
what do you want with me? Because I
wasn’t alone in there as I always was in the past. My thoughts always suffered in solitude but
not today. The smashing waves suddenly
stopped as the air in my mind was filled with silence. Within the calm, I felt language, the very
communication device we use to speak but not in the form on a page, or spoken
but rather in the ideas that inspire one to speak them in the first place. The genesis of thought that is manufactured
in the mind into an utterance that is spoken out or a word written down, there
is this nucleus that manifests itself within the mind that becomes what defines
us, it creates a signature or stamp of uniqueness that becomes thoughts with
which recall memories and forecast movement with ideas and beliefs.
This is what they wanted and I
don’t know why or certainly can’t use language to explain why that is. They want my unique code, religious believers
might call it a soul, but men of science call it by its name, consciousness. They want my brain's operating system, this is
why they haven’t killed me, this is why I’m here, I’m here as an experiment on
separation. Can the mind and body
exist…apart? The unconscious,
subconscious and conscious mind must coexist within the Homo sapiens
organism. Separation is not possible;
separation is death for one cannot live without the other.
Like the massive brain in water,
I am perplexed at what is happening but I’m curious, why is this happening and
to what end? What can be done with a
harvested conscious mind? I have to
deduce that they have a purpose for what they are doing, they have me strapped
to a table in a room, trying to figure out how to get my mind out of my brain
without killing me because they must know that if I die my mind dies with me.
These beings are clearly not
religious because for centuries people have believed that once the body dies
the soul leaves it and goes to heaven.
If this were true they could conceivably kill me and somehow, with their
advanced technology bottle my soul, my mind at the moment of my death. I can’t explain it but I can feel they have
no interest in my body or brain, whether it lives or dies. They just want the essence within it, they
want my complete identity, my past present, and future which leads me to wonder
if they are medical doctors, wanting to understand the answers to life or they
might be psychologists of some sort that want to understand why we do what we
do, why we are who we are. As they connect
to my mind I am able to extract shadows of them in my thoughts moving around, I
can feel them but that feeling is foreign to my thought processing so it is
fragmented at best.
The mind is a maze but it isn’t
digitized, it’s something else, something more.
It’s not a soul that goes to heaven when the body dies nor is it
something that can be successfully uploaded into a computer in spite of the
many scientific attempts. It is a system
of biology, a system of nature that serves as a weapon for my particular
species. A weapon against all predators and
unfortunately for our planet as well, so with that, I suppose that the great weapon
of mass destruction is the human mind and these things want it.
Is it the hardware of it that
they want because I can’t imagine they’d want the software portion, I’m no
one? I didn’t do anything with my life
thus far, for the most part, if I had to be honest, I sat around and dreamt of
the future and missed most of the present.
There are men of great genius that would serve far better subjects than
a university drop out. Why aren’t they
here on this table and why aren’t I back in my New York apartment dreaming of
being someone special, someone famous, someone important. Maybe this is important and maybe this is
what I’m meant to do if we are actually meant to do anything. This could be my great moment because they
chose me and not the genius with all the answers. Maybe I am important.
The creatures press harder
against my chest and stomach as I see the walls around me collapse into a
liquid form and fall to the floor. I can
see me to my left, no that’s me to my right, I look down toward my feet and see
a row of people on tables just like mine.
I then look to the sky and I see a dome cover reflecting millions of
bodies on tables. I see them all as dots
and as individuals at the same time.
Blue lights appear over everyone’s head, they’re doing it right now, my
nose bleeds and the blood drips up. If
the laws of gravity apply wherever I am, this evidence leads me to believe I’m
in fact upside down. I’ve been this way
the whole time but it certainly didn’t feel like I was.
I’m skateboarding down a steep
hill in Virginia……
I’m slapped in the face by my
mother……….
I’m tasting cotton candy for the
first time and I hate it because it feels weird in my mouth…….
I looked up and could see the light
spill into a vase thinking, is that me?
Is that what I amount to? Off in
the distance I can now see the Earth on fire; I’m on a space ship, floating by
the moon as my home burns.
I love the feel of grass in the
summer….if I’m not conscious then what am I?
What is happening to me… I want to go….
The Earth was attacked by an
unknown Alien life form at 21 hundred hours eastern standard time, April 20th
2034. The attacks began with the Chinese
city of Wenquan and then La Rinconada in Peru and the Bolivian city of Potosi and
then the Ecuadorian city of Quito, all these cities are among the highest in
altitude in the world. The attacks ended
four days later, spanning the globe, at Beijing, China, a city of one of the
lowest in altitude.
The light above my brow is so
bright, this is not the afterlife. This
is immediate in its….ectoplasm………………….
I’m disappearing……I’m gon……
3.1415926535….89..793………… … .. .
Friday, 28 February 2014
Sunday, 23 February 2014
Zero Point
by Christopher Barr
The Japanese soldiers picked me up and off the beach
during that summer in 1944. I had been shot twice the day before while I
and the Allied Forces attempted to advance upon the field. I suppose I
understand why they kept me alive as their prisoner. I know they wanted
intelligence on invasion planning. I was put on a battleship with a
number of other guys and taken to Japan to a sadistic camp 4 miles north of
Nagasaki. There, I was beaten repeatedly for information with sticks and
rifle butts. I knew little to no Japanese so when they ordered answers to
their questions, all I heard was gibberish, so they beat me more. These
solders saw all us prisoners as shameful for being captured alive in
combat. The warrior spirit of the Japanese field army code, states that
the individual if defeated must calmly face death while in battle and to those
that disobeyed orders would be killed by the Japanese sword, a symbol of wisdom
and perseverance to the Japanese people and an honour to die by.
The camp was surrounded by eight-foot high barbwire
fences. They kept most of us cramped in long wooden cells filled with
lice, fleas, parasites, bedbugs and flies. Sometimes some of us would be
put in bamboo fortified cells outside and half underwater, where those that
stayed there used the bathroom and ate right where they slept, we didn’t have
to deal with the bed-bugs there but the flies swarmed to the point that it was
impossible to not breathe them in with every breath. Because being half
underwater, sleeping became hard to do, which means most of us barely slept.
On a daily basis they’d give us scraps of rice and would later ask questions
most of us never understood, and then they would beat us. Every so often
six prisoners where brought out for all to see, bound, gagged and blindfolded,
and with many watching, their heads were cut off with samurai swords.
Their bodies were dragged to a pit by other prisoners where they were burned
and in some cases eaten by younger Japanese soldiers.
The savage beatings became a daily ritual that I
actually started getting used to, not to say they became enjoyable in anyway
but they became routine, that my body was so numb from the last beating that it
could no longer feel pain. What I didn’t get use to was when the other
men were tortured and in some cases to death. Once a young man was pulled
out of one of the housing units and four Japanese soldiers performed a
vivisection on him, right there on the dirt and with no anesthesia.
Others would be tied upside down to determine how long it would take them to
choke to death.
Operation Meetinghouse got underway as I, along with
over a hundred other guys remained prisoners of war. The firebombing by
the B-29’s leveled the city of Tokyo in the biggest air raid to ever be
executed by the will of man. Some of us were worried that if these
soldiers don’t kill us in here then the US bombs might. My left arm was
broken and the lower right side of my face was slashed with barbwire by a guard
during that time, as well as 27 guys lost their lives in a fit of rage the
Japanese held over the bombing of their homeland.
When times were quiet around the units, we’d all talk
about food, what food we’d like right then and there, what food we had in the
past and where we had it. We never really talked about the usual guy
stuff, like sports and women. Especially women, none of the guys wanted
to even think about it. Maybe that was the real torture of the place, all
the things we lost and all the people that mattered. We never really
entertained the idea of escape because the risks were too high. This
place drained the life force right out of you, leaving a shell of a man with no
past, present or future; we were just meat, and barely that. We weren’t
individuals anymore with names, hopes and dreams, we were meat for them to
beat, burn, eat or laugh at. I wasn’t from anywhere anymore, I didn’t
have a wife or children, and I didn’t have parents or brothers and sisters
because in this place…I was never born.
When the plutonium grade atomic bomb dropped on August
9th 1945, the men that
I was with in the outdoor cells all dove under water. While we forced ourselves to stay
underwater, I looked up as wind, fire and a bright white light painted the
surface above us. Once we
got up we all gasped for air, only then we could see that the prison camp we
were at was destroyed, the entire housing units for the prisoners was gone, the
guard house was gone, the cage we were in was shattered and the fencing around
the prison was broken open. This
place had been leveled as we could hear the screaming sounds of people and the
roar of sirens. Blood and
dead bodies filled most of the outdoor cages. Over a hundred of us entered this
prison during the summer of 1944 and now 16 of us are walking out. The smoke was so thick that we
couldn’t even see where we were walking or what direction we were going but we
needed to keep moving.
By the time we walked out of that prison camp, most of
us were starved and looking like walking skeletons, some had lost body parts
that were cut off. If they weren’t beat to death, stabbed with a sword or
shot, most of the men died from dysentery, pellagra, cholera and vitamin
deficiency, before the discharge of the bomb killed the rest of them. We
walked by a building that was in bits and pieces after the tornado force of the
bomb blasted through it. I pulled wood splinters out of my leg and chest
as we walked through the smoke, coughing and spitting up blood.
As we walked we could see a massive black cloud in the
sky, hovering there like a city-size flying saucer. The smell of burnt
wood and flesh filled the air as it started to rain out. The rain was
black in color and thick, so a bunch of us picked up wood from a crumbled
building to shield us from the black rain. Terrified, screaming people
ran toward us and then past us, their exposed skin was red, black and bubbling,
blood poured from their dusty bodies as they ran by ignoring us. One
horrified woman ran naked by me as the skin fell off her back splashing to the
ground next to my feet like molten lava.
I could see that this backwater city was transformed
into a momentary vision of hell. As we
walked closer to the city, all still elated from the blast, we started to see
the devastation, the horror that those of us that survived would never be able
to erase from our minds. I knew it was Thursday
and I knew judging by the position of the sun’s rays, barely forcing their way
through the clouds and smoke that it was just after noon. But what I was looking at in front of me
seemed alien in nature; they were ant-walking alligators, creatures of the
fall-out that looked to be neither human nor animal, neither living nor
dead. Any noticeable features or gender
were burnt off of them as they walked creepily nowhere. The radiation poisoning and immense heat
melted their flesh and clothing off their bodies. These creatures that were once human beings
had the misfortune to survive when the sky exploded 700 yards above Nagasaki. The great light would have filled the sky
laying waste to 80,000 people and destroying two-thirds of the city while
setting fire to the remaining structures.
These things are the survivors of the direct blast and firestorm.
They had no eyes to see out of and no will to live but
there they were, skin seared from their skulls leaving a black, shiny leathery
substance. Their mouths would open and
close without any purpose, revealing a red hole surrounded by blacken teeth
with no lips. Twenty of them staggered
on charred stumps for legs and they all gave off this horrifying murmur,
whether that’s all they could do to scream wasn’t quite clear. Hopefully whoever was still inside those
black skeletal bodies, I can only hope was unconscious and the person they were
before the blast is dead and gone, leaving what I see before me eerily
murmuring. One of them was carrying what
looked like to be a baby but it was charcoal in color and molded to the
creature as if it were part of it all along.
I have been through and have seen some horrible things
in this war, and I heard of the devastating things the Japanese were doing to
the Chinese, but no human being deserves this fate. I wanted a machine gun desperately to shoot
them all down and put them out of their horrifying misery. These things walking here were not
responsible for the war I was fighting in.
These people were farmers and fisherman trying to live their lives while
their insane government and its pride were exacting atrocities in their names.
This blackness will never leave me. What have we done to this place? How is it possible to win in such
devastation? Were American’s all
cheering victory back home the same way they’d cheer when the New York Yankee’s
win the World Series? Is that what this
is, a competition?
Some of these charred people have finally started to
lean over and die. A soldier that was
part of my group picked up a rock and stated to bash them in the skull while
hysterically crying. A couple of the
other guys pulled him away as we moved on leaving the remaining alligator
people to wander and die.
As we moved closer to the city we were all shocked at
the site of this dusty wasteland.
Buildings were gone with the exception of big concrete government structures. Most of them were severely damaged with
pieces of black stone falling off them.
I don’t know why we were walking this way, walking into hell, but there
we were at zero point on August 9th, 1945, walking in silence.
Dr. Elliot Sutherland
Department of Bio-Technology and Research
00120 Via del Pellegri
Vatican City
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