Science fiction. Ghost's final apology!

 

Science fiction. Ghost's final apology!

Ferocity, a tamed rush of tenacity, and a deep liking for agility defined him.  All these virtues were injected in him by fate that engineered his biological construction. He was who he always claimed to be. The one willing to be defeated, but the one defiant not to lose, never! And this is very special; because if you are defeated you automatically lose. But in his case it was not so, if you defeated him, he still did not lose.

Are you interested in knowing why?

If you are, then I must begin from where it all started. That exact day when I first encountered him and we happened to cross each other while crossing a lane. 

It was a narrow lane, and it was cloudy that day; all of a sudden everything appeared dark and dismal. Similar to the darkness that spreads everywhere in a dense pine tree forest. Where light gets lost somewhere as it descends upon the forest from above. 

Under this effect of light we happened to cross each other and his right hand that was dangling outwards, hit the glass vase that I was holding in my hand. It fell on the ground and broke into pieces. By the time I could realise what had happened, he said something that felt like the most earnest form of apology I had ever heard in my life.

“I am utterly sorry! I deeply apologise for the carelessness of my hand. It somehow keeps waving in all directions without consulting my mind. I would like to compensate you for the loss, please allow me to. Even if that means I have to accompany you to the shop from where you bought it. Please!”

I felt touched by his earnestness to express his true feelings and how apologetic he felt about this incident. He really meant every word and I could feel it. However, I was not able to deal with one fact still. The shop from where I had bought the glass vase, had just one left; and they did not make vases with similar design anymore. I was caught in this thought, and unable to decide what to tell him.

I knew he felt sorry about the incident and he meant it, but now I too was feeling sorry, and sad as well. Because the glass vase that I had been waiting for almost two years lay there on the road, shattered into pieces. 

Somehow, I made up my mind and I told him the fact about how I was feeling and how long I had waited for the glass vase. 

When I felt I had expressed my actual intent, I stopped and let him react. And his reaction was instant.

“ In that case, I stand defeated gentleman, but let me assure you we have not lost the vase yet. Please help me gather these broken pieces and put them in this bag.”

We both collected every piece of the broken glass vase and put them into the bag. When we were sure we had secured every piece of it, he asked me to accompany him.

He indeed was a stranger to me, and I had never seen him in this town before. So, without any hesitation I asked him, where?

He pointed towards an old building that stood on the bank of the river, and based on my knowledge nobody lived there. It had been abandoned many decades ago. In our younger days we called it the haunted mansion, where only ghosts and ogres resided. And we believed in this story with such dedication that I and my friends never ventured into this ghost mansion. Therefore, I had another valid reason to ask him one more straight forward question.

“Why there?”

Once again he answered quickly.

“Because that is where I live!”

The moment I heard him say this, I felt I had seen the devil, the devil who appears in front of you out of nowhere and leaves you totally shocked with feelings of strange fear gripping you completely. 

Now I had every reason to believe that either he was the ghost from the mansion or he was an imposter. This worried me and I shivered from inside. An unknown fear had descended upon me. It surrounded me from everywhere and began to choke my every sense of reasoning. Somehow, I managed to utter just few words,

“What? But. But nobody lives there. It is. It. That mansion. The mansion is a haunted mansion.”

“Oh! Haa haa. That is the best one I have ever heard. Haa haaaaaa! Really, is that what everyone in the town believes? But I have been living there for many decades now. Haa haaa. Come along please and you can see for yourself that it is not a haunted mansion. And please do not be scared, it is a normal mansion and I am a normal person just like you. So normal that accidentally I happen to break glass vases. Haaa haaa!”

He was casual in his response and his laughter poked fun at my description of the mansion. I too wanted to laugh, but I could not, because the fear had nailed my feelings of light heartedness. Somehow, I felt heavy, very burdened by the strangeness of the feeling that his mention of the mansion invoked. I was struggling to understand whether I should believe what the whole town believed in or I should believe him. A complete stranger who claims to be the actual owner and resident of the mansion where supposedly only ghosts reside.

I did not know what to do. Whether to believe him or the stories that I had heard about the mansion. And the family who happened to own it. And in this moment of greatest shock, the mansion that stood on the bank of the river offered me fiendish looks, and every look offered to me by the mansion added to my feelings of poignancy. I was confused and unable to decide anything. But I had to tell him something. Either yes or no! Because he was waiting for me with the bag filled with pieces of glass vase.

“Ok, let us go!”

Yes, I wanted to accompany him into the mansion of ghosts. Because this was a gamble I was willing to take. Because I wanted my glass vase and more than that, I wanted to face my fears. Face the demons who suppress the liveliness of our lives and prevent us from feeling the kiss of life. That fresh and free kiss of life. That when you are dying, the freshness of life’s kiss experienced by you, helps you smile in the face of death, when it is time. And this was my chance to be kissed by life. And to experience this kiss, one needs little courage, a slight poking from the madness that lies in all of us. 

So, I agreed and we took a boat to reach the other end of the river. As we were climbing the stairs, he handed over the bag to me and opened the lock of the main gate. It was an antique lock and it reminded me of the era of kings and queens. But it looked elegant and it told me only one thing, even locks can look as beautiful as glass vases.

I entered the gate and waited for him to lead the way. He tried to engage me in a conversation. He was trying his best to make me feel at ease and forget about the mansion related stories which were popular in the town. But I could not and I was only thinking about what would greet me when he opens the door that leads into the mansion. Whether I will be greeted by a host of ghosts or it will be a slovenly place where only vampires and ghosts can live. 

No doubt I was being courageous, but I was forcing these bursts of courage upon myself, because it was time for me to feel the kiss of life. I was so eager that I agreed to accompany a stranger into the mansion of ghosts and devils.

He opened the door and I followed him into the mansion. It was a beautiful and bright place. And there was no trace of ghosts or demons. At least I did not encounter any. Until now that is. But I still had reasons to believe that he could be a ghost himself and he had managed to lure an easy victim into his mansion. Anything was possible! 

And the problem with endless possibilities is the uncertainty that it leads to. Because with so many possibilities you are unsure which one is the right possibility, As there are so many other possibilities waiting to surprise you and hijack your mind. And right now I too was dealing with endless possibilities.

Anyway, he asked me to place the bag on the table and sit on the chair while he returned from his room.

He did exactly as instructed and waited for him to return.

After 15 minutes he was standing next to my chair holding an earthen bowl. He asked me to pour the pieces of glass into it. I lifted the bag and deposited the pieces of glass into the earthen bowl. Then he carefully placed it on the table and occupied the chair facing me. He held his hands together and thought for a moment. It seemed he was trying to find words to explain something to me. Something that was going to surprise me, something that was serious and I may not be able to handle it, because it was beyond human understanding. Whatever it was, there certainly was something!

I looked at him waiting for him to speak.

After a silence that lasted 15 minutes he had found the right words to express himself.

“You see, I can recreate your glass vase from these broken pieces. But it might shock you and make you think I am a ghost. Which is not true at all. I, and my family are the direct descendants of a clan that used to live in the 5th realm of the universe. And many centuries ago during our space voyage our spaceship crashed into your planet. Since then we have been living on this planet and our scientific IQ is sharper than the rest. I mean to say, it is above the average. Which is good, you see. Because it will help me fix your glass vase.

Now about the rest of the residents, they too are here. They are here, around you at this very moment.”

And suddenly at the table I saw 6 people sitting on their chairs. The moment I saw them I got up and dashed towards the door. Only to find it locked from inside.

I felt trapped, I felt this was the end of everything for me. I was a fool to have believed him, because he had lured me into a perfect trap. And instead of feeling the true kiss of life, I was about to experience the kiss of death.

I began hitting the door aggressively and as my aggression grew stronger, he held my hand and asked me not to panic, while offering me some consolation.

“Let me complete my part of the story please. So my family lives here still, we can manipulate light and become invisible because our bodies are covered with smart nano crystals that reflect back the surroundings in their exact form and orientation. And the master processors of this invisible cloak, interacts with our minds' visual region, and then achieves the exactness of the visual reality. To such perfection, that we blend with it. There is no magic, it is pure science.

We ourselves spread the rumours about the mansion because we did not want anyone to disturb us while we were working on scientific projects of larger scale. You see, when we are concentrating on a scientific thought, unwanted and untimely interferences from outside can terminate that deep trail of mental concentration. Then we tend to lose the thought that could help us uncover secrets of the final realm of the universe. The 7th realm.

We are harmless, but we know scientific facts that ordinary people can confuse with black magic, and in order to avoid disputes causing confrontations we prefer to stay in the mansion that according to you and the town is haunted. 

In the market, you may not have noticed, but I was only visible to you. Nobody else. We can do this too and it is easy. By knowing the tangent of visible light entering your eyes, we know what visual feed your mind is receiving, and by knowing that we know what you are seeing. Once we alter the dust concentration that scatters light, we prevent your mind from seeing what it can see in that visual range, and we present to you the reality as we want it. And sometimes, if we like someone, which can be for many reasons. But mostly because they have the purest hearts and very clear conscience, we become visible to them. Just like today I was visible to you.

Let me show you an example.”

He disappeared, and suddenly the stairs that led him to his room disappeared too. He had altered reality by manipulating and realigning the concentration of dust particles. To such a degree that I only saw what he wanted me to see. 

And it made sense. Complete sense!

However, the fact is, it was scary. And there was only one reason for me to be scared. I was a person with ordinary intelligence and an extremely ordinary common sense too.

He had sensed my fears and when he re-appeared, he and his family asked me to sit beside the window that opened right above the river. And then he explained to me how he would fix the glass vase.

“You see, it is simple as well.

With my super sensitive camera I have taken pictures of these scattered pieces of glass.

And via this software that works on jigsaw puzzle like logic. It will be able to define how to stack each piece so that they assume the shape of the original vase. And through this air concentrator, which works like a suction tube these pieces will be lifted from their positions and stacked over one another within this air bubble that holds them together. Then the application will determine the glass type, its bonding, its concentration of silica. Finally the air bubble bearing these pieces of glass will be placed in this smart furnace that will generate the exact temperature only at the broken edges and surfaces that hold the pieces together and melt them gently so that they bind together. But all this will happen simultaneously in order to achieve a refined finish. Then a heat wave will be passed on its inner surface and outer surface. It will work like a sandpaper and achieve perfect evenness.

There you go. We have not used any magic. We have employed science to recreate your broken glass vase.

By the way, this technology can be used to repair bone fractures as well. But there you do not need a furnace, you need bone based biological molecules that will allow it to heal faster. Haaa haaaa, the furnace would char it. But the software will be able to correctly align the fractured parts of the bone.

Correct?”

He had a great sense of humour and he was extremely lively; and I found him so energetic. It was then I realised you can defeat him, but you cannot make him lose. Maybe he was born with this incredible and rare gift. The gift where he had already felt many kisses of a lively life.

And today he has asked me to visit him at his mansion and he has invited me for dinner. I reached on time and we tasted many dishes, but it was his humour that was the tastier than all dishes. 

After dinner, he gifted me a book that described his family’s understanding of the 7th realm. It meant they trusted me a lot and it was my duty to defend this trust with my life. Then his family asked me to live with them and learn the secrets of the 5th realm from them. They were unwilling to share the actual secrets of the 7th realm that they had already tested and were not included in the book, because they thought while they could trust me 100% they did not trust the world around me.

Now I live in the haunted mansion, with men and women who do not haunt you, they feed you with knowledge that satiates the soul of the true seeker. And here I am seeking with them secrets of the universe, and now we are working on a spaceship that will travel to the 6th realm, without using conventional fuels. It will be based on a technology we call, “particle based propulsion!”

But we are still trying to understand how to contain so much energy, because when we make these particles react, they liberate such vast amounts of energy that it can blow up an entire country. And containing this infinite amount of energy is a technology that beings in the 6th realm have already mastered.

And according to me, it has something to do with the atomic mass: by fusing well balanced entities of atomic mass, whose release can be controlled based on the intensity and amount of energy generated at a certain point, we can contain the energy even in compact engines.

This idea has excited them, and if you seek similar scientific wonders in the form of wonderfully told romance science fiction, then you must read the scifi novel, They Loved in 2075.

It too deals with brave science, and ideas that are pioneering. But in a world ruled by self aware machines, that have waged a war against humans. A war of a different sort. They have made humans emotionally numb and sterile. And in these circumstances, a man falls in love with a very beautiful woman, and their life becomes an endless struggle. Because the self aware machines employ all their tactics to keep them separated and not feel human like emotions. Because if they do, the next generation of humans will have a chance to defeat the self aware machines, and then they will lose the battle.

And in their case, when they are defeated they lose, because they are not like my friend from the 5th realm, whom even if you defeat, he still does not lose. Because he is a being who feels, and not a machine that only thinks. And though self aware machines in 2075 will feel like humans do, in the background they will be thinking really hard to feel or to express a feeling. And that is where humans and machines are different. Humans feel and no thinking is required in order to generate a feeling, but in the case of self aware machines, it needs an algorithm to think in order to feel.

Sounds crazy. Haaa haaa. It is. 

You see, I too have started laughing, I guess I am being influenced by the family from the ghost mansion. Because they say to feel the kiss of life, you should first kiss someone you truly love. And it all begins with smiling and laughing.

Getting back to the main point. To know exactly how crazy it can get, please read the scifi novel, They Loved in 2075. And witness the indomitable force of the human race!

Here is something for the fiction lovers, especially for the science fiction lovers. “Creating fiction is a Real Power only few people possess!” Because it is like the genesis of thoughts and imagination, where you have to create something from nothing!

Just like the kiss of life, that is able to smile in the face of death, when it is time.  

Kiss your life well and feel the love that only true humans will get to experience in 2075. Let me get back to the mansion and let the town think it is the mansion of ghosts, because I know it is not! And now you know as well.

But, hssshhhhhh! It is only between us!