My thoughts collided with each other, making up obscene theories about the mess I have gotten myself into, as I have begun to cross a large, snow covered field that stood between me and my condo building. Sinking my shoes through the snow, I have pushed on, wanting to get there faster, and hopefully sort this mess out… Somehow, still hoping to wake up, still hoping that it was all just a dream. Dark, thick clouds loomed overhead. It began to snow once again, snowflakes gently waltzing in the air, all around me.
“Cracka-WWWWW!!” the sky exploded with thunder, making me jerk down in surprise.
“Thundersnow?” I have asked the sky, looking straight up and witnessing a brief flash of lightning pass between the clouds, as the heavy, thick snow kept falling and blotting out my vision.
“Cracka-cracka-cawWWWWW!!” The clouds boomed, lightning jumping between them.
“Great. It is lightning quite nicely and I am walking across a field… real smart. Good thing there is plenty of tall trees around. Like this one here…” I concluded, staring at a large, maple tree in front of me. The storm continued to spin overhead. As I walked forward, tumbling through the snow, the wind suddenly ceased and looking up again, I realized that I was now directly in the eye of the storm. A wall of clouds and falling snow curled around me, around the field, reaching up into the heavens.
Lightning bounced right in the eye of the storm, rebounding between the opening in the clouds, flashing lower and lower. “Cracka-CRAWWWWWWW!” the sky exploded, suddenly descending, and tearing out my eardrums.
Blinding lightning flashed down and ignited the tree. I threw my hands against my face far too late. Falling to my knees, I rubbed my eyes that were filled with white, dancing fire. I could hear the cracking of the burning tree in front of me. The white sparkles went away pretty swiftly, just in time for me to see the colors of the world change again.
Click, click, click, the colors of the world shifted, throwing me somewhere in time.
“Hooooboy!” I whooshed out, sinking in the snow. I checked my watch, to see which way I was going, but it was hopelessly broken, its monitor cracked in several places, crunched up somehow during my flight from the spontaneously exploding walk-in-hospital.
I stood on my knees. The tree in front of me was burning. The wall of clouds was coming down, swirling, glaring and flashing, as it too caught fire.
Static echoes of voices were coming through, seeping into my brain from somewhere above.
“You idiot, how could you miss him?”
“I did not miss him. I could have sworn he was right there. A slight miscalculation.”
“Upon your part!”
“Its not my fault! He keeps moving! Yesm, firing again”
“Get him this time, for…”
The voices fuzzed up again. It was just enough for me. I jumped off from my sitting on my knees position to rolling through the snow position just as the lightning beam struck again, the snow melting away and the grass curling up into a nice, big and round crop circle that formed right where I sat a second ago. The crop circle spread its arms, birthing more folds and lines as fire and light ignited the field again and again, striking, jumping between the grass and trees, electrical currents slicing grasses and leaves.
“Run. Run. Run. Alex run.” Thoughts shot through my head.



Darkness. Nothing but absolute and pure, crushing darkness, so thick that I could not tell whether my eyelids were open or closed.
My body, wrapped in a some kind of cloth.
Flakes of what felt like pieces of metal and glass rustled off my body as I slid sideways and got up.
The pain no longer seemed real; it shot back and forth appearing and re-appearing, an illusion of what it was before.
I have amplified my other senses as far as I could, staggering about like a moth in the sunlight, completely blind and utterly defenseless. My feet rustled on something like metal and snow.
Was I destined for hell, because I simply chose to disbelieve in heaven?
Perhaps I was just still asleep, somewhere out there, many years ago?
The view was black and opaque. I concentrated to distinguish any light. There was none.
So this is what hell is like? Nothing at all to see, only metal shards everywhere to step on? Was I even alive? The ground rustled beneath my feet. My running shoes were still on me, the little plastic parts catching onto the rustling ground. There was thick, metal dust in the stale, cold air. The dust filled my mouth, covered my hands, harassing my senses. Sand and metal scraped between my teeth. The pungent taste of ash stung my nostrils.
“Appcha--aaayyy” I loudly sneezed, flailing my arms about in the pitch-black, stale air.
“Chuuuaaayyyyy... Ayyyy…. Ayyyy…” an echo of my sneeze danced around, running forward. I tried to imagine how big this illusive hell was. A cavern? No… more like a mountain plateau. Impossible…
“Light. I need light. I would kill for a light right about now. Kill whom… there is no one here… or is there? Curse this thick darkness!
My pockets… there must be something… There... wait…” I reached deep down into the left pocket of my pants.
“A lighter? No, it can not be. It sure feels like a lighter.”
I tried to remember where this came from. A slideshow of images started to unwind itself inside my brain. Days…. or was it weeks? I could remember the black letters on the lighter. “Vote Sarah Slean for student Union president”.
“Thank you Sarah. You may just have saved my life… if I was still alive that is… time to find out….”
I pulled the lighter out of my pocket and raised it up, my thumb slowly sliding down its rough metal wheel with the usual “Krrhhhhhhh” sound.
It was the most magical sound I heard. I prayed that the lighter would work.
A tiny sparked formed itself in the bottom part of the wheel, connecting with the hissing gas that escaped from the bottom chamber.
“Thmkkkk” the spark ignited, generating a tiny ball of fire that spread itself out from the metal chamber.
“Whooooshhhhhh” A miniature sun was born in my fist, temporarily blinding me, rays of light beating in all directions, mercilessly chasing the darkness away.
“And wherever light goes it will always find darkness there, waiting for it” an old quote leapt off my tongue.
What miniscule flame the lighter produced, was apparently somehow enough to chase the darkness away for thousands of meters around me. I was in the middle of a barren field, covered in dust and metal, black and orange rust covered everything from the ground to my hands. A massive scrap yard of unknown civilization stretched all around me, as far as I could see. Black plants poked through here and there, increasing in numbers and turning into a curvy field far off.
Farther ahead, loomed leviathan mountains of jagged metal, rising up left and right and vanishing in the murky, syrup clouds. Twisted, bent and torn up shards of steel, hexagonal beams and piles of mangled, rust covered metal rose here and there out of the field, some covered in black plants, slightly resembling dead prairie trees. The dancing sun on my hand generated countless shadows from each shard and beam that crisscrossed and flailed left and right.
I wrapped myself tigher in the ambulance bedsheet looking like an orange caped crusader- completely out of place.
“Yep, it is hell all right” I concluded then and there, my heart sinking. Around me was a dead world, burned out who knows how long ago, now made up entirely of dead monoliths, broken carcasses and ashes…
Large, orange flakes of dust, illuminated by my lighter floated around, everywhere, like bloated up, massive snowflakes, some resembling dried up spiders or twisted starfish. I nearly recoiled in shock and let go the lighter as I saw one of the spider-shaped dust flakes land on the ground and silently scamper away through the metal mush, very quickly, disappearing somewhere between the cracks. This world was not dead. Instead, it was filled with inorganic dust monsters.
“Ahhh.. ahhh” I flailed my arms as some of the dust particles that landed on them, started to crawl on me, trying to get away from the burning light in my hand.
“Ahhh ahhhhhhhhh ahhh geeet awaaay!” I spun, shaking the countless, nearly weightless, cold, spider-flakes off me. My skin chafed everywhere.
In another second I stopped caring, as a monstrous shape had started to emerge from the charcoal, somber cloud ahead, capturing my attention.
“Twhoooook… twhooook… twhooook…” an array of massive, angled legs dropped into the field, gliding and clipping on the shards of metal.
“Ohh… my… ghttt..tchhh” I uttered looking up. A dark body, made up of a few sharp tetrahedrons, supported by a few, relatively thin, but incredibly long legs, loomed in the obsidian sky somewhere up above me. A single, even longer, slightly thinner leg, covered in millions of constantly moving, long, flickering hair probed the ground ahead. I realized it was the same as the tiny spider flakes, only about a thousand times bigger, even more horrific was the realization that the colossal thing was made up or at least covered in the same tiny metal spider-flakes, all of them crawling up, down, sideways in a mess of motion. My hair stood up as goosebumps ran all over my hands. The lighter was starting to burn the skin on my finger.
“Twhoooook… twhooook… twhooook…” The legs approached me, one of them hitting a large metal carcass nearby that looked fairly solid but dissolved away into the air as if it was made up entirely out of ashes, metal dust crumbling down and ascending into the air.
I realized that the monstrosity was blind, but it craved the warmness of my lighter, as its probing; thin, metallic leg slashed through the ground here and there, its claws reaching for me.
I dashed back from the monstrous spider claw in pacifying fear, sliding on metal shards.
The gliding claw slashed against my hand, thousands of separate strands reaching for the lighter, like metal flakes drawn to a magnet.
The lighter flame flickered and my finger slipped off the little yellow button as the claw engulfed my hand.
“Hwshooooooosh” my only source of light and warmth, in this cold and dead world, was gone.



“AM 9:43” The black dial showed, inside the truck driver’s cabin.
“This is radio D-J-AAAY, 106.5, here to bring you the next bin bang!” the radio resounded through the cabin.
“And here it comes! Just shut of all other sounds and listen to it appear in your raaaaadaaaaaar!” The DJ sung out, as a tiny speck of spherical, black dust suddenly appeared in the middle of the highway, apparently out of nowhere, hanging still in mid-air.
The truck, changed lanes, heading straight towards it. With a little clipping sound the two collided and by Newton’s Laws of physics, the smaller piece of matter should have bounced right off, but it just didn’t happen here. Instead, the truck, stopped in an instant, going from 120 to 0 kilometers per hour, as if it hit an invisible brick wall. Clip, clip, clip, the little ball of black dust, pierced right through the engine, compartments and walls, pulverizing and fracturing them, stopping somewhere inside the cylindrical trailer, filled with gas and air. A single spark followed.

“9:44” The green shiny numbers of my stereo clocked shot back at me. As I looked back onto the road I saw the end coming. A truck carrying two gas trailers had spun out of control, blocking all highway lanes. Another one, carrying metal railings, intended for laying out new subway lines was cruising directly behind it. As the first truck turned over, the second one mushed right into it, in a cacophony of metal mating with metal.
I jammed on the brakes, just like the short row of cars in front of me, but it was far too late to slow down safely. The 1st truck had stopped impossibly abruptly, comically spinning in the air, flapping and twisting up as if it was a fly crushed by a pair of giant tweezers.
“Ka-blamooooghhh!” The whole thing exploded in a lovely inferno, rings of fire rippling through the road like ocean waves. Ping! Ping! Ping! Flaming metal railings flew out, gobbling up cars and bouncing against the concrete.
Crack! A railway bar went straight through my windshield piercing the passenger seat and turning it into a leathery mess, showering me with pieces of my windshield. My jeep twisted forward, raising its back into the air and disconnected from the road surface, flying upwards. I screamed something obscene.
Crack-caaawwrcchhh! Another bar tore through the roof of my jeep, heading straight for my head.



In temporal displacement I stared through the ring of fire at myself.
And for a brief second I was everywhere.
Chained by my storm, I could only control my fate but not the fate of others.
What good was it to do anything, if nothing could ever be changed?
With the reach of my hand, I re-awakened the ancient machine, seeking answers.

For eons this world was dead, abandoned long ago by its creators and I dared to give it life. But the question was… perhaps this world wish to stay dead? Did it want change?
Perhaps there was a reason for it to fall into the darkness?
Who was I… to bring it light?
As it drew power from my chronostorm, I realized that this was not what I wished for.
What did I wish for?
What exactly did I want? I was a mere human, bound by my dreams and thoughts, tortured by momentary impulses, bound by fate itself towards… I wasn’t even quite sure towards what.

Lo and I have become… the creator of life.
It awakened, reaching towards me, consuming everything around it, to give itself shape.
It spoke to me, not in a voice but in images and song. A long forgotten song, that had not filled these halls of scorched metal for myriads of years.
A living kaleidoscope of colors lights and colors, glittering, sparkling and lighting up before my very eyes. Scraps of metal and glass tearing themselves from the ground and levitating, rising, merging into chaotic shapes and patterns.
Hundreds of unblinking, cold metal eyes examined me, scanning, interpreting and forming an interface in my own image.
Flesh forming out of metal.
Metal forming out of flesh.



I raised my left foot, preparing to walk forward, wanting to see and feel more of this magically time-less world, when the colors of the entire spectrum suddenly shifted again.
The world wasn’t perfectly still anymore. The station looked as if it was melting away in feverent heat. Lights and shadows warped, slanted and intertwined.
A shadowy figure was racing towards me, slowly gliding through the air, sending black streaks of swirlies behind it. My last thoughts were how the swirlies remind me of tea that slowly dissolved inside water, when the shadow collided with me, sending us both tumbling backwards in slow motion. During this spectacular flight I managed to blink a few times, and at the exact moment when my back collided with the cold marble floor, the shadow materialized into a female shape. The swirlies dissolved completely, releasing a girl dressed in an outfit of a fashion that I could probably never imagine even if I’ve worked as a fashion designer for 200 years. Her outfit was a silver mess of flowing curves and shifting lines, above which I could see the Romanesque cubical ceiling of the train station. The ceiling lost most of its color and was smudging up, becoming hazier, as if I was seeing it through a strong current of water.
Fiery, amber eyes stared at me coldly, first in surprise, then in anger, then in confusion. Musical tones and strange sounds started pulsating on my nerve cells. The sound was coming right from inside my mind and not from her lips; forming into flowing; perfectly clear words of her voice.
“Time Immemorial! What? Hey, what do you think you’re doing? This isn’t a jump terminal!”
“Ah… ah I tza” I uttered, unable to say anything intellectual at the moment, captivated by those fiery amber eyes, orange tinted skin, sparkling crimson hair and the constantly flowing suit that followed every single tiniest contour and bump of her body.
“Who is this divine creature, I wonder?” I thought, staring back.