[Original Novella] If That Looking Glass Should Break, Part 2

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It was blank. I don’t know what I expected. When we arrived at my apartment, Zach proposed we throw down in Mario Kart and as the rest of the day was wide open I obliged. For him, Mario Kart also meant vaping. He always picked Wario and drove far better than should be possible in such a condition.

“In every game, always pick the fattest jew” he explained. I soundly scolded him for it. “The shit you say! This is why I can’t have other friends over when you’re around.” It rolled off of his back as my complaints usually did. Best out of three became best out of five, then best out of seven. Certain items in the game routinely allowed him to come from last place and win during the final lap. He was giggling, quietly but continuously with a demented melody to it. I dropped the controller in disgust.

When I came back from the bathroom, he was hunched over the leather case. Somehow he’d removed the metal stencil from the bottom. “There were little turney things at the corners with notches in them. With all four positioned right, I could just pull this out.” I might’ve figured that out if I’d studied it more seriously. He had a knack for games and puzzles of all kinds.

Underneath the stencil was a grid of seemingly random characters in an unfamiliar language, also metal, protruding slightly. The stencil had apertures in a few places so that specific characters could show through. It was unclear why. I gave up on it for the night, drove Zach home, then called it an evening.

The next day on a whim, I picked up some graph paper and copied down all the characters in the order they appeared on the bottom of the case. I then circled in red the characters which showed through. A colleague of mine in the computer science department specialized in cryptography. With only one lead there was no uncertainty about what I was going to do with my day.

“It’s sanskrit.” Emilio didn’t volunteer more than that until badgered. “It was an Indo-European language common to some of the very first agrarian cultures in the fertile crescent. That narrows the search considerably.” It wasn’t obvious which search he meant until he proudly showcased his thesis project, an artificial intelligence specializing in language.

“Google’s already doing cutting edge stuff with translation but this goes way beyond that. I call this Parvu. It exceeds what Google’s doing in that it understands linguistic conventions central to wordplay, flirting, humor and so on. So it can not only identify what a string of text is from but what sort of social interaction is occurring in it, if any. That’s just the tip of the iceberg too.”

I cut him short as his tendency was to make an explanation as long as his audience would endure before stopping him.“Supposing there’s a book out there someplace in which the sanskrit letters I circled appear on some page in that exact arrangement relative to one another. Could it figure out which book and which page?”

He stroked his chin stubble and squinted. “With a little work. You’ll owe me though. I dunno what yet, but coding isn’t easy so it’s not free.” Sounded fair to me. “Put it on my tab. Email me when you’ve got something”. With that, I went out for more coffee and some light reading. I never expected he’d be done so quickly.

“First I narrowed it to works originally published in sanskrit for obvious reasons. Then I searched for just those letters in that order, which further narrowed the results. I was really hoping it’d come back with just one. Since it didn’t, I then had to integrate the grid system and analyze each page for the correct spatial relationship between those characters.”

The real satisfaction he got out of such a project was making me understand the difficulty of it and how smart he must be to have achieved such a thing. I did not deny him. I remembered him launching into a tirade once when walking through a mall with me because he saw a nine year old play some first person shooter on whatever the new console was at the time and grow bored in under a minute.

“Do you think that little shit has any idea how many man hours went into programming just the physics engine? Or modeling every asset, painting textures and mapping which bits should be reflective because they’re wet, or using parallax mapping to make little details stick out?” He settled down when I provided the much needed perspective that kids that age have the attention span of a goldfish.

The program singled out a particular page in the Mesopotamian epic ‘Gilgamesh’. I downloaded a copy from Project Gutenberg and got to reading. It told the story of a king whose closest friend died, inspiring him to devote his life to questing for a means to restore him to life and to prevent his own death.

The moral seemed to be that death is inescapable, and that for humans, immortality is achieved through great works. Very defeatist, but a familiar line. The journal I edit for constantly receives emails from people we call “death apologists” who provide what they think are compelling reasons that death is necessary, dignified, and that living forever would be an insufferable nightmare.

We have our own ideas as to why people do this. The terrible moral weight of those already lost to mortality compels the living to rationalize why it ‘had to occur’. Perhaps some dare not hope for an escape from death, for fear that it will not arrive in time. Then there are the religious types. What need is there of salvation if nobody dies?

Emilio’s printout lay in the passenger seat as I drove home. The characters appeared in that configuration only on the page where Gilgamesh abandons his quest. Each character appeared in a word which, when they were strung together, formed the phrase “Neither is life”.

Once home I sat down with the case, bent a lamp over it so I could see it more clearly and scrutinized the protruding metal letters on the underside. With a little effort I found each one could be pushed in like a button. I wrote down the sentence in sanskrit characters spaced apart, then punched it in one letter at a time.

Nothing happened. To hell with this. Why was I wasting my time on an old fruitcake’s puzzle? What could be inside? A note that says “Gotcha” most likely. I set it aside, watched some Netflix and fell asleep on the couch. Another day went by. It was strange to have this much leisure time. What I like to call my responsibility gland was hyperactive. Was I forgetting some appointment? Was today the deadline for some paper I was writing?

I don’t like to drink alone, so silencing it with booze was off the table. Instead I returned my attention to the puzzle. Shit like that always sucks me back in. “No, it couldn’t be that easy” I thought. “That would be stupid.” But placing the stencil on upside down did appear to highlight a different set of characters. I copied them down, carefully took a pic with my phone and sent it to Emilio promising I would owe him twice over for it.

He got back to me around four with a new phrase: “Death is not certain”. It made no sense until I flipped it. “Death is not certain. Neither is life.” Part two of the gag, it had to be. To make me sit down and punch in those letters like a fool for the second time only to drill in how gullible I am. I did it anyway.

A sharp pop sounded and the two halves of the case felt loose. Sure enough I could now open the damn thing. I was mostly curious to see the mechanism by which it understood which letters had to be pressed and in which sequence but it was hidden behind a red velvet lining which, when peeled away, revealed a layer of metal. Not intended to be tampered with I suppose.

The lining gently held in place a lens which, judging by the coloration, had been carved from a solid piece of rose quartz. It was breathtakingly pure. I almost didn’t want to handle it with my bare hands lest I leave fingerprints, but when I looked at it closely there were already some on it from the last owner.

I held it up to the light. One half of the proverbial rose tinted glasses? I spotted motion through it. For just a split second. Like a blurred shadow flitting past. Looking through the lens more directly, I saw nothing out of the ordinary until I spotted the blue thread clinging to my pants. I’d not changed them since my trip with Zach.

The thread glowed and pulsated gently. I studied the lens, looking for hidden electronics. But there was no place to hide anything, it was wholly transparent. I looked through again, with the same result. It brought out blues like you wouldn’t believe. Then I had the idea of looking at the note with it.

The crafty old professor must’ve used invisible ink of some kind. It faintly glowed like the thread. “Congratulations to the new owner of this Orgonometric optical detector. I apologized for including only one, but I keep the other close to me at all times for reasons you will soon discover. Without exaggeration, the correct application of this device can greatly extend your lifespan. But once you gaze through it, there is no returning to your life as it was before. Regards, Professor Heironimus P. Travigan.”

Under the bottom layer of velvet was a small silk pouch to carry the lens in. Curious to try it outside, I put it into the pocket of my jacket, checked my phone to see how much daylight was left and headed out. I wondered how I’d look to strangers, furtively pulling out a pink lens and peering through it. Perhaps I could claim I was trying to bring back monocles?

I made my way to a nearby bus stop. It was someplace inconspicuous that I could sit down and not be bothered. I was in luck, the stop was derelict. Nobody I’d have to explain myself to. I withdrew the lens from the silk pouch and peered through it.

As with the thread, anything blue stood out very richly and radiated a faint glow. The sky most of all. But in peering at the sky I began to notice dark patches moving above above the cloud layer. Like photographs I’d seen of the ocean, where you can see the shadow of a shark just below the surface. These were immense, though. Swirling, writhing, never holding their shape for long.

Then I heard someone talking on their cellphone across the street. I peered at them through the lens and nearly fell off the bench. I tried not to stare, still conscious of how I would look if discovered but what I saw was simply beyond the pale.

Something resembling a frail, emaciated man just one third the size of a normal person clung to her shoulders, riding about on her back. It was bald and nude, missing a nose and ears, but the eyes were disproportionately large. And closed, as if it were sleeping. For some reason this bizarre creature appeared to be suckling the back of her neck. I started up as if to inform her of it, but what could I say without being maced?

It occurred to me that whatever it was, it might’ve noticed me staring if I’d not been lucky. What were they? What would happen if they knew I could see them? Did they relate somehow to the shadowy masses in the sky? I trembled, struggled with these strange new thoughts and set off looking for someplace else to sit.

On the way, as people passed me I turned and peered at them through the lens. All of them had those creatures riding on their backs. They varied in size, the smallest simply rode on one shoulder. In every case they suckled intently at the man or woman’s neck. Couldn’t they feel it?

I halted in my tracks and intense discomfort overtook me the moment the thought entered my mind that I might have my own ‘passenger’. After a bit more walking I found a sufficiently reflective shop window. My hand trembling, I held up the lens. There it was. Not the smallest I’d seen but still able to sit contentedly on my shoulder, eyes closed, leaning over and suckling at my neck.

My mind raced as my stomach turned. What to do? What could be done? I thought maybe vaping a little would be a good start and headed home. Once there, I set the lens back in the case and sat there, staring at it. I should never have opened it. It was some sort of trick, it had to be. But I couldn’t ignore what I’d seen, just as the note warned.

The note! I unfolded it again and turned it over. Was there anything on the back? Peering through the lens revealed nothing. So I flipped it over to read the original text. Only, it wasn’t there either. Something entirely new instead. “If you’re reading this, I feel it safe to assume you have peered through the lens and seen the sorry condition of our world.

The first set of ink should degrade a day or two after exposure to air, this set of ink will then activate and remain visible for a few hours after that. If you decided it was all some hoax I imagine you’ll never see this, having sealed it all up and sold it or whathaveyou. The person from whom I bought it never so much as tried the lens, and I envy them for it.

You have doubtless seen the Orgonovores. So named because they feed on the Orgone which fuels all biological life. Just as the scientist observing all atoms in a metal spontaneously align in the presence of a magnetic field would be baffled if he knew nothing of magnetism, the matter of aging will forever remain a mystery to modern science so long as it denies the existence and function of Orgone.

Aging is not inevitable. It is not even something inherent to life. It is merely the decay which occurs as Orgonovores sap us of Orgonic energy faster than our bodies can replenish it. The Orgonovore appears always as a smaller copy of the species it feeds on, anatomically skewed in some respects, the size depending on how much it has consumed so far. Hence the elderly unknowingly carry with them immense, nearly matured Orgonovores, and the young carry very small ones.”

“It is the increasing weight of these creatures as they swell which slows us down as we age, aside from the decay they inflict. The boundless energy of a child who can explode to his feet in an instant and run for hours is in fact our natural, healthy condition.

But as our parasitic burden grows, it becomes more and more difficult to climb stairs, get up from the floor and so on. It exerts some influence on the mind such that we not only cannot see them but cannot consciously feel their weight, only notice the secondary effects.

That brings me to the final point. The Orgonovores exert influence on us in a number of other ways. They are not as intelligent as we are but can recognize when we are coming close to discovering them and will subtly steer us away from it. Any who write stories about immortality will be nudged into writing an ending which paints it as a hopeless fantasy we ought not yearn for in the first place.

The creature whispers discouragement into the ears of those who even now rail against efforts to understand aging, a simple act of self-preservation. For those who discover them can also remove them. But be warned, a displaced Orgonovore will never stop trying to reattach. Regards, Professor Heironimus Travigan.”

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^{Stay tuned for Part 3!}