Nemanja Jovanovic

There are many decision makers in this world. Then there’s one who’s above them all. Vast majority doesn’t even know he exists. He sits high up in heavens but has nothing to do with the Heaven itself, nor God. Just a man sitting behind a desk. His office is in an airplane that never lands, orbiting the lower stratosphere. He is one hundred and fifty years old and connected to all sorts of tubes with multicolored liquids flowing in and out of his body and across the room. They do more than just keep him alive. They keep his brain at a very high level of lucidity and preciseness of thought. This is a man completely converted into function, to keep the world, the whole future of humanity, on a proper course.

There is a waiting room outside his office, filled with exceptional people, mostly at the very edge of their youth, who have just finished their third or fourth doctorate on multidisciplinary subjects like drinking water, farming, depollution, space exploration, and more. All these papers lay scattered on his desk, unopened. He’s glancing through the titles waiting for his diluted curiosity to be triggered. No one’s been inside for hours, probably days by now. He long ago stopped feeling the passing of time. Out the window is the same all population glow, shades of orange and blue that give the liquids in his tubes an even stranger luminescence. He spins his favorite toy made of ivory one more time.

Approximately three minutes later the toy stops its twirl and threatens to fall off the desk. The old man goes to catch it and grasps onto something he had not noticed was there before. It doesn’t look like a doctorate, or any other academic work needing his approval to be applied into existence, but rather reminds him of an existing work of fiction. A very intriguing one, titled “A World Inside Imagination”. The name of the author is missing from the front page. He calls for the secretary to let the person in.

A young woman steps in. She is in her early thirties and dressed in professional attire. The freckles on her face, neck and hands are luminescent under the light-polluted night. She wears no accessories or jewelry, nothing to distract the viewer from anything but her. Less is always more—he concurs. Her big fish eyes and movements speak a bewitching language which suggests that the stratosphere is, indeed, water—he feels—and the airplane but a submarine. As she sits down, her jacket strains at the tiny waist, and her thighs fill the skirt. The network of his infusion tubes turns giddy with bubbles, reflecting the old man’s genuine excitement.

“As a solution to the certain extinction of our planet, you propose a world inside imagination? I’m dying to hear you out,” he says beguilingly.

“Empathy,” she emphasizes, “the world can be saved only through empathy. Unfortunately, we’re the furthest from it we’ve ever been in history. Nobody cares about anyone anymore.”

“So what do you propose?” The old man asks.

“People can only be reminded of empathy through another mass suffering.” She says.

“Everyone will die their worst deaths anyways, and pretty soon; no need for me to get involved. Thank you for your time… I never caught your name, by the way, you forgot to sign your paper,” he hands it back to her, “for someone with hazard on the mind it’s better to remain unknown, anyways,” the old man concludes.

“Anna is my name, it’s on the second page,” she responds quickly. “Had you opened it you’d know that it only talks of creating an illusion of the end, not fast forwarding it.” She snatches the paper from the old man’s hand, not caring for his aged frailty.

“What do you mean by an illusion?” he asks not hiding that he is intrigued by this notion.

“An illusion of the apocalypse before the real one happens can give us time to ask ourselves the deepest questions and, hopefully, find the right answers.”

He pauses to assess for a moment.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re saying that these answers already exist inside all of us, inside our imagination?” he inquires.

“Yes. But only deeply imaginative individuals have the capacity to collect them; and the empathy towards the dying world is the only weight that can take them deep enough. This is our last chance.”

“Say I approve, what would you need from me?” he asks curiously.

“We need to hide the sun. We must free our minds from its stimuli and let our own, from deep within, ancestral, take over. Just like it used to be long ago when humans were but organisms without eyes powered only by their ideas of what surrounded them. We need our ability to imagine and reimagine reality now, again, more than ever.”

“And how exactly can we do that?” He asks starting to doubt the time he’s given to this dangerously beautiful young woman.

“Let the sky become a resource,” Anna responds looking through the window into astonishingly colorful toxicity of the twenty fourth century heavens. “Let’s fill our atmosphere with airplanes and use sunlight to light up big banner commercials.”

“To fill the sky with airplanes? How many of them?” He asks.

“Thousands, millions…”

“Thousands?! Millions?!” Over the decades the old man has lost the ability to laugh, but it’s not stopping him from sounding extremely entertained, “You’re nuts. Air pollution is the main cause for our extinction,” he says, ready to finish this meeting.

“Yes,” she replies in frustration, “the air is dead, but not from the airplane fumes. While you’re using the last bits of sun to light up banners in the sky and make money, we’ll infuse the air with an agent that will turn impenetrable to sunlight. It will, actually, slow down the apocalypse. Just think about it, people are dying for a big farewell show anyways, for a grand distraction from the whole extinction expectation. Give them a show, a spectacle in the sky brimming with thousands of aircrafts and bright commercials that will keep their eyes open for minutes without blinking. And mouth wide open,” she says, crossing her legs again and settling back in the chair.

“What kind of commercials do you want to air?” he asks swallowing a chunk of saliva.

“You got a TV here?”

The old man taps his finger twice on the desk and a small control deck comes out. He presses a button and from the ceiling behind Anna drops a see-through panel.

“Is there a sports game on?” she asks, turning in her chair.

He presses another button, and a basketball game comes up.

“You see, on those big banners in the sky there should be the same commercials we see here. Insurance, drugs, fast food, cars, jewelry… If we try to invent hot water with this one, we’ll fail big time. We want people to buy from them to fuel the sky hazard. The whole thing needs to be financially sustainable, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I get it,” the man says ironically, “but won’t that piss off the empathetic ones? The people they need to save will order burgers and pizzas from the sky commercials and fuel the whole disaster!”

“There is no selfishness in empathy,” responds Anna.

“This isn’t your first effort to sell your story—you’ve perfected it,” admits the old man, “I don’t know whether the whole idea of a world inside imagination can be real, but it can’t get any more real than money. We’re failing as a human race because we never chased anything else but the money, so I don’t see a better way to go, the last hurrah. There are two buttons underneath your chair—press the left one.”

The doors of the airplane open but the room remains intact. The old man continues, “You can just jump through the doors.”

Anna springs up like a cat out of fear.

The old man continues, “There’s an invisible filament in the door frame that will shape around your shoulders and expand into a parachute. It’s my newest invention and you’re the first one to use it.” He grins from ear to ear.

“That’s it?” she asks, half happy and half confused.

“We’ll contact you. Grab a bottle of water on your way out. We’re currently flying over Taklamakan.”

II

50 years later

A dark layer of smog fills the skies over North America. Traces of sunlight can only be seen far east, in the form of a bright horizontal crevice. Europe and the rest of the old world remain unaffected by the cloud, or so it is believed in the west. The new world was decolonized quickly after the disaster. The migration was organized with such sublimity that moving millions of people took only several months. Not everyone got to experience the sunny side of the Earth again. It was a prize for those who passed a series of in-depth examinations: biological age, positivity of mindset, willingness to be employed. Those who didn’t pass remained in the now, once again, Wild West, drenched in darkness.

Power and internet were cut. In the beginning of the exodus, people spent months gazing into the pitch black distance in utter disbelief at what had happened to their once new world. Then, slowly, a survival instinct prevailed and imaginations started to awaken. Suddenly, to the people of the dark came a realization previously reserved only for the old and dying that memories could be reimagined so vividly it was as if one was actually reliving them. Further down the path of applying imagination to reliving memories, the desire and ability to change them developed. And with the ability to change memories, new futures started to form, and nothing seemed so lost any more. Many started tapping into the unrelenting resource of imagination, and the search for new lights commenced in the west.

In the Atlantic suburb of New York City’s north boundary, sitting at the dining room table lit by soft candlelight, Joan Patrick is entering notes in her diary. Her four-year-old son, Wright, is looking through the window. Outside is glowing with lanterns, as people and children in caravan head towards the Oasis believed to exist only a few weeks north.

“Mom, why can’t we join them?” asks the little boy.

“Because you don’t want to get eaten,” Joan answers nonchalantly.

“Eaten? By the animals?”

“By the cannibals.”

“Cannibals?” he asks excitedly and with innocence, preconceiving it a name for a mythical creature, a dragon from an old Slavic tale.

“It’s a name for people that eat people.” She throws him a dramatic look in order to spook him.

“But maybe there is an oasis?” asks Wright, playing with his big toe.

“Remember when we climbed the roof of the tallest building that we know?”

He nods.

“And do you remember seeing light anywhere?”

He nods again. “There,” he answers, pointing at the gloomy brightness of the eastern horizon.

“That is the only oasis, my dear boy, but you have to earn your right to cross the black ocean,” Joan answers.

“How?”

“If I knew, I would’ve brought you with me, kiddo. Try and fail, use your imagination, just don’t go with the majority,” she says. “One good thing about your gloomy lifetime is that the worst has already happened.”

Joan blows the candle out and stands away from the table. She gives him a kiss and puts her cheek up against his as they continue to look outside. Wright has a sad look in his eyes. Revealed from darkness by soft yellow light, the faces of the people passing in the street awaken feelings he can’t yet understand. They’re going into certain death—it’s Wright’s first meeting with empathy. One might find it probable that it was precisely this moment that decided the little boy’s destiny.

III

16 years later

Wright and his partner, Lauraine, never married. Such obligation died with the old world. Together, they have a four-year-old daughter, Alice. This young family of three lives in his mom’s old place, which is a one-bedroom condo on the third floor of a twenty-story building. It’s about an hour and a half’s walk from the ocean, and only minutes away from a local tavern, the melting pot for migrants, locals, and cannibals on the hunt for those who believe in oasis.

Mr. Thomas’s aircraft lands a few blocks away, on the helipad that belongs to an old hospital. Stepping out, he is stung by the cold black western air, but his thermal suit is there to keep him warm. From the landing pod he is looking towards his destination—Lauraine’s apartment. A small flickering square in the distance. He takes a deep breath and turns back towards the aircraft.

“The air feels nice, I’ll go by foot,” he says.

Derek is silent at the doors of the aircraft.

“I’ll see you there,” says Thomas, heading towards the staircase.

He is a lonely pedestrian in the dark suburban streets, which echo with his footsteps. It takes him thirty minutes to reach the apartment, plenty of time to rethink his mission one last time. He ponders on the reasons for Wright’s disappearance. It happened exactly three days ago, and only a day after the first rumors reached the east that he had saved the world. Can it really be that the world inside imagination has been created? he questions. Did the great Guan Shi Yin touch Wright, plant the seed of god’s empathy inside him and make him a savior of all doomed people?

Ten minutes after Thomas exits the aircraft, ten more men, camouflaged in black, spread from its concealed cargo area like baby spiders. They assume positions in a building across the street from Lauraine’s apartment, rifles and launchers ready to keep an eye on the meeting. With a dose of static through their feeds, the sound of knocking on the door comes through.

“It’s unlocked,” Lauraine shouts from the living room.

Thomas and his companion, Derek, are observed through the outside window as they enter the apartment. They each take a chair at the dining room table. Lauraine and Derek assume opposite seats on the longer side, while Thomas takes the first to the right from Lauraine. She is sitting at an angle, facing Thomas, and looking over her shoulder into their reflection in the dark window frame. Flickering light comes from the kitchen island, as one smaller sized candle gently illuminates the room. The light is just strong enough that nothing can be seen outside, but Lauraine keeps looking. Alice is playing on the carpet, caressing the static with the voices of her dolls.

“I was expecting you to come alone,” says Lauraine.

“It’s only Derek. He’s here to help,” Thomas answers promptly.

Derek’s skin is pale yellow, without a single hair. He looks and walks as if made of rubber, which he is. He’s a clone, the ultimate replica of nature. Everything that happens in his presence leaves a permanent mark on him, which he’s able to reproduce like an old music box. The clone is also able to find traces of past in the present, and uncover it like footsteps in the ground beneath the fallen leaves. He can then venture down multiple paths and track more than one subject, but that doesn’t come without dangers. Exploring too many storylines can trap the clone in a metaphysical dimension. He can lose his way back. When the clone loses his way back a total mind erase is necessary to wake him up in the real world. Derek’s memory has, therefore, been erased multiple times, leaving many, many loose ends. Even though he has the ability to live through and memorize eternities, he cannot recall his last job.

“When did Wright go missing?” Thomas asks.

“What’s today?” Lauraine replies.

“Friday.”

“It was Tuesday then,” she says. “I wish I could tell you more but nobody’s seen anything. It’s just too darn dark outside.”

“Figures,” he confirms. “Did you notice anything unusual in his behavior in the days prior to his disappearance?” His eye raises inquisitively.

She pauses to think for a second.

“No, not really. He had spent a month at the beach like he usually does at this time of the year, commemorating his mother’s death. After he got back he made his usual trips to the tavern, did the same on Tuesday, and then just didn’t come home afterwards. Luckily there’s no dinner to get cold, only the room lacking the heat of his body. Some people say he went with a stranger. So, how about you introduce yourself, Thomas? Alice is not allowed to be around strangers.”

“Oh, where are my manners,” Thomas gives a slight bow from the chair, honoring the young lady.

“Are you a friend of Daddy’s?” Alice asks.

Thomas looks at Lauraine for a moment.

“I most certainly am, Alice, but don’t let that fool you,” he uses theatrics to conceal true meanings, “many would stop at nothing to earn a spot in your daddy’s world!”

“Mommy, what world does Daddy have?” Alice asks.

“Is that why you’re here, Thomas?” says Lauraine.

“The news is spreading fast, Lauraine,” Thomas begins. “Soon there will be many more following in my footsteps.”

“What news exactly?” asks Lauraine.

“That the savior has retreated to finish the works on the creation,” Thomas says, dramatizing his answer in order to entertain Alice.

“The savior?! My Wright?! Everybody’s belief that my Wright, of all people, may be the savior is flabbergasting to me,” she laughs.

“Why was he taken then?” Thomas asks.

“Oh, Thomas… A person needs to spend much more time in the dark in order to start seeing things. But there hasn’t been, and won’t be enough time, even for us born in here.”