Short Little Stories

Imagine if you couldn’t control how you saw the world.

Now take away the imagining – it is fact, sir, and that is all there is to it. Our mind chooses what it is we see. It interprets shapes and lines into data, and associates that data with ideas and concepts. Your mind knows what a chair looks like – it sees a chair, it tells you that it is a chair. If it sees a drawing of a chair, it tells you that it is a chair.

But this… this affliction spreading across the globe… goes so much farther beyond that.

Take a look, out a window, and gaze up at the sky. Do you see the clouds drifting past? What do you see in them? Do they form shapes, like they do for children – can you see tigers and dragons, buildings and books, familiar faces and strange new worlds?

No? It isn’t surprising – those shapes aren’t there. Only vapor drifing on the wind.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t see those shapes if you look close enough. For some it may come easy. For some there shall be only clouds forevermore.

Imagine, if you would, that your mind’s capability to perceive reality suddenly… went into overdrive? Every image and shape you see forms into new patterns. Every cloud could be a dancer or a dime, an hourglass, an eagle, an ocean in the sky. Imagine if everywhere you looked, you could not perceive one single clear image, but instead a hundred thousand possibilities.

That is what is happening. We do not know how or why. All our research has yielded nothing! Every day we hear of more subject to this… this change, without rhyme or reason for their choosing. Each man and woman suddenly cursed with imagination uncontrollable and unyielding, reality as cut off from their sight as from a man with no sight at all.

This morning I awoke afflicted. I write this report blind, for I dare not let my eyes open and observe the nightmares that my mind insists are there. Even closed, the shadows that rest upon my eyelids, the spots of recollected light that dance before my gaze – they too twist and turn into a thousand burning shapes, terrible and inescapable. I… I do not know how long I can withstand the sights before me. I think it little wonder that all the others have been driven mad. I can not imagine any cure to this terrible… terrible…

This is no disease. This is a curse, sent to make the human race answer for some unspoken crime. Find a way to stop it, or our race will perish in madness and chaos. Find the source and end it; failing that, find a way to shackle our thoughts from these lofty heights.

It is too late for me, but it may not yet be too late for the world.

Godspeed.

-Final report from the research journal of Dr. Howard Anton, deceased