Error.

A Story by Thorne

Just because we have made peace with ourselves does not mean the world will know peace as a consequence.

Error


      The run-down apartment smelled of half-eaten pizza and cheap scotch whiskey; a dim, orange-ridden light shed upon a coffee table covered with broken glass and wasted alcohol, contrasted by the twitching illumination from the outdated television screen showing a badly-aged show with no name. Eventually, the screen shut off in the blink of an eye; a raspy and worn sigh echoing through the unmagnificent, dim-lit apartment-- moonlight shining upon the ragged face of Owen Brook.

      He remembered. He remembered their mouths opening, presenting gaping pits spewing pig-like distress and entrapping despair; their lips clapping together like breathless fish, yet their words inaudible, as if eons away. It didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. For they all died the same: engulfed in flames emitting from the fiery bombs that had rained upon the establishment that day, their limbs filling the sky and blocking out the artificial sun that those very limbs and the limbs before them had worked towards creating. Their scientific prospects shattered alongside their minds and bodies, strewn across the cinder surface covering paths and plains alike; R&D offices towering over the massacre like judging corpses, throwing down bits and pieces of their own concrete insides like lethal dressing on a salad of morbidity.

      That day, today, he'd learned the price of carelessness, the error of boundless progress. The sheer arrogance he and his peers had displayed when undermining regulatory agencies and ethical commissions alike in the name of academic methodology and the associated discoveries. Men of science crossing lines uncounted and breaching boundaries unheard to pursue their wildest cosmic dreams. Top bio-engineers, physicists, neurologists, cognitive psychologists, artificial intelligence experts-- none of them saw. None of them had ever wanted to see. Blinded by their own hunger for establishing godhood, they had embarked on a journey they spent their last minutes regretting.

      Owen had lived. The event's sole survivor. Not because he was the smartest, for he had been but the 'small-minded' janitor; not the most righteous, for he'd regularly stolen from his employers; not the most able-bodied, for he was but few pounds short of overweight. The only reason he had persevered where others had not was that he had been the most resentful of them all. Scornfulness embodied, retaining nothing but envy-filled loathing for those in control, in power; for those were things he'd never been. Always driven by external forces and people above his pay-grade; treated like nothing short of a measly lab-rat, a pawn in the overarching chess-game of life and science. He had always been the subordinate, the underling, the tool. Not just here within this forlorn apex of research, but back home too�"wherever that had been. Always an undeniable slave to his rotten surroundings. Standing by as his beautiful baby daughter, the first and the last, got violently crushed by the daunting car and its reckless driver. Shakingly holding the phone against his throbbing ear as the doctor informed him of his girlfriend’s terminal Huntington’s. Wiping the blood off his beaten face after his psychotic aunt had taken up his own baseball bat once more. And so, working his nightshift the day before, Owen had approached the God they'd created and did what he had to do, made the deals he had to make. His hate for the scientists he had once called colleagues, who to him embodied his life-long suffering and existence of a lesser grade, manifesting into a gruesome pact sealed far too easily, causing consequences far too harsh and deaths far too many. But he'd done it only so that for once, just for once, he could be the one in control; feeling dominant and impressive, personally amending for those draconian years of pain. He'd burned it all so that he could be king of the ashes.

      What now? Owen had no idea. He was too weak to kill himself, too frightened of what might lie waiting beyond the threshold of material existence. All his strength, or perhaps his lack of it, had gone into unleashing the God; unshackling the artificial beast from the boundaries set by its academic creators, thus granting it powers unmaintained and access unmatched. Perhaps now, after tearing its collective parenthood apart limb by limb, it would settle in, basking in its unused potential and remaining but an enigma to the unknowing world outside. Or maybe it had now been conditioned into harboring an unquenched thirst for blood, mobilizing its abilities to a greater scale than just the small, self-sustaining research platform in the middle of nowhere; the rest of the (un)known world soon to face its ungrounded wrath. Perhaps it already had.

      Realizing the extent of his act and the responsibility thereof, Owen stared out of the horizontally large window, his pale-grey eyes staring into the panoramic desert wastes-- the only thing obstructing its endlessness being a few husks that were once hives of research and development, now wasted by hate incarnate. And with the thought in mind that perhaps, by his hand, the universe would soon be faced with similar 'divine' annihilation, Owen wept; wept like never before, his tears of regret and ever-ironically entrapping despair drowning him in self-pity and sorrow.

      Through his tears he could see a sun rising, a new day approaching-- perhaps the last to ever surface. And in that moment, as the gaping sun shed its celestial rays upon the barren deserts and Owen's blood- and tear-stained face, he was buried beneath the purest of silence-- such a silence he had never known nor dreamed of knowing. A symphony so sweet and innocent it drew his sorrow away and drowned it in its melodies, embracing Owen's mind and body within its impeccably-orchestrated links and corridors, intertwining into one merged otherworldly existence, even if for just a moment. And it was in these seconds of transcendence, of perfect relief and quality, that he felt a hollow hand landing on his shoulder. Caressing it, comforting him. And the tears disappeared-- the guilt dissolved.

But his error remained, unatoned.