It was 1988, sometime in July when it all happened. I was working as a cop in a tiny town barely breaking one thousand residents. One night I was called on one of the backroads to check out a clearing kids just loved drinking and partying at.
When I arrived I started making my way to the clearing, walking through the deep, dark pines only partially illuminated by my old flashlight. I clearly remember, there was enough vegetation surrounding me that I could make out the pattern in the flashlight beam. Anyway, I followed the path, which wasn’t much of one, just cleared of plants and only maintained by eager teens desperate for some fun in this boring town.
I was getting close to the clearing now, but it was unusual that I have yet to see any trash. Cans and whatnot. Finally, after what felt like forever; I saw the clear moonlight and heard the sounds of talking and music. I started jogging and soon enough I came bursting from the trees into the clearing. The clearing was about 60 feet in diameter. The moonlight there hit the dewy grass and the pine trees perfectly. It looked magical. There was one small issue when coming into the clearing though. Nobody was there. Not even a trace of someone being there.
I twisted around intending to get back to my car. But no matter how much I turned I couldn’t find the path. It was gone. Suddenly, a droplet hit the bridge of my nose and in an instant, rain started pouring down. I looked up at the newly cloudy sky. “What the fuck?” I whispered to myself.
Soon I heard a roar, sounding like a thousand whales. I covered my ears, trying to hide from it. I looked toward the treeline and saw a box rising slowly from afar. It was a dark rectangular thing. It blended into the silhouettes of the ghastly trees. It looked as if it was made from clouds, its surface rippling. I watched in stunned silence, mouth agape as a central eye slowly opened at the center-top of it. The eye was so human, so intelligent. As it stared me down, I abandoned my conception of “God”. This thing did not come from a god. This thing was a god. The way it looked at me, as if I was just an ant in a child’s ant farm. It stared with a reserved interest.
I barely noticed as the droplets of rain slowed in the air, to a crawl and the roar lessen to silence. Eventually I tore my eyes from the god, and I realized that the droplets had stopped. I looked puzzled at them before hesitantly reaching out and touching one. It leaped to my finger, sticking to it. I shook my hand and a million little droplets went flying in every direction like glitter, some getting absorbed by other, larger pearl-like drops. Soon, I couldn’t say how long, but soon after, the drops started going up. And with them, I did too.
Slowly, I began to rise. I looked down as only my toes were able to reach the grass. About a second later my feet couldn’t touch the ground. I started rising faster, and faster. Soon I was above the trees. The god still gazed at me, staring into my very being.
“Why me?” I thought hopelessly. The roar returned, only for a split second before morphing into a thousand screams. Soon it changed to a thousand voices. It spoke to me. Concepts and ideas my mind wasn’t meant to hold. Things humanity should never know. Even when presented with eternity, I could never gather the words to describe what it said to me.
The rain and I started falling towards the god. It was taking me closer. I was still pondering on the things it told me. I started soaring at a breakneck speed. Over cities, towns, people. “Could they see it too?” I thought. A vision from the god hit me. People slumped over in the streets. Clocks with hands still. A track coaches stopwatch lying on the ground, the time not moving.
I started falling even faster, soaring over jungles, oceans, mountains, and snow. I reached it. I still can’t remember how big it was. It may have been smaller than me, but so many conflicting memories rattles my brain. It looked at me inquisitively. Still studying me. It stared at me for hours, waiting for the one question that could unlock its knowledge for me. I am not sure why it took me so long, but I finally asked the one thing that it was willing to answer now. “What are you?” I thought. It answered.
Floods of visions came to me, of war, explosions and destruction of a small town somewhere in the middle east. Death, a family succumbing to the black death in a damp, dank barn filled with moist, molding food. Famine, starving children in a hot, arid desert with no civilization in sight. It was always, and will always observe. It showed me visions of joy, parents holding their child for the first time in a white, sterile hospital. A father watching his daughter take her first steps in a cozy suburban home. A young boy with an A on his school test. It showed bliss, anger, revenge, love, and many, many others.
After what felt like years, it showed me the average joes, the “normal” people. It showed me businessmen working in cubicles, their office being mixes of greys as the only colors. It then showed me a businessman, floating in front of it as I did now. Then a woman, probably during a run judging by the clothing, after that, an old man, then they started flashing faster and faster. A knight in full armor, a person in a loincloth, red paint staining their fingers and animal skin on their back. An American civil war soldier, a feudal peasant, an emperor, more and more started flashing. I was not the first and I’m not the last. It was always here, and it will always be here.
It is a judge. A judge of humanity. It is a scientist, observing what makes humanity what they are. It is a collector of voices. It is a curious child. It is a monument of what humanity is. What we did, and will do. The good, the bad, and everything in-between. It is the physical form of who we are. It changes as we do. We are just as much an influence on it as it is on us. It holds an incomprehensible amount of power. If the path of humanity leads to pain, destruction, and war. Its path leads there too. It will reveal itself to us when it deems it time. When that day comes we must pray it wont be angry.
I was thrust back into the clearing, faster than I could see. The sun was slowly rising, in the same place the god was. It was no longer raining. I slowly got up, breathing heavily. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. My voice was gone, taken. I drove to the hospital while disorientated. Irresponsible I know. Once there I grabbed the pen and clipboard they asked me to sign and wrote “It took my voice” in big bold letters.
When the doctor entered the room the nurse took me to he said that my vocal tract was just gone. No trace of it. This is how I live now, forced to remember what it told me. Things I’m not supposed to know. I am its harbinger, and it sends a message to us. It said that in the Rapture, Armageddon, Ragnarök, whatever you call it, it is humanity’s actions as a single entity that determines our fate.