4. Rebirth

Its—my—nose broke; as surely as I could feel the pain invading my temples. Without further ado, my waist turned, my left arm went up to the reaching hand and my flailing arm continued its arc down to break or dislocate its—my—arm at the elbow; it was dislocated. The thing—I—fell down to the ground with a crack that brought a wave of pain to its—my—torax. I brought my feet onto its—my—nape and slowly pushed until I could felt the hard leather of my soles on my own scalp and smell the oily scent of my boots with my own nose.

Will I die? "Sooner or later we all will die, son" answered the voice of my long gone father. Then, I stomped on the thing—myself—. It died with the whisper of a pop—and I was born.

3. Awakening

The real alarm clock beeped. I woke up, faithless and godless. It was uncommon in me to wake up bellowing in anger; or was it pain? Anyway, the alarm clock ended up crashing into the wall. For the first time, I hated myself for being a social drinker and not having any alcohol at home. It seemed like the most logical path to force my mind into oblivion.

The routine kicked in. Every muscle doing what it had been trained to do for years on end independently of the state of my mind. That was me, a part of me, most of the time impervious to the state of my mind, doing the job.

In no time, I found myself walking the road back to the lab trying to keep my mind busy with the eerie world provided by the morning fog out from the river. Sunrise got me at the underpass through the river. The long tunnel filled with  thick brume refracting the nascent light in such a way that the passersby were rendered as mere blurry, inhuman silhouettes.

Time stop. I became no better than a piece of marble. Unmovable. All the silhouettes frozen at their places. 

That's when the infernal sound came. If pure, distilled pain had a characteristic sound, that unearthly cacophony would have been it. My skin wanted to crawl; it couldn't. A silhouette at the other end of the tunnel—no, not a silhouette, rather a dark void devouring all the scattered light—started moving towards my direction. Whenever it brushed one of the human silhouettes, the tunnel was filled with the hellish sound, and I felt this urge to ran away in every cubic centimeter of my body.

It advanced slowly, the silence in between encounters a periodic witness to its approach. The silhouettes of those in front of me getting blurrier as soon as my ears ringed again with the infernal sound. I thought of destruction... of undoing, but the silhouettes remained. Tendrils of pure darkness slowly creeping over them, slowly engulfing them. Everything in me begged to flee.

The black void stood in front of me. At its heart, a figure clad and hooded in a black robe stood.

A sleeve slowly rose until its empty end was in front of my face; a pale hand covered in thick, lively tendrils of pure darkness reached out for my face.

My skin crawled. Before I consciously registered the feeling and the though, I found my hand flying towards the hooded figure. 

My fist hit the mark and I found myself staring at Corruption itself. It had my face...

2. Dreams...

The door welcomed me in silence and stubbornness. Time warped by each blink of my sleepy eyes... hallway... darkness... staircase... darkness... hallway... darkness... lonely bed... darkness... fast approaching pillow... darkness... 03:14 in square red numerals... darkness.

*bleep bleep* 

Repetition of an every day's routine made an automata out of me. Morning came, I was a mere mechanical imitation of a human being, the incarnation of the "instant human, just add coffee" meme.

Turn off the alarm clock... check. Get naked and grab a towel... check. Walk to the bathroom to have a shower... in progress.

The bathroom's door was friendlier than the apartment's door; it received me with a warm mist and the calming sound of flowing water. "That's how a morning is started," I thought while getting into the shower. 

"Ayip, Birtanem!" She said with the most wonderful and radiant smile upon her face. It was contagious! I couldn't help but grin. "That's really how a morning is started!" I said to myself again. 

"Günaidin askim," I said while staring at her, taking delight on her wavy reddish brown colored hair, amber eyes, pale skin and red lips. We kissed. 

"All is well that ends well," I thought, the grin still on my face. She left, to get the morning choirs started. Sleepy, I put myself into taking a shower, with the feeling that I was missing something. I dismissed the feeling; I have never had a good memory, anyway.

I came to the hallway in my usual polo and denims. Before I took five steps,  the most primitive, dangerous and adorable beast leapt upon me, slowly climbing from leg to waist, from waist to back, and finally settling down on his regal throne: my shoulders. "Tsao Papa!"

"Elijah, you are gonna break your Papa; he's not young anymore!" Said Lale. We laughed.

*bleep bleep*

1. Beginnings...

The world came to me in sporadic bursts of colors. Sounds were beyond my ability to register the reality of my surroundings. The long walk leading to the staff's living quarters became shorter due to the intermittent darkness brought by my erratic blinking. My depleted energy reserves barely allowed me to perform route correction. Still, I managed to imagine myself raising arms and mumbling "brrrraaaaiiiiiinss;" it put a grin on my face. I was a  picture perfect zombie after three days of troubleshooting my piece of the  elephant. Back then, we called it "the elephant." Each and every one of us was hired to design a pretty specific piece of equipment under the most stringent specifications. Each and every one of us was kept in the dark as to what other pieces of hardware were being built. Our confidentiality agreements clearly stated that any breach of secrecy were to be considered an immediate forfeit  of  the involved parties' remuneration. The certainty of being under surveillance 24-7 and the lack of interest in losing a seven figures paycheck kept our mouths shut off.