Imagine yourself sitting in a dark, damp, dimly lit basement on the cold cement slap of a floor. You're leaning up against a moist wall of peeling paint, your knees tucked and drawn up just below your chin. It's actually mid-day outside but you1d never know it - a thick dark gloom has set in all around the world about an hour ago, according to the very last information on the TV and radio. That was the last word just prior to all world-wide communications systems going completely down. No phones, no electric power, no generators, no nothing. Not even batteries are useful any longer. Through the dark clouds speeding by unusually fast overhead, you can still clearly make out the moon, a rare unusual color of red, along with those now famous four Hebrew consonants that have been globally visible on its surface to everyone for the past six nights, since the beginning of October. What were they were called? The Tetra something....
The air is hot and heavy with the moist thick sweat and bad feeling that you and billions of other people are in VERY VERY serious trouble. There are no longer any religions left, except, of course, the one, and the past three weeks have been marked by increasing worldwide anarchy, as civil governments in every country, one by one, have failed. As everyone has gradually become more and more aware of their hopeless situation, very predictably, most persons simply seem to act more and more evil, since nothing really matters anymore. We're talkin' about formerly "everyday people", the typical overweight mom you would see driving her kids around in a mini-van, the average guy working the checkout counter at K-Mart, the mailman, the real estate lady down the street...
They are all completly different now. Their social masks and behavioral restraints have all been angerly thrown and cast off, like outdated and worthless garments. They can now do anything they want! Money is now worthless. It has actually become a disgusting abomination to almost everyone everywhere, especially to those who spent most of their lives trying to obtain and horde it as a hedge, a form of security for whatever they thought was ahead. Yes, foolishly they had put their trust and hopes in mere money. Many, out of deep revulsion for it now, are literally throwing their wealth out their windows, right into the streets below.
As a result of these shocking and extremely emotional attitudes, you can easily imagine how unusually dangerous it has become in simply attempting to venture outside, since people everywhere are being raped and murdered for just the thrill of it, like video games of wanton carnage spilling directly over into reality. But people still have to sneak out to obtain food, water, strong sedatives and tranquilizers, the usual new cocaine-based designer drugs, and of course, the very new and powerful "Digitized VR software drugs" or "DreamiDrugs" as they're now known on the street.
These are actual "drugs" on CD-ROM that have been around now for almost a year or so, highly illegal. They were passed around or covertly downloaded, and could only be used on Macintosh computers. Once hooked in with an eye-goggle interface, a person could experience a virtual drug-induced, real-time, menu-driven encounter by tapping into and specifically stimulating one's own natural opiate-chemical flow in their brain, with amazing nanopoint accuracy.
The hypnotic result was like hot-dreaming, yet you had full and total control of what you want to feel and experience, all material right out of your very own private memory-library. Lucid dreaming in its highest possible form. Most people would just sit there day and night, stopping only for brief food/sleep/bathroom breaks. They tended to regress back into their vast detailed supply of memories, both conscious and unconscious, and totally and realistically relived them differently, doing whatever and anything they desired, which usually ended up degenerating into non-stop sexual encounters with various people in their past. But it was really just memory tampering and everything has its cost. You are what you are today because of the sum total of all your life's experiences. Radically change your memories and background and you end up radically changing your personality.
Therefore, the most common and heaviest side-effect seemed to be the resulting deep psycholocal problems associated directly with what a person, doing "DreamiDrugs", ended up doing and experiencing, simply because it was so very "real" and breathtakingly believeable. Add to that, the unavoidable physical and emotional exhaustion from the tempting massive-pleasure of continuous and prolonged orgasms. Most people could do "DreamiDrugs" for only about a week. By then they were wasted. Vegged Way Out. And "DreamiDrugs" are now history since there is no longer any power to run the computers.
There is no longer any "society", as we knew it before. Cities and towns everywhere, in a matter of mere weeks, have rapidly deteriorated to the dangerous point of "every man for himself", "survival of the fittest", and power-grabbing by those with the superior firepower. Obviously those with any police or military survivalist background skills thrived best. These "self-proclaimed leaders" are indeed making out far better. But it is only a relative "better", because they have no more hope of living any longer than their weakest followers among them. "Survival" is no longer a valid word. It is with grim sarcasm and/or extreme ignorance to even casually use the word or concept.
Sensing the approaching climax of doom, you decided to hide alone in the basement, fearful, of course, of any unpredictable and violent behavior on the part of others, or even, as you hate to admit, on the part of yourself. You feel that you have had your fun and now it's time to get serious before dying.
You start smelling wiffs of putrid odor and you feel a hard sinking tightening knot in your stomach as the acids churn around and around, causing slight vertigo up in your inner ear. There's a certain something else in the air, almost like a high-pitched sound or sonic-feeling that is causing the hair on the back of your neck to stand out stiffly and your skin to crawl, like you're hearing and feeling fingernails being scraped on a blackboard or being rapidly bloodied down to nubs across a cement sidewalk. Your mouth involuntarily opens wide at your jaw-hinges, as if your ears are about to pop, but it doesn't happen.
You are really scared now.
In a distant and abstract way it almost reminds you of the sickening feeling of when you were young and always had to jump into bed a certain way in order to avoid getting too near the edge. That way, anything or anyone slimy or evil hiding beneath the black void of your bed would be unable to viciously grab your foot and drag you under. Throughout the night, every night, it was always extremely vital to avoid the edge of the bed for the same scary reason.
The feelings were always there and they were impossibly hard to ignore. You would try to comfort yourself by trying to convince yourself that whatever was in the closet was much worse. And mom was always there, of course, just in the next room. That was usually enough to balance the powers. But now, sitting here in the dank dark basement, things are a lot different. A whole lot different. You are alone, very alone, facing what amounts to the virtual end of everything you know and love,
including, above all, yourself.
Imagine what's going through your mind now at this critical moment of impending doom. You reflect back on how short your life ultimately turned out to be. You reflect on how much living you will miss out on and it's almost funny how you end up silently cursing yourself for all the wasted time you spent watching so much mindless "prepackaged artificial experiences"(TV). Then your thoughts go deeper: the frustrating elusiveness of never really finding the perfect companion, your soulmate, someone to have shared your life with. Such a glaringly empty and massive lack of meaningful love. That depressing thought saddens you to yet new depths as the gloom of the immediate impending situation continues to gush in. Hopelessness and resignation, in their purist forms, are among the very worst of human feelings. They tend to sap and drain out all of your life force and energy. Deep depression tends to snuff out even the slightest flicker of hope.
No way out.
You feel that same "no way out" now. Imagine sitting there in almost complete gloomy darkness, like being locked in a terrifying closet without a doorknob, unable to get out, screaming at the top of your lungs for help, remembering about how people suffocate, drowning in deep water, unable to touch the bottom with their toes. You feel like you're locked in a small closet and it's being filled with water. There are few feelings in life worse than panic. Total panic, adrenaline pumping, reason-put-on-hold, emotions running unrestricted at sonic speeds.....what can be worse?
No way out.
Yes, Doomsday has finally arrived. You had been subtly warned of it many times throughout your life by various people, directly and indirectly. You were, of course, like most people, too busy, too involved, and too apathetic. Always, in the back of your mind you figured you'd look into it someday. But you never did. Now you, along with over 5 billion others, have finally taken notice, but too late: there's no way out. You envy those who DID take notice, those relatively few who really did do what was right and will subsequently not only survive but will live forever on a beautiful paradise earth! You not only envy them, but like everyone else, you hate them. You have small comfort in finally learning the simple truth that when you die you will indeed be dead. As in "No Life", as in no afterlife Anywhere. You will drop into an incredibly deep void and the state you will remain in forever will be as when you were before conception. It'll be just like all those centuries of time that you were Not. You'll be just like the way you were in the year 1879. Or 1479. Or
1,479 years before Christ. Or even 1,479 centuries before the earth was here. It will be like that again except in the other direction, Forever. A million billion years from now you will still not Be. So hard to grasp. So difficult to fathom. You will never "Be" again. Total nothingness from now on....forever and ever and ever and ever.....
And there's no way out.
Your mind keeps going back to your childhood, and now you desperately relive the warm comfort of being cuddled up in your bed by your mommy. She bends over you in soft coziness and tucks you in so lovingly and all the world is right there in her beaming smile and her gentle stroking of your forehead. So warm is the feeling that not even what's hiding beneath your bed can alter the moment. Those loving memories were seared so deeply into your mind that you can bask in it even now, in your final moments of Being in the universe. Regrets. Deep regrets. If only this, if only that. If only you had listened to The Truth About It All.....
You bury your head now and sob and heave so heavily that you almost lose your breath. Tears begin to soak down into your collar as they stream down your face, like trickling veins of grief. All your moments of smiling and laughter in your life were ultimately for nothing, because they will not continue. All your moments of pleasure were in vain, because they will soon stop. Every memory will be lost, as if they never really were. Memories, "like tears becoming insignifcantly
lost in a downpour of rain." You sadly recall that expression from some movie you saw.
And there's still no way out.
Your childhood surfaces again, like some desperate automatic emotional barrier to shield yourself from the tightly knotted stomach-churning realities of the moment. You remember when you were young, sitting on a bench with your pretty mommy at the city park, watching the other kids playing. She was sitting close up against you with her bare arm affectionately and so securely around you. As you dreamily recall those feelings now, and as you focus on these words before you, it takes you way back to the time when you were hiding in your closet with your playmate friend who was so fun for playing with, and in whom you were so infatuated. There, in your closet, you both had experimented with kissing and hugging and enjoying all the new feelings of those emotional rushes that come with doing those things so secretly together. You would take all your clothes completely off the rack above so that you could then stand erect in the small space that was opened up. It felt so good to be together in such a tight space that you soon found out that your playmate desired you to go all the way into the rear of the closet and hide and live there together forever.
You never did go all the way back because you were much too shy and scared of what to do, so, instead, you simply promised to marry each other when you grew up. You remember after that experience, laying in bed at night with nothing on your mind except replaying the memory over and over and picturing all the affectionate possibilities that could have happened. Even at that tender innocent age, certain feelings popped up to arouse your curiosity of how it would feel to be more intimate with someone of the opposite sex. You really came deeply to committ yourself to your playmate to be your future marriage mate, quite a big step to take at that age, and obviously it kept you from getting involved with anyone else.
But getting involved with others you eventually did. Your closet became the secret meeting place with many others. You recently recall remembering the time when you thought back to the last time you were in there with a playmate and your mommy totally surprised you when she suddenly opened the door wide and lifted up her dresses that were hanging in there to see you. You looked slowly right up her legs to her face and saw her quivering lips wide apart as you revealed yourself as to what you were up to. You were, between your playmate's long legs and yours, somewhat shorter, so it must have looked a bit odd to be right in the middle of hugging and kissing like that.
You felt so naked and vulnerable as your shocked mommy yanked you out and grabbed you, giving you such a hard lick'n and severe tongue lash'n
that you never ever forgot. She made it so hard on you that you quickly came to the point of not being able to hold back from finally bursting and exploding all over her short white silky slip with your thick wet tears. She immediately felt that maybe she went too far, and sighing deeply, genuinely seemed to feel sorry for her severe behavior. She bent down and cuddled you tightly into her breasts which only made you come and burst out again, only harder, between her sighs, as you took advantage of such a rare display of her scanty affection.
But you got over it, moved on, grew up, had your own closet, and lived your life the way that YOU wanted to, with no one ever telling you what to do. That1s exactly how you wanted it, always the feeling in the back of your mind of not having to be accountable to anyone. You clearly realize now, in the final analysis, that you and your desires were always your god. Literally now, you realize that this is indeed the Final Analysis. You worshiped yourself. Too bad, you tell yourself now, as you remember a saying you once heard: the smallest package in the world is the person that's completely wrapped up in himself.
Your sobbing begins to slow down now as you look up and suddenly let out a terrifying blood-curling horrible scream at the very top of your lungs. You scream because you want so bad to hear a comforting word, an answer, any answer . . . anything. You stop and hold your breath, listening now, straining your ears to hear of some way out. Thick stonewalled silence answers your hysterical plea, like a derelict parent who is never there when you desperately cry. You try to comfort your racing mind by reminding yourself that it will be all be over soon, but even that backfires as that thought does more damage than good.....you'll soon be permanently wacked.
If only you could somehow go back into time to perhaps do things differently. Curiously, that reminds you of the time when you were reading that strange story that you had gotten off the Internet - what was it called again? Something 666 - BunnyPlug, yes, that was it, "BunnyPlug 666". You recall how depressing it was to read - and never in a million years did you believe that such a fate like that would actually ever befall you, especially so "soon" afterward. The really
weird part was toward the end of the story where you remember how it ironically mentioned how you wished you could actually go back into time to the point when you first read this prophetic story and how you wished it had affected you to the extent wherein you could have actually avoided what the story said would eventually happen to
you.....
Even more strange, you now suddenly realize with tremendous and obviously enormous relief - you really ARE actually back in time reading "BunnyPlug 666" RIGHT NOW! Yes, maybe that's the whole point after all: the future is not really etched in stone for anyone. You really are back in time to perhaps make sure that the foregoing scenario does not actually happen to you at all!
You hope with all your speedily beating heart that that really is the key to the story and that's exactly why "BunnyPlug 666" was written and that you're not just desperately grasping for mere straws here. But then, all of a sudden, as you're still sitting on that cold tomb of a basement floor with your renewed flicker of hope, you remember exactly how "BunnyPlug 666" ended. It concluded with you back HERE in time again, now reading the fifth to the last paragraph as you are now doing, eagerly and desperately wishing that the future was not etched in stone and that maybe there was some way of living your life differently now to avoid what it said was going to happen. You even remember reading this sentence and picturing yourself in the then future looking back to remember yourself remembering......
It's so confusing. Your mind reels now, dizzy, vertigo setting in, blood draining from your brain. But it doesn't really matter.
Because, in the very last moment of your life you distinctly recall the very last devastating sentence of "BunnyPlug 666" - yes, that one last hopeless phrase in that so mesmerizingly prophetic story:
There is absolutely no way out.
You now die.