Translucent

by Beardsley, Nathaniel

  And Karena was on top of it all. As soon as the glass beneath her feet broke she found herself falling into the vortex of swirling sand, and as she fell she was doing something that hardly any phericke or human ever did. She was laughing. It was a strange thing to see a phericke laugh, as it looked more like strong body convulsions than laughing as an ordinary person would know it. But nonetheless she was laughing as she was enveloped in the sand and the shards of broken glass-like material, and in the same amount of time in which everyone else had disappeared, she was gone.

  But breaking Translucent has far greater consequences than just killing everyone in its proximity. Translucent contains within it the power of the vortex, which has the potential of destroying entire worlds. Normally these worlds are dream worlds, and so in the real world the vortex wouldn’t be able to destroy everything. But as it was sucked back into the void between realities, it would create a massive explosion that would suck everything in that area into the void with it.

  And that is exactly what happened. The entire compound was surrounded by swirling shapes of violet that penetrated everything. For in the room where Translucent had been, the void had opened up, sucking in the sands and the humans and Karena and everything there was into it, to be carried off into some other dream world. Who knows, maybe some of them could have survived. But they were out of the real world now, and were in the world of dreams, and so they would never be able to come back into the real world unless there was some other rupture powerful enough to tear rips between reality and dreams. They would all be labeled as dead.

  The vortex continued to rip through the compound, sucking in everyone and everything within it. All the phericke and humans who were in simulated dreams had already woken up when Translucent had been destroyed, only now to be torn out of their dream chamber less than a minute afterwards and to be hurtled into another dream world, never to return again. The head, on his way out of the facility, was also ripped off the ground and hurled into the void. And in the space of just 66 seconds after Karena had destroyed Translucent, the compound was gone and the rip in the void had vanished. There was a massive hole in the ground where the vortex had sucked in the earth, and in the area where the complex had been there was literally nothing. Not even air. It was just sheer emptiness.

  The reporters weren’t to know how to explain this strange and sudden event. No witnesses had survived the incident, and so no one knew what had happened. It was another thing at which humans had no explanation for, something which only happened very, very rarely.

  66

  Earth, early 21st century. Some millennia before the destruction of Translucent.

  Harold and Christi Byrd woke up to the sound of their daughter screaming. Harold didn’t mind being woken up in the middle of the night, after all, it happened about once a week, and this particular time he was awake when it happened. He waited for a moment to see if it would stop, which was what he always did. It didn’t stop. He got up and went down the hallway into the nursery.

  He didn’t need to turn on the light to know how to avoid the chair and go straight to Karena’s crib at the other end of the room. Softly, he lay a finger on her small face and stroked it. “Shhh,” he said. “It’s okay. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  The screaming continued. As gently as he could, Harold picked up Karena and began stroking her. For a moment, it seemed as if nothing was happening. And then the crying slowed down. Harold began to hum something, although he wasn’t quite sure what it was. It seemed to do the trick, though, because as he hummed it while stroking Karena she calmed down considerably. It usually had this effect on her, allowing her to be soothed even though he wasn’t necessarily the best singer. Fortunately, this night wasn’t any different from the other nights when she’d woken up.

  Harold gently lay Karena back in her crib, and by the time she was settled she was already sound asleep. Harold began to leave the room. As an afterthought, he turned around and said: “Sleep tight. You’re going to grow up to do great things.” He then left the room and went back to bed.

  And Karena did grow up to do great things. She lived a happy, normal life, full of friends and success. Her parents dying at the age of 10 was a great tragedy for her, and for a while she was in a state of depression. But after a few years she had gotten used to living in the orphanage, and had made new friends there. The sting of losing her parents never really left her, but after a while, Karena realized how important this sting was. It proved that she was human, that there were things in this world that she cared about. After coming to that conclusion the sting became easier to live with.

  There was only one incident in her life that was completely unexplainable, or at least to her. It happened one day while she was with her friends at the restaurant called Quencher’s. She was sitting at a table, eating her food, when suddenly she saw something move out the window. She saw it only for a split second, and all she saw was some sort of fleshy blob move quickly past the window. She had never seen anything like it before. She wasn’t sure if it looked like a blob merely because she hadn’t seen it for very long or because it actually looked like a blob, but nevertheless it was gone in less than a second, and by the end of the day Karena had entirely forgotten about it.

  She grew up to be an adult and attended college, before starting a business and being very successful with it. She was perfectly content with her life. She lived all the way to the age of 97 before passing away peacefully in her sleep.

  Just before dying, as she was reflecting on her life, she realized that although her life had been full of happiness and success, there had never really been anything totally shocking or surprising, some adventure that made her heart beat with exhilaration while filling her with fear and wonder. For a moment she was disappointed. An adventure, she realized, was the one thing that she wanted in her life, that would make it feel totally complete. But after a minute, she decided that an anticlimax was good every once in a while. She’d rather be like this then be in despair. She may not have had a terrific adventure, like the kind she read about in books and saw in movies, but that was okay. She had lived her own life. And so she died, entirely content with what had happened to her.

  Of course, the blob Karena saw out the window of Quencher’s was real, and it was the Sandman. He was taking information of her life, and he’d decided that that point would be the point at which he’d make the phericke start over during the simulated dream. But that is not the point of telling this part of the story. The point is that Karena was real, and that the real Karena, the Karena you’ve been reading about this whole story, actually lived long before the events of this tale.

  For the time being, no one knows what happened to the other Karena, the one who was a phericke. Perhaps she survived and is in a dream somewhere. In fact, it would not be entirely impossible that she did not appear in your dream, or maybe the Sandman, or one of the guards. Maybe we’ll find out someday. But for now, I think it should be best to focus on the fate of the other Karena, the Karena of the real world, because that tale has a definite conclusion, and it’s a good one.