Work Text:
August 23, 2014
Sandy,
First off, I don't know if you'll even read this. I mean, it's a letter. Who writes one of these these days? But I need what's happened written down in some form so that maybe some day, someone will see this and know it happened. Because I'm even having troubles convincing myself about this and you're one of the few people I know who can understand it.
I know I haven't heard from you lately. I tried calling you, leaving you messages, texting you, e-mailing you, and you never respond. At one point, I might have thought it was because you were ignoring me or I did something that pissed you off. But now I think it's because they won't let me talk to you. I'm hoping a letter at least can make it through. Who knows?
I don't even know where to start. But remember this while you're reading this (or anyone please anyone): I'm not crazy.
I'm not crazy and I didn't make this up.
I don't think I did-
It all started with Chris (crap, I can't remember her last name). You might have known her as RandomChris from the anime club. I know you weren't particularly into it, but she hung out in Jill's apartment a few times, so I'm sure you met her least once. She was the tall girl with the really curly dark hair and always wore those plaid flannel shirts and talked about these science things that sounded cool even if I had no idea what she was actually talking about. You probably would.
We called her RandomChris because you never actually knew when she would show up – you'd be eating lunch in the cafe and then there she was, sitting at your table. You didn't ask her to come sit with you, she just did it anyway. Or you'd be at a bar with Jill trying to relax after putting up with the dumbest questions at the reference desk you can imagine and there she was, trying to speak in nothing but Greek to her. Greek! Who does that?
I know I'm rambling-- but I need you to know why I didn't stop her--
But she could be awesome fun to hang out with and she was incredibly smart, so when I left school, I kind of hoped that one day I'd bump into her and we'd get coffee or something and talk about some sort of super secret project she was working on for some think tank and I'd tell her the joys of being unemployed with a masters' degree and thousands in debt. I didn't hear from her though, for years, and after a while, I figured that as randomly as she had entered my life, she had left it as well.
Until three weeks ago when I started getting e-mails from her. Thankfully, she had never changed her e-mail address from when she used to spam us those with weird news links so I sort of remembered it still.
I can't remember exactly how the first one went (and I can't send it to you because I don't have it anymore), but it was strange because she wrote to me like it had just been a week ago that I talked to him and not, you know, eight years. But I figured it was just RandomChris and that's how she is. Anyhow, it was full of scientific things I didn't understand (I tried Googling some of it and still couldn't figure out half of it), but basically, it sounded like she had gotten a hold of something really cool if even she was frustratingly vague about it. At first.
So I e-mailed her back and asked for details about it. She seemed a little put upon in the e-mail she sent back like I should totally understand everything she was talking about (she was always touchy if she thought you were playing stupid when she was talking to you, but seriously, I didn't understand her half the time). But she was a little less vague this time. And by a little less vague, I mean she said things like:
“If we could master it, we could transcend time and space, break the limits that were put upon us, record everything that is and was and ever shall be. We could comprehend words that were never meant for us, talk to those that are long gone and have not yet been born. We could share those alien vistas with everyone, and everyone could bask in their glory. We would remember what we are made to forget.”
So, yeah. That happened. And at first, the only reason I wrote it down was because of how completely deranged it sounded. I mean, who writes like that? Besides those weird pulp fiction authors you wrote your thesis on and those stories we wrote back when we were Goths? Chris had always been a little weird, but never quite so... wordy.
And then I opened up the pictures she attached and that's when things got really strange. Again, I don't have the picture anymore, but it looked like a pair of glasses with some sort of green lens. It was a odd green – I wasn't sure it was the light the picture was taken in or when she scanned it, but it seemed like it was shaded darker in some areas, lighter in others. And it had an odd glow even in the picture.
The frames were also odd, some sort of dark gray metal with something scratched on the side (words? Pictures? No idea what they were). There were all sorts of odd wires sticking out of them, and at least one of them looked like it was sending off sparks. I had no idea how anyone could wear them, let alone keep their head from catching on fire.
I e-mailed her again asking her what exactly the glasses were supposed to do? I mean, were they x-ray glasses like those ones in the catalogs (biggest disappointment of my dad's life, apparently)? Were they for some sort of virtual reality system like that Oculus thing I saw in the news? Were they a homemade rip-off of Google Glass (and if so could I buy one once she fixed the whole combustion problem)? Okay, so I was kind of a jackass in the e-mail, but she had been so bizarre that I wondered if the whole thing was some sort of prank to get revenge on me for dodging her in the cafe.
She said when she responded back that they were “lenses for views upon a world that humanity has never known or remembered existed and that those that use them believe us to be incapable of mastering them correctly, but we will show them we are their equals.”
And: “They will never control me again, nor will they make me forget.”
Once again, I jotted it down because it was just so crazy. Who was this “they” she was talking about? I really hoped it wasn't something like the government or her workplace because I really didn't want to read about something horrible she did in the news.
So after that, I wrote her back to say that she still really hadn't said what the glasses did exactly or who “they” were and maybe she needed to get a little sleep or eat something or take a break from her project and do something else for a while.
She took a week to e-mail me back just about the time I thought I had maybe really pissed her off and I should probably apologize to her since we all got a little obsessive in school about certain things and I know I would have bitten someone's head off if they told me the same thing. So I was relieved to see a really short e-mail telling me to read a really long text attached to it in my in-box when I got home one day. I printed it out since I wanted to read it that night after I drank enough wine to the point that she might begin to make sense.
I really wish I hadn't read it. I really wish I hadn't ever answered her e-mails. I really wish--
I'm sorry in advance for the length of this and for-- I don't know what. I guess I'm just sorry. But you have to read this.
------
August 21, 2014
Alex,
I am dismayed that you haven't fully grasped what we have done. I thought you of all people would understand the most what I have wrought with this – what is possible to be done. You were one of several that showed true imagination when we were in college, and to lack it now, means that perhaps your senses of adventure and discovery have atrophied in the years since I last saw you.
I believed you shared my dreams – those dreams that woke me less than a year ago and changed me from a drudge in a lab to someone consumed with visions she could not understand. But perhaps you have not seen the same sights I have. Perhaps, you stumbled on the truth without realizing it and needed me to unlock it for you.
The truth is last year, I began having dreams of a great city, filled with strange books and landscapes that seemed familiar, but upon waking, I realized that they were not anything I had seen here before. Granted, I have lived a very sheltered life, as my mother said when I went halfway across the country to escape her, but I have spent the last several months in libraries and online trying to find a glimpse of what I saw in my dream, and it does not exist.
These dreams consumed me – I was not myself in them and yet I seemed truer to who I wished to be than anywhere else. I walked in a body that was not my own, talked to people that were from times long ago and far in the future, and I felt a sense of exultation upon realizing that this was the source of knowledge I had been looking for. My education, my reading, my research, all of it seemed nothing in comparison to this.
I was not terrified by the tall, cone-shaped creatures, for they seemed to be if not actively benevolent, at least not malevolent. Most paid no attention to me as I drifted through this landscape, a state of being I am accustomed to. It was not an unpleasant time, though I did feel that there might be a final layer of this reality I was not experiencing, something veiled to me that I could not push through to.
So I would always wake, frustrated that the dream was not real, did not last, could not be.
But then one day, after I had lost all hope and began to wonder if sleeping pills might be in order for me to retain any remaining sanity, I found on a defunct forum on a website that only exists as an archived file, a single message. And it told me that the poster was the same as me, a dreamer looking for an answer to dreams they believed to be memories instead. We were possessed by an alien race, the poster said, who made us try to forget after they had gained all the knowledge they could from us. Thus, some of us were doomed to a life of obsession, trying to recapture that which would not return.
Unless we had a very special pair of glasses.
These glasses were created by things known as The Great Race of Yith as another method of experiencing the human world. These creatures could use them to record their experiences while possessing their human hosts and transmit to their fellow possessors to experience as well. It was an experiment to use a method different than that they normally employed, but in the end, they discontinued it, believing it to be too memorable to humanity and that it marked them too easily as a possessor. They destroyed all the glasses and never attempted the experiment again.
But, the poster said, not all glasses were destroyed. Several pairs made it out into the human world, and though the Yithians have been looking for them for some time, they have stayed hidden from them. If a exceptionally talented person could get their hands on a pair, the person might be able to reverse engineer them and use them to experience the Yithian world without any limitations.
Yes, I would have thought this to be mere ravings of a madman, one of those conspiracy-laden diatribes so commonly posted online as to be easily ignored and filed next to all the others. But it had the ring of truth to it and the longer I contemplated it, the more my dreams began to make sense. I could never dismiss the idea of intelligent life existing that was not our own and if my dreams were ones caused by Yithian possession, then they no more farfetched than any religious story I had read as a child.
But the glasses... One could hardly find them on eBay, and I believed that were these things to be in the public eye, the Yithians would have long since found a way to reclaim them from our hands. No, if they existed, they would not be easily found.
If they still existed.... I had doubts about that as well.
But then the box arrived last month... and I knew. I knew that I had been the one chosen to reinvent these glasses – to change them into something that I could use to take back what had been stolen from me. To change the pale shadow that haunted me with what could be into what is.
I have spent the last two weeks working day and night to reinvent the glasses. So many failures have occurred, created by the alien nature of the technology and the inadequacy of the human mind to grasp it. No doubt the picture of the prototype has left you doubting my ability to do this work. Perhaps you think me an unworthy inheritor of them.
Well, you need not think that any longer. I believe I have finally grasped what needs to be done to fully convert them and tonight, I will experience true success. You may witness it and know that once this is done, there will be no returning to mediocrity and falsity. The true world will be seen.
Chris
------
In the body of the e-mail, she had put a link and indicated she would be streaming video of her experiment that night at 11 p.m. her time. It was less than a hour away by the time I finished reading her... whatever that thing was she wrote.
I didn't want to look. I didn't want to watch her. I probably should have called the police, but I didn't. Maybe her deranged confidence had affected me because even though I knew she was crazy and deluded and insistent that we together in some sort of mad scheme, I couldn't help but want to see if she was right.
I know. I did everything wrong. I should have done something else. But in that moment, as the minutes ticked by, I felt strange, like I was on some sort of road that I couldn't find a way off of. All I could do was follow the directions given to me.
So I turned on my web-cam and logged in. She had some sort of website set up, and at first, all I could see on the cam was darkness.
Then 11 p.m. came and I saw her approach the camera. She sat down in a chair in front of it and at first, I couldn't really hear what she was saying. She was mumbling and-- Sandy, she looked terrible. Her face looked like she hadn't slept in a month, but her eyes... When she looked at me, they were bright and gleamed with insanity.
“They think they can stop me,” she said. “The Yithians think they can take me over and force me to stop but they can't. Their own technology blocks them.” She tapped on the glasses on her head. “They won't stop me.”
She kept repeating that for a few minutes before she seemed to gather herself. “It's okay, Alex. Soon we will be triumphant.”
She put the glasses on. She had apparently fixed the sparking in the wires, because they were now intricately wrapped around the frames into a odd network of crisscrossing colors. The glow of the lenses was even more prominent and seemed to radiate through the screen, a pulsing green that I swear faded and brightened constantly.
“I'll tell you what I see,”she said.
And she twisted a wire on the side. The glow of the lenses intensified and for a few seconds I had to look away as my computer became unbearably bright.
“Oh Alex, it's so beautiful. It's everything I dreamed of, but better.” She was so happy, smiling at me. “I can't even describe the colors to you. I've never seen them before. I don't think any human has ever seen them. It's just--”
She paused and stopped smiling. “No one has seen this before. No one has seen these colors or these hues. We see in such limited vision and now I can see what we will never be able to see with our pathetic human eyes. This world is so dim and dull compared to what I can see now. ”
I wanted to tell her something, to ask her a question, to move or do something, but I still felt that strange lassitude. I couldn't have lifted a finger.
“There's so much I would love you to see, but I realize now my error. I believed that if I understood these glasses, if I grasped their capability, if I could master them, that I would be able to bring humanity to a new level. But I see how wrong I was now.”
She twisted the wire on the side of the glasses. The glow of the glasses dimmed. “I believed that the Yithians were wrong in making us forget. They were wrong to put boundaries upon us and keep us from our true destiny. But our destiny was never about mastering Yithian technology. We were never meant to be the ones to conquer the stars. The Yithians will exist before us and exist long after we crumble into dust.”
“Humanity was never meant for these gifts. We are fragile things of flesh put on the earth to serve the needs and whims of things far greater than us. I served them by adapting these glasses to show how far we were willing to go to pursue power and knowledge and how we will inevitably fail, doomed by the limitations of our lesser species.
And Alex, I see now that you served them too, by sending me the glasses and witnessing my progression on this path, knowing that my final step would be this one.”
“I see everything now.”
She took off the glasses. Her eyes were milky white and opaque. The frames must have cut into her head, because blood was trickling down her face. She was strangely calm, however, tilting her head as if she was listening to something only she could hear.
Though... I thought I heard a buzzing, a distant humming that seemed to echo in my head. It never grew louder and yet I believed that it strengthened in my head until there was nothing but white noise.
Chris smiled again. “I see.” She reached her hand towards her webcam and I saw it go dark again.
A few seconds (minutes?) later, the humming disappeared. I don't know if she logged on again, because a few minutes after she left, I must have collapsed. When I woke again, I was sprawled uncomfortably on the chair in front of an off computer and it was light outside.
I may never know what happened to Chris. When I checked my e-mail to see if there was any contact info I had for her, anything that could let me get in touch and find out what happened, they were gone. No e-mails from her or to her. The statement she sent me was gone. The picture was gone. There was no history of her website in the browser.
I don't remember her last name so I can't check the papers. When I try calling anyone, the phone goes dead. The e-mails I write bounce back to me. Texts are lost, posts disappear, and it doesn't matter if I use the cafe down the street or my own. Nothing is recorded. Nothing gets through.
So I'm writing this letter because I think it will be harder to stop. I'm going to try to make as many copies of this as possible in the hopes that it will reach you somehow.
I don't know why Chris thought I sent her the glasses. Maybe she convinced herself that I did it just as she convinced herself of everything she did. Maybe someone posed as me, tricking both of us by making her the victim and me the accessory to her death.
Maybe I sent it.
I hope you get this letter.
I hope someone gets this letter.
Alex
-------
September 15 (1 day ago)
Alex,
I have to say, when you e-mailed me last month about a strange pair of glasses you thought I might like, I had no idea what kind of drugs you were on. But I just got them in the mail and wow, those are fairly cool. It's a shame they're broken, but you did mention you thought of a few ways they might be fixed, so I think together we can make them so awesome they make Google cry.
Looking forward to working with you on this,
Sandy