The Designated Judas

Somewhere in the distant dark there is a whining, whirring noise. This sound, emanating from an unknown source, rises and falls in speed and volume, but is otherwise continuous. As consciousness grows, this sound continues in my conscious world, where light also exists, and the source of the sound is revealed. Computer servers. In my house, three or four feet away. Mystery solved. But what is not clear is why I am lying on the floor, and why I have the worst headache of my life. This is a memory. And as messed up as this sounds, especially considering how totally horrible I felt at the time, I now consider those dimly remembered flashes that preceded full comprehension as the last happy moments of my life. Not happy as in a warm feeling of contentment, but as in the unencumbered bliss that is associated with ignorance.

Great, sudden, catastrophic events serve as markers that partition our lives into what went “before” and what came “after”, like how everything was before the bomb detonated in Hiroshima, compared to the totally different world that survivors experienced afterward, or how our innocent illusion of safety dissolved when the second plane rammed into the Twin Towers, and we all realized this was no accident. Before and after. Different worlds. A concept vividly captured by the Gates of Time at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, with 9:01 inscribed on one and 9:03 on the other, a very short amount of time, but a world of difference for those affected. And what happened next as I lay on the floor in my server room changed the “before” and “after” of absolutely everyone everywhere in all the world, as well as any who come after us, if any do come after.

As my eyes began to focus on the freshly materializing world of light, I realized with a mind-numbing shock that I was looking at a small, silver, heart-shaped locket lying just inches from my bleeding nose. I had seen the locket before, many times in fact. Never in actual reality, as at that moment, but in premonitions, in dreams, and eventually in waking moments that made me question my sanity. I became obsessed with the locket, seeing it everywhere, but really nowhere. The closest I had come before this moment was when I careened, whitefaced, to a screeching halt when the locket suddenly materialized in my waking world, appearing before me on a billboard as I drove just south of Dubrovnik during a recent visit to Croatia. That billboard became my touchstone with reality in the following days and months. The heart-shaped locket existed outside of my imagination. It was real, and I had proof.

But now the locket had been delivered to me, this small, heart-shaped silver island floating inauspiciously in a pool of my blood. And I was terrified. Not by the blood. The blood was nothing, and would become even less of nothing compared to the rivers of blood that I knew would soon be flowing. But the locket was different. The locket was everything. Everything that ever was or ever could be. Or that would never be. Which was why I was terrified to see it then, in the real world, in my house, within my reach. I had encoded the image of this heart-shaped locket as an NFT on my servers, reproducing it endlessly as digitized data, to what end I was never certain. But now, through some process no doubt related to my throbbing head and bloody nose, the locket lay before me, no longer a digital representation of something possibly from my imagination, but an object that was very terribly real, and as I knew from my dreams and waking premonitions, also horribly ominous, for it was so much more than it appeared to be.

The object lying on my floor, innocently masquerading as a simple heart-shaped locket, was a portal to the most horrible and foulest of evils, beyond all imagination or description. And it had been presented to me for a reason. A reason that filled me with self-loathing and a tremendous desire to flee frantically from what I now knew I was appointed to do. As I grasped this little piece of silver in my hand, I confirmed my role as the designated Judas of all creation, of space, of time, possibly of all life itself. Like Pandora with her box, there was never any real chance that I would not open the locket. And if you are aware of even a fraction of what has been going on in the world recently, you know that I did. The opening of that one small, heart-shaped locket created a very quiet, but totally catastrophic apocalypse which separated all of our “before” from all of our “after”. A seemingly unremarkable event that initially passed unnoticed outside of my own home released the worst terrors of hell into the world, creating immutable changes that automatically and immediately destroyed that world forever.

Make no mistake, even though things may still appear much the same on the surface, the world that existed before the locket was opened is over. We have passed through one gate and have come out the other, and even if you haven’t noticed yet, we are living in a totally different post-apocalyptic world now, in this time after the locket was opened. Although still hidden to many, beasts that I have seen before only in dreams and premonitions of the heart-shaped locket are drawing near enough to begin taking form in the waking world. Tyrants are rising now, some already obvious, others yet to be revealed. Armies are being gathered. Hatreds are being fomented, and soon rivers of blood will run where rivers of water never did. The diseases that have already been inflicted upon us will pale in comparison to those that will come. Water and food will all but disappear. Fire will scorch the earth. There will be tremendous earthquakes and tsunamis, and meteors will crater the globe. Death, destruction, and deception will dominate and decimate this world. Unimaginable evil is moving and growing around us now. This dystopia is our present and our future, and relatively few will survive these approaching horrors. I hope you are one of them.

You may believe this is all just a terrible fantasy, insane words from a deranged mind. But I have seen other things before this, things that proved true. Before the advent of GUI based computing systems, I dreamed of glowing icons lined in rows on a dark cave wall, and eventually saw these become fixtures on every computer screen. I had a vision of 9/11 in July, 2001. I saw the I-35W bridge collapse two weeks before everyone else saw it on the television news. And I have seen some of the horrible things that are happening now, and the much greater, much more terrible and unspeakable evil that is already growing in our world, waiting and biding its time, impatient to pounce, now that the little silver heart-shaped locket has been opened. But if you still don’t believe me, do what I did so many times when I doubted my own dreams, before the locket came to me. If you are reading this, you still have access to the Internet. Get on Google Maps, select “Street View”, and drive south from Dubrovnik on D8. If you go far enough, you will find the billboard on the right, not far after D223 turns off to the left. Did you find it? If you did, you know now what I learned earlier. The little heart-shaped locket is real, and so are my dreams.

Somewhere in the not-so-distant dark there is a whining, whirring noise that I know has nothing to do with computer servers.