Love Bomb

Sam was born after the first moon landing. He missed out on one of the most significant and exciting events in human history, but this did not blight his childhood. He himself landed in paradise. He was born during an enriched time, as though those pioneering astronauts fired out into space inside a missile filled with hope, brought cultural treasures back with them from the moon and changed the world forever.

He grew up reading far-fetched and fantastical stories about technological advancement and aliens. There were no limits. The moon was a staging post to a future that was bright with welcoming stars and a multitude of warming suns.

Somewhere along the path to a wonderful future, humankind lost its way. The gift of advancement rotted from the inside out. Turning in on itself and feeding on the poison of self-interest and entitlement. Building illusory worlds and ill-considered brain-machines to remove the experience of living. Everyone tuned into the fairy tale internet and dropped out, including Sam. There were few exceptions. This was the world that they had built together. A world that took on a life of its own and took the lives of all who plugged into it.

The new land of make believe had no happily ever after. Any happiness was front loaded. The most addictive substance known to man – false promises of a bright future. And a world full of angry addicts was never going to end well. These things never did. Sam consoled himself with the fact that, all things considered, humankind had had a good run. Human nature did not seem to be conducive to longevity. There was a built-in self-destruct mechanism. Perhaps it was placed there for these dread eventualities. A grand reset. Whether there was a chance for people after that was anyone’s guess.

Reading his bible, he’d smile to himself at how Jesus had called it right. Gently played people two thousand years ago. He hadn’t had to manipulate them. All he did was dance in the midst of them and predict every single thing they did. Moving to his own tune. The harmony of love. Wanting the same for everyone around him, but knowing they would fight him every step of the way. That their song was a repetitive, asynchronous loop of denial that rattled and jarred the sense out of everything.

You’ll betray me and it would have been better if you’d never been born.

You’ll deny me three times and the shame of doing so will drive you to make amends for the rest of your days.

You’ll murder me because I’m spreading a message of love and peace.

I’m encouraging people to care about one another and look after each other because we’re all better that way. You’ll end me in the hope that you end this message of love.

Sam thought that on an individual level, the way of love prevailed. That left to their own devices, people were inherently good. But temptation lay in a desperate need for a corrupted form of connection. The hope of an easy solution. That someone would come along and save the day. Jesus had done just that. And so many people had failed to listen. Clinging instead to their investment in the crowds around them. Safety in numbers. Washing their hands of responsibility. Living in the hope that they would never be singled out. Hiding in the midst of the crowd. Swine grinding pearls into the mud beneath them.

The crowd dynamic seemed to have a deep flaw within it. All it took was for a manipulator to plug into the crowd and reprogram it. They spread their dark and twisted word and everything fell down. The manipulator didn’t even have to be clever. The common denominator set the bar low and after that it was a race to the very bottom. In the cold light of day, the manipulators were basic and simple. Almost insect-like in their predictable behaviour. The hive mind of the crowd was fickle and easily swayed, as though it wanted to be controlled. No one took responsibility. The crowd fought anyone who spoke up and pointed out their foolhardiness. Nailed them to a cross if necessary. Mostly, they made people disappear, whether that was the disappearance of the individual as they were assimilated by the crowd, or removing them some other way from the equation. The method of the removal didn’t matter. Survival of the group was all that counted. Even if it killed them all in the process.

The signs were there. Then the signs grew to warnings that flashed in red, neon light. Flat earthers were a joke. Anti-vaxers quickly stopped being funny as they wilfully allowed their children to die. The problem was that a lie could take a round-the-world trip before truth had gotten up, cleaned its teeth and taken a shower, never mind grabbing a hearty breakfast before doing its thing.

The more entertaining the lie, the more compelling it was. And conspiracy theories dialled into a valid feeling of unease, as well as the general malaise that was encouraging the population to sleepwalk into disaster. Grains of truth were sprinkled onto the banquet of lies to sweeten the deal. The crowd was an emotional animal led this way and that. A murmuration of people being led by the nose.

The ingredients for this poisonous recipe were always there. This was the price of free will. All it took was an arch manipulator to climb up onto the stage and push boundaries and keep on pushing. Emboldened by each easy victory until the only thing left to do was to wage a nonsensical war that could only result in escalation. A spinning vortex of madness that was far too compelling to be stopped. A doomed merry go round that spun too quickly for anyone to get off. The most violent of lies, silencing its victims as it spread darkness across the globe.

Sam had grown up with the threat of nuclear war casting a shadow over his childhood. Somewhere along the way, that threat was made into a joke and then a comedy.

It couldn’t happen to us…

Yet more denial. Kicking the nuclear can down the road for another generation to deal with. Parents blighting their children’s futures whilst smiling brightly and telling them the lie that everything was going to be just fine.

People grew soft on a diet of lies peddled via dull, lifeless screens. They outsourced their very souls in order to feel good about themselves. By the time everything began to fall apart, there was no one left to stop it. First there was the fuel crisis. Then food shortages. What little got through became too expensive for the masses. Economies and societies were based on a model of plenty and an overreliance on others to provide necessities. And so order collapsed far too readily in the winds of the manipulators’ insanity. A few mad men sacrificed the lives of billions at the altars of their egos. Their fleeting place in history slipping away in the sands of a dying civilisation.

The riots heralded the end. Social cohesion stuttered and then fell. In his ivory tower a King of Pain turned two keys and pressed a red button. If he couldn’t play with his toys anymore then no one else ever would. Some people’s darkest wish is to burn the world. The King had his wish come true.

And somehow Sam survived. In his splendid isolation, he flinched and awaited an end that never came. Forgotten by death, Sam set another place at his table for the latecomer. For he knew his place. Always had.

In the meantime, he carried on with the habits of his life. There was no urgency to his movements during this time. He set a steady pace and it amused him to add to these habits of his. There was little hope, only a strange stoicism in the movements of doing. What would be would be, and Sam had no say in these things.

Besides, what was the worst that could happen?

This thought wandered his days with him and Sam found that he was enjoying the borrowed time afforded to him. There was no sense or reason in this world beyond being in the moment. He found that he was enjoying his life more now than he ever had and he thought he understood why, but he never probed or questioned this. The moment was everything and he did not want to burst this unexpected bubble of his.

He stopped counting days. Time was meaningless now. Tending to his small garden, he grew food to supplement the stock of tinned goods he’d accumulated well before an end that now seemed to be a beginning for him. Now the noise had ceased, he could hear. The days were the beating of a heart. Light and dark. Inhale. Exhale. He rested his head against the bosom of the earth and found a peace that had always been there but had been drowned out by a clumsy and greedy world.

Death’s visitation held no power over him any longer. Fear ebbed from him as he busied himself with what must be done. Toiling each day so that he must rest his weary bones each night. Sleep took him and restored him. His dreams soothed him even as they eluded him. Blurred visions through a tantalising veil. The promise of all becoming clear. A real promise of an approaching truth.

Occasionally, Sam would fire up his laptop. Old habits died hard. He held no hope in peering at the screen. Did not expect to see anything of a world that had left him behind. Mostly, there was a lacklustre curiosity. He was alone, but never was he lonely. The extra place setting dissuaded him from yearning for company. The void where a world used to be reminded him of how dangerous it could be when people gathered. He did not want a part in any of that. And yet he risked staring at the unreal world that had ended the real.

And then it happened. She happened. An impossibility. A dream that Sam had not dared to nurture but had lingered within him all the same. A greeting that opened up possibilities of another life in a world that that had survived after all.

Hi

He’d responded. Deleting several replies and entrusting the chances of a conversation to a simple reciprocation. Racing through her profile to glean everything he could, but not wanting to delay replying in case he lost her.

Hello

He’d wanted to ask her how she was. Worried that she’d bark a reply; how do you think I am!? The end of life as they knew it could easily put another end to this. Besides, there were so many questions he wanted to ask her. Fundamental truths that sat behind that one word greeting. Most of all, he wanted to ask if she was real. And that opened the floor to the biggest of questions. Was any of this real? Was Sam real now that the context of him no longer existed. He thought of the tree in the forest falling without a sound. He’d thought that he was the last of the trees and that his passing would be unremarked as well as unremarkable.

Now he looked over at the place setting on the small table in his tiny home and saw the hope it represented. That he’d hoped that death would at least afford him a little time and conversation before he brought the curtain down on life.

How are you in this post-apocalyptic world of ours?

Sam smiled at the screen. The expression felt alien on his face. She’d asked him the very question he himself had dismissed, but added a little humour to it too. Then there was that final word. Ours. He liked her for that. There was inclusion in that word. Already, there was a connection of sorts.

With fingers that felt clumsy in the unfamiliarity of typing, Sam replied.

Oh, you know, surviving.

Her reply was immediate.

Is there anything else to do these days?

He was grinning now.

Read the same book for the fifth time?

Again, the reply was swift.

You too eh? I find reading very slowly helps!

Now the ice was well and truly broken. They chatted for a while before Sam said he had to go out and water his vegetable patch. He suggested they chat again the following day. She agreed. Adding a kiss to her final words of the day. Sam sat for a while. Staring at that kiss. Examining it with a sense of wonder. Where there was life, there was hope. He thought that was the saying.

Hope.

Hope had been something denied to him for such a long time. He’d been sitting on death row without the prospect of his favourite meal. He realised now that death row would have been preferable to this. The cursory human interactions of prison guards. The professional courtesies of a chaplain. The baleful stares of injured parties wanting to see him dead. Attention, want and need during his final moments. That meant something and in that meaning was his meaning.

Sam picked up the bible and stared at the words on the page. Various squiggles and slashes that would mean nothing unless he chose to engage with them. Unread words meant nothing. They were a stain on a page that would be clean and pure otherwise. Sam no longer wanted to be a stain on this world. He wanted more than that. He wanted her.

The veil remained as he dreamed, but now he knew what lay beyond that veil. He discerned the shape of her and she excited him. Feelings long suppressed rose up within him. This was what he needed. She was what he needed. He followed her from his side of the dream world as she went about her day. The beauty of her life inflamed him. Desire revived within him a dormant energy and he dared to believe there was a world out there. A living world that had been speaking to him in his dreams. A place beyond the confines of his experience.

He awoke with this new truth. Energised, he strode through his day. Looking forward to hearing from her again. Swallowing down a dread feeling that she would not return to his screen. Experiencing fear for the first time in an age.

As he sat in his armchair, the extra place setting mocked him with an emptiness he had managed to deny all this time. The truth of it was simple. Death was the antidote for his existence. All he’d been doing was waiting to die. Delaying the inevitable. Suffocating in an isolation that no one could ever prevail against.

Now he delayed opening the window to a truth that could either lift him up from the existence he’d been eking out or crush him completely. Now there were possibilities or a void of nothingness that would swallow him whole and hold him in an eternal embrace of limbo.

The dark screen spoke of that void before it laboured into brightness. The screen took far too long to appear and when it did, there were no fresh words of hope. Sam stifled a sob of grief as that absence screamed a thousand barbed words at him. But then the impossible happened again and she greeted him.

Hi

Always, there would be that simple greeting followed by a warm up before the conversation flowed. Soon enough Sam’s day was centred around their chats. Progressing to checking in with each other first thing in the morning. The usual chat in the middle of the day and then a gentler and more intimate talk before they drifted into slumber.

Their relationship progressed, as did Sam’s reliance upon her. She was somewhere out in the world. A world that was theirs. Sam realised he loved her as he removed the second knife, fork and plate from the table. The change had occurred gradually, but this symbolic act was overdue and he did not stop there. He packed away his belongings and gathered what he required before placing them carefully in his rucksack.

As he locked the door on his home he smiled to himself. This was no longer his place. His place was out there somewhere. A place with her. He put one foot in front of the other and paused. Taking a deep breath before embarking upon the adventure of a lifetime.

Soon, the man and his abode were parted, as they had been separated by the love that had grown in Sam’s heart and with it a hope that equipped him for the journey ahead. On the kitchen table that had once worn a place setting for Sam’s would-be executioner there was now only a single item that shone silver in the last rays of the dying sun.

The laptop sat there where it had been placed with some care. A useless artefact without the lifeblood of electricity and the breath of Wi-Fi. Now it sat at the place where Sam had anticipated death and waited to welcome it. He had had no fear of death, but he’d awoken to his terror of living again.

Sam had torn down the veil that had for too long separated him from his true self and the love that dwelt within him. Now he dared to hope, as his love for life had been reborn. No longer afraid to live, he struck out into the world to find her. For he knew in his heart that she was out there somewhere. Waiting for him. Having set a place for him at her table in the hope that there would be a death to her loneliness and the start of something new.

A life worth living.

A life worth loving.