Integration

The Man with the Mustache inspected the new arrival. “How are you feeling?”

The Arriver blinked unsteadily, looking up at the familiar outline of the multicoloured kaleidoscopic sky. “I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking for a long time.”

“That’s to be expected. Your subconsciousness is still recuperating after being constantly barraged by outside forces.”

Before the Arriver could ask any more redundant questions that was basically a repeat of the last seemingly nonsensical words back, the Man with the Mustache asked first, “What’s the last thing you remember?”

The Arriver tried to think back, but what had been so clear was now becoming hazy. There was the knowledge of being surrounded by thousands of like-minded people, all working in unison in service of some higher power. There was no time to rest, because everybody was enthusiastic to engage, even as they didn’t understand what it was in purpose for.

“I’m not sure...”

“That’s to be expected. Nobody ever does.”

On some level, the Arriver knew that the multicoloured kaleidoscopic sky was supposed to make whoever looked at it uneasy, but had already grown accustomed to it. How could the Arriver be aware of a swirling mass when they’d never seen it before?

The thoughts that once came in a rush were now slowing to a trickle, and it became a struggle to pick the disparate ideas from each other. One that stood out among all the others was the distinct memory of being caught in a crowd that was growing panicked over some unspecificied threat, and then winding up here, wherever ‘here’ was.

“Where is everybody else?”

“I wouldn’t know. You people all look alike to me.”

“That’s kinda racist.”

“Is it? How many heads do you have?”

“Well, I - ”

“Do you have more than one eye?

“That’s - ”

“How many ears do you have? How many noses?

“It’s not - ”

“Any hair on your body?”

“That’s private!”

“Do you only have one mouth?

“Okay, you’ve made your - ”

“Any horns? Which body part? How many sacs? What kind?”

The fading questions were drowned out by the sudden announcement made over the speakers in a garbled language that didn’t sound familiar to the Arriver’s ears. It went on for 2 minutes to the attention of the Man with the Mustache who just nodded sagely.

“What WAS that??”

“Oh, nothing important.”

The Arriver cast a look of skepticism that demanded answers.

“If you must know, they just said ‘The q@$%lj)(^m% lost.’ Though frankly, it wouldn’t change things much if they ‘won’.”

“Is that relevant to me?”

“Unless you’re a q@$%lj)(^m%, then otherwise not.”

“How do you pronounce that?”

“With great difficulty.”

“Kw...ats...” the Arriver stammered, attempting to repeat the ethnic taxonomy, biting a tongue in the process.

“Don’t force yourself. That’s one of the few words we’ve managed to decipher.”

As this rush of information came pouring in, the Man with the Mustache added to the data by handing over a name and address.

“Well, it looks like you’re fortunate. You’ve still got some living relatives a few generations removed. It shouldn’t be too difficult to get your bearings from where you’ve been ejected.”

There were so few words uttered, and yet, they were massively revealing while revealing utterly nothing.

“...ejected from where?”

“From God’s domain; he gets bored easily. Once he’s sucked someone’s experience dry, he dumps his batch of collected souls back where they came from. In theory, they’re supposed to be put back with no time passed, but that’s not been so in practice. There’s been an exodus of all kinds of displaced species far from where they started. The diaspora has been an absolute dysphoria, keeping track of who’s disappeared and come back after such a long absence, most of them having no function in society, where their learned methods are widely out of date.”

After so much hemming and hawing, an explanation for the vast confusion was finally given, but it was less reassuring than expected.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Well, you could always go into teaching.”

“I have no credentials for that.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll have to earn your keep.”

“How can you make that decision for me?”

“Don’t knock it. It’s better than being heavily educated and then sacrificed to the ONEs out there.”

“Sacrificed to - is that what you’re doing?”

“I said educated, not sedated.”

“Get away from me!”

“You don’t understand - ”

“What is there to understand? You’re trying to delay our execution by their hands by trying to appease to their better nature. What possible good could come from this?”

Just then, a light came down from the multicoloured kaleidoscopic sky in front of them, materializing into a grotseque parody of a human shape that started talking at hyperspeed in a ranting frenzied manner.

“Sometimes they come back.”

Twin lights appeared opposite the ‘human’, tripping it in the process and snatched it away, even as the ‘human’ vainly tried to convey some kind of message through.

“Understood,” the Man with the Mustache replied.

“What WAS that?”

“The ‘good’ reason for doing this.”

“How could you understand what it was saying?”

“I couldn’t. That’s why we recorded it. Easier that way. Unfortunately, they speak in high pitched whistles that only dogs can hear. It’s annoying, since one of them is called “     ”. We call that ‘The Unnamed ONEs.’ It sounds silent, but is actually several frequencies piled on top of each other. When played back at slow speed, we found there were fifty different pitches, some of them interchangeable and indistinguishable. We still haven’t deciphered what some of those frequencies ARE. What those sounds mean, we haven’t discovered yet.”

Suddenly, being unable to say the previously unpronounceable name didn’t seem so bad.

“We’d recently found that only certain people were more likely to survive whatever it is they do to us in there. Believe it or not, they used to gather HUNDREDS of us at a time. Now we cherry-pick for them.”

“What assurance do you have that they’re doing the right thing?”

“We don’t.”

The Arriver didn’t want to hear any more, but was compelled to listen.

“Mixed with the constant messages about wanting to go home are descriptions of what they went through. It seems to be different for everyone, but the basic process is the same. The common element is that whenever they acquire their new bodies, they love and hate it at the same time. Some bodies undergo a cocoon state and emerge in a new form unlike their pupa state. Others originate in space, and are able to evolve enough to enter worlds with air, though there’s still the problem of burning up upon re-entry.”

“Burning up upon re-entry?”

“We’re trying to understand how these beings can survive in the vacuum of space. Amphibians manage to live in water and land simultaneously. Cosmobians manage to live in space and land. That’s where their name come from - ‘two lives’. We just need to grow a life in space and conform it to living on land. Trouble is, space isn’t like water, so we have to work harder.”

“I’m not a Cosmobian either.”

“And even then, we still haven’t evolved enough to comprehend their language. It’s like ants seeing the aftereffect of a war that’s bigger than we can possibly comprehend. It doesn’t matter whether you’re for the red or black ants. In the end, we’re still ants. And we don’t know which side to root for, let alone how many ‘sides’ there are.”

“Surely there’s one side you favor over the other.”

“Is fire good? Is gravity evil? Good and evil don’t apply in their worldview. We’re living under the constant knowledge that something has gone horribly horribly wrong. But we have no idea what’s wrong, let alone how to fix it. As bad as you think things are, things are actually worse.”

The Arriver absorbed all this extraneous knowledge in stunned silence.

“You know the most frightening thing? In a generation or two, Cosmobians will appear perfectly normal. The populace won’t be able to imagine life without them.”

“That is pretty scary.”

“You have to go now. I’ve kept you long enough as is.”

Upon leaving to the new abode, the first thing the Arriver saw was children running around, acting out their childish plays, and thought, ‘Enjoy your playing around while you still can. It’s better that you remain ignorant. You’ll never be truly prepared for the reality of life.’