Chapter 1: Chapter 1 - My Time
THUMP...THUMP...THUMP
The stadium reverberated the sound of my beating heart, . The crowd screams out another figure walks into the stadium, and another and another until there are x people standing there as prideful as can be. As I walk on to the stadium, my feet and hands join the rhythm the crowd were making. Each step, each time I beat my chest with my hands, my heart beats faster. This was a feeling that I was used to by now, it wasn't fear, not anger ,not anxiety, but pure fucking excitement.
the first time I felt that guttural excitement was on a not so exciting day. I was headed home from school on a Friday hoping to sleep for the entire day before getting up to sleep the day after. it wasn't that I was sleepy, just that there was nothing else to do. what was the point of being awake anyway? I didn't have a sad life, no struggle, no significant suffering. Just a boy trying to make his way to being an ordinary man. But that's what my life was, ordinary. Ordinary to a deathly boring extent. I mean that's why I slept so much , I felt that sleeping was like a time skip. Secretly, I would always hope that maybe one day I would wake up to a more interesting world. That I would suddenly wake up with a goal to conquer the world, but I never would. Or I never had until then.. `add a better bridge`
I would usually take a nap on the way home from school, it helped me calm down after all the work I had done at school. Or so I told myself. On this day, I never really went to sleep, just kept my eyes closed pretending to be asleep. I have no idea why I was not able to fall asleep, but there was this guttural feeling to keep my mind awake as if going to sleep would be a crime. So I stayed awake, calmly listening to the sound of the engine of the rickshaw I take home. The calmness dragged me to the edge of sleep and kept me frozen there. My breathing went still and the sound of the engine died down. The only thing I could faintly hear was a beating that was quiet but still very audible. As this beating filled my ears and everything else disappeared I felt that I had to open my eyes, like there was something that I had to see. And so I did.
My eyes were still adjusting to the light outside the comfort of my own eyelids, but that didn't mean I could feel anything. The beating from before had now become the sound of a million drums all beating in sync, I instinctively covered my ears with my hand hiding them away from the sound that went from soothing to screeching in seconds. As my eyes adjusted they saw nothing but black surround me, with a few dots of light coming from far away stars. I was in space, or at least it looked that way. I noticed that I could still breath and it didn't feel freezing cold, so there was no way I was actually in space.
My first instinct was ,surprisingly so, to do nothing at all. Throughout my life in situations that I had no idea what to do in, I would often do nothing at all. I would let something happen first and then react accordingly. I at least would feel like I wasn't taking shots in the dark. So I waited as the the thumping kept berating my ears, almost scolding them for even existing, but again, I didn't feel scared or anxious. I felt eager. My life that had amounted to nothing, that may have just now come to an end was finally feeling meaningful. I looked around and noticed a floating white box, with text written on it. Curiously, I read the text written on the small white box. It went something like this 'Greetings. You have been chosen. Name an entity you respect.'
Well, that's too fucking vague. But I'll play along. "Shiva" I shouted out loud(though no sound was heard). To anyone who knew me, this would be a fairly surprising answer. I wasn't a religious man. I rarely prayed, and wasn't enthusiastic when festivals would come around. A few years ago I completely abstained from even doing so. So saying that I respected a god was quite hypocritical at first glance.
I didn't care though, no one was looking at me. My relationship with god is to complicated to be explained anyway. But lets just say this, I quite liked the things Shiva represented. The man, or god, he was was closest to the man I wanted to be.
1 second, 2 seconds, ... 5 seconds. A whole minute passed by before I heard any sort of response from the.. box I guess. It said, "You have been registered as 'Shiva's Disciple'. Welcome to the Hall of Fame." Damn. I have no fucking clue what that means. Suddenly the black around me faded into the light from the stars and I was returned to the rickshaw I was in. Except the auto driver had pulled over and so had all the cars on the road, a massive traffic jam stretching across the entire road was what I saw. But slowly cars moved out of the road and the traffic cleared out. I paid the auto driver and walked home, the neighbourhood I lived in was eerily quiet, I was starting to think that everybody had seen what I had seen.
I walked into my home to see my Mom and Dad sitting together in the living room watching the news, I planned to bring up what happened on the road today. I sat down next to them and as soon as I opened my mouth, the news anchor started to speak. "Today, across the world, all people were put into a strange dream.`use 'dream' less` The dream has been described to be extremely similar for all the people. The dream involved the dreamer to be put into space, for a period of 5 minutes. During this period, the dreamer was presented with a box saying that they had been 'chosen'. They were then asked to name an entity that they respected, post which they were told they had been inducted into the Hall of Fame. We do not know much about this incident, and the worlds authorities are trying their best to figure out more." The news report ended there. I ask my parents, "So.. you guys had that dream too?" My mom was the first one to reply, "Yeah, you are okay right?". She was always the one to worry about me over her. I reminded her that everyone had the dream and everyone was fine, and so was I. "Yes, yes I know I'm just checking." My dad being the ever rational person asked both of us "Did anything different from what the news reporter described happen to you?" "No Appa, nothing different.", I replied.
I told them that I would go have a shower to freshen up and clear my mind, I headed up to the bathroom took of my clothes. I wasn't fit. A 'dad bod' would be perfect to describe me. Even though I was only 16. I knew that this was my fault. I ate more then I should for a very long time in my life (you can't blame me, Indian sweets are pretty fucking good). But I have been trying to get fitter and it has been working! (if I do say so myself) I had lost weight and was starting to look better but I was nowhere close to where I wanted to be. I had all black hair, that was slightly curly and slightly straight that I was trying to grow out at this point in time. It was around the length of my nose and growing even longer. They slightly hid my deep brown eyes, that were dark enough to be considered black. My face had no sharp features other than the side burns that grew down the sides of a square-ish face that had a slight cleft chin at the end. My cheeks were slightly chubby, the same feature that got me the nickname of 'froggie.' My jawline wasn't sharp and had a slight stubble growing evenly across my jawline. I didn't look good, luckily, I didn't look very bad either.After posing in the mirror a little, I turned my phone on and opened Y(chatter's new name) and looker at what people were thinking.
But they weren't really thinking at all. Of course some people were being logical and trying to reasom out what had happened. They only got so far though, I mean an event like that had no logical explanation, and trying to figure out what it could have been just left to conspiracy theories. However as I kept reading through I noticed a couple popular tweets that held a common theme, some of these were even from credible scientific organisations. One of them went something like this, "It has been noted that those who focus on keeping their mind at an almost sleep state are able to enter the next phase of this 'message'."
Deciding to test the theory out, I went into the shower, turned it on and put the water at a lukewarm temperature and closed my eyes. A few minutes later, my mind calmed down. The sound of the water got drowned out as I was getting closer to sleeping. But right before I did, it was almost like my consciousness was getting transported to.. somewhere else. When I opened my eyes, the scene from before, with space and stars around me and the familiar box was in front of me again. However this time I noticed it was more like a phone than anything else, the shape the text all reminded me of my smartphone. Not too worried about what could just be a coincidence, I read what the box was saying.
"Welcome back to the hall of fame, your school, arts and attributes have been prepared. Would you like to enter the world?"
"Fuck it we ball, yes" I answered unbothered by the vagueness in the message. And again that feeling of my consciousness being transported filled me as my eyes watched the stars blur and fill more and more of the screen until eventually my entire vision was filled with bright white light. And just as fast as it came, the light dissipated and my eyes started adjusting to the new environment they were in. My ears didn't need to adjust though as they heard a woman's voice speak clearly, almost too clearly, like she was way too close to me. She said "You have been transported to the human hub of the universe, Domus."
Damn. That was the first word that came to mind as I looked at the scene in front of me. There were some cities in China that operated on several levels, but nothing came even close to the city that filled my mind. I was somewhere in the middle of what seemed to be 10 or so levels to this massive city, the largest dome was the one I was and the further away from the middle you went the smaller the levels got. They were approximately square shaped with some curved elements to them. The disk I was on stretched beyond the horizon itself, and was at least 50 km across. I was in a park that was average size compared to everything else that I saw at that moment. Buildings that stretched for 5-6 km to reach the disk above. Others that seemed bigger than entire villages themselves. Everything from spheres to cubes to pyramids, the architecture here was sheerly stunning. The surprising thing is, this didn't remind me of the classic idea of megacities. It wasn't just greys and blues, the city was abundantly green. Trees rose high and strong, intertwined with the buildings. Many of the residential buildings in the city, were made to be similar to trees and had some holes in them as windows and doors. This made the city seem like a much more environmentally sustainable megacity and that while developing this place, the environment was made a top priority.
Since the voice said that this was the human hub of the universe, so it seemed like the humans had made huge developments. Just as I felt I would look into what the message meant by school or arts, but I heard a faint knocking noise from somewhere I wasn't? I realized what this probably meant so I willed myself to wake up and as I did..
"AMITAV CAN YOU HEAR ME!" I could hear my mom yell out for me to come out of the bathroom and I replied back ,"Yes ma I just had my headphones in "Well come out quickly, we were worried something happened to you" again with the worrying. "I'll be right out ma give me a bit of time." and I turned off the shower and headed out of the bathroom.
"What were you doing in there, you have to be more responsible given what's happening" I agreed with her and convinced her that I was fine and I walked to my room. I talked to some of my close friends and all of them seemed weirded out or even scared.
I didn't feel any of that. I felt excited. Every day my life had felt the same, finally I had the chance to show that I could be a better man. This is my time.
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Amitav_Reddy
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