Confession

(Editor’s note: this document was recently unearthed during a review of the personal papers of one Aloysius Feltcher, donated to Linfield University Library in June 1995. We cannot vouch for the accuracy of details contained there-in.)

The following is the confession of I, Aloysius Feltcher, of Flint Mount Drive, Linfield, England. I write this confession in the Autumn of 1994, although the events I will speak of happened some twenty years ago. It is of my own free will I choose to lay bare my soul to you, stranger, and to confess my terrible misdeeds. All of my colleagues are now safely in the grave, and I shall soon join their number. I have nothing to hide, and wish instead to admit my culpability and my shame. Please, I beg that you forgive me, although I know you most probably will not.

My research team was first assembled in the early 1960s by some offshoot of the government or the military or some shadowy corporation – we never were told who precisely, and we were each sworn to complete secrecy about our work. Seven bright young boys on the cusp of manhood, we were made to sign a contract banning us from any contact with the outside world. None of us, according to that terrible document, could ever communicate with our families or friends again. None of us could fall in love, or nip down the local for a pint, or share a mutual rueful smile with a stranger as we were both drenched by the same downpour.

I was young and naive and blinded by the possibilities offered up to me. For Christopher’s sake, I was 19! And so, with all the grandeur of youth, I signed away my entire existence, and I never found out who I sold myself to. 

We spent the next decade working on some really out-there stuff, the kind of things you wouldn’t believe. I was surrounded by fringe astrophysicists and quantum physicists and the scum at the top of the nuclear industry every single day, along with my peers in the research team; and all we had to talk about was our work. Work which we were contractually obliged not to discuss. 

And so I sat and I listened. I absorbed new theories and the latest discoveries, industrial developments and advanced weaponry. I was particularly pleased when those around me discussed the multiverse, the idea that our universe is just one of infinitesimal other universes, all separated by a web of membranes.

And, although I now regret it bitterly, I decided to pursue certain new ideas which were fermenting within the crags of my mind.

I shall not disclose anything of my method. This must never be repeated. Not that it would matter. It’s already too late for that.

In brief, I thought I could rent a tiny tear in the brane which divides our universe from the next, and the next, and the next. A portal between the layers of the multiverse, if you will. 

Our mysterious benefactors signed the cheques, and my team and I immediately set to work on the project. Just like that, I had condemned them all.

Condemned us all.

It took two years of constant work. After all, what with the contracts we signed as teenagers years before, we had nothing better to do with our time. And we succeeded. The portal only stayed open for a few nanoseconds, far too short a time for us to learn much of what lurked beyond the fabric of spacetime; but we had done it. A little bit of fine-tuning, and we’d do it again.

More cheques came our way, signed by occluded hands. The seven of us worked night and day on the portal until it was ready.

And the day came. If I remember rightly, it was Saturday 14th, as we’d purposely avoided the preceding day for obvious reasons. We gathered round our beautiful, devastating masterpiece, our baby, our interdimensional portal, as it visibly opened in the air before us. A horrifying black void. No light, no sound, no form, just a smear of nothingness the size of a dolphin’s hiccup.

We were snapped away from our horror at the throbbing void by a noise which will haunt me until my dying day. Imagine the shrill screech of rusty train wheels grinding to a halt when the driver releases the dead man’s handle. Then, underneath that, imagine the singular grunt all adolescents make when a parent asks them to perform a chore, but with a heavy bass tone which you can feel rattle your gizzards. Then mix in the scream of a mother on learning of the premature death of her only child; the drone emitted by a hive frothing with summer bees; the frightened yelps of a dog in the bottom of a dry well, becoming harshly robotic as the soundwaves reverberate over and over against cold, unforgiving rock.

I can still hear it now, though twenty years have passed. And I know that that sound was the sound of nature screaming in horror as she saw the mistake she’d just made. 

The tiny void, our beautiful portal, suddenly stretched, expanding like tugged lycra, now larger than a man; and from it emerged a creature very much like a foot-long maggot or a huge tardigrade. Another, similar creature, followed, and then another. Within seconds, hundreds of these otherworldly things burrowed their way through our interdimensional portal.

I snapped myself out of a catatonia of horror, and hastily closed the portal. I knew even then that whatever we’d done could never be undone. We’d made history. For better or worse, Pandora’s box was open and it was full of maggots.

We tried to capture the specimens, but they proved to be swift tunnellers. They ate their way through the tiles of the laboratory floor, through the supposedly impermeable layer of materials beneath that, down, down into the belching bowels of the earth.

That’s what they do, see? That’s how the little bastards get you. I know that now. They eat their way into the crust of a planet, dig out a vast nest somewhere close to the warmth of the mantle, they each lay their of spawn, and then they die. And their spawn lives on.

My team and I ran as many experiments on the few maggots we caught as we could think of, and learnt as much as we could. When they tried to lay their spawn, we experimented on that, too. The spawn is very much like frogspawn, only larger and more voluminous. A single maggot is capable of laying close to a billion spawn, a billion embryos encased in jelly. Once the maggot has discharged its duty and laid its spawn, it then dies. 

They feed on emotion, these little embryos. Human emotion. My team and I divided the spawn into groups. One group, we fed solely on love, empathy, compassion, the most noble of emotional states. A second, we fed on hatred, and anger, and prejudice, the most raw of emotional states. The third group was our control, to whom we gave nothing but the most humdrum of emotions of the sort we all feel every day.

I am dismayed even now to report that the spawn fed on love died out pretty quickly (turns out love really isn’t enough), and the control group seemed neither to suffer nor thrive. By contrast, the spawn fed on hate showed signs of rapid development. They grew fast and they grew strong.

It was around this time I realised that new hostilities were forming within my research team, my band of brothers. Some of our number became increasingly paranoid, others receded into silent shame or picked fights about inconsequential things. At the same time, the control group of spawn began to grow.

On a hunch, I secretly ran a series of tests on the air around us, the air we breathed every day. Bear in mind, we were all working and living in a secret bunker deep underground, and in an age with at best rudimentary air conditioning. To my horror, I found countless spores in our air, spores of a kind I did not recognise. I now realise that, when the otherworldly maggot-embryos who starved on love died, their bodies released mood-altering spores into the air. 

That’s what they do, you see? That’s what the space maggots do. When they die, they pour out spores to make a planet’s inhabitants hate one another. They sow discord and fuel hatred and divide us, all so they can make us hate ourselves and each other. All of that turmoil and that blind, empty rage feeds their little babies, spawning a hundred miles beneath our feet.

The year is now 1994. Here is what you can expect to see over the coming decades. Those divisions, cracks already forming in society, will deepen and deepen, creating cracks of their own, fissures of suspicion and paranoia and mistrust becoming vast caverns of open hatred. Divisions of gender and race, religion and all the usual suspects for sure, but as the spawn grow hungrier, the divisions will diversify. Cultural interests, postcodes, opinions, each will become cause for dividing us from one another. Our screens and newspapers will become rage machines, engines of hate, whether by inciting our instinctive fears or exploiting our vague grudges or simply implying one series of mediocre movies is better than another, slightly different series of mediocre movies. And the rich will grow richer and the despairing poor more numerous, all feeding the spawn from another universe. People will begin to question the very foundations of civilisation.

And then the little bastards hatch. Mite-like in appearance, tiny, hungry little spiders. Within a matter of minutes the mites devour the planet’s mantle. A few seconds after that, and they’ve eaten the core, too. As the planet disintegrates beneath our feet and we quibble over which ethnic group is to blame, the monsters eat their way through the solar system before spreading beyond, eating and growing and eating and growing. It’ll take them several hours to consume the Milky Way and Andromeda, the galaxy next to ours. And as they eat, they grow to become monstrous in size. Before long, neutron stars and even black holes won’t cause them any more than a little indigestion.

I would like to pause a moment here, friend, to plead for your forgiveness. I ask you not to forgive me for the terrible crime against nature I committed when I opened the interdimensional portal and let these creatures in. Instead, I ask you to forgive the injury I am about to do to you. For, once you read what follows, you will learn of your own, terrible destiny. And, once you know, you will never be able to un-know.

The truth is, once these monsters have finished dining on every scrap of matter in our universe, they will then eat backwards through time. When they’re done, nothing in the entire history of our universe will ever have happened. No stars forged from the big bang’s fertile clay, no galaxies formed, no planets falling neatly into their orbits, no life.

Not only will we cease to exist, we will cease to have ever existed.

Every moment of every life, permanently erased from existence. That fleeting instant of eye contact with an attractive stranger on a packed bus? Never happened. The pride you felt when your old headteacher gave you a certificate and all your schoolmates clapped for you? Never happened. 

The treasured memory of that summer morning when, as a child, you played hide and seek with your gran whilst on a nature walk, you peeking out from inside a bush and her pretending not to have spotted you? Never happened.

The time your ex found out you were having a rough time and brought you some flowers, and you briefly considered getting back with them but then decided against it when you remembered why you broke up in the first place? Your ex was never born. Your gran, your old headteacher, the stranger on the bus, they were never born. They never existed.

You never existed. 

First these terrible creatures ate your rage and cost you the chance of freedom and happiness, and then they ate your planet and left you to choke to death in space. Now they’ve erased your past, your entire existence, in order to sustain their own gluttony.

Having devoured everything from the Big Bang to whatever might’ve been at the end of all this, the huge interdimensional spiders starve to death. Their unspeakably vast bodies burst, and the vacuum left by our universe fills with trillions upon trillions of maggot-like creatures. Each maggot is pregnant with a fresh batch of hungry spawn.

My team and I allowed this evil into our universe through our portal. And, when the time comes, they’ll be all that’s left of us, those repugnant maggots with bellies full of interdimensional spiders. They’ll writhe and wriggle, just waiting for another rip in the branes between universes. Another opportunity to erase an entire universe from existence.

In my earnest pursuit of knowledge, I condemned our universe and each one of us to this terrible fate, that Saturday 14th long ago. I stumbled upon a discovery nobody should’ve ever made. Plenty of the interdimensional maggots got away from us. I saw them eat their way into the earth, ready to lay their spawn. I know for certain they’re there, and that some day, they will hatch.

I have now carried this secret for twenty years. One by one, my colleagues have succumbed to suicide or addiction. There’s no point in living when you know nothing you do can possibly matter. Every day, each of us feeding those terrible spawn with our intolerable guilt and the sorrow we feel when we think back on the families we denounced so long ago, when we were stupid boys with heads full of rocks and numbers.

I’m sick. Terminal cancer, started out in the kidneys and then spread. Having already renounced my existence on a Saturday long ago, I no longer fear death. In fact, I’m looking forward to unloading the burden of my life these twenty years. And yet, I found myself with a quandary.

I have nobody to share my knowledge with. Should I take this terrible secret to the grave? Would it be kinder to let humankind squabble and squander its final days oblivious to the futility of it all, or should I alert some agency or other so that they can try to find a way to eradicate the spawn and the spores? 

Beyond that – do we really deserve to exist? We’re repugnant, us human beings. Don’t even try to deny it. 

Is that me speaking, or is it the spores inducing hate in me?

It was whilst pondering this question that I decided to write this letter. It was never really intended to be read by human eyes. Consider it my elegy to existence, and also a bomb thrown into the bowels of hell. 

You see, I’ve poured hours of love and devotion into every word of this letter. Each word, polished like a delicate jewel. This letter itself symbolises love – the pure love between a creator and the work they create. The love between the artist and the art. 

It is my undoubtedly vain but nonetheless sincere hope that this bomb will strike at the belly of the beast, that my love might prove strong enough to save the universe and all the people I might’ve loved had I not signed that contract. 

Yours with contrition and hope,

Professor Simon Feltcher