September 11, 2024

The Presence Beyond
By: Gerald R. Lucas (2024)

It was on a night like any other, beneath a sky aglow with cold stars, that I found myself consumed by thoughts which, in retrospect, I wish I had never entertained. The stars hung in their timeless constellations, indifferent to my gaze, and yet something in their silent arrangement stirred within me a dread I could not place. They flickered, mocking me with the cruel reminder that if there were minds, vast and unfathomable, amid their celestial expanse, I would never meet them. The distances between the stars, incomprehensible in their breadth, yawned like the gulf of eternity itself. Light, swift as it may be, crawls pitifully across the cosmic abyss. Any life beyond Earth, should it exist, would remain forever hidden—undiscoverable due to the insurmountable chasm of space and time that divides us. We, the inheritors of this small sphere, would never ascend to find our equals or our betters. The very laws of the universe had ensured it. But as I lamented this cosmic isolation, something stirred within me—an intuition, a feeling that the separation I so bemoaned was but an illusion, a veil that could be lifted by a mind willing to peer beyond the frail boundary of human perception. I felt drawn, not by curiosity, but by something far darker, as though the stars themselves beckoned with unspeakable knowledge. My thoughts unraveled in a strange, ecstatic frenzy. Could it be that the physical world was but a shell, that consciousness itself might traverse the distances that matter cannot? The sky shifted before my eyes, and a terrible clarity overtook me. It was as if I had left my body behind, cast off the prison of flesh, and soared into the void. What began as a gentle drift soon became a harrowing plunge through the cold void of space, and I reached out—blindly, foolishly—toward what I believed to be the minds of others. And then, I touched them. In that moment, my consciousness collided with a thousand, no, a million entities scattered across the cosmos. Their thoughts, their voices, assaulted me, and I was forced to comprehend them all at once. Some were beings of incomprehensible beauty—radiant, eternal, their existence harmonious with the fundamental laws of the universe. I could hear their songs, symphonies of light and time that wove creation itself. They saw me, they knew me, and in their fleeting acknowledgment, I felt both honored and pitied, for I was nothing to them—less than a speck, a fleeting thought. But there were others. In the spaces between the stars, beyond the reach of light, lurked intelligences that twisted and writhed in hideous, unfathomable forms. They slithered across the fabric of reality, their very essence a violation of all that is sane. Their minds were like dark, ravenous voids, consuming every thought, every glimmer of understanding that dared to approach them. I recoiled, but I could not escape their touch. They whispered to me in languages that no human throat could utter, and yet I understood. They showed me visions—worlds devoured by shadows, civilizations crushed under the weight of something far greater than themselves. I felt their hunger, their ancient and insatiable lust for dominance, and in that moment, I realized that what I had touched was not a random sampling of the universe. I had breached something, disturbed a balance I did not know existed. But it was not over. As my mind crumbled beneath the weight of these revelations, I became aware of something else. Something deeper. Older. A presence beyond the beings I had encountered, lurking at the very edge of existence. It was vast, ineffable, and its awareness slowly, deliberately, turned toward me. My mind screamed, a primal terror flooding every fiber of my being. I had been noticed. I cannot describe it—not fully—for its form, if it had one, was beyond comprehension. It was neither light nor dark, neither being nor void. It was existence itself, and yet it was something that should never have been. It stretched across time and space, older than the stars, older than thought, and as it regarded me, I understood the horror of what I had done. In my reckless yearning to touch the cosmos, I had awakened it. It had slumbered, unknowable, unbothered by the affairs of lesser beings. But now it was awake, and it saw not just me, but all of humanity. Its gaze swept across the Earth, and I felt its hunger, its malice. It was patient, and its purposes were unknowable, but I knew one thing with certainty: it would come. The stars above, once distant and indifferent, now glowed with a baleful light, as though the sky itself had become an eye—cold, pitiless, and unblinking. It would watch. It would wait. And when the time came, it would act. I had summoned its attention, and it would not forget. The enormity of what I had unleashed crushed me. My body trembled, and my mind, already fractured, threatened to collapse under the weight of this knowledge. This was no mere contact, no fleeting glimpse into the beyond. I had become a beacon, a signal to the cosmos that humanity had reached beyond its limits, and for that, we would pay. I had doomed us. We are not meant for the stars. They are not ours to explore, nor ours to understand. The universe, in its vast and terrible majesty, has seen us—and now, it will devour us.