Hey there. Name's " ", and you're about to hear my life story. But yeah yeah, I know what you're gonna say first. "You forgot your name!" If I were anyone else, I'd agree with you and promptly demand that I give you my name or else I'd burn my house down. See, here's the thing.
I have no name.
Well, no legal name, that is. See, I was born just the same as anybody else – from my mother. But what happened after my childhood is a mystery to all. All I know is that at some point in time, my parents got sick of me and kicked me out of the house for one reason or another. Of course, I didn't care. I was in the very stage of maturity that literally said you can't care about anything. Otherwise known as being a teenager. To make a very, very long story short, I ended up getting a job at a local bakery churning out loaves and whatnot. It made enough for me to eventually get off the streets and rent an apartment, and it sure beat being a busboy at some run-down restaurant. I still had no name, but I just asked people to call me "Bob". Nice, inconspicuous, rolls off the tongue easily. I felt rather like a Bob, too.
Then, one night when I sat down to watch TV, everything changed.
Okay, not literally. I was pretty sure gravity still pulled me down, and that the president of the United States was not a talking dog. At least, not yet. But the point is, my life did change in a substantial way. See, I was watching the latest episode of White's Dichotomy when suddenly one of those national warnings came up, blaring its robotic "BYEEEEEEHHHHHHHHRT" as a call for attention. While I was as miffed as any other couch potato at my program being interrupted by a veritable tape recording, I sat still and waited for the inevitable canned voice to come onto the set, saying calmly that we were all going to die. Imagine my surprise when the screen suddenly shifted to some guy in a lab coat, with his hair standing straight up. He looked as if he'd stuck his finger into an electrical socket, and his coat was torn in many places, yet he had the smile of a lunatic.
Now they had my attention. It wasn't often that they got a live speaker for these things, and to have some guy looking like a mad scientist on screen...well, that's intriguing enough for even a 5 year old with ADHD to stop and look at. Either this guy just killed us all, or solved all of mankind's problems. Personally, I could go for either. Eternal happiness is nice, but oblivion's pretty cool too. So is Skyrim, if you catch my drift.
"Hello, America! I come to you with great news!" he rambled, immediately displaying a heavy Slavic accent. A Slavic mad scientist was even more interesting, so I crossed my legs and settled in for what this guy had to say.
"We have had a breakthrough! We were attempting to convert the heaviest known particle into another state of matter, when a wormhole opened far off in the stars! But this is no wormhole that will destroy anyone or anything! The theories are all true, all the theories about alternate universes are true! Our findings show that this wormhole leads to a bright, vibrant planet inhabited by life! As I speak to you now, early satellite images show clusters of beings gathering around the entrance!"
The screen quickly cut to a super grainy picture, and whilst I squinted trying to make out what the hell I was supposed to be seeing, the scientist rambled on.
"You see here," he gasped, as a red circle traced around a splotch of white and blurry colors, "That speck of coloring is unlike any living creature we are aware of, short of those that can refocus light to camouflage themselves."
He paused, and I could hear him scraping at something once more. The screen then shifted slightly as he whooped in delight.
"But there! There, you see!" he practically shouted, punctuating each 'there!' with a slight change in the coloration onscreen. "It moves! It moves!"
Big whoop, I thought. It moves. So what? I can make a ball move if I kick it, doesn't mean it's alive. Seemingly, the guy was aware of the fallacy, as he immediately leapt onto the train of thought that I'd been riding.
"Now, I know movement is not definitive proof of life," he admitted. "But! We have sent a probe capable of transmitting short video clips back to Earth, and it will take approximately, as of this very moment, about 10 minutes to impact! The probe is not built for a return trip, so all efforts were put into the video capability and travelling speed."
"But!" he added for about the twentieth time. "Any signals it transmits will arrive much faster than it took to get there. Upon impact, we will have transmissions in approximately 2 hours! Then we will see what this anomaly really holds!"
The screen cut back to him, where he was scratching at his hair wildly. The fellow looked so excited I actually found myself perking up a bit. Life on another planet, huh? Finally. Maybe we can start society over there, and I'll get a name. A legal name, at that. That, and I'll be out of this dump.
There was a brief bit of scuffling, in which the scientist turned to somebody off-screen, and practically whisper-shouted something at him, which sounded a lot like "Cut the broadcast, cut it now!" In the seconds following this, the screen blanked off, there was the trademark "BYEEEEHHHHHHHRT", and next thing I knew, the ending credits to White's Dichotomy were rolling on screen.
I found myself smiling rather stupidly. Hell, for all I knew some Russian dude managed to hack into the Emergency Broadcast System and photoshopped some things together, put on a lab coat and yelled at us that there was a wormhole within travelling distance. But for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to doubt him. I just liked the idea of going somewhere else too much, somewhere where I could settle down and live a more comfortable life. My surroundings were starting to gather dust anyway, so I immediately wanted to believe this guy. Rather stupid, I thought. But I suppose all dreams are.
My nightly routine was much the same after that. I took a shower, brushed my teeth, briefly browsed the internet, and got back into bed. For the first time in a while, I fell asleep with a little half-grin on my face, instead of a mask of boredom. The cityscape was suddenly much easier to fall asleep to, and the darkness was much more welcoming.
In fact, I dare say I was asleep in seconds.
It was about five hours before I woke up to my phone vibrating on my nightstand like there was no tomorrow. Blearily, I glanced at my alarm clock, and saw that it was only 3:00 AM. Crap. Was my first thought.Now I won't get a full night's sleep. I was correct for many reasons, the most prevalent being that once woken up, I seemed to have an inability to sleep for at least a few more hours. The biggest reason, however, was that Michael was calling.
See, Michael is...I don't know if I can call him my friend. Acquaintance, maybe. But whatever he is, he's another thing entirely, and that is annoying. Very annoying. He's the sort of guy that calls you at 3:00 AM, and if you don't pick up, he'll call again. And again. And again. Then he'll text you, and call you again...and again...and again...
Right, back to the point. I managed
