Three Minutes and Three Seconds
By George S. Karagiannis
* Note: It has been scientifically hypothesized that the human brain may last for approximately three minutes in hypoxia (oxygen deprivation), before brain cells start dying.
The Mother Temple was too tricky to catch and no one ever imagined humanity would crack the problem, now steady in the row, more than four scientist generations were literally sponged off, beyond the stage of their ‘Remembrance Day’. As a matter of fact, it required scores of mathematical freaks reconfiguring a long-lasting domino pattern, made of compound questions, to manage towering up the puzzling algorithm to its hard end. When, at last routine geodesic distance calculations, daily satellite screenshots, unlimited geologic, seismologic and stratigraphical measurements, along with partial differential equations and other stochastic algebraic models were put together, yottabytes of documentation, visional and auditory information were readily integrated to give birth to an ultimate prediction algorithm for tracking the Mother Temple.
The chief challenge with tracking the Mother Temple was it was constantly altering its relevant location to the Earth. Most of the times it was laid down somewhere in the core, expanded under the soil not in touch with the lower atmosphere; in yet other times, it was spanning aloft, somewhere in the circumference of cloud-crafted kingdoms and way up to the stratosphere in retro-space intervals; the less frequent was the short appearance at the level of the ocean, which could actually define a one-chance paradox for the humans to unravel the secrets of life and death; for this relic seemed to be so holy and precious an artifact, that Mother Earth opted to reassure it would never be caught at the hands of mortals, because it would most probably be industrialized and commercialized.
When the night-shift service mechanic witnessed that the sophisticated computer algorithm predicted Mother Temple would appear for a total duration of three minutes and three seconds, in exactly eighteen hours from the time point of prediction, somewhere on an island in southern Pacific Ocean, he was first iced, and then taken aback, but eventually, he urgently proceeded to signifying the red alarm state.
In moments, all governments were fully briefed; excessive military forces besieged the destination point with quite an army load; thousands of reporters and cameramen were packed in helicopters to capture a moment, potentially sealed through history; religious and spiritual waves began their own propaganda to allure ignorance and grow in zealots; and the rest of humanity measured the final countdown, jammed right before the TV screens, miraculously staying away from the soap opera tranquilizer; for the only time the story was repeated all over again, in a similar context, had been the Millennium.
When everything was pretty much settled to perfection, and the specified temporary home for the Mother Temple was cut clear on the sniper rifle, a mind-blowing silence echoed around the island, with amounts of energies capable of lifting tsunamis. Cameras zoomed at the center of the fresh meadow; reporters transmitted their agony through the lens; the war leaders were prepared for the unknown; presidential committees were engaged to their cell-phones, as first-line access to giving orders upon a crisis. The tension reached peak levels way above the normal magnitudes of reference values.
In the nick of time, the artifact emerged, in strict geometry and perfect time- and space-symmetry, resembling a cubic die, dynamically altered through time. The Mother Temple was blinding white, like fresh snowflakes on a sulfur garden, instilled in icy plates glistered and sharpened by diamond knifes, through sunbeams. Before selling the view as a pallid dream, everyone felt his belly muscles utterly contracted, pointing at the periphery of their detached diaphragm to concrete congestion. Now, every second passing by was not planning to pay a visit back to humanity’s memory shells, as it was one of the exceptional moments that time was not negotiable.
The human representative took a leap of faith and leaned forward to fulfill his destiny and apply the pinnacle of his hard and whole-life training, as if he was only born for this very moment, like a divinely chosen and naturally elected Messiah. He walked the heavenly pathway to the Mother Temple and sighed at the momentum of making it to the clandestine entrance. He wished for establishing a prosperous communication with Mother Earth and becoming a witness of the serpentine pathways life offers by itself. When hesitantly entered the structure, he saw a hexagonal prism, mirrored in all sides by multiple light sources and gravity immediately deteriorated. He jumped in gentle hops, like an innocent rabbit heading for its burrow, towards the middle of the room and felt the caressing breeze worming around his light-filled body. Naked from a handful of sins, his lifetime deeds were spoken to him in time, through eternity, making him lose contact with the local time. When he approached the heart of the room, he, there, found out a natural carbon plinth with a glossy appearance retaining a large, finely-cut diamond on the top. The diamond’s luster sounded and tasted nice.
Out of his ignorance, he thought this was the one-way ticket for life, and dared touching it with an impulsion to contact Mother. At the minuscule touch of his soft finger pad, the diamond took a red color, as if a pool of blood emerged from its core and revealed a wreckful of lesions around it, ultimately cracking like a sand castle.
Exactly three minutes and three seconds after the diamond was shattered into a cornucopia of pieces and the pedestal bloomed with pure blood, everything that was considered alive -including humans, animals, plants, fungi and bacteria- up to that point, suddenly died, exactly like a fetus does, when lacking a motherly placenta.
- - -
George S. Karagiannis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and is currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto in Canada. He enjoys writing science-fiction in the subgenres of hard science fiction, bizzarro and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic settings. He has recently got an accepted story in the magazine "Apocrypha and Abstractions", pending to be published. He is also an abstractionist/surreal artist and his blog can be found here: http://abstractsur.blogspot.com/
By George S. Karagiannis
* Note: It has been scientifically hypothesized that the human brain may last for approximately three minutes in hypoxia (oxygen deprivation), before brain cells start dying.
***
The Mother Temple was too tricky to catch and no one ever imagined humanity would crack the problem, now steady in the row, more than four scientist generations were literally sponged off, beyond the stage of their ‘Remembrance Day’. As a matter of fact, it required scores of mathematical freaks reconfiguring a long-lasting domino pattern, made of compound questions, to manage towering up the puzzling algorithm to its hard end. When, at last routine geodesic distance calculations, daily satellite screenshots, unlimited geologic, seismologic and stratigraphical measurements, along with partial differential equations and other stochastic algebraic models were put together, yottabytes of documentation, visional and auditory information were readily integrated to give birth to an ultimate prediction algorithm for tracking the Mother Temple.
The chief challenge with tracking the Mother Temple was it was constantly altering its relevant location to the Earth. Most of the times it was laid down somewhere in the core, expanded under the soil not in touch with the lower atmosphere; in yet other times, it was spanning aloft, somewhere in the circumference of cloud-crafted kingdoms and way up to the stratosphere in retro-space intervals; the less frequent was the short appearance at the level of the ocean, which could actually define a one-chance paradox for the humans to unravel the secrets of life and death; for this relic seemed to be so holy and precious an artifact, that Mother Earth opted to reassure it would never be caught at the hands of mortals, because it would most probably be industrialized and commercialized.
When the night-shift service mechanic witnessed that the sophisticated computer algorithm predicted Mother Temple would appear for a total duration of three minutes and three seconds, in exactly eighteen hours from the time point of prediction, somewhere on an island in southern Pacific Ocean, he was first iced, and then taken aback, but eventually, he urgently proceeded to signifying the red alarm state.
In moments, all governments were fully briefed; excessive military forces besieged the destination point with quite an army load; thousands of reporters and cameramen were packed in helicopters to capture a moment, potentially sealed through history; religious and spiritual waves began their own propaganda to allure ignorance and grow in zealots; and the rest of humanity measured the final countdown, jammed right before the TV screens, miraculously staying away from the soap opera tranquilizer; for the only time the story was repeated all over again, in a similar context, had been the Millennium.
When everything was pretty much settled to perfection, and the specified temporary home for the Mother Temple was cut clear on the sniper rifle, a mind-blowing silence echoed around the island, with amounts of energies capable of lifting tsunamis. Cameras zoomed at the center of the fresh meadow; reporters transmitted their agony through the lens; the war leaders were prepared for the unknown; presidential committees were engaged to their cell-phones, as first-line access to giving orders upon a crisis. The tension reached peak levels way above the normal magnitudes of reference values.
In the nick of time, the artifact emerged, in strict geometry and perfect time- and space-symmetry, resembling a cubic die, dynamically altered through time. The Mother Temple was blinding white, like fresh snowflakes on a sulfur garden, instilled in icy plates glistered and sharpened by diamond knifes, through sunbeams. Before selling the view as a pallid dream, everyone felt his belly muscles utterly contracted, pointing at the periphery of their detached diaphragm to concrete congestion. Now, every second passing by was not planning to pay a visit back to humanity’s memory shells, as it was one of the exceptional moments that time was not negotiable.
The human representative took a leap of faith and leaned forward to fulfill his destiny and apply the pinnacle of his hard and whole-life training, as if he was only born for this very moment, like a divinely chosen and naturally elected Messiah. He walked the heavenly pathway to the Mother Temple and sighed at the momentum of making it to the clandestine entrance. He wished for establishing a prosperous communication with Mother Earth and becoming a witness of the serpentine pathways life offers by itself. When hesitantly entered the structure, he saw a hexagonal prism, mirrored in all sides by multiple light sources and gravity immediately deteriorated. He jumped in gentle hops, like an innocent rabbit heading for its burrow, towards the middle of the room and felt the caressing breeze worming around his light-filled body. Naked from a handful of sins, his lifetime deeds were spoken to him in time, through eternity, making him lose contact with the local time. When he approached the heart of the room, he, there, found out a natural carbon plinth with a glossy appearance retaining a large, finely-cut diamond on the top. The diamond’s luster sounded and tasted nice.
Out of his ignorance, he thought this was the one-way ticket for life, and dared touching it with an impulsion to contact Mother. At the minuscule touch of his soft finger pad, the diamond took a red color, as if a pool of blood emerged from its core and revealed a wreckful of lesions around it, ultimately cracking like a sand castle.
Exactly three minutes and three seconds after the diamond was shattered into a cornucopia of pieces and the pedestal bloomed with pure blood, everything that was considered alive -including humans, animals, plants, fungi and bacteria- up to that point, suddenly died, exactly like a fetus does, when lacking a motherly placenta.
- - -
George S. Karagiannis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and is currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto in Canada. He enjoys writing science-fiction in the subgenres of hard science fiction, bizzarro and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic settings. He has recently got an accepted story in the magazine "Apocrypha and Abstractions", pending to be published. He is also an abstractionist/surreal artist and his blog can be found here: http://abstractsur.blogspot.com/
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