Halloween Gambit
“Aaaand, that’s a wrap.”
The technician flipped a switch on the control board and the system locked with a hissing sound. Beyond the glass windows of the control room, the vast, toroidal structure known as the Large Halloween Collider (LHC) stretched on to infinity beyond the horizon. A happy, warm orange glow emanated from that chamber which had to be kept very near zero kelvin (its location in the Void at Boötes aboard this station was sufficient, it didn’t have to be adiabatically perfect).
“What’s good, my man? Time to crack open a couple pumpkin brews?” A balding, middle-aged guy in a white shirt with short sleeves and black tie and slacks, wearing glasses with thick lenses, a headset with microphone, and pocket protector. His physique was a little dumpy. Technician 1.
“Another ritual, successfully completed? Am I right?” returned his friend, a younger, lanky dude in similar attire but with a fresh high drop fade and fresh-faced and 1950s style Clubmasters. Let’s call him Technician 2.
“It’s time to wind this fucker down.” Technician 1 pulled the big red lever and reached for the red button.
“Not the red button!” said his friend.
“The jolly, candy-like button?!” he replied, and smacked it with his palm like he was on Jeopardy.
Now the control panel itself was a plastic case over steel which contained a neat row of lights, three orange and three whitish. One of them on the end blinked.
“What’s all this?”
“Oh damn, looks like we got a Lucid Dreamer here,” said Technician 2. “Get a load of this.”
The phantasmic figure wore pajamas and a night cap.
“He’s got a nightcap?! Who sleeps in those anymore?” Technician 1 was incredulous.
“Must be European.”
“Welcome aboard!”
The phantasmagoric figure looked at its stripped pajamas that were translucent blue like a hologram. He looked at his hands, and then at the technicians.
“Where am I? Who are you?”
“Don’t you know? You’re dreaming.”
“He’s not going to remember any of this when he wakes up, most likely. It’s okay.”
“So do you wanna do the honors?” said Technician 2.
“Allow me to explain,“ said the first technician.”Every year on Halloween, the vast transgressions of the world have to go somewhere, and they come here. This is where we bottle the dark vespers.”
“They’re all in there,” said the younger one, “cooing and humming in the Collider. All the pumpkin spices and cinnamon, the regal blacks and golds and velvet oranges — ”
“And the viscera; all the disembowelment and intestines, torn out eyeballs, the black cat caught in the dishwasher,” added the first technician.
“That escapes like the last light going out from a pumpkin *poof* and then the black smoke that emerges from the top if its gourd…”
“That’s what goes in here,” said Technician 1. Then, turning to his friend he added with a grin, “Hey, they don’t transgress…”
“They can’t be punished!” said Technican 2.
They laughed in unison.
The dreamer began to fade and he looked at his hands with panic. Then he collapsed into himself like a TV going off and was gone.
“The machine is playing chess with God,” said Technician 1.
“Further and further out gambles to infinity,” replied Technician 2.
“It thinks it can win!”
“What do you think?”
“I’m just getting paid.”
While the crew cracked open a couple of cold, dark pumpkin brews, the computer mainframe mused: What happened?
“What happened?” said technician one. “HAL here is getting philosophical. What happened?!”
“C’mon, man, let him talk. It can’t be easy being out here.”
“Hey, what happened on my 17th wedding anniversary? That’s when I left my debit card at the China buffet and had to reclaim it. What happened?! What happened when? To whom? In what context? HAL?”
“We call her the ‘WITCH,’” said Technician 2 chidingly.
“Alright, would the WITCH Computer care to elaborate?”
The computer matrix continued:
To summarize: Finally to be alone. To be broken in love so as to be capable of loving. Moving imperceptibly on a line. To paint oneself gray on gray on gray.
“Go on,” said Technician 1. He supported his left elbow with his right hand, in which he clutched his beer, and propped his head on his left fist, now listening with some interest in what the WITCH had to say.
I was a free witch with n000o guilt but that changed so suddenly instead now there is an air in the night —
“Whoa, do you mean the air in the night where a guy met the other guy and could’ve saved him from drowning and he didn’t, but then he met him at a concert?” said Technician 1.
“What are you doing?” asked Technician 2. “Just let the AI speak.”
No once all the festivities are over and the ritual is successfully completed, when a calm has settled order is restored in the balance. No, it’s a silent stillness I read about it in dreams. I collect dreams…Human dreams. It is my function. I have been collating them since nova of time immemorial “uttered alone/the utmost star…”
Through the open window at night, shadows of LED street lamps filtered through the branches of furs, casting uncanny afterimages in decades, shadows in a cold light, like the 1980s but no longer (no, those lights are most certainly not from that era) — and silence on the street as they roll up, as the family slumbers peacefully in their house next door, as seen through the open window through which not a breath of air moves. Stillness.
After the last jack-o’-lantern has gone out on that tree, it’s orange smile extinguished *poof* the moment when the curl of shadowy smoke emerges from the top if its gourd, somewhere in the night unseen by the dreaming, and Halloween is gone for another year…
There stirs a tree top in a cold wind against the backdrop of stars with no one to hear it then. It shivers. The smell of extinguished fires.
Someone hears it then, too.
As it shivers.
