fortunately his patient never looked back. It was the first time he addressed him in such an aggressive way. He wished he could have replied something but all he felt was anger and he knew perfectly that in these conditions he had to remain silent until his irritation had passed. Lest he would put at risk his role as a therapist.
– Keep calm, Doctor. I need your presence and your calm to stabilize myself. But One also needs you to have a truthful understanding of what is happening in this room right now.
Vanderglück took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly, as he had learned to do in order to calm his emotions. He felt ready to speak.
– What are you feeling, Damien?
– Thanks to your presence, Doctor, I feel much better. Something inside is dislocating my memories, my thoughts, my emotions. One tears them apart like paper and reduces them to dust, One dismantles systematically what makes me be the “normal” individual you have trained me to become. It's as if I were slowly dying by disintegration. But your simple presence helps me to control this terrible anguish.
– But who is this “One” you are talking about, Damien?
– It's the syndrome to which you have given your name, Doctor. Over the years, I have learned to forget I have always worked for him. But my true nature is about to regain the upper hand. And now that you are here, I am ready to assume the function for the sake of which I have established communication with you and your fellow men in the first place. And now, if you don't mind, we are going on the roof. Sofia?
Damien offered an open hand to his wife. She grasped it without hesitation. The whole building shook again violently. The walls were cracking, the fragments that composed the mosaics on the floor were spurting out of their mold, parts of the ceiling collapsed. Damien grabbed Vanderglück by the collar, and then applied a forceful push on his neck.
When the psychiatrist lifted his gaze up, a few fractions of a second later, they were all three on the roof of the building. As he was kneeling on the ground, he felt the cold touch of the rain water on his legs. He looked up towards Damien, who was levitating about six feet from the ground, seated in lotus. Was it an illusion? Had he completely lost his mind? Plumes of black smoke rose all around, over the city. A car lifted by one of the many twisters that ran through the streets crashed into a balcony of the opposite building. Vanderglück recognized with consternation his beautiful Audi.
The scene took an even more surreal turn when the sky color shifted towards a darkening violet and Damien's eyes started gleaming yellow. Sofia was sitting nearby, eyes closed, as if nothing unusual was happening.
– Thank you both for being here, Damien said. Your presence will be essential for me to stabilize my emission. I thank you in advance in the name of the Collective.
The sun seemed to have moved away. Vanderglück could only see in the twilight thanks to the ever flickering light of the many lightnings that stroke in all directions one after the other. Sofia was now also hanging in the air, in the lotus posture. A strong vibration that seized his sensations like a magnet turned his guts upside down.
– Hold on, it won't be long, he heard in his head.
Then, the emission began:
– This is a world wide telepathic broadcast. Don't be afraid, everything is under control. One is a collective entity, the result of the interconnection of a large number of consciousnesses. Until now, you have considered our Collective as a simple set of persons suffering from an autistic disorder. But if so far One has not bothered communicating with you, it is because One perceives reality in a very different way, and One does not feel like participating to the one you have built for yourselves.
The round of lightnings had stopped. The entire firmament was rotating in an exorbitant movement, as if Earth were a giant spinning top. The sun and the moon executed a complete revolution within a few seconds. Unable to control his dizziness, the psychiatrist vomited on the roof of the building everything he had in his stomach.
– Each individual having ever been part of the Collective gave it the entire content of their experience, until their death, and One has stored the sum of all those information from time immemorial. A very long time ago, the Collective was the crucible of almost the entire human kind. It was an age of harmony between human beings, because everyone had access to the experience of every other. Over the millennia, the inevitable dissidents grew in number, until they reached the critical point beyond which the majority of individuals, the ones who always remain easily influenced, shifted to their side. They all ended forgetting even the existence of the Collective.
Vomiting seemed to have purged him. Vanderglück felt much better. He had also started levitating. The vibrations were still very powerful, but his body was now in sync with them. The calm he felt inside as a result of the soothing in Damien's voice contrasted with the apocalyptic visions that the external world offered him.
– Those dissidents would not act any more taking into account the whole of their fellow men, but only according to their own apparent interest. They sought their personal pleasure, without concern about the consequences that what they did to obtain it had for their fellow men. They lost sight of the fact that, by believing they served their self interest in defiance of their fellow men's, they worked eventually against themselves. They have finally come to squarely erect egocentrism as a supreme value.
The cosmos was distorted in all directions. All sorts of stars, planetoids, galaxies and interstellar clouds seemed to come near and then go away in vertiginous movements.
– But One has made a lot of progress during the last few millennia, and One is now able to set up this revolution. You are about to be connected to the Collective. Those of you who want to will be able to be part of it. Others will be redirected toward a separate reality they will be allowed to construct as they want, and One will wish them good luck. Prepare now for getting shifted towards the Collective's assemblage of reality.
The entire space deformed, as if dilating. All the lines got pulled towards the infinite in all directions, and seemed to freeze in this state. And then suddenly they all converged into a single tiny point that shone briefly in the middle of darkness. The next moment, everything was new. And the tacit message spread: “Welcome.”
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