"Before you sent it to me...," David frowns, sitting next to Daniel at his kitchen table. "Did you read it?"
As the day outside the window grows darker, Daniel's eyes do too. He did not read but devour it, as if its lines were pieces of cake, after he, far ahead of his time, broke cracked the impossible-to-break-into-device, even though no one in this time should have yet been able to read them. How he has done it, doesn't really matter. For the next 100 years nobody will understand it, either way.
David didn't ask Daniel for explanations, when he found the decrypted file in his inbox earlier today. Until now, he hasn't even thanked him, because the wife-stealer owes him, or so he thinks, and Daniel might give him that. His head moves up and down as if he were, in fact, agreeing, but he is actually only answering David's prior question.
"Yeah, I read it," he says. "And now I honestly wonder what it is, and where the hell you got it from."
He will have to keep wondering. David didn't tell him anything about the message in a bottle, and going by the distance on his face, neither has he any plans to do so in the future.
Why would he tell him?
They aren't exactly friends and will never be.
So David thinks, at least, but he is eventually going to be wrong. A lot can change in a few months, sometimes even the future.
"How much more of it is on the device?" David asks, hoping that the question will help him to get rid of Daniel
The thick hands of the ornamented clock on his wall are racing towards midnight. At this time of night, you don't want anyone in your house who you wouldn't call a friend.
"I didn't count them," replies David. "But I would say they at least 30 more documents, each of them encrypted individually."
Decrypting the first has taken him more than two weeks, meaning that it will take him over 50 more for the rest. David doesn't want to wait this long, but he sighs at him, because he has no other option.
"What does that mean? Can you go on?"
Hesitation. For the first while that is, because Daniel would like to know something about the origin of the files, before he agrees. Apart from that, he won't have to distract himself from the thought of their ex much longer. 'Their' ex, meaning that she has now left Daniel just as well. She reappeared the other week. Not in person, but only on the phone. She is back with her ex, that´s what she said to Dan. With the same one that she once left for her marriage to David. A guy manager called Mark, who is from the big city and that is where she is now. Not out here any more, but in the distance and because she has left the life out here behind, she doesn't want to hear about a pregnancy.
"I... had an abortion," she said, when she rang.
That she could be lying, didn't occur to either of them.
Really? They could have known better. She has been lying to each of them for years which is why healthy distrust would have only been appropriate. David and Daniel might not agree on much. In the future, however, both of them will unanimously agree that their blind confidence in her words at this point in time was one of the most regrettable mistake of their lives.
A panicked phone call will give way to their regret, and only when they will start to repent, they will learn the whole truth. That is, as far as the truth can ever be whole. Maybe in regards to it, an entity of it is just as big of an illusion, as a future would be in regards to humanity. The two of them, however, don't see it coming yet, which is why Daniel only gives a slowly executed nod.
"I can decrypt the rest of the files for you, no bother. But you need to tell me what this is about."
The clock on the kitchen wall strikes midnight. Across from David there is still someone who he does not want to call a friend. and at this time of night he deems it an ordeal. Especially after Daniel's next sentence.
"Today's file…. That's heavy stuff, David. Who would come up with a story like this?"
Speaking in midnight-voice, he sounds like he doesn't actually consider it a story at all. Not just an idea, not just fiction, but the facts of history.
"I, ahm... I found it," David shugs, and wishes hard liquor would circulate through his veins, so the midnight-talk with someone who is not a friend would be easier to take.
"Found it?" Daniel scoffs. "Why would anyone put something like this on a high security USB-device, like the thing you gave me? Unless…"
There are uncountable ways to finish this sentence. David, however, can only think of one.
"Unless it is a real message that is meant to warn whoever is going to find it about the horror that has happened long ago and might start all over again now."
hinking exactly this, David suddenly hears his own mind talking aloud, as if it grew a voice. No, will you stop, David? It is not your mind that is talking, but Daniel. The words that were in David´s head a second ago, are suddenly rolling off his lips, as if they had always belonged to him.
Could that be true?
Could the man that David doesn't even want to call a friend be thinking exactly like him?
With a sigh on his lips, David is about to find out.
"Alright, ya, let´s talk about it. But I have to ask you a personal question first. Did you get it? The vaccine, I mean."
For the year they are living in, this is not the strangest of all questions. During small-talk-conversations in the streets, when entering a pub, when going out for dinner or to the cinema, everywhere everyone would ask about it these days, as if a person isn´t more than their vaccination certificate, and maybe they really won´t be any longer, because everything that human beings like to do is, frankly, denied to you if you refuse the jab. The unvaccinated are barely still people. Conspiracy theorists and terrorists is what they are being called.
How much of either one is Daniel, David wonders.
Did he allow them to blackmail him into getting vaccinated?
Their ex did and kept on trying to convince David of doing so, as well, but he never agreed. Perhaps it was another contributing factor to their break-up. Unlike David, Daniel might have listened to her, David thinks, before Dan starts shaking his head and pulling his nose up, as if he feels offended by the question.
"Well, you obviously consider me more than stupid, if you have to ask me. I mean, who gets an injection of something which no one can know anything about?"
No one, but the message in a bottle, perhaps, does.
David isn't saying, but thinking it, and so is Daniel. With a sigh, each of them is remembering the vaccine conversations that they used to have with the ex, and suddenly they both consider themselves lucky that she went away.
"Just wondering," Daniel groans, staring out the window. "The document that I decrypted, could there be anything to it?"
David stares at the flickering kitchen lights. He was going to ask exactly the same question and that they are both wondering about it, is perhaps enough of an answer. Even so, they don't yet want to admit it. Because everything changes as soon as you consider something like this to be true.
That's why David shrugs to buy himself for some time, and ignores that tomorrow time itself might stop passing.
"I guess, the fact that anyone can make up a story like this means it is imaginable, at least. But I don't see how we would be able to find out for sure."
Daniel starts cackling.
"Well, you know what they say, the only thing you can ever be sure of is death."
A death that nobody wants to die anymore these days, and if you believe the file on the USB-device, nobody will get to die much longer.
It would only be suitable for the decade that they are living in. For years, overaging has been a problem, and when death does take hold of a few, like it did in the past years, it surprises people more than water would, on the moon.
Even though thoughts like these cross David's mind, he joins in on Daniel's laughter, as if he were deliberately denying that it mightn't be a laughing matter at all. If they are being honest, they both, however, feel that a catastrophe is imminent.
Shortly before Chernobyl, the nuclear disaster in 1989, Daniel last last felt this way. It was warm around where he was, when reactor four went up in flames. He was only a teenager back then, and doing what teenagers tend to do. A bunch of stupid things, drink, and defy authority, and break into empty houses, sometimes lived-in buildings just as well.
What exactly did he do the day of the disaster?
You see, nobody really knows what exactly they did at the moment of the explosion. Daniel only remembers that he was out with friends, when the alarms went off in Pripyat. It was 36 minutes to midnight on April 26th, the last Friday in the month, that a displosion overshadowed the sound of constantly screaming sirens. Wherever Daniel was, at this very second, he sensed that something was happening. He felt a shiver running down his spine, felt his blood running colder, and his breath faltering. At least, that's how he likes to describe it. If he really did, then he was one of only a few.
It took several days until anyone knew anything about the disaster, and once anybody did, an invisible threat was already travelling the air. No one could smell it, no one could see it, no one could perceive it. No one witnessed that anything was there, when a radioactive cloud was drifting northwest, and once it got there, it poured down with disease and death.
Every stain in the bright blue sky became a threat, and when the media started reporting about it, people became afraid. All of a sudden, they were scared to death of rain, of meadows, and eventually of their every breath. Misinformed as they were, they started panicking, started hamstering, and started wishing that they were already dead.
Everywhere they were faced with uncertainty, and didn't know who to believe, what had happened, what was going to happen, or what the truth exactly was.
A bit like they are these days, Daniel thinks, as he is reminiscing about the upheaval the nuclear cloud rained down with. A deathblow for the USSR, because they are usually related, disasters and upheavals. Sometimes for better, and other times: for worse. Like nowadays, he thinks, with the same shiver running down his spine that he felt back then.
Moaning softly and with the decrypted file in mind, he stares at David, saucer-eyed.
"You know, disasters, like the pandemic, are always an opportunity for those who use them to their advantage and for something that feels right. The scary thing about it is that there is always just as well the danger of narcissists misusing them."
Like what is happening now, pop-eyed David thinks. The vaccination discrimination is speaking for itself. Actually, it is probably only the summit of a mountain that has piled up stone by stone from everything that hasn't been right in society all along. Such as the constant urge to cling to life, no matter the cost. Once you have lived for a while, however, aren't you bound to get tired of it?
David has asked himself exactly this, ever since his own father grew tired of his .
"To be honest, I cannot wait for death," he remembers him saying, when he was inquired about it.
When he finally got to leave his life, David didn't cry. He felt relieved for him. Having worked in hospice care for a while, surrounded by the terminally ill, he had learned to understand the irreplaceable role of death.
"Did you know that they've been researching the jellyfish species from the file for over ten years now?" he asks Daniel, an entire carousel of thoughts on his mind.
Allegedly, it was being researched with the aim of curing Alzheimer's, a disease that had only been increasing by their successful attempts to delay death.
It starts raining behind fogged up windows, and the sounds of the heavy raindrops on the tin roofed carport seem to move David's head back and forth.
"It's a bit strange that they keep silent about the results of this research. I mean, they must have found something, right? After almost 15 years?"
Well done, David! They actually have, but they didn't know what to do with their observations, and froze them. Until someone intervened, claiming to know best. Daniel may consider it a coincidence that he just thought of nuclear power. However, if he had thought about it any further, Otto Hahn, the father of nuclear energy, might have come to his mind. It would never have occurred to Otto that in the US, his research would be used in order to manufacture nuclear weapons for World War II.
If Daniel had remembered any of this, he might have had a rough idea what had happened to the studies regarding the jellyfish. Nothing good, that's for sure, and maybe that's why he doesn't allow his mind to go there.
When he leaves David's house that night, he is doing so with a decryption-job and a strange feeling. At the kitchen table by himself again, David has a strange feeling too The rather unexpected sense that he has become Daniel's friend. As if that weren't unsettling enough, aside from that, he feels haunted by the gruelling premonition that the commissioned decryption will be the key that can open a door which hides something inconceivably upsetting. The future.
Big discoveries call for even bigger responsibility, because they come with the biggest hazards, if they end up in the wrong hands. As soon as David is going to realise it, responsibility will be demanded of him, as well. Vecause depending on whose hands get hold of it, a message in a bottle from the past that knows about the future is, like nuclear power, capable of wiping out the world.
It will be on David alone to make sure the right hands reach for it. Nevermind, this anticipating the future, and not relevant to David right now. That is why he can turn off the lights, like every other day, turn down the heating as usual, brush his teeth like he always does, and fall asleep on his warm sheets, where he might find the energy he'll need for everything that is to come.
Unfortunately, it proofs hard for him to close his eyes. Probably that is because of the full moon, as bright as day, or due to the heavy rain that keeps on pounding against his bedroom window. That's at least what he is trying to convince himself of as he stares at the ceiling, wide-open-eyed.
Thank God, it won't be the next day that Daniel will have decrypted the data. It won't be the following, either, and neither will it be the one thereafter. To be precise, the decryption will take nearly half a year. That is, not really the task itself. What will delay it, in fact, will be the thought of Otto Hahn.
It will occur to Daniel at some stage of the process, and it will make him wonder, whether or not it could be irresponsible to put the power that the data holds back into David's hands. Perhaps a list with its pro and cons could accelerate his decision, but he doesn't know David well enough to list any of his pros or cons. At most, he knows secondhand what the ex has told him about the man. Not exactly great things, and if she were a trustworthy source, the files might have never found their way back to David.
Like so many before, the truth that they are holding would just as well have gathered dust in the locked drawer of a desk. In this case, in that of Daniel's recently bought desk, with an extra compartment for things that should never be found, and if it had happened this way, then no one could ever have guessed what the future holds.
Knowing the future, it is difficult to judge whether it is good or bad that Daniel takes the files out of his drawer again on a warm summer evening, as if they were a volleyball that has only now become useful again. Just as difficult it is to decide whether David's are the right or wrong hands to hold it. Relevant to this story and to the shape of things to come is only that David gets the decrypted files. Due to a panic reaction on Daniel's part.
In the middle of the night, his phone rings. He isn't even asleep, and actually hasn't ever been again,, since he read 50.000 bytes of decrypted truth. From then on, he has only been lying there, wide-open-eyed, and constantly wondering how true the truth in his tightly closed desk drawer might be.
When he grabs the vibrating cell phone off the locker next to his bed at quarter past 2 am, he doesn't yet know that he is going to find out that day. He is in shock. Immediately, he recognizes the number on the screen. How could he not? It is not the first time that these digits light up his display late at night, accompanied by the dancing shadow play on his bedroom walls, and not that long ago he couldn't wait for it to happen. It is the ex. This time, however, something unsettling is dancing with the shadows above his bed.
Why would she ring him now that she has taken off?
Unlike David, Daniel hasn't heard from her in months and has only recently thought of her again, realising the delight it was to have her out of his life. She mightn't be a terrible person, but she is quite certainly a terrible choice for him, and by the end of the night, he will know all the reasons why. Despite it, he would never wish anything bad on her and what is just about to happen will hit as hard as a high speed train that is bound to knock him out.
He picks up. At the other end, however, he doesn´t hear the voice the whispers of which used to accompany him through the night prior to her leaving him. Instead, he can only hear a hissing and buzzing. Interferences that are disrupting the coarse voice of a man who is stammering incoherent sentences. Daniel cannot understand a lot of it. Three words, however, stand out to him, "So much blood." All of a sudden, he is wide awake. He shoots up from his bed, his heart pounding, and every second of his breaths faltering.
"Who is this?"
Actually, he could have guessed who. Mark, the manager who she has left him for. Right now, however, none of it counts. However, Daniel is counting. The seconds, the stars in the night-blue sky, and the car lights outside his window, until the next words from the other end of the line creep into his ears.
Mark doesn't tell him who he is. That is, perhaps, because he knows how little it would matter now. What does matter, however, are the letters that cling to each other and produce word which finally make it through to Dan, "No one can lose so much blood and stay alive."
Death… The same one that Daniel considered irreplaceable a few months ago? If so,, then one thing is for sure, now he really doesn't anymore. With disbelief, he is gasping. Did something happen to the woman whose small hands used to fit so perfectly into his?
No, that can't be true!
He refuses to believe it. A penetrant pressure occupies his ears. His heart beats at his temples, and his blood begins to stall, as his neck starts tingling, and his limbs go slowly numb. Suddenly, he can no longer feel his body, and like a ghost, a triplet of pressing questions appears before him.
When, where, and why did what exactly happen?
It is his "Where?" he gets an answer to. The call comes from a forest road just before Slovenia. A random place, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and close to the Austrian border, where old bunkers are still standing strong, and rugged reliefs of stone rises above tall spruce trees and firs.
It wouldn't even take him an hour to get there. His nervous eyes start jumping up and down, as if waiting for something the shape of which he's himself not yet sure about. Maybe for an answer to his questions, but the caller keeps silent. Once more, only interferences sound out, until Daniel decides to interfere himself.
Distraught, he slips on his pants, frantically slides into his shoes, grabs the rattling keys from the nightstand with shaking hands, and leaves to get his questions answered. Outside his house, such beauty! Lakes that are shining between healthy forests and bright grey mountains, but the night swallows their grace, when Daniel starts his car.
To his ears, the engine sounds like a wolf, the hunger of which violently pressures him south. It isn't the first time he drives up this very road, but misted by darkness, the landscape looks strange. It looks threatening, and uncanny, like a sleeping monster, which could be woken by the slightest sound.
Breezes of wind steadily brush through the trees. Their rhytmic trembles remind him of a calmly breathing chest, while his car constantly climbs uphill. When it finally surmounts the monsterous looking mountain and reaches its back, he moves further and faster towards the border, unsure what to expect.
As if remote-controlled, he follows the signal that is lighting up his phone. It is displayed by a tracking app that he has long ago installed to find her phone, in case she would ever lose it. Explaining it to her back then, little did he know that it would ever lead him towards the border, and into a borderline experience.
The signal gets stronger; it is glowing brighter and brighter. Up here, it is darker than in an underwater cave. Where the shine of his headlights end, the moon is the only light you can sporadically make out. If it weren't for the fog. In grey clouds it keep on pushing in front of the shimmer from above and dampens its milky glow.
Daniel cannot see much further than two feet. He can barely make out where exactly the road drops, and neither does he see where the steep rocks of the mountain to his right hand side begin to rise.
He slows down the car. The next time the moon squints through the clouds, there it suddenly is, her car, right in front of him. Surrounded by fir trees, it is standing at the former border crossing, where pointed posts rise from the ground, as if trying to spear the sky. Nausea wrenches Daniel's stomach.
What would she be looking for up here?
Bears are supposed to be living here.
At the moment, he hears only owls. Their deep hunting screams rise towards the sky, but hit the rocks on their way, where they reverberate.
For the headlights of Daniel´s car, it gets increasingly hard to crawl through the thicker and thicker growing fog. Their light barely gets as far as a foot, before it dies of suffocation. All of a sudden, the darkness in front of him starts moving. Shadows are staggering towards his car.
Perhaps the trees, he thinks. Perhaps leaves, or could it be the bears that are supposedly living here?
Without light, he cannot say for sure. He turns up his headlights and tries to see through the night, when a breeze from above moves the fog past the moon increasingly fast. Quickly fading flashes of creamy looking light help his eyes to investigate. There he sees him. A man.
His shadow-surrounded silhouette appears and disappears with the rising and falling luminance. Until the flashes halt all of a sudden, the breezes stop, and the picture that Daniel sees before him freezes. A stranger in the gloom of the moon. Covered in blood, he is approaching the car. Blood, so much blood. Never has Daniel seen so much of it before.
Right here, we´ll pause.
What might have happened?
What is going to happen?
How does it relate to the truth, to the future, to the past, and to a future that has passed?
Exactly this is what Daniel is wondering, staring at blood, the amount of which couldn't have come from anyone who is still breathing. Maybe a deer, possibly a stag, so he hopes. Hopefully something other than her whom he suddenly bears no grudge against anymore.
Everything bad that she has done to him is banned from his mind, now that she might have died. Quietly, he starts praying for her, even though he has never believed in a God, and then he starts to pray for himself just as well, so he might learn to have faith. He doesn't learn it in time. By now, the only thing that separates him from the answers to his questions is the bonnet of his car, the windshield, and all at once, nothing at all.
He pushes the car door open.
Blood drips down the stranger's hands as they face each other.
He could be a murderer, Daniel thinks. A madman who has slit her open and bathed in her blood.
Despite these thoughts, he is calm, and carries himself, as composed, as if this situation - himself faced with a blood-stained stranger - has always been immanent to his life.
Minutes, in which nothing happens. Daniel's bonnet is steaming, and so is the blood on the stranger.
But why?
If it isn't fresh anymore it cannot be warm. T
he phone call was an hour ago, he thinks, and the steam should long have faded.
Fogged up with thoughts, Daniel's eyes go dull.
Will he attack me, he wonders.
Is he going to crush my throat, with his blood stained hands?
No one moves. They stand opposite each other; a frozen frame, and no words to disturb the silence.
Like a dream, Daniel thinks. Could it even be real?
He opens his trembling mouth to say something. Slowly, he clears his throat, strengthens his voice, and his lips start moving, but nothing makes it past his heavy tongue. Suddenly, he hears a roar, louder than a clap of thunder. It startles him. His mouth is open. His lips are moving, but the roar isn't his. Soft wind weaves the sound around him, like in a fisherman´s net, All of a sudden, he feels trapped. He is the fish that's caught inside. However, he doesn't fidget, doesn't try to break free, and is, distraught, only standing there.
Clearly, it has to be a dream!
He hopes so, at least, when he realises that the screaming voice belongs to a child. His thoughts start skidding like unrestrained cars in an accident. It's not just any child he hears, it is hers, and her abortion, a lie. He knows it long before the voice across from him puts it in words.
"She... She gave birth to him out here," Daniel hears it echo back from the rocky walls. "All this blood... She's lost so much of it, I don't know how she's still alive."
Still alive... In an instant, Daniel feels his limbs again. The pressure on his ears eases, his heartbeat returns into his chest, and he takes a deep breath. He looks around for a while and his eyes fill with confusion.
"So… Where is she?"
It's getting colder; the fog is getting thicker. He's shivering, and as the answer to his question rings out, he freezes.
"I… I don't know where she is. I know what this sounds like, but… She walked away, unharmed."
He, the man covered in her blood, who is standing on a gloomy mountain road, misted by fog, might know what these words would sound like to someone else. However, he has no idea what Daniel hears in them.
Noticing his state of shock, he is trying to give him an explanation.
"It was like…"
A sigh disrupts the sentence and Daniel takes it over.
"... like her body regenerated."
Speaking out what's buried in the drawer of his desk, Daniel isn't wondering how these words might sound to someone else. The only thing that matters to him now is how they suddenly sound to his own ears. Like the truth.
"Why me?" He asks and his warm breath mixes with the fog, but what he gets in return is an incomprehensive glance.
"I'm a stranger to you," he adds. "You could have rang anyone. What made you ring me?"
The baby is crying louder, as if trying to give an answer.
"You are… The father, I thought, are you not? I was scared for the child."
"Scared for the child?" Daniel's eyes soak up the mist and become cloudy. "In what way?"
The gusty wind blows the roaring closer, but with the answer to Daniel´s question, the world turns quiet.
"Well, you know, she realised it too late. That she is pregnant, I mean. She wanted to have an abortion and tried it everywhere, but nobody was willing to execute it, late like this."
Sheer horror pries Daniel's mouth open. Before they are reaching the outside world, he foresees the words that are to follow. Even the moon is holding its breath and losing its lustre, above their heads.
"I think she came here today to leave the baby up here. I followed her, because I had a bad feeling, and when I got here..." With his blood-stained hands he points around the corner. "She had already given birth to him and stood where the road slopes, as if she wanted to throw him down."
She would have, if she had been by herself, Daniel is sure of it.
Swallowing, he is trying to rid himself of his nausea. Unfortunately, in vain; he feels sick when he faced the crying child on a blood stained blanket in her car. Sick, when he takes it into his arms, and still sick when he travels back to town, with her child on his lap. He lets the decrypted data out the drawer with it in his arms, and parks the car in front of David's house at six o'clock in the morning.
David doesn't immediately open up; it takes a while. To be more precise, it takes what feels like forever, and waiting for him, Daniel thinks through what to say. The perfectly reasonable sounding explanation that he comes up with in his head is exactly what doesn't leave his lips, when the door finally opens.
As soon as David makes out the USB-device in Daniel's hand, and the crying child on his arm, his sleepy looking eyes lose their veil. Wide awake, he steps back and nods at him.
"It is happening, isn't it? The past is about to start again."