#9 Transcendence
“Hi there. My name is Nathaniel, and… erm.. if you are watching this YouTube video then I’m dead, or transcended. And there is a great possibility that the former caused the latter. Hmmm, what might interest you? Well, for a start, this phantom image you are watching is unlikely to be the last you hear of me!”
“The press. Hmm, well now they have my human name, will no doubt furnish you with the monotony of my upbringing. I didn’t come from a broken home. I wasn’t addicted to anything,. And, other than my ‘God-Complex’ I lived a remarkably ordinary 33 years on the Earth.”
“So now you checked the date I recorded this, over 2 and a half years ago! In the twilight period of my monotony. How could I predict, so accurately, that I’d die on my 33rd birthday? And no, it wasn’t suicide! It is part of my god issues (note the small ‘g’, rather than the capital ‘G’, I am not The God, just have godlike powers).”
“Anyway, 33 years feels right to me. It ties in perfectly with the age that Jesus is said to have returned to Heaven. I’m no prophet for God, but I do have powers that science cannot explain. I’ve tried looking for rational explanations, believe me, being so unique is troublesome!”
“My powers didn’t slowly materialise. No, they just hit me last Saturday morning. I’d been out with a friend, a few beers at the local pub, a takeout and a crappy film on Netflix (ha ha, no advertising here, other television providers exist, though Netflix are pretty damn good) to end the night. Woke up, no hang over, a surprise, but a pleasant one. I heard my friend snoring, so focused on him, and then damn if I wasn’t inside his head. Not physically, I’m not AntMan! No, it was crazy, like my body was in bed, but my mind was inside him.”
“Yeah, I know, you’re thinking I’ve had a stroke, but no, my body was fine, as my mind flipped back into my own body, I took all of him with me. Literally! Every thought, dream, idea that he had ever had, were mine. And so too his skills, I just knew that I could play the guitar, something I was really jealous of. But the reverse was true. I knew all his neurosis, his fears, every superstition, and his loneliness, his overpowering self-doubt, his worries about work, money, debt… I had it all.”
“Concerned, I went and spoke to him, he seemed his normal self, but… but now I could read him like a book. I knew every thought, not like Mel Gibson in “What Women Want”, but all underlying currents, all his pent-up frustrations. I quickly agreed to meet him later in the week, and I felt his soul lift a little. See why I say god-like, rather than God-like.”
“I’ve had this power a week now, and every person I encounter zaps into my mind. And there is something in common. Nobody is happy. If they are ill, then they are unhappy about that illness – I get it. If they aren’t ill then they worry about money, if they’ve got money and health, then they worry about their job, or their looks, or their car, or their relationship, or about a billion other tiny insignificant things. It is all negative, the whole bloody lot of them.”
“I saw a beautiful, young, physically fit, smiling man climb out of his Ferrari, yesterday. He had a tailored suit, was meeting and greeting people, warm smile and quick quips. Yeah, before my powers I’d have hated him too! But inside his head, he was a bundle of twisted nerves, of twitching issues. He felt he was fat, ugly, not rich enough. What the flying f… oop, keep it suitable for all, can’t get banned off here, it’s hard to reinstate it from the afterlife.”
“I focused a little closer on his brain. He was comparing himself to multiple near-impossible standards, he wanted to be as handsome as a famous movie star, as rich as Bill Gates, as slender as some YouTube celebrity that manipulated their online image… He had no hope. So, I tried something new. I reached into his head, and turned him around, making him run into the road in front of a oncoming bus. SPLAT!!!! Ha ha ha, dead as a dodo!”
“I know. I’m a monster. But in these next two years I’m going to execute a lot of people. Those who do not deserve to live as they fail to live their own expectations, trying to live up to impossible heroes. At some point someone will stop me, but, until then, I have been Nathaniel, and now I am more.”