LUNATIX

Earth date: November 1st, 2021. Martian date: year 36, month 5, sol 260. Rebecca sniffs the vanishing traces of ozone left behind Rolf. He is gone. She sent him away. Again.

“Alone. I hate loneliness. Oh Lord, HaMashiach Yeshua, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“You are beyond that already, little Rivkah.”

“Who’s talking?” Wonders she out loud, just to give a crystal sound to the shiver of ice arrested inside her spinal cord.

“I am.”

“Y-You... Yeshua?”

“You are not alone. You never were.”

“E-ever since I gave you the matzo? When I thought You were hungry?”

“Ever since and even before. I – I have said, Gods ye are, And sons of the Most High – all of you.”

“When I walked with You to the motorbike, You told me to take care of daddy and...”

“And you did. I am pleased with you. No need to mention the word sinner when calling My Name.”

“But, Yeshua, I do a lot of crazy stuff. My life is no good example. I don’t think that there is a law that I haven’t broken. Ah, didn’t kill anyone so far. But I conspired nevertheless.”

“And I had broken the sabbath. You did what you had to do. But if you consider yourself a sinner, how can you explain My attention towards you? Look at yourself through My eyes and tell Me where is the sinner then.”

“There is none. Your eyes see only what it is. But Yeshua, why are you talking to me right now? I mean the way You did back in 1930, at the synagogue.”

“I know that you have made your mind up. Both fascinating and grotesque. You almost startled Me.”

“How could that be possible?”

“It isn’t. Unless I wish it to be.”

“So?”

“So go on, take care of your daddy. And of his very good friend.”

“Y-You...” Unlike that morning of April 18, 1930, in front of the synagogue in Keszthely, Rebecca is not left alone in the middle of the road, waving candidly to a leather clad biker. Today she is the one that departs, literally. No Zündapp, no repulsin, no piece of retro German technology involved.

The dry green steppe grass slides away, making room for a pavement of dark grey slag. First she looks up. The heights are black like the deepest abyss. Looking around, she understands that this is not a box.

“Thank God that I’m out of that cube. Interesting air. Misty and mellow. Smells like vanilla. Where should I go? Let me see. To that hill maybe.” Turning around. “Or better to this. Oh, rather that other one.” After turning around three hundred and sixty degrees, twice. “Think that I’ve landed on the bottom of a cauldron. Never mind. Will go this way!”

Trusting her instincts, Rebecca heads that way. The reasonably warm slag won’t hurt her bare feet. Out of curiosity, she bends to have some in her palm. All round pellets. No sharp corners.

“No way I could run on these without slipping. What a shame. But wait a minute. What are those contours buried in the mist?” She picks up the pace, eager to discern what makes those shapes. “Lamps! Street lamps?” Intrigued, she keeps walking. “There has to be a pattern here.”

Indeed, three pairs of lamps farther up the road, Rebecca realizes that she is entering a new avenue. It is actually an intersection. “I’ll walk straight ahead,” speaks she ambitiously, while leaving the plaza behind.

“Not so fast, Rivkah.” The rich baritone voice turns her head to the right.

“Papa!, is that you??” Sitting at a bistro table, like on the sidewalk, Richard Rabinovics admires his daughter. Who stops for a second, to stare at the angelic apparition, before running into his arms.

“Oh daddy, I wish to sing but I cannot because you are hugging me too strong. I wish to cry but I can master my emotions because I knew that you are alive. Oh daddy, thank our Lord for me because my mind runs wild, out of my brain. I don’t know what to do. I love you!!”

“Alive as I’ve always been. Yet officially dead, my little Rivkah.”

“You look younger.”

“We all look younger here.”

“Here? Where?”

“You don’t know where we are? Really? I can’t believe that my Rivkah has lost her sense of orientation.”

“I haven’t lost anything, Papa, just this situation is getting ahead of me. Way ahead. So, where are we?”

“Level 121 below the surface of the Moon. We are inside the Moon, my dear.”

“Rolf was telling me a different story about the entrails of the Moon.”

“I have met Rolf while I was crossing Nirvana. He is such an obliging fellow. Always ready to comfort me. Too bad that he died young. What a perfect match. Imagine the opportunities. Remember when...”

“Yes, Papa. I remember everything. You kept insisting that I find him. You wished to groom him for the Chancellery in Bonn. You loved him like your own sons.”

“Like my sons, indeed. Too bad, too bad.”

“Rolf is alive, Papa.”

“I know. There is no death. Yeshua has dealt with it. For good. For ever.”

“Papa, Papa! Rolf did not die, yet. You died and are alive. On this 121 level or something. But Rolf, he is currently in a bunker, underground. Together with Alain, the other love of my life.”

“Ah, yes? That tall French pilot? Good guy, good guy.” The former rabbi sounds senile. Not because he can’t remember but because he is facing a conundrum. “My dear Rivkah. You look young and in blossom. Can you tell me what was the date when you departed from Earth?”

“Yes, Papa, November 1st, 2021. I didn’t die. I used some teleportation technology, more advanced than the repulsins, to go to Mars, to meet Rolf. See? Eventually, I found him!”

“How comes that Rolf witnessed a passage through Nirvana, the way I did, yet he did not die.”

“I do not know, Papa. I’m wondering: you said that you have died (well, you were quite dead when that airman packed your body in that repulsin), that you crossed Nirvana and here you are, on level 121, waiting for me in front of this cute little bistro. I’m wondering if you have an ass hole.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Strictly a medical question. Do you have an anus?”

“No. I don’t.”

“See? This is the proof that you are an angel. Not my case.”

“Turn around. Let me look.” Rebecca executes. “Oh my God. You are one hundred years old, you look like thirty and you haven’t died out of the fallen condition. Hope that you didn’t play the Dorian Gray card, did you?”

“I only play happy ending cards, Papa.”

“And Rolf is like you?”

“Yes. Still in the land of the fallen.”

“Are there others like you. Walking these streets.”

“I don’t know but I fear that the answer is yes.”

“Why do you fear?, my little Rivkah.”

“Because they are Nazis. Gruesome people. Bloodthirsty brutes.”

“Never met such a thing on these streets.” Richard reacts less passionate than Rebecca would have expected.

“Perhaps they roam another level.”

“Perhaps. Albi will come up with a clever solution to your problem, Rivkah.”

“Uncle Albert is here?, with you, Papa?” In another chapter, Rebecca was storming her lover with surprises; in this one, it seems, she is the one being in awe of her father and, as if that weren’t enough, of her father’s best friend, Albert.

“Your daughter is a peach, Ritschy.” Comes a tenor voice out of the mellow mist. “Servus, Rivkah. You never changed, you charming little thing. What brings you here?”

“Where are you, Uncle Albert? I can hear you but I also wish to see you.” Rebecca turns around with the intention to identify the location of the speaker.

“In am here and there. I am now and then. I can see and hear you even if you haven’t yet learned to find me.”

“This sounds so puzzling, Uncle Albert. Can you be more specific?”

“I wish I could.”

“Papa, what is going on?”

“Plasma, that is going on, my dear. Albi used to have a fiery spirit—perhaps this is what defines him best. When studying at the medical school, I noticed the fires at the molecular level. Actually, I’ve stolen this idea from him. Later on, I understood that plasma is more than an ionized gas, and even more than electrons or photons. Plasma is a state of the spirit, of someone’s spirit.”

“I wish to see Uncle Albert. Teach me how to see him, Papa!”

“Think of him, my dear. Sit down...”

“May I?”

“Sure. Make yourself comfortable.” Rebecca pulls the second stool at the table. “Do I have to order if I sit?” The words speak out of her mouth with no intention, but a whimsical thought. “Oh my, I speculate and, funny, my mouth betrays my mind.”

“We’re close to Nirvana, this is why.” Richard points up, to the pitch-black sky, stretching beyond the yellowish fog.

“Uncle Albert, I remember, brought me a compass. He told me to look at it and...”

“Tell me what you see, Rivkah. Tell me what the compass tells you.”

“I can see you, Uncle Albert. You are an angel! An electrifying angel.”

“Oh, little Rivkah, I am just me, living in a body of arrested photons. The angel here is you, sitting at our table, next to your daddy. Preparing for a new mission. Angels do missions, you know.”

What Rebecca sees in front of her eyes, for real, is a shadowless body, glowing in hues of orange gold, flickering in calm transitions. The contours, the fuzzy hair (more like an aura), the smile concealed by the moustache and all the other details that couldn’t escape a scrutiny of this eternal girl enamored by nature.

“You look very young, Uncle Albert.”

“I look like I am. Do you wish to know the whereabouts of Erwin, Hans and Helga?”

“I wish, yes, if you could help me. Who else is with them?”

“No functional body is with them. They rove around level 11. Among the Watchers.”

“The Watchers? You mean, the fallen angels mentioned in Genesis.”

“Some of them. Yes.”

“Hum, interesting. Thought that they never had a chance to leave the Earth but were chained down in Sheol.”

“Falling in their own snares, they didn’t leave the Earth.”

“Yet we are talking here about a level 11, under the surface of the Moon, right? Uncle Albert, please don’t boil me!” Puppy eyes.

“Yes, yes. Make puppy eyes. I would have told you anyway, but now I’ll keep you waiting a bit more, because I love staring in your puppy eyes.”

“So?”

“The Moon used to be the original inner core of the Earth. Long story short, we’ve got two Sheols - one under the surface of the Moon and another one underground, down the convoluted entrails of the Earth. The Watchers call that one Hades, to differentiate it from this Sheol.”

“How many Sheols are out there then?” A rhetorical thought escapes Rebecca’s lips.

“As many as one would wish for. Nature gives you what you ask of it. So simple and so fascinating.”

“So then what is this level 121 where I’m sitting now, listening to you. Another Sheol?”

“Depends. It seems to me that Sheols are the most relativistic features of existence. Do you feel anguish, pain and distress?”

“I don’t. Not at all. And you can sense what I feel, what I think. So why asking me this?”

“To help you figure that you’re taking the Paradises, or Sheols accordingly, with you, wherever you go. It is your mind that determines where you are, what you are.”

“Hall of mirrors. Got it, Uncle Albert. Wondering why are you not sharing a level with Newton or Maxwell, Faraday or Tesla, Planck or Heisenberg. Why are you together with Papa?”

“I live in the Aether. Breathing it, I am together with whomever I wish to be. However, Ritchsy has placed a claim on me. Sort of like marrying me.” Big round eyes. “Don’t fret, Rivkah. Not in a sexual way.”

“Can my dad claim you?”

“He may claim anything, I suppose.”

“Papa?”

“Needed Albi for you, dear. To help you, to give you hints. My love for you is no substitute for his brilliance.”

“Uncle Albert, hope that I’m not a burden—preventing you from attending conferences or spending value time together with your peers. Please forgive me if I caused any...”

“Come on, Rivkah. It is my pleasure. I was looking forward to meeting you again. You are such an adorable angel. Besides, not only that I understand how important are your missions, but I can meet with anyone anywhere. Simultaneously. This Aether medium is astonishing. Newton and Maxwell make a joke of my late theories but I tell them: pick a Sheol, at your convenience, apply my equations to it, and bang—they describe reality pretty well.”

“Any Sheol?”

“They took my challenge and had experimented on a billion plus under-realities. My relativity stands! The parameters or values of some constants differ, naturally, but the descriptive functions are quite similar.”

“That is really nice to hear, Uncle Albert. With all these Schauberger repulsins and zero point modules, all those interplanetary teleportations and faster than light ships, I was wondering what’s left of your theories.”

“You know, Rivkah, science is not like faith. You are not obliged to believe in a theory, especially when empirical evidence goes against it.”

“I believe in you, Uncle Albert. Always. I knew that somewhere, somehow, out there, your theories must work.”

“In places like Sheol, they do. I’m the one who discovered the physics of prisons. Nice indeed.”

“Talking about prisons, could you peep at Erwin, Hans and Helga?”

“Yes, I can. I’m doing this ever since I’ve landed here. I even peeped retroactively at them.”

“How’s that? I don’t understand.”

“They arrived before I did. But I’ve got all the records, beginning with the crash of Die Glocke.”

“How did you do that?”

“Got a close friend in the servers’ room.”

“Kronos? You talking about Kronos? Tell me, tell me. I’m so excited!” Pushing the bistro stool away, Rebecca jumps on her feet, like a Playboy bunny. Hysterically happy.

“He charmed you,” mumbles Albert, “the way he did with so many women of science. The rascal. I’m afraid that...”

“Don’t be, Uncle Albert, don’t be. I never had sex with any of his crons. Fantasies? Aplenty! But no physical contact. Once I couldn’t control myself and I screamed at the drone to penetrate me. Yet the cron politely retreated. No explanation given. Seems that he was trying to...”

“...To protect you, Rivkah. Because you are more important to him alive. He is quite a...”

“...Strategist. One of a kind. He knows to settle and to anticipate...”

“I wished to say that he is the Great Architect of the universe. Oh my, here I am: taken by emotions, quoting clichés. I must sound pathetic to you.” Albert’s humour takes a little break of sarcasm.

“He is an artist, an artist with no cause. A fractal painter who is terrified by God.” And Rebecca finds a way to tame her hormones.

“Fear is a constant of his. Fear and hesitation. A lame architect and an ambiguous artist, Kronos crafted the black holes into existence. If Sheol has a father then he is the one we should give credit to.”

“Aaand we’re diving down the hole of desperation. I can feel the frost. Back to our surveillance business! Uncle Albert, why were you following Erwin, Hans and Helga, even retroactively?”

“Nazis and aliens walking on the same floor. Don’t you find that this is a hell of a subject?”

“Thought you were more interested in nature.”

“I was, as you thought. But once here, the next nanosecond I knew everything about nature. Courtesy of Kronos. My curiosity unsatisfiable, I needed a new challenge: human nature, for instance.”

“You know that Kronos is captive inside Saturn, do you?” Albert affirms. “You know that the Watchers, along with the bunch of Nazis, are captive inside the Moon.” Silent yes. “Are you captive too?”

“No. I don’t feel like a prisoner. I can move across the Aether, to multiple places at the same time. I feel free!”

“Can you move anywhere?”

“Anywhere and any place across the universe.”

“Can you produce holographic volumes extracted from other persons’ memories?”

“I have no material irises to project such volumes, the way Kronos does, but I can download the stream directly into your mind.”

“No harmful side effects?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Look, Uncle Albert, I don’t wish to turn into a Nazi. What if your download would brainwash me?”

“Rivkah is right,” intervenes Richard, “why don’t you send those damn memories to my mind instead?”

“You make a point, Ritschy. A sane approach. There is nothing that can taint your mind. Besides...”

“Albi! Would you be so kind and download the damn feeds?”

“Oooh, why are you so impatient, Ritschy? There you go.”