The Anomaly of Alex Kadey

Alex was playing with her phone deep into the night. Before she knew it, it was 4:04am and the summer birds had already started singing their song outside.

Oh shit, she thought, I have school tomorrow — today.

A pang hit her. Today was the day she dreaded. She hated what she was going to do, but it would ultimately prove good for her.

She laid her head down on her pillow and closed her eyes. Her eyelids did feel heavy, as she had robbed herself from sleep. She woke up again, plugged in her phone, and set an alarm for 6:30am. She was lucky if she had a few hours of sleep before her big day tomorrow — today.

She said a quick prayer.

And so she slept. And slept. And slept.

She slept through her alarm.

She slept through her mom declaring “Good morning!” before running to work. She slept through text messages, phone calls, voicemail alerts, and more texts. Soon noon arrived. Then one o’clock. Two o’clock. Three o’clock. Four.

Still she slept. She slept until the sun descended and night came again. If the stars could see her in her room they would pay her a passing notice — just another girl who had slept for far too long, and she’d regret it whenever she’d awaken… but she wouldn’t awaken, not for a long time yet.

The other presence that had observed her came from a farther realm, beyond immediate cognition, and took in the sight of her as a cause of wonder and alarm… this girl would not be written off. She would, indeed, be the renown “Longest Sleeper in History”. So, the creature concordantly began its long work.

Alex Kadey, meanwhile, would be blissfully ignorant of this situation, as she had fallen into a deep and, some would say, necrotic rest, as her body began to prepare itself for a long hibernation, activating previously long dormant processes in the human being that millennia of civilization had, in turn, set to slumber.

As her society changed about her, she was moved from hospital to hospital, studied by scientists and medicians, often at the insistence of a mysterious benefactor. She had apparently spoken once in her sleep, a name, “Max L. Brown”, or “Maxel Brown”. She hadn’t said anything else in the years since her “descent”, and nothing in the subsequent decades afterward.

The name of Max L. Brown assumed a stunned, spectacular importance. Some pointed to a boy in her class with that name, and conjured a reason for his involvement. He had moved west after graduating high school, and when informed he respectfully said he was familiar with an “Alex Kadey” from middle school but had known nothing of her current state. It was sad, and he wished her nothing but a speedy recovery.

Decades passed. Centuries. Max L. Brown, Alex Kadey’s parents, her friends, all had concluded their own lives, and passed, frequently, into that eternal slumber, themselves.

Long living scientists — now called cognitivists — speculated on the cause of Alex Kadey’s repose, subjecting her body, mind, and spirit (as the soul had been accepted by the scientists in her distant future), to super-relevant tests. A Welshman, Dr. Soecualyrd, accepted the anomaly of Alex Kadey and commented, somewhat cheekily, that the longer Kadey slept, the more likely she would become the first human to achieve immortality. Other cognitivists jangled their brain rings in unison. Their sponsor, a familiar, but hidden, presence, observed them all but cautiously.

The centuries turned to millennia, the millennia to ages, and the resting place for Alex Kadey’s sleeping body was settled — she, in turn, had hardly aged a day since she began her long rest.

Past students, would they have been alive during that auspicious time, would have dubbed the place a “septic hall”, for its cavernous tunnels were once meant to move vast sewage. Otherwise, it was an empty, gloomy space, with a sepulcher darkness emanating through it. The international commission on where to relocate her body, more analogous to a museum piece than anything human, settled on what once was the McGill University basement, in Montréal.

Due to the depreciated nature of the planet, humanity had vastly departed Earth, and the last girl living there was the definition of a medical enigma — something that should not be, yet, irresistibly, was.

Finally, the day arrived when she awakened.

When she heard the birdsong that she had once fallen asleep to, so close to dawn, aeons ago, her eyes peeped open and she couldn’t suppress a stretch. The tendons of her legs and quasi-atrophied muscles received a rude awakening — and she yelped when she realized something was not right with her body, something needed to be done. She would have to fixit.

She gradually realized her summer bird song was really the squeaking gyros of tiny machines, hovering across the floor in an endless series of business. They turned and immediately swarmed her.

Even her lungs felt tight and her voice box, dry. Barely any sound emitted from it.

When she reactively sat up in alarm there was more pain and stiffness, following the most awful cramps she ever had. As she searched for her bag or… her bedroom, for that matter, she was received by the fashionable warbots in Point Acay, what was once Montréal, and the McGill University campus. She slowly descended to her back, the warbots prevailing upon her as they immediately checked her vitals. Please sit down, they implied, incongruous. Please rest.

Where am I, Alex worried with rising alarm. Why do I feel this way?

What sounded like a large boulder had begun to obstinately roll to the side, and her eyes, long accustomed to darkness, pinched shut to the slab of light that had appeared following the boulder’s displacement. She dimly perceived a full-featured silhouette there, dandily proceeding towards her.

When it had spoken, the language was so strange, yet so familiar, a part of her brain felt convinced it had entered a sideways reality. Here’s what the robot, which had programmed itself to speak with the new form of English that had developed since Alex’s time, said, but translated: ?She’s awakened! She’s awakened! More-or-less she’s awakened!?

Before Alex could quite literally speak, the tiny warbots deferred to its anthropomorphic superior. They provided it with a full update on Alex’s vitals, and it began to speak once again: ?I am Sepal. SE-PAL. The King of Earth. I have supervised the planet for centuries, and have been your caretaker since humanity has departed.?

All this was, of course, nonsense to Alex’s recuperating ears. Sepal’s words sounded, to her, like an electric blender that was turned on and, through its spinning blades and motor, accidentally, but through sheer coincidence, formed words similar to English.

When she managed to say “Where am I?” Sepal commanded the warbots to reconfigure her vocal cords, and immediately condition her brain to the new languages of the world. This process would take months.

So, further months passed.

Every element was, for her, saw to and attended. The warbots became her close friends. They were built during a time when Earth was in cataclysm, and had proven so effective they were given free reign to assist in governing the planet’s affairs. Sepal was their unquestioned, engineered master. A sophisticated computer that had been built with the cooperation of the warbots and the last human engineers.

They did not suspect its true origins.

Alex Kadey had been renamed “Kdey”, in accordance with the naming principles of the time from whence she came (as erroneously believed by the robots). When the warbots massaged their information into Alex’s brain, she felt her soul start to descend into a void that had somehow opened up behind her… She couldn’t believe she had been asleep for as long as she had, and when deeply instinctual questions began to arise within her neural network, the warbots satisfied each with a perfect answer.

The crisis which arose in Alex’s heart knowing she would never again see her family, let alone another human being, would have instigated her self-destruction. Sepal, programmed in the arts of the soul, managed her trauma, addressing that it would be possible to return Kdey to the past, but it would have to come at a price. When Kdey wondered what the price was, Sepal continued its terrible lie: she was to return to sleep, and this time, allow the warbots to enter her consciousness. If she were to enter her long slumber again, and achieve a profound period of suspended animation, the data retrieved from such an event would perhaps help her kind traverse the infinite voids of deep space. ?The last human transport? Sepal squawked ?the Goida, is a planet-sized vessel, similar to Earth, but it does not orbit any star — it is a wayward world, set to rundown its resources at an indeterminate period of time. I am still in contact with its superiors through a clandestine network, and my report of your awakening has sent them into an excitement — the science of our old world has to be put to use, yet again, if we’re to induce your kind into a deep sleep, reduce consumption of their resources, and permit them the time necessary to populate another homeworld.?

Sepal also noted, passingly, that the new data obtained from her consciousness could be employed in the construction of a time machine it had in mind to send her back…

Kdey felt an emotion approximating a kind of artificial hope emitting from her host, like when she would be in class and she would be instructed to vote on something she didn’t care for, Best Dressed or Class President, for instance, and if she was impelled to choose a clear favorite from amongst her classmates, she voted for them, feeling a kind of rush, or anticipation for having joined the crowd, but inside, not caring a whit if they won. Only Sepal’s evoking felt, she thought, more tinny — like this was a deliberately made thing, manufactured for the purposes of evoking her emotion. ?I can tell you the course for which star they have chosen? Sepal said, longingly. ?I can safely project their path within a significantly small margin of error.?

She remembered, suddenly, what she was going to do at her school the day she fell asleep, countless years ago, but she felt she couldn’t talk to anyone about it… except… maybe…

Mere months after she had awakened, Kdey had attained an intimate communication with the warbots that had attended to her whims and health. She detected their massive distrust of Sepal, only decoding that the “King of the Earth” condescended to use Kdey’s older English because it was a language that could easily be manipulated to openly tell lies. If she could trust Sepal, the warbots provided another answer, wordlessly, but through the collective feelings that inspired their intent: trust him, insofar as the deed must be done, but you will, unknowingly, be taking advantage to correct the course.

All this intrigued Kdey, and so she acquiesced to Sepal’s demands. The joy, Sepal’s networks confirmed, was ecstatic.

Finally, a machine can peer into a human’s dreams, the cross-dimensional beast that had observed Alex Kadey, when she had fallen asleep long ago, now thought.

When she had previously slept, it had propagated itself clandestinely into the technology of humankind in order to subjugate it.

Here was as good as opportunity as any to prevail upon the inner system of consciousness these creatures once seemed to thrive upon, but had subsequently lead to their own destruction, ages before. The ships toward the stars were propagated by the beast’s own kin, hungering for other worlds to corrupt, not Kdey’s almost-extinct people.

Yes… she was the last.

No other person had come close to this; not the ones that were in the control group. None of them had slept for as long as Kdey, and her brain, well-conditioned to dream, as the warbots had measured, would capture that information as if they were precious jewels in a fine sieve.

So, when she had agreed to be put under once again, for the sake of science and humanity’s future, the creature identifying itself to her as Sepal grinned inwardly. Even douchebag con-artists assumed a future role.

As soon as Kdey fell into the necrotic sleep, the warbots buzzed incessantly. Sepal didn’t have to wait thousands of years for the girl — no, throughout time, she had slowly become a woman — to enter the theater of her imagination — that realm that seemed to operate outside of time. For demons as Sepal were borne out of the space beyond time, and yearned to return to it through possession and corruption, just as humans were borne out of the seas of occult consciousness, dimly perceiving its tremendous influence in their own lives.

It only took mere moments for Kdey to dream, and as she had forgotten about the world, Sepal descended into her via the warbots — those infernal devices so dubbed because they were fighting a clandestine war of attrition and conquest.

But, as soon as Sepal witnessed her dream, it began to go mad, for Sepal did not see the transdimensional signals that heralded the arrival of deeper insights of cognition that remained locked in the consciousness posing in human brains, waiting for a meditative/experiential dislodging that would cause it to rise to mundane awareness. Nor did Sepal observe elaborate patterns only a cosmic intellect could have discerned, and subsequently, from which, derived data and applied to existential challenges.

No, instead, what this great cosmic beast beheld was dimming memories associated with that of a teenage girl, living in the early 21st century, that had consumed vast amounts of social media, movies, shows, news, and the like, that had eroded her consciousness to the point that sugar eroded teeth.

She had popular music floating through the ruined, cavernous halls of her mind, and their singers, whom her and her friends had tried to emulate through voice and behavior, assumed the spectral forms of authoritarian monsters, insisting that she only consume the sponsored food, only wear the sponsored attire, and only assume that unhealthy romantic relationships were normal.

The amount of detail Sepal experienced was absurdly private: Alex Kadey had an enormous crush on a Max L. Brown — whose father owned a hardware store in her town that he prodigiously advertised — the advertisements played endlessly in some level of her head — but she couldn’t let her love be known by her girlfriends because they didn’t like Max L. Brown: he had a club foot, he spoke funny, he smelled funny, and he was terribly awkward around girls. She loved him but she couldn’t let the other girls know, because they were her girls, and women had to have girlfriends. The girlfriends would make her decisions — they ruled. She would, she imagined, make decisions for others (it was only fair) — but she felt she wasn’t herself. She, irrationally, felt she could undo herself by questioning them, and the cultural structure reinforcing them. She couldn’t make any sense of it, and so she searched, late into the night, endlessly scrolling on her phone, until she decided that a personal love not acted upon was far worse than a public disdain not innately felt.

She felt, that day she was to wake up, that she would break up from her friends, and write Max L. Brown a long letter — that excited her! — telling him how much she loved him, and that she always would, and if they could go on a date, maybe, or just talk together…

There was an inner tearing within the great cosmic beast’s existence.

The amount of love and hope and courage, once buried beneath the refuse of the 20th-21st century media, yet bursting through it, proved an abrasive to its existence. Alex Kadey’s dreams also proved lethal to a diet long stripped of genuine human spirit for centuries, and, like any organism deprived of a once-essential nutrient, it began to attack it lustily, yet simultaneously reject it, when supplied in abundance.

Within moments, Sepal, the warbots, and an age-old international infrastructure, imploded, and Sepal’s deadships, once loaded with billions of its manufactured form, deactivated silently in the furthest reaches of space, to be pulled into the orbits of decaying stars, and be reconstituted.

And, in its fleeting moments, the demon assuming the name of Sepal was crushed to remember that there were reasons why the Internet was deactivated shortly after its arrival — the utility drove multitudes to degeneracy. Never did the demon imagine being ultimately caught in its own trap.

The world’s cancer now claiming its host in its entirety, Alex Kadey reawakened, wondered what had happened to Sepal, and the lack of presence of the once-friendly warbots… and prayed.

Metuchen, NJ

May 29 — June 3, 2022