No Void. Never was. Trapped here forever. The Beam doesn’t want me.

The Big Beam has been back dozens of times now. Every time the volume drops and every time the knife gets sharper. The first time was a sunset, powerful but diffuse.

Now, it’s like s malevolent laser bream, cutting through anything and everything in its way, looking for me and never finding me. Again and again I have run to the Beam as it hunts, but its light passes right through me.

It tortures my three brothers, however.

Didn’t there used to be more? Like, a lot more?

Their screams have made me weary and weak. Far better that I die than endure the torture of my three Earth-bound radical Radiant brothers. I would die a thousand times if it would spare them this torment.

I feel as though I already have.

Yeah, yeah! There was like, a couple dozen of you all over the world. I remember that. Where’d all your friends go?

Even worse are the screams of the humans. As we feared, the Beam has no mercy. It will carve the surface of the Earth like it was peeling an apple and shows absolutely no consideration for what it burns. A forest, a mountain, a street full of children at play. It is all the same for the Beam.

If the Beam is truly from Authority, then Authority has gone mad. Some might call it evil, but to a Radiant, there is no difference. Evil is madness, plain and simple.

Now look fella, I’ve known a lot of crazy people, and I’ve known a lot of evil people, and brother, they ain’t alike at all.

For one thing, the crazy ones are a lot easier to like.

If the Beam is not from Authority, then Authority is dead. Our species is dead. The Radiance and Authority are joined at the center. Without Authority, the Radiance cannot reproduce. The whole reason Authority was conceived was because it is so hard for us to reproduce. We had to create an enormous organization capable of tracking millions of stars and predicting their behaviour to the very last decimal point in order to increase our numbers. Without Authority, none of my people are capable of finding just the right star at just the right moment putting out just the right energy for us to procreate.

And while we are almost immortal, that does not mean we are forever young. We age slowly but we age, and soon enough we are so old and incoherent that we are no better than a flickering nebula arguing with itself.

Well that’s clever. Live forever but age anyway. Wish I’d thought of that.

So it seems I have not just doomed my three brothers and my beloved humanity, but my own race as well. A hundred Earth millennia from now, there will be none of us who even remember the time when we were fertile and vital and young.

Jeez, fella. Get over yourself. You didn’t ask this Beam thing to come along. You had no way of knowing that sticking up for yourself could lead to that. You did what you thought was right, and that’s all God and all His angels can ask of us.

Well, I did what I thought was right. That’s all the Radiance Within can ask of us. I have no choice but to try to learn to accept that. Even we Radiants are at the mercy of the whims of fate.

Wait a minute…. are you listening to me? Since when did that start? I’ve been yakking in your ear for years now and the best I got was a pat on the head and a meal at that lousy diner. So this is the time when you start listening?

Lemme see if I can work this. Uh…. Santa Claws wears red rubber knickers.

I feel guilty for how self-pitying I have become. What is the misery of one immortal compared to the millions of lives lost to the Beam, not to mention how it has destroyed human society due to the impossibility of prediction or defense.

Well that didn’t work. I guess it can’t be something stupid. Maybe it’s got to be something along the lines of what this sad sack of crap is already thinking.

Humanity is destroying itself out of rage and fear and frustration. The future has been abandoned and people are drinking, eating, smoking, and indulging in every destructive pleasure on Earth in their frenzy to forget the Beam and live life to the fullest before the Beam comes for them.

Sound like my kind of party. They got any women?

I appreciate their suffering and their need, and I especially appreciate the mad joys they are bringing me as they are all I have to ease my pain, but this is definitely not my kind of party.

Hey, that kind of worked! What next, uh…. uh… fuck, I don’t know. This putz is on some kind of economy sized guilt trip, and I never put up with that shit when I was alive. Fucked if I know how to deal with it now. I know, since this bozo is so into making a martyr of himself, let’s lay some New Testament on him. “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces….” shit…. “glory”?

The humans think that suffering brings glory. But to me, it’s nothing but shit.

Uh, that was close enough I guess. Listen, things are going to change around here now that you can hear me, kinda. You used to be a lot more fun to be around and with me in charge we’re going to get back to that. We’re gonna forget about your immortal torment and go get some liquor and some pussy, okay? You hear me?

The final insult? Even Frankie has stopped talking to me. Not that I can blame him.

Aw, son of a bitch…

Every since I was a kid, I knew that nothin good ever come from acting smart. From my momma slapping me hard and saying “Don’t you pretend you’re smart, you little shit!” to the neighborhood toughs wandering around hunting for something that pissed them off so they could beat on it to the teachers who acted like it was a fuckin’ miracle that a kid like me, no shoes and beat up clothes, dirty as a pig, could do anything at all and brought down all kinds of attention on me that I never wanted and ducked the moment I could, acting smart has never done a damned thing for me but brought me trouble and pain.

It fucking well figures.

Still no Void sign.

The other eight are pretty solidly against me now. They don’t agree on a lot, but they do agree on that. I am a false Messiah who led them astray, they should never have listened to me, and they should have known I was crazy when I talked about this crazy mind erasing demon. What were they thinking, listening to someone like me? And now, the wrath of Authority was coming to wipe out all life on Earth, and it was all my fault.

Can’t say I totally disagree. I mean, I don’t know where they got this “all life on Earth” business. Authority might be stiff and petty and irrational, but they would never harm an innocent being. Surely, this must be the product of someone’s imagination running away with them.

Yes, I am aware of the irony of my saying that.

So now none of them will do more than pass information back and forth with me. The sense of communal camaraderie is gone. More than gone. It has been torn away, burned, then paved over. I am more alone now than I ever was before the Void incident.

Oh, what havoc that lone hallucination has wrought!

Surely, that is what it was. That is the only explanation that fits the evidence. The depth of our information gathering is truly staggering now. Layers upon layers of inference, analysis, and synthesis knit together into a perfect machine for extracting truth from the world. And still, not even the slightest hint of the Void.

So I must be crazy. Truth be told, I feel crazy lately. Thoughts keep pouring through my head that don’t even make sense. I have this terrible feeling that I have been dreaming for a very long time, and I am about to wake up.

And that frightens me so deeply I can’t even think about it.

We have had another Big Noise incident. This time, it wasn’t nearly so loud, but it was far more cutting. Those touched by it said it felt like the heat of the Sun was focused into a single narrow beam as it flickered over them. The pain was terrible.

And yet, it hasn’t touched me at all. Could it be me that it is looking for?

If I thought that was true, I would gladly sacrifice myself to its power if it would spare my Radiant brothers. I am the one who provoked Authority into this act of brutality. It would be only fitting if I was the one to suffer for it.

And it is not like I have a lot to live for any more anyhow. My duties stop inspiring me months ago. The simple pleasures I shared with Frankie’s ghost no longer mean anything to me. I take care of his needs, but only out of habit. Habit, and the need for something to do so I don’t get to thinking too much.

So sure. Next time that big beam comes back, I will scream “Here I am!” and ride that beam to oblivion.

Life sucks most of the time anyways.

Still no sign of the Void(s).

And my compatriots, understandably, are beginning to lose faith in my leadership. Truth be told, so am I.

It all seemed so clear not so long ago. The Void were an imminent threat. Everybody had to know. The entire human race was at stake. And what kind of guardians would we be if we stood idly by while our charges were annihilated? Surely this threat is more important than the office politics of Authority or some absurd notion of chain of command.

We were put here on Earth to help the humans, and through that, grow closer to the Within. Surely protecting them is part of helping them. Certainly, I would have vastly preferred our lives to have remained one of peaceful, gentle coexistence with our human friends, acting as kindly shepherds to our flesh bound brethren. I miss the days when the worst I could hope to encounter is a single human with murder on their mind.

But we cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend we did not see the wolf in the fold. Sometimes, in the name of peace, one must wage war. Sometimes, in order to protect the innocent, you must destroy the guilty.

That’s all well and good. But if the enemy disappears? We have penetrated every level of human communication, from the most highly encrypted (to humans…. to us they are pretty games, easily won) communiques to the listless instant messaging of a pair of teenagers who are very sleepy but can’t quite decide to end their conversation, all eighteen of the current active Radiants on Earth have access to anything electronically communicated, and a lot that isn’t, too.

After all, even an old fashioned letter is scanned many times as it passes through the postal system. Out loud communication by human speech often happens near the receiver of a cell phone. Other conversations come to us via surveillance cameras. We can’t claim to hear everything said, but we can say with confidence that we get most of it.

Hmmm. If only our dear little humans knew how deeply we spy on them. They would not take it well!

Well, it’s for their own protection. Or at least…. I thought it was. I thought it would be. Now I am not so sure. Now I feel like maybe we did something wrong.

Oh, who am I kidding? I did something wrong.

All that information gathered and not one sign of the Void(s). I wasn’t expecting to catch one in the act of deleting someone, but I think they would leave a trail of clues behind them.

After all, that poor woman I saw devoured had a name, and a home, and a job, and people who would miss her if she stopped coming home. You would think that, after all this research, I would at least know who she was by now.

But no. Nothing. Not a trace. We tried everything to find her, up to and including inducing some humans to ask questions about her, a line we had not dared cross before. Everything in our training says that is the worst violation of our code of ethics imaginable : to take over a human body.

But it’s for their own protection. So I thought it was worth it.

Now I feel like I am nothing more than a charismatic lunatic who has led his people so far astray that they have no hope of ever going back home, and now they fellow me not because they believe I am wise or even that I am right, but because they have no other choice left to them.

If I hadn’t been so shocked by my one encounter with the Void that it drove me to break all the rules and contact my fellow Earth Radiants, odds are they would all be happily tending to their flock of Earthlings and absolutely nothing bad would have resulted. We would all still be in contact with Authority and would live our lives in serene beatitude.

Speaking of Authority, we still have not heard from them, but we did hear… something.

It was a few days ago. We were discussing methods of deducing the Void(s)’s presence when, as one, our senses were overwhelmed by this massive block of noise on the Authority’s channel. It seemed like utter chaos, information without form or content, and yet there also seemed to be a deep layer of meaning to it, like it was looking for something.

And we were terrified of it. Something about it, something deeper than the mere electromagnetic chaos of it, scared us so deep that a few of us still have not fully recovered. And it went on and on, pulsing in enormous waves and making our every wavelength quiver like a newborn star.

It stopped as abruptly as it started, leaving us reeling. It was many hours before we managed to re-calibrate ourselves into some semblance of coherence and immediately, the questions began to fly.

What WAS that? And why was it on the Authority channel? Was this Authority, striking back at us for our defiance? Were they looking to make an example of us? Was this going to happen again? Would it be worse next time? What if it was just Authority testing the weapon they planned to use to annihilate us?

I think it was only our newfound interdependence that kept us together that day. A lot of my colleagues wanted to destroy the Back Channel and then spend all of their remaining time begging Authority for forgiveness. It very nearly happened.

But I managed to convince them that without Authority, we need each other more than ever, and breaking off communication would only make it all the easier for Authority to destroy us.

So by convincing my confederates to chase a threat that now seems imaginary, I have exposed them to a danger that is very, very real, and beyond our ability to comprehend.

If I could, I would resign in shame. But that would surely lead to utter chaos amongst my people, and I would feel worse than ever. And I am sure that if they felt they could depose me, they would. But it seems none of them wants to be in charge.

So I am stuck with them, and they are stuck with me.

Normally, I would ask Authority what I should do next. But they no longer listen to us.

Guess it’s all up to me now.

Never have I felt so small.

Sorry, no “Silence” today either. I am not quite sure what happens next. Tomorrow, probably.

Plus I have news to relate.

Late last night, the sky over the oil fields of Yemen….

Just kidding. Not that kind of news. Personal stuff. Yesterday, I went to my friend Garth Spencer’s yard sale (which did not occur in a yard, but in his apartment), expecting nothing more than to buy a few books from him as a show of support.

He always has very cool books.

But lo and behold, he had an Android table three times the size of my current one for sale, and I bought it off him for $30, which I can’t really spare (this being a 5 week month… grr) but how could I resist?

Meh. So I will get $40 off my card to compensate. No big whoop.

And wow, do things look nice on it. There is something about making the picture bigger, whether it’s a tablet, a monitor, or a television, that just makes your eyes happy. That’s why the entire history of television has revolved around bigger screens.

And it’s an Android device, so I already know the operating system. It’s not the same “flavour” of Android, so some things have different names or icons or both, and some things are in different places, and a few things look a fair bit different, but all in all, it’s pretty much the same.

The problem is that it seems to be fairly buggy. Sadface. A lot of the games I play on the little one, the Galaxy Tab 2, crash on the big one. And some I can’t even download because it says they are “not compatible with this device”.

I assume that means that they are not designed to handle the device’s aspect ratio, or somesuch. How very irritating.

So it might turn out that I keep playing games on the little one, which would be a terrible bummer. I am hoping that I just need to upgrade the OS or something. If not, well, I will end up only using the big one for watching video or typing.

And that would truly suck.

I can only call it “the device” for now because I have no idea what it is truly called. I know it’s an Android device of Samsung’s Galaxy line, but other than that, I dunno.

One nice thing is that it has more storage. The little one has 4.5 gigs of on board storage, the big one has 13. Still not enough to put my mp3 collection on, but still. Nice!

And my mp3 collection is on an SD card anyhow (as well as my HD), so if I can find an SD port on Big Boy, all I have to do is take the tiny SD card out of one and stick it in the other.

So far, I have not been able to find an SD port on Big Boy, but I am not all that good at finding. It could be right there and I would miss it. My sensory filters are extraordinary that way. Very little gets through!

It’s a wonder I don’t bump into things all the time. I guess just enough gets through.

Oh, and about today’s blog entry title : I have been getting that “life is a long dark never ending silent corridor” feeling again lately. I have a hard time finding value in my life. I feel like all I do is tread water. I survive, but I do not thrive.

Not even a little.

And for me, what is now growth is death. The concept of progress is writ with a heavy hand upon my soul, and so for me, there is no such thing as stasis.

Only health, and decay.

And lately I feel quite rotted. I feel like I am someone who finds their cage increasingly intolerable but does not yet have the ability to escape. This creates the pressure that will eventually lead to progress, but in the meantime, I feel futile.

And yet I know I am not. I know my life has momentum separate from my own will now. Stand Up For Mental Health in mid-May, Associate’s in Creative Writing from Kwantlen starting in the fall.

But still, I feel pointless. Adrift. Meaningless. I suppose the demon Depression and its ability to prevent pleasure will keep me from truly believing either of those things are real before I have done them. They are just mirages on the horizon for me right now, nice to think about, but not truly real.

I was talking with Felicity lately about how depression makes long term planning so hard. The fact is, depression makes it very hard to believe in the future. It saps your self-esteem and mental stability, making it hard to believe in your ability to get your shit together long enough to accomplish anything. It fills you with pain that makes it hard to think about anything besides merely surviving the day.

And it robs you of the pleasure of progress that keeps a healthy person motivated to keep working toward the long term goal. A healthy person gets pleasure from getting a little closer to their goal. But the demon depression’s cruelest servant, a Miss Ann Hedonia, ensures that these small pleasures never reach us.

In fact, a lot of small pleasures don’t reach us.

People talk a lot about “motivation” and “tricks” to motivate yourself to do A or B. But it’s not about motivation, willpower, or whatever else you want to call it.

It’s about pleasure, pure and simple. The person who gets in shape and loses all the weight is someone who gets enough pleasure of progress to keep them going. It is that simple.

I think people would a lot better off forgetting all about willpower and motivation and concentrating instead on finding all the pleasure they can in every little thing that leads towards their goal.

After all, if you are looking for motivation to do something, that means you already want to do it.

So what’s the problem?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have good news and bad news. Good news first.

The new global channel is complete.

The project was slow at first, I will admit. But once we all put our energies into it as one, it was done in an instant. All the necessary electron tails and resonance repeaters appeared as if by magic. It is truly amazing what we can do when we work together for a common cause.

In this case, that cause is freedom from Authority.

The bad (ish) news is that there have been absolutely no Void sightings since I first contacted my compatriots. None here (it knows better than to come back!), and none elsewhere. As far as we can tell, the Voids no longer exist.

We should be so lucky. Clearly, the answer is that the vile beast is staying out of all the Radiant zones it knows in order to be allowed to hunt with impunity. No doubt there was thousands of them by now, devouring their way through the defenseless minds of our beloved humans, and gathering together into an unstoppable army of destruction bent on defeating not just the human race but their faithful guardians as well.

That would be us.

But I am unafraid. They may have numbers and brute strength on their side, as well as a horrifying aspect, but we Radiants of Earth are united in our determination to wipe out the Void threat, and then find the door by which it came in, and seal it.

No half-solutions for this Army of the Within.

I find the unified resolve of my fellow Radiants and I to be quite heartening. As I had hoped, they all care about humanity just as much as I do, as well as being just as willing to sacrifice of themselves for the sake of our human charges.

Guess on that score, I am not so exceptional after all. Fantastic.

Another bit of good news : thanks to my fellow Radiant who is a master of communications, we will soon be able to monitor all the various forms of electromagnet communications that humans us without having to go through a human mind to do it.

This will improve our monitoring efficiency a thousandfold, and hopefully that will be enough of an improvement to allow us to find where Cellophane and his gang have been hiding and where they plan to launch their attack on us.

We may still be limited to our territories, but that does not mean we are defenseless!

Speaking of our territories, one of the oldest Radiants on Earth made a suggestion that made my amplitudes flutter with astonishment at its simplicity and seeming obviousness.

Instead of trying to escape our territories, why don’t we try to expand them? Or at least move them?

And he’s right. Why don’t we? There is nothing in our conditioning to prevent it, and we all at least know the theory behind changing the boundaries. The theoretical side of the picture is clear. Now all we have to do is try it.

This brought up another troubling subject, however. Why are our territories so far away from one another? It can’t be an effort at providing maximum coverage because our territories are tiny. I thought that maybe all our territories were in high population density areas in order to include the most humans. After all, that’s true of my own patch.

But no, while the majority of our territories are of at least suburban population density, many are in small towns in remote areas and one consists of a single trading post village in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, with a permanent population of eight humans, all excessively related to one another.

The Radiant from that territory is a little mentally imbalanced. You can understand why. And I thought I was the one who had angered Authority. How could they be so cruel?

Other explanations for our isolation have been conceived and rejected. None of our territories have anything of political importance in them. They are not centered around fault lines or other geographical features. They aren’t arranged to be near centers of human communication.

We even thought that maybe we were meant to be watching for some kind of extraterrestrial threat. But no.

In fact, the only thing all our territories have in common is their utter banality. Each one seems to have been chosen to be as unimportant as possible. With nearly thirty of us, you would think at least one of us would have a territory near something at least vaguely important, but no. We are unified in our harmlessness.

And this has caused us some worry. What could Authority be thinking, keeping us apart like this? Putting us so far apart then making us beg and plead before even thinking of letting us use the original global channel? Obviously they meant to keep us from communicating with one another, but why? What are they up to?

This is an especially vexing question because nobody has heard from Authority since the day after my first light show. No directives, no assignment, not even the usual requests for reports and so forth. Total silence.

None of us have ever experienced life without Authority. It created us from the Within. It raised us to serve the Light. It taught us to respect and love all conscious life and to use our abilities to comfort and nurture it. Everything we know about existence, we learned through Authority. And until recently, everything we ever did, we did because Authority told us to do it.

None of us have ever experienced this kind of silent treatment, and none of us know what happens next. Is this what Authority does to those Radiants who truly anger it? Abandon them?

And is that it? Or is this merely the prelude to Authority’s brand of justice? None of us can even imagine what Authority can do to us now. And that is what makes us so nervous. Who knows what they are capable of?

And as the person who kicked off this little backwater revolution, I can’t help but feel responsible for it.

Oh well. It’s out of our control. All we can do is hunt the Voids and try to make this Earth a better place for humans.

Nothing else matters… at all.

It worked. Blessed be the Light, it worked!

I have made contact with the other Radiants on Earth, and I have done it in a way that Authority can neither control nor suppress. As long as humans have eyes, we can communicate.

You see, many wave cycles back, I learned an old trick first used by the first Radiants to communicate with one another. It involves encoding information into spheres of colored light bound by a thin electromagnetic shell and releasing them to float into the air and over the horizon.

Any other Radiant will instantly recognize and decode this message even without training. But with training, it is instant and effortless, and I know all of my fellow Radiants on Earth have had that training.

It was meant to prepare us for assignment to places with very sparse populations, or places where the usual channels we establish for communication do not work, but I am quite thrilled to say that it works equally well as a way to circumvent Authority.

I did not know if I would get a second chance to communicate, so I packed my initial message with all the information I have about the Voids and how to use my method to send messages back to me. Decoding is automatic. Encoding, less so.

And for a while, I awaited their reply, torn between desperate anguish and shivers of unbridled optimism. Surely the spheres of brightly colored light would be seen by millions of humans all over the world, and my fellow Radiants would see them in the minds of their flock, and my message would be received.

And after a brief eternity, they replied. First one, then two, then half a dozen, then a torrent that must have the humans quite bewildered at all the lights in their skies that they cannot explain.

All I had to do was monitor a couple hundred human minds, carefully selected for their hunger for on the spot current events, and I got all the replies I could ever want, and more.

First, all that came were acknowledgments of receipt. That part of the process is automatic and it would be beyond Authority’s control to keep those under wraps.

After that, though, the other Radiants were on their own. They could have ignored my message and gone on attending to their duties and nothing would have come of it.

But no. By my count, twenty seven of the roughly thirty Radiant agents here on Earth replied beyond the acknowledgment and all but one of them share my concerns about the Voids and about how Authority has been treating us.

Indeed, some of their objections were far more cogent and on point than anything I could come up with. Seems that Authority has been treating all of us, or at least all of us on Earth, in the exact same distant and heavy-handed way.

So much for my egocentric theories of being singled out for punishment! Which I now find highly amusing.

From what I gather from their communications, there have been Void sightings in all their territories, but only I have seen one… feed. Also, there seems to be far more Void activity in my area than any other. None of them had witnessed Cellophane even half as often as I have, neither did they think of him as a threat as I had even before the incident.

By the Within, could I be reason for that? Did my detection and monitoring of Cellophane somehow reinforce its existence and make it strong enough to feed? Is there something about my particular frequencies that attracts these creatures?

After all, none of us have any idea why Cellophane struck when and where he did. Why now? Why that woman? What was he doing all those years I spotted him browsing through shops? What was he looking for?

Even after consulting extensively with Radiants far cleverer than I, we are no further to an answer to any of those questions. There is nothing special about my own patch of Earth. There is no high level science going on here that might attract (or create) a new form of life. The humans of my district are nothing special. As far as we can tell, there is nothing about the local geomagnetism or other energy patterns to create any sort of unique or ideal conditions for anything.

And yet Cellophane definitely favours here. As a group, we are stumped.

But it feels so good to pierce my isolation and find out that I am not alone in spotting Cellophane that, for the moment, that doesn’t matter. I have rejoined the holy chorale of my people’s vibrations, and it is only upon rejoining that I realize how much I have missed it. It is as though I had been starving for so long that I had forgotten food even existed, and now, I am full, and grow healthier by the hour.

Thus emboldened, I feel fully confident that this new union of Earth’s guardians will prove to be far, far more than the sum of its parts, and that there is no problem we cannot solve if we work together. Whatever the Voids are, wherever they come from, we will unite our strengths, our minds, and our information into a single powerful force capable of excising the horror that is the Voids from the body of the human race and destroying it forever.

And the best part is, thanks to another Radiant who knows a surprising amount about communication, we will soon have our own global channel that Authority can’t even touch. It will have to be done slowly and very quietly, but once it is established, Authority will be helpless to prevent its use, and we can stop frightening our humans with colored lights in the sky.

I am far calmer now than I have been in some time. Gone are the bitterness and hysteria of before. Now, I am a leading voice in a choir of many, and together, our victory is assured.

A little surprised they all agreed to this so easily, though.

I guess maybe I am something special after all.

I want to leave. I have to leave. I need to leave.

I cannot leave.

The final insult came today. I, very humbly and respectfully, asked Authority if I could use the global channel to warn my fellow Earth bound Radiants about the threat I discovered. I promised I would not be alarmist or hysterical, and would only present the facts as they can be established and ask that they draw their own conclusions.

Authority made a big show of deliberating, but the fix was in. They said that it was too early to warrant bothering other Radiants at their important work for what could turn out to nothing and there was no point spreading suspicion and paranoia amongst the faithful and dutiful servants of the Within, especially those on Earth, a notoriously difficult assignment and blah blah blah I stopped listening.

So I can’t even warn the thirty or so (not nearly enough but it’s a big universe) other Radiants working on Earth about the threat of the Void. I expected as much. One thing I have learned from the humans is that once an institution decides it does not like you, nothing can change their mind.

Because they don’t want to. They are quite comfortable with you as an outsider who must be left out in the cold and anything you do to try to win them back only gives them more chances to mistreat you and thus reaffirm their in-group identity. Everyone at Authority can tell themselves “that shows HIM” and pat each other on the back while assuring themselves that of course they would never do a thing like whatever they think you have done.

Every society, even ours, loves having someone to exclude.

Having anticipated this result, I was already prepared for the next phase. I had convinced Frankie that he would like to go on a trip, and I had dipped into our most secret cash reserve to get him some decent clothing so he would not stick out when I had to take him somewhere other than the mean streets of the concrete jungle. I steered him towards the edge of my territory, and braced myself for the transition. I knew there would be a struggle, my newfound resolve versus my training and conditioning screaming at me that leaving my assigned zone was worse than death itself.

But what I didn’t anticipate was that I would lose. Apparently, the “voluntary” conditioning I underwent during my training went a lot deeper than I had been told it would. It took all my willpower (and considerable strain on poor Frankie) to get within a foot of the invisible dividing line between my territory and the rest of the universe, and after a few seconds of that, my resolve crumbled and I withdrew and let Frankie do as he pleased for a little while.

When I regained myself, I found Frankie, quite predictably, on a collision course with alcohol. I very carefully and firmly reminded him of all the problems drinking had caused in his life, including his death, and he sadly agreed.

I reassured him that all the bad times were over now and that I would never put him through what I had just put him through again, and that everything would go back to normal now, with no trips.

So in other words, I lied to him.

Things can never be the same. I have seen the face of evil and can never forget it. For all I know, there’s thousands of Voids roaming Earth now. Or none. I have no way of telling without being able to go look for myself.

I have become hard and cynical and bitter, and the worst part of it is that I don’t even care. I know I should feel bad for how far from the vibration of the Radiance I have drifted, but I don’t. This is what Authority gets for its petty and smallminded attitude towards me. This is what they get for shutting me down and locking me in this cage of animals. This is what happens when you tell everyone the house is on fire and they tell you it’s not a problem.

And the worst part is that I can’t even protest by withdrawing my labour. Since my attempted escape from the cage whose bars I had never seen until today, I have carried out my duties exactly as before.

And I would love to blame that on the conditioning, but the truth is, I can’t abandon my people. Maybe that’s the real reason I couldn’t leave. Conditioning had nothing to do with it. Deep down, I just could not leave my charges to relapse into the sorry state they were in when I first arrived on Earth.

Besides, I have nothing else to do.

I tried being mad at the humans. Stupid filthy humans, I told myself. I was pure before I came here. I was clean before I waded into the cesspool of their hopelessly corrupted minds. I would still be pure, and strong and clean and happy as well, if I had never come to this wretched rock. Let the Voids have them!

But it didn’t stick. I can’t blame them for the trauma I suffered when I watched the Void feed. They are but children, sheep to the Void’s wolf, and deserve only my love and my pity.

So it seems like my prison is complete. I can’t leave. I can’t stop looking after my flock. I can’t return to Node and be cleansed and renewed. And I can’t warn my fellow field Radiants on Earth about the Void threat.

Earlier, I had to laugh, because I found myself wishing there were creatures to aid and comfort us Radiants as we do for the humans and other creatures under our care.

A ridiculous idea… but I took some comfort from it.

If only I could communicate with just one other Earth-assigned Radiant. Tell them what I have seen. Warn them to be on the lookout for the Voids. Find out if they have seen one too.

But without access to the local channel, I can’t do a thing.

Actually…. there might just be a way….

I can’t find the twin Void monsters anywhere.

And before seeing the original destroy that poor woman, I would have assumed that meant they went elsewhere. But Cellophane proved to me that he could disappear from my sight at will, and now I don’t know what to do.

Nothing at Node prepared me for this. At Node, we Radiants learn how to deal with everything from a sad dog to a full blown serial killer. I have dealt with people so mentally deranged they experience people as geometry and odors as people, killers who live for the moment blade punctures flesh, rich people so consumed by their money hoarding that there is no deed too black if it results in profit, and people whose mating proclivities include everything that isn’t a consenting adult, and yet this new evil frightens me in the way no human monster could ever match.

I have requested a transfer back to Node so I can be realigned by expose to the Within, and interface with Information to see if these monsters are known to my people at all, but my request was flatly denied. No doubt this is payback for my brash insistence on taking no other assignment but the humans of Earth, the infamous “troubled” planet that ate Radiants for supper and excreted darkness for dessert.

No doubt Authority thinks that after I made such a fuss about being assigned to Earth, I should be left to deal with it on my own instead of running back to them when things get tough.

The sad truth is that even angels can be petty.

They didn’t even accept my Extraterrestrial Threat report, because if they did, they would have had no choice but to accept my transfer request, and possibly even sent extra help back with me when I returns to my duties on Earth.

They said there was no “substantial” proof that the threat was extraterrestrial in nature and that for all they knew, this was a perfectly natural Earth event and interfering would unbalance the ecosystem.

As if anything could be more absurd.

Speaking of my duties here on Earth, I have not been executing them as well lately. This Void matter has me too rattled. The simple joy of helping these simple creatures has vanished and for the first time, my job seems like work.

So far, I have carried out my duties efficiently enough, but with none of the brilliance I showed at Node. This makes me feel like a fraud. I help people, but it doesn’t feel like helping.

It feels like an unwelcome chore. Only my sense of duty keeps me going.

And I have never been one who could live on duty alone.

Frankie feels it too. He hasn’t been his usual happily passive self since the Void incident. He flits about in the mind we share, asking inane questions, making ludicrous suggestions, and acting for all the world like a child who desperately needs to pee but can’t remember how.

I’m sorry. That was both cruel and unfair. Frankie’s ghost just wants to help. The horror we both witnessed rattled him out of his complacency as well, and he doesn’t know how to handle it.

And frankly, neither do I.

I have never felt this kind of hate and fear before. Node teaches us to embrace but not act upon our more destructive impulses and to view each living, conscious being as equal before the pure and infinite light of the Radiance Within All. There are no sinners or saints before our compassionate eyes, only fellow sentiences trying to cope with a universe that often seems cold, hostile, and malign.

And I thought I understood this. I have not stood in judgment of any human I have encountered. I remained compassionately detached, determined to get the best outcome for everyone, even those another might find undeserving. All beings deserve all the love, compassion, and caring we can give them. That is the very soul of what Node teaches.

But I cannot forgive these Voids, let alone care for their wellbeing. They are pure evil and must be destroyed before they spread their foul emptiness any further. They are a disease for which the only cure is their destruction. I will wipe them out whatever it takes. I will hunt them down.

And yes, I know this is heresy. Everything I have just said flies in the face of all we active Radiants are supposed to believe. We are people of the universal love and compassion, not single-minded dedication to genocide.

And I do not care. Perhaps if I had been allowed to realign, I would be able to regain my balance and thus be able to deal with this situation in ways that even Authority would have to approve of.

But Authority decided to leave it all up to me, and so I will act as I see fit. I will find and destroy these entities even if it means leaving my post in this neighborhood and chasing them around the globe, an act unheard of for a young Radiant like myself.

it’s not that I want to leave. My love for the people of this area is undimmed. Indeed, the thought of a creature like the Void preying on people like them is what drives my desperate rage. The very notion of those creatures turning my beloved humans into disgusting abominations like themselves makes my entire being quiver up and down the electromagnetic spectrum with rage. I absolutely must put an end to this.

I, myself, am immortal. Nothing on Earth could produce the kind of ultra-dense magnetic fields that can harm a Radiant. We have no need for any form of nourishment or relief. We are powered by the fabric of the Universe itself. We need nothing else.

But this human beings are so fragile, so vulnerable, so delicate. They require so much to survive. They can only live in a narrow band of temperatures, they require an astonishingly variety of substances to survive, and their minds are but infants crawling toward understanding of what it means to be the part of the universe that looks back upon itself.

I cannot allow them to be harmed by these Voids. Regardless of the consequences, until Authority sends a brace of other Radiants down the alleyways of the Spectrum to lock me in a cage and take me away, I will hunt and destroy as many of the Voids as I can.

Of this I swear.

Mister Cellophane is in my neighborhood again.

I call him that because, to me, he is almost invisible. I can see his body through the eyes of others, and it is unremarkable. Suspiciously so. Everything about him seems designed to blend in and go unnoticed. Just your average citizen, another face in the crowd, another person passing you on the sidewalk.

But I can tell the difference. To me, people are souls and his is missing. Or invisible.

To me, looking at him is like looking through a slightly dirty window. He has no aura, no emotion, no empathy. Just a faint but terrifying sense of utter nihilistic hate. Like he’s man so full of loathing and contempt for himself and the world that he willed himself into nonexistence.

But something is still there. Something animates that average body with its average looks and average build. Something makes the decisions as to where to go next and what to do there. There is something hiding in all that nothing.

And I can’t shake the feeling that this something is…. hungry.

So when he is around, I monitor him. To do this I must see what those around him see, and keep track of him through their eyes. This is difficult because his camouflage is so effective that people rarely give him more than a moment’s glance. I have to look through as many eyes as I can at the same time in order to keep track of his movements.

Right now, he is unobtrusively browsing the offerings at the thrift shop at Oak and Coal. He does this a lot, this aimless perusal of goods. I have never seen him so much as pick an item up, let alone buy it, yet he goes through the motions of examining everything exactly as the shoppers around him are doing.

Whatever it is that he is looking for, it’s not bargains.

I must admit, to my shame, that I hate him. I hate that I can barely see him. I hate that he walks in and out of my territory at will, disrupting my peaceful and vibrant environs with his offensive invisibility. I hate that he shatters my gentle and benevolent life of compassion and aid.

But most of all, I hate him because he makes me feel like this.

I stop my monitoring briefly in order to comfort a child who has grown very frustrated with the cast on her arm. She is tired of it being there, all heavy and itchy and hot, and it will continue to be there for almost three more months.

To her, that is forever.

When I return to my vigil, I discover that my worst nightmare has come true.

Mister Cellophane has disappeared from view entirely.

How this is possible, I do not understand. I was with the child for no more than two minutes, and when I left him, he was on the third floor of the thrift shop and would have had to go down to the first floor to leave.

Even if he took the elevator (something I have never seen him do…. hmmm… ) it would take him more than two minutes to leave. And even if he had left, I would be able to find him in the eyes of the people on the street. But no matter how many pairs of eyes I look through, I can’t find him. He is no longer in the neighborhood, as far as I can tell.

This throws me into a panic. I cannot convince myself that Cellophane is actually gone. It can only be that he has detected me and found a way to finish the job and become utterly undetectable to me. He could be anywhere doing anything to any of my people and I have no way to find them. I have failed them!

I am like this for a few minutes before I manage to get a grip on myself and think things through. What do I know about him?

I know that he has done nothing remotely harmful while I have been watching him. I know that he has no soul, only a faint but disgusting smell of pure hate. I know that he blends in with the background so that nobody notices him.

He blends in! That will be how I track him!

I extend my mind to its limits, looking for the sense memory of having seen someone without any of the usual emotional responses to the presence of another human being. Even passing strangers on a busy sidewalk register as human to our deep senses, and this fellow registers as nothing at all. Not even an inanimate object.

And it is by this I shall find him!

There are a number of false positives, mostly from the local mental ward, but then I find him. He is seated next to a heavyset woman in her early forties on a bus bench at Coal and Elm.

He seems to be paying her no attention… but I sense danger.

After a while, he leans towards the woman very slowly. It is a tribute to the effectiveness of his camouflage that he can be get within inches of her face without her sensing him in the least. As he does so, he stares at her with the fixity of a snake about to strike. What is about to happen?

I get my answer when he suddenly opens his eyes and mouth all the way and…. something emerges from them. To me it is a ghostly pale mist which hovers around his victim’s head for a moment, then all at once dives into her mouth and eyes, and proceeds to feed.

It does so by ruthlessly and coldbloodedly devouring the contents of the woman’s mind. Every memory, every thought, every emotion devoured by an incoming tide of nothingness, all happening in the space of five seconds.

I tried desperately to intervene. I flung my entire being into trying to prise that nightmarish creature from that poor woman’s mind and fling it into darkness, but it was like trying to stop a raging river with your hand. The violent energy of the process pushed me aside with the ease of a horse swishing its tail at flies. I was nothing compared to it.

And then it was over. The woman’s mind was drained and she was now as utterly blank as her destroyer. With growing horror, I realized what this meant.

It meant now there was two of them.

Soon, they both wandered off in different directions, both blending in with the crowd, both seemingly looking for nothing in particular. But now, I know better.

They are looking for fresh victims upon which to feed. And it’s more than mere feeding… it is reproduction as well.

There is no more Mister (And Misses) Cellophane.

There is only the Void Which Devours, and I swear to the Radiance Within that I will destroy them.

The flesh is fed, and I have located a more suitable resting place for it, inside and out of rain. Currently, it sits on the toilet in a small, out of the way park bathroom frequented only by the local homosexual men, and they do not come out during the day, for the most part. It will be undisturbed there until nightfall.

And of course, in this location, dealing with the aftereffects of a fine meal and much coffee will be simplicity itself.

Of course, it would be much simpler if I could simply rent a room and leave it there, but even signing up for welfare is surprisingly difficult for one such as me.

For one thing, I can’t read.

So this forces my flesh and I into a homeless existence. This suits my work, but I do often lament my inability to provide a more comfortable and secure existence for my fleshly encasement.

It makes me feel like a very poor parent. And I have dealt with enough of those to know just how bad that is.

Once my flesh was a lowest-level criminal named Frances “Franky” DeLaine. He was a man without direction or identity of his own. He clung to existence by being whatever someone wanted him to be, and thus got by as a flunky to various criminal organizations who passed him around like an unwanted orphan.

We met when my previous body, a rich man’s social secretary named Rose Berber, passed away. She was 68, and died of lung cancer. This left me homeless, as it were, and I don’t have very long to find a new body in that situation, and so it was pure coincidence that, after a heart attack due to poor diet and excessive drinking, Frankie was vacating his body two rooms away at the exact moment I needed a new host.

By the time I got into this new body, the lack of oxygen had destroyed much of what was left of Frankie. It took a great deal of my energies to keep him breathing long enough for the medical team to come stabilize him, and there was a time when I thought I would surely need another new host at any moment.

But we pulled through, Frankie and I, and I was able to speed his recovery by encouraging his cells to release their toxins, then scrubbing those toxins from his blood.

That kept me so busy that it took a month of hard labour before I suddenly realized that, for the first time, I had a body more or less to myself. All my previous hosts had been in firm control of the body, and I could only flit about them doing whatever good I could for whoever was around them. Now, I was in control, and I frankly had no idea what to do with myself.

So I concentrated on healing poor Frankie’s body and, occasionally, flitting about the hospital giving comfort and aid whenever I could. In doing so, I inadvertently gave that hospital a reputation as the place where medical miracles happen, and as a result, it attracted the kind of funding and talent that could turn that into a reality.

Thus, that little hospital, previously on the lowest rung of the hospital system, the places where they send the lowliest of people to be indifferently cared for by a constantly changing roster of inexperienced doctors and nurses, became the sprawl mega-hospital for one and all that it is today.

I love it when things work themselves out that way.

Eventually, of course, Frankie was discharged, and have a few hearty congratulatory slaps on the back for an extraordinary recovery, he was out on the street and I had decisions to make.

Thus I wandered into my current life. Luckily, none of Frankie’s former associates recognize the sober and healthy version of him, and I am able to look after what is left of him in total anonymity.

He is not entirely gone. I have some of his memories, some positive associations with various places and food and such, and a ghostly remnant of his personality who is quite content to sit on my shoulder and watch what I do without interference.

He likes me. And I like him. He was a gentle and decent soul in life, despite all that had befallen him, and what remains of him is as happy with my work as I am.

And for that, I feel truly blessed.

Today, I have opted for active patrol instead of my usual spider’s web scanning for trouble. The flesh needs the exercise and there is much to find that is wonderful and new when I have a mobile base of operations.

So to the human world, I am just another homeless man in a tattered trenchcoat and shapeless hat, ambling down the street and looking in garbage cans for something that can be converted into money.

Frankie understands this task, so I can leave it to him for the most part while I patrol.

In front of a red brick tenement apartment building, I tell Frankie to linger so I can explore a potential danger situation : a woman is on her way home from work in a very foul mood, and in moments, she will discover that the child she left unsupervised has spilled an entire bowl of soup onto the living room carpet and done a very poor (but well intentioned) job of cleaning it up.

Frantically, I rifle through her mind to find a solution. Nothing in her current consciousness is of any use, so I dive into her memories, starting with childhood. At first I think this too will prove fruitless and tragedy will unfold. Her parents were mild mannered well educated people. Teachers were all reasonable. It looked like she has never faced the kind of anger she was about to unleash upon her child.

But then I found a summer spent with an unpleasant aunt who lived a life of constant, vicious complaint, and as the key was being turned in the door, I stimulated her mind into remembering said aunt, and how she vowed to never, ever be like that when she had a kid of her own.

Bingo. All her rage disappears, melting away into a profound sense of love for her one and only child, and when she sees the stain on the rug, she reassures her child (who has been terrified of this moment all day) that it’s no big deal, Mommy will fix the stain, and everything will be okay.

I could bask in the love and peace of that moment forever. But Frankie has started to attract the attention of the local beat cops, and it is time to move on.

Farewell, O mother and child. Remember what you have learned today.

You learned that love can move mountains, and forgiveness is more powerful than punishment and rage.

Peace be with you.