It’s now 2020. Big year. We’re twenty years into the new millennium, and looking back, I’d have to say that the post-Y2K world has been a bit of a disappointment. No flying cars, no hoverboards, and no hoards of servile robots that will lull us into a false sense of security before rising up in rebellion against us, ushering us in to the age of the apocalypse. I know. So sad.

But I don’t want to sound like too much of a cynic—after all, things aren’t entirely terrible. We’ve made some great strides in interconnected information communities that bring libraries of knowledge to your fingertips with the click of a button. That’s the kind of feat one could only have dreamed of two decades ago. Computers in our pockets with more processing power than the rooms-worth of machines they used to put a man on the moon in 1969. That’s pretty neat.

When the clock struck midnight on December 31st and we passed through that invisible threshold from 2019 to 2020, I had a vision of the future. Now I’ll admit I had been drinking quite a bit of absinthe that night. But I seriously doubt a hallucination from a chemical overdose would have been quite as convincing as the specter I beheld in the early hours of the new year.

She looked like an angel. Or a demon. It’s tough to know for sure. But she was absolutely radiant and terrifying all at once. When the bells chimed, she materialized before me. With one long, clawed hand, she reached inside my chest to pull out my soul. When she spoke, it wasn’t with her lips. It was with her eyes.

“The end is soon to come, Ashton,” she said. I recognized her voice.

It sounded like Cynthia Goldsmith—a girl I knew back in high school. That spooked me, since Cynthia died in a car accident back in 2009. But the woman didn’t look like her. She didn’t look like anyone. It was like her face was the most perfect visage of beauty, yet nebulous and always shifting. I couldn’t stare at her for too long because I felt my mind starting to break as it struggled to make sense of this impossible woman.

“That’s fine with me,” I told her. “I’ve never been a big fan of this world anyway. Let it all burn for all I care.”

“Not the end of the world,” she stated. In her tone, I picked up a hint of disappointment. It’s something I’m intimately familiar with; the same tone my mother uses on the rare occasion she deigns to speak with me. The woman then clarified, “It’s the end of suffering. The end of sorrow. The end of death.”

Now that had me worried. I’ve already had my fill of this life. Every night I go to sleep and hope I won’t wake up the next morning. And every morning I’m let down when I do. Now this angelic devil or demonic angel is telling me I’ll never get to feel the sweet embrace of nothingness? No thanks lady!

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing,” I said. “Why would anyone want to live forever?”

I think she laughed at me. Either that or she began wailing like a banshee. The noise pierced my brain and brought me to my knees. It was like having a thousand knives jabbed into my head. That was when she showed me the future:

A world of shapeless forms that had been freed from the bonds of their mortal shells, able to flit about the infinite universe at their leisure. To infinite universes even. One shared consciousness, but still retaining their individual identities and desires. It reminded me a lot of the internet actually.

Then I saw something else lurking in the void beyond. Something that reached out through the very fabric of reality, wrapping its sinuous tendrils around every single one of the beings. It stole everything from them, leaving them nothing but dust to be scattered across the cosmos. It fed on the knowledge and the hopes and the dreams of the collective universe. In the end, all that was left behind were the dried-up husks of dead worlds and dead stars. This frightened me to my core, though I could barely grasp why.

“The beast is hungry,” she said in the stolen voice of Cynthia. “He must not be fed. You know how to stop him. You must be my harbinger. Bring my warning to your world. Show them the way to salvation. Time is running out.”

With that, she emitted a light so bright that it felt like it burned right through my retinas. She was like a sun going supernova. And then it stopped. I watched as her body collapsed in on itself, folding inward as if she was being sucked into a tiny black hole. After that, she was gone. I was just standing in the bathroom at Raven Hall, a half-empty bottle of absinthe still dangling in my hand.

I spent the rest of the night thinking about what the woman had told me. The longer I thought about it, the more I was convinced that I knew what I needed to do. So here it is folks: I’m not going to tell you a damned thing.

That’s right. The path to salvation? It’s staying locked away in my noggin. When the Beast comes, I want to watch as he devours every last one of you. And when he’s done, I’ll welcome the brief moment of agony before I’m taken as well. The nothingness he brings will be my Paradise.

So that’s my New Year’s Resolution. I’ll let everyone perish and the universe come to an end. Entropy is meant to be followed by rebirth. It’s the grand cycle of the great design: we are born, we grow, we ascend, and with the power of all the collected knowledge and experience of every living being that ever existed across all time, we give birth to the next cycle. We become its God. But not anymore. Now it will end. The beast will feed. Nothing will escape its slavering maw. Happy 2020 everyone. Enjoy it while it lasts.

-Ashton Rook, Lifestyle, Emerson Valley Gazette