by Z. M. Wilmot
The Man in Amber
It is the ultimate nightmare, though few even can imagine its possibility. I am eternally surrounded by this terrible substance of amber, that which lets me breathe without breathing, lets me see with eyes eternally open, and lets me live without living. I have not had any nutritional sustenance for the longest time, yet I still linger on. I have lost many things in my imprisonment: I can no longer hear, nor taste, nor smell, nor feel. Only my sight remains, and even that is limited to what I can see directly before me, for I can no longer move any part of my body. I have not felt my heart beat, nor my lungs swell, nor my flesh tremble since I woke in my prison of amber. My eyes can no longer flit back and forth, nor follow the movement of a pendulum, nor even fill with tears without the greatest of pain.
My immobility pains me the most. I am not capable of moving any part of my body even the smallest amount; I have been completely immobilized, frozen in this rigid pose. Yet despite my immobility, energy still flows through my body, and I have a desire to move, to run, to jog, to walk, to stretch – yet I can do none of these things. Nor can I make my state of life known to any who see me – and a fair few have.
The amber substance that surrounds me is also inside of me, extending down my throat and mouth, preventing even my tongue from moving. It is the strangest, most uncomfortable feeling, made especially noticeable when I became aware that my lungs were no longer functioning nor my heart beating – anything that had even hinted at life in me was gone, yet I was still there, and still am. Even if I had managed to communicate some message to those beyond, I don’t know if they could even break through this substance that coats and infiltrates me, or if I would live if they could. Even death, though, is infinitely preferable to this cursed state of half-life. It is impossible to adequately describe the state of boredom that accompanies eternal stasis. There is literally nothing to do but watch, and I certainly am not always put in the most interesting of places.
I still do not know, nor do I ever think I will know, how I came to be in this state. I was a lecturer at a prestigious university, having obtained a doctorate and completing post-doctoral studies many years previously – I can no longer remember how long ago it was – but never having been able to land a job as even an assistant professor. My specialty was in anthropology – an ironic twist, for I have since become the subject of anthropological study many times.
I remember the moments of my previous life – before the damned amber set in – with the utmost clarity. I am aware of everything that I have lost. On my last day as a free man, I went to sleep, my eyes closed, and the next thing I knew I was somewhere below the earth, completely surrounded by darkness. It took me several minutes at least to fully realize the state I was in, and my terror and despair knew no bounds for countless hours, until I finally resigned myself to my fate.
The blackness surrounded me for what must have been decades. I had no wife or children, nor any real family left, so I doubt my disappearance left much of a stir – assuming, of course, that I was the only one who had vanished – other than perhaps a brief article in the local paper. I did not worry overly much, then, about my affairs back home, but more on the how, what, and why of my current situation. I was to receive nothing even remotely close to answers until my unearthing, and even then, those answers were limited.
When I was dug up out of the ground, I could see the amber around me coloring everything in my field of vision for the first time, and discovered that my eyes were open, and indeed must have been for the entire time I was down there. During that time I had nothing to do but think and ponder upon existence, and though many conclusions were reached and discarded, no discernible philosophical progress was made.
I had solved in my initial period of stasis many of the anthropological problems I had been working on at the university, and found a way to enter a state of daydreaming. I spent most of my time lost in the fields and valleys of my imaginations, dreaming the years away. I also developed a method of meditation, but no matter how hard I tried, I could never truly sleep. At the same time, I do not ever feel tired. Whatever it is that imprisons me somehow supplies me with energy, food, drink, oxygen, and everything else required to preserve me for an eternity.
After being taken from the ground in what could only be described as a desert area utterly unfamiliar to me, my amber cell was poked and prodded with various tools, but nothing that the humans who unearthed me possessed could break into my prison. They quickly gave up, and sent me to a museum, where my boredom was alleviated somewhat. I was able to people-watch, examining those who examined me, able to finally have something of interest go on before my eyes. After a few months, I was not ashamed of being naked, and I began to play games with myself. I mentally narrated the conversations I saw mouthed around me, and created life stories for those who ogled at me.
Humans had changed while I had been away. Our skin had become darker, and our bodies taller. The average woman tended to be more attractive, and the same could be said about the men. I saw cats on leashes and fish tanks on wheels being carted about everywhere. I was horrified that any museum – for I had no doubt that I was in one – would allow pets in it, but eventually I become accustomed to this.
I was eventually deemed uninteresting, and cast away into an archive of some kind. My first shift on the surface lasted, in my estimation, a decade or so, and then I was moved down into the dusty basement of some old building, where I was surrounded by a plethora of fascinating exhibits that occupied me for most of my time down there. I spent the next century or so of my existence alternating between the storage area and the upper museum, and then was transferred elsewhere and put on exhibit in a different building.
I was in an archive, down beneath the Earth, when the cataclysm came to man. I felt a terrible rumbling and shaking, and saw the supports of my underground cell began to crumble and fall. The ceiling eventually collapsed under some great and terrible force, and I was again cast into the complete and utter darkness of the inner earth.
And so I remained beneath the earth for many years, wondering what it had been that had caused the destruction of my archive. Perhaps it was some terrible earthquake or act of terrorism – though why a museum would be targeted was beyond my understanding. Things had certainly changed.
After centuries of my loathsome half-existence, I found myself back upon the surface of the world. It was an earthquake that caused the earth to heave and tumble and throw me back into the sunlight of the world above, freeing me from my period of darkness and gloom.
I almost would have preferred the darkness and gloom to what came after, and I would have wept had I been able to without pain. There were no buildings anymore; what little remained had been eroded by the steady hand of the wind or been destroyed by the ultimate folly of man. Metal and stone still burned and melted, even after all this time. Scorch marks covered the earth, and I realized then what had happened to us: we had destroyed ourselves, just as the doomsayers had always said we would – and only I was there to witness it, ages after it had occurred. I was in the center of a massive crater, the walls of which I could see in the distance. The explosion or impact that had caused it had to have been immense.
It did not take long – relatively speaking - for the blowing sand to unearth hideous mummies – perfectly preserved specimens of humankind, lying dead upon the ground. A cruel, sadistic and vengeful part of me hoped that they, too, somehow maintained their consciousness, but I could tell that they hadn’t. They were as inert as I was, and their decaying eyes hinted only at death.
Time passed, and countless dark aeons rolled past me as I floated in my prison of amber, unable to move or react to the outside world – not that anything was going on. Even the mummies themselves decayed as the millennia went by. The wind carried on its dreary work, and soon even the smoking and burning buildings finally withered away into nothingness. Sand blew in from all over, and I was slowly buried again. I almost hoped for darkness this time; anything was pre
ferable to looking out upon the lifeless plain before me.
The darkness did come again, and it lasted for the longest time. But I did not forget; I remembered the folly of humanity, and cursed my memory for its edges having not been dulled by the millennia that passed me by. Not even the rats or cockroaches had survived the calamity. There was only me.
I railed and howled in mental anguish at my foul prison, but never did it respond or act. It remained as inanimate and inert as it had always been. It could not hear or understand, let alone obey, my gloomy and wrathful thoughts.
Yet my sanity stayed with me somehow – likely a damned byproduct of the hellish amber that still surrounded me. Every moment of my immortal existence remained perfectly clear, and my memory was flawless – dare I say better than it had ever been before. I wondered what kind of sin I had committed to earn this endless torment, but I was helpless against it. There was nothing I could do.
The sands eventually were blown away again, all at once in a great force that surprised me with its speed. For one who lives by the passage of millennia, great cataclysms that occur in mere minutes or seconds are terrible surprises.
But something from the space outside struck my beloved planet, the force of it sending the sand that surrounded that which surrounded me flying away. I was again exposed to the surface, and the light hurt my eyes – but I could not close them. In the distance was a plume of fire and ash. Volcanoes heaved up their molten loads all around me. From the nearest massive plume was an onrushing tide of darkness that enveloped me within minutes, my moments of vision again obscured.
For many decades the cloud surrounded me, and eventually it subsided, but my amber allowed me to see as clearly as always. My Earth was no longer recognizable; it was now a hideous atrocity that no being should ever live upon. And yet there I was, witnessing it all, immune to all its dangers.
I cursed again my immortal existence and wished for death, but death would not come. I feared it never would. I had attained that which men had killed for – and I would have killed to lose it.
As the aeons passed, I noticed that the star, our great Sol, our sun, the giver of life – had expanded and changed its colour. It was a dark red now, and I watched over uncountable years as it grew in size, swelling to fill the horizon and then the entire sky. The rocks and stone themselves that were all around me begin to burn and twist and melt, but my prison remained as it was, both it and myself unchanged.
I wished desperately that the ever-swelling star would swallow me, but my prayers were never answered. I was swallowed instead by the melting planet, my amber cell sinking into the molten ground, the star, my last hope of salvation, passing out of sight. Yet never did I feel any heat. My prison still protected me, despite my fervent wishes and prayers that it would do otherwise. I could only hope that the swelling star would finally melt the thrice-cursed amber and free me from this hell – but I harbor no such delusions.
I alone have witnessed the fall of man. I alone will endure. I alone have seen.
I alone will remain.