Fools’ experiments

An old man, with a characteristically bushy white beard, appeared amidst the chaos produced by a large number of people fleeing from a building in flames. He was wearing a complete Victorian outfit and he didn’t seem to be startled by his sudden appearance in this scene. After looking around for a few seconds, he asked:

“What is this time, my Lord? Will I find answers inside that building being evacuated?”

Without waiting for an answer, the man straightened his clothes and proceeded to walk toward the burning building. 

Ignoring the survivors running through him, he pondered aloud:

“First, the main question: where and when? The sign in the street reads Luxted Road, good one, oh Almighty. Your sense of humour never ceases to bewilder me!”

Focusing again on the scared mass of humanity surrounding him, he resumed his musings.

“The main language spoken by these poor souls fleeing the place is English, although it is not easy to pick up an accent behind all this shouting and screaming.” 

He stopped and noticed several vehicles in the middle of the street, parked haphazardly in front of the building, with bright lights and noisy sirens.

“Mmmm, those must be police cars… My last successful missions told me that plenty of information can be extracted from the observation of such vehicles. ” 

He paced around one of the police cars, oblivious of the officer shouting orders and calling the fire department next to him. 

“The plaque reads ‘Explore Minnesota… 10,000 lakes…’ Continental US it is, then. About the when…”. He looked around, paying special attention to the people in the street. Several had small rectangular devices in their hands, casting a bluish light to their faces, many pointing the dark side of the device towards the building. Others were talking to the device with the building at their backs.

The face of the old man lit up with delight.

“Aaaaah, those must be these new apparatus that all the new arrivals in Heaven are missing terribly! Smartephones! My Lord, it would be really helpful if you could provide me with one…”

He waited for a few seconds, and after nothing happened, he let out a loud sigh, resigned.

“It’s this kind of test, then.” 

He approached a young woman, holding her Smartephone in front of her face and saying loudly “O EM GEEEEE, guys, I was just sleeping and I heard an alarm and I had to come running out of my apartment and there was lots of smoke and I could barely breathe, please share and follow me on insta for more updates! At Mary Janesi underscore boss bitch sixty-nine. BYEEEEE!”

Peeking over her shoulder, he could see that the front part of the Smartephone was showing the face of the girl with the building in flames behind, acting like sort of a mirror. But the woman in the device had big red eyes and cat ears, and there was text, rapidly changing, imposed over the image.

“This must be a visual recording of the present…” 

Visibly amazed, the Victorian man tried to make sense of all the information on the front of the device, constantly changing. Lots of small letters in boxes appeared on the lower half of the screen, and the woman was pressing them incredibly fast with her thumbs, generating text with this process. He could make some sense of the language, similar to English but with a plethora of unknown words:

“My bro was wasted AF in the basement

Recording a jackass vid

With Josh and Evan and other dumb mfs

Do you think it might be their fault?

I hope he is all right tho”

The woman pressed a small button on the side of the Smartephone and the front went black. The girl was about to pocket it, but the device made a sound and the woman quickly looked at it. The gadget illuminated and, before the woman summoned the small letters in boxes again, the old man was able to read an inscription displaying “01:33 08 22 2015”.

“Assuming that the first part represents the hours and the minutes, which matches with this fresh summer night, and taking notice that North Americans follow strange conventions with respect to their date format, I will happily conclude that today is the twenty-second of August of 2015. Thanks for your assistance, young lady.”

The girl, oblivious to the old man’s words, kept furiously scribbling on her Smartephone.
 
“Now, let’s see if the word ‘basement’ on the young lady’s tool is a clue or just a red herring.”

By then, all the tenants seemed to be evacuated from the building and two fire trucks were arriving at the scene. Despite having seen similar scenes during his multiple trips to Earth, the Victorian man was always surprised about how the world had evolved since his heart attack and subsequent painful death in 1882. He observed for a few minutes the frantic activity of the firefighters, but as it looked like the apartment building would be ablaze for some time, he decided to move on with his investigation.

He stepped into a large hall that looked like the gates of hell, and walked through the burning inferno, unscathed by the flames, until he found the stairs. He had to pass through the debris, as parts of the stairwell were already collapsing, but that didn’t cause any difficulty to his ethereal body. When he finally reached the basement, he found a long hallway with several door frames, all the doors consumed by the fire. 

“Now, where did all this mess start?”

One of the door frames on his right looked more like a giant hole rather than a square, with parts of the metallic frame broken outwards. 

The gentleman walked towards the destroyed door, and, keeping his mind focused on being more substantial, was able to knock gently on the wall. He poked his head through the door and asked:

“Hello? Anybody here?”

Five pairs of phantasmagorical eyes stared at him, clearly confused.

The Victorian man, looking pleased with himself, gladly announced:

“So it seems I finally found the origin!”

He walked inside the room, which was utterly destroyed by a big explosion and the subsequent deflagration. Pieces of rubble, broken objects beyond the point of recognition and charred bits of bone were scattered through the place. Some of those objects were even embedded into the walls and the ceiling. The Victorian man strolled inside the room, randomly inspecting some spots, until he stopped next to a wall where something was poking out of the burnt plaster. 

Pointing at it, he turned towards the eyes floating in the middle of the room, and explained, with a clear lecturing tone:

“How exciting! This, gentlemen, is a tooth. Richard Owen, one of my mentors and, later, one of my more fervent detractors, firmly believed that we can identify any species just by looking at its teeth. And this tooth belongs, if I’m not mistaken, to a Homo sapiens. More specifically, used to belong to one of you.” 

The five sets of eyes looked at each other, still confused.

“Now, if you can please humour me, would you focus on your material form so I can address you with the respect that you properly deserve? I’m perfectly aware that this situation will seem really disturbing and confusing for you, but once you are able to anchor yourselves in the present reality everything will start to make sense.”

Slowly, five human shapes started to appear around the eyes, finally settling in the form of five, if slightly transparent, young men.

The bearded man, visibly satisfied, summoned with a twist of his wrist six comfortable armchairs. He sat in one of them, while inviting the recently appeared ghosts to take a seat.

“Much better! Let me start our impromptu meeting by explaining my purpose here: 
Our Almighty creator, apart from being omnipotent and omniscient, is also a quite hilarious entity. In my lifetime, I gained some fame from my research on living beings, especially due to my most successful book and the theory behind it. Since I passed away, this knowledge has expanded, even exploded, if you allow me this little joke. The most beautiful and most wonderful studies have been, and are being, evolved from it. Alas, in recent times, my name has also been associated with particular kinds of accidents, which have the potential to limit the probabilities of the individual -” 

At that point he paused, gesturing at the group of recently deceased.   

“... or individuals suffering them, to produce descendants. To be honest, when I found out I reacted quite negatively to it, even bitterly. But then, our Lord, blessed be its infinite wisdom, proposed to me a sort of a game, in order to tame my pride, but also to allow me a deeper contact with the ever-mutating society. I will be sent to Earth to witness the consequences of some of the most spectacular displays of these ‘accidents’, with the condition that I must unravel the circumstances behind such misfortunes.”

The ending of his verbose monologue was followed by a pregnant silence. One of the young ghosts slowly raised one hand.

“Yes?”

“Are we dead? Are you Charles Darwin? Were the mines still working?”

“Oh my, aren’t you a clever man? The answer to your holy trinity of questions, I’m afraid to say, is: yes. Although I need more context to possibly answer the last question. Would you be so kind to entertain my infamous curiosity by recounting the unfortunate chain of events that lead to your demise? I would start with the introductions, please, adding information that can help me understand your current situation.”

The man that raised his hand began:

“Hi, sir, my name is Brandon. I live in this place…” He looked around, seeming to notice the destruction for the first time. “Lived in this place with my sister Jane, and I sometimes came to this basement with my buds here to get lit and record videos like Jackass.”

“I think I saw your sister outside, using her Smartephone device.”

“Smartphone”, one of the yet unnamed apparitions added.

“Aaah, my mistake, smartphone, yes, not Smartephone. I got it wrong all this time. Mmmmm, there are some things that still escape my comprehension… Videos like Jackass? I’m not familiar with this certainly modern meaning of the jackass word. And… Get lit?”

Another of the ghosts answered:

“Maybe I can explain it. Josh here. Getting lit means having some drinks and sometimes smoking weed and, on special occasions like tonight, doing a little of the hard stuff… And the Jackass stuff all started with this crew that got really famous doing crazy shit and pranks and getting fucked up in their movies. So we record ourselves doing stupid shit like jumping from a bridge or lighting our balls on fire, just to make people laugh-”

Darwin was astonished, wordless, staring at the recently deceased guys with a mix of awe and repulsion. 

“Or to make money!” The dead young man that corrected Darwin about the smartphones interrupted. “I’m Tony, I work as a joiner for a company that mostly does contracts for the military, mister Darwin. Installing window panes and shit. Anyway, like I was saying, if enough people watch our videos we can get paid for it, and you see, I had a wicked idea while I was at work, ‘cause I saw these guys blowing up defective land mines. Like the ones used in wars and shit. They had boxes full of the stuff. Most of them didn’t even explode, and some just did a small puff and some smoke and a small explosion… Nothing too bad I thought…”

“Ahhh, here is starting to make sense!” Darwin exclaimed, although by his face it looked like this was an exaggeration.

“Yo, Charlie, you don’t even know the best part yet, man!” An excited ghost interjected. “Name’s Evan, but never mind bro, I’m just telling you Tony here is a fucking genius! So he managed to steal a box of mines, right? Yo, Tony is like a fucking ninja, going there in the night all sneaky and shit. Then, he got this idea of playing Russian Twister, you know like the Twister game and Russian roulette?”

Darwin, struggling to follow Evan’s explanation, replied:

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with either concept, my young fellow.”

“My turn! I’m Dave, big fan of yours, sir. Haven’t read your books but watched all the docos from your friend David Attin… David Attenbra… Attenbruh? They are rad, all those birds doing crazy fucked up things to get laid. Anyway, Russian roulette is a game when you put only one bullet in a revolving gun and you spin the cartridge and you bet if you will get killed by the next shot, crazy mofos those ruskies, aye? And Twister is a game where you have big colored circles on a mat and you spin an arrow and get a random color and everybody has to place their foot or hand in a circle of the same color. Then you get another color and everybody has to put another hand or feet in another of the big dots. So everybody gets fucked up and falls and the last one standing without missing any color wins. It’s kinda lame but Tony thought that we can paint them shit mines with different colors and play Twister on th-”

Dave was interrupted by Darwin’s big booming laughter, soon to be joined by all the young dead. After a few seconds of unstoppable guffawing, Darwin managed to regain some control over himself.

“Now, it’s only a matter of finding out why the whole building is in flames, but this part will be easy. I guess this was a boiler room, or there were some gas pipes affected by the explosion, or something els-”. Shortly after saying gas pipes, time stopped for everything except for the six spectres, and the whole reality slowly faded away, until only a faintly lit void remained. The quintet of dead young men were speechless for once, until Darwin resumed his conversation with the group, while walking them towards a distant light:

“Gentlemen, please allow me to congratulate your exotic little revelry for being the most amazing display of human stupidity that I have ever feasted my eyes upon. You certainly deserve the so-called Darwin’s award. Now, young Dave, would you be so kind to tell me more about David Attenbruh and his birds? I haven’t really met this gentleman but I heard only good things about him. You see, I was interested in the art of breeding pigeons…”