A
man dressed in an unusually looking outfit stood at the
Central Control Panel. Looking in front of himself, he held
a laser tape with an old video on it. The cover of the tape’s
box had a surrealistic image that looked like a mixture
of both painting and photography. He glanced at it briefly
and got the tape out of the box. Then he inserted it into
the computer in front of him, and closed his tired eyes
for a brief moment. The TV monitor suddenly started making
some kind of sizzling noise, and through the bad vision
caused by the distorted band waves, jamming lines suddenly
started running down the screen. The tube's annoying sounds
reached Morphus' ears when he started barely hear some words
coming out of the set.
"Mr.
Za, some people say that all this 'Lalaland' story is nothing
more than a fruit of your own imagination. Is it true? What
is the 'Lalaland' story and what is its significance? Can
you tell us what you have told me, and if you get tired
along the way, for I know that that’s a long story, I’ll
continue with what I can remember from what you have told
me?", a news-anchor and host of the Galaxy Show from the
Galaxy Union’s channel, was asking a man comfortably sitting
in the armchair. The latter posed for a second, exhaled
and whispered with a deep voice:
"They say that no one really knows exactly when and how
this story began and when, if ever, it is going to end.
Hence those that knew are dead, and those that will know
have not been born yet, and thus, have no fate written for
them yet. As far back as I remember, it all started in the
Old World at the second half of the 21th Century. The place
where I was born was known to the others living away from
it, as an Evil Empire, though, many of us called it Zuyos
Melikha, or simply Zuymel.
"Mr.Za,
could you explain to us what is it you are holding in your
hands?" the newscaster asked. "This is my canvas"
Mr.Za replied. "What do you mean?" the newscaster
questioned the man in front of him. "I mean that I
am an artist and in order for me to remember the story better
and to explain things to you more realistically I need to
visualize these events again. It reads my thoughts and applies
my artistic interpretation of the events using my artistic
styles to convey them on the Sensory Canvas, the latest
technology available to us today, if you will. The blank
canvas takes upon my artistic styles and various mediums
that I used to utilize and renders them visually. "How
are you connected to it?" the newscaster asked. "Remotely,
via these sensors that I attach to my head. They read my
electronic pulses in my brain and interpret them to the
Sensory Canvas that you see here" Mr.Za said.
My childhood memories are the only witnesses to the events
that took place at that time in Zuymel. Whether I twisted
the story, or not, is for no one to know, for this is the
way I remember it, and this is the way it will be told and
remembered.