"We cannot. It is part of life here. Once you have reached the age at which you must be brought home, you can no longer withstand the conditions of any world but ours. If you were to stay there, you would just be invisible. You would be unable to hear anyone, see him or her, or interact with them at any level. They would think you had disappeared. Only, you would watch them grieve you, you would watch their pain, and you would not able to do anything. This is the only place that you can survive."
"Well, let me stay there and die..." He choked out, wishing the light would just go. "It has to be better than this..."
The voice hissed, "You will not speak ill of your home!" He yelled. Jack hadn't meant to insult the source of the voice, but he did not care much, as it felt to him as though there were a thousand people pounding on the inside of his skull.
"I don't want to beleive you." Jack whispered.
There was a very long silence as Jack tried harder and harder to control his breathing.
"Jack, ask any questions you have now. For in a few moments you will be unable to ask them, nor hear the answers."
Jack panicked. His mind was screaming at him not to believe it. And he would have ignored everything, but the pain was too convincing. What about the voice? What about the darkness, and the light, and the facts, and the grip around his body? If he were dreaming, he wouldn't be able to feel the things he was feeling.
"So everything... nothing was ever real?"
"Yes. It was all a creation of yours."
"Like what?"
"Well, you created the person, the human existance is yours. You created how they move, breath, see, think, hear, taste... all of it."
"I did that?" Jack was bewildered.
"Yes. You created God." The voice added. "That is why... I could not be God. Because, there simply is not a God. It's in your mind."
"I still don't understand... how I could have done that..."
"Every world that has been created by our young have had three things in common: it always has its own language, life form, and atmosphere. The rest is just arbitrary chimerical things made to fill voids, or create them, in your world. You made everything up."
"Wow," Jack managed. "So... who am I really?" He asked, desperate to know before, as the voice had warned, the pain turned him into nothing.
"You do not have a name."
Justin had never felt so lost; he wanted the voice to suddenly start laughing. He wanted him to say that it was a joke, that he was still on Earth and he had just been kidnapped. He would not care if he was told that he had been injected with poison and was being held hostage by dangerous criminals. It would be more believeable and easier to face than what he was currently being told.
"This isn't real, this isn't real, this isn't real..." He repeated desperately as his mind felt even more compressed. "This is a dream."
"Dreams are not real either. You do not eat, you do not sleep, and you do not dream. Nothing is real."
"No... it is... it is real." Justin cried.
"You are not real. Reach, feel your face."
Justin did as he was told, slowly moving his shaking hand toward his face. He screamed. There was nothing there. There was nothing for his hand to touch. There was no hand to touch with. Jack wasn't sure why he was still hurting, if there was nothing to have pain in.
"That Human figure you knew, it is not real." The voice boomed.
"Do-do I have a face or what?"
"You are not anything. Soon you will be nothing."
"I'll be air?"
"No, air is another creation of your mind. You'll be NOTHING."
Jack screamed again as another wave of pain shocked him.
"So, every one of 'us', grew up in a different world that we created in our minds?"
"Yes, I think you have got it."
"What do I do here?" He cringed.
"Well, nothing. You wonder and wander in the dark. Soon all the knowledge of who you are and where you are, of our world, will come to you, and you will be rid of all memories of your Earth world."
"No! Is there a choice? Can I go back?" He gasped desperately, as it became even harder to breath.
"No, you have no choice. We will continue to analyze your pre- reality years and use parts of them. Someday we will live on that perfect world."
"How long do I live?"
"There is no such thing as a 'life span'. You go on forever. You have no concept of time. And your only method of communication is a form of telepathy."
"How-what-when-where-why-but-whoooo." Strange noises were escaping from Jack.
"You are starting to loose speech capabilities."
But Jack couldn't make out the words that the voice had said, he was spinning and twisting and shrinking.
"Good luck." Said the voice.
He was plunged, once again, into total darkness... as the light that had once surrounded him seemed to evaporate with his memories... There was a quiet weightlessness about him now.
He had no final thoughts no closing words. No one to say goodbye to. No one to say goodbye to him. It was as the voice has said, there was no one who cared for him in reality.
There was nothing around him, nothing in him.
He was nothing. Now, he roamed about in all the nothing.
Hearing nothing. Seeing nothing.
Being nothing.
