Also available on r/nosleep.
Do you know much about Plato’s allegory of the cave? I’ve always found it to be a fascinating thought experiment. It’s worth mentioning that the old philosopher used it merely as a tool to bridge a gap in his theory of Forms, but it’s a very appropriate metaphor for something I’ve come across not a few days ago. I’ll explain the gist of it as we go along.
I got to work on Friday as I always do - with a box of donuts and a cup of hot coffee in tow. There are few things that can disrupt my workflow at the Institute, but overwhelming government presence certainly is one of them.
In the lobby waiting was a group of what I instantly recognised to be fellow eggheads, surrounded by a wall of muscled-out military types. I tried passing by without much fuss when one of them referred to me by name. It was me who they had been waiting for.
The research I have specialised in is that of colour perception and integration; over the course of the last few years, I’ve been making attempts at creating light of the so-called “impossible” colour.
Impossible or forbidden colours are essentially colours that cannot be perceived in the normal seeing of light (which is, in itself, a combination of various intensities of the various available frequencies of visible light). All the same, these “impossible” colours are reliably reported to be seen under special circumstances.The easy way of doing so is to trick your brain’s visual cortex into mixing the incoming colour signals from each of your eyes, really. The hard way - which is what I’ve been interested in - would be possible if we could set the output strengths of the human retina to values that cannot be produced by exposing it to any of the normally available seeing conditions.
Finding a way of attaining these unusual conditions has been my biggest problem, though I did write a fair number of essays on how something like that could theoretically be accomplished.
As soon as the eggheads started talking, I knew that they must have read some of my work, judging by their vocabulary. Coming from an aptly-named government subsidiary (Prisma), these people were thrilled to have come across a sort of material which they believed may have been what I was looking for. The chief scientist proudly knocked on the rugged silver suitcase he had been carrying all along.
Their idea was to combine my proprietary technology with their lensing material, so as to try and create an impossible spectrum of light - to make it possible, in essence.
To say that I was thrilled at the prospect of making it happen would be an understatement. I dropped the donuts and the coffee with the guard, pushed my way through the military dudes and led the Russian-sounding scientists toward my lab. I walked fast.
The excitement was tangible in the air.
As the machine - a spindly-looking and whirring room-sized monstrosity with numerous entry points for various types of luminescent objects - sprung to life, the chief Prisma scientist opened the suitcase with the utmost respect for its content. Inside, slotted into a form-fitting groove, was a thin, membrane-like object. Its colouring was impeccable: it looked as if it was black and blue at the same time, along with a sheen of rich mahogany that rippled across its surface once every few seconds. The scientist picked it up, only for it to become clear to me that this was, in fact, a seemingly organic, jelly-looking substance.
“If what I believe is correct,” said he: “then we’ll only be needing a single UV light tube, preferably a thicker one at that.”
I happened to have just the right thing for the job, but to be quite frank, the man could’ve asked for a pony-shaped incandescent bulb and I’d probably have it somewhere around the office.
The mounting process took us a better part of an hour, and just as we were getting ready to fire it off, they had me sign an NDA.
“Sure,” I said, too excited to think about the implications.
The allegory of the cave features a group of tied-down prisoners who are set up so as to stare at a wall and have never been outside the cave. From somewhere above and behind them, is a hole leading to the outside world, and from it, various shadows of things moving outside are cast onto the wall, like those of trees, people or animals.
Since the prisoners have never been given the chance to leave their cave, and have only ever been exposed to shadows of things, they will recognise what these shadows represent and refer to them as such. The shadow of a dog will, for example, be a dog, and the shadow of a box will like so be a box to the prisoners.
The thing is, even though the actual objects may well be discernible to prisoners by their appropriate shadows, these people don’t know their true, objective forms. They just see their projections via diffused sunlight or some other source of light which casts these shadows on the wall. To put it in simple terms: the prisoners have no contact whatsoever with the true, objective reality of their situation.
So, with all of that in mind, what happens when the prisoners are turned around and allowed to peer outside the cave?
The gelatinous membrane twitched slightly as I flipped the UV switch. At first, nothing happened, but it didn’t take long for the first flash of impossible light to appear. It came in dashes, as the ceiling-suspended membrane started convulsing and erratically changing colours that were ranging from red to green, from blue to yellow. In but a few minutes, we were facing something indescribable.
It was beautiful, completely unknowable. The stuff that Nobel-winning dissertations are written about.
With wide smiles stretching across their faces, the three scientists started clapping in excitement before suggesting that we should try and expose something to the light, to see if any particular reaction might take place.
We tried exposing objects of all sorts at first, though nothing interesting happened until we brought a mouse in front of the dazzling luminescence.
By peering outside their cave, according to Plato, the prisoners would be exposed to things beyond their wildest imaginations. The true, infinitely more fascinating forms of the things they had spent all their lives staring at. It would be nothing short of a complete paradigm shift - like the discovery of a new geometrical dimension or some such.
It sounds marvelous at first, but marvel would likely be the last thing on your mind if you learned that the reality you had been interacting with all your life was merely a shadow of what truly lies beyond.
Prisoners would either turn around and escape to the safety of their cave or risk going batshit insane. That’s just how the human mind works - it’s not quite as malleable as we like to believe.
The light meshed with the mouse immediately. We thought it to be a mirage of some type at first; an unknown visual interference produced by the impossible light.
When exposed, the small white mouse looked as if he was floating just a few millimeters above the floor of his cage. An odd, gooey-seeming aura enveloped him whole like thick oil as he started convulsing and twitching in directions I had never thought were even possible.
After twenty minutes of careful observation, we decided to switch the light off to see what permanent effects did it have on the poor rodent, only to see him run around completely unharmed and seemingly quite content, in fact. This just went further to confirm our suspicion that it was nothing if not an undocumented visual artifacting brought about by a newly-prototyped sort of light.
The true nature of what we had seen didn’t become apparent until one of the Prisma guys decided to take a step into the light himself.
My understanding of Plato’s allegory of the cave may well be faulty for I’m no philosopher myself, but I believe that he was trying to say that even though we may acquire concepts from our perception of physical objects, we mustn’t expect that to be the true state of things independent from our blissfully limited sensational apparatus.
Mankind has, from the get-go, been developing and evolving so as to comprehend the world around us in a way that’s simple enough for our brains to process, and it’s really not much of a stretch to believe that our senses show us the amount that’s not likely to fry us top to bottom.
There’s more to the world than we know. So, so much more.
As one of the scientists stepped underneath the jelly-amplified UV light, he got lifted off the ground by just a tiny bit and got exposed to the same oil-looking substance as his mousy predecessor did. This time, however, the effect was far more dramatic.
Instead of twitching and convulsing, the scientist got twisted completely in a thoroughly disgusting manner, though still capable of normal, articulated speech without so much as a hitch on his end. I wanted to pull the plug before the undulations of the man’s horribly contorted body pushed me to empty my stomach, when my compatriot in science pointed at something.
In the mess that was the light-exposed scientist was something we could focus on, though just barely, and not for long at a time. Like shadows, almost, were versions of him - some of them upside-down, some floating horizontally, some jutting at mind-numbing angles, but they were all projections of the same person.
It was at that point that the lead scientist had what seemed to be a ‘eureka’ moment. He called for his co-worker to come and step out of the light for a moment.
As soon as he did, just like the mouse, he was normal again. According to him, there had been nothing wrong with him at all, aside from odd and abrupt jumps of perspective he reported to have been experiencing.
Before nudging him back under the light, the lead instructed the unlikely subject of our experiments to try and measure his temperature with a medical thermometer we gave him.
We waited for a few minutes until the guy called out: “I can’t get a read of this.”
“How do you mean, you can’t?” I asked.
“It’s- it’s- no, this can’t be.”
“What’s wrong, Vyeko?” said his co-worker.
“It’s every temperature all at once. Every single one.”
After that, we gathered every measuring instrument we could find before mounting them onto poor Vyeko, only for each and every one of them to show us - everything.
“Think about the parallels,” said the chief scientist: “Why do the instruments show everything, from absolutes to moderates? How is it possible unless- unless what we’ve witnessed here is the underlying truth of existence - the potentiality.”
“Come on,” I said half-jokingly: “You can’t possibly prove something as esoteric as that!”
“Oh, you’ve not met Kozlov, have you? It’s just a matter of time. I’m particularly interested in whether our cognizance was developed deliberately so as to avoid being aware of this phenomenon. Are there dangers in being exposed to it? Plus, don’t tell anyone, but this isn’t the only piece of evidence I have. Maybe I’ll bring the rest along next time we meet.”
He was sure he would prove his hypothesis eventually.
At the end of the day, we had a fair few theories on what strange anomaly we found ourselves to explore, and agreed on Prisma dropping by the Institute for a future cooperation. Vyeko was especially thrilled and voiced his wishes for us to use him as a test subject wherever possible.The four of us had a fair few laughs, shared a lunch and exchanged notes with a promise of meeting again sometime in the near future.
Up until that point, it had been one of the best days of my life. I never saw it coming, I swear. I’m not sure if I was stupid or too fascinated by the sheer strangeness of the whole thing, but I missed it completely.
It wasn’t until I passed by the mouse’s cage after the scientists had left that I heard a soft crunch and an unnervingly familiar sound of flesh twisting and turning. I turned to see the mouse convulsing yet again, albeit this time without any interaction with impossible light. There was no oily liquid, no floating, and the poor animal kept twitching at an increasing pace until it exploded into innumerable bits of bone and viscera.
I stood there for a moment, thinking about what the hell happened when I heard a much bigger, louder and more violent sound than I ever have: an explosion. On an impulse, I ran outside to see my visitors’ SUV strewn burning across the street just as it drove out of the courtyard. It was a particularly devastating explosion, with much more wounded than one would expect there to be.
That’s not the part that worried me, though. But rather the fact that there was something shining an odd shine from the resulting fire, bathing the passers-by in small yet very tangible bursts of impossible light.
Twenty-five were exposed on that day. Including me. Nothing’s happened so far, except for a Prisma official reaching out and telling me to take as much time off work as I can and barricade myself into my home to the best of my abilities.
I still didn’t believe in the theory of potentiality. Not until this morning, that is, when I saw dozens of me brushing our teeth at the same time, all slightly differently from one another, all just barely visible. I wonder if the rest of the people who got exposed feel the same way.
