Omega (52) "I live round here!" I exclaimed to Beta. "This is where I've lived all my life! My house isn't at all far. Look at all the destruction!" Beta squeezed my hand with sympathy. "Shall we see how your house is?" "I'm not sure I can bear to see it! It'll probably be a ruin like all these others." I indicated the houses with collapsed roofs, broken windows, charred brickwork and dismantled hedges. A crack of lightening launched itself onto the ground at the end of a nearby cul-de-sac releasing the smell of burning wood and followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder that echoed loudly across the roofs of semi-detached houses. It lit up a street scene of discarded rubbish, broken television aerials, shattered cars and what appeared to be another body lying on the drive of the house we were standing outside. At about the same time, a huge droplet of water splattered my face and stung as it trailed down my cheek. "I don't think we'll have much choice. It looks like it'll start raining again. We'll need to find some shelter!" I nodded. "It's only a couple of streets away. Perhaps it'll be alright!" I breathed in deeply. I feared the worst, but could see no choice as more raindrops fell on us, accompanied by flashes of lightening and rumbles of thunder. "Let's run!" Urged Beta. "Come on!" "Yes, we must!" I agreed, still grasping Beta's hand and dashing along the streets neighbouring mine. Along Orchard Drive, past Cherry Tree Close and Poplar Avenue, around the corner of Meadow Crescent, and straight into my own street - roads I remembered more for their relative location than for anything in them that I could actually recognise. As we ran, past and through puddles, dodging cars parked extremely badly in the middle of the road, the refrain of thunder and lightening urged us on our way together with the constant beating of rain not yet in full torrent. As we ran along we heard a roar approaching us from the sky, louder than any crash of thunder, and then, speeding just yards above our heads, just skimming over the ruined roofs of the houses, was a jet plane, its lighted fuselage easily visible. It was gone as soon as it came, the roar of its engines still getting progressively louder after the jet had shot off into the distance. A more persistent roar of helicopter gunships followed behind it, visible like a swarm of dark bees against the white electric glow of the lightening-illuminated sky. Our immediate concern however was the rain which had broken into a heavier more persistent patter. And then we were in my own road and ahead of us I could see my home. It stood out distinct from the other houses, including that which was the other half of the semi-detached block, not only from its long history of familiarity, but also by its unusual intactness. All the other houses were charred and ruined, but mine was as I had left it. The hedge remained intact, the dustbins standing, the windows unbroken and, most surprisingly of all, amongst all the darkness of the Suburbs, was the distinct luminescent aura of light generating from an upstairs window. "I don't remember leaving a light on!" I gasped, as we hesitated at the gate. "How can it be a light? There's no electricity! You don't have your own power generator?" "No," I said puzzled. "I don't know what it can be!" We dashed to the front door which was closed and secure, and stood under the porch as the rain finally ceased its teasing, and culminated in a heavy outburst. A wall of rain surrounded the house, obscuring visibility, and making escape impossible. I took my keys out of my pocket, and applied them to the locks securing the door. After a few moments, the door was open and we were in the darkness of the hallway. Instinctively, I clicked on the hallway light, but there was no response. "The electricity has been cut!" I exclaimed. "So what's the light from upstairs?" Beta asked. I shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know. I really don't know." "We'll have to find out." I agreed. There appeared to be no choice. The timpani of rain beat against the windows and the front door porch. Despite the dark, we navigated to the foot of the staircase, which wound up to the upstairs landing, and gingerly walked up. When we were half way up the carpeted stairs, and just by a vase of flowers on a table, we could see the ruin of the Suburbs through the landing window. Helicopters and jets were gathered over the Suburban roofs, and even through the cracks of thunder we could hear the din of their engines and more ominously the crackle of rocket fire. A sequence of bright lights shot out of the jet's nose, followed by explosions and a column of flame rising from whatever it had shot. The jet arched up in a loop and disappeared off in the distance, while another jet roared in from another direction. The landing was partially lit by two sources of light. One was the occasional flash of white light from the electric storm, and the other came through the rectangular door jamb of my bedroom which was where the mysterious source of light came from. "What is it?" I wondered. "It's the Truth!" Beta asserted. "I just know it. I'm certain of it!" "The Truth! Here in my home? All along? It can't be!" However even as I stated my doubts, I felt a strange feeling of certainty. Yes. It was the Truth. What I had been searching for the last week. The Truth. It was here. In my bedroom. I don't know from where this feeling of certainty came. It was nothing in the aura of light, which resembled nothing more than the normal light of a bedroom in a dark hallway, but something that seemed to emerge from deep inside me. It was a certainty born of the Truth itself which dispelled any uncertainty or doubt. Beta and I approached the bedroom door. I pushed it open, and we looked inside at a room transformed not in any particular detail, no part of it at all different from when I had left, but now possessed of a new quality and essence that I was sure had never been there before. And the source and immanent possessor of this quality was the Truth itself. "It's here! We've found it! At last! Now everything will be alright again. Things will never again be bad! All the world's problems since the beginning of time and for eternity have found their solution!" I eulogised to Beta, who like me focused her eyes intently and unblinkingly on the Truth. There suddenly came another roar of jet plane engines, getting louder and louder by the microsecond, and then without warning a sudden jarring crash. The fabric of the house shuddered and then collapsed in on itself. The ceiling crashed down onto the floor, the television aerial and chimney plunging through the roof, through the plaster of the ceiling and, then, along with the rest of the room including ourselves into a pile of rubble on the foundations of the building. Like a light being turned off, or a fire being extinguished, the aura of the Truth vanished in the destruction as our bodies were covered with our blood and brought down with the weight of my home's walls and plaster. As Beta and I collapsed under a pile of masonry we knew, with the same certainty we had when we'd seen the Truth, that it was now destroyed. Its fragments scattered forever, to the four winds, from the beginning to the end of time, from the greatest galaxy to the smallest boson, from alpha to omega. Epilogue And in the end we survived. We were found in the ruins of my house buried under the rubble, soaked in blood and rain, protected from the worst of the damage by the mattress and pillows of my bed. Beta and I were repaired, along with the Suburbs, and now live together in married bliss in the Suburban avenues where I was always destined to spend the rest of my life. Beta is now a normal Suburban housewife, indistinguishable from all the others, and I commute each day to work to provide for my home and family. The Suburbs were restored to their former state. Houses were rebuilt, the streets were cleaned, the electricity and telephone lines were reconnected, and the television aerials replaced on the roofs. Beyond the Suburbs, the country gradually repaired itself from the chaos, but not without some political cost. The Red Government was ousted by a coalition of the White, Blue, Black and Illicit Parties which rewrote the constitution to justify its seizure of power. This fragile stability didn't last for very long. In a succession of suspicious elections and power-broking, first the White and then the Black Parties were ousted from the coalition, their departures not being long followed by them being banned, like the Red and Green Parties before them. Within a year, the Blue Party was also ousted and became similarly illegal, and the country became a nominally independent Illiberal Socialist Republic - an independence which was not to last for very long. The Truth remained lost. All mention of it was purged from Illiberal Socialist doctrine and no record remains that it had ever been the subject of a quest. The official history of the Illiberal Socialist Revolution does not even have a footnote dedicated to the great pursuit, and indeed it is as if it had never happened. The quest for the Truth continues as before. Nobody would ever believe us that it has in fact already been discovered and has now been destroyed. It is now, as it had always been, a timeless and possibly insoluble enigma.
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