The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

    I cannot describe to you how I feel right now. What I’m experiencing is so detached from the normal, I’m almost convinced I’ve finally gone insane. Almost. My wife, Bea, died during childbirth. She was gorgeous, funny, intelligent – stubborn. A woman whose laugh was so loud eating in restaurants was a challenge, and whose stare was so intense it made my hands shake. I lost her, as she gave birth to our daughter. Sam. Of course, I could have resented Sam. For taking away what was once mine in a way nothing else can be. For taking what was so truly and utterly pure. But I didn’t. I knew Bea wouldn’t have wanted any resentment. She wouldn’t have wanted our only child to have a life ruined by hate. But this isn’t about grief. This isn’t about the physical sucker punch of losing forever something you loved. This is about something far more sinister. My daughter was lively, always running and screaming, leaping up an...

  I’d always thought that life functioned like a system of complex computer programs. For example, when you touch a stove, you get burnt. If you spend too much time in cold temperature, you get hypothermia. If you apply too much strain to a limb, it breaks. Every consequence is resultant from a previous action. A simple conditional statement, if you will. Now, I can’t confirm the existence or lack thereof in regards to a creator… a God, if you will. I obviously don’t have that authority. But if one were to exist… it would make sense that this is just the way that we were programmed. How the reality that we see in front of us was meant to function. Just a system of codes. But just like man-made programs, nothing’s perfect. And with such a large and complicated one like life itself, even a God would have to make mistakes… right? I can pinpoint the exact moment where it all started happening. At that moment, I wasn’t at a great spot in ...

    When I say that my roommate Jack is an amateur at directing, I’m making an understatement. I mean, going into this little project of his, he literally had no experience. I don’t know why he thought that this would be a good idea. I couldn’t tell you how his brain works, to be honest. It all began one boring night in my college dorm. It was a weeknight, and we couldn’t be fucked to get started on our assignments, so we decided to watch the Blair witch project instead. I swear, he must have been one of the last people on earth who hadn’t seen it at that point. I guess he loved it, because he wouldn’t stop talking about it afterwards. Specifically about how he could probably make something similar to it and blow up. “Fuck studying man…” I remember him saying to me. “I could do it. How hard could it be?” I tried to get him come back down to reality, but he wasn’t having it at the time. Thankfully, he ended up dropping the topic a ...

    Alright, long story short – my name is Cam and I’m a virologist. If you’ve never heard of that title, it’s just a person who studies/researches viruses and any biological agents resembling them. It’s a decent job. Pays well and keeps me interested. I’ve never really thought about pursuing anything else. That was until last night. We’ve discovered something very bad. I was part of a 5 person team in a small lab situated up in the mountains of a western European country. I’m not going to give too many specifics here. The project was spearheaded by a particularly exceptional microbiologist. Let’s call him Hathaway. Now, Hathaway had been on vacation for a while in South America. Everybody who worked closely with him or knew him well thought this was incredibly strange. I mean, the guy never took a break. However, it all made sense when he came back. He looked like absolute shit. There were heavy bags under his eyes and sc...

  Back in 2011, a man by the name of Jack Mayfeld conducted what was known discretely as “The havoc project”. I say discretely because even the participants weren’t aware of the title at first. The only person who called it this was Mayfeld himself. Everybody else was told that there was no official name. That it was just a simple experiment. I’m not going to go into how I knew the guy because that’s not all too important. All I’ll say is that it before any of this happened, I considered the guy a friend. You see, even though Mayfeld was never a secretive man, this whole thing was shrouded in mystery. Everybody, excluding himself, went in with minimal information, and they deemed the whole thing a crapshoot from the start. But I guess adding a decent amount of money into the equation was good enough to keep it going. There was a lot of confusion and speculation as to why Mayfeld even wanted to do this in the first place. He was no scientist. No re...

    Alright, before we get into any of this, let me give a quick summary in regards to how the hell we even got ourselves into this situation in the first place. You see, my buddy Cal got laid off a few months ago. He was also kicked out of his girlfriend’s place a few days later for not wanting to meet her parents or some shit. He couldn’t afford another apartment just yet, one - because his savings skills are shit and two - he insists on buying shots of Patron Silver whenever we go out. Because of this, he was staying at my box (AKA studio apartment) until he got back on his feet. He eventually did land another job. However, since it paid considerably less than his old one, he still couldn’t break rent for an actual apartment. Things were still looking bad. But one day he’d stumbled upon an ad made by a family renting out their basement in a nearby neighborhood. It was also cheap as hell. He’d pretty much made up his mind on the spot. Shit w...