Tuesday. Ordinarily, it's just another cog in the relentless machine of the week, a day neither remarkable for its joys nor its sorrows. Most Tuesdays dissipate like mist in the morning sun, leaving no lasting impression. But April 3rd was different, violently so. It's a date seared into my very being, a permanent scar on the timeline of my life. That Tuesday marked a catastrophic turning point, a day when the familiar trajectory of my existence, my family's future, and indeed, the fate of the entire world, was irrevocably and shockingly altered. The change, when it came, was abrupt and without the slightest hint of foreshadowing, a sudden cleaving of reality itself. I would soon learn I was alone in this experience.
The morning of the 3rd had unfolded with a deceptive and almost painful normalcy. The well-worn routine began at 5:30 AM, with the gentle, but persistent, rousing of my eldest son, a 16-year-old for whom the early hours were a form of mild torture. Each day, I delivered the same quiet lecture, a reminder of the growing responsibilities that came with approaching adulthood. By 6:00 AM, he was gone, a silhouette disappearing down the street toward the bus stop, leaving me to steal a few more precious, fleeting moments of sleep before the next wave of activity. At precisely 7:00 AM, my wife and I would rise, embarking on the carefully orchestrated ballet of preparing our two younger children for their school day. It was a practiced dance, a testament to years of shared mornings.
Our 15-year-old son, already exhibiting a fierce independence that bordered on self-sufficiency, navigated his morning preparations with minimal intervention. Our 13-year-old daughter, however, still required transport, a task, and a privilege, that I gladly accepted. After the flurry of farewells and the carefully timed departures, I'd drop her at school and navigate the quiet streets back to the tranquil haven of my home office. The privilege of working remotely, a now-commonplace perk in the world of Information Technology, eliminated the soul-crushing daily commute. Companies, in a rare display of enlightened self-interest and financial pragmatism, had embraced the remote work model, significantly reducing their overhead in the process. I had just finished my second call of the day, a mundane discussion about backups. A brief, almost unnerving calm had descended. And then, without warning, the world changed.
I sat, frozen, captivated by the impossible spectacle of the floating window. My mind raced, desperately trying to recall every detail of last night's dinner. Surely, something I'd eaten could explain this vivid hallucination.
"What? Wait—what?" Robert stammered, his voice thick with shock and his mind reeling, utterly unable to process what he'd just heard.
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"Stop! You don't understand; there must be some mistake!" Robert cried out, his voice rising in panic, his hands shaking uncontrollably. "I can't leave—I have a wife and three children!"
"Wait, please, listen! There has to be another way, some other solution! How can you claim to be perfect and still choose someone with a family, with young children who desperately need him? To tear him away forever, a lifetime of separation, just to coldly observe their reactions? It doesn't make any sense!"
"What am I supposed to do? Just... what? Explain that to me!" Robert's voice, once pleading, now cracked with a rising tide of anger and desperation. "You're telling me I have six months, a mere six months, to prepare to abandon my family forever, and you expect me to just... calmly accept that? Is that your 'perfect' plan?"
"And those so-called governing principles—were they established by whom, exactly?" Robert demanded, his voice low and controlled, but laced with barely contained anger.
"I see. So, if you're the ultimate authority, the one who makes the rules," Robert pressed, his voice edged with a defiant skepticism, probing for any hint of weakness, "why can't you simply change them?"
