"Vivek, how's Bart's neural activity going?" asked the fat man who wore glasses and had a thin beard around his mouth, giving the impression of dirt created by oily hands rubbing against shiny skin.

He barely finished his question when a red alert covered the touch screen in front of his colleague, seated to the right.

"What's going on?" he asked again and glanced quickly in Vivek's direction, the thin wire frames of his glasses bouncing off his crooked nose.

"The vibrations of the crystal have increased beyond normal, and the resonance inside Bart's skull is not optimal," answered the young man with the narrow head and large ears.

The tone of his voice was uncertain, wavering between offering a suggestion about what he should do next or waiting for the advice of Hugo, who was not his superior but who had spent two decades in UCLA's Department of Neuroscience while he, Vivek, had just joined the team as an intern. Their boss, Bart Vinkrell, an eccentric scientist who wasn't afraid to test new technology on himself, was the one they were monitoring.

"I suppose everything is being recorded, isn't it?" Hugo continued asking question after question to his colleague, who was on the verge of panic.

"Yes, Hugo!" His avatar is active and I can see how his fluctuating feelings affect his heartbeat as well. It's at the heart of what's going on there.

Hugo nervously massaged his chin with his short fingers and pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. Then he touched the screen in front of him.

The tension in the windowless monitoring room had risen palpably. As he sat back in a leather chair, Bart's features seemed relaxed, contradicting the readings on the translucent displays that came from the crystal placed on his forehead, giving him an air of royalty.

"I'm initiating the emergency procedure," Hugo said.

It was more of a statement, and he preferred it, than seeking the approval of Vivek, whose eyes were glued to the graph of Bart's neural activity. The young man suddenly looked up, his eyebrows arched in panic.

"No, you can't!" Not from the phase he is in now. It's too dangerous! The return procedure must be gradual and follow the steps for such interventions. Breaking him from his reverie so suddenly, he might be leaving a part of his mind and soul behind. He won't be whole again, Vivek said using this justification to gain respite from his colleague.

Hugo looked for a moment, hesitating.

"You and your theories about losing your soul inside a virtual world!" The mind can, but the soul... nah! I don't think so! Hugo replied tapping several glowing controls on the screen.

"At least check to see if the water I put on the crystal has absorbed or is still there." We can erase what's left and thus lessen the absorption process, the younger man suggested, hoping he would be listened to.

He rubbed his left ear in a nervous gesture, trying to calm his beating heart. A subtle smell of sweat touched his nostrils and he recognized his body's response to the increased stress level.

Hugo ran his stubby forefinger across the glass surface, widening the camera angle on the flat surface of the crystal fixed to Bart's forehead.

— There is not a drop of water left on it. Everything was absorbed. I'll give the boss another ten minutes before I activate the return procedure, he said sharply, meant to discourage any attempts by Vivek to convince him otherwise.

The younger man nodded and bit his bottom lip as if to stop himself from saying something he would regret later. If anything happens to Bart, I'm absolved, he said, relieved that recording that conversation would absolve him of any responsibility.

***

The village was quiet that morning; only the wind brushed the roofs of the huts and the bamboo leaves left on the ground by the elephants. It spun through every tight space, changing its tone from howling to screaming, then stopping again to catch its breath.

The humidity in the air was thick and filled with the scents of thousands of flowers and trees, happy to live another day.

The children were not yet awake, and neither were their teachers, the elephants. Only he was aware, the old scientist of Laeta, the eye of wisdom wide open, sitting in front of the library, observing his breathing, as he had been taught.

Bart could feel the vibrations of every life form that surrounded him, sending wave after wave of energy towards him, as if trying to strengthen his weakened body, long past the survival limit of any other human being in the village.

The elephants, after much deliberation, had decided that the place in front of the library could be given to Bart to spend the rest of his days given by the One Who Created All. Food and water were brought to him twice a day. He couldn't remember the last time he had gone. His feet, devoid of energy, had sunk into the ground, turning into roots that connected him to the village, to the jungle, and to every particle reverberating with the blessings of the One Who Created All.

He spent his days in prayer and meditation, declaring his love for the supreme being he had met so late in life.

Rakash, after taking his rightful place in the Council, had not visited him more than once a week. An abnormal coldness had crept into a relationship that had once been strong.

The wind suddenly hit his left cheek. The blow, vigorous, lessened its power in the thick, tangled beard which covered almost the whole of his face. It was punishment for the forbidden thoughts of the time when Rakash, lost among strangers, had been forced to reveal secrets about the jungle community so closely guarded until then.

Bart, or what was left of his identity, had experienced enough flashes of bliss to understand the vast beauty of the world within him, which was the purpose of the entire life of the village community.

He was to transit peacefully, prepared and, for the first time in his life, convinced that he was immortal and that the cyclical rules of this earth applied to him as well. In fact, rules that applied to every human being in Laeta, east and west, but they didn't know it yet. They were too busy, wasting their energy on foolish and ephemeral gratifications.

As the wind played with his beard and ragged clothing, a question arose in his mind: would they bury me among the Trees of Life or right here in front of the library? The earth will absorb my physicality, bit by bit, until the mind's eye, being opened, migrates to the top of the head to look at the sky for the last time...

That memory would stay with him as he sank into the earth, and share it with the grass and worms and insects that would feed on his decaying flesh.

But he didn't care that he would perish physically, since the other journey, that of the soul, was what had fascinated him for years. He felt swallowed by the dampness of the earth, the roughness of the buried stones and twigs piercing his skin, tearing him into a thousand particles as his body was pulled deeper and deeper. He was still aware of his physical form, it seemed strange to have that sensation anymore, and he realized that his soul was not being lifted up to the astral, but in the opposite direction.

Bart woke up shaking and covered in sweat. Drops of sweat were running down his forehead, falling into his eyes. The pain in his right leg, the shortest, revolted desperately, and out of habit, he dug his fingers into the soft flesh, seeking relief.

Again he had had a dream as real as could be, revealing a lost thought of what it would have been like to live in the village inhabited by children and elephants. He had imagined Rakash, a special soul and his only friend in the community, asking the elephants for permission to join them as a family member so that Bart could observe their habits and, after many tests, be initiated into the esoteric state of happiness.

The dream had shown him what would have happened if he had followed that path. A much nobler goal than staying engaged in the activities of UCLA's Department of Neuroscience. Testing new methods of breaking the barriers of the mind through languages, which had not been openly discussed in scientific circles or properly funded, excited him. His intuition told him that the mixture of water and crystals could be that new language.

Bart slowly stood up and headed for the bathroom. A cold shower would refresh him and prepare him for a new day in the laboratory, where a team of engineers and psychologists were studying the recordings of his forays into the virtual world, created by drops of water collected from sacred places on earth and filtered through the purified crystals connected to his own brain.

Dressed in a pair of jeans and a checkered shirt, he limped to the kitchen, where he grabbed a breakfast bowl from the cupboard. It would consist of oatmeal and coconut milk. Eat in silence, without the din of online news, a source that over time no longer showed trust. Thoughts plunged into the depth of the last session in the laboratory where the water molecule had been collected from the Andes mountains and housed in a basalt container, which would prevent any possible exposure to outside influences. The water had filtered perfectly through the pores of the crystal right into the synapses of his brain, amplifying his senses like a hallucinogenic drug.

The experience had revealed to him the story of the village—which had later passed into his most recent dreams—with the elephants who had become teachers, and the children—students who needed guidance on their path to enlightenment.

“The crystal started vibrating seconds after we put water on its surface,” Vivek—the newest member of the team—had told him after snapping out of his trance and showing him the diagram of brain activity for his own examination.

Together they had decided that the optimal location for effective brain stimulation through the pure agate crystal was the forehead, the site of the third eye. Hair-thick nanotubes connected the crystal to the frontal lobes, and the nanobots enhanced the transfer of stimuli to the pineal gland, which had the property of opening the mind to alternate universes.

"How is it possible for water at that altitude to contain information from a completely different physical location and, if you ask me, a point in time that contains much of humanity's past?" Bart had shared his thought with the team.

No one dared to say anything; they hated those moments when they didn't have new ideas that could push the research forward.

He put the empty bowl in the sink, slung the leather bag over his shoulder, and headed for the lab in a driverless taxi he had called ahead of time. The twenty minute ride passed in silence, and Bart was lost in thought, not noticing the streets, the people, or the feelings etched on their faces. The memory of the water exposed in his experiments excited him. The information that had originally caught his attention from the much simpler research done earlier by the Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto still provided a strong baseline. However, he wanted to deepen the research, asking the water about its origin and how it could memorize ancient dates for which there were no other records.

"How can I ask the water how it collected all these memories?" he muttered, disbelieving the idea that had suddenly appeared in his mind like an arrowhead piercing the victim's body.

— I know that water is alive and has memory, he continues the dialogue with himself. That's what I keep telling the team. All sacred texts mention similar properties of water. But how do I know which approach is best?

Bart internalized the last question on a deeper level, feeling the information coursing through his brain's synapses, descending through the labyrinth of many thoughts and ideas, old and new, abandoned or in a state of waiting, ready to be brought to the surface at the right time.

The thought-energy "How do I know which is the right approach?" he flew into the ether, connected to the Divine Matrix and asked the invisible intelligence for an answer. The wait for the answer was short, and all previous doubts about the existence of a higher power were erased from his mind: create a vocabulary for water and its ancient memory will be accessible to all humanity!

Water needed a language of its own to express its feelings: pain, sadness, joy, or to overcome the memories accumulated over the millennia, which Bart had experienced through the incursions of the crystal-filtered water.

The man gave mental thanks for the answer he received and felt an unshakable determination to build an evolutionary bridge between humanity and the primordial element, water.