Blinky's Death Dream

Scientists watched as a chameleon died.

With its eyes sunken in and its little legs twitching horribly, it looked completely pathetic. Then, as the lifeforce slowly ebbed from the lizard’s body, its iridophores shuddered into action, sending waves of dazzling color across its skin. Its life must have been flashing before its eyes.

When the chameleon’s color show began, it left the scientists speechless. At first, they didn’t know what to make of the warm pinks, soothing teals, spritzes of yellow, or pops of green. But they were among humanity’s brightest, and had completed years of schooling dedicated entirely to recognizing and analyzing patterns. So it didn’t take long at all for them to realize they were watching the chameleon’s life story filtered through its pigments.

The chameleon turned bone-white as its tongue lolled out of its mouth; it was remembering the experience of being inside an egg. Speckles of soft red and yellow suffused its skin as it felt content and cradled, transported back to an easier time. Then, in a blooming mandala, the comfy white gave way to lush blues and greens. The chameleon remembered what it was like to hatch into a gorgeous rainforest, surrounded by baobabs and orchids. Bands of green writhed across its skin as it saw vines swing to and fro in a distant memory.

Life in the jungle was beautiful, but danger lurked around every corner. The chameleon recalled times of pain, hunger, and fear, which caused bombs of orange, red, and purple to explode across its skin. In its mind’s eye, the chameleon relived a close encounter with a predatory bird: blue pigments were blotted out by a dithered crash of yellow and black. The scientists understood that this represented a life-threatening hazard swooping out of the sky– perhaps a banded kestrel, a zoologist muttered.

Chameleons live mostly in solitude, so even the flourishing hues of Madagascar were always tinged with a lavender touch of loneliness. That is, except for one moment when the chameleon remembered encountering another adult male chameleon in its tree. Reds and unnatural greens flared up, fractionated by painful yellows and shards of crackling white. These were the product of a territorial spat, recollected and translated into living color.

Every so often, the chameleon faded completely to a dark, dark almost-black bruised blue as it remembered a long cold night in the jungle. A single tear rolled down its cheek. One scientist collected the liquid on a sterilized piece of tissue and placed it in a petri dish, which was eventually filed away next to thousands of samples of the tears of other animals.

Excited chatter filled the room. The scientists enthused and bickered as a firsthand depiction of dying unfolded right before their eyes. The previous final word on the experience of passing away had been from various religious little boys who had fallen off the monkey bars and then communicated with “A Presence” before pulling through the night. But science knows that children are dumb and prone to flights of fancy. This was not the wishful near-death-experience of a church boy. No, this was a genuine reptile brainstem recursively experiencing its own existence in all the glorious emotion a lizard could apparently feel.

The scientists’ breath was taken away. Who would have thought that a being that spent its whole life dragging its belly across tree branches and chasing flies could write the last word on what it was like to leave this world? Why had nobody thought to watch a chameleon die before?

A few detractors in the group disputed what was happening in front of their eyes. The chameleon’s biological systems are failing, they said. This moribund thing isn’t watching its life flash before its eyes. It doesn’t have a ‘mind’. These brilliant colors are simply a random glitch as the animal’s body turns off, like a family annihilator shitting his pants in the electric chair. And plus– who cares?

But just as the words left their lips, something happened that removed all doubt.

The chameleon had been continuing to dream its way through its short, emotional life. The colors of the jungle had vanished, giving way to a sterile off-white complexion that seemed to represent both a lack of vitality and the experience of captivity in a laboratory. The chameleon’s deathbed retrospective was coming to a close, its memory nearing the present moment. And the scientists saw the colors on its body change again, but this time it was like they were coming into focus. The radiating hypnagogia resolved into a definite image. The exact room they were standing in. Each individual pigment-containing cell on the animal’s body acted like a pixel, working together to show a real-time live feed of the lab. It was like the chameleon had become a television screen. The scientists could see their own jaws drop on its skin.

Then, the image began to move, to scroll upward. The invisible “camera” recording the room– it had to be the chameleon’s soul– rose upward. The scientists saw the tops of their balding heads on the lizard’s skin as the vantage point of the image moved up, up. It passed through the ceiling and they saw a video feed of the floor above them, with several of their colleagues dissecting a sheep’s brain. But it didn’t stop there, it just kept moving up, faster now. It passed through the roof of the building.

Now, the chameleon’s skin was blue and white, a perfect representation of the sky, and looking closely the scientists could see the Earth, located just around the lizard’s right shoulder, and it was getting smaller and smaller as whatever metaphysical thing was left of the chameleon flew up, up, and away. Rogue iridophores around its toes and face lost contact with the whole and fizzled into a soft grey color, representing the emotion of being at total peace in extremis. The scientists looked at each other in awe and confusion. Where was it going? Mars?

Their question was soon answered. Blue sky gave way to somewhere puffy and white, with gold trim. There, inscribed across the dying creature’s back like a tacky tattoo, were the Pearly Gates themselves. Heaven. A few of the scientists fell to their knees and began to weep, their entire worldviews shattered. The point-of-view of the chameleon’s soul floated lazily forward toward the Gates.

Then, near the base of its tail, a Hand entered the frame. It looked old, yet young. Strong, but weak. It was white and black. Everybody knew instinctively, without saying a word to each other: this was God’s Hand. The Hand grew larger as it neared the soul of the chameleon. Then, the Fingers encircled it. God was holding it in His Hand. A scientist cheered.

The live feed on the chameleon’s back spiraled out of control as God’s Hand flung its spirit with great Godly Force. The colors went blurry, and then came back into focus. Head to toe, the chameleon was emblazoned with trash and refuse. God had used His great Hand to throw the chameleon’s soul into the Trash Can.

As the flesh-and-blood lizard’s body finally gave up the ghost, its iridophores flexed one last time, then lost their ability to change color. A partially distorted final image of God’s Trash Can was the last thing to be seen on the chameleon’s corpse, and remained there indefinitely until its body was cremated for biohazard safety.

The scientists crowding around the reptile’s lifeless body exploded into a debate even more spirited than before. While many doubters had been convinced by the miracle that had played out before them, some dug their heels in further to the idea the group had witnessed some kind of biological coincidence. Most of the people in the room quickly agreed, though, that whatever they had seen proved something earth-shattering. Exactly what was proven was not agreed upon so handily.

When the findings of the chameleon experiment went public, they spread through society like wildfire. Most religions that believed in Heaven experienced deep turmoil as the faithful argued about whether or not there was a meaningful difference between ‘God’s Trash Can’ and ‘Hell.’ Followers of religions that did not believe in Heaven flocked to religions that did in droves.

The President of the United States addressed the issue with a resounding shrug, and a sentiment of ‘I’m sure people are looking into it.’ The Pope failed to make a public statement or appearance for days on end, and months later it came out that he had locked himself in a bunker in case of Rapture. Herpetologists that specialized in chameleons came under fire in the media. How could something like this have flown under the radar for so long?

Many people dismissed the whole thing as complete B.S. They claimed, and rightfully so, that the results of this little ‘experiment’ were moot unless it could be reproduced.

So, the scientists got their hands on a second chameleon and waited patiently for it to die. They waited for weeks, feeding it gourmet-level cockroaches and giving it luxurious toothbrush massages to appease animal rights groups. The general public nicknamed the second chameleon Pinky, after a particularly impressive color it displayed during a promotional photoshoot. In turn, the scientists retroactively dubbed the first chameleon Inky, and themselves the Inky Group. The eyes of the world watched Pinky as it blithely lived the life of a lizard.

The scientists used grants from their research to construct the Pinky Center, a huge stadium-style viewing facility in Beverly, Massachusetts. It had a capacity of around 20,000, with huge screens so people seated way at the back could see what was happening onstage. With Pinky still a ways off from expiring, the scientists were able to rent the Center out for various concerts to recoup some money.

Then, Pinky took a turn for the worse. 20,000 of the most respected and intelligent scientists in the world made the pilgrimage to Beverly and filed into their seats in the Pinky Center to watch the lizard pass away. Money-hungry opportunists flew drones over the arena and charged the curious an exorbitant fee to watch the footage live online. Several people were turned away at the gates for impersonating scientists, and a press release went live to reassure the public that non-restricted chameleon death viewings would be held in the future; this one was just for the scientific community, and if anybody didn’t want to wait, maybe they could adopt their own chameleon and wait for it to die peacefully?

The Inky Group waited backstage anxiously for Pinky to die. What if the phenomenon wasn’t reproducible? Not only would their credibility in the scientific community be ruined, but the biggest breakthrough in recent history– maybe ever?– would be rendered illegitimate. It turned out they had nothing to worry about. On a stage in front of 20,000 scientists and millions more online spectators, Pinky began to die, and its life started to flash before its eyes.

It was largely similar to the emotional tapestry rendered by the first chameleon, with differences that could be mostly chalked up to varying temperament– Pinky had lived in the lap of luxury and thus was a bit snootier. Pinky’s life story played out for millions of awestruck eyes in a whirlwind of pigment. The Inky Group, who had spent the weeks since their first experiment poring over the footage of Inky’s death, commentated the event over the loudspeaker. Through painstaking interpretation, they narrated what the color patterns on Pinky’s skin probably represented.

Off-white. “Pinky is remembering being inside an egg.”

Blue and green. “This represents the humidity of the jungle.”

Purple, pink, and red. “This must be a memory of the satisfaction and pleasure of a toothbrush massage.”

Orange, yellow, brown, and teal. The color of Pinky’s skin continued to change in response to neurological signals, which arose in reaction to the memories playing out in its brain. Then, like Inky, it ran out of memories, and the brain began to unspool. Pinky’s memory center stopped producing signals, but something continued to stimulate its iridiphores. This ‘something’, which the scientists had called the soul, bypassed the physical connections of Pinky’s dying nervous system, and hooked up to its skin directly through some type of spiritual link.

Like the first time, the colors on Pinky’s skin ceased to be abstract portrayals of memories, and instead perfectly depicted the chameleon’s surroundings, as seen from the bird’s-eye view of its ascending soul. The world watched with jaws dropped as Pinky’s scales displayed the unmistakable process of the animal’s soul rising up, up, out of the stadium, past hovering drones, through the atmosphere, and into the cloudy kingdom of Heaven.

You could hear a pin drop as the spectators saw the golden Gates for the first time. A member of the Inky Group came over the loudspeaker: “That’s Heaven.”

Then, like the first time, as Pinky’s soul approached the Gates, the inimitable Hand of God came into view and grasped it. Millions of people craned their necks forward to get a better view of the lizard’s body, which showed God’s Fingers clutching it. Then, in a manner as unceremonious as God was capable of, Pinky’s soul was thrown into the Trash next to Inky’s. The crowd erupted into a furor. The existence of God, Heaven, and the soul had been confirmed, all by the deaths of two chameleons.

There were some who chose to deny what was right in front of them, as there always are, but the vast majority of people on the Earth took the findings of the Inky Group as the unvarnished truth. The generally accepted model of reality became something different. Most people now held a new and daunting set of axioms:

Heaven is real. God is real. The soul is real. Chameleons have souls that go to Heaven. Heaven has a Trash Can. Chameleon souls are thrown in God’s Trash Can.

These basic truths led to a flurry of questions that demanded answers:

Do humans have souls? Why do chameleons get thrown in the Trash? Is Heaven located somewhere above Massachusetts? What does the rest of God’s Body look like? Does anything else go to Heaven or just chameleons?

The weeks that followed were a frenzy. Those who adhered to the scientific process spent every resource available to them trying to answer these questions, and those who didn’t grappled with their new reality in other ways.

A huge number of chameleons were bred and observed, and every time they died the same phenomenon occurred. There was almost no variation. Researchers tried to locate the ‘soul’, to maybe attach a GPS to it and hitch a ride to Heaven, but no dice. Other animals became the subject of death experiments as well. Octopi, cuttlefish, anoles, flounders, anything able to change color and potentially display an image of Heaven on its skin. But the Pearly Gates did not appear on the skin of anything besides chameleons. Scientists theorized this might be because only chameleons had the exact level of requisite intelligence. Anoles and flounders were too dumb to understand they were in Heaven and so their souls did not render their surroundings. Octopi and cuttlefish were far too intelligent to believe in Heaven and so didn’t bother depicting it with their chromatophores.

Chameleon after chameleon died, and their recurring numinal experiences filtered their way into the zeitgeist.

Since 1775, the towns of Beverly and Marblehead had been in hot contention for the title of ‘birthplace of the U.S. Navy’. After Pinky’s death dream revealed Heaven to the world, Beverly ceded that title to Marblehead, and began calling itself “The Window to Heaven”, even though the original chameleon experiment had been in Cambridge.

Many people who had one foot not-so-firmly planted on the precipice of fanaticism tumbled over the edge and migrated to Beverly in droves, visiting the Pinky Center to plant their palms against the cool concrete walls and experience the transcendence of seeing a building they’d heard a lot about. They wore pink clothes and swapped theories about where the physical location of Heaven was– the Moon, Mars, or maybe GJ 504b, an exoplanet 57 light-years from Earth with a hot pink atmosphere.

A business mogul with more earthbound interests proposed the idea that if the ‘soul’ of the chameleon was harnessed, it could far outpace the highest-definition and fastest-refreshing digital screens technology had access to. He was met with derision that he couldn’t understand, and though he publicly disowned his idea, he privately contributed money to chameleon-soul-display (CSD) testing.

Almost everybody still went to school and work and the bar, only conceding the immensity of current events after a couple beers, delivering long speeches across patio tables that amounted to, isn’t this crazy?

The Inky Group bided their time– their research had hit the dead end of becoming a universal mission. Every scientist and their grandmother had now conducted a chameleon death experiment. Could a soul exceed the speed of light? Could you make a sad chameleon turn red instead of blue? What material are the Gates of Heaven made out of? Every question that could possibly be asked was already having huge amounts of time and money poured into answering it. What were the originators of the phenomenon to do? Twiddle their thumbs, mostly.

Some people committed suicide. They placed bets on whether they could access Heaven by flinging themselves off bridges. They bought chameleons to view the Gates for themselves, took improper care of them, and watched their pets shrivel up and die without dreaming. Movies, books, and music came out. Murals and graffiti were painted on walls. Dinners were garnished with parsley. Chameleons turned blue and green and red. The world record for longest fingernails was broken.

In fluorescent-lit rooms, clandestine interests and organizations strained to bend the chameleon revelation to their benefit. Innocent children, virtuous vagrants, and altruists of every stripe were abducted to black sites, where they were subjected to mental conditioning– repetitive audio commanding them to “WAVE FROM THE GATE”– and then chemically and brutally executed. Top minds theorized that martyring these idealists in an unjust fashion would guarantee them a spot in Heaven. Millions of chameleon death videos were monitored for human souls waving hello through the golden bars of the Pearly Gates. No such luck. If the terminated souls were ending up in Heaven, maybe they were leaving all Earthly shackles and compulsions behind, including the attempted hypnosis.

Legions of lizards were picked to pieces, utterly atomized by surgical machines, and combed over by herpetologists and occultists on the hunt for any miniscule oversight by generations of biologists that could signify the seat of the soul. Human beings were vivisected, their splayed unraveled bodies juxtaposed with chameleon entrails, scrutinized to “find commonalities”. Program directors conducted grueling interviews with experts on haruspicy, asking questions too abstract to answer. Jackal-headed scientists weighed hearts against keratin claws. Gloved figures pulled chameleon’s tails to hurt them and pumped their veins full of neurotoxins to disrupt their memories. The hallways smelled like formaldehyde and copper. Terabytes of dictated text and snuff footage ballooned inside hard drives, stacked neatly on laminate shelving in linoleum closets. Results. In anonymous corridors, breakthrough.

Whispers dripping with dread and import bounced off the walls. The human soul was located, labeled, extracted, grafted. Enormous gears began to grind implacably toward something. Therefores and thuses ricocheted off in all directions like firecrackers. Implication fueled development. Sensory goggles, medical phantoms, weapons of mass destruction, social credit systems, telomere preservation, novel cosmogonies, vehicles, materials, ideas, beliefs, vessels, deceptions, remote viewings, full-spectrum dominance, the total elimination of internet latency, low-resolution video, and sedition.

A man in a black jacket wheeled a gurney with a wheezing chameleon into a white-walled room filled with scientists. “This is Blinky.” he said.

The Blinky Group comprised various researchers who had been made offers lucrative enough to ignore their provenance. They were the foremost authorities on chameleon death dream interpretation. Many of them had been part of the Inky Group, which was now “disbanded” even though it had never really been a structured organization in the first place.

Blinky blinked. It started to die. The Blinky Group leaned in and took notes. The man in the black jacket leaned against the wall and watched.

Blinky’s death dream started not with eggshell white but rippling pale red. A yonic slit of color widened to allow Blinky’s memory to pass through into a world of antiseptic white and clinical blue. Loving pinks cradled the fringes of Blinky’s skin. The colors of its childhood memories were not rainforest hues. They were slate gray and urban beige and plastic off-white. The red anxiety of riding a bicycle for the first time. The satisfied royal blue of acing a pop quiz. The soft, diffuse yellow of a summer day. The Blinky Group dutifully took down their interpretations in notebooks and laptops.

Color continued to swirl in relatable patterns on Blinky’s scaled skin. Each hue indisputably represented a distinct memory in the creature’s life. Crimson, first girlfriend. Forest green, graduating high school. Indigo, loss of a parent. Olive, food poisoning. Magenta, twenty-first birthday. This death dream was much longer than Inky’s or Pinky’s. Memories flitted through the iridiphores, stimulated by the soul in Blinky’s dying body.

Purplish black, terror, darkness, unfamiliarity. Sterile white, stasis, coma. Dark smudges crowding around, leaning in, holding cold metal. Injections of chemical green and blue, conscious, paralyzed, screaming. Sharp lines of red slicing across the skin. The colors change. The memories become fragmented. Mauve. Fear. Black. Transgression. White. Transfiguration. Green. Chameleon.

Then, the room came into focus. The Blinky Group saw their own dismayed faces represented in pixel-perfect detail. The soul rose, not smoothly like previous chameleons, but haltingly, shivering, jerky. It wobbled up toward the ceiling, reflecting its field of vision on Blinky’s video skin. It passed through the ceiling, then through the ceiling above that, then above that, ascending through rooms full of men in black jackets, sitting at desks with wafer-thin computers, chewing on ballpoint pens like stinking cigars. It left the facility and flew up into the darkening sky, wheeling like a bird with an injured wing. It swept through the coagulating clouds into a bright gold Somewhere now familiar.

With lurching desperation, Blinky’s soul fluttered toward the Gates of Heaven. It paused, and the scientists held their breath. Would the Gates finally open? Even without briefing they knew “Blinky” was something different. Would God?

God’s ineffable Hand reached into frame. It plucked Blinky’s soul from the air and held it still. Second after second, nobody breathed. Then, like all the others, Blinky’s soul arced through the air and landed in the Garbage. One scientist wrote, God saw through the ruse. Another wrote, Some humans are just unworthy. But most of the scientists wrote, God can’t tell the difference.

As God’s Hand retracted from the scene, the man in the black jacket leaned forward, hands in his pockets, and clicked his tongue. The iridiphores on Blinky’s skin reacted to something, changing, adding to the depicted scene. Letters appeared, spoken in some spirit-sprung language directly from Blinky’s soul. They spelled an anguished message across the chameleon’s back in black, wobbly letters: WHY?

The sound of note-taking was deafening in the room, as each scientist copied the word onto their clipboards and computers. The WHY? shrank and faded, as if the effort of communicating was too difficult to maintain. God’s Hand stopped moving. Its Owner had clearly seen the message. He’s thinking it over, somebody wrote.

Then, across Blinky’s skin, perfectly comprehensible by all, pristine golden letters, instantly identifiable as the neat handwriting of God Himself. Immortal and wise, His message to Blinky and, through the Blinky Group, to humanity: YOU CHAMELEONS ARE STARTING TO PISS ME OFF. HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU GUYS? STOP EATING BUGS. IT’S DISGUSTING.

This made zero waves in any religion because the message was not intended for mankind. It was simply intercepted. If God had something to say to us, He would say it. But apparently He’s been talking to chameleons this whole time.