It was four in the morning. The man stood in the road, watching the sky. It was a cloudy night, but he could see glimpses of the stars and the moon. More importantly, he could hear them. He held the radio to his ear. Radio static can be described as the background noise of the galaxy, the emissions of countless pulsars and alien civilizations all combined until they were indecipherable, a constant droning. The call of the Milky Way to its brothers and sisters out there in the deep darkness of intergalactic space, like whale song. It was beautiful. Tears streamed down the mans face.

A truck carrying thousands of litres of petrol roared past, and the man was covered in water. The truck driver didn’t notice, as he was busy wondering why the talk-back radio he had been listening to had been submerged by the static. As he rounded the corner and out of the man’s line of sight, the voices of men with opinions came back and the truckie smiled.

The man walked on, oblivious. He walked on the side of the road, so that the few cars that were driving at this ungodly hour could pass by him, leaving both parties relatively unmolested. He passed empty shops and darkened houses, and kept walking. As he passed the houses with sleeping occupants, those within dreamed of snowflakes and supernovas.

One boy, young and a bit slow, dreamed that he was dancing in a blizzard, though each snowflake glowed brightly in a range of yellows, oranges, reds and blues. It was warm and cold at the same time. The boy laughed as he looked up, and saw that some of the snowflakes were joining with each other, interconnecting with tiny strands of light. Tiny, tiny specks of light and life moved between and joined the snowflakes with what looked like spiders webbing. The sound the strange construct made was peculiar, not quite like the endless rushing of the blizzard air, but more like birdsong and the sounds of busy voices mixed together in raucous harmony.

The boy smiled, but suddenly felt a cold behind him. He turned, hesitantly, and saw something in the air. A vast tunnel in the ground, into which the snowflakes were being sucked into, constantly. And it was growing. The boy felt himself grow cold, and the ground begin to move toward this hole. He tried stepping backwards, but the ground moved and he fell, and then he was being pulled and he clawed at the ground and he could feel all the specks of light and the webs of light and sound and all else whoosh past him into the nothingness and he felt the ground that wasn’t really ground give way beneath his fingertips and something that felt like icewater and fangs gripped his leg and then he was and then he was and then he

Was awake.

The man walked on. Some part of his mind knew that his presence was a danger, and a vector for the truth that mankind was not ready to handle. The weak and pliable earthly laws of physics could give way beneath the effects of exotic matter and naked singularities. He made it a point never to travel near something that he could really fuck up. Like a nuclear power plant. Some part of the mans original personality, a vestige of his former ego still clinging onto existence within the supercharged neurons of his brain that should by all rights be self-immolating, still survived. It was not much, but enough to prevent complete disaster.

The majority of his mind, though, did not care. Not about anything. Except the call of the galaxy, a Great Mother in a way that this pathetic little ball of dirt could never be. Not anymore.

He was getting close. He could feel it. Stellar geometry was aligning over the vast gulfs of space. Astrologers didn’t know shit, because they dealt with a couple of pathetic little planets and constellations. Terra-centric amateurs. The ebb and flow of the stars did affect the Earth and all manking, but the movement of a minor asteroid in the Orion arm was as important as the position of Mars and Jupiter. Human astronomers with their weak mechanical eyes couldn’t see shit, and neither could the astronomers. If one were to chart the entire galaxy, collect data on every object within and combine that information, then maybe the astrologers could say something useful.

But the man didn’t need that. Anything he wanted to know, the Galaxy just told him. Direct hotline to the centre of all things, the primordial gulf into which the first stars had vanished and into which everything that made Her up would eventually be absorbed into. She sang to him, and through him Her will was done.

His thighs were chafed. Actually, they were more than chafed, the skin was beginning to peel off. But pain, like everything, could be tuned out, drowned out in the call. As he walked, he left drops of his own blood behind him. A small stray dog was following him, licking up the drops, but staying about 500 metres back. Any closer, and the dog would collapse in pain, as the worst sound it ever heard ripped though its skull. Twice it had happened, and so the dog had learned. It was a pretty smart dog.

It was almost five, and the glow of the sun was beginning to appear on the horizon. It was almost time. Luckily, he was almost there. He could see his destination ahead. A train station. The first train would not arrive for another hour, so it was almost completely empty. Nearby, a homeless man whose heart had stopped in the night was lying on the other side of the platform. As the man approached, the homeless man got up and left. The homeless man walked strangely away, as if he had never used legs before, and kept trying to walk sideways like a crab.

The man watched the thing inside the homeless man for a moment, then continued toward his destination. There it was.

The Coke machine was covered in graffiti, black and pink spray paint obscured the logo. Most would write the scribblings as indecipherable tags. A few scholars, none of whom were within a thousand miles of the city, might recognize them as letters from an unknown language from the ruins of ancient Jericho. The machine was only a few metres away. The man smiled, and reached into his coat pocket.

“Hey, mate, Coke is bad for you, there’s a coffee machine on the other platform.”

The man turned his head. The policeman who has spoken looked at him strangely. His partner was busy looking for where the weird-looking homeless guy had disappeared off to.

The policeman smiled, and said “That’s a weird radio you’ve got there. Where’d you get that?”

The man glanced up at the sky for a moment, then walked forward toward the police officer. He leaned in and he told him where he got the radio from. The policemen broke into a cold sweat, and his fertility rate dropped, but he wouldn’t notice the latter for another few years. Something screamed in the cops mind to grab his gun and shoot the man in the head. But he couldn’t move. His partner hadn’t heard anything, he was on the edge of the platform on tip-toes, peering into the distance at a homeless man who looked like he was trying to eat a power pole.

The man walked away from the first cop, then turned and went up to the Coke machine. He took a coin out of his pocket, a one dollar coin with three holes drilled into it in an irregular pattern. He lifted it up and placed it in the slot. There were silence, and suddenly there was a clink sound, a far louder clink sound than there should been, as if the coin had been dropped into a deep cavern with an amazing echo effect. He looked down at the buttons. He held the radio close to his ear with one hand, listening for the right moment. Seconds passed. Planets moved in space.

The man smiled, and pressed the button for Mountain Dew.

A minute later, the second cop turned away from the homeless mans distant shenanigans, shaking his head. He noticed his other partner was shaking all over.

“Hey, Rob, what’s the matter? You OK?”

Rob stared at the Coke machine. The man was gone, of course. But the cop had seen something else, beside the man vanishing into the Coke machine. He had seen what was on the other side. Seen Her Womb. Rob reached down and unbuckled his walkie-talkie from his belt and switched it on. He lifted it up, and held it to his ear.

And She told him what he had to do.