From distributor to retail dealer, this particular
flatscreen unit---a part of the most superior and
efficient model now being manufactured---has been
deemed undesirable, and now occupies part of a
wall in a fairly shabby pawnshop. Although equipped
with the latest technology---cutting edge, really---
it is umable to receive or transmit either video or audio,
digital or analog, prerecorded or live. Instead, its screen
reveals a man---an ordinary and hitherto unidentified male
human being---who is apparently trapped within it. His
antics, all directed toward eventual escape, are momentarily
amusing; but soon pale in interest, as the limited space that
contains him necessarily limits the variations of his
activity in there. The expression of horror on his face---the
visage of absolute terror that never seems to change or to
relax---is too disturing to look at very long. The means of
extraction and the means of his original confinement in there
are most likely so complex that no amount of study or
analysis can supply an adequate knowledge of them. Thus,
few observers maintain any kind of interest, beyond the
initial shock. Is it this admitted apathy that terrifies him, so that
he is well aware that he is trapped forever, or for what will
seem to him equivalent to forever? Or does he share whatever
plane of existence he occupies with hideous, frightening, and
enraged inter- or anti-dimensional aliens who, like him, are as
inexplicably and inescapably confined and contained therein?
And have these revealed to him the ghastly and, in our language,
indescribably dreadful entropic chaos that lurks upon and around the
edges of our universe, refused entry by only the thinnest membrane, and
squirming or clamoring against it like parasites eager to
drain and devour some unwitting victim?
Starward