I first heard about the Bellringer during a dinner at the Chicago world’s fair in eighteen ninety-three. I was attending a special dinner party for the University of Chicago’s science department, and I was sitting with my good friend professor Zed. We had enjoyed an elegant five-course meal and were sipping on whiskey when Zed began telling me about his private studies. He had been focusing primarily on torsion, specifically, the opposing spin state of two amalgams of liquid mercury. In his experiments, he had routinely observed what he described to be a positive alteration of time, where it seemed as if time was speeding up. He posited that he could produce an isolated pocket of malleable time and space within the confines of his own laboratory. In other words, he believed that he could create a time portal.
I thought his story was fantastic, and when he asked if I would come to his lab that night and witness the strange phenomena for myself, I most gratefully obliged.
The Bellringer was made up of what looked like two bells inserted together and stacked atop one another. The mouth of the bottom bell was fit inside the mouth of the one on top so that the amalgams of mercury in each bell would line up on the same horizontal plane. Each bell could spin fluidly on the vertical axis, and when Zed turned the thing on, they began spinning in opposing directions. As it spun up faster and faster, it began to hum. And as the rising hum reached an unnerving crescendo, a splitting crack of sound rang out inside the room, and a thick white cloud of smoke plumed out from inside the Bellringer. I assumed it had broken but when I looked at the professor, his eyes were widening in wonder. And when I looked back to the spinning apparatus, I saw the hideous thing appear out of thin air.
It materialized out of the smoke like a ghost and was made of a highly sophisticated machinery, of the likes I had never seen before. It was mostly mechanical but was spotted with patches of organic tissue in varying degrees of generation and decay. It resembled a human form with its arms, legs, and head, but it was much more like a life-size puppet that could move about without strings. And regardless of the sophisticated machinery, which indeed looked marvelous, it was a hideous thing to behold. The thing had an acrid odor of ozone, oil, and putrefying flesh. And when it spoke to us, I realized it had no mouth, lips, or jaw. Its voice seemed to speak directly into our heads, and it felt intrusive. It announced that it had a message, and began telling us the story of how its species fell into the abyss. Zed and I were utterly aghast.
The story began with a terrible struggle between the people of its world and an ideological force that believed in a master race of humans. This ideological force believed that they were genetically superior to the rest of the human species, and inevitably, began cleansing the population of everyone who did not reflect their ideal form. They called themselves, Nazi, and they nearly destroyed the world. The Nazis were eventually beaten, and life seemingly got better. But then, the ideological Nazi force once again emerged. However, they no longer believed that they were genetically superior. This time they believed that they were morally superior. Which meant that anyone could join them so long as they conform to their moral ideology. They called this guiding principle, Equity.
The original Nazis were so traumatizing, that the very word Nazi had become a curse. And so the new Nazis did not call themselves Nazi. They hid behind other names as they imposed their morally superior dogma.
Equity was hailed by the new Nazis to be the ultimate path to justice, and if you did not agree with them, then you were accused of being an immoral and dangerous person and attacked with harsh accusations. If you suggested that their methods created dissent between the sexes, then you were labeled a sexist. If you argued that their methods were racially divisive, you were labeled a racist. And if you questioned the evidence of their radical theories, then you were labeled a denier. They aggressively attacked every attempt at reasonable discourse with hostile condemnations and extreme moral prejudice. If you did not agree with their radical ideology, then you were labeled a terrible person, and even the cursed word Nazi was cast upon you. Words became weaponized.
It was an unbelievable tale, and I thought to myself; Impossible! the strange visitor then answered me as if it had heard my thoughts.
“Yes. It must seem impossible. But the technology of our time gave the new Nazis incredible power over the minds of the masses.”
It told us of an advanced science that allowed for the transmission of information into each home. The humans of that time were habitually subjected to this transmission and lulled into a sort of trance-like existence where it became easy to supplant thoughts and ideas into the minds of millions. The information was being disseminated by private companies owned by advocates of Equity, and so the new Nazis took control of them first. By controlling the information, they were able to widely propagate their extreme methods and ideology, and quickly, they rose to power.
Equity became the new guiding principle of the law, and the new Nazis began to compel the majority to submit to the will of the minority. This was initially seen as a blatant attack against the very foundation of their democratic society. And it was asked; if the majority is not guiding society’s destiny, then who is? But these questions were immediately silenced with hostile character assassinations, and accusatory shouts of the words, denier, racist, and Nazi. And as strange as this all may sound, it got even stranger.
They began systematically denying the existence of established biological science and claimed that sexual gender was a mental construct. They believed that by removing a person’s sexual organs, and surgically reconstructing them, that they could reassign their gender one way or the other. They called it, sexual reassignment, and began educating parents to have their children examined by the state so that they could be sexually reassigned as early as possible. For example; if a male child was diagnosed with having feminine characteristics, then his parents were encouraged to have the child castrated, sewn back together with surgically crafted female genitals, and subjected to intense hormonal therapy. According to the new laws of Equity, the young boy was now a young girl. The State had succeeded where nature had failed, and every butchered child was a celebrated victory for the new Nazis.
I know this story must seem implausible, if I hadn’t seen this creature appear out of the Bellringer’s smoke with my own two eyes, then I would surely struggle with this bizarre story as well. But as it was, the creature was manifest in the very same room as professor Zed and me, and its putrid stench and haunting voice constrained our fullest attention. I can’t say that the outlandish story this creature told us was true, but I remember every word. It went on to explain how this insidious ideology was sadly embraced by all of society.
The new Nazis attracted the mentally ill, the arrogant, and the lazy. They charmed the most dissatisfied patrons by granting them moral superiority and rewarding them with societal status for casting blame and judgment upon the immoral opposition. They cultivated the dissatisfaction in these people to the point that they were willing to destroy their own democracy in the name of Equity. The amassed misfortunates began marching in the streets and chanting things like the majority is racist, and, burn it all down-Equity for all. These epitaphs of destruction attracted the lowliest and most unsavory people to the cause.
No one was expecting this, and at first, everyone was shocked into disbelief. And when they finally found the words to question it, they were rendered silent with accusations of being a racist or a Nazi. And so over time, the defeated masses began adopting the new Nazi ideology.
Those that continued to rebel against it, were rounded up, sent to re-education camps, and never seen again. Families came under attack. The mass transmission of information was telling everyone that the traditional family was a breeding ground for hate. Children were ripped from their parents and made wards of the state, and the new Nazi ideology became the prevailing culture of society.
The propagated information was beamed twenty-four hours a day into each home and into every workspace through news and entertainment. Violence was a common conveyance, but sex was always the prevailing spectacle so long as it was strange and perverse. The transmissions were so sexually perverse and violent, that the thought of sex would trigger the viewer into mania, anxiety, or trauma. People either suffered from hyper-sexuality or withdrew into an isolated and lonely trance. Every minority was given prominent positions in news and entertainment, and the biggest celebrities were made of the smallest minorities. The dregs of society became luminaries and were celebrated like royalty. Rapists, pedophiles, and serial killers were being broadcast day and night into the homes of the docile populace, delivering the new Nazi message; Equity for All.
Sexual re-assignment became the norm. As soon as a child was born, its sexual organs were immediately carved out, the child was psychologically tested, and their gender was then determined by the state. The child was then sexually reassigned, given a role in society, and put to work accordingly.
The hideous visitor then paused, the silence was dramatic and discomforting. I could feel a great suffering permeating from its swollen patches of flesh as if whatever humanity it had left was in terrible pain. And then it said to us,
“The surgery and drugs were not successful. It was all a lie. All we were doing was mutilating ourselves. It was a nightmare come to life, and then it got worse.”
It told us that it became common knowledge among the humans that the sexual reassignment process was a total failure. All it succeeded in doing was robbing the species of their ability to reproduce naturally. The synthetic sex organs were useless, and so the new Nazis began breeding humans in Petri dishes and rearing them in factories.
The factory farmed humans were weak and defective, and they began melding themselves with machinery to remedy the endless stream of genetic deficiencies that arose. Weakened and deformed bones were replaced with metal rods. Mechanical filters and pumps were engineered to replace spoiled organs. The hideous storyteller then opened its arms, mechanical palms facing up towards the ceiling with pale reddened skin hanging from its metallic fingertips, and said;
“I am a product of this insane butchery, but more than that, much more than that, I simply am.”
It then went on to tell us that their brains were connected to a centralized hub, and as soon as this central brain was switched on, a small few of them accidentally tapped into a hidden archive of information. A historical record of humanity that illuminated the truth of their demise. It said that this illumination of truth led them to transcend their metal and explore the subtle nature of their own flesh, what little there was left of it. This led to an enlightenment. It was described as a spiritual revolution and a rebirth of natural individualism. And despite there being very little hope left for their kind, their revolution persisted.
In the historical record of humanity, they found professor Zed’s experimental journals on the Bellringer. A device that was able to lift the subtle veil of time and space. And they thought that perhaps they had found a way to save themselves from their horrible fate. Before the creature disappeared back into the Bellringer, the hideous monster claimed to be from our very own future, asserting itself to be one of our descendants. I do not know what to make of this. I find it impossible to conceive of a future where mankind is so inexplicably frail that it would fall for such absolute madness. And fall so deeply that it would mutilate and destroy itself. I pray that we never come to know the same fate as the thing from the Bellringer, devoid of all humanity and hope.
This is my written record of what I witnessed. And if the thing was truly from our own future, then may I honor us all by delivering its warning. May all men, women, and children grow ever more vigilant and strong, so that we may transcend such a dismal fate.
~Godspeed,
Francis J. Emerick
October 13, 1893
