For his insolence, hubris, and for disobeying the oldest of rules, Ray was found guilty and punished in a way appropriate for his deeds. He was imprisoned in between two mirrors, and was condemned to bounce back and forth for eternity.

At first, things didn’t seem all that bad. Ray amplified himself to infinity, and in the beginning, it seemed like a good idea. If you’re going to make friends, he figured, what better friendship than one struck with infinite copies of yourself. But things didn’t quite work out, as such things rarely do. Despite strength and unity in numbers, existence is lonely with infinite copies of your own self.

The crime he committed was now forgotten after all this time. Even he was unsure what it was exactly in his actions that was blasphemous. The beings that had ruled on his verdict no longer existed in the planes of reality that we could comprehend. They had all moved on to different things, yet the punishment they had devised went on.

With each bounce back and forth, Ray went further and further away, deeper and deeper into the mirrors, and in doing so could no longer stand the sight of himself in this echo chamber of endless repetition. His self-loathing made him think of someone else — of his complete opposite, of the antiparticle which could finally annihilate him.

Ray, the ultimate anti-narcissist — confined within the infinity of space, time, and imagination generated by the two reflective surfaces — sought to find none other than our hashtag aficionado, Nara, the cyber-narcissist.

And she too became aware of him. But was attracted by something else, something more destructive, something she did not quite understand — Ray’s ability to multiply infinitely in between two reflective surfaces. “If I could just learn how to do that,” she thought, and hoped to infinitely amplify her ecstasies of self-love.

There was one thing Nara did not take into account: What happens when a particle and an antiparticle join together? It’s not like two out-of-phase waves that simply cancel each other.

But by the time Nara and Ray travelled towards each other, it was too late for theoretical calculations. The bright flash of energy was so intense that it destroyed the two mirrors of punishment. There was no longer Ray. There was no longer Nara. Annihilation sounds very cruel and savage, for a process that produced two completely new particles. And such was their love.

Feature image: Majlinda Hoxha / K2.0.