«Why me? What did I do to deserve this?»
— From Snail
I have always had a problem with dust.
I cannot stand dust's wretched habit of coming back.
I remove it carefully, make sure not to leave a single speck, and yet it inexorably settles again the moment I turn away. In this long war I have always lost. I have tried everything, and dust has always beaten me.
This war began many years ago, when I was small. I must have been five when I first noticed an irritating film over my collection of toy cars.
I went to my mother and asked what it was, and she told me it was dust. I went back to look at the toy cars and ran a finger across the surface, watching the clean trail form in my wake. I brought my finger to my mouth to taste it, but I noticed nothing in particular. Flavourless. Neutral.
I asked my mother to explain this business and she told me it needed to be wiped away. "What is it made of?" I asked. She smiled. "Lots of things. Dirt, fibres, and… dead skin." The words froze me. "Ours?" "Yes, darling. We shed skin every day. It's normal." Normal.
I took a cloth and cleaned all the cars on the windowsill, but now I knew what I was removing. Pieces of us. Dead fragments that broke away and drifted off.
A few days later I picked up a car to play with and saw another layer of dust. I was baffled. Hadn't I cleaned it properly? I ran to tell my mother and she laughed and, stroking my hair, said that dust has to be wiped away every now and then because it comes back.
This shocked me. What do you mean it comes back? Where does it come from? My mother found my questions very entertaining.
It became essential for me to remove that strange substance from my bedroom. I wiped every Sunday. Little by little, as I grew, I noticed new places where dust hid — places harder and harder to reach, almost as if it wanted to hide from me, as if it were afraid.
My mother was very proud of my punctiliousness in cleaning my room. My friends rather less so; they often made fun of me and asked me to clean theirs too.
Inwardly I was deeply unsettled. Why didn't the others care about dust? They simply wiped it away, nothing more.
I was ten when I decided what I wanted to do when I grew up.
I wanted to find an answer to dust. Looking back, I must have seemed like a madman to the other children. They wanted to be footballers, archaeologists; they wanted to become YouTubers or travel to strange places. Not me. I wanted to discover the secret of dust.
I was certain there was something strange behind it — I felt it in my gut. Something did not add up.
My parents treated this obsession of mine like any other childhood fixation, laughing and saying I had a peculiar head.
But they couldn't see how resolved I was. I had spent days observing dust, working out how it formed, where it gathered most and why. I kept entire notebooks tracking the movements of dust in my bedroom and then throughout the house.
I tried to understand how it moved, where it went, and what its purpose was. Yes, I was convinced that dust had a purpose. But I kept that to myself and never told a soul — I was beginning to understand how strange certain claims could seem.
During middle school I tried to contain this eccentric curiosity and kept investigating in secret. I ran various experiments with different substances. I tried applying cleaning products, drinks, glue traps — anything that came to mind to catch it and stop it coming back.
One evening, aged thirteen, I put a sample under an old toy microscope. I saw fibres, fragments, and then… Scales. Translucent, paper-thin scales. Skin.
I took a piece of tape, pressed it against my arm and examined it magnified. They were identical. The dust was me. I was the one creating it, simply by existing.
I discovered that honey trapped it well. A few drops scattered around caught the particles, as if they were drawn to the sweetness. But it also attracted ants, and I found my room overrun.
In every experiment I was defeated; it always came back.
During those years I began to clean the rest of the house too — perhaps my mother wasn't removing the dust properly and it was reforming and migrating into my room. By the final year of middle school I had a highly efficient cleaning system in place; I was certain I was removing almost all of the dust.
That "almost" troubled me. However hard I tried I could never eliminate it entirely; a little always remained somewhere. I was certain that from that small remnant it would multiply again and invade the whole house. My parents were beginning to sense something was off.
My behaviour was not normal. I spent every weekend in the house cleaning every surface and corner with millimetric precision, trying to eliminate every last particle of dust.
I never managed it, and I began to suspect I was using the wrong method. In hindsight it was obvious. Simple cleaning could not work. After all, everyone cleaned, but dust returned everywhere.
During secondary school I decided to take my observation of dust to the next level. I began watching how it behaved outside too — in the street, in buildings, on cars, everywhere.
Over the years I noticed similarities, as though dust behaved differently in different environments but followed general guidelines. The most difficult place to monitor was the streets. With the wind and the movement of people, dust was always in motion, pausing only briefly in some corner.
But even in corners it didn't stay still for long.
I was always an excellent student, top marks in every subject except during the penultimate year of secondary school. That year I went through a deep crisis.
It was the year I realised that dust was everywhere.
The day I realised it, I was astonished I hadn't seen it sooner. It had always been right in front of me and yet I'd never truly grasped it. Dust was everywhere. In every place.
This shook me to the core. What a fool I had been! I was trying to remove it from my bedroom! Then from the house, hoping it would stop coming back.
I had been so short-sighted. I could not possibly beat it by cleaning the house. It was everywhere. A war I could not win.
Despair settled over me. Nothing mattered anymore. Whatever I did, I would never manage to understand and defeat dust. It was something far too great for me.
I lived for months like a zombie. I ate almost nothing, I didn't study, I didn't care about anything. I kept asking myself how it was possible that for everyone else everything seemed so normal.
There was dust and the others accepted it, without questions, without investigation, nothing.
I felt completely alone and isolated.
My parents were desperately worried; they sent me to a psychologist, tried to understand what was happening to me, but when I talked I could see they didn't follow. They didn't share my vision. And this made me even more apathetic.
I began to believe there was something wrong inside me.
I began to dim, slowly.
I was promoted to the final year of secondary school only thanks to my previous career as a perfect, unblemished student; everyone said that such periods could happen during adolescence but that I would recover.
They were right. I recovered.
Shortly before the final year began, I came back to life.
I remember that day. It was very like the day I had understood that dust was everywhere.
That day I understood something that, in hindsight, was obvious. If dust was in my room, I had tried to clean my room. If dust was everywhere, then I could clean everywhere. The whole world. And so eliminate the dust. My vision had simply been too narrow! An immense relief washed over me.
I could still win — the battle had simply moved to a higher level. I made a plan of attack.
Clearly I couldn't think of cleaning the world by conventional means — it was impossible. I had to find the right method, invent it if necessary.
An enormous energy flooded through me. I finally had a clear objective.
In the final year of secondary school I was simply in a class of my own. I was hundreds of steps ahead of the others. For me that year was merely a necessary nuisance before doing what I truly wanted to do.
I finished with top marks and started university. I enrolled in two degrees simultaneously. I needed to know my enemy thoroughly, so I decided to study biology and chemistry. My parents were very pleased with how my studies were going. I graduated in six years in both subjects, studying day and night without pause.
I was twenty-four. The problem was that the more I knew about my enemy, the more new questions surfaced, and I was still nowhere near finding a way to defeat it definitively. But this didn't discourage me — I was making progress.
Now I knew the composition of dust in detail and from what it derived. Under the electron microscope the truth was incontrovertible: seventy per cent of household dust is dead human skin. Cells that detach, drift, accumulate. I saw my own dead tissue floating in the laboratory air, lit by a laser beam.
Every breath displaced thousands of fragments of myself. Every movement generated a small cloud of cellular death. We were the source. Humanity was an immense dust factory.
But then came the discovery that changed everything. At twenty-six I began studying interstellar matter — the particles drifting through the space between stars. Under the spectrometer something struck me. The quantum signature. It was identical. That of my hands and that of the cosmos shared the same basic pattern.
It could not be coincidence. I dug deeper. Dark matter constituted eighty-five per cent of the universe's mass. Eighty-five per cent. Just as skin was seventy per cent of household dust.
I understood that what floated in my laboratory was nothing but an infinitesimal echo of something cosmic. The particles were sisters to those pervading the space between galaxies. Both residues. Both the dross of being. Dead human skin and dark matter shared the same function: the residue of existence, the waste product of living.
The universe itself was flaking away. I had presented my chemistry thesis on dark matter, astonishing the professors with what I had found. I continued running every kind of experiment in my spare time. At twenty-seven I attempted the first radical experiment: genetically modifying dust mites to make them devour themselves. It worked. Too well.
The mutated mites developed a voracious appetite and began producing a toxic substance. Three of my assistants died in the laboratory before I managed to seal the room. I watched them through the armoured glass as they slumped. I felt no pain — only frustration at having lost six months of work.
That evening, back home, I looked at myself in the mirror for the first time in weeks. The man staring back was a stranger. Sunken eyes, greyish skin, cracked lips. I ran a finger down my cheek and watched the scales rise, floating in the bathroom air like dirty snow.
I too was part of the problem. I too was flaking. I smiled. It was the last time I felt anything looking in a mirror. The university closed the laboratory for two years. I resumed elsewhere.
It was during that period that I met Elena.
She was a literature student, green eyes and a smile that seemed to illuminate the grey days in the laboratory. For a few months she almost made me forget the dust. Almost. But when I showed her my notebooks, when I explained what I truly wanted to do, her smile vanished.
"This isn't normal," she told me. "You need help." She left one November evening, leaving a note on the kitchen table. I never read it. I already knew what it said. Everyone said the same thing. No one understood. After Elena, I stopped trying to make myself understood.
Dust was the only thing that mattered.
Now that I knew chemistry I could create and experiment with the most varied compounds. I had gaps in studying the movements of dust, so I enrolled in mathematics and probability theory to develop stochastic models of behaviour and understand how dust dispersed.
Everyone was astonished by my talent. The professors said they had never seen a student with such a pronounced aptitude across so many disciplines. Everything I turned my hand to came to me without difficulty.
No one truly understood where I drew all that determination from. No one could. At thirty I discovered that dust had a fractal structure. Every particle contained within itself the echo of all the others. But that was only the beginning. What I discovered in the following months took my breath away.
Dark matter was not simply matter.
It was a field of universal flaking. Everything shed "skin" at the quantum level. Atoms themselves, immersed in the quantum vacuum, continuously emitted virtual particles. They were born and died in fractions of a nanosecond, but they were there. They were real. Quantum physics confirmed it.
Those virtual particles were the desquamation of the space-time fabric. Space itself was flaking, renewing, shedding fragments of itself at every instant. Stars through the stellar wind, billions of tonnes per second. Black holes evaporating via Hawking radiation, losing mass like skin peeling from the infinite.
The entire universe was continuously shedding itself. The virtual particles born and dying in the quantum vacuum every nanosecond were nothing else: the universe renewing itself by flaking away. And that matter… That was proof that it was alive.
At thirty-two an international ethics committee attempted to block my experiments. They called them "dangerous to humanity". They were right, but they didn't understand. The true threat was humanity itself, which produced dust simply by existing. I had to persuade certain key members. Money for some. Blackmail for others. Threats for the most stubborn.
Three of them took their own lives within the space of a year. It was not my fault. They had placed themselves between me and the dust. The choice had been theirs.
At thirty-five I stopped sleeping more than two hours a night. The body had adapted. Dust did not sleep; neither could I afford to.
As time went on, as I mastered advanced mathematics, I began to understand certain things about the movements of dust and its behaviour.
Through relentless proof I found a formula to gut the chaos. I called it the Equation of Becoming. It allowed patterns to be predicted in disorder, to see the hidden order within chance.
Everyone was astounded by it, and the stock markets nearly collapsed because I could forecast them with perfect precision.
But it was not enough to predict the movements of dust on a global scale. Something was eluding me.
While pursuing these studies I received incredible offers of research positions, but I declined almost all of them. I had to concentrate on my own work. People didn't understand what I was working on.
As I advanced in my studies I understood that I had to go deeper, that dust was eluding me because it existed in symbiosis with living organisms — but not only them. I had to go smaller, so I began studying physics and quantum mechanics. I slept almost not at all.
Two hours a night, sometimes less. The body had adapted. Over the years it had learned that dust did not sleep, and therefore neither could I. I studied for years and years, moving from one discipline to another, until the age of forty. My parents died when I was thirty-six, within a few months of each other.
I attended neither funeral. I was in the laboratory working on a formula to destabilise dust molecules at the quantum level. I received the phone calls; I ignored them. I received letters from my brothers cursing me. I burned them unread.
Dust did not wait. No one in the history of humanity had ever taken as many degrees as I had. And no one had produced inventions as great as mine. I had become a world authority across many fields. I had created a virtually infinite and non-polluting energy source.
I hadn't done it on purpose — I was looking for a way to break the molecular bonds of dust at the field level.
I had found a cure for cancer, again without meaning to — I had been looking for a method to destabilise the symbiosis between dust and living cells.
I had found a system for producing warp drives while trying to map the dispersal of dust across the universe.
The world that had been on the brink of ruin when I was born was living through an era of growth and prosperity without equal, thanks to me. I was recognised as the greatest genius of all time.
But at the age of forty something in my motivation was cracking. However great my efforts, I could not beat my sworn enemy. I had stopped feeling. I couldn't remember the last time I had laughed or cried. Emotions had worn away like everything else, left behind as useless ballast.
I had become efficient. Precise. Mechanical. But perhaps for precisely that reason I was losing.
However much I learned, there was always as much again escaping me. A piece was always missing, then another. It was as if I were trying to build an infinite puzzle. I could feel that dust was winning the battle.
Every time I entered my laboratories and saw it there, staring back at me, inert, I felt a stab deep inside. Every time it returned after I had eliminated it, it was a defeat that weighed heavier and heavier.
I felt that I was losing the war. I began to withdraw into myself and grow ever darker.
The people around me couldn't understand why I had changed. They thought I had everything a man could want. That I had won every challenge I had decided to undertake.
How wrong they were.
They didn't understand that I had never won. Never. I had one objective and I hadn't come close to it.
I had suffered nothing but defeats. Over the years I had discovered that dust existed not only on Earth but in space too. This had shifted the perspective and the scale of my objective yet again. Every time I believed I had drawn nearer to a solution I discovered that the finish line was in fact further away than ever.
I began studying astronomy to understand where space dust came from, and in doing so I invented a means of controlling a possible route at the speed of light. I also found a material capable of withstanding such extreme stresses.
I studied and experimented as no other human being had ever done before.
My funds were unlimited; I was financed by virtually every nation on Earth.
The first large-scale space exploration missions began.
At fifty I was a global hero — everyone knew my name.
And I was more and more closed off within myself. It was now clear that dust was everywhere — more than that, it was everything. Inseparable from the universe itself, in the large and in the small. I discovered it was the connective tissue of reality, what held together the particles, the stars, the void. Every thing, in different forms. And we…
We were the greatest producers. Seventy per cent of dead skin in household dust. But on a cosmic scale? Stars died and became dark matter. Planets disintegrated. Life was born, grew, flaked away. The universe itself was nothing but a gigantic organism continuously shedding skin.
But then I understood something deeper. Dark matter was not a passive residue. It was the nervous system of the universe. Every particle drifting through space was a signal, an impulse, a cosmic thought. Just as neurons in the human brain die continuously to make room for the new, so dark matter died and was reborn, allowing the universe to think, to change, to evolve.
Like dead neurons in the brain, necessary for the new to be born. The universe grew, changed, evolved through flaking. Without it, without the continuous loss of self, it would be a perfect and dead crystal. It was not the waste product. It was the mechanism. Growth through loss.
Every particle of drifting dark matter was a dead neuron of the cosmic brain. To want to eliminate it was to want to kill Becoming itself. If you eliminate it, the universe dies. Or worse, it stops evolving. It crystallises into a motionless eternity. Neither could exist without the other.
We ourselves were dust.
That was the supreme defeat.
I would never be able to win.
For some years I sank into a state of deep depression. I stopped studying and inventing. I retreated to a remote mountain cabin without seeing anyone. I was fifty and I believed I had failed. The cabin was of wood, small, surrounded by fir trees. Dust was there too.
It settled on the beams, on the books I had brought and never opened, on the windowsill. I watched it for hours. At times I thought I could see it moving, organising itself into patterns. Was I going mad, or was it speaking to me? I spent whole weeks staring at a single particle lit by a shaft of sunlight. I didn't eat. I only drank water.
My body was consuming itself, slowly transforming into that which I had always fought. Matter generating matter. The perfect cycle. The solution was eluding me because I was part of the problem.
Until a new and crystalline idea arrived. It came to me while I was watching a magnificent dawn break. I was fifty-two.
It was clear. I had not yet lost. I simply needed to increase my will in order to have victory. I must not place limits on what needed to be done.
Everything was clear to me. I had no doubts. To achieve victory I would have to embrace an equivalent sacrifice.
I returned to my laboratory and for two years remained locked inside, building a very special machine. No one understood what it could be for. I built it in an underground bunker I had had excavated beneath one of my properties, far from prying eyes. I told the financiers I was working on cold fusion.
Technically I was not lying. The machine was a ring forty metres in diameter, made of an alloy I had invented myself. Inside, superconducting magnets cooled to impossible temperatures. At the centre, suspended in a vacuum, a fist-sized sphere of antimatter held in position by force fields that consumed the energy of a small city.
When it was running it emitted a hum so low as to be almost imperceptible, yet you felt it in your bones. In your teeth. In your marrow. A sound that seemed to come from the centre of the Earth.
The day it was ready was the only day in my life I was truly happy. I had moved funds through a hundred shell companies. I had made scientists who asked too many questions disappear. I had falsified safety reports. I had bribed government inspectors.
Two intelligence agents who had come too close to the truth died in a road accident. It was not difficult to arrange. When you have enough money and enough rage, everything becomes possible.
By now I had practically won.
Once switched on, the machine would create an inverse singularity — a point of non-existence that consumes instead of attracting. It would devour matter at a speed greater than that of light. It would eat the universe in a matter of minutes. It would be like a Great Collapse, the exact opposite of creation.
To switch it on I would need to draw directly from the energy of the Earth's core.
Today is the great day. I stand before the ignition console with a wide smile.
The dust will finally disappear.
I type in the ignition key and the machine fires up with a deafening roar. The hum climbs in frequency. The walls of the bunker vibrate. Dust begins to rise from the floor, from the surfaces, swirling in the air as if drawn towards the centre of the ring.
I only need to press the launch that will set the Great Collapse in motion.
My hand stops above the red button.
I feel so light at this moment.
No. Wait. For just an instant… For one instant only… An image. My mother stroking my hair. "Dust always comes back, darling." I drive it away.
Elena. Her smile lighting up the laboratory. I burn it.
My assistants falling behind the glass. I bury them.
My father at my mother's funeral.
I erase him.
Everything.
I erase everything.
Nothing remains but me.
Me and Her.
Every sacrifice has had its meaning. I close my eyes for a moment. I see particles. Billions of particles dancing in the darkness. They organise themselves. They form patterns, galaxies, spirals. Then a face. My face as a child. Made entirely of dead skin, of translucent scales that flake and reform. It smiles at me. I open my eyes with a start.
Everything makes sense. The matter in the air thickens. It forms a cloud before me. I know it is impossible, and yet it happens. The dark matter in the room, the virtual particles of space-time, the fragments of dead skin — all of it converges. It takes shape. Not a human shape.
Something vaster. Miniature galaxies rotating. Nebulae being born and dying. A vortex of creation and destruction.
I feel a pressure that is not physical. It is in the mind. In the thoughts. The universe is speaking to me. Not in words. In direct understanding.
WHY DO YOU WANT TO STOP ME?
"You are it," I answer aloud. "You must end."
I AM BECAUSE I AM ALIVE.
I see images. The Big Bang as an explosion of primordial skin. The first particles breaking away from the fabric of existence.
IT IS NOT THE WASTE. IT IS THE CHANGE.
TO STOP THE FLAKING IS TO STOP GROWTH.
DO YOU WANT A DEAD AND PERFECT UNIVERSE?
"Yes," I say, and my voice does not waver. "Clean. Still. For ever."
LIKE YOUR MOTHER WHO CLEANED YOUR ROOM. SHE KNEW IT WOULD COME BACK. I KNOW I MUST COME BACK. IT IS THE CYCLE.
An image strikes me. My mother wiping down my toy cars. She smiles. She knows that tomorrow it will return. But she does it anyway. Why?
"Cycles must be broken."
YOURS TOO?
I look at my hand. The skin is flaking in real time. Particles of me rising, entering the cosmic vortex, becoming part of the dance. I am already part of it. I have always been matter generating matter.
"Mine too," I whisper.
THEN YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD. YOU CANNOT DEFEAT ME. YOU CAN ONLY BECOME ME.
And then I see everything. I see that if I press the button, if I create the Great Collapse, the universe will not truly end. It will compress. Return to zero. And then… It will explode again. A new Big Bang. New matter. New galaxies. New life.
And sooner or later, somewhere, a five-year-old child will look at his toy cars. And will see, for the first time, a strange film. And will wonder: what is it?
Because this is what we are. Cycles that flake. Matter generating matter.
"Then let us make a pact," I say to the consciousness of the universe. "I eliminate you. You return. And somewhere, in another cycle, another me will understand again. Will begin again. Because this is what we are."
YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD.
The pressure fades. The particles drift gently down. I am alone. But no longer alone. I have understood.
I press the button. My hand descends with a calm I have never known. The red button sinks. A click.
Then absolute silence for an instant that seems eternal. The machine begins to vibrate. The hum climbs beyond the threshold of hearing. The inverse singularity ignites at the centre of the ring. A point of non-existence that begins to devour. First the matter in the air. Then the air itself. Then the walls. Then the light.
I feel my body beginning to flake. It does not hurt. It is… liberating. Every cell detaches and flies towards the centre. My skin, at last, joins the Universal Matter. I become what I have always fought. I become what I have always studied. I become what I have always hated.
I become what I have always been.
And in the last instant of consciousness, as even my thoughts break apart into particles, I smile. Because I know that sooner or later, somewhere, a five-year-old child will look at his toy cars.
And will see, for the first time, a strange film.
And will wonder: what is it?
Big crash.