"You want to know how I became a saint?" said the man, perplexed.
"Yeah! Everyone calls you that, but no one will tell me why," said the girl, yearning to know the reason.
The man went into deep thought. 'Hmm, she wants to know how I became a saint, huh? She might be too young... Ah, whatever.'
He thought for a while and decided to share the story. "Alright, but you better not share this story with anyone, promise me that," the man said with a serious tone in his voice and a strict look on his face.
"I promise! I won't tell even mama!" the girl said with a determined look.
"Good! Now where to begin? Hmmmm...." The man thought for a bit scratching his head and finally started the story.
"A long time ago, in a world, unlike this one, lived a boy..."
***
[Earth: United States of America, 2018]
The morning was bright and beautiful—the birds were chirping and the dew on the grass was glistening.
A boy woke up to a fiery, pink sunrise shimmering outside his window and got up since he had school today. He stretched to loosen his stiff and languid body before he got out of bed.
The boy was slightly above average, looks-wise, with beautiful green-brown eyes, scruffy black hair, olive skin, and was lanky but tall. Overall, you could say he was an average looking guy, the only thing that stood out was his height and eyes.
Aside from looks, he was a genius in most people's eyes. With an IQ recorded around 160 and a photographic memory, he excelled in studies and found high school quite boring because he had learned everything that was taught in high school even before he was in middle school. The only thing that he liked about it was the friends he had there.
Most of his close friends were geniuses as well, or people who worked hard enough to be at that level. Most of his classes were taken together with them, and the times spent together in those classes were some of the most enjoyable times for him.
Before leaving for school, he did his daily morning routine. After showering, he went downstairs and got his usual breakfast: a muffin and a banana.
"Why do you always eat a muffin and a banana for breakfast, it's so weird," the boy's younger sister asked in a mocking tone.
"It's quick and easy, and it tastes good. Plus, there are a lot of healthy things in bananas," the boy retorted with an expressionless face and a monotone voice.
The boy ate his meal and completed his routine, then left for school.
"Have a good day at school honey," the boy's mom said as he was leaving.
The boy only gave a notice that he had heard her and left. The boy was old enough that he could drive and had bought his own car with the money he earned from his part-time job. It was no Rolls-Royce, but it got him from point A to point B.
The boy arrived at school at around eight in the morning. Still tired from staying up till around one in the morning—reading new particle physics papers—the boy lazily drifted to his first-class and plopped down at his desk.
The hours at school drifted by like a flowing river, calm but, to some, equally boring. That is what the boy thought of school, a calming area, but completely boring with little to nothing to do or learn, aside from articles on his phone.
At lunch, the boy got his usual lunch, which he had gotten every day for the past year; it provided all the necessary nutrients and tasted alright, so he had no reason to eat anything else. He bought it and headed over to his friends. He sat down at the table full of his friends who brought lunches from home and were already happily gorging themselves.
The boy was incredibly lazy because of his boredom, but he could afford to be. During lunch, after finishing his food, he pulled out his homework that was supposed to be for the night before and started doing it. It was for his next class.
His friends always gave him a hard time because he always did this, unlike the others. His friends were all very diligent students, one, in particular, would do his homework almost immediately after getting it, which the boy found ridiculous.
"Dude, why do you always do your homework right before it's due, hahaha?" said his energetic and amicable friend, Edward. Edward was a hard-working friend of his. He fell into the latter category of someone who worked hard enough to be recognized as a genius.
"I'd rather do other things than do homework. I do it before it's due because I can. Simple as that," the boy answered coldly, not caring for the redundant question.
"You know that that's a bad habit that you'll regret once you go to college~" Edward added with a grinning smile.
The boy responded again, getting progressively angrier, "What are you, my mom? I don't care. If college is boring and offers nothing new, then I can just do what I've always done."
"Whatever you say~" Edward responded with a sly grin and a slight snicker. Edward would always tease the boy about his laziness and complacency.
While the boy would always get his work done, and it would be near perfect, he would still do it last minute. This was something the hard-working Edward could never understand. He prescribed to the doctrine of "if you can do it now, why push it off till later?" It was a belief the boy couldn't understand. For him, it didn't matter when he did the work before the deadline, since the result would be the same nonetheless—he had no sense of urgency.
Lunch finished and, as expected, the boy finished his assignment and turned it in on time. He got full marks for it.
After this class ended, the final class of the day came crawling up. It was the boy's favorite class because there weren't many people in the class and the teacher didn't care if you goofed off as long as you didn't disturb the class. So, the obvious thing for the boy to do was to sleep or read—which, he did. He decided to read this time while taking notes for the class, as notes were graded. It was an interesting article in a physics journal about crystal light structures formed from photons' reactions with a device that used superconducting materials. Well, at least he found it interesting.
Near the end of class when the teacher was done writing notes, the other students were studying or doing homework, while the boy had moved on to another article—it was about bosons, specifically gluons. He found the interactions between gluons and quarks interesting because their interactions made, basically, all the matter we know and interact with; making up protons and neutrons.
When the boy was about to look for another article to read after finishing his read on gluons, a loud explosion—that almost sounded like a whale—erupted from behind him!
WHOOM!
The boy, sufficiently startled, ripped his view away from his notes that were flying away due to the air pressure, to look behind him!
"Wha-What is that?!" screamed one of the girls in surprise and horror. Her knees were weak and her arms were heavy from trying to hold a desk steady to block the incoming wind. She was a small girl and the force of such wind would've easily blown her away.
"R-Run!!" one of the guys screeched as his voice cracked. He was someone who thought highly of himself—an arrogant type.
The previous girl, after seeing him scream like a girl and his voice crack, couldn't help but snicker, despite the danger and craziness of the situation.
When the boy got up from his seat and turned toward the explosion of air pressure, what the boy saw would make most people question whether or not they were dreaming. Looming in front of the boy, there was what the boy recognized to be a wormhole.
It wasn't exactly what he had imagined a wormhole would look like, but in his mind, he had no doubt that it was a wormhole. The circular wormhole swirled with a haze of deep, azure blue. There were intermittent violet sparks on electricity as thick as a full-grown man's forearm arcing out of the wormhole creating loud zapping sounds and melted the nearby area that turned a few desks into liquefied rubble. Also, there was a staticky sound resonating from the wormhole overwhelming the boy's ears, which made his head throb.
"Aaaaugh! My head, I gotta get out of here!" another boy yelled out from behind, after snapping out of his revere over the sudden wormhole.
While the boy was hypnotized by the sight of the wormhole, the class was thrown into a panic—obviously—and the students were feverishly trying to run away from the wormhole that suddenly exploded into the classroom, destroying the area around it.
The boy was ignorant to all the chaos around him, he was too busy being entranced by the seemingly supernatural appearance of this wormhole, even though his head hurt worse than a migraine.
Amongst the chaos, the boy thought, 'I wonder if there's anything on the other side of it.'
The boy was well-read and knew a lot, covering a wide range of topics. One thing he was very well versed in was astrophysics. He knew very well that theories predicted that wormholes could connect two points in time and space. The only problem is that they required an immense amount of energy and "exotic" matter to keep them stabilized, which is why scientists hadn't been able to create a stable one yet. This was the main reason for the boy's shock and awe with the striking appearance of the wormhole. The part about it connecting two points in time and space was what prompted the boy to ask this question.
"Hey! What is he doing?! We need to get him away from there!" one of the girls shouted toward the teacher while panicking. The teacher obviously didn't want to go and grab the boy away from the wormhole and decided to run away dragging the girl out with him, against her will.
"It's too late! We can't risk going over there!" said the boy who first yelled to run, to the struggling girl, still with his voice cracking. He wasn't willing to risk going back into the room for someone who obviously didn't care.
The boy, entranced, was left standing alone in front of the wormhole as everyone else had already run away, including the teacher. This was when the boy looked around and realized he was alone. He didn't know when they left, but they were gone and the only thing that could be heard was the static and zapping of the wormhole as arcs of electricity continued to spray out and melt the surroundings in a beautiful display of destruction.
The boy thought to himself, 'If I go through there, I wonder if I can find something interesting?'
The only priority for the boy was to find something to quench his boredom and his insatiable thirst for knowledge, which school and his current life couldn't provide.
Yes, he was on track to attend an Ivy League university, but the information he would be able to get ahold of there wouldn't be anything he hadn't been able to learn online. He would have to wait years to maybe decades to get ahold of information that he truly desired. Since he had no access to a research lab or classified documents, he had little left to learn that the STEM fields currently covered.
This wormhole sprouted at a perfect time when he wanted to escape from his endless cycle of boredom.
'I must go through here,' he thought, as if the wormhole was calling out to him as a sign of fate, building up the courage to chance going through the wormhole. Despite his usual complacency, he was unusually motivated when he finally felt the excitement he had long forgotten when he learned something new.
The boy's stomach started to flutter like a swarm of monarch butterflies had just migrated there during the mating season. He was extraordinarily anxious but in the same way excited. He could only imagine what amazing things waited for him on the other side of this swirling ocean of mystery.
The boy took a few steps back between the rows of desks and got in a position to run into the wormhole. He bent down into the position of a runner for the heck of it. In his head, 'On your marks! Get set! GO!' He sprinted off the starting line, with adrenaline pumping, and ran as if his life depended on it straight into the wormhole! He somehow dodged the electricity as he entered—probably just got lucky.
He had entered the wormhole and the scene was amazing. Despite the sight being a deep blue color at the entrance, the wormhole was filled with a blaze of colors more beautiful than the best paintings and natural wonders of Earth. The scene was of a constantly shifting tessellation of fractals all around him, the colors of which randomly pulsed from one color to the next as the fractals moved around him. If a normal person saw this they would feel like they could stare at it for an eternity, hypnotized by the swirling beauty of the colorful lights. However, the boy wasn't an ordinary person, the moment he saw the shower of color he was dazed and overwhelmed by the spectacular light show; in a similar way to how someone is overwhelmed when your mom suddenly opens the blinds in the morning to get you out of bed. He didn't see this as particularly artistic.
This shock didn't last for too long though, as he adjusted to the sight and could see what the wormhole actually looked like.
When his eyes peered into the infinite tessellation, the boy realized that the wormhole wasn't all rainbows and unicorns after all!
It was like a poisonous apple!
Just like the entrance, the interior was filled with arcs of electricity, which were mainly responsible for the glowing lights and were the width of a full-grown man.
Cold sweat ran down the boy's back as he felt his life in danger. He was moving along in the wormhole as if he was being carried through an invisible river by the flowing torrent of water. The only difference, this was like a metal kite being dragged through a thunderstorm, where the boy was the kite and the wormhole was the thunderstorm.
Yes, the boy did get lucky when he entered the wormhole. But, no one was lucky enough to escape thousands of lighting bolts unscathed when they were the only conductor around.
ZAP! ZAAAP! ZAP!
Soon after entering the wormhole, the boy was bombarded with a blizzard of lighting. He was thoroughly electrocuted. He could no longer feel pain as the electricity had fried his nerves. His skin was burnt to a crisp and was charred and peeling; he had smoke rising from his body to complement the look.
His eyes had gone blind, his ears deaf, all his senses gone. He looked like a fly that had gotten hit by a bug zapper and then barbecued.
From the immense strain on the body that had just occurred, it was a miracle that the boy was still alive, maybe the adrenaline bought him an extra second. However, his consciousness was quickly fading away as he continually got zapped by electricity. The last thought that drifted through his mind before he lost consciousness: 'Am I going to die?'