Christmas Eve, 1974
Serrano

Ring ring ring ring... Fiorenzo “Flo” Friendly was woken at 3 a.m. due to the constant ringing of his bedside phone.

He picked up the receiver “Who is calling at this ungodly hour?” It was Doctor Derek Deadly.

“Flo, you need to come to the morgue. There is something you have to see with your own eyes.” The coroner hung up before Flo could respond.

Flo stumbled out of bed and found the clothes he had been wearing the day before. He put on his turquoise suit jacket, black pants, his two-tone brown and white spectator shoes, with white as the dominant colour, the tip and heel were brown, and the main body of the shoe was white. His shirt was black, and his tie was white. A Smith & Wesson Model 29 hung from his shoulder holster, hidden behind his jacket and topped off with a white hat with a black brim around it.

Flo sped to the morgue as fast as he could in his rusty old Cadillac that didn’t have much life left in her. Old Catrina had been brand new when he bought her and was fire engine red, but now years of neglect and rain from a city that never saw sunshine had left her with rust all over her body and just holding herself together as she sped through this unforgiving city’s chaotic streets.

As he entered the morgue, Flo witnessed his own body or a doppelganger lying on the cold slab in front of him. Derek had his back to him. He saw something crumpled up in the hand of his own body. He unclenched the corpse’s fist.

It was a note that read, “Go to the church of Serrano”.

*
**

Flo had a smoke outside the morgue. He placed his left hand on his right knee, then his right hand on top of his left hand, in a bid to try and stop his hands shaking and get a handle on what he had just witnessed.

Was that me? Am I dead, or did I have a twin I didn’t know about? Is this really hell or purgatory?

These questions raced through his mind, scholars, bartenders, and detectives, just about anyone who lived on this hellish island described it as hell on earth. He decided to head to the church and follow the clues or go where his cadaver double wanted him to go.

The church of Serrano was massive; it was one of the most recognised buildings in Serrano. It towered over most buildings in the city and could always be seen no matter where you were on the island. Which meant it could be used as a focal point if you were ever lost and needed to find your way home or to a specific area nearby. The main body of the church was made of sandstone and had four identical turrets in each corner of the large nave. Around the outside of the church, symmetrical on each side, were multiple unique large stained glass windows. Inside the church was empty, but its doors were open to the public 24/7. Flo slowly approached a magnificent statue at the back of the church as he made his way through the river of over two hundred pews. All of a sudden, he felt a pain in his left shoulder as a bullet exited, and blood sprayed over the long baby blue tapestry carpet below, which was evenly distributed in three thin rows at the end of each row of pews. Each rug was a metre and a half wide and ran from one end of the church to the other. It would have taken a weaver many months to make these beautiful carpets depicting epic historical operas, and a bullet Flo could not hear or see had ruined one of these priceless antiquities.

I thought churches were safe places of refuge and off-limits. Flo said to himself as he darted for the altar and slid and rolled clumsily behind it, Flo thought he looked like an action hero from an adventure movie. Instead, he realistically looked like a panda falling down a hill at the zoo. Flo had arrived where he had been heading initially, looking up, there it was, the statue of Jesus. A spray of gunfire from behind the table in the vestibule at the entrance of the church missed him and riddled poor Jesus with dozens of bullets. Blinding light was shining through the statue’s mammoth right sandaled foot. Flo kicked out at Jesus’s foot, and it cracked open. There was a hole big enough to crawl through, and multiple colours of fluorescent light were glowing through it. Flo dived into and crawled through the Son of God’s foot and found himself in complete darkness. Quickly, he pulled out his flashlight from his pocket and, shockingly, found he was standing inside a sewer, nowhere near the foot or the church he had just exited.  

*
**

Flo climbed the ladder and cautiously opened the maintenance hole. It was snowing, and he could hear a kid selling newspapers from Christmas Eve 1924. In Flo’s Serrano, it never snowed, only rained eighty per cent of the time; the other twenty per cent, there were grey and black clouds in the sky, preparing for rain. The Serrano Flo had found himself in was a happier and more alive version of the sin-filled city. Even Flo had become less of a hardboiled cliché. He had built a snowman not long after climbing out of the sewer. He had given his scarf and hat to it, but had retrieved them as it was too cold to go without. He had a few snowball fights with the street kids. Eaten hot nuts and a hot dog from a nearby street vendor. He was now sitting in a diner drinking hot chocolate topped with cream and marshmallows. He travelled round the city on the streetcar, comparing the sights and enjoying a more heavenly version of his own city that was often compared to hell. At 3.30 a.m., he made his way to the church of Serrano, and the same thing happened again. Flo was shot in the same shoulder that ruined a priceless tapestry and climbed through Jesus’s glowing, magnificent, sandaled foot into a dark, forgiving sewer.

Flo travelled through Jesus’s mammoth foot twenty-four more times. Flo visited multiple versions of Christmas Eve in Serrano, not in any logical order. Each was different and unique to the home he knew, and Flo was unsure if he would ever see it again or remember what it was like, as every time he travelled through the church, the city he loved was changed beyond all recognition. Flo enjoyed every decade from the 1900s to 2010 and beyond; he witnessed the world evolve with new technology he struggled to understand. Leading up to a futuristic wasteland where he didn’t see any other Serranoites, and there was a version of Serrano he visited where everything and everyone was in black and white. He was currently sitting on a bench in a park in a far-off future version where the sun was always out, he was watching the world go by and enjoying an ice cream. Flo was in a version of Serrano where no one seemed to have jobs, and it never rained, and everyone had too much time on their hands. Robots and automations had taken over, and people seemed to be lazy and or stupid. All these timelines ended at 3.30 a.m. in a sewer until after his twenty-fifth alternate Serrano, where he met Harry Hawthorn.

*
**

Harry had opened the maintenance hole and pulled Flo up through it, and suggested they go to the diner and talk. He had arrived on Christmas Eve, 1937. Flo was sitting in a booth at the back of Emily’s diner. In front of him was a giant cup of hot chocolate overflowing with whipped cream, marshmallows, and rainbow coloured sprinkles. The hardboiled detective who entered the first sandaled broken toe of the Son of God was gone. He had found his inner child again. Flo was attacking his drink with a spoon as Harry returned from the bathroom and sat across from him.

“Flo, this won’t be easy to hear, so I will just come out with it. Nothing is real.” Harry said directly as Flo dropped his cream-covered spoon on the table as if the joy he had found had ended.

“What do you mean, nothing is real!” Flo screamed in a high-pitched yelp.

“Exactly as I said, the universe as we know it isn’t real. It is a simulation, that’s where religion comes from. Yes, the world and we were all created by a man, and that’s why prayers can get you what you want, and churches are the key to everything.”

*
**

Harry left Flo, trying to understand what had just happened, and calmly walked out of the diner and headed back towards the sewer, hoping Flo would eventually follow, and his head didn’t explode with what he had just heard.

Flo opened the maintenance hole cover, and a door had magically appeared in the wall of the sewer, with a rainbow of multicoloured light streaming out of it and a lot of electrical noise. He slid down the ladder and drew his Smith & Wesson Model 29 and entered a room which was full of big black refrigerators with lots of blinking lights and noises coming from them. Well, to Flo, who had no idea what a server framer was or had never seen one before in his short life. Harry had opened one of the top doors of the fridge and was typing on what looked to be a modern typewriter, and looking at a very skinny television.

“Flo put the gun down, you could destroy the world and kill us all!” Harry delivered these words calmly and unassumingly.

“What do you mean? What is this place?” Flo said as he holstered his weapon.

“These are the computers that keep the multiverse running”, Harry winked as he spoke.

“What is a computer?” Flo asked, very confused.

“Well, I already explained we live in a simulation, and these big boxes write the code... erm, story of our lives. If you could go anywhere in your life on Christmas Eve, where would you go?” Harry asked inquisitively.

“I would like to experience Christmas as a child and see my mother one last time.”Flo wiped a tear away from his cheek as he spoke.

Harry started typing furiously on the keyboard after a few seconds of mechanical noise from the keys. The two men were in the darkness, and white letters appeared and hovered in front of them before their universe reset, and they were in Flo’s childhood house. 

 

Harry turned to Flo and said loudly, “It’s okay, they can’t hear us”

Flo was already confused and mesmerised all at once as he watched a twelve-year-old version of himself carrying a black and white cat while running towards his mother. She had just returned from a long, tiring shift at Emily’s diner and was carrying leftovers for dinner and a bag of gifts that she could afford for the following day. Young Flo threw the cat on the ground and hugged his mother for what seemed to be an eternity.

“I thought I could experience this when you asked what Christmas I would like to relive, not just watch it?” Flo asked, trying to hide his tears.

“No, the past can’t be changed, you would say, and do things that might impact your own future,” Harry said as he was typing loudly and quickly again. The white text appeared as the universe was reset again; it was 1974, and he was reliving the fight he had with his wife, which he had had hours before the coroner had woken him up at 3 a.m. Luckily, she was a heavy sleeper. The argument was about him forgetting to get the gift their son wanted, and it was too late to get it now for Christmas morning. The final Christmas Eve Harry loaded was 1978, Flo was sitting in Old Catrina, eating a burger from Emily’s diner, he was overweight and looked to have lost all of the joy in his life. His ring finger was missing his wedding ring, and he seemed to be the only cop working in Serrano on Christmas Eve. Harry hit the escape key and they were back in the server room.

“Okay, I have had this conversation with you many different ways. You always miss the point, you can change your life for the better, but every time you want to expose that the universe is a simulation. I always warn you that if you try to do the latter, you get shot in the head when you return to the church of Serrano and your own timeline.” Harry pointed to the door at the back of the server room and continued.“That door will take you back two hours before you left.”

”I will expose them, whoever they are!” Flo said as he opened the door before he was shot in the head and killed instantly, his hand was holding the crumpled note he had found on his own body as he fell to the floor at the back of the church.

THE END