December Pulse

Prologue

The events unfold between the two nations of Larmenia and Oranco—both born of imagination.

Is there any link between them and reality? That is left for the reader to discern.

And when you reach the end of this tale, do not ask who wrote it—Adam or its inhabitant… perhaps it was penned by another hand entirely.

Prologue

The Pulse of December

That was the name given to the operation that erased the greatest nation on Earth—Larmenia—from the maps of the modern age, reducing it to scattered primitive villages.

Larmenia was not bombarded by our Orancian army with planes, tanks, or conventional weapons. Instead, it was struck by a nuclear electromagnetic pulse—an invisible force unleashed last December. The immense EMP wave disabled everything that relied on electrical circuits… and what, in our world, does not?

Our war against them was never primitive—

it was designed to make them primitive.

From that moment on, the world was no longer what it had been. In the pitch-black nights of modern Larmenia, only the eyes of a black cat will gleam in the darkness.

And this is the story you are about to read—

a story born on its soil.

Are we standing at the edge of the end of the world…

or has it already ended without us realizing?

One day, I met a pale-faced woman, her fingers trembling, leaning heavily on a cane. You might have mistaken her for a shepherdess—if she were one. She seemed to be in her seventies.

She asked me a question that forced me to stop, just as I was about to pass her by:

“Do you know what the greatest lie humanity has ever lived?”

“Survival?” I replied.

“No,” she said. “There is a greater lie… knowledge. Many believe they stand at the center of events, when in truth they are merely inhabitants of neighboring towns. Tell me—are the laws of physics truly unbreakable? Were the reports and images of astronauts sacred texts beyond error? Can man-made laws never be violated?”

Since the first human being began to ponder the universe, to theorize and to believe—another always followed, exposing the flaws of those ideas and replacing them with new ones.

Today, most theories and laws are regarded as final, fixed, and unquestionable. But who knows? Tomorrow, someone may rise to prove some of them wrong.

Perhaps you have heard of the Faces of Bélmez.

In the early 1970s, in the Spanish village of Bélmez, inside the home of María Gómez, strange faces began appearing on the cement floor of her kitchen while she was preparing dinner. The phenomenon terrified her family and the villagers alike, who believed the faces to be restless spirits inhabiting the house.

Mr. Gómez removed the flooring, convinced it must be a defect in the material. Yet days later, the faces returned. He replaced, painted, and repaired the floors again and again—but the faces persisted.

Finally, he decided to dig beneath them—only to uncover two headless bodies, later confirmed to date back to the 13th century.

And despite María’s death in 2004…

the faces are said to appear to this day.

Then there is Jason Padgett.

An ordinary man—a salesman in Washington State—concerned with little beyond life’s pleasures. One night, everything changed. He was violently attacked, struck in the head, and suffered a severe concussion.

When he awoke, he was no longer the same man.

Padgett began to see mathematical equations everywhere—Pythagorean forms, curves, circles, intricate formulas whose solutions appeared to him with astonishing simplicity.

His life transformed completely. He was later classified among a rare group—around forty individuals worldwide—diagnosed with what is known as acquired savant syndrome, a condition that still defies scientific explanation.

Do you have answers?

Has human knowledge truly explained these stories—

and the thousands of inexplicable phenomena that unfold each day?

Will science one day offer answers?

Perhaps.

And when it does, I imagine the people of the future will look back at us and call us fools.

Though she appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary woman—perhaps even ignorant, if one were harsh—every word she spoke carried a deeper aim.

The moment something strays beyond the familiar, humanity recoils in denial. How could you possibly tell people that what they know… they do not truly know?

Throughout history, scientists and thinkers have suffered in their pursuit of proving ideas that once shook the foundations of knowledge. Take Georg Ohm, whose work was dismissed and ridiculed in his time, despite his brilliance. He even received a formal reprimand declaring that his book sought to “strip nature of its dignity and insult it.”

Even Isaac Newton himself was not spared, suffering a nervous breakdown under the weight of opposition that nearly drove him to madness.

And consider this—if a major scientific institution were to admit that something it once declared as truth was, in fact, false… would it not lose a significant portion of its credibility?

The answer is yes.

And so, more often than not, silence prevails.

If I were seated among them, in positions of power, I doubt I would risk destabilizing such carefully constructed certainty. And if I ever did it once… I would never dare do it again.

So tell me—

How do you convince someone that their thinking is flawed…

when their thinking itself is flawed?