Standing in the huddle during a timeout, Marreese Speights listened intently to his coach. There was still a lot of time left, and they needed to make a focused effort to regroup.
Suddenly, a sharp pain exploded through Marreese’s head. He clutched at the apparent source, the bump on the top of his shaved head. “NNNNhhhh,” he moaned through clenched teeth.
“Yo man, you okay?” asked Justin Holiday, who was standing next to him. “You injure something?”
“No, no, I’m good,” Marreese managed to answer before another wave of agony jolted through him. “AAAAAAAHHH!” Now everybody in the huddle was looking at him with concern. “It’s happening again,” he wailed fearfully.
“What’s ‘It?’ What’s going on?” asked Steve Kerr.
Marreese couldn’t respond as he collapsed to the floor. Behind his shut eyes, horrifying visions were playing out. A technologically-advanced starship sailing through the Milky Way; a greenish-gray alien figure readying some kind of ultra-destructive plasma gun; a wide view of the earth getting bombarded with flaming alien projectiles; a distant prison planet where humans toiled for eons mining rare metals for the use of their extraterrestrial overlords.
Just as suddenly, the visions stopped and he was able to see again; still, the pain remained. Shaking off the helping hands of his teammates and pushing himself up off the floor, he took off at a sprint towards the locker room. In his ears rang menacing, high-pitched words that mimicked no Earthly accent: “This is what awaits the humans of earth, a doom greater than any previously fathomed apocalypse, a cleansing on a galactic scale!”
It was his cyst. His cyst was receiving these alien transmissions. For some sick reason, he was the chosen one, the prophet anointed to tell the human race of their impending demise. As he ran, brief images flashed in his eyes. He could make out dismembered human bodies, and gloating, eight-foot-tall monsters standing over those bodies. Here and there he caught a glimpse of a burning White House or the smoldering ruins of the United Nations. All the while, the insidious screeching of alien voices tormented his ears, mocking his species’ meaningless attempts at cultivating a civilization.
Marreese’s mind was in chaos. Some of the coaching staff was chasing after him, but he had to evade them. Nobody could know what he knew. These episodes passed within minutes, and if he could just make it to a bathroom stall, he could play it off as a bad case of diarrhea.
“Diarrhea! Your human bodies are so weak, so fragile. Long ago we perfected ourselves so that nothing would be wasted! The universe would truly be a more prosperous place if your kind was removed from it, Marreese.”
“No…no…” Marreese groaned, finally bursting through the locker room door and into the bathroom. “Please, stop…”
The pain began to subside as he rested his head against the cubicle wall. The images invading his visual cortex started to become less clear, eventually fading out to nothing. And all that was left in his ears was a piercing ringing that would persist for days.
There, sitting on the toilet, Marreese cried. Not only for this terror which he had to endure so often, but for the doomed future of the human race.