The Harvest Bioluminescent

Lettuce Head
Sep 12, 2025
8 min read

Updated: Sep 12, 2025

“I got an email from Helen, Steve. Did you?” Constance asked.

On the other end of the phone line, Steve was silent, but Constance could hear him breathe a shaky sigh.

“You did, didn’t you?” She asked again.

There was another long moment of silence before Steve, who was normally well-spoken, stuttered a reply. “Y-yes, C-constance, I… s-saw the email. I don’t… I don’t know if I believe it. I… don’t want to believe it.”

“I think she did it, Steve. I think it’s real.”

“Then God help us all,” Steve said, and hung up.

Dear friends,

I know many of you are upset with me.

You were all very supportive funders and collaborators.

We shared an interest in the afterlife, and through our diligent research, I accrued vital experience and data.

When I created a machine to stop and start the heart so that I could self-induce near death experiences, many of you backed away from the project.

Some of you were angry, and I forgive that, as I always understood your ethical reservations.

Some among you tried to stop me when you realized I would be experimenting on myself.

Some of you feared I would use the machine on others, though I assured you I would never do so.

I kept that promise.

But I did, as the old saying goes, take the money and run.

To continue my research, I was forced to change my identity and go into hiding.

I don’t know for certain that the journey on which I am about to embark will be my last, but, just in case it is, I sent multiple copies of the diagrams for my machine, the manual for its operation, and written accounts of my experiments to all of you in the hopes that, should my machine fail to bring me back once I move into the light, my work will still unveil what lies on the other side of death’s door to those who remain among the living.

In many near-death experiences there is a welcoming light.

In my own self-induced experiments, I long searched for the light but found only darkness.

Until now.

Each time I went under, I found myself in a void at first, but then, manifesting from the shadows, various figures would appear.

As you’ll see from my records, I would sometimes encounter loved ones. My parents, my grandparents, my husband, my son…

My beloved son Harry was the hardest of all to meet there in that darkness. I will leave it to you to read experiment #37 as even thinking of it right now rattles me to the core.

At other times, the entities I met professed to have been mortal, though not human.

Most were not hostile, though intelligences of that sort seem to lean mostly toward indifference, waving me away as a fool.

“Another traveler, eh?” one shade remarked. “You will realize when you reach your goal that you were better to enjoy mortal life while you had it rather than seek what lies beyond. Time bleeds monotony here, and never again yields to joy.”

That was experiment #42.

The few benevolent ones, however, seemed more than content, and told me that the afterlife, much like life itself, was what we made it.

They encouraged me to keep searching until I found the light.

Because of this, I think of them as the Emissaries of Light, and will refer to them henceforth, as I have in my notes, as the Emissaries.

“When you find the light,” said one named Gabriel, “you will find that you can travel anywhere, be anything, and know all. What your kind sees as death is a rebirth into another life for those who choose it. There is no supernature. All life is biological, though some is of an extradimensional sort which your three-dimensional, mortal mind is unequipped to comprehend. Shed your mortal skin, sister, and be reborn into the Harvest Bioluminescent.”

“If you seek, you shall find,” remarked Raphael, another Emissary, “but you must overcome your darkest, even your most nameless and primal fears. We will guide you with light, but there are others who will attempt to stand in your way and will yet guide you aright with terror.”

As my search deepened, I encountered others whose very presence was so vile that I would flee through the dizzying maze of the void to keep them at bay until the machine brought me back.

They were flitting shadows within the shadows, like the gray blobs or tricks of the vision which sometimes impress themselves upon the darkness behind our eyelids.

Though they did not speak, they emitted a constant drone of guttural grunts, screeches, hisses, and slithering sounds which evoked visions of snakes, dripping blood, oozing slime, or charred flesh melting off molten bones.

Each time, I fled deeper into the unknown, unsure if I was making any progress at all, until an Emissary appeared and congratulated me on escaping another Sentinel, as they called them.

The Emissaries resembled bioluminescent creatures, as found in the wild. They glowed with a soft radiance, just enough to view them but not the darkness beyond.

The Sentinels would depart, spitting screeches and hateful hisses, when the shining Emissaries drew near.

The Emissaries’ faces were a blur, which would sometimes settle into definite forms I associated with the angular symmetry of classical human beauty, so I could see why our forebears might have believed them angels and mistaken the ripples of light beyond their heads and shoulders as wings or halos.

Perhaps their faces take the forms our cultures give them. I questioned them, but their answers on these matters were cryptic at best, as you will see when you read my accounts.

After many terrifying yet enlivening excursions into the void, I finally saw the light.

It is a beacon to a wandering ship which seeks safe harbor ashore.

It calls me.

The experience is a thrumming in my solar plexus, a warmth which spreads through my entire conscious awareness and lingers even after the machine brings me, jolted and jarred, back to painful life in this prison of flesh.

Unlike my conversations with the Emissaries and other figures and intelligences I met in the void, the voice of the light is inside, and since encountered has not left me.

It invites me towards itself, promising me all that the Emissaries say is true, and the feeling is of immense reassurance, hope, and—dare I say?—yes, love.

The Emissaries warned me that once I walked into it, I would not return. My machine will be impotent to bring me back.

“How can I leave a record of what lies beyond?” I asked Uriel.

“All who come to the light from the three-dimensional mortal fold must find their own way,” she said, “and cannot be instructed by their peers in that lower dimension whence they come.”

The scientist in me balks at this.

So it was that I explored recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and neural networking.

To my near death machine, I added an AI modeled after my own brain which, in connection with another apparatus of my design, will record my final journey, and send it off immediately to you upon my passing, so that you will see what I see when I step into the light.

So long as it all works out as planned, it will arrive as a file saved under the name The Harvest Bioluminescent.

Sincerely and with great love,

Helen Blasky

Constance had not only been a colleague of Helen’s, but also a good friend.

They studied neuroscience at university together.

Helen was a genius of the highest class.

In her youth, Helen helped develop procedures that saved lives, successfully treating brain and nerve conditions which puzzled neurologists for decades.

She married Tom, Constance’s brother, and they had one son, Harry.

One winter night around Christmas, Helen, Tom, and Harry were driving home from visiting family in Missouri.

A semi-truck slid on a patch of black ice and jack-knifed into their sedan.

Only Helen survived the wreckage.

She spent a week in a coma.

When she awakened in the hospital, she described a vivid vision of Tom and Harry.

Tom, agitated, spoke at length, but she couldn’t recall what he said.

She could only remember how real Harry was as she hugged him tightly.

“He was really in my arms, Constance. Really there,” she’d said, the ache of longing and loss unmistakable in her voice. “I think the reason I can’t remember what Tom was saying was because I was so focused on not losing Harry again.”

In the years after the wreck Helen became deeply involved in researching near death experiences.

Constance missed her brother and nephew so much that she not only joined Helen in her research but also helped recruit others.

They found that though near death experiences tended to be colored by cultural beliefs, there were many consistent factors which indicated the possibility of an afterlife.

As a neurologist, Constance was inclined to write it off as the hallucinatory states of the brain under stress, but as a friend, a mother, a lover, and as someone who still held onto some semblance of the faith of her youth, she wanted to know if there was more, and she knew that if anyone could establish such as fact, it would be Helen.

Steve was Constance’s ex-husband.

A neurosurgeon and man of faith in his own right, he was a supporter and funder of Helen’s work.

Until the machine.

Their marriage was already a little rocky before Helen’s revelation about how she intended to go forward, but after Helen stole their money and fled to continue her research, Steve and Constance couldn’t keep it together.

Constance wanted to support Helen. Steve was livid.

Yet Helen trusted no one, not even Constance, to help with the last stages of her work.

The email was the first anyone heard from her in over five years.

When an email link to a file too big to send directly appeared in Constance’s inbox with the name The Harvest Bioluminescent in the subject line, she almost didn’t click it.

What if this was some sort of hoax?

What if it wasn’t Helen at all?

Yet she knew it was. The tone was Helen. But more than that, she felt an internal shift, an intuition accompanied by a chill up the spine and gooseflesh rippling her skin.

A premonition.

She clicked the link.

There was darkness, save for a tiny, distinct glow in the center of vision.

Helen’s voice, unmistakable to anyone who knew her, narrated the scene as the light grew closer.

You should be seeing through my eyes, hearing with my ears. In this realm, the senses of touch, taste, and smell are dulled.

When I think of the visions which assailed me upon meeting the Sentinels, I am grateful for this.

I walk toward the light. It is farther away than my last visit, but I can feel its pull internally—an extrasensory perception I cannot translate into mere words.

The light got bigger as she spoke but still seemed far off.

Hisses and high-pitched screeches rose suddenly, seemingly everywhere.

They stabbed the eardrums, insinuating themselves into the crevices of the mind, as if trying to pull it apart.

Helen turned to look.

A score of gray blobs, shifting in an asymmetrical manner which hurt the eyes to behold, were closing in on her.

She turned back and the vision of the light shook as Helen ran towards it.

The Sentinels! A horde of them!

The light drew closer still as the shrieking became more distant.

Helen wept.

Her hands came into the picture, reaching for the light.

It grew larger until it filled the screen, shimmering between her outstretched fingers.

The hissing and shrieking receded until it faded altogether.

They will not approach it, just as the Emissaries said! I am safe! I am home! The love—it bursts within me! I can’t describe its fullness! Its beauty! Tom! Harry! Mom! Dad!

Helen’s hands touched the light, and it intensified, as if to greet her.

The light parted, however, to reveal greater darkness.

Almost imperceptible, but still unmistakable, were the points of long, jagged teeth above and below.

Helen screamed as the darkness engulfed her with a squelching sound like a dozen knives simultaneously shoved into a slab of raw meat.

The light disappeared and the neural link abruptly ended.