College student Kosmos Villareal worked on the final project for his Advanced Media Studies course. He named his final project “The History Lesson.” Kosmos thought it might be fun and a ‘killer project,’ as he called it, to take a film made from every television show and commercial broadcast for a year. This proved unfeasible, so he set his laptop to record one second of programming at 10-minute intervals on randomly selected channels. Why he called it “The History Lesson” is an unanswered question.
He kept notes containing his ideas for the project, put his computer in a closet, and let the whole thing run its course for two weeks. Luckily there were no power outages during the recording period, and he ended up with 33 minutes and 36 seconds of rapid-fire imagery. Two weeks later when he sat down to view the collected footage, he only remembered pressing the “play” button of the app he used to record everything. When he woke up, he had a broken arm, his bedroom had been torn asunder, and all the goldfish floated face up in his aquarium. There was furious knocking on his bedroom door. His uncle, Jupiter Villareal, had called the police because he heard screaming and the sounds of breaking furniture. He thought Kosmos had lost his mind.
Kosmos was arrested for disturbing the peace and placed on a 5150 hold. In California that means he had to undergo involuntary psychiatric commitment because he appeared to pose a danger to himself and others. To the arresting officers and the detective, Kosmos did not appear to be mentally ill, but decided to err on the side of caution. Further, the K-9 units did not detect any illegal drugs in his room.
The detective found the binder of handwritten notes Kosmos used to document his project. She suspected there might be a causal link between what Kosmos stored on his computer and his strange behavior. The detective confiscated his laptop along with the binder of notes. During the time Kosmos spent at the psychiatric wing of a local hospital, his uncle Jupiter and his cousins Nebula, Venus, and Capricorn cleaned up his room.
Uncle Jupiter said, ” Make everything nice and neat, as your cousin will be home in a couple of days, and we want him to be comfortable.”
“You think he got some bad drugs or something?”
” Hey Nebula, look at this!” Capricorn discovered another notebook hidden under the pillow on the bed. Kosmos kept not one, but two handwritten research journals, based on his slightly paranoid idea that one of them might get confiscated or destroyed.
“Wow, cousin wanted to record every TV show, but he had to settle for recording what he called only a ‘representative sample’ of stuff. It says if the laptop is destroyed or lost, it’s OK, because everything was automatically copied onto a hard drive that he kept in the closet. It says the hard drive has “power supply” written on it, but it’s really a hard drive. Hey, is Kosmos some kind of spy?”
“I don’t have a clue about what that boy was doing. You know what? Don’t touch any of his stuff; just leave it where it is, OK? I mean it!” Then, Uncle Jupiter closed and locked the bedroom door.
The evidence room clerk at the police station, Officer Sojourner Smith, loved to study history. She held an associate of arts degree in history from Modesto Junior College. She transferred to the local university where she attended classes in the morning before she went to work at the station. She was 23 years old, childless, never married, and lived with her parents. She joined the Air Force right after graduating from high school, and her military experience helped secure her position at the police station. Within the next two years, her undergraduate studies would be completed. She saved as much of her money as possible, and every year she worked as a police evidence technician, she saved about $20,000. She estimated that by the time she finished her bachelor’s degree, she would have somewhere around $75,000, barring any bizarre catastrophes. She already knew where she was going to attend school for her master’s degree and her doctorate. She wanted to study the influence of ancient Egyptian culture and civilization on the cultures of the Mediterranean basin, with particular attention to Mycenean and later Greek culture. She had plans.
When she noticed Kosmos Villareal’s belongings in the evidence room, she was intrigued. She knew Kosmos. They both enrolled in the same political science class at the university and participated in many lively group discussions. She called upstairs and asked why his things were in her “office,” as she called the evidence room.
“Oh, all that stuff belongs to the guy who went berserk, broke his arm, and killed his goldfish,” came the detective’s answer, “Right now he’s in the hospital emergency room so the doctors can set the broken bones in his arm, then his ass is getting a 5150 hold.”
Although she was surprised by this news, Officer Smith’s work experience allowed her to be somewhat philosophical, because she knew of several upstanding citizens who had done some really strange, really crazy things. She spread Kosmos’s laptop and notebook on the stainless-steel counter to properly catalog them. She was intrigued when she saw the words “The History Lesson” written on a piece of tape stuck onto the laptop. She turned on the laptop computer that belonged to Kosmos and flipped up the screen. She saw a video file labeled “history training” and pressed play.
When she came to, her uniform was torn to shreds, she was barefoot, the word INRI was written across her forehead with a felt pen, and she was the reason traffic stopped on a busy street. The shock was overwhelming; she started screaming and crying. Other police officers rushed over and put a blanket around her shoulders. They took her to a local psychiatric hospital for observation.
The detective assigned to the case recalled one strange passage in the notebook that belonged to Kosmos Villareal that said:
“Dude…I think I dreamed this, yeah, this was a dream, and I remembered it for once… In the spring of this year, some teenagers discovered a way to induce an altered state of mind from watching a series of television shows. I mean, they were actually pieces of television shows and commercials all stuck together and it was called the history lesson. Yeah, it was a dream, but it gave me an idea for my media class project. That’s what I’m gonna do…”