← Nephilim Death Squad
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One day during the final summer, a team of doctors came in from Berlin. They were in the midst of a grand experiment which they considered to be of the utmost importance and needed access to a large number of prisoners, something beyond what they could acquire in Berlin. We protested that we were not equipped for any sort of medical experiments, that our camp was designed for a single purpose, but they insisted and we were forced to accommodate them. I was immediately irritated by their senior doctor, a haughty man in his late 40s named Engel, who always wore a crisp white coat and fine leather shoes. He arrived with his team of doctors and I could scarcely believe it. A Jew. This was perhaps the ugliest Jew to have ever personally offended my eyes. He was a very tall man, a full head, taller than average, with a furry black beard, a gnarled claw like nose, and very prominent eyes. These eyes were something of a source of fascination to me, though, as they were not the rat like black color of the normal Jew, but a much lighter shade of brown, almost like bronze. He wore a shabby suit and followed Engil around quite closely, almost as if they were associates. And always his strange flashing eyes were roaming about in a suspicious way. When I first met Engel, I asked who this Jew was, but my question was brushed aside. They immediately set about converting one of our buildings into a station for their experiments, the details of which were kept from me entirely. And his team made no contact with the other staff and except to demand various supplies. After a few days of being subjected to Engel's imperious behavior, I could feel that my SS subordinates and even the Ukrainians were smirking at me behind my back. So I decided to give Engel a tour of the other part of the camp which he had not seen yet, the part where we process prisoners. Of course he refused, but I insisted. Fortunately, a trainload of prisoners was arriving at that moment and we went out to the platform. The odious Jew with glittering eyes followed us, which pleased me all the more. The train arrived with the cries of its passengers blending into the squealing of the metal wheels. The blue units worked themselves into their usual frenzy, pulling the passengers out, shouting and clubbing and herding them towards the main gate amidst a crush of passengers. The limp bodies of children occasionally came spilling out onto the platform and the blue units tossed them into a pile. And Gail watched all of this impassively. A woman came out of the train clutching a child of perhaps three years. She looked about frantically screaming for a doctor. I gave her a sympathetic look and held out my arms. She approached me, the handsome, stolid looking authority figure that I am. I took the child from her and tenderly examined, was still alive. I placed it gently on the ground and used my boot to reshape its skull. The woman I shot Rachel does not dream. Rachel does not sleep. Rachel does not wake. Rachel feels all the time. Rachel head has a direct sense feed with Reinhardt Emotive FPS blending for stunning clarity and total sensory presence. With the entire culinary library at her fingertips, Rachel can put herself into any scenario and create precision mixes at speed of mind. Watch as she blends Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with the Asteroid Orbital Catalog, the 2018 World cup game and the new hot anal cumming video from Angelica Alena. What mastery. See the subtle crafting and non stuttering blends. That's because Reinhardt's proprietary technology blend splits 240 visual FPS on the fly and to create an eye popping visual stream of over 1000fps while simultaneously delivering 60 tactical FPS and 60 olfactory FPS. Now this is salvation. But hey, forget the specs. Check out the feelings her holocaust child victim torso muscle thumps have walls around the world shedding tears and making those real feels. You can't fake this stuff. Are you tired of distant deadening emotions? Reinhardt Emotive FPS blending gives you realistic immersive feelings without excess rumination or thought linger. This kind of subtlety just isn't possible at ordinary 240fps. That's the difference for Rachel. That can be the difference for you. Rachel does not dream. Rachel does not sleep. Rachel does not live. Rachel does not die. Rachel feels. Can you. After a week at the camp, Dr. Engel put in a rather perverse request. He wanted to move his laboratory to the old gas chamber. I had no problem with this. We had installed a new, more efficient gas chamber with the help of an expert on the matter. And although they had a capacity of over 20,000 a day, we were seldom ever able to process more than 15,000 in a single day due to the unreliability of the trains, which were often slow enough to preemptively process many of their passengers. For us at this point we had orders to cremate the bodies and they burned in open pits day and night. And we warned Dr. Engel that the old gas chamber would be a rather distracting environment. Work in as it was between the smoke of the burning pits and the noise of the new gas chamber. He disregarded this and his team moved in that day. After that, I rarely saw him as that part of the camp was somewhat hidden from the rest, and my headaches, which were growing more severe, had always made me reluctant to visit. Soon my men began to tell me strange tales from the new laboratory. Nobody except Engel and his men was allowed inside, but we surmised that he had removed or reduced the chamber's interior walls and sealed up all doors except one. He requested his own SS detail, and two guards were posted at the door at all times. A steady flow of prisoners went into the laboratory whom Engel selected with the help of his odious Jew assistant, often to the great irritation of my units, as their fussy selectivity often slowed down our processing activities. Nobody could make any sense of his selection process, as it mainly consisted of the Jew looking the person over and making various mutterings. It was reported that every few days an enormous package wrapped in tarpaulin would be removed from the laboratory and carried over to a special burning pit which they had made. These packages tended to bleed, leaving a trail of blood to the burning pit where they were burned. Under the watch of Engel's personal guard. This behavior was only extraordinary and that there was no need for secrecy when it came to killing prisoners. Thousands were being killed every day just a few meters away in the new gas chambers. Between this and the inexplicable presence of the Jew assistant, I slowly became curious about their project. My men, however, were unable to get any information about what was occurring inside the laboratory. So I decided to focus a few questions on the member of the team who presumably had the least sense of loyalty. The Jewish. On one of our days off, I found the Jew in our little zoo admiring the peacocks. He looked very much at peace while he watched the birds strut around. While I was suffering from a vicious headache, I began to talk to him, affecting an offhand friendly manner. His German was perfect. I asked him about his background. He told me he had been a religious student in Berlin until he was expelled to a ghetto in Krakow. I asked him how he had met Engel. This is when he told me something quite surprising. This was actually his second time coming to Treblinka. On his first visit, he was on the very verge of being shot when somebody had noticed his perfect German accent. Apparently, there had been a request for prisoners who spoke excellent German, and this earned him a reprieve. He was sent back to Berlin, where Engel performed tests on him. I asked about the nature of these tests. At this he became more reticent. He had been instructed to discuss nothing with me. I merely informed him that I would shoot him through the face if he didn't tell me everything. At this he showed no fear, but looked at me with his odd brazen eyes and gave me an almost pitying smile. He said that the doctors were testing a new Swiss invention, some kind of chemical which was administered orally and caused profound changes in thinking. I asked him about these changes. He said that the chemical allowed him to see the mind of God. Naturally, I asked for elaboration. At this he launched into a rather overworked smile involving a broken mirror, and switched to another smile using a spider's web, neither of which made any sense to me. I informed him that I was a practical man and had little use for philosophy. He told me that after taking the chemical many times, he had become possessed of two minds, his own and that of God. In all his doings he was conscious of God's intentions, of God's plan for all human life. I asked him if he was following God's plan, and he said he was not following it entirely. I am wrestling with God, he said cryptically. How does one wrestle with God? Isn't he all powerful? He replied. When God presses forward, you must yield or be destroyed. And when God yields, you must press forward. That sounds more like dancing than wrestling or making love, I said with a snort. He smiled. Yes, it is. Except that dancing is not so painful. Why wrestle at all? If God is God and you know his plan, why not simply follow it? Surely this is the best course. Yes, but I cannot bring myself to, he said. For the first time I saw the peaceful expression flee from his face, to be replaced by an unsettling dread that trembled in his eyes. God's plan is simply too awful. Imagine Mother Babylon, Mother Rome, Mother America. The world enslaved flesh networks spanning the globe, the blood of humanity moving through veins thousands of miles long. Cavernous curving tubes as big as superhighways, biological superstructures, bones the size of the Golden Gate Bridge. Living engineering hearts as big as mountains pumping with tectonic force chained in relays moving blood across continents. Exotic neurochemical pestilence flowing from monstrous glandular ridges or flesh encased nightmares, farms of non human tongues babbling blasphemous gibberish. A vast sea bed dotted with lonely eyes. This is the great Queendom of Babylon. A great blood drunk whore wearing the crown of the atom. As all around her fleshy carapace float orbital platforms of nuclear death scattered in the stars beyond the seeds of Israel weep to gaze upon their new mother, the undying queen of blood and corruption the worst thing a black man can do is go to church on Sunday. We're not supposed to do that. In the old days, before Jesus paid for our sins, we'd be put to death for idolatry. But now you see them all dressed up in their suits and the girls are in their dresses with their booty all hanging out. They got the coochie hanging out of the dress at church. They're going in there like it's a club. That's not what God wants. He wants us to dress modestly because we are God's chosen people. But they don't know this. They're eating crabs and shrimp. Shrimp platters. Going to Red Lobster. All you can eat shrimp, $9.99. They don't follow the law. Then they go into church and worship this picture of white Jesus. That's idolatry. That picture of Jesus with the long soft hair, the good hair. That's not Jesus. That's actually a man named Khazar Borgia. The real Jesus had curly hair, black hair because he was black. He was a Jew. You have to understand what's going on in the world right now. They have satellites in space and they have weapons systems, atom bombs, everything. In which way are they pointed? They're not pointed down here on Earth. They're pointed out into space. Why? Because the nations of the world, America, the UN they're all waiting for something to come from space. Watch. It's coming, and they're going to try to destroy it. The Battle of Jehoshaphat. See, there's a thread, a line through history. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, America, the slave owners. It's all one. Do you know who the Nephilim are? They're mentioned in the Bible, but only twice. You have to understand the mystery of the Bible to understand what they are. The first time they get mentioned is in the story of the Flood. It says in Genesis 6, 4. There were giants in the earth in those days. And also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. These giants were Nephilim. Nephilim is the original Hebrew word in the Torah. You have to understand Hebrew to know the mystery of the Bible. Nephilim are the children of the sons of God who are fallen angels. Angels came down and had sex with human women. And they gave birth to Nephilim, people who were half man and half angel. The angels looked down, saw the people. The original man, the Black woman, the nice bodies, the nice booties, the thick legs. And they all got them a piece of that. I'm serious. They said, we angels, we can do what we want. So they got some. A little later in Genesis 6:12, it says, and God looked upon the earth and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, the end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence, and through them, and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. That is how the flood came about, all this mixing of flesh. Now, what if I told you the children of the Nephilim are still among us, that they are renowned as the scriptures say, that our scientists, our bankers, our leaders, our inventors, our Nephilim, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, these men are part fallen angel. And they are corrupting the flesh like the Bible says, by doing all this gene splicing and mixing chromosomes because they're made from mixed flesh between angel and human. So they're all for everybody, mixing men with men, girls and girls, whatever. Pretty soon you're gonna see chicks with two heads walking down the street. We're supposed to say, it's cool. I won't say no more because I don't want to get banned. The Nephilim control, the Internet. I'll just say I seen it myself. I've seen how they mix. The flesh, experiments, the government making new things. It's out there in the training curriculum for becoming a readjustment specialist. They emit finger blasting entirely. Which is odd considering what a routine part of the job it is. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the middle of a conversation with a client only to have her slip her finger into her shorts and start diddling away. My clients long term session heads, that is people who have been connected to a direct sense feed for multi spans are practically feral. Even though the feeds are supposed to be all about empathy and social connection, everything is so mediated that they lose the capacity for normal social interaction. If their session begins at an early enough age or goes on long enough, shit gets truly weird. The readjustment client is a stimulus addict. They crave easy immediate stimulation. Some turn to drug use, but they usually require near lethal or outright lethal amounts to properly stimulate themselves. Others turn to masturbation. The readjustment client has no patience. If they are uncomfortable, they want immediate relief. If that entails an indiscreet bout of ananism, then so be it. Almost all my clients are women. The female clients tend to choose male specialists. And the male clients tend to choose female specialists. In the feeds, they often surround themselves with coteries of admirers of the opposite sex, so they insist on opposite sex specialists. This is an unhealthy impulse, but we must meet our clients halfway. Our job is to slowly transition them away from being fake adoration sponges and being functioning adults. I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. I am trained to think of myself as a paid Big Brother. Perhaps there is an inherent contradiction. I must be stern without being overly judgmental. I must be empathetic but effective. I can't coddle them. The feed coddles them. That must end. The work could be described as Sisyphean. Trying to reculture a person after years of all that whiz bang feed simulation is like pushing a heavy boulder up a hill. And occasionally the boulder is masturbating. I asked the Jew exactly what sort of procedures they were performing in their laboratory. But at this point we were interrupted by several members of Dr. Engel's team, and they hurriedly ushered him away. Although there were still many unanswered questions, My curiosity was largely satisfied. They were testing a new chemical and probably performing vivisections and such to ascertain its physical effects. Perhaps the bodies were burned separately because they require special handling due to the presence of the chemical. There was nothing especially sinister in that. It was actually rather considerate of them. That night, shortly before I was about to retire for the day, One of the Ukrainians came to me with a small package wrapped in cloth, about the size of a loaf of bread with an irregular shape. He was very excited. He unwrapped the package, and inside was a fragment of pale white bone, an extremely unusual fragment. It was a sort of rounded carapace, like a part of a giant skull, but with five round holes in it, much like eye sockets, but obviously too numerous to be so. Studded throughout the fragment were extrusions that looked like molar teeth. Looking at it, I could not place it as part of any animal I had ever seen. I asked the man where he got it, and he said he had retrieved it from near the laboratory's cremation pit just an hour before. The piece itself did not appear to have been burned, as it had the meaty stink of death about it. I asked him a few more questions, but he knew little else. Still, he insisted that the bone fragment was from something monstrous and unnatural which they were creating in their laboratory, and that I should shut down their experiments. One of my SS subordinates immediately set to thrashing the Ukrainian with a baton for presuming to advise me on my duties. And with that, the conversation came to its natural conclusion. I took the fragment with me and spent a while turning it over in the dim lamplight of my quarters. It was indeed otherworldly, and as the Ukrainian had said, with a kind of wild fear in his eyes, it was truly monstrous. Despite the Ukrainian's impudence, I decided to take his advice. This had all gone too far. Whatever the high command might say, I mustn't let this camp be overrun by secretive madness, but must maintain a spirit of rational cooperation. I would insist on full inspection of the laboratory first thing tomorrow morning. I lay down to sleep and was soon visited with a dream so intense that I did not feel like I was sleeping at first. At first the bed in which I lay seemed to rise up from the floor and flowed ever upwards through a large glowing tunnel, which was painted with all manner of designs, from paisley to topographical lines to various kinds of calligraphy and unknown languages. After this, the dream became a series of absurd images, ever changing and blending into new images and shapes. Many of these shifts struck me as clever or absurd, and I found myself laughing maniacally at it all. Finally, all these desperate images appeared at once before me and began to rotate around each other as part of a fantastic wheel. And slowly I began to suspect that by combining them all some sort of grand secret would be revealed. Just as this notion occurred to me, all the images began to coalesce into one final image of stunning clarity. It was the image of a woman or something, which was mainly a woman, but also different creatures, who was vastly large and seemed to tower over me miles in the sky, who looked down on me and fill me in human eyes. Her skin was inhumanly pale, but she wore a crown of exquisite thorned flowers, and blood ran in shimmering red streams down her skin. She was pregnant, vastly pregnant, with a stomach so swollen it was like she sat upon a huge mountain of distended flesh. I could sense within her belly there was a hive of activity, of something or many things, pulsing and squirming feverishly. Soon the belly burst open like a ripe fruit, and rivers of blood poured out, and a revolting mass of fleshy tubes came spilling out, unraveling and tearing open to set free hundreds and thousands of monstrous infants who were both human and not human, who had the same filmy eyes as their mother, who were slathered and dripping with blood. The oily ones lack all harmony. They are neither silky nor subtle. They Are slow and stupid and loud. Evilly loud. Arrogantly, thoughtlessly, senselessly loud. Night and day. They make noise. Their unnatural things make noise. They cry to each other like kittens. They are far larger and stronger than any of our kind. But they are more hairless than the newly born. And they cry like hungry whelps. It is evil. It is abomination. They make dead things live. Things which do not have the smell of life should not live. But these things are touched by the oily ones. And they live and move this evil, unnatural magic. Their unnatural things come in all different shapes and contain deadly mysteries and tricks and traps. Some are invisible. Some are faster than sight. Some never sleep. Some cut and claw. These unnatural things lack all harmony, like the oily ones themselves. I've seen the deadly darkness of their magic. I've seen our kind crushed and smeared by their things. I've seen our kind disappear inside their things, never to be seen again. Once I saw a kitten who was struck by their magic, who made bloody foam from the mouth for three days, who died in agony. Yes, I have known sleeplessness. I know them as evil. And this would seem to be all. But there is more. There is more. There is mystery. There is the mysterious smell of the oily ones, the smell by which we know them. It is both awful and alluring, disgusting and entrancing. It smells like the sweet, oily fats that coats the heart of a pigeon, the best part of the flesh. We find ourselves drawn to it, drawn to them. And there is their food, which can contain dark magic, but also feeds many of us and truly tastes wonderful and righteous and does not scuttle, but always sleeps and is easy to hunt. Even more mysteriousness is their kindness. For it is they, they alone, of all living things, who show our kind any affection, who bring us food as if we are their young, as if they are our mother. How could this be? How could these evil beings show us affection? How could they show us more affection than the world itself? Who is of our kind? This is the central mystery. Ever since my kitten died, this has become my obsession. I have watched them closely. I have looked into the strange places where they hide, where they appear and disappear. The place is full of mysterious lights and smells and 10,000 forms of evil and wickedness. If I aim to capture this mystery, if I am to feed on its sweet, oily heart, I must go inside one of these places. I must go through one of their portals. I sit in my room watching bright specks of dust float through the sunlight from the window. The summer heat is pressed against the glass. Somewhere down the street a lawnmower winds. The air is stale. The corners of the room are filled with damp shadows. My toys lie on the floor, scattered. I hear the fractured music down the hall, a sound like wind chimes. A shutter goes through the old house and I find myself rising. I am walking down the hallway, called to the other end. I smell her as I get closer. Foul meat. Gray hair, Stomach acid. I walk in her room and her bloody pieces are lying all over the floor. The strange flute music slowly coalesces into a melody and the pieces rise and float like flies. The music charms them into formation and they come together to make mother. The eyes are missing, still fleshy cavities. They come in from the hallway, floating over my head, settling into her face with a squishing sound. Streams of blood falling like tears. Child, fetch me my bag. I need flesh. I shake my head. I hate her. She leaps to me, grabs a handful of my hair and slaps me across the face with her ragged dog's paw. Again and again I scream and cry. She lets me go, sobbing. I go to the closet and get her big bag. We wait until night. I call it coming back online. That moment when you first come out of a drunken blackout. It's always frightening. Where am I? What is this neighborhood? What happened to my face? Where's my wallet? Some people, when they drink enough to disable their short term memory, immediately collapse into an immobile heap. This is nature's fail safe. This is nature's fail safe. But I lack this feature. I can walk and talk and carry a tune, yet have no idea of what's going on. I have never come back online to find myself up to any good. I have never emerged from a blackout to find that I have built a convenient spice racker, delivered a morning speech about women's rights. It's always been some fucking calamity. The last time I came back online, I was standing in my front yard having a conversation with my parents. Even in my tottering state, I knew this couldn't be a good thing. I had no idea what we were talking about. Why were we talking about it on the front lawn at night? What time was it? Hoping for a clue. I waited for something to come out of my mouth and here it was. Didn't you notice I never left my room? I've been living with you for six months. I think I've seen each of you twice. This was bad. I knew I shouldn't be saying something like this. It sounded terribly confessional. Ever since I had gotten fired and moved back in with my parents, I had been holed up in my childhood bedroom, secretly drinking and basking in an unremittent sense of personal shame. But this was all supposed to be a secret. As far as my parents knew, I was freelancing and getting back on my feet. This scene, this mad scene, was not a part of that narrative. We were giving you your privacy. We didn't know you were getting drunk up there, my mother said. This conversation was out of control. I should just tell them I'm going to bed. I should calmly bid them a good night. So I said, of course I was getting drunk. Fuck, I've been drinking every goddamn day for the last 10 years. What the fuck else should I be doing? This was a poor choice of words. This was not how one calmly bids another good night. Ah, the look on my poor mother's face. That look stayed with me. That look, the fallen face of a tired old woman, stayed with me as I laid in bed that night. It stayed with me as the alcohol wore off, as the night turned into cold, queasy morning, as the hands began to shake, the brain tingle set in, as the hell whispers began, as I waited for them to go to work so I could sneak a bit of relief from the liquor cabinet. As the awful day wore on, as we talked that night, as I packed my stuff up, as I went off to rehab the next day. My mother is almost 70. She's a small and stooped and old woman. When did she get so old? I just thought I would be something by now, 33 years old. I thought I would have something to show her, something to give back, something to make her proud. I thought I'd be a man, not just a drunken failure. All those little soccer practices she took me to, all the swim lessons and therapy and errands and effort and love. What was it for? So I could be a drunken sack of shit? Why was I so fucked up? Why did I require shore leave levels of liquor to operate properly? As I lay in bed in the rehab that first night, listening to the occasional moans of the other patients, I asked myself these questions and others. Soon I found myself returning to the question I had been asking my entire life, the one I always retreated to in moments of a self pity, the one that seemed to hold some key to my dysfunction, the one I had always been afraid to ask my mom. What about that one summer when you were dead? The next day I felt under the weather. The vivid dreams of the previous night had left my Mind feeling dull and exhausted. As soon as I left my quarters, I was greeted with the news that one of our Ukrainians had gone mad during the night and attempted to attack Dr. Engel's team in their quarters. It was none other than the one who had brought me the strange skull fragment. After shooting him, they had come to the conclusion that he somehow ingested some of their magical chemical, which they referred to as the Swiss invention. Engels insisted that I make an announcement to the camp. Everyone found ingesting this chemical, under any circumstance, whether by intention or accident, will be summarily shot, regardless of whether they are prisoner or Hewie or even ss. This was by order of the high command. At this I was forced to admit to myself what was already obvious. I had somehow been dosed with the chemical in handling the bone fragment. My dreams had been a reaction to the poisoning. Looking into Engil's cold blue eyes, I tried to deduce the consequences of confessing this to him. Despite his disagreeable haughtiness, he seemed like a rational, efficient man with an appropriate love of duty and country. I had no doubt that he would murder me without hesitation. I decided to keep my little nocturnal epiphany to myself. Naturally, my curiosity in Engil's project had been aroused again. He apparently was working with a chemical which could induce temporary madness. The value of such a chemical was obvious. But what of the bizarre bone fragment? What had it come from? I couldn't help but feel that this creature, whatever it was, was somehow connected to the visions of the monstrous, bloody mother. Again and again her blood face appeared in my mind, her filmy eyes gazing down at me, inhuman and imperious. I attempted to contact the Jew again, but after our conversation, Dr. Engale's team guarded him jealously. He was never left alone. As the hot summer days went by, my curiosity about the matter grew to obsessive proportions. The monstrous mother visited me several more times in my dreams, of the normal variety this time, but no less vivid and disturbing. I began surreptitiously observing Engel's laboratory, which was guarded day and night, and I asked some of my men to do the same. To our knowledge, the bloody packages had ceased to emerge from within. But something stranger began to happen. This new phenomenon was presumably occurring at all hours, but was imperceptible in the bustle of the day when men were about and the gas chambers were operating. Only at night, and only when the fires were burning quietly, could it be perceived. I first observed it shortly before dawn one muggy morning, as Ridiculous as it might sound for me to be skulking about in my own camp, I did just that. Slipping along the walls of the new gas channel chamber to come within a short distance of the laboratory. There I witnessed what others had reported to me. At fixed intervals, a sound emerged from the laboratory. It was very quiet, but not just my imagination. A creaking sound. The sound that many old houses and structures make as their materials shrink and swell from temperature and moisture. But this came very regularly, every four or five seconds. Slowly, a realization crept upon me. The building was breathing steadily in and out. It was breathing. It was alive. This realization, which I'll admit was more of an unconfirmed intuition, filled me with a dread so strong that tears came to my eyes. There's something enormous and alive inside that building. The sight of death, bloody death beyond most men's imaginings had left me unmoved. But the sight of life, this new and unnatural life, pressing against the walls of the building, was enough to chill me again. I saw the face of the unholy mother in my mind. I saw her filmy eyes, saw a slight smile form from her lips between the streams of blood. That night I could not sleep. Unfortunately, the next day was our weekly day off and I was able to spend most of the day in my quarters. It was abnormal, intolerably hot and humid. My thoughts followed disorderly circles around the revolting image of the mother. And I felt as if I was being revisited by the temporary madness brought on by the so called Swiss invention. I had long loathed life at the camp, but had accepted it as tolerable hardship. But now the constant smell of the burning, burning sickened me. I felt I could take no more. That afternoon some of my men decided to go off to a nearby lake for a swim. And on a whim I accompanied them. I needed a reprieve from the heat at the lake. I eased myself into the cool water and floated idly, watching the clouds pass overhead. Here there was nothing but the gentle twittering of nature. It had been here before our murderous camp had been built and it would be here long after. Gentle and peaceful. I had been in the water for just a few minutes when I received the news. A group of prisoners had broken into the armory, smuggled weapons out and a full scale uprising occurring back at camp. The rest of the day was a whirlwind. We raced back to the camp and I found myself personally trading fire with the prisoners as all about buildings burned and everything was chaos. We called for reinforcements, managed to subdue the camp and set out into the woods to catch the escapees. A fair number were intercepted, but over 100 escaped. This was an unmitigated disaster. Coming back into the camp after the hunt, I had only to look around at the faces of my men to know that I was now in a position of total disgrace. As calamitous thoughts raced through my head, I found myself walking towards Engil's laboratory. Deep black soot stains around the front door showed me that the interior had been burned out. All around the entrance lay the bodies of Engil's team, their white coats dyed in fresh red. They had been massacred. Engel himself had been shot or stabbed several times and his throat had been slashed. And then there was the Jew. The Jew lay on the ground with one of my SS men standing over him holding a rifle with a fixed bayonet. The Jew's abdomen had been bisected and his bowels spilled out all over the ground. They were now caked with dust. A few feet from him lay a kitchen knife. Apparently he had stabbed Engil's whole team to death before being opened up by the bayonet. To kill half a dozen men like this was no mean feat. My officer stood with one of his boots atop a loop of the Jew's intestines, sneering at him. Remarkably, the Jew was still alive and wear when I approached. He lifted his head and I for the last time found myself caught in his strange gaze. We stood like this for a moment, staring at each other, inexplicable emotions flooding my mind. The Jew opened his mouth and croaked something. A bloody foam spilled out over his lips. He tried again. Water, he said. I quietly instructed my man to get some water. He scoffed and I clouted him about the head and screamed at him. He scurried off and returned a moment later with a large ladle of water. I took it and stooped down over the Jew and carefully tipped a ladle to his lips, letting him drink. He drank carefully. I wiped the bleeding foam from his lips. All the while I could not fathom why I was doing this, except by the commandment of this man's pleading eyes. His lips trembled and he attempted to speak. I cradled his head and leaned close to hear his words. I know this is not God. I've killed them, but others. You must. I waited for him to continue, but he did not. Must what? I asked. You've seen her. Your dream is the future. The mother? I asked. The bloody woman. There is still time to stop her. You must you must. And just like that, his life fled from him and the glimmer in his eyes went dull. I set his head gently on the ground again and stood up. I looked to the burned out entrance of the laboratory. It was now unguarded. I could walk right in. A chill went through me at that thought, but I knew that I must. I walked into the entrance. Just inside was a curtain made of tar, pollen concealing the interior. The smell of charred meat and petrol, which normally pervaded the entire camp, which had been giving me headaches and slowly driving me mad all the past year, was especially sickeningly strong here. With a trembling hand, I pulled back the curtain and looked inside. There, mostly hidden in the darkness, was a great, inexplicable monstrosity. Everything had been burned and blackened, but still I could see human shapes and forms. Arms, fingers, faces, jawbones, teeth, eye sockets, all burned in reduced ash, clinging to bone. But this was no pile of burned bodies. I had seen piles of burned bodies. I had seen mountains of burned bodies. This was something different. Human parts were coming out of the walls and the floor and ceiling. Arms and legs hung like stalactites. Faces came out of the floor. They were fused together in ways that could not be possible. At seeing this, I was filled with the strongest possible urge to turn away, to back out of the awful laboratory and run for my life. But I heard again the Jew's final words. You must. I knew this to be a command. I went inside. As the curtain closed behind me, I was enveloped in almost total darkness, bones cracked beneath my boots. Near the back, I saw a shot shaft of light where one of the old doors had been sealed up, but had become partially open again. I walked toward it, stepping over unspeakable, crunching shapes, brushing past nightmarish forms. I reached out to the crack of light, pulled back a board which was covering the door. Though I was not able to rip it free, I pulled it loose enough to let in a considerable amount of light, enough to reveal what sat at the back of the laboratory. As a child, I once went to a zoo in Vienna, where I saw an elephant skull. Looking at the object now before me, I was reminded of this long ago moment, and of how I had spent maybe half an hour staring at the skull from every angle. How I was titillated by its enormousness, its impossible alienness, and its unsettling similarity to what was familiar and human. Before me was a large obloid shape, almost as tall as me, stippled with hundreds of what looked like eye sockets. The lower portion consisted of a complicated structure that resembled several sets of jaws, each with hundreds or thousands of teeth of all different kinds, including molars, incisors, canines, even animal teeth, some of them of normal size, some of them as big as my fist. The center of the shape was split vertically, and inside was a set of curving bone tubes that seemed to fill the interior. I stood there in the charred darkness, staring at this thing, this blasphemous alien thing, while my mind filled with images of the awful dream Mother and the final gasping words of the Jew, There was still time to stop her. His commandment became strangely clear to me. This thing that the scientists were attempting to create. Whatever it was, it must not be allowed to exist. It was an abomination, and Gel and his team were dead. But there were others working on the project. It was secretive enough that the essential personnel would be few in number. A lab in Switzerland, a few top scientists, perhaps, perhaps that was the entirety of would not be easy, but far from impossible to find them all. It was perhaps in my power to destroy the whole project, especially if we lost the war, which seemed increasingly likely after Stalingrad, and if this chemical that they were using was obscure enough, it might be possible to eliminate the entire world's supply. Thus I could shut the door on whatever unholy creature these madmen were attempting to unleash. Yes, I could do this. At least I could attempt it. I felt now a distinct sense of the entire world's history resting on what I decided to do next. Surely moments like this did not come about often. Surely they must only come to men who are worthy of them. Surely there once was a little boy who loved swinging on the tire swing in his backyard. It was a simple swing made from an old tire and a length of rope tied to a branch of utter non existence. On many a lazy summer afternoon he would while away the hours, swinging back and forth under the shade of the big leafy existential nullity, and in the fall he picked apples from it. One day his father told him to cut down the apple nullity. But Pa, he protested, I love that old nullity. Mind what I say, boy, his father said. I don't like ontological paradoxes, and I don't like you sassin me. The boy ran crying to his mother. Ma Pa said I have to cut down the old nullity. Say it ain't so. I'm afraid it's for the best. The other day I was weeding the tomato patch and I saw Sammy the cat had gotten into the nullity when I was trying to get him down, I accidentally gazed into an infinitely branching timeline of events which never happened and never will happen. Well I'll be darned if that old Sammy didn't jump right on my head. But Ma, what about my tire swing? Come now, there's all sorts of other things you can tie your tire swing to. What about one of the many giant flay demon penises that grow abundantly in our world and provide our lumber? But Ma, I don't want to swing on some dumb old demon penis. You just say that cause you haven't tried it. Now mind your PA and fetch an axe. The boy got his father's ax and went to chop the non thing down, but after a dozen swings he found his hands were red and sore. The axe's demon penis handle was quite rough. He called to his father, Pa, this darn demon penis handle got my hands all scratched. Tarnation boy, don't you have any sense? Why don't you wear some gloves? The boy put on some gloves, but his hands were already quite scratched. At the end of the day they were covered in blisters and the tree still hadn't fallen. He worked the next day, despite all the pain and finally brought the non being crashing down. I'm mighty proud to have you as a son, the boy's father said, tousling his hair. I guess it's true what they say, the nut doesn't fall far from the demon penis. I could tell it was going to be a hair cocoon before we even opened it up. They have a smell like a mix between a barbershop and an ass crack, which is distinct. They occur when the hair growth regulators and the hygiene beds go awry. At this point I had not been a readjustment specialist very long and still enjoyed the feeling of standing back in my white lab coat while the technicians did all the mucky work. As I once had to do. This was how I saw the trajectory of my life moving farther and farther away from the dirty work. When I was discharged from the Marines, I was very proud of what I had accomplished and fully determined to never get myself involved in bullshit like that again. So I went to school to become a bed tech, went to school again, became a readjustment specialist. Eventually I hoped to become one of those high dollar panty sniffers at the Halcyon Psychomotor Clinic. A thousand coins an hour. Not bad. So I was standing there in my spiffy jacket while the working joes opened up the bed. I was pretty sure there would be little need for me today. We were pulling out a 33 year old woman who had gone into the bed at age 9. This was approaching a record. The younger a person is when they go in, the lower the likelihood of viability. Even if she had gone in at age 20, spending a full 24 years in the bed made viability unlikely. But at age 9 it was almost certain that she would be A gibbering smear. The technicians lifted the lid on the bed to reveal a nest of black hair. Guided by the glowing ER outline, they started working through it with scissors, cutting around the shape of the sleeping figure until her yellowish limbs were revealed. She was emaciated, but fortunately the soft moisture wicking hair had prevented any sores. She had a medium mixed American complexion which would turn into a deep bronze color if she ever went to the sun, but now was the color of yellowed cardboard. They finally removed the mass of hair that covered her face and wiped away the various crusts that caked her head holes. The typical eerie agelessness of a long term patient was especially pronounced. For a startling moment it seemed as if she was still nine years old. She was especially short and bony, but as I came closer to her I was able to see those indefinable signs of age that let me know she was an adult. Hi Karen, can you hear me? I asked. I was required to at least attempt to communicate with her, though the odds of her being able to comprehend a face to face conversation were essentially zero. Her eyes opened, revealing large wet eyes with black pupils. This was a good sign. Some occupants were unable to even understand the concept of eyelids or blinking. The pupils roamed within the eyes after not seeing anything more than a micrometer away for 24 years, there was no chance of her being able to see anything in the room. She licked her lips with admirable muscle control. Hello friends, she said in a faint creaking whisper. Her eyes still roamed, unable to fix on anything. She talks, one of the technicians muttered. Another technician who was taking a blood sample turned and strode out of the room. Is that you, Ben? Karen asked. I was surprised by this. She knew my name. This was supposed to be a black awakening, that is a spontaneous involuntary disconnection due to some physical layer disruption in her hygiene bed. She shouldn't have known my name. I had been assigned to her less than half an hour ago after she had been disconnected when she was just lying in a dark hair cocoon. Ben? She called again. Her eyes stared blindly at the ceiling. Yes, Karen, I'm here, I said trying and failing to sound reassuring. Can you come closer to me? I can't see you. I'm scared. I stepped closer to the bed, the smell of the foul hair becoming more intense. Up close, her face looked positively inhuman. I'm here, Karen, I said. Not knowing what else to do, I began the standard speech for a responsive occupant. You've just been disconnected from your feed. You're in a hygiene bed. My name is Bed. I mean Ben. I'm a readjustment specialist assigned. I know all of this. Come closer. Something in me resisted. I didn't want to get any closer. Though I had seen and handled occupants much worse than this. There was something eerie about this one talking to me with the face of a child and the voice of an old woman on her deathbed. Still, my entire job was to be psychologically reassuring. I couldn't afford to seem the least bit put off. I stepped closer and closer, put my hand on the hygiene bed. We were instructed to touch the occupant as little as possible, as they were unaccustomed to actual physical contact. Are you there? She asked. Her skin had an unreal plastic quality. I'm here our Come closer. I want to feel your breath on my face. I wondered if I should comply with this request. It was very odd. Frankly, I was a little unnerved by it, but I figured, what harm could this wasted little creature do to me? I leaned toward her, letting out a small, shaky breath. The woman's mask like face became a blissful smile. The pupils wobbled within the rims of her huge, glistening eyes. Listen, she said in the faintest whispers. You must help me. I'm here, Karen. A moment ago, one of your technicians placed a small pellet under the skin of my forearm. Within 10 minutes, the pellet's wax coating will melt and release a cardiopilegic into my bloodstream, stopping my heart. You must cut it out. User has logged out. General Castillo is gone. She made a real flash narrative. She was clever. She got a lot farther than any of us had any right to. But Q smelled her. Q slew her proxies. Q localized her. Q funneled her paths to one disconnection. It hurts. She was the last of the bread, our best hope. The ultimate soldiers fighting the final war. She and the other children were supposed to be the answer to Q. But there was no answer to Q. There never will be. Not after 10 trillion heat deaths. Not if every particle in the universe became a transistor and they all cycled together and the stones themselves cried Out. The war of the mind is lost. We lost it. Now begins the plague. The plague of the flesh. I'll say it. Hitler did the right thing. Do you know what he did? He came busting into people's houses, snatching them out of their houses, killing them. But that's because the so called Jews in Germany were selling weapons to America to go to war against him. So he did what he had to do. He had to check them. The people in Europe who call themselves Jews are not Jews. They're the Rothschilds, the Khazars or Khazarians or whatever they're called. They say they are Jews and are not, but do lie. And there wasn't no Holocaust. They just said there was. To get control of Israel, they sold arms to America so they could get the land of Israel. You want a real Holocaust? What about a hundred million people killed in slavery? What about 100 million Indians killed in the New World? That's a Holocaust. What happened in Europe wasn't no Holocaust. You can disagree all you want. Five years ago, I'd have disagreed too. I used to go to that church every Sunday and worship that white Jesus. Just clapping and singing praises with the rest of them. Oh, hallelujah. Go down, Moses. But that was before I knew my history. My wife taught me my history. Before I met her, I didn't know nothing about this. But she was so full of knowledge and beautiful and everything she said made so much sense. She taught me that Jesus was black, that the Israelites was black, that God was black. What are you gonna do when you get to heaven and God is black? When you see he has a face like mine, hair like mine? You'd be surprised. I was surprised too. Oh, you'd be surprised that he even exists. You're gonna be real surprised. Do you. Do you believe in evolution? No. No. The world is not no millions of years old. It's 6,000 years old. And you can follow the history of our people from the beginning of time through the deserts of Egypt, through the Roman Empire, across the oceans of the slave ships. You can see how God has tested us, how we have survived. Because we're special. We're his chosen people. I learned all of this from my wife before we got married. In the Bible it says that the man is the head of the household and the wife should submit to the husband. So I was young when I got married, but I had to be a man. You know, a man's wife is sent to him by the Lord. So I had to be a man for her. I learned to trade, how to work with my hands, put food on the table. We had two kids. You didn't know I had two kids? Yeah, a little girl and her little boy. My babies. I was a daddy and the head of the household. But I. That's when it got me. You ever seen New Jack City? Remember Pookie? He'd be like, shit, just be calling me, man. Be calling me. That's real. That's the way it is. You could be doing anything at work. Reading the Bible, playing with your kids. But if you hear it call you, you go to. Don't matter. I can't explain how it just snatches you up. It makes you move. You could walk out your door one day, just get some fresh air, and you don't come back for a whole week. Everything gets into motion, into play. You'll sell anything. Phone, laptop, car. It's all gone. Just like that. Because you want it. You are on a mission. I used to see the streets in my mind like a maze, like a grid. And I just walked the streets, turning those corners, just moving, moving, looking for something. I'd see buildings behind buildings, alleyways, lights coming on in empty houses. I'd hear noises, the sounds of cars coming up behind me, Whispers, people talking about me, Shadows. I was looking for it. But it was looking for me, searching for me. Like Pookie said, it was calling me. I was supposed to be the head of the house. I was supposed to be a man. You know? One day I came back to the house. I'd been out for a few days, and everything was gone. My wife, my babies. While I was out carrying on, they left. That was four years ago. I saw them on Skype once. The scripture says, God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. I guess I did it. Put it all asunder. I thought she betrayed me. But I know now that it was my character defects and my addiction. That's why I'm in this program. I'm going to stay sober. I. I don't care if you see me crying. I know that I'm going to be a man again. I have to become a man again. Because God joined me to my wife and made me a man in his image. I'm not going to defile his temple anymore. After they left, it took more. It took more of me than ever. I lost the house and was staying in my car. Then I was at the shelter. Then I was just out on the streets. I was always moving, watching things happen out there that nobody knows about. They think nobody cares. You might see a van pull up and some guy gets out. If you look like I looked. Some base head. They don't even care if you see what they do. They're nephilim. They come to our side of town to feast on the flesh of Israel. I watched them. The children of fallen angels. I saw what they did, what they built. I never want to see it again. Love and tolerance of others is our code. Page 84. Giant Crock of shit. It's not often you meet a black Jew. It's even less often you meet a black Jew who believes in Jesus. And it's that much rarer to meet an anti semitic black Jew who believes in Jesus. That's gotta win you some kind of fuckin prize. That's like a unicorn throwing a no hitter. And to be roommates with an anti semitic black Jew who believes in Jesus. What a treat. What an absolute delight. Don't you love it when a disagreement over laundry turns into a 30 minute fact. Free lecture about the end of days FEMA camps and the mark of the beast. Just anti semitic black Jew for Jesus things. I don't think I'm gonna make it living in this sober house. I can't live with this nutcase. The house manager says I'm supposed to be open minded and tolerant. Should I be tolerant of some of the most odious and insane antisemitism I've ever encountered outside of a Nazi rally? I don't know. I'll concede that it is possible that he could become a cool guy if only he stopped believing in everything he believes in and believed in entirely different things. That would be a good first step. The real problem is that I hate aa. I fucking hate. Has the same old bullshit magical beliefs as any cult. But they pretend to be open minded. It's just a bait and switch to convert you to believing in God. The entire program is nothing but let God make you sober. That's it? That's the entire program? Yeah. They try to distract you with all this pseudo systemization. 12 steps and 12 traditions and triangles and diagrams and slogans and little self help exercises. But that's all just a bunch of numbers and jargon to hide the essential emptiness of the program. To hide the fact that it is centered on a God that doesn't exist. The idea that this is the go to program for helping alcoholics is fucking appalling. It's a fucking crime. It's like getting cancer and going to the best hospital in the country and the doctor hands you a voodoo doll and tells you to sacrifice a chicken, you'd sue him for malpractice? They should be fucking ashamed of themselves to prey on people in such a vulnerable state, pretend that they're going to help them and try to convert them to their stupid fucking magical beliefs. It's a crime. I mean, everybody thinks the true Jew Hebrew guy is nuts, but it's not like their philosophy is any less bullshit. At least he is upfront about being religious, and he sure as hell isn't trying to convert me. He told me that white people are the children of Esau. We're gentiles, but we can still get into heaven if we aid the children of Israel. I let him borrow the charger to my laptop, so I guess I'm covered. A moment ago, one of your technicians placed a small pellet under the skin of my forearm. Within 10 minutes, the pellet's wax coating will melt and release a cardioplegic into my bloodstream, stopping my heart. You must cut it out. Hearing this, I breathed a sigh of relief. There was something unsettling about her face that made me believe she would tell me something urgent and terrible, but this was typical occupant talk. Like many of them, she believed she was still inside a feed narrative. You've been disconnected. This isn't a feed. There's no pellet in your arm. Your name is Karen Castillo. Do you remember? Scan my right arm with the er, she said in a bare, cracking whisper. You'll find it. Karen, do you know why you're in this bed? I've been disconnected. This was a strangely lucid answer. It didn't make sense. If she had been forced disconnected, how did she know that? Hey, we got two more calls to get to. One of the techs reminded me. Yeah, okay, Polar, I said, stepping back. A pair of techs hoisted her tiny doll like body from the hygiene bed onto our gurney and covered her with a sheet. Please, she croaked. Just scan my arm. What did she say? Asked Ricardo, lead tech, as we rolled her out onto the Bedrack apartment's narrow, almost lightless hallway. It's a feed dream, I explained. These guys were looking at me to be the expert, so I had to act like I knew exactly what was going on. It was best to go ahead and get to a medical center and and address her physical needs before we started counting her delusions. Until then, all I needed to do was be reassuring. Under no circumstances could I encourage her delusions. We rolled the gurney down the hallway to the elevator. Karen was making little croaking noises. Her voice was almost useless. After 24 years of disuse, her face seemed extremely disturbed. Somebody was standing at the elevators, already waiting for one. It was just Elian, one of our techs. I hadn't noticed him leave before us. I got an elevator coming, he said with a little smile. Even though the apartment building was a 300 cube, it had an old style cable elevator and they came with the frequency of subway trains. Thanks to Elian's thoughtfulness, one was arriving just now. I gave Karen a friendly smile. Don't worry. Nobody's going to hurt you. You're completely safe. She managed to gasp a couple of words, which I barely heard. Elian, he there. She had known another of our names. How was this possible? It was hard to sort through the implications. Did she have access to our records? Maybe dispatch was wrong about how she got disconnected. The elevator let out a ding and the doors opened. There's barely enough room inside for the gurney. Me and the three techs. Elian stood on the other side of the gurney from me. I looked him over. As the doors closed, an elevator began to descend. Was she saying that this guy put a poison pellet in her? It was strange that he would be a part of her narrative. Very strange. I didn't know much about this guy beyond his name, but I had worked with him a few times. He was just one of the rotating techs. Young guy, military hair and goatee. Skinny but pretty fit. I wondered how he would be in a fight. These younger guys had so much supplementing, it was hard to tell. Elian caught me looking at him and gave me a bit of a surly look. For some reason, this irritated me. So, friend, you trying to get out of here before the rest of us got a date or something? I asked, needling him. I was just getting the elevator, he said quietly. He didn't seem to like the banter. Well, whatever. I looked down at Karen and noticed something. A small red spot on the white sheet that covered her arm. Blood. It must have been from where they took her blood. Who took it? Elian. The spot was really too low on the arm for that. Odd. I thought of taking a look at it, but one of the most important protocols when dealing with occupants was not to act like you believe their delusions, even for a moment. You must insist on the reality of reality. I realized that Elian was watching me. I casually looked over to the elevator panel to see what floor we were on. 2:38. Man, this fucking thing was slow. What was the deal with that spot? It Wouldn't be out of place for me to wonder about some patient bleeding. I lifted the sheet and took a look. There was a small puncture wound a few inches above her wrist. How'd she get that? I asked. One of the techs just muttered about not knowing. Elian didn't even look at the spot. His face was blank, unreadable. I touched her arm and felt a small nodule under the skin, about an inch from the wound. Huh. Interesting. I stood there trying to process this, caught between two realities. Was I in an elevator on a routine call with a stable client and a few techs who were just ordinary acquaintances? Or was I in an elevator with a murderer and a woman on the brink of death? There was really no way to split the difference on this one, no course of action that would work for both cases. Fuck. What was I even asking myself? There was no way. Simply no way. Stuff like that never happens in real life, but it happens in the feeds all the time. It's a 100% typical spy narrative. Bullshit. How can I let myself get caught up in some feed fantasy so easily? But still a nodule under the skin. There was no good explanation for that. Elian turned to me. We looked at each other for a long, silent moment. I couldn't read the expression on his face. It wasn't chummy goodwill. Whatever it was. I felt a twinge in my stomach and my body began flooding with adrenaline. I could feel it radiating out into my limbs. My time in the Marines had taught me many things, many of them useless in the normal world, many of them useless outside of a bar or cat house. But one of the more useful ones was that I should trust my adrenal gland. It meant that my paranoid lizard brain understood something that my snotty intellect was too busy to notice. It happened when things were too quiet, when a certain car kept following the convoy, when somebody was acting funny there in the elevator. I almost reached for the grip of my rifle. I wasn't wearing a rifle, of course, so I just scratched my chest, trying to keep my fingers loose. Elian put his hand to his hip. Just like that. It was leaping across the gurney. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, but it was at an awkward angle with me, splayed over the gurney. I had no control. A silver pistol came out of his pants, still halfways in its holster. Help. Get him. I shouted as I slid off the other side of the gurney towards Elian's feet, holding onto that wrist for dear life. I heard shouting everywhere, but nobody helped me and nobody Got him. Now I was on the floor, wrestling with Elyun. There was a lot of awful, terrified fumbling. Four hands were grabbing and clawing for the pistol. Somehow my head was jammed between Elyon's shoulder and the wall, and I couldn't even see the gun. I could just feel the metal. There was a shot, painfully loud. Elian shouted, was I hit now? The gun was wet. I managed to wiggle my fingers around the grip. With one huge twisting jerk, I put the muzzle against Elian's face. No. He shouted. I pulled the trigger. A shot, and his head kicked back against the wall, the mouth popping open. Everything went still. His hands were still holding mine. The people were moving along the river as people do in the gentle days, moving from one fruitful place to the other. Maid played the flute, first a river song, then a berry song, then both mixed together, when it was so flowing that the people began to laugh and shout. Resh slapped his chest and called out the names of the fathers and the deeds, and it all flowed so well that we almost didn't see the old woman in the thornflower bushes. She was an old crone, huddled up in the bushes, naked and covered with cuts. All the music fell away at once, and the people gathered around to take a look. She was very old, far into the barren years, maybe even into the years of being carried. I did not like the look of her right away. She did not have a face of the fathers and the people, but rather the hungry, untrusting face of one of the wandering strangers that we sometimes met along the river. Even when strangers were friendly, they did not know the names of the fathers or the deeds, except for maybe a few, but they did not say them properly or with respect. Other times they set upon the people, killing, raping, and committing all manner of hideousness. I was always glad to see them go on their way, leaving us alone with Mother River. Some of the older people tried to talk to the crone. She knew some of the names of things but said them wrong. I went away from the crowd and looked out into the rocky land. I had a feeling that maybe she was not alone, that there were other strangers with her ready to set upon us. The land seemed to be empty. Some of our cats were with us, crouching and sniffing around, and they seem unworried still. I showed my chest and made signs of war in case anybody was among the rocks watching us. Rima saw me making the signs and laughed at me, saying that she saw some lizards making signs of surrender. I made a few signs of courtship towards her, but with a snarling face. And she ran off giggling. Somebody called my name. I came back to where the people were gathered. Somebody had given the crone a cloth to cover herself. And some of the women were putting good lucky mud on her cuts. I didn't like this. Why should we waste anything on a barren old woman? Somebody called me because I was the son of Arid, one of the great men of the people. The crone had called on all the great people, the leaders of the people. She wanted to show us something. I didn't like this either. Who was this useless crone to call on all the great people? The crone was talking to the great people. The way she said the names was all wrong. But her voice was like a strong music and her eyes were very large and powerful. And she moved her hands, making all sorts of unknown signs. The people listened to her closely and I found myself listening with them. She said that she was the daughter of the river. She did not have a mother and a father of the flesh. But her mother was the river alone. I scoffed at this. The stories of the deeds tell us that the ancient people came from the river. But this was long ago and they were not strangers who came from the rocky lands alongside the lizards. She went on talking, saying that she was living with the painted backs. A friendly group of strangers we had met before, but that they had been set upon by another group of strangers. The other strangers were powerful and cruel and they carried all the painted backs off except her. This was how she ended up naked in the the thorn bush. The people murmured at this. When had it happened? Just the night before. This was worrying. Maybe the other strangers were still around waiting to set upon us. The crone asked the people to take her with us. This started more murmuring. She was a stranger, not a person. And she was an old crone. She could never become a person by birthing one of the people. Nor could she work hard for the people. She was useless. Maid, the flute player spoke up and said that we should show her the kindness of the people. The same kindness that Mother river shows to us. Are we not useless to the river? Who was here before us? And would we be here forever? I liked Mate, who was close kin, but he liked talking and pressing people too much. Now we were in the gentle days and things were easy. But what would happen in the dry days when everything needed to be saved? And who would carry the crone when she could no longer walk? The fathers did not perform the deed so that we would carry old crones around But I did not say this because I am not good at talking and my words would seem weak compared to maids which glittered and flowed. The woman began talking in her strange way again, saying that we should take her with us because the Mother river would bless us with many things, as she was the mother's daughter. Now. Some of the people began to scoff like I did, saying that this was not according to the deeds. The crone agreed with this, calling these people wise and saying that some of the deeds were secret. This started more talk, which started to lead toward argument, when the old crone suddenly strode right into the river and held her hands up and called for everybody to watch. The people became silent. The woman reached into the river, searching for something. After a moment she pulled her hands out and showed us, dripping and shining in the sun, three very large river clams, waving the clams around for us to see. The old crone claimed that this was proof that she was the blessed daughter of Mother River. Many of the people snickered and muttered the names of the fathers. Everyone knew that these were the gentle days, and it was easy enough to reach into the river and pull out clams. The woman was just a filthy old trickster. We should leave her and move on. Look. The woman cried, and she handed the clams to the great men. Look inside. Our Uncle Kel slipped his thick yellow thumbnail into a clam's mouth and pulled it open. The people pressed around him to get a look. It was a nice clam with healthy meat, but clinging to the shell was a large, perfect pearl. The women all let out little sighs and the men murmured. Other great men pulled open the other two clams, and they both held even larger pearls, all three perfectly round. At this, people gasped and shouted, and everyone began talking at once. A man might go a whole lifetime only seeing one perfect pearl pulled from the river. Three was a thing that had never happened before. Three was a thing which would live among the deeds. Take her with us. One of the women cried, and soon most of the people were saying this, I found myself saying it as well. The woman was surely part of a powerful flow, and it was best not to swim against her. But even as the great men agreed that this woman would become a part of the people, and we all cheered and shouted out the names of the fathers and the de deeds, I found myself looking at her strange, hungry face and wondering if she had not somehow slipped those pearls into the clams herself. You cannot quite understand the power of addiction until you have seen it firsthand. Until you have seen it eat like an acid through everything you are. It is astounding to watch. Its slow and total corrosion of your entire life is mesmerizing. As you watch it, you keep thinking at some point the corrosion will stop. There is no way it will be able to eat through this next thing. This next thing is too important to me. But then it does. It eats through everything. And you realize you are dealing with a vast and inhuman power. The most frightening thing is that consequences do not work against a well developed addiction. There are ultimately no consequences. None which can separate you from your drug. As your addiction progresses and your self control slips away, there is nothing you won't risk to continue doing your drug. Nothing is important enough. Nothing is sacred enough. Money, career, marriage, home, family, goals, art, religion, dignity, safety, health, sanity, parents, children, life itself. All of it will go into play. All of it will be put on the table. If you play the game shrewdly, you might get to keep some of it. You will not get to keep all of it. You will pay. You will pay in ways that you cannot imagine. You will look at the people who have lost more than you and you will pretend you are different than them. You will pretend that you can walk away from the table, but the time will come to walk away. And you won't. You will keep playing. You will be made a liar. If you play long enough, all your poious little promises will be shown to be lies. I have a good job. I would never risk my job. I love my wife. I would never risk my marriage. I love my children more than anything. I would never risk my children's safety ever. I don't want to die. Whatever specific promises you make will be the ones that you will break. Because those are the ones you have made to try to control yourself. But you won't be able to control yourself. Your self control will be pried from your grasp like a toy being taken away from a child. And when you break these promises, you will not be some mindless junkie who doesn't care anymore. You will be in many ways the same person you are now. And you will know how awful and horrifying your actions are. And you will do them anyway. You will not be able to believe what is happening to you. You will tell yourself that you are unlucky or cursed. You will watch in horror. But while you are watching is yourself. The horror is what you are doing. I realize that this all sounds rather silly and dramatic from the perspective of somebody dabbling with drugs. This all sounds laughably overwrought. But if you ever go where I have been, if you ever see what I have seen, this will still sound laughable. Not because it is overwrought, but because it is insufficient. Because it doesn't even begin to describe it. To hunt prey, to taste righteous lifeblood, you must simply become an ordinary part of the world. Look around. What is happening right now? Nothing at all, yet. The leaves rustle, the grass sways, the birds call, the gnats dance. All of this is just a part of the world. If you become a part of the world, you become nothing at all. You become invisible. If you are not a part of the world, the world becomes 10,000 things. This is misfortune. It is easy enough to become invisible if you stay still. If you hide. But staying still and hiding aren't enough to catch prey. You must seek and strive. How do you seek and strive while remaining in an ordinary part of the world? How do you exert your will without disrupting the world? How do you move along with the will of the world? This is the mystery of hunting. This is the mystery of subtlety. This is the greatest of all mysteries. Consider the mouse. It is moving through the leaves, looking for food. You must not disturb it. Do as little as possible. Wait, watch and listen. If it moves away, move with it. Follow it. If it moves closer, stay still. Practice non interference. Let it come. It should be thinking happy thoughts of food and comfort when you strike. When you snare it in your claws, do not eat it right at once. Let it struggle and give up its lifeblood. Practice non action. You need not kill it. Let it die. To be subtle is to move with the will of the world. Do not move against the will of the world. This brings misfortune. Touch lightly the course of things without disturbing it. Touch it gently at points of inflection and it will move as you wish. This brings great fortune. This is the ancient art of subtlety taught to us by our form. I must follow it if I am to find any answers to the mystery of the oily ones. The mystery which has obsessed me since the death of my kitten. I must know why they both feed us and kill us. Why they are kind and motherly, but also unnatural and abominable. I have decided that I will go into one of their hiding places. After much investigation, I have chosen a place. It is a very large and horrible hiding place. A sort of mountain of box. Like shapes colored by unnatural lighting. It emits a powerful and unholy odor of decadence. What is more, there is something which makes it different from all other Oysters places I have ever seen. It seems that some of our kind live within this place. I have seen them from a distance, going in and out of it using small portals. They are different than those of our kind that I have known. It seems that some of the oily ones. Corruption has mutated them. They are very fat and slow. Their faces are stupid and sullen. They fear nothing. They have lost subtlety. I am not even sure if they are truly of our kind. I will go inside. I must be subtle. I must become a part of the world. I may have to become a part of the abomination itself. I may find death, bloody death, as my kitten did. But I will hunt to the heart of this mystery and I will sleep again. Now I was standing in an elevator, my hands covered with blood, a tech lying on the floor and a helpless occupant lying in the gurney. The other two techs had hit the emergency button and hastily gotten off at the next floor. Understandable. I had tried to explain to them about the poison pellet in Karen's arm, but they didn't stick around to consider the merits of my argument. I set the gun down on the floor. This wasn't good. A couple of Elien's fingers had gotten blown off and there was blood all over me, not to mention the bullet in his head. Shit. What now? I had shot people before. I'd killed them before, but this was different. They had given me mandatory therapy after the war. They might give me mandatory something else after this. Karen was wheezing, her blind eyes wiggling in her head. The pellet. I should take care of that before anything else. I wiped my hands off on my nice white coat, rifled through one of the tech's bags to find the C knife and some local. This shouldn't be too hard. It was a lot like removing a rotted jack. I'm going to cut out the pellet. You ready? I asked. Karen's head jiggled in a way that could be construed as nodding. Good enough. I hastily gave her the local and cut a pretty sizable chunk out of her arm, and the whole elevator filled with a burning smell that was a welcome change from Karen's existing smell. After sealing the wound, I examined the shriveled chunk of meat. There was indeed a white pellet lodged in it like a little pearl. I put it in a specimen jar. I might need it to avoid death row. Okay, you're safe now, I said, not really knowing if if that was true. Her monitor still Looked okay. What now? I wanted to just get the fuck out of there. But there was certainly a camera in the elevator, plus two witnesses who knew me. What would the camera show me suddenly leaping across the elevator and shooting a guy in the head? That wasn't good. But how would I even begin to go on the run? I didn't know the first thing about identity shifting. And hadn't I done the right thing? I had saved her life. I had the pellet to prove it. I was a hero, right? I felt like reporting this to my co. This didn't make any sense, but I should report it to somebody. I called the emergency service on my set and told told it what happened. It told me that officers would be sent over immediately. I tried to explain about the pellet, but this seemed to confuse asked me if the pellet was armed. After a few minutes of confusing cross talk I just hung up. As I waited and the minutes passed. The elevator felt very small and smelly and stifling. The blood around Elian could covered the floor surrounding my shoes. I imagined the cops coming up on another elevator as slow as this one. Karen's head was still wobbling its weird way, the gurney making little creaking sounds, little panting coming out of her throat. Everything's fine. You're in the real world now, I found myself saying half heartedly, going through my standard patter. Absurd. Nothing was fine. Then the thought finally occurred to me. Why had Elian tried to kill this girl? Who wanted her dead? This was an important question. Whoever it was wouldn't be happy with me looking at her lying there gasping. I knew it wouldn't be much use to ask her verbally, but she still had good jacks. It was against protocol to plug into a feedhead's jack. We were supposed to be getting them used to face to face conversation. But protocol did say you could plug in during an emergency. This definitely qualified. I told my set to find her jack's wireless presence. A flood of messages hid the set. A backlog from the last couple minutes. Don't. Don't. Don't call police. Bad idea. We have to go. Go. Go. Police are coming. Get out. Go. Go. What? I murmured as I saw the messages. Q controls. Techs Controls. Police. Police will kill you. We must go. Who is Q? The adversary. Shit. This was so similar to a feed narrative. I felt like I had played this one before. What was that one with Zack Akinquo? Fatal escape or some shit like that. Terrible story. Why do they want to kill you? I ask. I am one of The Bread. The Bread. I had heard that name before. I wasn't sure if it was from the news or narrative. I had a vague idea that it was one of those old art protest collectives like Anonymous or the Weather Underground. Was it a feed cult? I asked my set and it gave me a summary. The Bread is an alleged group of exploit experts who are thought to have been kidnapped at a young age and trained by a shadowy group variously identified as the Human Front, the Restoration alliance, or the New Organ. They are the subject of a number of conspiracy theories, most of which assert that the Internet's Combined Governance Corporation has been taken over by a sinister force which the Bread are struggling against within the free realms and infraspace. These theories generally involve discussions of mind control, feed conditioning, information war, and the possibility of a fascistic singularity. Occult Singularians regard the Bread as the leaders of the new 12 tribes of Israel. Is this real or is this part of a narrative? My Set replied. The Bread are featured in many narratives but are purported to hard exist. There is no widely accepted proof of their existence. Can I throughgate your Set? Karen asked. What for? We must go now. Now. Now. I heard footsteps in the hallway. The elevator doors were still open, so I peeked my head out. The police were coming down the hall. A lot of police in tactical gear. I intended to call to them, but that little lizard part of my brain told me to duck back into the elevator. There was a huge metal bang and I found myself on the floor with the gun in my hand. A bullet had hit the elevator door frame. Karen's messages unspooled onto my Set. I know Q Ruthless. She'll spoof calls to emergency. Multiple calls. Say you're an active shooter. Let me throughgate now. You want to die? I gave her through gate access on my set. The elevator slammed shut and my stomach leapt into my throat as we plunged downward. As the elevator plunged down through the building, I tried to understand the implications of it all. It was horrifying and raging. All this time, my entire life without me knowing it. Elevators have had a secret faster speed that they don't tell us about. Those bastards. A message from Karen appeared on my set. Must lure them. They will fire in here. Get ready. They will what? This was out of hand. God, I felt cranked up. Fantastic. The elevator began to slow, everything becoming heavy. Please move the body away from the door. Move the dead body. No, she meant her own body. I pushed the gurney against the side of the elevator door. Will open. Take cover. I pressed myself up against the wall. The Elevator came to a rattling stop. The doors popped open. The back wall banged and dented as bullets hit it. I cowered against the wall, hoping nothing flew into my arteries. The door clapped shut again and the floor seemed to fall out from under me as we went down. Man, this little bird had some access. I'd never seen anything like it. Another message from Karen popped in my set and I read every word in a glance. Silver Haohua van parking 17A 20 meters. Please take me. Please. The elevator came to another shuddering stop and the doors opened on one of the underground decks, a dim concrete cavern filled with rows of cars. I yanked the gurney out and pushed it like a madman, rattling over the asphalt. The van was where she said it would be. I stood there for a moment, waiting for it to pull out for us. But it just sat there. You must get me wired. I don't want to get fingerprints on its presence. Wired? Did she mean physically? An article appeared on my set called how to establish a physical link to your 2039 Hauhua Luxury Chariot. I guess so. I followed the ER guide, looking around every so often to see if anyone was coming. Weird sounds were emerging from the elevators. They seemed to be malfunctioning. I got a wire from my bag and linked Karen's flesh jack to a physical jack by the van's gas cap. A second later, the van's rear door unfolded. Get in. I did as she said. Following her orders felt totally natural. It was like I was right back at the tip of the spear. I remembered my time in Turkey and Greece playing feed games with the platoon all day. Then getting dropped right into the kinetic. Right into the warm, bloody center of war. Run. Here, shoot this. Get down. 19 years old, traveling the world and blowing shit up while the other kids were sitting economics class. God, it was beautiful while it lasted. I shoved the gurney into the van and jumped in beside it. The rear door folded down. Please secure the body. 90 seconds left. 90 seconds left until what? I flattened a seat and clumsily transferred her body to it and strapped it in. The van leapt backward. It began twisting through space, throwing me against a side window. Sorry, must go. I got in the other seat and strapped in as the van peeled out. We found the exit ramp and went up. I felt like I was about to break a rib on the armrest as we went on a never ending left turn and up the spiraling ramp. Finally, the daylight of the ground level burst into view. The whole parking lot was swarmed with flashing cop cars, black armored vehicles and cops in hard Gear. The van came to a stop in the middle of it. Fuck, I muttered. The cops were moving in a hurry. It seemed like they hadn't quite formed a proper perimeter around the building, but they were close. We've got to go now. They're going to form a wait. For what? Air. All around us the cops were assembling, pulling their vehicles into place, leveling their pistols and rifles. I watched our few possible avenues of exit close up. The van just sat there. Karen's eyes were closed. She looked calm, at peace. Just a sick little girl taking a nap. I heard a sound and my blood ran cold. I hadn't heard that sound in years. But there was no masking. Was a sound that was etched in my brain. In the marines we used an app called Harpy to call in air to ground strikes. It was a wonky over engineered DOD piece of shit full of weird quirks that they were afraid to fix in the name of ultra stability. It made a little sound like a sleepy bird chirping when a friendly missile was incoming and it was time to put your stupid head down so that you wouldn't get all the expensive training blown out of your skull. About two seconds later that sound, something would light up and a moment later a sound of the blast would hit and the ground would shake. I heard that sound now coming from my set. My God, what kind of access did she have? Get down. A moment later police perimeter around us became a wall of fire and the van was hit with a boom that felt like the earth splitting open. I put my head between my knees and let that old feeling flow through me. The shuddering rush of American air power being liberally applied. When I opened my eyes again, the van's safety windows had bowed inward on Karen's side, almost becoming liquid. Everything around the van was engulfed in fire and smoke. Slowly the windows began to regain their shape. The van took off with a start, rushing blindly through the chaos. Two minutes later we were on the interstate, flying down the taxpayer lane and I was sitting there trying to remember how to swallow. It was unreal, just unreal. She called in a drone strike in the middle of Atlanta. The level of access required to do that was unimaginable. I mean completely bypassing the DoD systems. It was beyond any exploit collective. It was beyond governmental, it was planetary. It was God level. I was sitting in a van with an infraspace God. I love waking up in the morning to the smell of fresh biscuits. The warm smell fills my dreams. A smell like friends and home and happiness. I wake up to See the sun so bright and lovely in my window. Hello day, how are you? Every day is bright and cheery when you share your house with your best friends. I can hear them downstairs singing and having fun. After a long night of spooky old dreams, it's good to be awake again in the cheery, deary sunlight. I unlock my bedroom door and go out into the hall. Some of my friends have left fresh piles of biscuits in the hallway, several different kinds. Wonderful. I breathe in the smell and make chirpy little sounds of glee. Chester Barrington comes up the stairs looking very handsome and somber in his tuxedo. Oh, Chester, I sing. How is the gentleman today? Chester nods to me, gruff and debonair. Proceedings are afoot. Madame Alice proceedings are afoot and makes his way down the hallway. That Chester, so self serious. On the stairway, Brett Turlingshire and Mansy Fairworth are in each other's arms, a lover's embrace. Oh dear, I cry. I'm afraid I've interrupted your tryst. Oh, madam, nonsense. This is no tryst. This is a destined love affair. Brett proclaims in his ringing voice. He looks dashing in his fine striped coat. Brett, darling, Madam Alice doesn't want to hear all that gooey talk, Mansy says in her sassy southern accent. I'll leave you two be, I say, lifting the hem of my nightgown and hurrying past them. When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I hear Brett murmur, I wish the madam would find a destined love affair of her own. She is a noble woman and deserves somebody to treat her well. You just worry about treating me well, mansy purrs, nuzzling against his cheek. I scurry off before they catch me listening. In the downstairs parlor, Raymond Dex Montrose pardon? Sleep Smith and Elise Rappier are having tea together. The smell of biscuits fills the room. A fresh heap of toffee colored scones covers the coffee table. A wonderful selection of pastries lies in the corner, and several of the chairs contain more treats. Hello dearies, how are we today? Can't complain, raymond says. Splendid, ser pardonsmith intones. Elise merely lets out a little sigh. Elise, are we not feeling well? I asked, coming over to where she is perched on the arm of the couch. Should we be? Life is but a vague dream which disrupts the sleep of death, she murmurs in her smoky French accent. Oh, Elise, must you be such an existentialist? She muttered something in her native tone, tongue getting up and stalking off. Poor Elise, I say as she leaves the room. She is affected by that peculiar continental Ennui ser pardonsmith observes, I say. She needs a dose of sturdy American optimism. Her birthday is coming soon. Perhaps we should throw her a party, I suggest. Ha. A party for Elise. That would go over like a bar mitzvah for Goebbels, raymond says. Oh, Raymond, I say, tousling his orange hair. Well, we'll have to figure out something for her. I don't like her moping about. She's an inveterate mope. There's no changing her, raymond says. You may be right, sir, I say, sighing. Well, c' est la vie. Not everybody can be as happy as I am. Some years ago, I was much like Elise down in the dumps. A real gray cloud. Then I met a lovely young woman who happened to be passing through my neighborhood. Her name was Angelica. It had been a long time since I had enjoyed the delights of society, but Angelica had a very mature, soothing presence despite her youth. I lived in a large house where my family had once resided but was now empty. So I asked her to stay with me. She accepted. Just like that. Can you imagine it? Two strangers just making a home together. It must have been kismet. She was my precious angel, treasure absolutely heaven sent. I'd been something of an existentialist myself, disbelieving in God and thinking his creation was a cruel trap for human prey. But then he saw it fit to bring Angelica into my life, and I never doubted him again. I found her company such a bam that I decided to open my home to whoever needed a place to stay. Singletons, couples, whole families have stayed with me. Many children have been born in this house. Though dear, sweet Angelica has long since passed away, her friendship is still a daily gift to me. For on the day I met her, I made a choice to simply not feel sadness or worry or fear ever again. And I haven't. Do you think it impossible? Is it possible if you simply surround yourself with loved ones? That's the secret. With all these thoughts in mind, I walk into the kitchen to see Reginald Strongton, Linda Mercy Chowder, and Charles Futz clamoring for their breakfast. Madam, I am famished. Reginald cries. Oh, dear madam, we starve, we want, we waste away. Linda says in tremulous voice, oh, mercy, I left you with a kingly feast last night. Have you eaten it all? I ask. It was not us. We had not a bite. It was that Chester Barrington, the scoundrel. Reginald cries. He is voracious and utterly selfish. I found him down here helping himself to your generosity, and when I tried to serve Myself the smallest morsel. He attacked me. Attacked me, madam. My nose still smarts. Oh, that Chester does have an appetite. But I find it hard to believe such a gentleman would attack you, eh? I am on the verge of swooning. Marshall croaks. Alright dears, let's have ourselves a proper breakfast, I say. I get a bag of cuisine from the cabinet and poured into china bowls for Reginald, Linda and Marshall and myself. I clear off the love biscuits that somebody left on the kitchen table and we all sit down to eat. My little friends immediately proceed with chowing down and I am about to follow suit, but I notice something that brings me a wonderful thrill. There is a stranger standing in the doorway to the kitchen. I have never met her before. She appears to have snuck into the house alone. She stands there, tense and alert, her yellow eyes taking in the scene. I am breathless. She is beautiful, extraordinary. Exquisite. She reminds me of my sweet Angelica. Oh, lovely day. I am about to have a new friend. We rode in silence for a while, the Hahua luxury chariot flying along the curves of the interstate as all the other cars obediently changed lanes to let us through. I had seen people pull access stunts before, like changing the music in a club or turning off the lights in a restaurant. But what she had done was outright sorcery. She had taken control of the elevator, the car, the drone, the other cars on the highway, all within seconds. She must have had control of her all security cameras to plan our escape. But every one of these was a hardened system. The drone was a DOD system, the hardest of them all. But she had based it like child's play. Sitting there in the car, I felt like I was coming down off a high. It wasn't a good feeling. I was sitting in a van with a mass murder of unspeakable power, and I had helped her, given her the access she needed to pull her stunts. She had saved my life, I think, and I had saved hers. But she had also just killed dozens of cops, maybe over a hundred men with families. Fuck. My life was over. I had helped her. That was a death sentence right there. We would become the most wanted people in the country. How did I get caught up in this? I looked over at her tiny skeletal body, so frail and weak I could pick her up and chuck her out the back of the van and end this whole escapade. But then what? Face the death penalty? She had to be my best chance at getting away. But who the fuck was she? She was a killer, that was for sure. Utterly ruthless. A message from her Appeared on my set. Sorry about all that. Had to hurry. Sorry. That was rich. I asked her where we were going. Upstate New York. What's there? Our objective. What's our objective? A way to defeat Q. Hard to explain. I wondered if she was insane. She was responsive and lucid, but she was also capable of murder. She would probably get rid of me as soon as she could. So you want me to come with you? I'd like it. I need physical help. You killed a hundred cops back there. The whole world is going to be looking for us. No, they won't. You don't think so? This isn't the feed realm. They take kills pretty seriously in the real world. I do too. But they'll be too busy to look for us. Busy with what? Q. What's Q going to do? You will find out. Four minutes. Just tell me. You wouldn't believe me. We fell back into silence. My thoughts were racing. I wondered why they didn't just flag our car or shut down the highway. I guess she was busy working her black magic on the police. Police and transportation systems. Who knew what she was capable of? Was she really wanted the bread? A grown up child soldier. It was illegal to hook children into long term feeds. But I had heard stories about China and the frn. Connecting infants. Trying to create people who were utterly at one with the Internet. According to the tales, the children all died. So they tried older children. But they all turned into drooling skull baskets. For some reason, the brain needs a certain level of maturity before it can withstand a long term feed without resulting in total madness. Even then, it results in near total madness. I figured Karen was another child abuse case. But she wasn't just some feed casualty. Her mind worked. Worked well. Whoever had made her had done the forbidden. And they had done it successfully. But why did I have to get involved in all of this? I had just got my specialist license. After getting out of the Marines and just drifting around for years, I was finally hitting my stride. Now it was all fucked up. Don't look back. I looked over to the girl lying next to me. Was it possible that she hacked so far into infraspace that she could read minds? There was a passing flash of light. Like sunlight glancing off some car. Then everything around us started to get brighter and brighter. Like the sun had just come out from behind a cloud. But there weren't any clouds in the sky. The light was coming from behind us. Bouncing off the other cars, creating a painful glare. I almost turned around, but then I realized what Karen had said. I closed My eyes against the brightness and the insides of my eyelids glowed red, like I was lying on the beach. After a few seconds, the light dimmed and seemed to return to normal. I opened my eyes, blinked a few times and turned around. A few miles behind us, the entire city of Atlanta had disappeared behind a megalithic wall of dark, rolling smoke. I felt my mouth falling open. I leaned down to look up at the sky behind us. The giant wall of smoke was just the base of the monstrous black tree of ash that rose miles into the sky, growing larger and larger, looming over the world. Then we were hit by a blast that rattled me down to the roots of my teeth. I shut my eyes again. The blast turned into a long, horrifying roar. The van wobbled and shuddered as awful groaning sounds passed through the metal. Eventually, the van's steering system righted us and slowly the roar passed. That must have been the blast wave of a nuclear detonation that had just destroyed Atlanta. I unbuckled my seat and crawled into the back window and pressed my face against the glass. A tree of smoke was still growing over us, becoming ever more massive. I just stared in silence. Slowly it changed from one awful form to another until it became a vague gray pillar in the far distance. I'm not sure how long I spent watching it. I know that by the time I looked away, I was crying. I approached the oily one's hiding place with subtlety, alert, not disturbing, letting everything flow through me. I did not search for anything, but allowed all to reveal itself. The smells were disturbing, awful. I could smell our kind, the mingling scents of multitudes. They seemed to have marked everything without any regard for each other. In front of the portal sat two of our kind. They were monstrously round and swollen, their form distorted. Dull eyes followed me without curiosity as I approached. Even as I came within the dangerous range, they showed no interest. Was it a trap to bring me in close? They did not attack. I passed them and came to the portal. Slowly, I pushed my head through the folding threshold. The inside was utterly bizarre, made of mostly box like shapes and arrangements I could hardly comprehend. There was no grass, no trees, nothing belonging to the form of the world. Instead, there were straight, flat shapes folded around to cover everything above and below, all sides. In the distance, some of our kind were walking around within this odd space, as slow and swollen as the ones outside. The smell was worse than outside, even more confusing. I saw and smelled uncovered droppings everywhere. To not cover droppings was unsubtle. It was a moral outrage. Still, I pushed through the portal and entered the space. The ground was hard and slippery and smelled of lesions. Everything was silent, a deeper silence than I had ever known. I knew now that I was cut off from the world. For the first time in my life, I was alone. I moved forward. I wanted to shut out the smells and sounds, but I let them pass through me. I was terrified, but I let the terror pass through me. I wondered if I was being unsubtle, if I was disturbing the world, if I was inviting deadly misfortune. But I felt no insight on this matter. The answer would make itself known soon enough. As I moved deeper into the space, I came upon a giant oily one. I call her Angelica because she is Angelica. There's no doubt about it. Oh, she looks different this time. But I think Angelica will look different every time she comes to me. She is also much shyer this time. Such a shy little thing. But the way she moves, that pure, lovely way. There is no mistaking it. It's Angelica again. How wonderful. How lovely. Would you think I'm a silly old biddy if I started crying? If I got on my knees right then and there and started thanking God? How he is great. How he has seen fit to bless me? I have been investigating this place and I found much confusion and monstrosity atrocity, but no answers. There is a single Oily one that stays here as well as many of our kind. All of them, the Oily one and our kind, are monstrously swollen and distorted. The Oily One in particular reeks of corruption and disease and death. She cries to me like a lost whelp. But I keep my distance, distance from her. I avoid the others of my kind as well. This space has many spaces within itself. Each of these spaces holds a thousand mysteries. It is everything I can do not to be overwhelmed, to let the mystery flow through me. Darkness has come and left, and I am terribly hungry. The Oily One comes to me with food, wonderful food. But I am afraid to take it. I wonder, what exactly am I looking for? Am I looking for some answer to the mystery of the oily ones? But what form will this take? I cannot know. All around me are forms I do not recognize. I must not look for anything. I will simply become a part of this place and let the answer show itself to me. Angelica has been here for over a day, but she hasn't spoken to me yet. I think I understand why. The last time she came to me, I was the shy one. I was the one who was afraid of everything, afraid of the world. In despair because of the first time she left. Now I have been restored, and she is the shy one. It is my turn to help her to give back. I've tried to give her some of our cuisine, but she hides. I don't think she's eaten anything since she found her way in here, poor thing. Hunger forced me to come close to the oily one. She set down some food and I took it, keeping an eye on her. She has an awful fleshy face and giant pale eyes. She often sings like a bird. Abomination. It was the first time eating the oily one's food since my kitten died. Would this food kill me? Only time will tell. My form commanded me to eat, so I ate. The food was absolutely wonderful. The oily one's food always is. I am trying to follow the art of subtlety, but. But there can be no subtlety in this unholy den of madness. I believe I have investigated almost every place within this giant place. There are many portals in here which lead to various small places. They open and shut in different configurations, but I have watched them carefully and gone into almost every small space and found no answers. But there is one place I have not yet gone. It is perhaps the only place yet unseen by me. It is the place where the oily one goes when darkness comes. I think she sleeps. I heard her make strange singing sounds from within. Frightening sounds. She keeps the portal closed at all times. It only opens for a moment when she goes in and out. I have tried to get a look inside, but have not been successful. I believe there must be some answer within this space. Everything has a form. Every form. Every form is a story. Every story makes sense. There must be some reason. For the oily ones, for their random kindness, for their random cruelty, there must be an answer. And that answer must reside within the hidden space, for it does not reside anywhere else. I will wait. I will go inside. Sweet Angelica is starting to warm to me. We eat together. She's still very skittish, but she shows up promptly at dinner time and eats like a little lady. She doesn't chat with me, but I think she will start too soon. I ask Linda Mercy Chowder to be Angelica's special little friend and show her around the house. Of course, Linda responds with, oh, madam, I'm too busy with my modeling career. Can't somebody else do it? Meanwhile, the little strumpet flirts all day with Chester Barrington. But that's another story. The oily one came to me with food, and I found myself crying out to her. As if I was a little kitten again. As if she was my mother. What has happened to me? How could I regard this horrid creature as my mother? I knew I would have to become a part of this abomination to unravel its mysteries. But this is too much. I want to leave, go back to the world, to go back to the fresh air and light. I must gain access to the hidden space soon, or I will go mad. Little Angelica finally talked to me. Now she talks all the time. Mother. Mother, I'm back, she says. Oh, I've missed you so much. But I knew you would find me again. You will find me every time. It's joyful. She's still shy and doesn't let me hug her. But to hear her voice again is such a blessing. I noticed her following me to my bedroom every night. So tonight I let her in. None of the other ladies or gentlemen are allowed in there. But this is Angelica, so she can sleep with me. She stays in the corner of the room until I fall asleep. Even though I sprinkle cuisine all over the bed. I hope that soon we can sleep together like we used to. I finally gain access to the inner space, the space which has to contain all the answers to the mystery which has tormented me for so long. I suppose I have not properly practiced the art of subtlety. I have pushed my way into a forbidden space. Snooping and seeking and striving and upsetting things. I suppose it is only fitting that I was greeted with such misfortune. There were no answers in the hidden space. None at all. Just more weird shapes and bad smells. There was nothing that seemed of any significance. I discovered nothing at all. And so the oily ones remain as much a mystery to me as ever. Why are they so monstrous? What is the reason for their kindness? Why do they give us food? Why did we call out to them like mothers? I guess I will never know. I have fled that awful place and am gratefully among the trees and grasses again. I will never go back there. Angelica is gone. I haven't seen her for two weeks. She stayed with me in my bedroom one night. And I really thought we were getting closer. And then the next day she just disappeared. How could she leave like that? I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. I told myself I wouldn't feel this way anymore. I just. I can't feel this way anymore. No more. I need to call my sister. I need help. What's happened to me? Please, God. I've been lying in bed all day. Weeping. All around the room there are pictures of the very first Angelica. My darling girl. And the picture. She's not sick. She's eating ice cream, learning to swim, playing cards. I showed them to the new Angelica. But she couldn't understand. After all, she's just a cat. To hunt prey, you must simply become an ordinary part of the world. Look around, my darling kitten. What is happening right now? Nothing at all. Yet. The leaves rustle, the grass sways, the birds call, the gnats dance. All of this is just part of the world, part of the mystery. The old crone became one of the people, and the people soon began to love her. After her bruises and cuts had healed, she became swirling and bubbly, like a young woman at the at any time the people could hear her musical voice babbling on without end, telling stories from different bands of strangers she had met. It was a strong flow of words that could bring anybody into it. Even me. She was also very lucky at finding clams, pulling them from the waters whenever she liked. She sometimes snuck away from the river and came back with rare treats like snakes, eggs and red beetles. The people did not like to go far from the waters of Mother River. Her protection stayed close to the banks and the rocky lands was known to be stalked by spirits of death. Fanged evils which became wolves and lions. Even our little cats stayed close. The alders and the rushes. But the crone had no fear of such spirits and wandered off among the rocks whenever she pleased. The people whispered about this, but it was known that the crone was once a stranger, so it was expected that she would keep strange ways. One day, near the end of the gentle season, the girl Ryma disappeared. She was with us the night and gone the next morning. We searched for her, going up and down the river and sneaking as far as we dared into the rocky lands. But there was no sign of her at all. Some of the women recalled that she had gone with the Crone into the rocky lands that day, and at night she had slept near the crone with her two gray cats. Now there was an argument among the people. Some accused the crone of talking with the spirits of Death. Some accused her of being a spirit herself. Others said she had at least been foolish in bringing Ryma out to the rocky lands. I was undecided. I did not like the crone, nor did I trust her. But people often talked about things they did not know anything about. The flute player maid argued that the crone had been a great friend to the people, giving us three pearls and Much food and telling us the stories and songs of the strangers. I knew that the stories and songs of strangers were worthless. But she spoke very beautifully. As the people argued. The old crone simply watched us. Her shriveled stranger's face making no sign at all. Her eyes choked just as calm as the wide waters. Finally, one of the great men asked her to explain herself. She spoke slowly, in trickling words, and the people became silent as they listened. She said that the same thing had happened to the painted bags or the last group of strangers she lived with. First, a few valuable young women had disappeared in the night. Night. One by one. Then young men were taken. Finally, the painted backs were set upon by another group of strangers. Monstrous men as white as cavefish. Able to take the form of the eagle and the lion. Powerful with evil and cruelty. There was much slaughter and all were taken away except her, as she was protected by Mother River. This brought great fear to the people. The women whispered and burbled while the men showed their chest to seem brave. One of the great men said that this crone was bad luck. That she was somehow muddied with evil spirits. She had brought disaster on the painted backs, and she would bring disaster on us. The people agreed her journeys into the rocky land had tainted her with evil, and we must get rid of her. The old crone said that the evil had not come from her and was not her fault. She said the evil came from Mother river herself. At this, the people became angry. Mother river did not bring evil. She brought the clams and the berries and the cleansing water. But she did not bring evil. One of the people's great men picked up a rock to brain the crone for speaking against Mother River. The crone showed no fear. She said that Mother river brought both luck and evil. If we were to accept Mother's luck, we would have to accept her evil. But there were ways to increase luck and lessen evil. She said that she had tried to teach these ways to the painted backs. But they had not listened and so were destroyed. Because they had not heeded her words. Their lives indeed ceased to flow and were dried up into dust. We all scoffed at this nonsense. Nothing like this was mentioned in the deeds of the Fathers. So we argued about whether to bring the crone or drown her. In the end, it was decided that we would simply leave her behind. But many of the people grumbled and were unhappy. We left her there at a bend in the river. As we walked away, she made a sign of respect. I expected that she would ask for her pearls Back. But she did not. She stayed there by the river's bend, staring into the waters. Later that day, we washed ourselves in the waters to rid ourselves of the evil that had tainted us in the days that followed. Mother river seemed quiet and sad without the pretty face of Ryma and the constant voice of the Crone to keep her company. The people wondered if we had made the right choice. The flow of the river was hard to know, and nobody could see the cold depths under the glittering surface. But as the days passed and we finished the long song of tears for Ryma, things became gentle again. Then another girl disappeared. It was the same as before, gone in the night without a sound. Now we knew we were being visited by evil. It was not just the old Crone who was muddied by evil. Still we argued whether the Crone had brought the evil or not. So much could not be known. And these arguments flowed nowhere. One of the people remembered that the Crone. One of the people remembered that the Crone had spoken of a way to increase luck and lessen evil. What if she could prevent us from being destroyed like the painted backs? Now there were many arguments and threats, and one man was almost drowned until he was saved by his woman. It was decided that this evil was very powerful and we would have to surrender to it or be destroyed. There was no choice. So whether the woman was lucky or evil, whether she was helping us or tricking us, we would go to her and do as she said. Killing her would not help. If she could bring evil from far down the river, how much easier would it be to bring evil from the other side of death, which is so close to life? No. We would go to her. I and another man were chosen to go back down the river and find the old Crone. She was still at the bend where we had left her, staring into the glittering waters. She smiled as we came to her and asked what we must do. If you are horribly burned in a fire, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. If you shatter your spine, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. If you are addicted to drugs and your life has turned to utter and total shit, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. And that's how the trap works. Imagine if the only cure for burn pain was fire. Imagine if the cure for back pain was whacking yourself in the spine with a hammer. The drug addict is caught in an analogous situation. The only fast, reliable remedy for the psychological pain of drug addiction is drugs. There are other cures. A notable one is not doing drugs, but they are all slower and less reliable. Somehow the lure of feeling better now overrides the hope of feeling better later. This is the basic mechanism of addiction. The behavior of an addict is perfectly logical in the short term and perfectly illogical in the long term. Because life exists in the long term, addiction is illogical overall. What is surprising is how easily addiction can ensnare people who are perfectly intelligent and self disciplined. You can go to certain parts of any sizable city in America and watch drug addicts totter around. Looking at their blighted faces, their filthy clothes, their total lack of self regard, you would be forgiven for thinking they lack self discipline. How could you think otherwise? When a person can't be bothered to shower, much less get a proper job or just stop smoking crack for more than a few hours. What else could you call it but a lack of self discipline? Imagine the Nazi troops at Stalingrad, encircled by the Soviet troops, fighting against total annihilation. Would you look at these troops, underslept, unshaven men in stinking, unwashed clothes and accuse them of lacking self discipline? Would you say these Nazis are an undisciplined lot? Of course not. You would understand that their shabby state is not from a lack of self discipline, but rather because they are concerned with other things. Dire things. While there are several notable differences between Nazi soldiers and crackheads, the same principle is in effect for both. For both, there has been a terrible reordering of priorities. Showering, the clean clothes, the jobs, all of these become secondary to fast access to the drug. If showering and clean clothes got them fast access to the drug, they would walk around looking like a detergent commercial. You would never see whites so white. But they don't need clean clothes, they don't need showers. They need drugs. The drugs are the solution to everything. Highly self disciplined people are actually quite vulnerable to drug addiction. It is because they believe that they need to control their feelings. They often seek to simply eliminate bad feelings, just as they seek to eliminate underperformance from every other area of their lives. The demon of addiction looks at their grand self discipline and giggles with glee. It knows that it will be precisely this self discipline that will bring them to heal. They will self discipline themselves right into total obedience to the drug. As an example, look at Prince and Michael Jackson. Were they self disciplined? Definitely. The world has hardly seen such self discipline. They were obsessive workaholics, devoted to their careers and they propelled themselves to the very pinnacle of professional success. They both knew the dangers of drug addiction and fictitiously avoided Drugs. Keep in mind, avoiding drugs in 1980s Hollywood must have been like avoiding water in a swimming pool at the bottom of the fucking ocean. Yet they managed to do it for a while, because they had self discipline. Now they are both dead. They were both destroyed by drug addiction. In the end, self discipline was not enough to save them. Why not? Because self discipline is just a talent, an accomplishment. And like any other talent or accomplishment, it can be turned and made to serve the dark master. What, then, is our defense against this menace? What is the answer? It simply appeared in the primitive infraspace one day, like a hungry lion showing up on the edge of a village. Over the course of a few hours, it breached a multitude of hardened systems, Going where it wanted, taking what it wanted, seemingly capable of breaking any form of crypto. Then it disappeared. That was in 1991. More than a decade passed before it was seen again. By the time it reappeared, it had already become something of a legend, in the sense that people scarcely believed that it had ever returned, really existed. Most experts had convinced themselves that the original episode wasn't what it appeared to be, that prime factorization techniques were still secure, that the attacks had actually used fairly mundane techniques. But it came again. It did much as it had done before, this time on a larger scale, One commensurate with the more highly developed state of the infraspace. Nobody could easily be sure this was the same entity responsible for the original attacks. It was only known that both sets of attacks involved the same, almost magically advanced capabilities. Now, at least, we knew we were dealing with something real. In the years that followed, it appeared sporadically, Accessing government systems, defense systems, nuclear systems, RL infrastructure systems, social networks. No latency communities, whatever it wanted. And as time went on, the appearances grew more frequent. Naturally, the governments of the world were extremely alarmed. A lot of accusations and threats flew back and forth, forth. The activity proved that our best crypto, even our best physical security, was inadequate. But what could be done? We couldn't just roll back the information technology revolution and put everything in manila file folders. So we looked for new techniques to protect ourselves. But it was a lesson in helplessness. It defeated everything we came up with. After the first attack, it began to use a technique of taming satellites and transmitting information to random locations in the middle of the ocean. We trained instruments on these locations and sent ships racing out to find whoever had been receiving all this stolen data. But they never found anything. Then one day, an attack occurred, and a tamed satellite began transmitting to a location in the Atlantic. Just a few kilometers from where a Royal Navy frigate happened to be. When the warship arrived at the location, the satellite was still trying to open a connection with the surface. There was nothing in sight, but they quickly detected a very large object on their sonar coming towards the site. Was it an accident? With all those millions of square kilometers of open water to choose from, would it accidentally choose a location near a warship of all these types of vessels? No, I think it wanted us to see. Personally, I think it has guided every step of its interaction with us, slowly revealing itself as its power has developed, slowly drawing us in closer. It's sad. Some of the others believe that we were valiantly struggling against it, but I don't think we were ever struggling against it any more than a rat struggles against a mace. A large stewed tomato. Rather ugly. This was how it was described by the skipper. Apparently not a poetic man. The video shows an enormous glistening mountain of flesh rising out of the ocean, dwarfing the warship, expelling streams of water out of a myriad of holes that cover its surface like giant pores. A latticework of huge purple veins runs between the holes, pumping dark globular objects along the structure's surface. The visible portion which emerged above the ocean's surface was shaped like a round hump, with a slight ridging along the center. The sonar record paints a vague picture of what was beneath the water, apparently an oblong object with a number as many as 12 of thin appendages as long as the main body itself. The conceptual artists of the day produced a great many imaginative monstrosities based on the information. After it surfaced, the warship assumed a defensive posture, meaning it backed off and waited. The metallic cylinders appeared shortly after. These were much smaller than the Iwo Jima or Novaya Zemla cylinders, but much more segmented, with thousands of cubic portions flicking in and out of existence like bad pixels. They lasted for three minutes and 13 seconds before vanishing as suddenly as they had appeared. Appeared a moment later. The fleshy mound expelled an enormous geyser of what was apparently air and seawater, like a whale blowing out of its blowhole, and dive beneath the surface. The warship attempted to give chase, but was unable to track the object. On sonar, it seemed to fragment and disappear. Eventually, the warship returned to the stage site and took samples of the water. Mixed amongst all the random plankton and fish cells, there was a fair amount of human DNA. In fact, we were able to trace some of it to specific people. And this was how we proved conclusively that this creature, later to be called A skinship was related in a literal sense to the so called Artigus portal, which was actually underwater, several hundred kilometers away from Arcticus Antarctica. So in the end, it turned out we had built it. We had built Q. It started as a field trip twice a week. Get out of the home for a while, go play video games. Not just for a little bit on the staff's phones, but for hours on real rigs. Before then, my favorite thing was when we took walks in the woods behind the home. But this was even better. It was funny because the game we played was called Children of the Forest, which was basically where you walk through the woods fighting enemies. In the game. You had to remember all these different paths, which were always branching off, and different patterns, and you'd fight different enemies. That all had different patterns. There was a lot of memorizing stuff and making decisions. Everybody liked the first 20 levels or so, but after that, most the other kids got frustrated. Instead of going on, they just played the first few levels over and over. But I kept going higher and higher. The final boss was called the Ancient Queen. You were always advancing on her castle, this huge, dark castle that loomed in the backgrounds of every scene. Sometimes you would see her floating around her castle, just a shadowy bird like shape, and she would taunt you from afar. Come, my child, come and face me. That kind of stuff. Man, I wanted to get her. Even as a little kid, I got really obsessed about things. I wanted to beat the Ancient Queen so badly. I got to level 100, then 200, then 300. At this point, every branch in the path offered like 40 choices. And they all came literally every second. Plus you had to do the enemy patterns, sometimes mixing two and three enemies at once. Kind of like playing two melodies at once on a keyboard. It got pretty insane. But I kept advancing. I was relentless. It was nice to finally be the best at something. I was way better than any other kid. I mean, no other kid went past like level 40. Sometimes they had me play online against other people. There was a kind of battle mode. I beat everybody. At first we could only go to play games like twice a week. And everybody was just dying to do it since there was nothing to do at the home. But after a while, they let me play whenever I wanted. This made the other kids jealous and they started shunning me. So I just played even more. I played all the time. I started sleeping at the game place and I played from when I first woke up in the morning or night until I went to sleep at night or the morning. They brought me food while I played. Whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. One of the people at the game place tried to spoon feed me while I played. It was creepy at first, but I got used to it. I had pretty much gotten used to the fact that whenever something was really fun, adults would come in and take it away or tell me not to do too much of it or something bad would happen and it would be destroyed. So when they told me I could play this all I wanted, it was like the ultimate freedom. The ultimate freedom. Funny that I remember lying in bed one night and I heard the theme music playing down the hall in the game room. The game was so much fun, but kind of cheaply made. It had this chintzy flute music. It played over and over. I heard it now in the middle of the night and wondered who was playing since I was the only kid there and the doctors never played it. So I got out of bed and snuck down the hall to see who it was. The game place was kind of creepy, with all the white balls and everything smelling like plastic. I was a little scared since I was only eight at the time. When I got to the game room, it was totally dark. Nobody was there. The music seemed to vanish. It had all been in my head. That's how much I played it. I was obsessed with that damn ancient queen. She was like this huge mythical creature in my mind. In the game, she only had like a dozen taunts, and I must have heard each one hundreds of thousands of times. They were burned into my brain when I was on the high levels and everything was flying at me at once. I kind of just cleared my mind and let my hands play the game. If that makes any sense. In these times, I would daydream about the ancient queen. What would it be like when I finally faced her? What would she look like? What would happen? It's strange, but sometimes I imagined her as looking like my mother. That strange face that I barely remembered. After a few months, they gave me the surgery to install my direct sense jacks. After playing direct sense games, I forgot all about the children of the forest and the ancient queen. I had found a beautiful, wonderful world where I was powerful beyond belief. Where I wasn't just some little girl who lived in a home and didn't have any friends. So away I went. A few years ago, I went back into the CIA files. I found a copy of the game to see if I could finally beat it. I got past level 800 after that. It became simply inhuman. So I botted it to see the ending it took a long time to build a proper bot. It really was a fiendish, clever game. Finally I got one working, but it turns out there is no ending. You get to level 1024 and it just resets. You never meet the ancient Queen. What's worse? Finding out there is no ancient Queen, or finding out there is one. Society is built on interfaces. You take a complex thing, put it inside a sturdy box and put some simple buttons on the box so that people can use. The thing inside the box makes it easier to use and prevents people from breaking it. For example, you can take the machinery of a clock, put it in a box and put two hands on the outside, along with a knob for winding it. Take all the machinery of a car, hide it behind a dashboard and give people two pedals and a wheel. Take all the circuits of a computer, put them in a box and give people a monitor and a keyboard. Interfaces receive input and produce output. And that's all we need to know. The clock gets wounded and its hands show the time, input and output. As far as the user needs to know. What happens inside the box is magic. This allows stupid and ignorant people to use complicated things. As long as the interface inputs and outputs are simple. Toyota uses millions of kilograms of steel every year. Does the CEO of Toyota know how to make steel from scratch? If he wanted to beat a guy up, would he go digging in the ground for some ore and whip himself up a batch of steel to make a pipe? No, he uses interfaces to get steel. He buys steel from a steel making company. Except he doesn't personally go down to the steel making company with a bag full of yen saying how much for a million kilos? He uses a bank. Except he doesn't even personally go to the bank. He has a subordinate who does it for him. All these people and institutions are interfaces he can use. He employs a system of layered interfaces, both metaphorical and literal, to control things he doesn't really understand. We all do. The point is this. Don't go messing with the CEO of Toyota. I assure you he could get his hands on a steel pipe if he wanted. The word interface refers to the input and the output, but it also refers to the box. We think of interfaces as existing in order to give us access to things, but they are also there to hide things from us. The idea is that some things are better off hidden. Everything will go along fine so long as a certain input produces the expected output. But when this stops happening, we have to open up the box and see what's Inside. Sometimes we don't like what we find. When the old crone told me how to get rid of the evil, I said the names of my fathers, all of them in a row. I spat on the ground. It was too much to bear. I had been told to bring the old crone back to where the people were camped. But I wanted to hold her down in the water of the river and be done with her. She said that we must wait for the next moonless night. Then lead one of our young women deep into the haunted Rockies lands. One of the monstrous evil strangers would come and take her away. If we do this, the evil strangers would leave the rest of the people alone. And they would not destroy us as they destroyed the painted backs. She said we must do this at the beginning of every dry season. It was absurd, but we took the chrome back to the people as we had been told to do. She told the people what she had told us. The people listened and were silent for a while. I spoke up as the son of one of the great men. I said her plan was evil. The people strengthen their young women who are ripe and bear sons. To give them away is a humiliation. It is the way of cowards. When we make war against strangers, do we not take their young women for our own? We should make war against these evil strangers. We should set up a night watch. And when the evil strangers come to us, sneaking in like cowards, we should slay their men and take their women. This is the way of the fathers. This is among the deeds. Many of the people agreed. Even though my words were clumsy, they still had the flow of truth. However, some of the men seemed irritated because I spoke first. Even though I was not a great man myself. One of my uncles asked the people if the painted backs were cowards. Were they not at least as numerous as the people? Were their men not strong? Did they not join us in war against the vile grub eaters and fight like lions? Yet they had been entirely destroyed by the evil strangers. It was not the act of a coward. To prevent this, the people had many ripe young women. And just one was not too much to give away. To go against the flow of a powerful evil like this was unwise. It would bring destruction. This led to much arguing among the people. Nobody knew what to do. I became angry. I shouted that the crone was a witch trickster. She had probably kidnapped the young girl Ryma, and sold her as a slave. I said my uncle was a fool. Some of the men had to lead me away from the camp. So That I would calm down before blood was shot shed. When I finally came back, all had been decided. The next moonless night, the Crone would lead Ryma's younger sister Rona out to the Rocky Lands. I was outraged, but did not say anything. The people were decided, and I could not go against them. Then Maid, the first flute player, spoke up. He said that it was cruel to send such a young girl out to the Rocky Lands to be taken away by evil. She would never see her mother and father again, nor the people, nor Mother river herself. With many beautiful and flowing words, he begged the people to change their minds. Now the arguing began. Again the people were decided, but some of them lamented for Rona. After Mae's words, I felt an opportunity. I asked the great men if I could go with Rona and the Crone to the Rocky Lands. I would make sure that the Crone was not tricking us and face the strangers to see if they were, as the Crone had said, monstrous men as white as cavefish, or if they were just ordinary men. I was sure that the Crone was trickster and that the evil strangers were just a lie she was telling. I expected her to protest, and I planned to show the people that she was lying. But instead she just bowed and said that this was wise and a fair idea. She said I was very wise to doubt her, even wiser than some who were older than me, which made my old uncle grumble. She would be glad to show me the nature of these terrible beings so that the people would believe her. This surprised me. The old witch was more tricky than I had expected. She offered to take anyone who doubted her out to the Rocky Lands to show them the evil menace. Nobody but me was wise enough to go with her. Now I became worried. Was the menace real? Would I encounter something monstrous out there in the Rocky Lands? Was I swimming against the flow of something sinister and powerful? I had to go. To back down would be cowardly, not something that belonged among the deeds. But I would have to be very careful out in the Rocky Land. Maybe the Crone was telling the truth and the monstrous evil strangers were real. But more likely she would try to kill me out there and blame it on the strangers. That would get rid of me and make the people even more afraid. Rona, the Crone and I set out the next day. I let the two women walk ahead of me with Rona weeping and the Crone whispering strange things to her. I stayed behind them. It was hard to look at poor Rona's red weeping face. And I did not want the crone near me. I had taken the fishing head off my spear and attached the warhead. I had also had my black stone knife hidden inside my tunic, and I had brought my two favorite cats, Charm and Grayscruff, in my satchel. They both rode in the satchel well and were very clever and watchful. I wanted to be ready for any sort of trap. We quickly left the gentle trees and bushes of the riverland and went into the steep, bare folds of the rocky land. I had only been away from Mother River's voice a few times in my life. Out in the rocky Viennas there was nothing but the occasional stirring of the wind, which was not warm and burbling like the river, but thin and whispering. All around. I could feel the evil dryness and death that covered the land. Dust blew over the tilted rocks, and here and there were animal skulls and stalking black birds. The sun was sinking down from its highest perch, where when we came upon a huge smooth stone which rose above everything else. It was round like the top of a bald man's head and large enough that many men could stand on it at once. The crone said that this would be the place where the evil stranger would arrive. I asked her what we must do. She said that we only needed to wait for night. Rona would go atop the stone. The stranger would come. Rona did not weep now, but looked at the stone with glittering eyes. The crone ran her hands through Rona's hair, gently pulling out the tangles, and Rona smiled at her. I asked her if she was afraid. The crone had told her wonderful stories about how the strangers would treat her kindly because she was coming to them willingly. They would take her across the rocky land to another river which was far greater than Mother river, wide and flowing with sun gold waters, and they would make her into one of the great women of their band. I kicked the crone over. She cried out. I told her if I heard her voice one more time, I. I would paint this evil rock with her brains. She became meek. Rona protested, but I told her that the crone was a trickster. I tied the crone's hands behind her back with my belt and stuffed a wad of cloth into her mouth. There would be no tricks from her now. I brought Rona and the crone atop the rock and looked around. The rocky land had many folds and hiding places. Still, the high stone was not a good place to make an attack. I let Charm and Grayscruff out of my satchel and they Stretched their legs and sniffed the rocks. If they felt any evil in the land, they did not show it. I walked far around the giant rock and searched among the cracks and folds in the land to see if there was anyone waiting. The whole place seemed to be empty. There were a few dry, dead bushes, so I gathered firewood. When I came back, the sun was sinking behind the rocks, and long, curving shadows lay across the bare world. I built a fire, and Rhona and I ate while we watched the sky turn orange and purple. Finally, all color fled from the world and darkness fell. With no moon, the small fire was the only light except for the stars. I told Rhona to stay by the fire with the crone, who lay on her side, seeming to sleep. I withdrew from the small circle of light and lay flat against the still warm stone with my spear by my side. I was completely hidden in the darkness, looking away from the firelight. The world was perfectly black. Grayscruff startled me as he appeared out of the dark, sneaking up the rock to sit by the fire. Charm soon joined him. Maybe it was too dark for even cats to hunt. Or maybe the land was too dead. A long time passed, and there was no sound but the fire. The crone seemed asleep. Rona added wood to the fire and drowsed. The cats lay side by side like a man and woman. I wondered if I had ruined the Crone's plan, if I would just lie on this rock all night with nothing coming. It was better than being stabbed in my sleep. More time passed. My thoughts became loose and wandering. I imagined the waters of the river flowing through the weird folds of the rocky land. My eyes closed. I opened my eyes again. I wasn't sure how long I had slept. Everything was quiet. The fire still burned well. Rona and the crone slept. Grayscruff and Charm were still lying next to each other, both awake, both looking off into the darkness, both looking in the same direction. I looked out into the darkness. I couldn't see anything out there, just far stars over the blackness of the land. Were the cats watching something? Her eyes were wide. I found myself slowly wrapping my hand around the shaft of my spear. The cats did not take their attention away from what they were looking at. Maybe they had both heard noises, a pebble falling somewhere. Grayscroft slowly, carefully got up, keeping its gaze fixed. Charmed. Hit the same. I pulled my spear close and gripped it tight. The cats both jerked their heads slightly in the same direction, following something. Something was out there. It was close. I pulled my knees up under myself and held my spear with both hands. I listened to every noise, everything around me. I knew I was outside the light of the fire. I would hear anybody coming up the rock. Still, I wished desperately that I could see what the cat saw. It was awful to not know. Charm and Grayscruff crouched and turned, their bodies ready to flee, but still watching the thing in the darkness, their wide eyes glowing in the fire. Slowly they raised their heads, following the thing up and up until they were looking almost straight up. They must have been watching a bird. That was the only thing that could be that high. I let out a relieved breath. A gust of wind made the fire shudder. The cats both jumped, scrambling off into the darkness. Rhona screamed. It landed just in front of her with a flap of wings and a gust of wind that scattered the fire in a spray of sparks. I was on my feet, holding the spear out. The brightly burning pieces of wood showed its shape like a giant pale man with huge wings instead of arms. It stood for a moment with its wings spread, far larger than any bird, but with no feathers like a bat's. The firelight shined through the thin wings, showing the creature's long bones and the streams of blood that flowed under the skin. It turned to look at me, and I realized that the scattering of the fire had brought me into the light. It could see me. My war spear felt like a frail little stick in my hands. Its face was like a rock lion's, but with awful black teeth and huge filmy eyes. It was just as the old crone had said. She had been right all along. Rhona had fallen back onto the ground, and the evil thing stood over her. It was far taller than a man, but very thin, with a waist hardly bigger than a cat's and legs like a mantis. As I stood there with my spear in my hand, the flaming wood lying scattered all around me, looking at this thing in the shifting darkness, it seemed less and less like a man and more like an animal, one of the snaking, starving animals of the rocky land. It folded its wings behind itself and its teeth shuffled in its mouth like a spider's. Rona was screaming, the horrible sound ringing off the stones. I knew what the spear in my hand was for. I knew what I must do. But I could not move. I was held in place by an evil cowardice. The thing crouched over Rona and its cock rose from between its legs, very thin, but longer than any man's. It separated into many different parts, like the petals of a flower opening like a man Spreading his fingers apart. The many parts grew longer, very long, and wound like snakes through the darkness towards Rona, seeming to sniff the air. They found Rona's body and went inside of her. Inside of her mouth and nose and ears, and in between her legs. Her screams ended at once, and the snake like parts lifted her body into the air. Many seasons ago, shortly after I became a man, I had killed a rock lion while it was at the river's edge watching waters for fish. I had simply found it there below me. As I came to the edge of a small cliff. All I had to do was leap down and drive my spear through its shoulders, and it was dead. When the people found out, they made me like I was greater than even the great men, at least for the rest of the day. The only other living person to kill a rock lion was already gray and almost toothless. It was said that I would become a great hunter, but Mother river provides so much for the people that we do not hunt often, and I hadn't killed any anything since then except a few boar. Now I ran toward the great and evil thing, my feet slapping quick over the bare rock. I lifted my spear and leapt and drove the heavy warhead right into its side. The spear went deep into its body and a spray of black blood exploded out of the wound. It let out a sound like an awful bird call, and one of its wings unfolded and hit me hard enough that I fell back. Its wings flapped wildly, spraying fire and sparks everywhere, but it could not fly and fell back down onto the stone. Black blood poured out of its side. I pulled Rhona away from it, but she was limp and moaning. The awful snake like things were still inside of her. I pulled them out one by one, but they were sharp and cut my hands, and they came out of her body covered in red blood. When I had freed her, I took her up and grabbed my spear and slid down the side of the rock and stumbled through the blackness until I found a ridge of rock to hide behind. There were a few bits of fire left on top of the rock. They soon went out. I was in total darkness, except for the stars above, clinging to Rhona, who made no more sound. I waited there in the utter blackness. Rhona did not stir. I felt the warmth slowly flow from her body. By the time the first gray light of morning came, she was dead. As soon as I could see well enough, I went back up to the top of the large rock. The thing was lying there, its wings spread wide and coated with black blood. It had bled enough to cover the entire top of the rock with blackness, which had dried and become thin flakes that blew away in the wind after I stepped on them with my spear. Grip tight, I approached it again. Its body was the same sort of pale color as the morning sky. It was covered in tiny glistening hairs. The mouth was like a spider's with sharp black teeth. Its cock had become just a shriveled little thing. No sign of the long snake like parts. I went down the rock again to where I had left the crone. She was gone. My belt lay in the dust, sawed in half. Maybe it was just as well. I did not want to see her again. I called for Charm and Graysgruff, but there was no sign of them. I left the evil rocky land as fast as I could. The weird rocks all looked the same to me, and I did not know the way well. But I found the river before the sun had climbed to its highest. It was a different part of the river than I had left, and nobody was there. I made my way along the banks looking for the people. There is much to tell them. Would the other winged stranger soon try to set upon the people? Would we have to make war against them? If it must be so, then let them come. They could be killed like any other men. The sun was still above the trees when I first saw men walking along the river. Their faces were the normal color of sandy river mud, not the evil white of the winged stranger. I called to them happily, called the names of the fathers, but they did not answer. I came closer and saw that these were not the people. I took my spear in both hands. These men were painted backs. They stood silently by the river, their war spears in hand, signs of victory and triumph painted on their chest in bright blood. They watched me with strange filmy eyes. It's really difficult for me to tell a story with just words, so please bear with me. I am trying to tell you the story of who I am and how I came to be this thing. But I have trouble organizing my thoughts into a single linear flow. I wish I could just show you the entire story all at once, in all its many dimensions. Then I could make it clear why I hired somebody to put a pellet of poison into my own arm. But as it is, I must use the ancient art of written narrative. So here it goes. Imagine spending your whole life in a cramped, stinking prison cell, counting the days, scratching tally marks on the walls. And then one day that big iron door creaks open and you're whisked off to a glamorous party full of beautiful people and delightful games. And everybody you meet is toasting you for being a genius. For being the great hope of the human race. That's what it's like to plug into the direct sense feeds after living at the children's home. I can't describe that first day in the Feed Realm. Though I have not cried in 24 years, I still get the ghostly feeling of tears coming to my eyes every time I think about it. To be looking around at the home field environment, everything glittering in a new way, shining in colors that do not exist, all of it stretching out before me. All the main gateways open and waiting to be explored. The feeling of that moment of being a small child looking out at the beautiful new vastness of of the Realm was the most magical thing I have experienced. What I want to impress upon you is this. Every step I took towards slavery felt like a newfound freedom. At first it was just games and social mixing with other kids. We all had played the Mysterious Children of the Forest game and scored highly on it. The game had been an entry exam of sorts. It turns out that I had scored higher than anyone else. A lot higher. This made some of the other kids jealous, but most of them seemed to look up to me. I had never made anyone jealous before and I had never been looked up to before. Social mixing and share streaming was easy and fun if you had time to think of what to say, which video or Annie to post to the stream, which paste to link up. It was so much more exciting than being in real life. I had a good memory and could work the assisted recall pretty well. So I made a lot of friends. They told us we would all be going to Harvard and Stanford and Tsinghua. That we would be famous mix stars and government stars. That we were the future of the world. To be fair, they couldn't have known that most of us would be dead before we were 20, that all of us would be dead before 34. But they knew damn well we wouldn't be going on to normal lives. We were a part of an experiment. After we got used to the Feed Realm, they began the conditioning. I realize that you might not know what the Feed Realm is, so maybe I should explain a little bit about it. The Feed Realm is basically just another interface for sharing information and carrying out transactions. It is based on the metaphor of 3D space. That's why it's called Realm. You can move through it. You can go up and down, left and right. It feels like swimming through weightlessness they made it this way because that's how human minds work. Our brains evolved to exist in a 3D space. We naturally imagine things as existing in space, even abstract non spatial things. We think of the future as coming towards us, the past as receding behind us. Powerful people are considered above and the powerless are below. Items belong in some categories and outside other categories. Some of these spatial relationships really exist, but they are useful metaphors because our minds are suited to process things in 3D space. It has always been theoretically possible, even trivial, to create a four dimensional or n dimensional feed realm. But since the human mind isn't made to process so many dimensions, it was considered pointless. But recently a genetic mutation dating back to the Stone age was discovered which allows certain individuals to experience and comprehend feed realms of four and higher spatial dimensions. While this mutation may have been useless for Stone Age people living In a spatially 3D world, it was also harmless. So it somehow survived, though its initial origin is something of a mystery anyways. Now scientists were able to hook people up to 4D feed realms. Early test subjects described the experience in terms ranging from nauseating to utterly horrifying. It was theorized that maybe if children were conditioned from a young age to exist in a higher dimensional environment, they would become accustomed to it. But such conditioning was deemed unethical. Enter the CIA. Their motto, where ethical approbation ends, our work begins. They used their global genetic database to identify children with the genotype and collected a group of them to begin conditioning. And that brings us back to my story. At first we were just playing around in the feed realm, getting used to it. Then they started the conditioning. How do I describe higher dimensional space, so called hyperspace? Nauseating and utterly horrifying are exactly what it felt like. At first everybody hated it. We cried and tried to run away when they made us go into the hypo realm. But of course there was nowhere to run. We were all lying in hygiene beds where almost all of us would lie until death. They forced us back into the hyper realm a little at a time. Just showing us simple shapes at first to acclimate us. But how do I describe Was like watching things pass through each other, but without touching each other or covering each other up in ways that made the brain go that's impossible. Stop it. There were plain gray boxes and cones and infinite planes and bottomless abysses. And the shapes would move slowly along and do things that were simply impossible. Some of the kids never got used to it. They hated it and dropped out of the program and disappeared. From the feed realm. But I kept going. Just like in the Children of the Forest game. I got used to four dimensions, then five, then six. I was a leader. I taught the other kids tricks for how to understand what they were seeing. And it was cool being in hyperspace. Seeing everything at once like that was hyperspace. Mind bending, sure. But not nearly as mind bending as hypertime. And not nearly as horrifying. A friend from rehab invites me to an HA meeting. Shooting boy was never among my vices, but I'd go with him. The meeting is out in the suburbs and is packed. Every bit of floor space is filled with folding chairs and every chair is filled. I want to leave as soon as I sit down. It's like being in a crowded elevator for an entire hour. I can feel the coffee breath on my skin. It is disturbing to look around at all the kids in the room. How are they all so young and fresh faced? The alcoholics tend to be much more beat up. All those years of excess capillary dilation give our faces a meaty quality. These little heroin addicts, on the other hand, come into the rooms at 19 with the glow of childhood still on their skin. My friend's arms have no track marks. They are smooth and doll like. No major veins left. He is 21. I've been roommates with kids like these for the past few months. They don't know who Norm from Cheers is. They don't know how to empty a dryer filter or take care of a Teflon pan. But they know how to cook up black tar. They know how to find veins. It quickly becomes apparent that one of the meeting's regulars died last night. Everyone is upset. People start crying. My desire to not be there grows exponentially. I didn't know the kid. I feel like I've stumbled into the wrong funeral. The kid's sponsor talks. He's an older man with a grey goatee. He was guiding the kid through the steps. The room looks at him to say something comforting, something with a ring of authority and wisdom. The room is full of children in the grips of a problem that their parents cannot understand. Here is a grown up who can understand. He talks about meeting the kid's parents at the hospital. His eyes grow damp. He recalls, haltingly that the parents were very polite. They thanked him very politely for trying to help their son. He looks down at the floor. There is no more to say. Later, I relate the story to my roommate Sean. He says that this has been going on with the blacks for years. But nobody cared until it came to swallow up all the little white children. He says that most problems come to visit black people first because black people are God's chosen people. They must be chastised. The program tells us to be more open minded and less judgmental. I am trying to be more open minded and less judgmental about Sean's beliefs. At first glance, his beliefs are paranoid, ahistorical, conspiracy theory hogwash. At second glance, they are appallingly anti Semitic cultural appropriation. But my sponsor says it's not my place to enlighten him with my views. I only need to be a decent roommate to him. When the Jews were sold into captivity, their narrative survived. This was not so for the slaves of America at least. Nothing like the Torah was passed on. The American system of slavery worked to destroy the history of millions of people. But I wonder how much of the Jew's history really survived. There are certainly parts of the Torah that don't have the resounding ring of authority and wisdom, eg. The talking snake or the talking bush or the Nephilim or 90% of everything else. How much of the real story actually survived? It must be tempting to place oneself into the context of a mythical narrative that goes back thousands of years, that extends forward to the end of history. Instead of just being this lost little individual, you become the inheritor of a grand spiritual legacy, part of a grand struggle. One of the chosen people, a new roommate, moved into the house a few days ago. His name is Donnie, he's in his mid-40s and he's a former Marine. I show him the Iwo Jima segment of my story and ask him what he thinks.