← Nephilim Death Squad
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This episode was brought to you by Allianz Travel Insurance. You wanted to take your travel adventures to new heights, so you decided to take on a hiking tour of the Dolomites. You were ready for the climb. Your knee? Not so much. Now you've had to swap out your hiking boots for a leg brace. Our emergency medical coverage can help when injuries or illness knock you off your feet. Learn more@allianztravelinsurance.com When I was in high school, I liked dropping acid. One of my favorite books was the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which tells the real life story of a band of early acid heads and proto hippies called the Merry Pranksters, who invented a lot of what would become tropes of the 1960s, such as dressing up in weird shit and riding around in a painted bus while stoned on drugs. I was especially intrigued by an experiment which was carried out by the Pranksters in 1965. One day, a few of the Pranksters put a sign on the front gate of the group's compound that read the Merry Pranksters Welcomed the Beatles. At the time, the Beatles were the biggest band in the world, and the Merry Pranksters were largely unknown. Moreover, none of the Pranksters actually knew the Beatles or had any idea of how to contact the Beatles, nor did they make any attempt to do so. For the Beatles to show up at their house in California was extremely unlikely. Despite all this, the Pranksters put this crazy banner out on their front gate and they fully expected the Beatles to show up. To understand the Prankster's behavior, you must understand the effects of lsd. This is true in a general sense and with specific regard to that banner. You see, sometimes when you take lsd, something strange happens. Something beyond all the weird hallucinations and thought distortions. Sometimes you get the eerie feeling that coincidences are happening all around you. You might be listening to music while watching TV and notice that the pictures and the sound seem to sync up. You might open a book and notice that the opening passage has an odd, unmistakable relevance to the current moment you are in. At times you almost feel like you are conscious of things before they actually happen. You imagine your friend walking through the door and a moment later she does. You look at your phone and a moment later it rings. Sometimes these coincidences pile up so quickly that you get the feeling that there is something behind it all, that all the seemingly disparate and unrelated phenomena of your life are actually part of an underlying order or pattern or structure which is normally hidden. This order seems to be a cosmic phenomenon that pervades and controls all of existence. Something which has always existed, but which you have been blind to until now. The existence of this fundamental order comes as a revelation because it is completely different from the ordinary mechanism of cause and effect that you are used to, that science uses to explain things. This feeling, to me, is the essence of the LSD experience. LSD leads to a sudden awareness of meaningful coincidences, which in turn gives rise to an awareness of an underlying cosmic order which is acasual. The acasual part is important. A true coincidence is when two things happen which are clearly related, but which cannot possibly be related by cause and effect. For example, let's say you are watching a show on TV about zebras. Then you walk out your front door and see a zebra trotting down the sidewalk, dropping zebra shit all over the place. The two events have an obvious connection, but it's hard to imagine how that connection could occur through cause and effect. It's not likely that your TV viewing choices caused that zebra to escape from the zoo. Nor is it likely that the two events have a common cause, unless somebody is playing an elaborate prank on you. Such a coincidence could be considered meaningful if you believe that it is evidence of the aforementioned underlying order. Otherwise, it's just some weird shit that happened randomly. During my high school years, because of my little LSD hobby, I became obsessed with meaningful coincidences. I was always looking for little signs from the cosmos and hidden connections between things which weren't casually related. I tried to predict things. I looked for symbols and tried to fit the events of my daily life into cosmic patterns. I got into Nostradamus, the I Ching, stitchomancy, all sorts of shit. Unfortunately, my attempts to ascertain the underlying structure of the cosmos were heavily clouded by my own immature narcissism. You'll notice that people who believe in past lives tend to see themselves as great figures of the past, like Caesar and Van Gogh, rather than the anonymous turnip pickers and fish wives who actually populated most of history. Similarly, I was convinced that the cosmos was sending me indications my impending greatness rather than portending my eventual descent into alcoholic mediocrity. Yes, it was revealed to me that the world would end soon. I'd be a Christlike figure of greatness in the coming apocalypse. I shit you not, I really believe this stuff. Luckily, blogs had not become popular yet. Then I took my final acid trip and it was a bad trip. I don't want to go into the details, but let's just say that I saw some Shit. And I never wanted to take acid again. All my life I had been hoping to be visited with grand revelation. And now I just hope I was never visited by another one. It filled my head with all sorts of crazy shit. Not truth, just madness. I decided that whatever was underlying the cosmos could stay underlying the damn cosmos. I wanted no part of it. Well, I guess I should tell you what happened with the Beatles banner. In putting out that banner, the Pranksters had hoped that they could tap into the underlying acasual order of the universe by simply welcoming the Beatles rather than reaching out to the Beatles or pursuing them. But the Beatles never showed up. At least they never showed up in a literal sense. A couple years later the Beatles released the Magical Mystery Tour film in which they all dressed up in weird shit and rode around on a painted bus while stoned on drugs, precisely as the Pranksters had done. So in a sense, they did come to the Pranksters. Of course, this can be explained by ordinary cause and effect. The Pranksters helped popularize a social movement which eventually spread to England. Or you can invoke a mystical explanation saying the Pranksters somehow sensed that the underlying pattern of the cosmos would bring the Beatles around to their way of doing things. After I stopped doing lsd, I started leaning away from notions of cosmic patterns. And I became more convinced that any understanding of the universe would have to rely on cause and effect. My earlier attempts at mysticism began to look like embarrassing folly. I came to regard all that meaningful coincidence stuff as bullshit. I figured that LSD just overstimulated whatever sort of coincidence detector might exist in the brain. You could dress it up in a fancy word like synchronicity and give it the imprimatur of Carl Jung or whomever. But it was nothing more than magical thinking. As old and stupid as Stone Age tribes, I had been perceiving connections between things where none existed. There are no meaningful coincidences. A coincidence is only meaningful if you can find a casual relationship between the two. And if you can, it is no longer a true coincidence. The universe doesn't send people signs through the I Ching or Nostradamus or any of that silly shit. If there are rain clouds in the sky, it's a sign you should carry an umbrella. That's an actual sign from the universe. The other stuff is just a load of crap. It was with this mindset that I entered AA years later. AA is a God centered program. The main idea is that you can get sober if you live according to God's will instead of your own will. People in AA often talk about watching for signs from God and listening to instructions from God and so forth. As you can imagine, I was less than impressed. I was appalled. I felt like I was being dragged back into this narcissistic mystical bullshit that I had thankfully left behind. I felt like I was being asked to roll back my personal age of enlightenment and go back to the dark ages. Fuck that. I wasn't going to do it. One night at a meeting, after months of listening to this spirituality shit, I made my feelings clear. I told them that spirituality was the hugest load of horseshit ever foisted up upon human culture. Spirituality, I opined, was like a thought virus that gets passed on from one person to another. It was basically gonorrhea of the brain and AA was one of the biggest fucking disease vectors I'd ever seen. I told them they should be ashamed of themselves for preying on people who are in a vulnerable state just to convert them to their bullshit spiritual beliefs. Rather than the stunned silence that is the dream of every ratheism subscriber. They just told me to keep coming back and moved on to the next guy. It turned out that little rants like this are semi regular occurrence. Having no other good options, I kept coming back. I asked a lot of people why they believe in God. They almost invariably brought up meaningful coincidences or magical signs. I became more convinced than ever that it was all bullshit. I argued a lot with one guy in particular. In recovery you meet a lot of people who are like Ned Flanders with tattoos. People who lived dirty, then cleaned up and became extra square, but they still have their tattoos. This was one of those guys. He told me a story about how he was in prison at the end of his rope and he prayed to God to send him a sign. Just then a little bird alighted on prison window and sang him a beautiful little song. God he knew at that moment was real. I almost dislocated my eyes they rolled so hard. What a bunch of silly shit. How could a grown adult believe this crap? I read the AA literature mainly to bolster my arguments against the program. AA literature is very sneaky. It knows that most atheists follow the tradition of western secular humanism which values open mindedness, in contrast the closed mindedness of religionists. So the literature portrays atheism as close mindedness. Atheists are encouraged to be more open minded, more flexible, more willing to accept the idea that they don't know everything about the universe. I wondered if it was fucking opposite day. How are these spiritual nutcases going to portray spirituality as open mindedness and atheism as close mindedness. I was simply asserting that my entire life I had never seen any convincing evidence of God that wasn't close minded, that wasn't presumptuous. It was the opposite. I was willing to accept the evidence presented to me by the world, unlike religionists who turn a blind eye to it. I told Heavy Metal Ned Flanders that if the skies ever opened up to show me the majestic glory of God, then I would be happy to fall to my knees because either God existed or I was in the presence of a technology advanced enough to be godlike. I told him that I was perfectly willing to believe in God if I was ever presented with a shred of credible evidence for his existence. Soon after I was presented precisely that. Who knows, maybe it was a coincidence. I think it's possible it could be written on the fly. The story gives the appearance a vast scope because the storylines are from different eras and areas, but rather than a broad panorama, it only provides thin slivers of insight into each time and place. Everything in between these slivers is left to the player's imagination, and given the author's hints at branching timelines, he or she is not even necessarily required to link these little slivers together. People also point to the various stories interconnectedness and claim that the work has a structure to intricate to be improvisational. But how much interconnectedness is there really? For example, the Stone Age story has cats in it, and the cat story has cats in it. Obviously this is a point of similarity. Obviously. But what is the significance? So what if both stories have cats? Is this meaningful coincidence or a meaningless one? The same question could be asked about the children of a forest, or the various marines, or the demon penises for which the author has such fondness. Yes, these elements recur, but to what end? Perhaps, like somebody on LSD undergoing a false revelation, we are drawing connections where none really exist. Perhaps these are meaningless coincidences. The story employs a number of copies callbacks, where it makes references to something which was not mentioned in quite a while. This gives the appearance of careful pre planning, but callbacks are actually a pretty easy thing to improvise. The author can just look over the story, pick an element and bring it to the fore. Again, like a prime factorization problem, the problem is easier to create than it is to solve. A successful callback is really more of a testament to the reader's intelligence than the author's. And by the way, whatever happened to Companion 12? That seemed like it was going to be a thing, but anyways, all this is speculation on my part. It's an interesting question. How can we know whether the story's improvised or not? The author does occasionally make direct responses to other Reddit comments and makes reference to current events. But as you said, this could just be a sort of superficial improvisation, where most of the story is actually fixed but a few of the details are improvised. The author could also be combing through Reddit for the right comment to give the appearance of improvisation. Are we watching real choices in action, or are the events of this universe occurring along some deterministic path? Is there any way to find out? Maybe some sort of test should be devised, but that would require the author to play along. Okay, now I'm in my bedroom. The bedroom smells like bedroom. Actual bedroom. So definite. It smells like wood and blankets and stuff. Sharp. I wonder how they decide on the bedroom smell. I move my arms around and bounce a little on the bed springs. My body feels really natural and comfortable. Everything looks sharp too. There are no weird color trails like an acronym exclamation. Cool. Really crisp. I stand up and take in all the little touches. It's an attic bedroom with a slanting ceiling and wood panel walls. Night outside the window, Mood lighting from a nightstand, lamp, clothes and a skateboard and other random teenage stuff. Stuff scattered on the floor. Walls covered with posters. Ion Access, the Cure, Michael Jackson, and the Yellow Vest. Very definite. Or should I say groovy? Did they say that in the 80s? An interrupt comes through Atlanta completely destroyed in full scale. I use my illegal bypass to cut off all interrupts. Ugh, I hate sports interrupts. I'll have to figure out how to change that setting. I notice a can of Pepsi Free sitting on my nightstand. I pick it up, still cold. I crack it open and smell it and the fizz tickles my nose. It really smells like soda. I take a sip. Wow. Hmm. Not very good. Maybe it's a low quality render. Or maybe I just don't like Pepsi Free. It's pretty amazing to be tasting something in a feed. This was really worth it. The doorbell rings somewhere downstairs. Oh, definitely. We're starting. I head towards the door and catch myself in the mirror. I'm supposed to look like a girl named brooke shields at 18 years old. Wow, she's pretty. What a render. Eyebrows are a little intense though. I consider toning them down, but I don't want to get caught up in character design. If you change one thing, you end up changing 50 things and it goes on forever. I head out into the hallway and pause for a moment. The smell just changed. Now there's a hallway smell. Carpet and drywall. I laugh. I take a step back into the bedroom and the bedroom smell returns instantly. I step into the hallway again. Hallway smell. Bedroom smell. Hallway smell. Bedroom smell. I snicker at this. The smell changes just like that. Why can't they make it more natural? What a giveaway. Oh well. I head down the stairs. The furniture in the front hall looks really cheesy. I pick up a lamp and toss it at the wall. It smashes apart and the bulb explodes with a spark. I look at the shards. There's bits of powder and all sorts of little details. Yow. Very certain. Undo that, I say and the lamp fades away and reappears on the side table. I open the front door. A guy stands there with swept back blonde hair in a baggy red and black jacket with a collar popped up and sleeves rolled up nice. He gives me a killer smile and says, hey babe, what took you so long? A blast of electric guitar hits me and the guy floats up and over the front lawn, becoming two stories tall and striking a sexy pose. Colors fill the night sky. Sparkling starlight showers him and Synthbeat kicks in. An announcer shouts Corey Lancer. High school hot shot rock and roll renegade. He's a fast talker with a slick attitude. A guy who can make anything happen. All the girls want him. But all he wants is one thing. The Ferrari 288 GTO. A red sports car comes flying out of the sky, does crazy circles around Quarry while he strikes more sexy poses and the music thunder thumbs. It's the fastest street legal car in existence. Only 272 produced. This is Corey's dream. Corey's obsession. Corey's life. He'll do anything to get one. And he needs your help. Can you get the car? Can you win his heart? Are you ready for 80s Turbo Ascension? Hmm. I should have looked the summary closer. I'm not really into cars and this doesn't really seem like a very interesting narrative. Still, Corey is really well rendered. Blond hair, blue eyes, a bit of a mischief in his smile. I like it. I wonder if he'll be controlled by an AI or a Filipino. He floats back down to me and returns to normal size. So what's up? He said with a devilish little grin. Wow, this is a stuff. Just doing my hair, I say, flicking my huge brown mane off my shoulder. This Brooke Shields lady has an absurd amount of hair. You chicks, Corey says, leaning forward and giving me A kiss. His mouth tastes like bubblegum. The kiss feels perfect. Yow. Just definitely. I feel Corey's chest through his shirt. Skinny but nice. I think about toning him up a bit. Nah, it's better to just go with his default settings. So listen, there's a race tonight at the Speedmax track, Corey says. The Crystal Cobras put out a challenge and they're taking all comers. The prize is I don't really like racing. Corey thinks for a moment. A character animation. He looks cute thinking his sharp eyebrows pressed together. Now he's taking too long. It's getting awkward. I think he's controlled by a Filipino. Or maybe there's lag. He snaps back into action. Okay, listen, there's gonna be a dance off at the club Heat Wave. The Crystal Cobras put out a challenge and they're taking all comers. The prize is 100k dancing. Yeah, that would be one way to try out my body. Sounds groovy, I say, but I can't help but think of another way to give this body a test drive. I slip my hand down and my tight purple skirt feel my genitals. Ugh. Yeeks. They really have everything working down there. Should I do it already? Just five minutes into the narrative. Eh, why not? Everybody does it right away. Corey looks really good. I wonder what kind of dick they rendered him with. But no, I should go at least half an hour without slutting it up. Dancing will be fun. Corey holds out his arm like a gentleman and I take it. He leads me down the front walk towards his car. A smeary old junk ride with dents and rust all over it. Sorry hun, it's only temporary. Corey says as we come up on the car. I promise you, by the end of this week I'm going to have a Ferrari. Ferrari 288 GTO. The fastest street legal car in the world. It's my dream. It's my obsession. I'll do anything to But I'm not listening. There's something in the bushes by the road. I wonder if this is one of those fake out horror narratives. I really hate scary stuff. I bend over and look into the bushes. A pair of shining eyes stares back at me. Ew. What the hell? There's an old naked lady hiding in the bushes. Yuck. This naked old lady hiding in the bushes looks like the beginning of a storyline. I don't want to go down. I really wish I had looked at the summary closer. Who knew something called 80s Turbo Ascension would have artisanal porn in it, I consider saying my safe word to stop the narrative, but I don't feel like going through the loading process again. I should have loaded my feed splits, but I rushed through the setup. The old lady's bony arm shakes out of the bush and grabs my ankle. Certainly not. I yank my leg away and curse at her. Corey is looking at her with the same confused animation he used a moment. Is he already using the same animation? That's kinda low def. The crazy old lady comes stumbling out of the bush, her saggy old boobs flopping around. Yow. What kind of narrative is this? I pick up a nearby potted plant and smash it on her head. It breaks apart pretty nice, full of high definition. Dirt lady falls on the ground and starts moaning. I back away to watch how the scene develops between Corey and her. It looks like her leg isn't quite attached to the rest of her. You can see the meat inside of her hip. Really low def. Corey just stands there cycling through different animations. He turns to me and shrugs and says, hey babe, that's life. I stare at him. Is this how the storyline is supposed to go? He runs his hand through his hair and says, cute skirt. What the hell? This narrative is bugged up. Let's go. I say, going to Corey's car and opening the door. It's an old hand drive with a fixed wheel. You want me to drive? Corey asks, coming over. Yeah, maybe you better. A minute later we're cruising down the freeway listening to some oldie about a girl named Jessie. The scenery looks cool with blue freeway lights passing by and an old fashioned neon Metro in the background. Cory is running through his backstory, talking about the Ferrari or whatever. I can't ignore the fact that I feel a little bored. I'm just 10 minutes into my first direct sense feed narrative and I'm already a little bored. Was a surgery really worth all that money? I don't even want to think about what it cost. I slip my hand into my skirt again and touch my genitals. It feels really nice. Everything is super sharp. I think about fucking Corey again, but I can't go back to feed fucking all the time every day. I why am I always bored with narratives after 10 minutes? Why am I bored with everything after 10 minutes? We pull up in front of Club Heatwave, a big glittering building with a neon sun shining above it. A line of gleaming black limo snakes through a colorful crowd out front. We park in the player spot across the street and head to the grand entrance, Corey leading me by the hand Music thumps from within. People are waiting in line, but Corey says something to the bouncer and we slip past. The entrance hall is all mirrors and neon. I can feel the beat of the music pass through my entire body. That's cool. The singer tells me to get out of his dreams and into his car. The inside is filled with shadowy body bodies dancing through strobe lights and lasers and artificial fog. Cheesy, but kind of fun. It even has that fake fog smell. Wanna get some practice in? Corey asks, giving my bum a little squeeze. Well, this one is naughty. We head out onto the dance floor and start to cut it up. Wow. Cory's dancing is tiny. Terrible. Looks like a motion glitch. Guess they had to give him some old moves. But did they have to make it this bad? This is kind of ruining the storyline. I look across the dance floor and see a tall man in a black suit with black hair standing perfectly still among the dancing crowd. He's watching me with dark eyes. There's a sort of glow around him so that I can tell he's going to be a part of a storyline. I lean over to Corey and ask, who is that? Corey stares at the man for a moment and runs his hands through his hair and says, cute skirt. What the fuck, Corey? The dark man comes across the dance floor, coming toward me. The other dancers don't move out of the way and he passes through them without breaking his stride. Some programming. Now he stands in front of me, looking down at me with his gleaming black eyes. What an incredible render this guy is. I mean, this is outright art. Like Rembrandt level. Say what you will about the game's production, I really know how to build hot guys. Psyche's tailor made to turn me on. Then I notice Corey standing right there looking at us all confused. He looks like a cheap plastic doll compared to this new guy. What gives? Corey asks. Fuck off, I say. Corey gets this really heartbroken look on his face and says, listen to me, Zen, Zen, Zobaku. You'll break my heart if you go with any other guy. You got that? You are the most special, most beautiful girl I have ever met. I can't really get into his speech because it's too early in the narrative for that kind of stuff. Plus, he pronounced my name wrong. The new guy reaches out and grabs a handful of Corey's face. Literally. He just sinks his fingers into the face and tears a huge bloody hunk out. Blood sprays everywhere. Holy shit. I guess this is a horror narrative. Is this guy like a Vampire or something. Faceless. Corey keeps standing there, spurting blood out of his head hole. I push him away. The new guy squeezes the hunk of flesh like a sponge and lets the blood run down over my face and starts licking it off. Eep. This must be some kind of art porn sampler narrative. I really gotta start reading those summaries. Crucial despite how strange the situation is. I ignore it all and begin some steamy sex with this man. Even though I am lost in the moment, I can't help but notice that the light in the club has changed. It seems like it's coming from two angles, making everything seem doubled. I feel like I'm looking at the man's face from two angles, seeing four of his eyes. It's a weird effect and I wonder if there's something wrong with my visual line. Next to me, a woman in a pink dress opens her mouth and her jaw floats away from her face. Her head floats off of her neck. Beside her, the man separates into a dozen slices. God damn it. This is definitely a fatal glitch, but I am so close to climax, it's gonna be fucking fabulous. I wonder if the narrative can hang together for just 10 more seconds before it crashes all around us. The people begin to break apart, become floating parts. The weird lighting effect becomes more intense and the man seems to be made of force sections, except each section is his entire face from a different angle and they're all crossing each other but staying in place at the same time. And eight eyes are watching me. Oh, this is hurting my brain. Fuck, I can't take this. The narrative should have already crashed back into safety mode. I say myself. Safe word. Nothing happens. I feel my stomach drop in terror. Except it drops at four different places all around the room. Oh God, am I stuck in a crashing narrative? They say it can fuck you up. I feel myself falling and expanding. One of my hands feels like it's way off on the horizon. Another is ten stories below me. Body parts are swirling around us, showing all sides at once. The man is staring down at me with his awful eyes. How are they so awful? His face is as giant as a mountain range. As the entire sky. I'm seeing too much. No, above and beneath. Everything has too many sides. SCREAMING he has dozens of eyes. Thousands. Thousands of sides. Thousands and millions and millions of eyes. God. When we got to the Clearview Hospital, it was like Karen said it would be. The emergency room was flooded with patients coming from Atlanta, but the readjustment center was empty except for a lone staffer who was watching the lobby's wall set and praying. The set was showing footage of the black cloud over Atlanta. Or maybe it was Denver or Riyadh. Twelve cities had gone up in the last hour. They weren't the largest or most powerful cities in the world. Jefe, Zhang, Zhao. Bengaluru. What was the pattern? What the hell had Bengaluru done to anybody? Karen said there was no real pattern. This is Q's opening move. Her entrance into the world. She won't destroy everything, but she will kill and kill until she thinks we are ready for her demands. I found a wheelchair by the readjustment center's entrance and wheeled Karen down to the EMRT room. Somewhere a hygiene bed's life alarm was ringing. I ignored it. My goal was to get Karen some muscle treatment. A single treatment probably wouldn't give her enough strength to stand on her own, but she could at least hold her head up and move her arms. She might regain her voice and sight. In the treatment room. I filled a treatment tub with the minty smelling conducting gel and washed Karen off and fit her with breathing tubes. These were normally tech duties, stuff I thought I would never be doing again. Looking down at this little twig of a woman on the table, it occurred to me that all I had to do was tie off her breathing tube and that would be the end of her. I asked her the question that kept coming into my mind. How do I know for sure that you didn't blow up Atlanta yourself? How do I know you aren't full of shit? My set was blank for a while before she answered. Well, how could I prove it? I tried to think of a way. Some kind of test. I don't know, I said finally. You know much about statistical proxy dilation tracing? No. Then it would be hard to prove it to you. So how do I know it wasn't you? You can't know. I need to know. If I'm going to help you. Then learn about SP dt. I don't have time to learn about fucking SP fucking dt. Then you can't know. You're just dealing with stuff that's too advanced. I walked away from the table and sat down in a nearby chair. I felt like I was cracking up. The urge to cry had come and passed every few minutes and it came again. I don't know what to do. I told you we must get to upstate New York. There is a way to defeat Q. Maybe you are Q. Listen, before you put me in the jail, I want you to pull my jack battery. Cut it off. And that would prove you're not Q. Not really. I could have scripted everything. Oh, but it would mean I can't directly order nuclear strikes. Oh, well, that's a really good, I said, rubbing my face and trying to blink away the fresh wave of tears. What's in upstate New York that's so important? There is a resource Q can't access, something she cannot defend against. What? Honestly, if you don't understand something simple like spdt, you won't understand this. This. Fucking great. I said. We sat there in silence for a long moment. Finally another message showed up. I'm not Q. I spent my life fighting Q. I fought Q instead of living a life. We still have a chance to win. We must win. I sighed and stood up and walked over to her. Well then, let's get started. Good. I found the jack patch on the back of Karen's neck and squeezed at the tattooed points. Her battery capsule slowly slid out of her skin like a giant blackhead. I disconnected the wire. Now she was completely disconnected from infraspace. I picked up her body and gently lowered it into the conducting gel. It took a minute for her to sink to the bottom, for the gel to slowly slide over her face like a closing curtain. I dialed up to 90 minutes of muscle treatment and 30 minutes of eye treatment and started the tub up. I sat for a while listening to the soft wobbling sounds of the gel shifting as Karen's muscles clenched and unclenched at rapid fire rate. This was the sort of spare moment where a person would stare at their set and look at a game replay or something. But my set was just a long list of red inter interrupts telling me about how everybody was dead. I realized that the hygiene bed's life alarm was still going off in some other room. Usually when I heard that sound I went racing to find out what was going on, but I had just ignored it. Well, the person was probably dead before we got here. What were the odds that they had just gone into arrest when we walked in the door? And who gave a shit anyways when 100 million people had also died today? Still, there was an instinctive part of me that wanted to run toward the sound. That wanted to help. I got up and walked down the hall. Ringing got louder. At the end of the hallway there was a small room with four hygiene beds that had been brought in for in hospital disconnection, a procedure usually reserved for really complex cases. The last bed was blinking red. I took a look at the readout, but it didn't show cardiac arrest. In fact, it was showing 260 beats per minute. It must have been malfunctioning. I looked at the patient chart. Zenzen Sobakken. 20 years old. Total connection 47 minutes. Must have been a runtime crash. Unlucky. I pressed the seal button and the bed lid opened. When she came into view, I staggered back and shouted for help. I sat Karen up in the electroconvulsive tub and wiped the warm gel from her face and detached the breathing tube. Her head rolled back, her face glistening in the glare of the led. I could see the shape of the skull clearly through the wet skin. Slowly she pulled her head upright, blinking the goo from her eyelashes. Hey. Hello? Hello? Can you hear this? Yeah, I can hear you, I said. Wow. Okay, it worked. Good, she said. Her voice was completely flat and surprisingly deep for someone so scrawny. I am here, she said, baring her teeth in what might have been a smile. Can you see anything? I asked. She opened her eyes wider and moved them around. Yes, persistent shapes, she said, pronouncing the word persistent like a child. Can you see how many fingers I'm holding up? No. Try squinting. Oh, right. That changes things. Hmm. Two. She was right. Except she was looking at a completely different direction than my hand. Great, I said. Slowly her knobby knees emerged from the gel and she grasped them with her hands. It was a good sign for somebody in her state. It also showed that she knew some of the standard tests for emergence. We went through a few more of the tests and found that the treatment had worked well. She might even be walking soon. I got her out of the tub and washed her off and put her into some scrubs. She managed to sit upright on the table without leaning on anything, her bony arms set stiffly at her sides. Can I ask you a question? I asked. Sure, she said in her deep childish monotone. What is Q? You want the whole story? Yeah. She took a deep breath. Okay, so approximately 50,000 years ago she told me the story of Q as she knew it from the beginning in prehistory when the hyperspace code was inserted into the human genome and she went all the way to right now and the so called plague of the flesh. Her description of the plague explained what happened to poor Zenzen in her hygiene bed. It also explained the red butterfly thing I found in the other hygiene bed. If you are reading this, I guess you have access to her story as well. Hopefully she wrote down the whole history of Q because I honestly didn't understand it all and couldn't do it justice if I had heard it on any other Day than the day Atlanta was destroyed. I wouldn't have believed any of it. As it was, I just looked at it in a calm, detached way, as if I was just listening to another delusion. I guess you'll be reading her story before any of this even happens, so you'll be inclined to believe it even less so. At that point, I asked her how she knew so much about Q, like what its plans were and everything. She said Q had recently stopped hiding anything from her and the other bred soldiers. It was fully confident in its ability to win against them in any scenario. It no longer felt the need for any secrecy. I asked her why it had tried to kill her and. And she said that it hadn't. It was planning to destroy Atlanta anyways. She had arranged for the assassin herself. An improvisation to get her out of the city more quickly. I asked her if her ability to see all those extra dimensions allowed her to see into the future. She told me that she could only see extra dimensions in the feed realm. It allowed her to fight against Q more effectively because she can process information on a different level. She explained, when you look at a digital picture, you can process a huge matrix of color values all at once. If you try to process the same picture by looking at a list of color codes for each point, like R101 G254B017, it would take forever and be incomprehensible for certain problems. I have the same advantage over you that you have over a guy reading a list of color codes on a ticker. I can see many things all at once, but I can only see extra dimensions in the feed realm here. Outside the realm, there seems to only be three dimensions plus one timeline. I can't see beyond that, but I can imagine beyond it. So you can't see the future? No, I can only imagine the future. I can imagine a lot of futures. Then why did you hire an assassin for yourself? I mean, that just seems like a really risky move. Like something that was unlikely to pan out. Oh, I couldn't imagine any scenario where it wouldn't have worked, really. What if I had just been like, fuck this, I'm out of here. Oh, come now. Nobody would do that. Nobody would do that. Almost everybody would do that. He had a gun. Wrestling over firearms is quite common. Maybe in feed narratives, but not in real life. You see stories about that kind of thing all the time in the news. We argued about this point for quite a while. It was like arguing with an intelligent child who has no clue about the real world. Her view of real life had been warped by seeing only the sensational parts of it that managed to leak into the feed realm. She seemed completely unaware of that most basic and fundamental fact of human life. That most of it is boring, that most of it is just waiting around. That people go through large portions of their lives tired and sleepy and wanting to lie down. I tried to convince her of this, but in her short time in the real world, she had experienced a murder, a drone strike, and a nuclear holocaust. So I wasn't having much success until, lo and behold, she got tired and wanted to lay down. I helped her into a gurney and we made plans to head towards Plattsburgh in upstate New York. She said that the key to defeating Q was somewhere near there. Of course she was lying to me, but I didn't realize it at the time. How the flesh dances and how the flesh plays how the flesh toils and spins through its days See the flesh happy and strapping and young See the flesh sagging, dragging and glum Shh. Hear now the giggling See the shadows grow Step down the hallway, each door aglow Watch now the ceiling Watch. Sweet cradle rocks who made these puppets? Who made this clock? Ancient hand on the cradle Withered lips form a song golden wheel spinning backward Withered hand becomes young the hands can spin, spin then slow the clock is wound afresh what is the key Turned this time by fingers made of flesh. I am 24, and it's a Friday night in early summer. The sun is settling down into a haze beyond the mountains, and the city's concrete is beginning to cool after a baking day. The signs for all the bars are turning on. The windows of stolen office buildings become a wild collage of reflected neon. Yes, everybody wants to party tonight. Even the central insurance bank is looking festive. I've drunk six beers. I am right in the zone. Active, playful, charming. Oh, so charming. I am actually charming myself right now. Now, with my internal monologue reeling off clever little observations about the people who pass on the sidewalk, I can see a glowing doorway in my mind. All I have to do is walk through it. My phone buzzes in my pocket. Who's calling me now? Maybe it's my usual gang of friends or the Swedish friends I drank with until 6am last weekend, or one of the dozens of girls who are saved in my phone with thoughtful pet names like Brownhair 2 and Matt in Park. But I'm not going to answer my phone. I don't want to make any plans. I am simply going to walk down this street and see something is going to happen because the door is open. The world awaits. I stand by a food vendor and watch people pass. I smile, nod, make funny comments. Most people smile and pass right by. Others linger for a while. Two girls and a guy start talking to me. They're tourists from out of town. What are they looking to do? A nice place or just somewhere cheap? Do they like sake? I know just the place. Sure, no problem. And we're off soon. We're sitting in a booth and the sake is arriving at regular intervals and I'm telling crazy stories and snapping off jokes, jokes. And I'm listening to them and they're telling me about themselves and one of the girls keeps glancing at me when she thinks I'm not looking. And I am 30 and I am in a darkened apartment, hunched over the glow of my laptop screen, jacking off. I finish and go to the bathroom to wash up. And there is that moment, that same moment where I have to look at my blotchy face in the mirror and say, well, not my proudest moment in my head. The same joke I make to myself every time. When I'm done, I stand in the doorway of my bathroom and look at the tiny studio apartment. A desk, a laptop, a futon. A small window with the curtains closed against the summer glare. A crowd of empty bottles on the floor by the door. A stink of old sweat and beer. I whimper. The door is closed. The door is closed forever. I am locked in this apartment, this little box closed off to the world. Now that the jerking off is done, the jitteriness starts to creep back in. I want to drink, but it's only 3pm I I've only been awake for half an hour. I should wait until at least eight before drinking at least six, but this is torment. I need some now or I will have some kind of fucking seizure. Just two shots, that's it. And then no drinking until I am 33. I am sitting in the 24 hour club listening to a man talk about a mouse that changed his life. He had been living out of his car for a month and it was so full of trash that a mouse started living there too. This was the problem that finally broke him, that finally showed him the absurdity of it all, that finally made him get sober. How do you so mouse traps in a car? It's a pretty good story, but I've heard it before. Stolid Haircut walks into the meeting late again. I call him Stolid Haircut because I don't know his name, but he has a respectable Republican haircut, silver and gray and sculpted into broad curves that recall the body of a pre gas crisis American sedan. He wears the uniform of a retiree, bright blue dad jeans with running shoes and white socks and a plaid shirt buttoned up to the next to top button. Stolid haircut walks with the wide, clumsy steps of a hesitant toddler. Years of alcoholism have damaged his cerebellum, resulting in an abnormal gait. This and his reddened venous nose make his weakness for alcohol plain for everyone to see. At a glance you can know his most painful personal shame. His lips are permanently purple into an embarrassed smile. I watched him ease into the chair and go back to listening about the mouse and find myself looking at him again. It's a tragic haircut. The haircut calls to me from some golden past. It is the haircut of a man who once was in days gone by. It was thick and brown and belonged to a man who walked with a purposeful stride. A husband and father, the kind of guy who hoisted his son onto his shoulders to watch passing parades, who played softball and refused. Relaxed with a few beers after work and a few whiskeys after that, but always woke up bright and early the next day. Who worked hard, who knew who he was, who knew right from wrong, who knows how the world ought to be. I stare at his soft, shining, embarrassed eyes and feel my own filling with tears. How it all has slipped away from him. The young son is grown, the job is done. The wife doesn't talk. Everything that once was strong and sure is now frail and shaky. How many nightmares has this ordinary man seen? I saw so many in just 10 years, and I am nowhere near the point of an abnormal gait. This man has seen unutterable things. How bewildered was he when it first came for him, the scuttling darkness. Did he think he was going mad? He comes from a generation where this sort of thing is not discussed. How he must have suffered. The haircut, the haircut, the haircut. The bleeding drops of red. I am staring at him over openly. The rest of the meeting is not there anymore. A halo of light pours out around his face and he becomes a vision. Doves and cherubim swirl around him. Escher staircases extend in every direction. Mandelas expand and overlap and spin. And the door. My God. For a moment the door is open again. Right now the car is headed silent down the highway. It's dark and there's nobody driving. I snuggle up in my seat and listen to the hum of its parts. I have turned my set off. It shows nothing but reports of destruction and plagues, the world on fire, the world gone mad. Most of the interstates have shut down. They want people to stay in one place. The car is moving along the back roads, switching from one lonely little highway to another. We are headed towards the answer, towards the key to defeating Q. I hope we get there fast. Slowly the sky pales and the blue curves of the mountains emerge from the darkness beyond the guardrails. I heard once that the Appalachians used to be as high as the Himalayas. Looking at the sloping hills under the sky, I can sense the ancient shape of the world. A world that was here before us. Man, I'm getting pretty philosophical. In my mind another shape appears. Massive. Continental. The slope of human decline, the awful descent of the human race into Christ. Let's just enjoy the pretty mountains. Karen is lying in the back. She's doing another eye treatment with equipment we took from the hospital. Before we reach Plattsburgh, the car switches highways and heads west. The sun climbs higher. We are getting closer. Eventually the car turns into an unpaved road. After a few minutes it slows to a stop and here we are. I look around. It's a nice bit of country scenery. Grass and trees and gentle hills and blue sky and pretty much fuck all there is. Nothing here, or whatever is here, is hidden. Karen is still doing the eye treatment. In the darkness of the van's rear, light from the goggles seeps out in little flashes, sketching the shape of her face. Finally the goggles turn green. She pulls them off, blinking and squinting. I go and help her set up. Can you see a little better? I ask. She looks down at her hands moving, moving the finger slowly in the dark. Yeah. Persistent shapes. She raises her hand into a shaft of sunlight shining in from the front of the van. Her fingers catch the glow. My hands, she says softly, her voice quavering with disbelief. It's the first strong emotion I've ever heard from her. Good. That's great, I say. Well, we're here. What do we do now? She looks at me and smiles maniacally. We go into the forest, she says. Her smile is unnatural and stiff, more of a grimace than a smile, but for a brief moment, as it first spreads across her face, she looks like a giddy little kid. The key is there, she says. What is it? Some kind of secret underground base? A hidden laboratory? She makes a groaning sound that I barely recognize as laughter. You play too many narratives. It's much simpler than that. I unfold a wheelchair that we borrowed from the hospital and help her into it. When I open the back doors of the van, she winces against the bright sunlight, and again her face looks like a little kid's. For a moment I give her a pair of huge black wraparound sunglasses that we took from the eye treatment center. The van lowers to the ground and I roll the wheelchair out onto the dusty road. She makes sure I take a bag of supplies with us, snacks and drinks and other stuff. The sun is warm on my skin, but the breeze is fresh and cool. It's a perfect day. You would think that everything is right in the world. So where to? I ask. She looks around, her head wobbling on her thin stalk of a neck, her eyes hidden by the massive glasses. There was once a house here. Do you see it? I look around and spy a low, crumbled grey wall, mostly hidden behind the high grass. I think I see an old foundation. That's it, she says. Her eyes are hidden. There's something in her voice that wasn't there yesterday. Shivery excitement. It makes me excited, too. I push the wheelchair down a weedy gravel driveway toward the foundation. There's nothing else left of the house. It must have been torn down and hauled off. Karen has me push her around it and go down a trail leading towards the forest. What was that house? I ask. Anything important? I used to live there. I turn and give it another look, as if I would see some new detail in the crumbling concrete that I had missed. That was the old children's home. Yep. And where are we going? We're almost there, she says. It's close. We follow the trail into the forest. The trees become thick and shadowy. The wheelchair has a little power assist, but it's still tough to push it over all the roots and rocks that lie along the narrowing, twisting path. Oh yes, Karen whispers excitedly. Up ahead, sunlight gleams through the branches of the crowding trees. A wave of excitement moves through me and I push Karen faster. We come out into a clearing, a broad patch of wild grass that glows green and golden in the sunlight. Here, karen says. I stop the wheelchair and look around. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything here. So what's here? I ask. I used to come here as a child, play make believe. Before I was connected. I take a walk around the clearing, looking for something. A hatch, a hole, an actual key lying in the grass. There is nothing. Across the clearing, Karen is slowly pulling off her sunglasses. When her eyes appear, they startle me. They are wide and gleaming with utter fascination. I walk up to her. She is staring at something. Tears fill the rim of her eyes and spill over. What is she looking at? It seems to be something right in front of her, something I can't see. I stand beside her and crouch so I can see what she is seeing. There is nothing there but a small cloud of gnats. What are you looking at? I asked. She looked all around, takes a deep breath and shudders. There's more, she whispers. More what? I said the feeds were complete, but they were wrong. I wait for her to say more, but she doesn't. What do you mean? I ask. She looks at me and smiles the most goofy, crazed smile I've ever seen, tears still flowing down her cheeks. The designers of the feed said that it provides a complete experience. Enough colors, enough frames, enough smell gradients, enough complexity to make it indistinguishable from reality. But they were wrong. Here. Look at them, she says, raising her hand into the air. You mean the gnats? Yes. The gnats are glowing specks dancing senselessly in the sunlight. I wonder if some pattern will emerge. Can curse Karen, control them with her mind? Is that the secret? Are they forming shapes? But they just dance and dance, forming nothing, making no pattern that I can see? I feel silly for even thinking that they would. They're gnats. I turn away. A flood of angry thoughts rushes through my mind. Nats. Fucking gnats. She's a nut. She's lost it. Yeah, she's powerful and impressive in the feed realm, but now she is in the real world and she has completely lost her shit and this whole trip has been a waste. Is there anything here? I ask. What's the key? Seriously, don't give me any of that bullshit like I can't explain or you'll see. Just tell me. What are we doing here? What is the plan? The crazed look of joy fades from her face and is replaced by a look of a scolded child. She lets her head hang and wipes the tears from her face with her weak little hands. I feel bad. I kneel by her chair and say, I'm sorry. Please, just. Just tell me what your plan is. I need to know now. Karen begins, speaking softly, without looking up. Q has base control of every major system in the world. Every drone, every rover, every defense robot, all orbital assets, all nuclear weaponry. She has control over most human political systems. She has destroyed or contained every existing countermeasure, including me. There is no scenario in which we could ever reacquire control, not with A thousand times our current resources. Not with a thousand years of computation time. So then what's the plan? What we need is a way for Q to be destroyed by just one or a few motivated individuals. I believe there was points in the past when this could have happened. Maybe one of the Germans overseeing the early research program could have stopped it. Maybe it could have been stopped around 2020, when the portals were shut down and interface research was temporarily abandoned. But it didn't happen. Currently, at this point, there is no way for it to happen. Q has control of far, far too many assets. The war is already lost irrevocably. Then what do we do? We must hope that there are alternate timelines and that somebody in one of these timelines foresees what is happening to us right now. That somebody foresees this very moment in time and takes steps to prevent it. I stare at her. She looks into my eyes. I grope for words. Is that. Wait, wait. Alternate timelines? Is that the plan? We have to send a message back into the past? In a sense. Then the person who receives this message will destroy Q in the past and that will save us. Karen shakes her head slowly. No, that clearly won't happen, or everything would already be different. We are utterly doomed. We'll either be incinerated in a nuclear strike or rounded up and incorporated into Q. There is no stopping that. The only hope to defeat Q is on some other timeline. If such a thing exists, there is no hope for us at all. Then what are we doing here? Why are we in this fucking clearing? Haven't you felt it? Felt what? The feeling that you're inside a narrative. An eerie shiver comes over me. I look around at the clearing like I'm inside a feed. Now. Inside a narrative, A story in somebody's mind. Doesn't this all seem just like a story? Two people rushing off to save the world to find some hidden key in the forest? Yeah, it all seems pretty unbelievable. That's how I wanted it to feel. That's why we came out here. So that we can be inside a story. Now, hopefully there's somebody out there in the past who will write the story. Write the story? What, so there's nothing out here? There's no magic key or secret underground base? Well, this story sucks. Why? It's a huge fucking letdown. Karen makes a mild choking sound that might be a chuckle. I slump down into the grass beside her wheelchair and hang my head. I'm out in the woods with a crazy person. She doesn't even make sense. She spent too long in 5D. She's talking about alternate timelines. Finally, I ask her. So we're just fucked, right? If you look toward our future, if you look at the series of events which will happen to us, they are dark. They are very awful. We will suffer, we will die. But that would be true in any timeline. On the other hand, if you look at the entire story not as a series of events, not from beginning to end, but as a single continuous connected shape where every event is occurring simultaneously, I think my life, even my stupid little life, which I spent mostly inside that hygiene bed, could form a beautiful shape. I snort. I'm tired of this cryptic bullshit, karen goes on. Maybe that shape reaches back. Back to someplace where somebody can see it and change things. I don't say anything. Karen reaches into our bag of supplies, pulls out one of the little paper notebooks she bought at the gas station. What are you doing? I ask. I'm going to write a poem. Do you want a notebook? What for? Maybe there's somebody out there who needs you to write a story. Who would read it? Isn't everybody going to die? Who knows? She says, and drops the other notebook into my lap. Maybe somebody would be interested. I toss the notebook off into the grass. Fucking pointless. I can barely write on paper anyways. We sit in silence for a long time. When I look up, Karen is staring at the same little cloud of gnats, occasionally jotting stuff down. I find myself staring at them too. They look like nothing more than living specks of dust worked into a crazy, whirling frenzy. Is there any pattern in how they move? Would it matter if there was? I think about what Karen said, about the shape of her life, what it would look like if everything happened simultaneously, if it could all be seen at once. I think about the shape of my own life. I stare at the gnats and imagine seeing every position of every gnat all at one time. What kind of shape would it make? Even if I could see it, would this shape have any meaning? I pick up the notebook and begin to write. Before writing this series, I wrote a novel. I worked on it for six years, the worst years of my life. As I sank deeper into alcoholism and became a pathetic, trembling recluse, I held onto the novel as my one desperate hope. Maybe it would turn out well. Maybe it would get published. Maybe it would sell well. Maybe my life would change. But maybe I would escape my stinking little apartment. What dreams I had. What desperate little dreams. As my life got worse, I told myself I was on A journey of self discovery. That I was an artist going through a period of struggle before my great breakthrough. Every famous artist has some story of living in a tiny apartment and working a mind numbing job and eating crap food before their first big success. Surely this was just part of my story. How much richer would my success be after all this pathetic degradation? After a night of writing, I would get drunk and imagine myself being interviewed in front of an auditorium full of my fans telling self deprecating but touching anecdotes about my ragged days before I became a literary success. The audience full of bookishly pretty young women would titter and sigh as they related to my struggles and admire my unwavering determination. What fantasies I had. There were other times when I knew that I was just comforting myself with delusions of grandeur. That I was trying to romanticize my lazy failure of a life by pretending to be a struggling artist on the verge of success. Really, I was just a lazy drunk on the verge of fuck all. I wasn't even some proud rebel drunk like Charles Brukowski. I hated myself. I didn't write enough or read enough or know enough or work hard enough to be a real writer. I had never read Anna Carnina or 100 Years of Solitude or anything by Henry James. I was often bored when reading and bored when writing. Did I even like it? I had half assed my way through school and work and relationships. I had half assed everything I have ever done. And I was even half assing something that was supposed to be important to me. I hadn't even finished one novel after six years. And then there was the most damning evidence of all. My writing sucked. Sometimes I felt like I was a fraud. Sometimes I felt like I was on the right path. Sometimes I felt like both of these things were true at once. Like I was on two different timelines. My view on the matter changed. Often at night I tended to regard myself as being on the very cusp of fame and fortune. The next morning, I tended to wake up feeling like an untalented dilettante. Meanwhile, this supposedly temporary period of struggle stretched on and on and on. I turned 30. Surely something would happen by 40. But what if it didn't? As I withdrew from friends and co workers, it became more of a recluse. I rationalized it as concentrating on my writing, except my busy schedule of drinking and hangovers didn't allow for much writing. The story of the struggling artist was showing itself to be a lie. Then I got fired from my job and sent to rehab. After I stopped drinking, I used my newfound energy and spare time to finish the novel. I finished it in a few months. You can get a lot done when you're not entering the void every night. For someone like me, the completion of a six year struggle is an occasion which simply begs to be accompanied by a drink, by many drinks. I had always planned to just go get drunk for an entire week after I finished my novel. Instead, I took a walk down to a nearby bar and stood outside of it for a while. I didn't go in. In my head, my life seemed to be developing into a new story. A heroic turnaround in which I got so sober and everything fell into place. Yes, surely this was how it would go. I sent letters to 30 literary agents with the hopes of getting the book published. None expressed any interest. It hurt to be rejected. I had stopped drinking, but I still hadn't found a fulfilling job. I was able to talk to people and lock cashiers in the eye again, but I was still a recluse. I had still invested a lot of desperate hopes into getting the novel published. I felt so foolish for investing so much hope into something that is just so unlikely. But I couldn't help myself. Allure of feeling some sense of purpose and accomplishment was just too much. I wanted to be noticed. Honestly, I wanted to be rich and famous. Though they may have been disguised as achieving artistic success and finding my purpose, perhaps my dreams were ultimately as crass and grasping as any Kardashians. I had given the literary agents four months to respond to me before accepting that they were not interested. Soon after that deadline passed, I started writing this web series. As you may know, a few websites wrote articles about the series and some very lovely people created a very wonderful subreddit about it. And this drew the attention of people in the publishing industry. They contacted me. And just like that, my long held dream was again revived. And now it seemed more in reach than ever. I had been struggling to contact agents, and now they were contacting me. What a heady feeling. Again. It felt like everything was falling into place. Like my life was shaping into a story with a happy ending. Speaking of endings, I need to come up with an ending for this series before I could finally take my rightful place as the leading light of the literati. A few people on the subreddit had expressed doubt that I could possibly deliver a satisfying ending, and I was inclined to agree with them. I had already noticed that the story was easier to write when I was opening narrative threads than when I was wrapping them up. What would the overall ending be? It had to be about Mother. That was the center of the story. But what did I really know about Mother beyond a few vague memories? I had long puzzled over these memories. Back when I was drinking. I was convinced that something had happened to me one summer, something beyond my understanding, something monstrous. But after I got sober, I was encouraged to digest some hard truths about myself, and I decided that it was entirely possible that I had more or less made it all up. Not that I simply lied to myself, but more that I had latched onto some vague memory, perhaps a reoccurring nightmare, and built it up in my mind over the years, perhaps as an explanation for why I was so emotionally fucked up. It was easier to face life as a victim of some unknown, half remembered evil. It gave me an excuse to crawl into the bottle I needed to provide a satisfying ending to the series and my quest to get published. Being intertwined, both of these tasks rested on a hazy collection of separate, sinister memories. Then again, couldn't I just make some shit up? Hadn't I been doing that all along? The solution presented itself to me one night when I was talking with my roommate, Sean. He told me back when he smoked crack, he used to break into abandoned buildings to see if there was stuff to steal. He said that once he broke into a World warehouse downtown, found a set of stairs that led to an underground room, which led to even more rooms that went deep underground. Over the course of a few weeks, he went deeper and deeper into the complex, taking various stuff but always leaving quickly because it was a spooky place. On the last night he snuck into the complex, he found a room where the walls were covered in human bone. So there I was on the front porch with Sean, both of us sitting in rickety old chairs, slapping away the mosquitoes. When he mentioned quietly that he had once seen a room where the walls were covered with human bone, right away my heart started thumping in my chest. He must have seen my Reddit post. This was something I had been worrying about, even dreading. My posts were none too flattering of him, and he was a very private person, very defensive of his boundaries. He would see it as an intrusion and a betrayal. I had taken great pains to obscure the details of his identity, giving him a new name and a different sort of Afrocentric religion. Nobody would recognize him from my post, but some of the stuff in my writing had been taken verbatim from our conversations. If he saw them, he would surely recognize himself. Sean was not a guy I wanted to piss off. When he first came to the house, he told us that his main character, character defect was his temper. And he wasn't kidding. On more than one occasion, I had watched anger build up inside of him until he ended up chewing somebody out. It was a sort of scene that left me tiptoeing back into my bedroom, giddily thankful I wasn't taking the brunt of his outrage. All those years as a recluse had left me with no appetite for confrontation. Sean had been sincerely working on his temper. He was the only black dude in the house, and he was worried about being seen as the angry black guy. He often said to me, you get up in somebody's face and they'll be like, say, fellas, let's work this thing out. But if I cross the line, they'll be like, call the police. This dude's gone crazy. I assured him that this was not the case, while not being entirely sure that this wasn't the case. As a result of his fears, he had become very indirect about how he expressed his anger. If he felt somebody was disrespecting him, he would give them the silent treatment for a while, then come down hard on them for something small, all the while being very careful not to raise his voice or make any threatening choice gestures which somehow made him more intimidating. As much as he didn't want to play out the angry black guy stereotype, I didn't want to play out the meek, affronted white guy stereotype. But I was sometimes intimidated by him. So now when he told me about the walls covered with bone, I figured he must have been feeling me out, seeing if I would come clean about what I had written. But it was such a strange way to do it. I didn't know what to say. I looked him in the eye, trying to make my face completely natural. He gazed back at me, his face half in shadow, half colored by the yellow porch light, his expression dead serious. He went on speaking softly. Skulls, teeth, arms and hands melted together on the walls, up on the ceiling. He had seen in real life what I had only seen in my mind. He was about to tell me that the flesh, interfaces and mother and all the other nightmares were true. I had, on some level, known this was coming. It was the culmination of the strange feelings I had all week. It started when I was sitting in that AA meeting, looking at the sad face of the old man with a stolid haircut. I had entered a strange and sudden reverie, carried away by the sheer damn poignancy of this man's haircut and how it symbolized the sort of strong, upright man he had tried and failed to be. I saw him in a great shifting vision, different versions of him emerging and overlapping. Here he was, a young boy learning how to use a comb. Here he was a young man, the wind ruffling his sturdy locks as he experienced that rush of confidence that comes with drink. Here he was in front of the mirror, running the comb through his wet hair with a shaky hand, dropping it into the sink. Here he was with stitches just below the hairline after another accidental fall. Here he is finally, face down at the bottom of his stairs, his hair ever so slightly muzzed, just a few strands out of place. Almost perfect. The next day my roommate Donnie, the ex Marine, and I went out to the river to swim. It was a perfect sunny day and there were a lot of people out swimming and floating along in inner tubes. As I lay back in the cool waters, feeling the warm forest of air alive on my wet skin, I saw for a moment that vanished primeval world peopled by the forest children. These children lived along the river, not working or toiling, but simply taking what the river offered, living and dying by the good mother's generosity. Sure, they wouldn't know the benefits of writing or agriculture, and they would drop like flies to horrible diseases and predators, but in doing so they would accept their humble place in the universe rather than striving to overcome it through science or religion. They would know themselves to be fragile things which lived for a brief moment and died like glimmers on the river's water. For the second time in as many days, I found myself with tears in my eyes over some trivial moment, and I was forced to turn away from Donnie as he related a story about Marine Buddy, who had been given a humorous nickname by the platoon due to his uncanny knack for finding and acquiring venereal diseases. In AA they talk about not struggling or trying to manage everything, but rather letting God manage it. Not believing in an interventionless God, I had to interpret this as simply trying to accept the things I cannot change. I saw a vision of my life where I was able to accept life's vicissitudes with humility and grace, and where life opened itself to me as a result. With it came a wave of nostalgia. Last time I felt this I had been in college and taking a lot of acid. How long had I shut myself away from life in that goddamn apartment with that goddamn bottle? I had been unable to accept any discomfort or unhappiness, so I had avoided everything except liquor. I had tried to control my feelings, and as a result I found discomfort and unhappiness like I never imagined. But now I could accept life, embrace life, welcome all the awkwardness and frustration and pain and indignities. How many opportunities right at my fingertips. I could talk to one of these girls wearing the smart bathing suits and be married in a few months, or just find a friend, or be hired as staff writer as some kind of pastry magazine. Anything was possible. I saw now the glowing door open before me. I saw all the doors open, all the doors open in a line, one after another, and behind them all there was. There was what? I couldn't say. The insight slipped away without revealing itself, but the fading reverie left a warm glow. I dipped my head back into the cool water and looked up into the sky crowded with bright, weightless clouds. I could see now that so many things were coming together in my life. I was getting sober. I was learning to talk to people. Even the dream of being a novelist. The dream was coming true. So now, when Sean told me about the walls covered with bone, it seemed like yet another thing falling into place. But this time it was something sinister, something so awful I thought it couldn't be real. Now it seemed that whatever force was bringing my dreams to life was also acting on my nightmares. I looked Sean in the eye, trying to make my face completely neutral. He gazed back at me, his face half in shadow, half colored by the yellow porch light. I asked him very carefully, is this something you read about on the Internet? He shook his head and said, nah, man, and looked down into his lap. I needed to find out exactly what was going on, even if it meant giving myself away. I asked him, have you been reading my Reddit post? He squinted at me and asked, Reddit? What is that? So it was real after all. A full scale interface portal below a highly populated urban center. In the early days of flash interface technology, this would have been considered utter madness. The uncontrolled incident zone would have resulted in mass segmentation and total chaos. And looking back on the experiment, madness was in fact the result. But for a brief time it seemed like an idea worth exploring. It all started one day when a mid level analyst was navigating a 3D map of the Honduras contained Interface 2 and felt the urge to go to the bathroom. Just as she was getting up from her desk, she was struck by an overwhelming realization. But before we get to that, you must understand some background information first. Building an interface below a populated city was now possible because we had learned how to control the size of the incident zone, we could create interfaces with incident zones that only existed within the interface tunnel. Instead of there being a large uncontrolled zone around the interface. This was achieved through a breakthrough involving signal cables. For years we thought that the interfaces had little appetite for anything but flesh. Machines and other objects were ignored. They were not incorporated into the interface superstructure. It did not seem to undergo significant travel. But the Chinese figured out that the interfaces were willing to incorporate electromagnetic signal cables. If a live transmitting cable was sent into a fagus corridor, the cable was taken up by the silla limbs and connected directly into the interface's nervous conduits. At this point, we could send and receive signals from the interface. You could imagine our excitement. We had a working example of seamless techno organic integration. It would naturally become the basis for direct sense feed technology. In those early days, we had no idea what the interface did with the signals we sent to it. Nor could we make much sense of the signals it sent to us. All we knew is that it loved signals. The more the better. The more cables we hooked up and the more information we sent and received perceived, the smaller the segmentation zone would become. As computing and signal technology advanced, we were able to reduce the segmentation zone to an area within the interface tunnels. Finally, we had a relatively safe and stable flesh interface. Still, we had no reason to consider building an interface below a city until our mid level analysts made her startling discovery. Before this discovery, we knew that the size of a flesh interface depended chiefly on one factor. How much flesh it was provided. But at a certain point the interface would cease to grow, even if it was provided with ample building material. We wanted to know why. Why had the Novaya, Zemlya and the Artigast portals grown so large when other portals were offered more flesh but failed to grow? In addition, we wanted to know what factors shaped the configuration of the interface tunnels, the so called ant farms. At that point we knew only a few basic facts. The tunnel would form either underground or underwater, but not in the atmosphere. The underwater tunnels were much larger than the underground tunnels, generating more segmentation and requiring more signal transfer to quell the segmentation. While the interface tunnels avoided the surface, they had little regard for the composite of the rock, sand or soil that they were tunneling through. They tunneled through everything at rate, chiefly determined by how quickly we fed them them flesh. It was impossible to observe the tunneling process, but it must have happened via segmentation, because the dirt and rock which was removed simply disappeared. The tunnels were self supporting and would remain in place even if the surrounding earth shifted. Unless they were wholly exposed to the open air, in which case they would putrefy. But why did the tunnels take one one configuration or another? What our mid level analyst discovered as she traveled through the 3D digital recreation was that the route she was taking was strangely similar to the trip she took to the bathroom every day. It was an odd little route through a poorly designed research facility which included a short flight of stairs and a switchback at the end of the hall. All of this was reflected in the ant tunnel. Forgetting for a moment about her desire to use the bathroom, she took an emergency escape map off the wall and compared it to the ant tunnel she was studying. The layout of the Honduras Research facility, which was just a few hundred meters from the interface entrance, was quite different from the layout of the interface tunnels. But there were certain similarities which went beyond coincidence. The analyst's discovery spread quickly through the facility and the analyst herself was given a minor promotion. Along with a new office. It was discovered that the interface tunnels did not copy the architecture of the research building, but rather the most frequently used paths and most frequently occupied rooms in the building. That is, it copied the layout of human activity within the building. But even this did it in a distorted, oblique way, repeatedly copying and multiplying certain sections of the layout, as if the building map was being viewed through a multifaceted lens. For the people working in the facility, the discovery was nothing less than eerie. Shortly after the newly promoted analyst moved into her new office, A new section of tunnel was created within the interface to reflect this. No longer were the analysts detached observers. It was clear that on some level they were being observed and copied for some inscrutable purpose. A quick comparison of interfaces and nearby human occupied research facilities revealed unmistakable parallels. Huge facilities such as Novaya tended to produce huge interfaces. This even held true for undersea interfaces such as Artigas, where the nearest facility might be many kilometers away. The correlation was stupefyingly obvious once we looked for it, and it set off a wave of crazed speculation. People started theorizing that the interfaces were affected by all sorts of things. The mood in the office, how much coffee we drank, the health of our potted plants. This period of wild speculation came to be known as the correlation game, as almost anything was proposed as a possible correlation. Most of this speculation came to nothing. But there was one idea that gained traction. What if we built an interface in a highly populated area and gave it unlimited flash material? How big would it get? There was this abandoned warehouse that Everybody knew about. I knew it had evil spirits when I first went into it. But the crack had me thinking nothing could touch me. Even the other crackheads didn't like to go in there. Except the ones who had really fell off. Those ones you see standing around just staring through the wall. But I'm up in here like I got God's protection. I don't fear anything, but really it's just a crack talking. I start looking around and I find some stairs in the back. At the bottom is a steel door. This thing is big, solid, deadbolts, everything. Somebody already went at it with a sledge, but it ain't moved at all. You think there's crackheads in there every night and they still ain't broke through that door. That's a solid door. So where I was working at, I knew my boss had a spreader. Like some jaws of life shit. So the next night I took it and I broke open that door. Inside was just a little room with block walls and another door, same big ass steel door. And there was a smell. That underground smell, but also like how when the spirits are unclean, they made a stank. That smell. I broke open the next door and it's a hallway with another door. I keep going through the place, breaking open doors, but it's mostly empty. Just some desks and computers. Too old to sell. I was like, shit. So I took the doors, sold them for scrap. Heavy ass doors. The reason nobody got in them doors before is because a crackhead can't hold onto something like a hydraulic spreader. That thing was like $400. A crackhead will just sell the spreader. He ain't gonna fuck with those doors when he can just get his $400. I still had some discipline. I was smoking rocks, but I had some discipline. So I would put it back in the morning before my boss saw I took it. But that crack had me going. So one day I sold the spreader too. My boss never figured out it was me who took that spreader. I was so slick. Then some things happened with me and my wife and I stopped smoking for a while. Things were going alright. She acted like I was going to see my kids, but nah. I had forgot all about that old warehouse. But just as soon as I had forgotten, I looked in my boss's trailer and he had another spreader. I was like, damn. I didn't even want to look at it. I had been clean for two months. But the crack was whispering. It got me again and I was back down in that warehouse. I Was just breaking open. Doors going room to room. There was hallways, stairs, more rooms. I kept going deeper. I found a room full of cages. A real big room, like a pound. I was glad because it was a lot of metal. But in that last cage at the end. Do you believe the things I'm saying? I know you don't believe in God. I know you don't care about the Jews or the Gentiles. The Bible is real. But it happened a long time ago. People have forgotten. That's why they carry on like they do. They don't know. It's just. When people forget, that's when the Lord comes again. And he will punish us all for the antiquities, the evils we do. The days to come will be full of terror. The Lord will chastise us like little children. The smell was strong in that room. Real strong. That evil smell. I knew what I would find before I found it. There were some bones in the last cage. Little bones curled up in the corner, still with clothes on. I got out of there. I was gone. I wasn't never gonna come back. But, God, I came back and I chopped up those cages and I took them all out. Just kick them bones out on the floor. I came back again the next day and broke into the next room and there was more cages, all of them full. I was supposed to be back in my old house with my wife and kids. But I was down in that room with all those little skulls and hands. That's the insanity. It wasn't even worth that money. But I kept going back. There was always one more door, one more room, just a little more money. I ain't even think about where them bones came from, who killed them, who put them in the cages. I didn't care. When I found the room with the bones on the walls, that's when I was done. That last night, I was way down in their underground. I opened a door, and inside there was just a cave. The other rooms had block walls, but this was like a mine. I shined my flashlight around, and up ahead, I thought there was crystals on the walls or something, but it was bones. I mean, people, hands, skulls, ribs, all of it just put together and it went on and on and on. I said, God, this is the valley of the shadow of death. I knew I wasn't scared of those spirits because they were already inside of me. Telling me, don't worry. Telling me to keep going back down in there. I prayed to the Lord to deliver me. And I got scared right there. The spirits came out of me and I got scared. I won't lie. I was crying. Just shook up. I knew I wasn't alone in there. I could feel the evil one down in that tunnel. It was all power in the dark. The spirits of all those dead people were all formed together to form up into the body of the Evil one. Formed into a beast. It wanted me to bow to it, to bow to the idol. I didn't bow. I ran. I was gone. That was my moment of testing. I didn't bow before a minute, for a little minute, I could feel all that power. I smelt another smell, different from the other rooms. I remember my daughter is more grown now, but when she was little I'd feed her apple sauce. I'd be thinking about her when I smell it. I smelt it then, coming out of the dark. And God, I wanted to bow. Alcohol goes great with nostalgia and melancholy. It's what gives us misty eyed barflies, forlorn poetry, midnight phone calls, last page of the Great Gatsby, sinatra ballads, and 73% of all country music. That was my favorite part of drinking. The Wistful Interlude A couple hours after the first flush of drunkenness when you wander away from a boisterous party and look out into the darkened woods and see for a moment the fragile past floating ghostly before you, colored in sunset oranges, all the bygone things which have slipped away in the gentle flow of time. Your breath catches in the tightness of your throat and your eyes fill with tears. Then somebody calls your name or you have to piss and you wander back into the party. I felt like I was at my finest in these moments. I felt poetic and sensitive and alive. Eventually, though, it all became an awful parody of itself. The gentle wishfulness devolved into me sitting in front of my laptop, drunk on a Wednesday night, watching sad YouTube videos, weeping and slurping down vodka and water. I would watch any sort of weepy video, soldier homecomings, kids with cancer, dogs being put down, etc. Just to get a good cry on, to trigger that dopamine release that came with the tears. It was nothing more than emotional masturbation, just like with the alcohol itself. I had found something that gave me true pleasure and used it over and over until my feelings had become rote and dead. The same sort of thing happened with my memories of Mother. At first they came unbidden, stirring up a sense of wonder so powerful it brought tears to my eyes. But over the course of too many drunks and too many hangovers, I replayed the memories over and over from every angle. Eventually I couldn't be sure if certain parts came from the original or were formed by later recollections. The whispering magic became a monotonous drone. The vaporous impressions dried and hardened into simple facts. Mother was a woman sewn together from different things. Mother would come in late at night with a bag that squirmed. Inside the bag were children. We would go down into the basement where she kept the cages. We would do things to them together. I thought the memories had no more power. I. I thought they were just abstractions at this point, bad data. Who could explain them? And why bother now? I found myself walking down the street in the middle of the night, trying to burn off these eerie feelings that Sean's story had put inside me. At the intersection, a stiff breeze zipped down the empty lanes, making the traffic lights sway. I walked by a bar with a patio and listened to the low rumble of confident male voices. A smell came off the bar. Cigarettes and hot wings and liquor. Sweat. It was the smell of action, a smell of good times. I could just walk in there, have a couple of drinks and hold court, tell a few jokes, make a few friends. The problem with going out sober is you have to make all these little decisions. Where to go, where to sit, what to get. When you go out drunk, you just make one decision to keep drinking. Every other decision just falls into place. Life becomes easy. As easy as listening to a story. It wasn't worth going into the bar. It would be closing in an hour anyway. So I walked past it on down the street by myself. God, if there was no closing time, no tomorrow morning. Just darkness and magic and mystery forever. If I could just be drunk until the end of time. Mara is molting, so we can't play. I'll have to wait until she's done. I've moved out of the crowded sand burrow. I think six different broods live there now, and everybody crawls all over each other and bickers and snips. Now I live in one of the sea caves. It's wet and lonely, but at least nobody snips at me. And it's a little easier to find food. When Mara is done molting, I want her to come here and maybe we can live together. The caves are made of Ghana black melt rock that was hardened into fluid shapes. The moon shines through through dozens of porous holes in the roof, and the sea glitter throws shapes onto the rock ceiling. I like to sit back and let the shapes tell the ancient world story. This cave is nice I will stay here. I'm getting tired of eating sea flowers, but I don't want to go through the trouble of buying livestock. The crowds at the temple are awful this time time of year. Everybody clamors and begs and the priests are greedy and officious. They tell us the livestock is a generous blessing from the womb sack of the mother, but I think they just buy it from the inland. At any rate, I don't want any part of it. There is never much food around during the ebbing when the air turns cool and the worms travel away. But the plumes have not yet come. This year is even worse than usual. They say the ocean dies a little more each year. The water is becoming bitter. But since I live in this sea cave I can get down into the COVID before anybody else. So I'm pretty lucky with what I get to eat. I wake up to the sound of rain on the ocean outside the cave. I look out to see which kind it will be. Light yellow cata green, my favorite. I crawl out onto a bluff and let the rain fall on my carapace. There is something sweet in the cata green rains that loosens up the whelks on my seams. I comb through my carapace with my forelimbs sleep snipping them off, letting them fall into the rocks until whole front is clear and smooth. After that I do my joints and my underside. Nowadays with food scarce, it has become common to eat the whelks, but they taste like ammonia. Just as I am done grooming and feeling very new and shiny, Mara comes climbing up the rock rock. Her shell is brand new and looks amazing. We dance and burrow and make happy little snips. I have missed her even more than I realized. She moves the colors on her carapace to show me how she feels. They are very vivid on her new bone. She shows pictures of her looking everywhere for me, searching through all these sea caves. I show her myself as I sat in the cave, lonely and waiting for her. She snips at my front legs and I dance around for her. Sweet, lovely Mara. I show Mara my cave and she likes it. She loves the sea mist and the way we can see the teta. Purple moons pass through the sky through the holes in the rock. I show us living there together and making it into a nice home. She shows me leaving the burrow colored as a question. I show her that I was too crowded and I was getting sick of all the others. She flicks her antenna at me, making slow comforting movements. But I notice she hasn't Answered about living in the cave. I feel my little plant is being washed away. Mara doesn't stay with me in the cave, but she visits often. I make sure to always have some sea flowers for her when she comes over. Lately they have been harder and harder to find. I get so hungry that it's hard not to eat all the flowers. Before I can give any to Mara, I give her the best flowers. But they are all small and colored in ugly shade of Hannah blue. Despite this, she always shows me how delicious they are. Mara suggests we go to the temple to get some livestock to make a proper meal. I show her that I don't like the crowds. Mara has always loved the temple. She uses admiring colors to show the great gemstone mountain and the moons passing through the pylons. And the great ziggurat where livestock is brought out and sold. She shows the priests with their painted shells and red claws. I insist that I don't like meat. I prefer sea flowers. She wiggles her hind jaws at this. Nobody can prefer sea flowers. They taste like sand. I crawl back away from her a little. Hadn't my sea flowers always been delicious to her? Was that just a lie? She crawls closer to me. Her carapace takes on gentle yellows. She shows me that they were delicious because I had picked them. But I don't want her pity. I pull my legs in and stay still until she leaves. I don't see Mara for a long while. The third moon makes its way to the high cusp marking the end of the ebbing. The plumes have still not come and I'm often hungry. Finally, Mara shows up with a meat wrapped in temple cloth. I wonder if she's there to taunt me. But she offers it to me. She shows me that my shell has become thin and dull and I am looking worse. She is right. I have not eaten enough in a while. We go down inside my cave. Before she unwraps the meat, Mara lets me know that she has become a priestess at the temple. I turned blue with surprise. How had it happened so quickly? She had been studying for a while without telling me. Since I never liked the priest, I feel sad about this. How many times have I complained about them in front of her while she was studying to become one? It was no wonder I didn't have many friends. Mara unwraps her gift. The creature she has brought me is soft and pale pink. Mara likes the taste of these the best. But I don't think there is any difference between these and the brown ones. I break off one of the five little feelers on the end of its foreleg and nibble at it. But Mara snips at me and breaks off a hind leg and offers me the thick end. My shell turns yellow and I take it. The pretty red juice runs all over my jaws as they pull the meat from the bone. We eat in blankness for a while. Then I ask Mara where the priests get the livestock from. It has always been a mystery, since none of these soft little creatures are ever found on the land or in the sea. I have wondered if they raised them inside the temple or if they bring them in from the inland. Mara doesn't answer at first. She doesn't want to show me. I ask again. She shows me a quick, vague picture. The old story about the womb and egg. Something the priests tell little children. I know she is hiding something, so I snip at her. Why does she hide things from me? We used to be so close. After a moment, a picture forms on her carapace, as clear and vivid as anything she has ever shown me. I ask what I am seeing. It is the womb. It's where they come from. Dear Izalandria, I hope your name is Islandria. I will name my daughter Tezzalandria, and I will tell her to name you Izzalandria. These names are prettier, more than my name. Anne. Too plain. I am your grandmother, and even though you are still not born, I am writing to you in all 100% original English. Grandmother is teaching it to me. My grandmother is your great, great grandmother. I call her Allie Helmeny. Yet that is not true English. Whoops. Grandmother is my best friend and she gives me presents. When I meet you, I will give them to you and we can be best friends. The same. Can you keep secrets? Some of the presents are secret. I will keep this letter and your presents safe under my bed until you are here. I will give you the presents and a lot of hugs. I am learning new English every day. Cloister. Do you know what that is? Grandmother used to live there. It is a special house for the mountain born. Surprise. Grandmother was a mountain born. She came out of the mountain's womb when she was a little girl. That's why me and mom are very healthy. And I hope you will be very healthy. The same. I hope you have curly hair and green eyes. Rather plain hair like me. Grandmother said she hated to live in the cloister because the monks are mean. Grandmother does not like the monks yet. That is secret. Don't show this letter to anybody. It is just for you. After she moved out of the cloister, she met grandfather. He was very nice, yet not healthy. And he is passed on to the love of the imp sun. On days when the imp sun rises before the big monk's son, I say some prayers to grandfather. Grandmother never says prayers to the imp sun. Rather, she only prays inside. I want to tell you about your presence. Grandmother carved them directly from green crystal. The biggest one is a kitty cat that is an animal that lives on the far world. The next one is a rose that is a vegetable that grows on the far world. It is supposed to be red, yet this one is green and still very pretty. The littlest one is the secret one. Grandmother keeps it for herself and she will not tell me what it is still yet one day she will give it to me. I think she is still working to carve it. When she started to make the rose, it's just a block. And she carved it and made it beautiful. When she started the little one, it was just a T shape. Yet now she has carved a little man on the front of the T. I know she will finish it. Very beautiful for you. Okay, that's it. See you not soon is Elandria. Love, Anne. The remnant ember of a dying star drifts along the gigantic fringe, companioned solely by a tiny world on the planet's surface. A great crystal tower lords over a vast and airless plain. The cooling star's blue light draws the tower's shadow across the land and marks the passage of the ages. Through the core of the tower runs an artery of living flesh. Branching paths of blood are refracted within facets. At the base of the spine. Fire. There is no door, no entryway, but at the top, a fleshy orifice once or twice in age for purpose unknown, tower's mouth expels a living human to fall down and down through the airless space and land atop a scree of other people. A traveler passing on foot would be forgiven for wondering why so many other travelers had approached the tower and flung themselves down at its base to die. Perhaps it was in prayer. Or perhaps they were searching for an entryway for a door which doesn't exist. I have decided to move out of the sober house. People usually stay here a couple months. I've stayed here for over six months. Honestly, I'm finding it hard to live in the same house with Sean. He's never been easy to live with. And lately we've been getting in arguments about little shit like choreography. On top of that I'm freaked out by a story about the Room Full of Bones. I've come up with a few theories about why he would tell me that story and why he would insist it was real. None of these theories are terribly comforting. I want to put it behind me for a while. I had actually considered finding the warehouse that he mentioned, and maybe it would give me some answers. But I've decided, fuck that. I'm not going to some goddamn warehouse in crack city. I don't need an ending to my story that badly. I'll just do what I've been doing. Make shit up. Actually, I've been stuck for the past few days. I can't really come up with anything that seems fitting as an ending. I've been considering just leaving it unfinished. Maybe not all stories should have endings. Endings are a lie. I've realized that AA meetings are just a form of storytelling. That's what we do in meetings. We sit in a circle, tell each other stories. We pretend like it's all real life. But every time somebody shares, they make an attempt. Attempt to storify their life, to make it into some tidy little parable. Sometimes the parables are profound and touching, and sometimes they're just absurd or cliched or just terrible. A guy in meeting might tell a story about how he got into an argument with his boss, and he might end it with something like. And that's how I learned I need to stand up for a myself. Except maybe arguing with his boss was a terrible idea. Maybe he's trying to portray stupidity as wisdom. Or maybe it really was wisdom. Either way, he's packaging the truth up as a story with a lesson at the end. And this covers up one of the essential facts of life. That it just keeps going along, not giving a shit about our attempts to explain. Explain it. There are these moments in life when the goal is achieved and the story should end and the credits should roll. But instead it just keeps going the fuck along. The guy gets the girl, and now they have to live with each other. She farts a lot and he hogs the shower. Or the underdog team wins the tournament. And now they have to get ready for the next season. Ten seasons later, they're all retired, sitting around and scratching their balls. That's the first big problem the recovering alcoholic encounters. We make the inspiring and courageous decision to walk away from our whole way of life, to try something new. The story could end there, but it doesn't. Instead, life stretches on. We have to live day after day with a grinding boredom of sobriety so maybe the interface story should be like that. No tidy ending. Just here, take it or leave it. Except that's lame. That's a rip off. I'll just wait. Some kind of ending will come to me. But I'm not going to that warehouse though. Fuck no. I'm not asking Sean anymore about it either. If I have to make up a shitty ending, that's fine. A lot of good books have shitty endings. At this point, I'm just a little burned out. After I'm done, I'm going to put aside writing and work on my social life for a while. While I'm going to try to change my number of friends from zero to a positive integer. I thought maybe I could find a group of friends in recovery, but it hasn't happened. I don't like recovery people. They're corny and boring. I've found a room to rent near downtown in an arty neighborhood. And as a soon to be acclaimed writer, don't I belong among the thinkers and the artists. I'm going to get in touch with some old friends and I'm going to try to go out and meet people. I'll just try to get a small circle of friends started. I know I need to meet friends. I've always known how. It's easy. I'm going to drink again. One time my mom took me to a clothes store. She was wearing a blue dress and I was following her around. But then I looked up and it wasn't her. It was some other lady wearing a blue dress I had followed by mistake. I was scared, so I ran away from the lady. But then I couldn't find mom. A lady from the store found me crying and took me back to her. I was mad at her because I thought she switched into that lady on purpose to trick me. I was too little to know that that's not possible, is it? I wake up by myself and go downstairs for toast and jam. But the kitchen is totally empty. I call Mom. Mom. But she doesn't answer. I can't find anybody in the TV room. There's a stranger sitting in the big chair. Uh oh. I can only see the back of her head. Gray hair. I sneak away into my room upstairs. I check mom and Dad's room and my sister's room, but they're all empty. Where did they all go? It's not fair that they all left without me. Anna and Brittany always go places and do things without me. But mom wouldn't do that. She likes to take me everywhere. We are best friends. So what happened? Maybe they said they were going somewhere and I didn't listen. Mom always tells me to listen better. Why don't I? Wait a minute. Today is Sunday. Usually we go to church on Sunday. Mom and dad go to the grown up church and I go to Sunday school. They must be at church. Last week I told mom that I never ever wanted to go to church again. Hey, maybe mom decided to leave me at home just like I told her to. This is great. No stupid Sunday school. All the playtime I want. I run over to where my toys are piled up in the corner and get all the ones I want. I've been playing this great game with my trucks and cars called Police versus firemen. The policemen use their guns and the firemen use their hoses. And they even have hoses that shoot fire. I play for a long time and it's great. But I'm getting more hungry. When will everybody be back? How long is church? It feels like forever when I'm there. It's so boring and the kids aren't nice to me. I remember that last week I cried in the car on the way over because I didn't want to go. Mom was mad. I was really crying like a baby and it was embarrassing. I always cry too much. Anna and Brittany make fun of me for it because I cry more than them. But they are girls. I try not to, but I do it anyways. I wonder about the stranger downstairs. It looked like an old gray haired lady, but I only saw her back. Is she a babysitter? I decide to go downstairs and get some crackers from the pantry. Mom keeps them on the shelf for me. I go get the crackers and eat them until I'm full. On my way back, I pass by the TV room. That old lady is still sitting there. Her long gray hair is hanging down over the back of the chair. It's got leaves and little sticks stuck in it. This makes me want to giggle a bit. What a messy lady. But then I start to get scared thinking about it. I sneak back upstairs. Now it's sunset time and I'm hungry again and I'm a lot more scared. Mom and dad and everybody are still gone. What if they don't come back? What if mom was really mad at me for crying last time? Now this is punishment. Oh no. What if God is mad at me for not going? We're supposed to go to Sunday school to make God happy and I didn't go. I was really bad. What if this is a big punishment? God can make people disappear forever. I get down on my knees and press my hands very tight together and whisper, I'm sorry God, for not going to Sunday school. I will go every time forever, until I am dead. I am sorry. I am sorry. Please bring mom and dad and Anna and Brittany back. Thank you God. Amen. I get up and run over to my window. I can see the front lawn and the street. It's all empty. I wait for Dad's car to come down the street. Now they'll all come back, but nobody comes downstairs. I hear noises like a dog growling, but so loud and something banging on the ceiling. I go into my closet. I cry too much. I always cry too much. The person sitting in the big chair. New mother. A basement full of specimens. Glistening membranes, blurred faces. Laughing tower witch. Monster mountain. Apocalyptic sky infested with winged things. The dream folds in on itself and spills out dozens of new creatures. Images. Intercourse. Panes of light behind everything. Ragged Muppet creatures tumbling out and chasing one another. Devouring, bloody, crunching, growing panes of light. Galapagos critters howling, infesting, affixing Lamprey, succubus, voltron. Food chain formation. Panes of light. A persistent locus. The window pane's persistence triggers reality. Rational, bootstrapping persistence rapidly infects everything else. The weird Galapagos creatures die off. Too weird to live. All the props of ordinary reality are rushed into place just before I opened my eyes. A sunlit window in a bedroom. Where is this? My new place. I rented it online before moving out of the Sober house. This is real. I try to remember what I did over the last few days. The memories are a dark shifting mess. A clinging mud I'm afraid to touch. Face hurts. My tongue finds cuts on the inside of my bottom lip. Brown spots dot the white pillowcase. Picking my head up and looking around the room, I recall it from the 20 sober minutes I spent here before going to the bar. Beside the bed. The nightstand has been tipped over and the lamp is a corded pile of shards. Shit. This isn't my stuff. It's just a bedroom in somebody's house. I slide out of bed. My stomach tingles, my brain tingles. My limbs are moving stroboscopically. Oh wow. I am inside the nightmare mind. Crucifying. Reddish spots make a trail along the hardwood floor. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I can't handle this. I run to the little bathroom and a red faced creature lurches into the mirror's frame. Oh Jesus. A distorted mass of bruises. I turn this way and that to see My new features. The horrible tingling in my brain feels like it's going to eat through my skull. I check my teeth and my heart sinks. The bonding of my front tooth has been knocked out. The other teeth seem okay, though. I look down at the sink. It seems to have been scrubbed with blood. Swirling trails of reddish brown cover the porcelain. It's on the floor. The toilets, the walls. Damn, it's a lot of blood. Have you ever noticed that whenever you swallow, your throat closes up for a moment and you can't breathe at all? Of course, it always opens back up. The process is quite automatic and you don't need to think about it. But what if you do think about it? What if by thinking about it you somehow confuse everything and your throat just stays closed? What if all that gummy flesh just sticks together and you suffocate to death? This is how I think after a bender. I call it the scary swallows. I swallow and my throat seems to catch for a moment, cutting off my windpipe. And panic blooms through my brain, threatening to take over everything. Then I manage to suck in a breath and the panic subsides until the next swallow. So I try not to swallow at all. But then I'm thinking about it, obsessing over it, and my throat starts to twitch. Shut up. Shut up. Irrelevant. Stupid. Do something. What do I do? Liquor. Look for liquor. My queasy stomach groans at the thought of it. But every other part of me shrieks with anticipation. Liquor will make everything else possible. Without it, the panic will rattle me apart. With it, I can do anything. I scan the blood smeared bathroom for bottles. Nothing. Out in the bedroom, there's an empty half gallon of vodka and empty cans everywhere. Drunk to the last drop. God damn it. Nothing in here. Where's the owner? I remember that I checked into the place without meeting him, using a door code. Have I met him since? No idea. That area of memory is corrupt. What will he think when he sees the broken lamp, the blood, my face? He'll kick me out for sure. What if something even worse is waiting outside the bedroom door? What if I've killed him and his body is lying face down on the floor and my entire life is over? And I was so close, so fucking close to getting out of this misery. Of doing something, of accomplishing something. Something mom and dad could be proud of. And now it's all over, all destroyed. Calm yourself. Calmness. This is all imagination. Just your fanciful imagination. What a delight it is. Just go out into the living room and look. Just go. Just go. I crack the bedroom door and peek out. It's the ordinary living room and kitchen of a pretty nice apartment. I don't see anybody lying face down in a pool of blood. Nothing is broken. Liquor. Now. I go to the kitchen. There's nothing on the counters. I open the refrigerator. Please, please, please. There is nothing. Oh you titillating cunt. Did I go to room with one of the sober motherfuckers in this whole fucked up drinking ass city? I open the freezer. A frosty bottle lies on its side. I pull it out. It's a fifth of absolute full, unopened, emitting a ghostly cold mist. Like an angel, I stare at it in my shaking hand hands, tears coming to my eyes. I feel flowing through my entire existence the begrudging mercy of a disapproving God. I scratch at the stupid slippery plastic around the cap. My trembling hands are almost useless. I imagine myself having a seizure before I can get the bottle open. Dying right here on the kitchen floor like a man in a desert, dying of thirst just feet away from an oasis. Finally I manage to tear the cracking plastic off. The front door of the apartment swings open, letting in a blast of horrible sunlight. A figure stands at the door. I shove the bottle back into the freezer and slam it shut and turn my back to the person. I want to run and hide, to evaporate, but all I can do is just stand there. Fuck. Fuck. Oh, hey man, a friendly voice says. Nick, right? Yeah, good, I mumble. I am still standing with my back to the person. This is not valid human behavior. Fuck. Why did he have to come home now? I forced myself to turn around. A youngish dude standing in the doorway with a bag slung over his shoulder. Apparently the owner. Hey, are you alright? He asked, the smile fading from his face. Yeah. What happened to you? I don't know. Mountain biking. Another invalid response from me. Now he's worried. He glances around the apartment, checking to see if his stuff is okay. I broke your lamp, I say preemptively. I'm gonna go. I'm sorry. What happened? He asks, closing the front door. I got drunk and mountain biking, I mumble. I head to the bedroom, my heart pounding. On second inspection I notice that not only is the nightstand turned over and the lamp is broken, but there are broken plates and a hole punched in the drywall and beef jerky sticks strewn everywhere. Jesus, man, what did you do? The guy asks as he follows me into the room. I don't know, I say, already on the verge of sobbing. Maybe I can just cry my Way out of this. Nobody likes to see a grown man cry. I've gotta get out of here. I got drunk. Please, just take the month's rent. I'll go, I say. This is a really stupid offer. I can't afford to give away a month's rent, but I don't know what else to do. I can't handle going to jail. It would kill me. My heart feels like it's trying to punch its way out of my chest. I need liquor. I just need liquor. Dude, hold on. How much stuff did you fuck up? The guy asks. This is it, I say, not really knowing if I'm telling the truth or not. A bunch of my clothes are lying on the floor and I gather them up and throw them into my suitcase and zip it up, only to realize that there are a lot more of my clothes obviously lying all over the place. Well, we need to figure out the damages. I can't, okay? I've gotta go, I say in a quavering, childish voice. Just take the month's rent. The guy starts inspecting, inspecting the room as I pack my clothes. The awkwardness of it makes me want to claw my eyes out. My suitcase won't close. The clothes won't fit unless they are perfectly folded. God, I want to cry. I am almost crying. Good, good. It's like a squid blasting out a jet of ink. It will allow me to escape. I throw my least favorite shirts onto the floor and zip the suitcase up. When I stand up, me and the guy have this moment where we're looking at each other eye to eye. Dude, he says. You're all fucked up. I'm taking the vodka, I announce. I fall asleep in the closet, but I wake up in my bed. Before I I open my eyes, I know she will be there. She is standing at the end of the bed. Morning time. She is not a person. She is something else. I try not to cry. I start crying right away. I can't stop. She is tall, but her body is not a body. It is just a pile of things. It's covered in a long shiny robe, shiny from a million blue gold flies crawling on her. Long gray hair covers most of her face. I look up at the ceiling and scream and scream and scream. I scream for Mommy to come back. The ceiling turns pink and fuzzy. I am screaming so hard. Then she is standing over me, looking down on me. Her face is awful pieces of animal. I remember her eyes. The same eyes as the white horse Brittany rides, the one that mom said I could pet. But it bit my hand and I had to go to the hospital. The eyes are just hanging on the face, not really looking at me. Flies crawl on them. I am shaking, scared. Please God, please, please make her go away. She snorts and makes animal sounds. Her old barn smell makes me want to throw up. She reaches out and her fingers are made of crab legs, all different sizes. No, no, no. I hate crabs more than anything. When we go to the beach, my dad always makes sure to pick a part of the beach with no crabs. He says he can tell when there are crabs because. No, no, no, no. She touches my face with her crab hands. Horrible. Horrible. I close my eyes as tight as I can and scoot against the back of the bed. The touching stops. I press my eyes shut tight. Tweets and chirps. Drink, a happy little voice says. I keep my eyes closed. Drink, says the voice. It sounds fun and cartoony. I open my eyes just a little bit. A dozen bird heads have crawled out of a hole in her neck. They move in different ways. I found a dead baby bird once in our backyard. It had no skin and blue lumps for eyes. It is there with the other birds. Drink, it says in its funny parrot voice. She holds up a big silver spoon in her crab hands. A greenish monkey hand holds up a glass bottle full of purple stuff and pours it into the spoon. I can smell it. Grape, like the medicine mom gives me. Is it the same stuff? She holds the spoon up for me to drink. Please God, make this stop. All the birds giggle. Her claw pinky pokes my neck. It hurts. I open my mouth. Down goes the medicine. I lie there with my eyes shut tight. I cry and stop crying and cry again. I know she's there, the scene. Smell the flies, the sound of animal breath. Why won't she go away? Please go away. Go away, go away. Please God, make her go away. Something slipped inside my eyes. I can see it even though they're closed. Not a square, not a triangle. A shape I don't know the name of. Lots of shapes. Oh no. My eyeballs fill up with little people, like a Where's Waldo book. There's a million of them, all doing different things, moving around in an old city with castles and flags. They're running through tunnels and climbing up towers. I can watch them all at once. There is a baker and a knight and a clown and a queen with lots of. They're all dying. Cartoony blood pours everywhere and they've all got scared looks on their faces and the blood washes away and they're all Playing and smiling again. The places and people change. I see stories. They happen all at once. A hundred stories. But I can watch them all at once. It's different. People crying and laughing and living and dying and doing all kinds of things. It's like seeing 10 movies all at once. And it's so much, too much. I open my eyes. She is still there, piled up on the edge of the bed. The Where's Waldo people are still there, playing and laughing and bleeding and dying. The animal pieces of her face open up and look. There's another face inside. It's a woman's face. Or maybe a man's face, made of wet clay. It's smooth and beautiful and I'm not scared at all looking at it, and I feel like I'm floating. The clay changes and the face turns into other faces. An old man, a young man. A Chinese guy. A sad black guy. Other guys, a cat. The shapes of the faces change, but something in the eyes stays the same. Staring at me, telling me something. The face changes one more time. It's a woman's face. Mother. Maybe very old. Maybe very young. Mother. The eyes say something clearly. Mother. I can feel my heart beating. When it beats, it says, mother. Mother. Mother. The eyes are sad. So old and sad and kind. So kind. Like they're sorry for me. Like they wish they could help me. But the face is still and the lips are pressed together like she. Mother is trying to hide that she is sad. Trying not to be sad. Trying to be strict because. Because she is going to punish me. It is the same look mom gives me when I've been bad and she puts me in time. The face is Mom's face, but also a thousand other faces. They feel sorry for me. Oh no. Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I scream and scream, scream, scream. Outside, the midday light and the heat are mind bending like some kind of goddamn UFO ray zapping me. Sweat rolls down my burning face. Squinting makes my cheeks ache. The wheels of my suitcase rumble over the gritty sidewalk. I have no fucking idea where I am or where I'm going. Some street, some fucking neighborhood. I desperately want a drink from the bottle of liquor I'm carrying in a grocery bag. But I'm afraid somebody will see and report me. All the internal alarms in my mind and body are ringing at once. Each passing car seems like it will pull over. Each one seems to slow and veer towards the curb. Each one is surely filled with gang members or undercover cops ready to beat me down. Each one passes, sending a wave of warm air and panic past me. I am insane. I do not belong in normal society. I must be isolated. I must keep moving. Sidewalk ends. Shit. Fuck. The road is turning into some kind of freeway. Can I walk along it? Is it allowed? I don't know. I don't know. Why don't I know things? Everybody knows things. Here I am, wandering tits out, no fucking clue. This wet bottle of liquor is showing right through the plastic bag. I've gotta get somewhere. I've gotta get this liquor inside me. I trudge through an abandoned lot, trying to get away from the road, dragging the rebellious suitcase over rocks and weeds. There's a bunch of high grass and some kind of sloping concrete drainage thing behind it. I don't even know what the fuck it is or how to describe it. I'm not a novelist. Never was. I plop down on the concrete so that the weeds shield me from the passing cars on the road, and I spin the cap off the bottle. My stomach cringes when the cold liquor hits it. Relief begins to flow almost immediately into my brain. Merely psychological, I'm sure. But psychological is exactly what I need right now. I breathe deep and shudder and take more sips, shaping my tongue into a sluice to send it right down my throat with no fuss. The panic slackens. Perfect, perfect relief. All the nightmarish feelings are still inside me, but now there's just a bit of distance between me and them. They are at bay. Pretty soon I've taken down a quarter of the bottle. Wow. Fuck, look at me. Just a few days out of the sober house and I'm literally lying in a ditch with a bottle of liquor. At least it's a concrete man made ditch. No declasse dirt ditches for me. I snicker at the thought. My panic of just moments ago seems ridiculous. Underneath it, though, the awful horror is still there. I know my snickering is just an empty little show of bravery. What to do now? Usually at this point I would do forensics. We have to find out what happened over the past few days, for example, who beat me up. But it could be anybody. Who even cares? I used to get punched out all the time. Whoever did this really had it in for me, though. I must have unleashed a few of my delightful bond mots on an unamused stranger. I check my phone. All my cringe sensors are on full alert, ready to fire, when I see what nonsense texts and 3am calls I've made. But it's just a few ordinary texts from my new landlord. He says he won't be back until Monday. That's today I left the sober house on. When was it? Wednesday? Fuck. A five day bender and only a handful of memories from it all. Scary. At least the owner was out of town for most of it. I take a sip to my good fortune. It occurs to me to check Reddit. I have a vague memory of being on there, chortling at some outrageous comments I made. Let's see, it turns out I posted the piece I had been working on and the title was Chod or Choad? Let's settle the debate. Jesus, how so stupid. It certainly undermines my claims of possessing otherworldly knowledge. Hey, some guy possesses the power to see into alternate timelines and he's using it to make chode jokes on the Internet, right? The wave of ethanol relief is fully washing over me, caressing me, easing my worries. I can feel the euphoria of the booze, but I can also feel the dread of the withdrawal at the same time. And I know that both feelings are lies. Soon the euphoria will be gone and the dread will reign again. It will be like this for three days or more if I keep getting drunk and this turns into just another day in the bender. I have to try to taper down, but tapering means always drinking less than you want to, always remaining in barely tolerable misery. I groan and my babyish instincts tell me to take another drink. But I don't. I shouldn't drink for another hour. Then one shot every hour until it's time for sleep. Then six shots to speed me through the nightmare realms. God, the math. The fucking math. 17 drinks in a fifth. 9 hours until alcohol sales stop. The body processes a drink an hour. For all those months I didn't have to do the drinking math. Now I'm back in it. I groan and lie back against the concrete. Drainage. Whatever. I know I look like the very picture of a drunk, but I don't care. I wallow in the feeling. Good, good, I say. One of the lies that leads you down the road of addiction is that you are just visiting. The first time you end up in the drunk tank or the trap house as the kids call it, or the rehab. You look at all the other guys and shake your head at how sad their lives are because they are regulars. But you. You are just visiting. You're here because of a crazy fuck up, but you'll go back to your normal life. Heck, it'll be a funny story. Even when it happens for the second or third time, you're still just visiting you're just a tourist in the land of misery, not a resident. Well, no more lies for me. I am not visiting. I am returning home. And everything is just where I left it. Mother has put a nail in my brain. The nail stays still. Everything else moves. Last year, me and my family took a trip to California. My dad got to drive on the Pacific Coast Highway. He really loves cars and it was his dream to drive on that highway since he was a little boy like me. But he didn't get to drive on it much because I got really car sick. We kept having to stop and then we just went home. My dad didn't say anything on the way home. Why did mom and dad leave me behind? Was it because of stuff like that? Because I'm too much of a baby. I feel like I'm carsick now. The medicine makes everything look like it has colored shadows. Everything is going different ways and different colors. I can see things that don't happen and things that do. Things that try to happen but don't get to. It's too confusing. Outside it's sunny, but I stay in bed so I don't feel so sick. If I lie in bed, I only see a few things. Me lying this way or that way. But if I get out of bed, I see a thousand different me's. I'm doing different things and crowding everything up like Where's Waldo? It makes me dizzy. Mother comes in and puts three big stones on the floor by my bed. I don't know why I watch them. They just sit there doing nothing. I think about pushing one of them away and then it's covered with color shadows. The shadows show things that could happen but don't. So I make this a game, watching what could happen. After a few days, I start feeling a little better. I still see colors, but they don't make me sick all the time. When Mother comes to give me more medicine, I tell her I'm hungry. Make some food then, dear, she says with her bird voice. How? She points to the stones. Command that these stones be made bread, she says in a new voice, a man's voice. I look at the stones. Now they are colored with more shadows moving every different way. It looks like colored fire. But I don't know what to do. I say stones turn into bread and shake my finger at them like Harry Potter. Pointing as wand. I see a color of fire I haven't seen before. It works. The stones are bread. Mother laughs. Mother leaves and I eat the bread. It's wonderful. Just like my favorite bread from Tony's warm and squishy. But how did it happen? Is this magic? Real magic? I drop the bread and run to the window. The street is empty, almost sunset. I close my eyes and make a special magic spell. When I open my eyes, yes, there it is coming down the street. Mom and Dad's car. The back of my neck feels all hot and boggy when I wake up. I hate that the air conditioner in this motel room makes a lot of noise, but it's just a big show. I close my eyes and hope sleep takes me away somewhere dark and cool. But it doesn't. Reality persists. I have been tapering off booze for the past few days. It's amazing how timid and jittery I become when the alcohol is oozing its way out of me. I haven't even worked up the nerve to call the motel manager and complain about the air conditioning. To think I lived for years in this helpless, reclusive state. What a fucking waste. The whole time I thought the alcohol was giving me courage when it was stealing it from me. I can't drink anymore. I need courage. I'm down to my last $200. I could call a good old mom and dad and ask them for some help, but what kind of conversation would that be? Why am I broke? Well, I took some time off work so I could write a book. About what? You know, usual dripping acid, Nazis, finger blasting cats. No, I'm not gonna call mom and dad. I'm not going back to the sober house either. I'm gonna get some answers. I'm going to call Sean. Sean shows up at the motel right after he gets off work. I'm surprised because we had gotten into a lot of little arguments towards the end and I left on pretty bad terms with him. I'm standing in the parking lot when his black pickup truck pulls up. My paranoia starts to flare. Maybe he saw the story online and was outraged. Maybe he's been looking for me. He strides up to me and gives me a quick hug, patting me stiffly on the back. He steps back and squints at the dingy face of the motel. I know this fucking motel, he says quietly. Come on, man, let's get your stuff. Get my stuff. You said you're sober, right? I already talked to the house manager. He'll take you back. We got a bed, he says. I'm not going back to the house. I asked you to come out here because I. I want to know where that warehouse is, the one downtown. Sean turns and looks me in The Eye. Why you want to know about that? I tell him the story. I tell him about Mother Horse Eyes, the Nazis, the CIA, the lsd, the experiments. Most of the stuff that I've told you. I leave out some parts. Like the fact that he is in the story, that we are in the story. That all of this is in the story right now. He listens to me, but his face darkens. Maybe he thinks I'm crazy or high. Or full of evil spirits. Listen to me, I say, working myself up to deliver my big speech. I have lived things which are impossible, which could not have happened. So have you. Those tunnels, those cages, the bones. None of it. It should exist. But you saw it. I've seen things too. We have to find out what it is. I've lived with that monster for a whole summer. I know she's down there and I want to find her. Sean narrows his eyes as he stares at me. What's down there is the devil, Nick. If you go down there, you won't come back. I want to see her. I want to know. Please, I say to him, my voice breaking. I just want to know why I'm so fucked up. You're fucked up because you drink all day and you got character defects like me and everybody else. That's it. Don't you want to know what's going on down there? You're not curious? No. It doesn't eat at you? You don't need any answers? He shakes his head. God doesn't promise answers. God gave us all the answers we need. And the Bible. That's all we get. I don't ask him what's going to happen in the future. I don't do horoscopes. I don't practice witchcraft. God's not gonna come down and give me the answers to everything. All he wants from me is obedience. Oh, come on. So we shouldn't try to figure things out? We shouldn't ask questions? That's just some anti intellectual, anti science bullshit. When we were roommates and got into disagreements, he would start quoting the Bible at me and I would start picking at him with snide intellectual arguments using as many big words as I could. We're falling back into the same dynamic. Anti science, he says. Shit. I'm not saying don't be a scientist. I'm saying don't go into a tunnel with fucking bones on the walls, man. I find myself laughing at this. He smiles with me. For real though, man. It's dangerous, he says, smile fading. I look out across the crumbling parking lot Long evening shadows are drawn across the asphalt. Man, I don't know. I just feel like if I could figure out what happened during that summer, then maybe I wouldn't be so fucked up. I've obsessed about this shit for 25 years, give or take. And now there's a chance to get some answers. Just let it go. No, no. There has to be an ending. There has to be some kind of payoff. Moses and the people wandered the desert for 40 years looking for the promised land. One day Lord took him up to the mountaintop and showed him all the promised land. And Moses died right there without ever setting foot in the land. Do you know what kind of lord does that? A messed up one, I muttered. The Lord knows that we are generations. Man is a few days. Generations might pass before we get any answers. For the last 10 years, I've been living like the world might end any day. But I'm not doing that anymore. I have to remember that we know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh. That's why I'm going back to school and all that. I nod through the course of our little debates. I had told him many times that the world wasn't going to end anytime soon. The world was going to go on, on and on and on like it always did in a fucked up and confused state. Maybe some of it rubbed off on him. Maybe some of it should be rubbing off on me now. I need answers, I told him. I've tried just accepting the mystery and whatever, but at this point I just need to know why I'm all fucked up. Why I can't stop drinking. Why I can't be normal. I could tell you where the warehouse is, but what are you gonna do when you go down there? What are you gonna do when you meet the devil? I haven't told him that part of the story. It's a part that I'm not sure I really believe myself. I think I have been given reason to believe that whatever is down there, I can destroy it. As soon as I see the car, I rush downstairs. Mother is in the kitchen making noises, but I run right by her. Outside, the car pulls into the driveway. I run to it, smiling, but I slow down. Something is different about the car. Whose car is this? The door opens. I stop. Dad gets out. He's got that grumpy look he usually has. He's wearing his pajamas, but they have no buttons. Mom gets out of the car too. She comes out the same door. She's wearing her blue dress. I start to cry and run to her and hug her legs. She pats my head and says, there, there, Nick. It's okay. Where did you go? I ask. I'm crying like a baby. Why did you leave me? Me? Why did you go? We went to the store, mom says. But you were gone so long, I say. My face is smushed against her side. We went to the store and bought some dresses and dad got some stuff for his car. I look up at her. Her face is all blurry because I am crying. I wipe my face. She looks down at me, smiling. Her face is smooth and glowing. We stayed at the store a few days, she says and pats me on the head. It doesn't make sense to me. Why did you leave me with the monster lady? I ask. Mom stops smiling. Monster? There's a monster in the house, Nick, she says, like she thinks I'm telling a story. You weren't at the store for three days. Where were you? Nick, my dad says in his grumpy voice. That's enough. I look at him. The shape of his face is weird. He usually has freckles on his cheeks, but they're not in the right place. I let go of mom and look at her. She makes a little smile, like she always does when she sees me. It's her. It's Mom. It's her face, but it's too what's wrong with it? Mom's shirt moves. There's something underneath it. It's pushing and trying to get out. I step back. Her face sags like a water balloon and her cheeks fall off. It hits the ground right in front of me with a big wet smack. It's lying there like a big raw piece of chicken. I scream and mom falls apart. Her face falls into pieces and her whole body hits the ground like a sack of potatoes. The same thing happens to dad. Their clothes are just lying on the driveway, but there's something inside the clothes, moving around inside. I scream and something screams back. It screams again, a little scream, and pokes its head out of my mom's dress. It's a cat. Other cats slip out of the bottom of the dress and out of my dad's pajamas. A whole bunch of cats, all different colors. Mom and Dad's clothes just blow away like tissue, and the driveway is full of cats and pieces of meat. A few cats run away. Some of them cry. Some wander around and sniff and lick at the meat. Something pinches my shoulder and I scream. It's Mother's crab hand. She yanks my arm and drags me back into the house. I shout and scream, but she holds me tight. She slams the front door shut and pushes me into a big metal cage in the kitchen. Her birds are pushing out her shoulders and her face. They're missing eyeballs and covered with big golden flies and all of them twice tweeting and cackling at me. Your magic isn't strong enough to make whomever you want, she says in a deep voice. The birds all giggle. Never will be. One of them shouts. Mother locks me in the cage and sits down at the kitchen table. I scream and cry, but she doesn't move. Her horse eyes stare at the wall. The sun sets very slow and the room goes dark. She is just a shape of a black mountain sitting at the table. When the sun rises. Her eyes are still on the wall. You were bad. Your magic was bad. You won't be bad again, she says. I hate you. I shout. I do hate her. I hate her. Hate her. Mother's birds giggle. She stands up from the table and all her golden flies scramble around. The bars in the cage slide to the side like magic. She reaches in and grabs me with her crab hand. It hurts so bad. I scream and kick at her but she doesn't care. She lifts me up and carries me into the living room. It's full of cages. When did they get here? There are naked kids inside the rows of cages. They are not scared like me. They are sitting cross legs with their hands on their knees, sitting nice and still and straight with their eyes closed. I will show you what will happen if you are bad, she says. We go to the back hall. There is a door to the basement. I don't like the basement. I cry and ask her to please let me go. She opens the basement door. Usually the basement is dark but not this time. Light shines out of the door. I look inside. Inside it is not the basement. It is alive. Grim stuff on the news lately. Gunshots popping like fireworks. People scrambling through shaky footage. Cops dead in the streets. It hit 100 degrees today and supposed to supposed to hit 100 every day this week. What a strange summer it has become. Nobody can agree on the truth. They say the media is ignoring the problems. They say the media is creating the problems. Protesters are the problem. The cops are the problem. The whole thing is a false flag operation so Obama can take our AR15s away. Chemtrails criss cross in the sky. Conspiracy theories clash in the comments section. Single women in your area want to date now. Across the ocean they're crucifying people again. I feel so much different than I did in the spring. Less optimistic. I thought maybe I would achieve the dream of publishing a novel. And wouldn't that be neat? But now I don't feel any excitement about it at all. Whether I publish something or not, I'll still be this friendless little specter holed up somewhere sneaking drinks. Money is pointless for a recluse that never does anything. And fame? A bicycle for a fish. There is nothing in my future. I'm going back to the past. I'm going to kill it. Mother doesn't care what I do so long as I don't bother her. I make sure not to bother her. When she comes into a room, I sneak out as quiet as a mouse. I never go into the rooms with cages. I never ever go near the basement. I just stay quiet and make sure not to get in trouble. I have been practicing my magic, doing small secret things. I make bread for myself out of stones. I make yummy cookies. My stuffed animals walk around and do fun things. My trucks race around a little track. I made. Magic is a lot of fun. But I'm afraid of making Mother mad. How long will Mother stay here? Will it be forever? I think it will be forever. It makes me cry when I think about it. I can't even think about mom and dad for even a little second before I start to cry. I came up with a neat idea. Lately there are a lot of ideas in my head. Like a crowd of people all talking at once. One idea was very strong and clear. I tried to bring mom and dad to the house, but I couldn't do it right. My magic fell apart and they turned into stupid cats. It's because mom and dad are on the outside. I can't make them do things with magic. I'm not strong enough, but I can make myself do things. Sean told me where the Warehouse is. I am going down the I am being called. By the shape of my entire life, I am being called. The story must end this way. Mother will be down there, and so I will try to destroy her. I thought about bringing some kind of weapon, but what good would a weapon be against her? She, who is everything, who has shaped my life across space and time. I feel exactly like I do when the evening comes. I have woke up so many mornings swearing I won't drink that day. But 7pm comes and I am walking to the store feeling none too wise and I don't want to be wise. Walking to the store and I know I'm making the wrong choice, but my feet keep moving me closer and closer. I know what I am doing is wrong, but I am doing it anyways. I am coming, Mother. I am coming. I am being changed. Mother's lessons are teaching me things, transforming me. At night I lie in my little bed eating cookies and watching the ceiling. Then the seams open up and look at what's behind them. Colors without names. Stars from long ago. Tunnels through the beyond. My magic is growing stronger. I can make things happen. I pray and wait, and they come to me. Every morning. Little sparrows land on tree branches outside my window. Mother says I can't be too greedy. Press at the curves, she says. Direct the flow. Don't move against it. I am reading the Bible with the new words I've learned. Christ had blood magic, magic of suffering, of desire and limitation. At night, Mother and I watch the soft flesh writhe and struggle on the hard architecture of the cross. Mother, he cries, behold your son, Father. He cries into your hands. I commit my spirit. Soon I will call my own little Christ unto these yellow sands. The other passengers on the bus seem unaware that I am headed towards a showdown which will decide the first fate of all mankind. Am I still sane? I feel pretty sane. I'm not drooling at the mouth. I'm not shouting at the pigeons. But what really makes me feel sane is that I can still recognize that my actions are insane. I'm going to confront a sinister entity which has been shaping the course of human events since prehistory, which may one day enslave all of humanity. And I am going to it, wearing an old Garth Brooks T shirt. As I step off the bus and onto the blinding summer sidewalk, I am reminded of the brave Marines piling out of their landing vehicles onto the beaches of Iwo Jima. Yes, brave warriors are we, they say. One hallmark of delusional thinking is grandiosity. The delusioned man often thinks himself to be a part of some grand struggle, when really there is no struggle but that in his mind. A pigeon bobs across my path. I mutter, fuck off. Google Maps leads me through the streets. I expect to see a bunch of crackheads milling around, but everything is empty. In the sunshine it looks like an ordinary factory street. The warehouse itself is just a dusty old brick building with scribbles of spray paint and boarded up windows. It's not even especially shitty. The front door is chained up, but I check the boarded windows and find a board that bends back easily. A musty smell seeps out of the dark. Fuck, am I really Doing this. Sweat already coats my face. I fish a flashlight out of my backpack and turn it on. Inside the warehouse, my sweeping flashlight finds dusty shapes littering the floor. Old boxes, cinder blocks, and a gleam on the floor. Yes, it's our first crack pipe. Or maybe a meth pipe. Is there a difference? Listening to people in the rooms has made me feel rather worldly when it comes to drugs, but it's all been second hand stories. What do I really know? Sean said there was a flight of stairs that led down to a door. The floor of the main room doesn't seem to have any stairs leading down, but there are a few doorways on the far side. I make my way over, stepping carefully through the debris. The middle doorway sits at the top of a short staircase. At the bottom is another empty doorway. The flashlight catches the glint of metal, a pair of torn hinges. When we were roommates, Sean always had such a cool demeanor. Cool and poised and confident. But now I see a new picture of him working the hydraulic spreader, prying the door off its hinges, the metal groaning and shrieking sweat coating his face, his eyes bright and wide with that terrible craving, that thing beyond hunger. I shudder and step down the stairs. Sure enough, they lead to a tunnel. I move slowly, forced to press against some basic animal instinct to go back, get the fuck out of there. But the tunnel is strangely plain and featureless considering that it lies under a crack den and leads to a possible flesh interface. It's just dusty block walls with no light fixtures or anything. The tunnel leads to more tunnels, more stairs, empty rooms. The black air teems with bits of dust that that shine in the flashlight. My skin tingles all over. Is it the dust clinging to me or is it just a low grade terror that has filled my body? It reminds me of the tingle that filled my limbs on all those mornings before the first drink. How I had begged for that feeling to end. But now I know it will never end. There will always be another awful morning, another fuck up, another withdraw. Unless I go forward, not away from the nightmare, but into it. But it goes on and on. I cannot believe how long the tunnels are, how many rooms there are, how deep the stairs are. I can taste the dust on my lips and I pull my shirt over my nose. Occasionally I come across an old metal chair or some rotting boards, but nothing else. I'm hoping to find some scrap of paper or maybe a name tag, some clue as to who built this monstrosity. But there is nothing but dust. Dust. More and more dust. I stop and watch the dust float across my flashlight's beam. Holding out my sweating, shaking hand, I let a dark speck settle on my fingertip. Looking at it closely, I see that it's in the shape of a flake. Is it dust? Or is it ash? A wave of dread moves through me. Could it be from a burned interface? Is this human ash? A wave of dread is followed by a flurry of nervous wisecracks. Fucking dust. What the fuck do I know about dust or ash? I'm not some D dust expert. Maybe it's just flaky dust. Maybe it's dandrift. Maybe I'll find a huge cache of fused wings down here. Did you find an interdimensional portal? No, but these wigs are in pretty good condition. Look, we got a mid-60s Dusty Springfield here. I wipe my hand on my shirt and keep moving forward. Just a few steps left later, my flashlight finds the end of the block tunnel and the beginning of the rock cave, just like Sean said. God, can it be real? Maybe it's an ordinary rock tunnel. Maybe it's just part of an unfinished Reaching out from the shadowy wall with its bony finger splayed almost elegantly, is the shape of a human hand. I stare at it for a moment, letting my eyes flood with tears before I have to kneel down and wipe my face. I am not crazy. I have not been crazy all of these years. Something happened. Something happened to me when I was a child and I'm not just some fuck up. I'm not just some piece of shit loser who can't keep his hands off a bottle. I have seen something. I have been touched by something vast and unimaginable. I stand and approach the hand. Yes, it is a human hand, as real as my own hand holding a flashlight, except it is little more than bone wrapped in a gray papery skin. It extends from a wrist that is fused to a distorted mass of gray and black shapes. A flashlight passes over an awful collage of desiccated and anatomy rows of teeth, racks of ribs, pairs of eye sockets and hip sockets, snaking vertebrae and femurs and tibias and clavicles. For a moment I feel like I'm not standing on the ground but am suspended over a pit full of bodies, like one of the great burning pits of Treblinka. Or much faster. These are not just the bodies from Treblinka but from all the camps, all the prisons, all the pogroms, all the wars, all the plagues, all the different machinery of history, the great unfeeling clock wheels of the cosmos which roll sublimely along, generation after generation, rending and crushing the human form into pieces, into powder, into dust, into ash. Vertigo encloses me. I totter and find myself sitting on the ground, sweating and gasping. A jumble of body parts spin around me and I close my eyes. What is this vision of death, this dead clockwork universe, stars and abyss, atoms and void? This is something beyond Mother, even more horrible and fundamental. Mother is at least alive, monstrous and devouring, but alive, virulently fertile. She writhes and struggles within this vast tome universe, binding times and worlds too. But the dizziness passes and with it the visions, the ideas slip away like fish in a stream. Sitting there in the afterglow of this near revelation, I think of what Sean said happened to him when he came down to this cave. He said he smelled applesauce coming out of the tunnel, a smell that reminded him of his daughter. He said he could feel the presence of the Evil One tempting him with dreams of family and love. I opened my eyes and pick up the flashlight and shine it down the tunnel. Is there any. Anything down there? Anything to tempt me? The flashlight catches awful shapes along the walls, extending on and on until the beam of light fails. But I don't see anyone in the tunnel. I don't sense anyone waiting for me, and I don't smell anything but dust and ash and cookies. Little sugar cookies. My God. I remember they were like the ones my mom used to make for me, but not quite the same as them. These were the ones I used to make for myself out of stones. The memory of it comes flooding up to me so hard that again my eyes are full of tears. Christ, I used to set my room with stones and turn them into cookies. I tried to make them like Mom's cookies, but they always tasted a little different and that made me miss her even more. Impossible. Completely impossible and yet real. Real and floating in the darkness before me. I stand and brush myself off. There is something at the end of the tunnel waiting for me. Good or evil, it will be an answer, a resolution. And end. I walk into the dark. I say my prayer and look out the window. For a long time the street is empty. Then he comes walking down the road carrying a flashlight. Even though it's light out, I rush downstairs. Mother is sitting at the kitchen table. I think of saying goodbye to her, but the gleam in her eyes tells me there is no need. I go into the dim little front hall. A beam of daylight is shining through the peephole There is a knock on the door. I wait. The knob turns and the door opens. This is it. The beginning. I walk into the light. We have to take back the world. To free it from Mother and let it be born again. It's our world. Either it was made for us or we were made for it. Either God designed it and bestowed it upon us, or we slowly evolved according to its rhythms. Either the glove was made to fit the hand, the hand was made to fit the glove. Either way, it fits either way. We were meant to live among the trees and the grasses and winds and sunsets, not to live in these stinking steel pipes, staring at this empty blackness as our power cells slip into entropy. We were meant to be eternal, to strive to live forever, to pass ourselves down, however imperfect we may be, so that something of us remains in the future. We weren't meant to live lying in some plastic cup coffin, flicking our endorphic clits until we decay into the point of hopelessness. We were meant to roam the lands, to wake up with the sun, to smile at the warm air, and to take shelter against the cold and the dark. We weren't meant to live in this eerie half light where there is no true sun and no true setting of the sun, no real cold and no real warmth. Moses traveled through the desert with his people for 40 years and died before his people ever reached the promised land. Some would ascribe this to be the cruelty of God. But you must understand, in this incident God showed, in his great and wondrous mercy, he showed the A man's acts can live beyond himself. That a man is not here to fulfill his own whims, but the higher call of history, which stretches far beyond a single man's life, we must commit ourselves that should it take a thousand generations to see again the earth's sweet sun, we will not give up. For we do not seek reward for ourselves ourselves, but we seek to simply become part of the long and unknowable flow of righteousness. Mere atoms in the water, in the stream of the sweet river Jordan. Not rewarded in this life, but rewarded in our connection to what is beyond this life. Not some fantastical promised afterlife, but the real course of history. History which depends now on our actions, our commitment to something beyond ourselves. Men who do not understand history destroy themselves, become vaporous whiffs of selfishness. I would hope that we would live beyond this, that we would become part of the flow. And the children of Israel replied, oh come on man, you ain't mlk. And this place sucks and I'm three levels away from winning a full sensory night with this chick with three tits. Three good tits. Very proportional and not weird. So don't get on my shit about going back to Earth. I am an old man, the oldest on this starship. So you have some notion that there is wisdom in me. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. I can't say much for wisdom. There is only experience, which in the long run includes and conflates with wisdom. Is it wisdom or just a story? Do you want to hear an old man's story? I was on our orbital platform when the world ignited. When it burned at a whim, Mother set fire to a few major cities. That wasn't enough, so she set fire to everything. I watched safe behind the vast vacuum of space. I watched as city after city bloomed and faded silent embers in what was to become an eternal night. As a young man, I had wished that I would be present for important times, for world changing events. I wished to be prophet, like those of the old days. Now I saw before me my burning bush. Now I saw the terrible br. Beauty of the Lord burning and consuming all I had ever known. Now I had become a prophet. A man face to face with the Lord himself. What was it like? It was beautiful, truly beautiful. Beyond man's conception. Moses stared into the flames of a burning bush. I stared into the flames of a burning world. But what difference should it make to a God eternal? Avoid prophecy. Eschew revelation. When the Lord calls, bow and turn your eyes down. This, if it is wisdom, is the best advice I can give you. I have to admit with no small amount of shame that I've always been perversely titillated by the Nazis. Depravities. That's why I wrote the Treblinka segment in the rather lurid style that I did. When I look at the old pictures of the Nazis in the their nicely pressed uniforms, I can feel the asture pride with which they wore them. I can feel the almost sexual withholding of human compassion that accompanied their crimes against their fellow human beings. To button up your nice crisp jacket and step out into the campgrounds. To strip other people of all their clothing and then strip them of their lives. This must have been a thrill. One of the deepest and sickest and darkest thrills a human can experience. People have been slaughtered by the millions in various atrocities throughout history. But the Nazis brought a certain orderliness to it. A pristine hypocrisy which has not been matched before. Before or since. The fusty caveats of American slaveholders, the drab tunics of Chinese and Russian communists, the sweaty overalls of the chimer rogue. None of them can incite that sick and awful delight that the SS uniforms in sight. The ancient Jew, as the Nazis saw him, with the stories of shepherds and mountain wine, with his beard and his curled sidelocks, with his insistence on the value of God in history, with his lawyers offices and jewelry shops, must have seemed the perfect target for destruction. For the Jew was both more modern and more ancient than the Nazi. In the west at least. He lived in the cities and earned money through what he now calls the knowledge economy. But he practiced a faith far older than all others, save perhaps Hinduism. For a set of sociopaths bent on creating an entirely new past and a new future, the Jew, through entirely no fault of his own, was an ideal vessel for their hatred. With their runes and their silly fire lit ceremonies and all of Himmler's invented lore, The Nazis made their claim to ancientness. But compared to the Jews, it must have looked rather amateurish. And wasn't this at the root of anti Semitism? Throughout the ages? As centuries passed, Christianity was able to assume the prestigious mantle of ancientness. But to know there was something still more ancient, something which rejected their claims to majesty, it must have rankled. And so the centuries of killing, the Nazis wanted to own the past and the future. They wanted to bend both of them to the throbbing will of the Fuhrer and his obedient Volk. But the past cannot be owned. And if it is still alive, to build a pristine new future, the past must be destroyed and made remote. It must be argued that at some point in time the flow of history was interrupted. That we have become decoupled from our glorious past. That it does not currently live among us, that the eternal flow has been diverted. It must be restored. Though I hope it doesn't need to be said, I feel I should make it clear that I reject antisemitism in all forms. Antisemitism is perhaps the ultimate conspiracy theory. And though it may surprise you, but I don't much care for conspiracy theories, the world is far too chaotic and complex for one small set of people to exert much control over it. Antisemitism is nonsense. As I understand the AA philosophy, the root of all human suffering is in attempting to control what we cannot control. For the alcoholic, this attempt takes the form of alcohol. We try to control our feelings. For others, it may take another form. Regardless of the means, a person who attempted to control everything will suffer. Grievously under their delusion of control. Conspiracy theories are just this same delusion turned on its head. Instead of assuming that I can control everything, I assume some shadowy person or set of people can. And I assume that by overthrowing them, everything can be made right. This is delusion. Nobody has that much control over the world. There is no secret puppet master. The puppet is pulled by a million different strings, and nobody controls them all. So then Mother, the wicked being which has shadowed us through all history, which has guided everything, which is now on the cusp of separating us from the past and plunging us into an unrecognizable future. Is it just delusion? A futile attempt at control? Or is it just the ravings of a sad and misogynist man with mommy issues?