Normal.
This was the opposite of normal.
But it was okay.
Scott was not well, not well at all.
Everything he was supposed to do, he'd failed at. His instructions had been clear, and hadn't included what to do in case he didn't succeed…
Or had they? He couldn't remember them now.
He didn't know where to go, what he was supposed to do; he noticed that he was lost, and that the voices had faded out and were no longer offering their advice. Even his own inner voice, long pushed to the back behind the dominating presence of the computer's non-stop whispered shouting, had gone quiet and left him alone with his perception and the environment and no filters. It was just the world, and what he'd chosen to do with it.
He couldn't take the judgment he'd leveled against himself, or that the world made against him, or whatever… No! He didn't need to be, he'd done what he'd done and there was no going back and it was already too late for him.
Maybe now that he was truly alone, he'd be allowed to kill himself; there was a freeway overpass just ahead of him, and a long drop to pavement and plenty of oncoming traffic, and there was a hole in the fencing that kept people on the footpath. It couldn't have been more clear what he was supposed to do, now.
The jump didn't kill him; the car smashed into his broken body and the driver flew through the window and died on the freeway next to him, but the crash didn't kill him. Scott's body reconstructed itself, more and more of the tissues replaced with the black endoskeleton woven by the programmed intelligence of the nano-devices, at last becoming more machine component than man. What actual flesh remained was raw and bloody and held together with black strings and emitting sparks of static electricity. He rose jerkily to his feet, lurched out from behind the smashed car into the next lane, and was struck again by another passing car. He went into the black.
When Scott last woke, his chest was flayed open and a man in a plastic bodysuit had his glove buried deep in his rib cage; the man gave a great yank that Scott felt from inside, and pulled out a throbbing blob of gristly black tubes and nodules with blinking lights rooted in it.
"You're lucky the transponder was still working. We almost lost you to the tabloids there. That would have been a real circus."
The man slopped the alien organ into a metal pan and rattled it at him, the words coming stilted and hollow through the hazmat suit, "You've been decommissioned. Good work, soldier. You're going to your final reward." He pulled another black glob of pulsing goop out of Scott's intestines and hoisted it into another pan, cutting the trailing cables embedded in his torso with a laser scalpel. The stink and the pain were overwhelming and dark fuzziness crept in at the edges of his vision, and Scott knew that his wish was finally being granted, and that all he wanted now was to live.
"We've taken the boy who was responsible for somehow deprogramming you, so you'll be in good company. You won't be dying alone today."
He didn't want to die.
Now, finally that it was inevitable, he did not want to give up his life, however horrible it may have become. Change was always possible. There would always be another tomorrow.
"Please, I don't want to die," he tried to say, but the man's hands were pushing his voicebox aside and it came out in a gurgle.
"Good night, sweet prince," said the man, who then pulled out the remains of his brainstem and killed him.
William wasn't afraid. He'd seen it all, forward and backward, through all possibilities and the entrenchments made by myth; he saw the hero killed an infinite number of ways, saw the necessity for the sacrifice written into the system and dared to dream otherwise. He'd been taken from his parents and locked away, unable to call for help and completely at the mercy of the man with the dark sunglasses, but his spirit had been one with the universe, but…
But his body had been taken. He was dissociating, slipping away into his own mind to escape. He had to keep the feeling, but come back. He didn't completely want to. It was painful back there.
William was strapped into the chair-shaped cradle of a cluster of electronics interfacing directly with his nervous system by way of a series of pads and electrodes that played through his memories at the twist of a dial; wires ran from the machine and pierced through his skin, and he had a terrible headache, and every muscle in his body was clenched to its maximum effort and straining against a harness which gave nowhere. The man was trying to find out what made him different, what role he played in something that was happening, how much he knew about anything interesting. William was being judged, and no matter what the verdict would come away with a death sentence.
He knew he wasn't going to live through this, and with that resolution a greater pressure than the electrostatic field engulfing him began to bear down upon him, starting with an elasticity of the forehead and relaxation of the muscles in his scalp. It wasn't anything special to accept that he was about to die, and the calm feeling that was not numbness began to fill him.
The machine below him rattled and began to spark, and an alarm buzzer rang out, and the man became very unhappy with him. He didn't mean to break anything, and now it was only getting worse…
He could not allow the despair to take him. If he was meant to leave this body for another, or for some other, higher purpose, then it would all be as according to the great clockwork plan of the universe that was God figuring itself out, or else it wouldn't, but that still wouldn't matter.
It was all about being the moment in such immersion that total acceptance was given, including the final moment.
And he was okay with that. It was part of the plan.
In the raveling strings of the greater time vortice, a woven strand pulled apart its neighbor and recombined with it to become a braid of greater complexity.
His death was part of the bigger picture, and would happen whether he cooperated or not.
The machine sparked against his back and caught on fire. More alarms were going off.
The man was in a panic, beating at the flames with his jacket, and then he saw the fire extinguisher on the wall. William was released from the electrifying grip of the device and slumped into it, exhausted; he was immediately engulfed in the choking spray from the nozzle held in Agent HUT2971's hand.
He raised his head and coughed, and found he could use his voice, if only there been anything he'd felt the need to say. He lowered his head again and closed his eyes. The man reacted to his apparent calm with a fury, and raised the fire extinguisher high above his head to strike.
"It's okay, you didn't know what you were doing," William said, and the red bludgeon crashed down and he ceased to be.
Jaime went into the light.
The great strings exploded from the center of the new knot outward, untangling and separating, disengaging to shimmy loose for one fleeting moment of free-floating isolation, the loose waveforms pulling together and aligning again in synchrony.
The rivulets of causation and probability asserted themselves in an adjusted form, and reality wrote itself accordingly.
William lifted away from the earth and his broken body, ready to pass back into the soul matrix, to be recycled and renewed.
He left behind the fire and mayhem, the man with the bloody metal canister smashing down into the still form spread out in the ashes of the terrible machine; he saw the man losing faith in a system that could be broken, knew him to be disgusted with himself for what he had to do and becoming less and less able to turn it off, saw the man choose to accept the self-disgust and dim a feeble light that had grown within him, and watched the man give himself over to hell.
And then he was the light.
The Queen knew of the unmaking and its effects upon the continuum, and marked that these periods were coming with an intensifying frequency, and that with each passing flare of the anomaly She maintained less and less control over the realm.
There were cycles beyond, wheels riding upon wheels within wheels, that were greater than the extent
of her reach—there was a deeper blackness beyond which her manipulations could not prove, and to which she was forever banned access.
This swallowing darkness came from the distant behind and beyond the unforeseeable ahead, and would not let Her pass. It was this darkness that pushed upon Her net, and would return to push again and again and stronger…
There was so very much to be done; the unmaking darkness was fast in coming, but if She were to build something that could withstand its persuasion to disassemble, She could survive its passage… It was desperate.
The cosmic gears were turning, and she would not be chewed between their teeth.
It was survival.
Manny was pretty sure that he was dead.
All the color had gone out of the world, and it lay deep in crawling shadows that reached for him and drew short, hissed and slunk away. There was a wailing wind coming from behind him, and he knew instinctively not to look back, that it would be something worse than death, and forever, and yet something in his heart knew that he had to go back into it.
He had no explanation for his attraction to the void; there was simply a reason to not yet let it go.
She'd been shot!
She was lying in her bed asleep, her no good ex-husband asleep on the couch and the kid in his bed, and someone came into her room and shot her! In her sleep!
She needed to get up, she needed to check on her boy, she couldn't just lie there like that… The bullet hole looked small from the front, right in the middle of her forehead, but the backside was much messier. It was all over the bed. No one could have survived a wound like that.
Karen realized that she was examining her injuries from the outside, that she was observing herself, and everything ended. The delusion that she was still alive took with it all her pain, and her strong emotions, and left her dispassionate and all-knowing. It was time to leave this body behind and take another.
But there was unfinished business…
Manny had gotten an idea and seized upon it obsessively, searching the ghostly reproduction of his home for a mirror, anything reflective, but finding only blackness in their surfaces. He'd hoped to search the void navigating by reflection, to be able to look Medusa in the face and find his way through her lair without being turned to stone; there was no such object in the afterlife in which to sink his gaze.
In death, he would realize how easy it really was to let his problems go, and that was when the solutions would become obvious. He relinquished his hold on the idea, and found his way.
The only light emanating in this place came directly from the other souls, and from the soul of the land, and the way to traverse was to be led by the lights from their eyes. And there were indeed others around him that he hadn't noticed before, a teeming multitude of them everywhere he looked, and the wind that was always behind him slackened, and he knew that the one set of eyes he needed to see, the one he sought, was elsewhere.
"Manny?"
She could feel that he was near, that she needed to go to him, that he called to her from across the gulfs…
And the strands of time wove themselves together, becoming a thread…
… And Manny extended a blind hand to the darkness, and felt another take hold and knew that it was the love of his life and pulled her to him, clasping her to his breast.
"Karen?"
"I'm here, Manny."
"I love you."
"I love you too."
He asked her where their child was, and she knew the truth of the words as she spoke them, that the boy had chosen to move on ahead and would see them again in the next place.
"Can we go together? I want you to be with me."
"I want that too."
Two stars shone brightly together, their light becoming one.
The threads of time tautened, and came apart again.
He pulled her to him, and was surprised by the cold. He held her tighter, would have warmed and taken the stiffness from her, but she remained more solid than he, and could not be moved.
"I've come alone," she said to him, "so alone."
"I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."
"Yes, you are."
There was always the darkness. Everything came apart.
Everyth—
THE END
Chapter One: Appendix
(or, My Orgonite Adventure — being an explanation of just what the hell I was getting up to & why I thought it might work)
... Be it so, then I answer'd
I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one
than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance
and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering,
(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the
field the world,
For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
I above all promote brave soldiers.
Walt Whitman, from "As I Ponder'd in Silence"
This is going to be the non-fiction section of the book.
pareidolia
noun
1. the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist, as in considering the moon to have human features
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pareidolia
The trouble with so many of the extraordinary experiences and encounters I've had has been that they can be so easily dismissed by conventional explanations.
The following story is not one of those experiences.
I am going to start this section of the book with a true tale of tangential relevance; its importance will be made clear towards the end. This really, truly happened to me, I swear by whatever you or I hold sacred.
Ahem...
I was fourteen years old and living at the group home for wayward youth; one midnight hour, my friend tells me that we're going to try a new way of getting ourselves into trouble—we're going to play with a Ouija board. I had never used one before but had some idea of what to expect. After all the staff had gone to sleep, we snuck out of our rooms and got down to business. I don't remember if we burned candles or bothered with any of the usual accoutrements; they would have been extraneous to the action which was to come.
As he was pulling aside the lid of the box, he said, "Whatever you do, don't take your hands off the planchette."
I think I might have said, "Okay..."
We set the board up on the floor between us and began the usual round of questioning; out of the two of us, my friend was the only one who'd used the board before, so he naturally led the proceedings. He began with the standard interrogation: "Is there anybody here?" and the board's sputtering response was a slow meandering of the planchette in looping circles, figure-eights and angular wanderings. It was giving a response, but an unsatisfying one as far as my friend was concerned—I had no idea what I should expect, so the action was to me as good as any, but he apparently knew what was supposed to be happening and this wasn't it.
I glanced up at him a couple times during this preliminary period when things were still getting started and studied his face for any hint of mischief; was he moving the thing around? Was he playing some kind of trick on me? If so, it wasn't a very entertaining one.
After a few minutes' worth of hello? hello? questions and the only response being nonsensical alphanumeric strings, I myself began to lose patience with it and blurted out of turn: "Come on already, who is this?" and that was when I got the response I'd been looking for.
It is difficult to truly do this experience justice in words; my description will probably fail to impart the sense of utter freakout that occurred.
Immediately after I asked my question, the planchette began to whip around so fast that we both had to hang on with everything we had just to keep from losing our grips on the thing. It really took off moving; it moved faster than I have ever seen one go, other than in movies, and we both actually
lost contact with it a couple times. I cannot say for certain that it did not move around on its own. It was moving that fast, and we couldn't keep up with it.
It spelled out, in just a second or two, "Y-O-U-K-N-O-W-M-E-B-O-R-I-S" and then stopped. We were spooked to say the least, but I still had the presence of mind to ask it: "What's your name?" after which it whipped around again, indicating with frantic speed another long alphanumeric string that ended with 6-6-6.
And then it stopped again, completely still.
My friend had had enough. He took the planchette, turned it over three times in his hands and then put it and the board away.
"Yeah, we're done now," he said, and would refuse to talk about it ever again.
I remember this incident every so often, and it still troubles me for a number of reasons I'm sure you can deduce. I swear this really happened to me, just exactly as I've here described, in every detail.
Needless to say, this forever changed my perception of the world. From that point on, I had no more question of whether or not ghosts and spirits existed or if there was any validity to claims made of the existence of paranormal phenomena, and anyone who would try to tell me otherwise was a damned liar.
And there would be people who would judge me for believing differently, and I would have to get used to not giving a shit.
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