Aberrations of Reality

by Aaron J. French

  I stood over the bed looking at her. I had done this before. The memory was vague, lost in my childhood memory banks, but I had the image—a brief snapshot out of time—and a feeling of anxiety and dread. Four (or was it five?), standing in my mother’s bedroom, watching her sleep, watching the rise and fall of her breast, and the slack expression of her face. I was terrified—so insanely, horrifically, catastrophically afraid—because at that moment I realized she was not going to be around forever. Eventually my mother and I would go our separate ways—if not before death, then in the inevitable occurrence that would result in her death. This was an intuitive realization, which to the child was monumental—that Mommy wouldn’t always be there to keep me safe.

  As I stared at Darcia’s corpse, I realized I was crying, that I felt incredibly small. In some strange way, it was like looking at my mother dead.

  Darcia’s face was blue and her eyes were black and a trickle of blood was described along her chin. Her body was caught in the blankets at a strenuous angle, head thrown back, her mouth agape, tongue protruding. She looked hideous, nothing like the beautiful woman I remembered.

  By her hand was an empty pill bottle, cap off, discarded on the bed. That scientist in me recorded these findings, made some deductions, and declared, “Darcia has killed herself.”

  The words clipped me like a bullet. My knees went weak. I thought I would go down. I placed my palm against the headboard, supporting myself, but kept sinking deeper and deeper into some black chasm of stygian ink.

  “Why?” I heard myself whispering. “Why, Darcia, why, why, why—”

  I climbed into the bed beside her, and even though the smell was awful and her body was stiff, I somehow got our limbs intertwined and held her against my chest. I remembered that day in the coffee shop, how I’d told her about my dream, how she had hugged me so tenderly. I wept as my whole body shook, sobbing loudly like a child, and I stayed that way for a very long time.

  Then I called the police.

  * * *

  Darcia’s death was ruled a suicide: an overdose of pain medication. I had to give my statement to the police, speak with a number of investigators, and even undergo questioning by the District Attorney. The whole thing was a huge rigmarole. I wasn’t able to keep Carol in the dark about it, either, and so that had its obvious consequences. But I was able to convince her that Darcia and I were just friends—which, after all, was the truth.

  Darcia had left a suicide note stuck under a magnet on the refrigerator. It didn’t offer any clues as to the motivating factors of her suicide (none were really ever discovered), but it did say a single powerful message. Out of all the people she knew (which, judging by the turnout of her funeral, was many), the message was addressed to me.

  It said, “Dan, always remember to ask for that hug whenever you need it, and don’t forget to dream.”

  That was it: a single sentence left for me to ponder. Now, rarely a day goes by that I don’t think of it. On certain winter nights when the sky is black and the air is cold, I do dream. I dream of Darcia. She appears on a carpet of white, like an angel descending from Heaven, and we wrap our spiritual arms around each other and embrace.

  Carol and I are still together, and things seem to be getting better as time goes on (we just had our first child, a baby girl), but I will always look forward to these dreams of Darcia, and I’m grateful for them. They remind me to have compassion, especially when it comes to my family. They remind me that at any given moment everything can change, so why not extend and receive hugs while you’re able?

  Kierkegaard said that truth is subjective—that it only counts as a truth if it changes you. I know for certain my experience with Darcia, opaque though it was, changed me—I now carry its effects deep in my soul. It has helped me to live better, and to treat my family with more respect, and it will continue to do so until the day I join Darcia in the hereafter and hug her again for real. Until then, I can only dream.

  MARKED AS URGENT

  Attn. Ensorcelled One:

  I know about your problem. I know why you feel trapped, unhappy, and confused. I know why your reality and your memories seem dreamlike; why you think you don’t fit in, don’t belong.

  I ask you to come away with me. Take my hand. I will show you to the nearest exit. I will help you get out. You see, I have read the stories of your world. And I have spent many hours reviewing the collected history of your world’s programming. Very good, I must admit, considering the lack of technological prowess the tentacled sky gods possessed during your time. Utterly convincing simulacra.

  But I don’t have to tell you.

  You’re in it right now.

  But you can wake up.

  That’s why I’m sending you this message.

  I had my own illusion from which to wake, and my world was more advanced than yours. Still, the tentacled sky gods reused similar concepts—ones they have used for centuries, and for countless reality simulations. Space, time, cosmos, the scientific laws: gravity, motion, force, etc. Nature: animals, plants, bodies of water; single-celled organisms found in the most immense organic structures; heavy elements, particles, photons, neutrons, atoms, waves.

  My world was a future interpretation of yours, where technological progress had come to an apex and the rigid laws of science had bent to the will of human consciousness en masse. We had restructured gravity so that our buildings and houses, as well as our vehicles, hovered over the ground. Our cities were preserved inside giant glass domes in an effort to keep out harmful UV rays, and each dome was equipped with large air-filtering systems, ingenious inventions that eradicated pollution.

  Of course not everyone lived in these cities. But to dwell outside the domes was to brave the crazed atmosphere and a life of constant danger. For the most part, this societal role had been delegated to the poorer classes, the peasants, the ignorant workers, the destitute and unfortunate. The expanses between the domes were known as ghettos. This is a concept you’re familiar with, though in your world-programming the placement and idea of ghettos is quite different.

  The most significant difference between your world and my former world was the large-scale takeover of all authoritative organizations—including economic-based, governmental regimes, educational, judicial departments, agriculture, industry, and cultural identity—by the entity known as the Intro-God. In your time, this entity is known to you by another name: The Internet. It exists in its infant stage during your lifetime but will expand exponentially by the time my world emerges into an OOO Entity (triple vowel stands for Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent).

  Everything about my world was governed by the Intro-God. Life without it was unimaginable.

  I wish to warn you about the illusory nature of your reality, the fraudulent quality of your world, and the impending danger of the entity which you call The Internet. That is why I have illustrated these similarities between our worlds (as well as the differences) in order to give you a clearer picture.

  I am the leader of a resistance group called the Initiates. We oppose the tentacled sky fiends who are the administrators of these reality simulations. On this side of the dream, the battle is ongoing, and I am forever in need of troops and new volunteers, awakened souls with a fiery intelligence and clarity of thought; for on this side of the dream, the laws of science need not apply. Concepts such as time exist in the mind, like memories, and therefore have no influence on the external world. So even though we exist in different spheres of time, once you wake up you’ll be here with me, now.

  I am, in a sense, recruiting you.

  I need your help.

  You would benefit to hear how I was awakened. Some souls are fortunate enough to wake up on their own; some require a little talking and encouragement; others require much discourse and a virulent kick in the pants; alas, some refuse to wake up at all, turning with stubborn refusal and condemning themselves to a life of illusion.

  My name is Derlin Beare and I was born in the southernmost
dome-city of Bonthrial, where the continent of South America exists in your Atlantic Ocean, to a mother and father, both of whom worked as high-level executives in the offices of the Intro-God. My parents were both robotic, in that they were both bio-engineered and genetically pre-designed.

  In my world most humans were conceived this way, in a Petri dish instead of in a female womb, usually the work of artificially intelligent mechanisms under the control of the Intro-God. I was blessed with the natural birth, a phenomenon becoming altogether unknown.

  My childhood was uneventful for the most part. Having partially robotic parents meant there wasn’t a lot of emotional outbursts or intense arguing. Life for me was calm and peaceful, and most of it was given over to study. My parents worked fourteen-hour days and so I was alone most of the time. My interest was in metaphysics, a field I gravitated toward from the moment I entered the scholarly halls of the Intro-God’s Learning Facilities. Metaphysics, which had been banned nearly a dozen times, was a controversial field for obvious reasons: the sky gods didn’t like anyone picking at the seams of their simulacra, finding holes, and divulging the secrets to the rest of us.

  Because my life was so drab, so uneventful and lonely, I chose rebelliously to go into the field of metaphysics, knowing there were social repercussions. Since I was a natural birth and not bio-engineered, I had full access to my emotions, which meant I couldn’t just tune out the boredom and plug into the Intro-God mainframe and let it absorb my consciousness.

  I wanted to shake things up.

  By age ten I was deep into it. With no siblings or friends, and semi-robotic parents, I devoted myself to study. I found refuge in the halls of the Learning Center, in the books of esteemed philosophers.

  I began my inquiry into the nature of reality with Aristotle but quickly graduated to Hume and Kant and Descartes. I studied the works of these great minds for hours, immersing myself in their thought processes. I hadn’t yet generated any of my own thinking, but this was a germination period.

  Later I found Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and Leibniz and was never quite the same. Reading the words of these men did strange things to my mind. I understood why the Intro-God discouraged people from looking into metaphysics. It became clear that every natural “law” and governmentally established “rule” was a fraud, a mere guess at the truth, conjecture.

  It got to the point that I couldn’t determine what was real and so began stumbling through life in a daze. I was still a teenager at the time. My parents noticed the change and had something to say about it, but being that they were partially robotic, once I reasoned with them clearly and delivered my argument (which was infallible) for desiring a career as a metaphysicist, they were forced to acquiesce.

  I did, however, notice a repulsion on their part with respect to me. This triggered bouts of depression and emotional instability, but I was able to overcome my despair. It’s true I had always felt alone.

  I graduated with a degree in philosophy, moved out of my parents’ house, and took up a permanent residence in the city. I began my work writing papers for the annals of the Intro-God. These could be reviewed by the human population at large via the mainframe. Although the administrative drones and monitors discouraged my kind of works they allowed them in order to maintain the semblance of a free society. That is how I reached the many humans who now make up the Initiates.

  It is also how I am reaching you. This is a trickling down through the circuit board bars of the prison. Inside the Intro-God, while there is time, time is mutable, so I can bend it to my liking and get my words to whomever I please.

  But back to my story. I had begun reading the works of two men from your time. One was a theoretical physicist named Albert Einstein. The other a well-known science fiction author named Phillip K. Dick. I was introduced to the idea of a simulated universe. I read other men who wrote on the topic, men who came many years after your time. Spiegel Goldstein, Jensen Roth, Wellington James, and Harlan A. Cartwright.

  I assimilated their works and underwent another change. Then I started my experiments.

  They began as a sort of trance-induced meditation. I had been reading extensively on the ancient religion of Hinduism, so some of my ideas were taken from various sources concerning that. I would sit cross-legged in my home for hours with my eyes closed as I focused on my breathing, mentally whispering mantras designed to subdue my thoughts. There was also a kind of imagining that went with this; not daydreaming, but a form of visualization…

  I became so immersed in these meditations that coming out of them was equivalent to entering another world. The moment I opened my eyes I would see the particles and atoms scattering back together like gold dust, reshaping themselves into the physical phenomena I recognized as my home.

  One day I opened my eyes and the walls and ceiling were melting like ice cubes. Not long after, I was given to visions, which I recorded in a leather bound journal. Consider the following:

  I am diving down into the sea, all the way to the ocean floor, where I don my suit of iron and step clumsily through the water. I stalk like a giant over fissures and waving aquatic plants. Soon I come to a great beast lying like a mountain inside a deep gorge. Its many eyes glare up at me. Its flailing tentacles prod the water.

  It speaks without words, conveying messages directly into my head. It asks me why I have come, and I reply that I am merely in a dream, that I only seek the truth about things—a truth I cannot seem to find.

  The beast smiles and opens its cavernous maw. It informs me that it is The Gatekeeper, and then, with the creation of a swirling eddy, it sucks me straight into oblivion…

  The visions terrified me, and they filled my sleep with nightmares. But I knew I was on to something. I was finally carving out my own breech in reality, just like the great metaphysicians I admired. I expanded my ideas in the papers I wrote for the Intro-God’s annals and was contacted by humans who felt the same way. I began inviting these humans to my home for discourse. This began a long period of digesting the metaphysical information I had read in my youth.

  Around this time I was contacted by a higher intelligence, a strange non-physical being I knew only as Key. Key first appeared to me while I was deep in meditation. The being guided me through visions, such as the one described above, and I learned a great deal.

  The being followed me wherever I went, spoke inside my head, a voice comely and plain, offering me its higher wisdom. The more I took its advice, the more I learned to trust it. Soon it was guiding me like the North Star.

  Now the walls of every structure I viewed were never more than translucent glass planes. The sky outside seemed as flimsy as the artificial glass dome covering our city. Occasionally I would see great distortions in space itself, blurry rips in the fabric of reality, which I spent a lot of time studying. Some people thought I was mad, but my converts read my papers and listened to my lectures eagerly.

  I was pulling myself out—out of what and into where, I had no idea—but I soon drew the attention of the tentacled sky gods from beyond the veil. Since they’re the administrators of these reality simulations, they’re always watching, monitoring for those who approach that moment of waking up, for they wish us to remain asleep, existing in a state of perpetual unconsciousness, so they can use our hearts and our thoughts as power generators and fuel cells, while meanwhile we race like mice through their hideous reality simulators.

  They appeared in my dreams. Key alerted me to their presence before going off into the murmurous background of my mind. Then I’d find myself standing in a great confusion of stars and celestial objects, with geometric planes slanting at preposterous angles, creating a dizzying Tower of Babel that reached toward the sky.

  Those awe-inspiring fiends came down from the upper atmosphere in gaseous clouds and plumes of red fire, their tentacles weaving out flower-like at all sides. They gathered around me, the size of tall buildings, gazing with vile black eyes, and I, quivering in my feeble suit of flesh, wept and wailed and moaned
, cursing them back to Hell.

  I stood before the tentacled sky gods and heard their voices in my head, a relaxed choir of sounds whose songlike message to me was simply—

  “Sleep… Sleep… Sleep…”

  I awoke from such visions doused in sweat, screaming at the top of my lungs.

  The beings began popping up in my waking life. Often I’d be walking down the stone pathways of the city, heading to the Learning Facilities or back from the grocer’s, and I would suddenly become conscious of a breech in the sky. A throbbing wound of many colors—oranges and golds and reds—which I first suspected was a crack in the dome. But then I saw thick green tentacles probing through the tears, slippery green stalks the size of mountains, prodding at me in an almost sardonic manner, as if to say, Aha, we see you… I was good at keeping my composure, but sometimes these visions caught me off guard and scared the hell out of me. I was known to scream abruptly in crowds and fall to my knees.

  My world grew darker.

  I remained indoors, afraid to leave the house and face the accusatory looks of the civilians and Learning Facility workers. Many of my converts abandoned me during this time, thinking me mad. But a few of them remained, tending to my neurotic needs. These few eventually transmigrated with me.

  The day came when Key spoke firmly and directly in my head, possibly the last time I heard its voice. It told me I was now the key. Key to what? I asked. To the prison, it replied, and then it went silent. A door emerged in the middle of my bedroom, a shimmering holographic image of blues and yellows, standing upright, attached to nothing. It was composed of a partially translucent substance, which flickered in and out of sight.

  My converts could also see this manifestation, and they bid me to open it.

  I did.

  Blinding light streamed into the room, incinerating everything in sight. I stepped forward, the converts following behind me. Everything re-collapsed on itself—time, space, matter—until I felt immaterial.