The Year of the Hydra

by William Broughton Burt

  “Which government?” she asks.

  “All the governments. It seems to go back to that job Lil and I had with Hydrangea Labs.”

  “The one with the connections?”

  I nod. “Our names went into all the databanks and forgot to come back out again. Yours, too, evidently. You remember what happened in Italy?”

  “Remember?” says Tree. “They detained us for eighteen hours.”

  “And Argentina? And returning from Argentina? It’s not just the governments, Tree. Or the agencies. Or the cartels. Or the secret societies. Whatever and whoever these people are, they don’t seem to like my sister and me very much. Especially when we’re around you.”

  “You don’t have to convince me of anything,” says Tree, unfazed. “If you can bend a spoon, you can interfere with communications. You can influence negotiations. You can do a lot of things. But what those people don’t know is, energy is hierarchical in nature. All that cloak and dagger stuff is very low. Of course you and Lillian weren’t attracted to that. You came in with a much higher purpose.”

  “Yes, well,” I say wearily.

  “There’s no yes well about it,” says Tree. “The three of us came here on a mission, and people can sense that. Fear-based people sense it right away. They are challenged by our very existence.”

  “Actually it goes a little farther than you know,” I tell her. “The Chinese remote viewing program went dark the minute we came here. They think we’re responsible.”

  “We are.”

  I look at the woman across the table. “What?”

  Tree leans toward me. “Julian, the instant the three of us met, something happened. Our energies combined, and something new came about. You remember what we did to people’s computers?”

  “Fried them.”

  She nods. “Stereos, TVs, everything we came near. Now that our energy has stabilized, we no longer throw off those spikes—but we do interfere with certain things.”

  “Such as?” I ask.

  “Such as evil.”

  “Evil?” I reply uncomfortably.

  “Spirituality without ethics,” says Tree, “and it’s very real. All I’m saying, Jules, is that certain energies come apart the moment they enter our field. We don’t do anything. They just can’t be where we are.”

  “So you’re telling me that we could be blocking Chinese remote viewers without knowing it?”

  “Of course we could. Listen, when our feet first touched this soil, something shifted. I knew it then, just as I know it now. China’s the place. This is where we’re to do our work.”

  I avert my eyes.

  “You talk about shadow governments,” says Tree. “Those things are only as real as our own shadow, Julian. If our personal and collective shadows are filled with fear and lies, we will definitely see that in the outer world—but the way we deal with that is through our internal work. Doing our healing. Generating a clear signal. Broadcasting a healed energy. Not turning our tails and running. Never. No matter what we see. That’s our work, Jules, and it’s the most revolutionary work anyone can possibly do. You and I and Lillian are the most dangerous people on this planet. And yes, the citadels of power do tremble before us.”

  “That’s kind of what I’m saying, Tree, only the citadels of power aren’t limited to just trembling.”

  “What have I always said?” she says, lifting her teacup with a smile. “Whenever we do something powerful for the good, the Opponent appears. All that tells me, baby, is that we’re exactly on message.”

  I feel Tree’s warm hand grip my wrist. “It’s the children, Jules. They called us here, just as their souls called us to this planet. The real work won’t be done by us but by others far greater. We’re just preparing the soil. When the time comes for us to do our small part, help will be provided.”

  I force myself not to fidget.

  “I know you don’t believe it,” says Tree. “That’s why I do. One of us has to hold a place for it. One of us has got to see it until everybody can see it. I know it’s there. I’m looking at it. The time will come when you see it, too.”

  I lift my face to hers. “Tree. The moment Lil arrives, I’m out of here. Just out, okay? You need to understand that.”

  Tree’s cell phone rings. Her eyes still on mine, she says, “I don’t understand anything, baby. I just see.”

  On the phone is Xu. The guards won’t let him in.

  “I’m on my way,” Tree says, closing her phone and hurrying out the door.

  For better or worse, so am I. Very soon I’ll find out whether Daddy was kind enough to clean up all my little debts in Memphis. Miriam meanwhile is sending airfare in return for my promise to produce a series of articles on second-generation Chinese-Americans. Fine with me as long as my research doesn’t take me anywhere near Westmont. Meanwhile, I have a lot of housecleaning to do before my sister shows. The literal kind with a bucket and brush. No rat trap will be necessary, at least. It seems to have vaporized for good. Serves it right.

  My eyes fall once more on Tree’s refrigerator art. 8 + 9 = 13. Or whatever you’d like it to equal, darling. It’s the feeling that counts. For a moment my eyes linger on the three orbs in a row, and suddenly I remember something. What that word means. Syzygy. It means three orbs lined up in a perfect row. As I consider that, the door pops opens and Tree and Xu enter, laughing.

  “They didn’t want to let Mr. Xu in,” announces Tree breathlessly, “because his ID showed an Australian address.”

  “So much paranoia!” says Xu, approaching to shake my hand. “At the airport, we weren’t allowed off the plane before everyone’s temperature was checked.”

  “Beastly,” I say.

  “Mrs. Carter tells me you’re returning to the United States, Julian.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “A going-away gift then,” beams Xu, dumping the contents of a small paper sack onto the table. Individually-wrapped chocolate bunnies, each tied with a pink ribbon. Seems I’ve forgotten Easter again. Tree and Xu seat themselves at the table, and we each open a bunny.

  Xu’s eyes meet mine. “I hope I can convince you to remain in China for a few more days. I feel that something momentous will occur here in exactly nine days.”

  “How momentous,” I say.

  Tree places her warm hand on mine. “Julian, before you go into your turtle routine—just listen, okay? Lillian is about to join us here. Think about that. The three of us coming together just in time for one of the most important evolutionary events in history.”

  “Like the Three-three-three?” I say.

  “Forget the Three-three-three.”

  “I’m really trying.”

  Xu adjusts his glasses. “Actually Mrs. Carter’s intuition was very close. She expected a major penetration during the first half of 2003, and she was right. This information just came to me, actually.”

  “And a Ouija board had absolutely nothing to do with it?”

  “Julian,” says Tree.

  Xu continues, “The Fibonacci sequence does not after all plot the development of human civilization, as I first hypothesized. Why should the universe care about human civilization? What the universe cares about is consciousness. So I began to look at that and—”

  “Everything goes back to consciousness,” interrupts Tree. “It’s the one irreducible thing.”

  “That’s what my Taiji tells me,” says Xu, smiling. “I was practicing the other day and I realized that movement and consciousness go hand-in-glove. Movement is the way the eye of the body opens. The body is aware on many levels—but the eye of the body opens only when it’s moving in accord with the body’s design and purpose. The question is: what is that design and purpose? When that question occurred to me, I didn’t go to my head for the answer. I just kept moving, and instantly I knew. The body is designed to be a probe, just like every other living creature here. Everything is designed to, first and foremost, generate experience and transmit every detail of that experience
into a central databank.”

  I fold my arms, recalling something recently passed along to me by a particularly strident mushroom. The same brand of gibberish as Xu’s, basically. Minus the rotating boxes, which is fine with me.

  “When we’re able to relax the thinking process,” continues Xu, “and just observe first-hand, the truths just jump out at you. The universe is a vast exercise in self-awareness. It’s a methodical, meticulous ongoing self-exploration—a running inventory. The true business of every sentient creature, then, is to upload information to the central databank, the Akashic Records, the mind of God. Just however you want to say it. Here on Earth, our job is to explore the types of organic consciousness that arise from Fibonacci growth spirals. That’s how the Sequence can be so accurate in tracking everything—there’s nothing else here. Just that and awareness. The Sequence can absolutely predict where consciousness on this planet is going, and when it’s going there.”

  I look at him. “I have a feeling you’re just about to tell me.”

  Giggling, Xu clears a space on Tree’s round kitchen table. Placing an individually-wrapped chocolate bunny near his own teacup at the table’s edge, he says, “The first number of the Fibonacci sequence is, of course, Zero. That’s Wu Chi, the fertile void. Everything is undifferentiated. There was no consciousness at that point because there was no foreground-background. All there was, was a spark of curiosity.”

  “Why curiosity?” asks Tree.

  “See what I mean!” replies Xu. He and Tree share a laugh. “The way we know that is simply by looking around. What I see is a universe intensely interested in examining itself, knowing itself in every possible way. Which leads directly to the next step in the progression…”

  Xu places a second chocolate bunny several inches from the first and slightly farther from the edge of the table. “The second integer in the Fibonacci sequence is One. Selfhood. The primordial ‘I am.’ It was like an eye suddenly opening. The problem was, nothing existed except that single eye, so there was nothing to see. So the next step was as inevitable as the first.”

  Xu sets down a third chocolate bunny, this one nearly midway to the center of the table. “Another One. The mirror image of God looking back at him. The reflection was exact in every way. No difference except that the creative power lay in the original One. The second One is just a reflection. It’s what you and I call the universe. The second One was the Big Bang. So now we arrive at the first event that has a date. The Big Bang occurred thirteen point seven billion years ago.” Xu pushes his glasses up his nose. “Now all we need is a second verifiable date, and everything lines up.”

  Xu lifts a fourth chocolate rabbit and holds it aloft. “Now we arrive at the Two. Up until now, everything has been unified. Not anymore.” He sets the rabbit down near the center of the table. “Here we have the birth of duality. Original yin and yang. Some say it was the fall from grace because the One and the One looked each other in the eye and said, ‘I’m not you. There’s a fundamental difference between us.’ The Two was the beginning of a great adventure, and it was also the birth of estrangement and alienation and disempowerment—you name the problem, it started right here with the Two.”

  “The terrible twos,” says Tree, grabbing the fertile void and unwrapping it.

  Xu says, “I asked myself what date to plug in for the Two. I decided to try ten thousand B.C.E., which is roughly when the human forebrain reached its present state of development. Think about it! For hundreds of thousands of years, we were just these happy, thoughtless hunter-gatherers. I don’t mean stupid. I just mean we weren’t abstract thinkers. Suddenly this huge forebrain comes online and wham, we’re seeing everything from this spooky theoretical distance. We’re seeing our own lives and our own deaths in abstract terms. We’re still channeling that original curiosity, that original ‘Who am I?’ Only now it’s a whole range of questions. Now it’s ‘Where am I?’ and ‘How did I get here?’ and ‘Where am I going?’ and ‘Why is all this happening to me?’ Those questions had never occurred to us before.”

  Xu leans forward. “We were suddenly at a distance from truths that had always been self-obvious before. Our intuitive grasp was gone. We’d been cast out of the Garden of Eden, or that’s how we felt. Now it was up to us to reacquire all our knowledge the hard way, through learning. In a way, the Two was a fall from grace, but it was unavoidable. That’s where the Sequence takes you. It has to be explored all the way to the end.”

  “And we’re the ones exploring it,” says Tree, turning to me. “I’ve always said that we volunteered for this. We asked to do this dirty work, to explore the darkest and most disorienting place in the multiverse: that place where we experience ourselves as separate from God. We came to bring the light to this place, and we are doing it, Nimbutsu Nimbutsu Nimbutsu.”

  Xu lifts another chocolate bunny and gives it a shake. “Which brings us to the principle of reconciliation. Again it’s an inevitable consequence of what has come before.”

  With a thump, Xu places the fifth bunny down very near the center of the table. “The Three. The Holy Spirit. The Comforter. This was the dawn of spirituality.”

  “Halleluiah and amen,” says Tree.

  “Only it wasn’t intended to be worshipful,” adds Xu, “or sentimental or anything of the kind. It was a cognitive correction, a way to get the One and the One—”

  “Seeing eye to eye?” I suggest.

  Xu grins. “Very good, Julian.”

  “Thank you. And what would be the date on that?”

  He sucks his teeth. “If the Two came in twelve thousand years ago, that puts the Three somewhere very near 3,000 B.C.E. There are practically no historical accounts that go back that far, but the Chinese and Indian civilizations have stories that speak to that time. There were sages, very powerful individuals who rewrote what a human is capable of being. They say Fu Xi lived around that time. Fu Xi came up with the trigrams that became the I Ching. Suddenly people began connecting things. People were talking about enlightenment. The various wisdom traditions came into being around that time. We were starting to integrate the new forebrain into our former holistic way of seeing. We were completing the human brain, the human being. I think that’s all enlightenment is, really. Just coming into focus. A few individuals were ahead of the curve and got there first, and if you look at their teachings, they were just trying to clue us in. Of course, we could only understand in terms of fear and superstition, and it all got turned into religion. But look at any religion anywhere, and you’ll see that it began with one guy who arrived in himself.”

  “Ding!” says Tree, lifting the primordial I Am bunny and unwrapping it.

  “Tree’s eating the Godhead,” I complain.

  “Notice,” says Tree, “how the dates are getting closer together. Time is speeding up, people.”

  “Definitely,” says Xu. “The historical spiral is getting tighter. That would place the next step, the Five, the Pentagram, roughly twenty-three hundred years ago. There’s a lot of historical information about that period of time. The Five seems to be all about complexity. Suddenly we’re dealing with simultaneous waves and interference patterns and competing discourses. Different levels of consciousness are working themselves out. As a species, we were just beginning to integrate the Three, and now suddenly we’re at Five. We think of that time now as the dawn of science. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid—this explosion of highly disciplined rationalism expressing into public life. Suddenly we have architecture and oratory and universities, and intentional governmental design. The whole world changed because our ideas about the world had changed, and you can see that it all came about very, very suddenly.”

  A line appears between Xu’s eyes. “Now it gets really trippy.”

  He places the next chocolate bunny right beside the last one, even nearer the center of the table. The two are almost touching. “The Eight comes right on the heels of the Five. Remember, it took over thirteen billion years to get from
the third bunny to the fourth. Now we have the Eight less than two thousand years behind the Five. According to this spread, we arrived at the Eight in June, 1905.”

  “Einstein’s first paper on relativity,” I say.

  Xu nods. “Until that moment, everything was direct observation and deduction. Common sense. Einstein’s work—and that of the others working at that same time—began at the exact point where rationality hit the wall. We discovered the limits of classical observation and deduction. Einstein’s first paper demonstrated that the rational process is limited to its own conventions. We can escape those conventions but only in very small bursts and by the most extraordinarily energetic of means. At the same time, our instruments were getting more and more sensitive. Now we could catch glimpses of counter-intuitive things like dark matter and anti-matter and so on. Now we were using mathematical formulas to illuminate that landscape because it was so far beyond our powers of apprehension. Suddenly we’re discussing alternative universes and strings and wormholes and multi-directional time.” Xu shakes his head in wonder. “That’s the Eight.”

  “Turn a figure eight on its side,” says Tree, “and what do you have? Can you say we’re not in Kansas anymore?”

  Xu nods. “What came into question with the Eight was the very eyes we’re seeing with. We were born under the Eight, so it’s our zeitgeist, our paradigm. And yet—”

  Xu leaps to his feet and bounds across the room. “And yet,” he says, turning to face the table, “at the same time, we are so close to the center of the spiral now—right now in 2003—that we can actually feel it. Whatever is pulling us toward itself is casting its shadow back in time, and that shadow is touching our faces at this very moment.” He blinks wonderingly. “To me, that’s rather stimulating.”

  “By the way,” I say, “what is at the center of the spiral?”

  “To find out,” says Tree with a smile, “follow the rabbit.”

  “Umm,” says Xu, peering into his empty paper sack, “we seem to be fresh out of rabbits. Let’s just say that the center of the spiral is acting as an attractor. I don’t know how else to talk about it. Except that it’s the Twenty-One. That’s the last Fibonacci number that can be spoken of because the Twenty-One occasions a turn.”