***
Not a Test
***
Conrad staggered through the dark, rain slicked lawns, cursing the closed and locked fences that he’d have no chance of hopping in his current state. He cursed the moon for its cowardice too, for it had seemingly decided him not worthy of its light, despite its earlier promises of fullness. Most all, however, he cursed his weak DNA, for its unruliness. Every time he swung his bad leg forward and dropped it like a lead cannon in front of him it drew a muffled gasp from below, and a wince from above. He didn’t enjoy being forced to be the pedigree in this cruel experiment, but he was also grateful that he was not a head growing out of a foot, attached to a bulging veined tree trunk of a leg, several feet too long to be properly useful.
The streets seemed to have disappeared completely from existence, the distant glow of streetlamps long ago snuffed from visible horizons. He had little doubt that this was just another experiment; that he was a rat in a maze and all of his hopes of finding and warning anyone were a cheese at the end that he would never taste. But he had to try; this had gone on too long. For two weeks his home had been an island universe, a world of terrible possibilities in which nobody had any control over anything. The very laws of the physical world had rebelled against their sensibilities and he and his family had been left to claw at the open windows where neighbors could be seen mowing their lawns in blissful ignorance. They would pound at the glass made somehow indestructible and scream at the mail man as he wiped sweat from his uniform brow, sometimes looking directly at them through the open blinds. Yet somehow he always looked through them, wondering where it was the Tenisons had moved to in such a hushed hurry.
Shaking off these fantastic and terrifying memories, he suddenly realized that he was trapped. The fences had conspired to move in against him when he wasn’t paying attention. The entrance to the strange yard he had wandered into had already disappeared. He ambled up to a wooden fence, one that looked ill-constructed, maybe even breakable. A light was dawning over the fence to his back; he drew in a quick panicked gasp that, tainted by pure primordial fear tasted of copper.
“I’m sorry James, but it looks like the end anyway,” the growth on his leg mewled; he doubted it was even his brother enough to understand the words coming out of his mouth. “This isn’t life anyhow.“ the last syllable of the word came out as a choked sob.
He drew back his leg, holding it straight under one arm, and swung it full force into the fence. The howl that issued from its mouth was almost as sickening as the wet crunch of the impact, but less so than the dark viscous stain that was left to slide down the face of the wood. It cried out only once. He noted this through his tears as he pulled the leg back again, a terrible sun still dawning ominously at his shoulders. The impact and the crunch this time was less terrible, no cry issued forth, but the splintering of wood gave him a sudden maddening hope. He looked back only once and the sight that met his eyes caused him to froth at the mouth. The shining dome of a human skull, eyes that rolled blankly towards the heavens like that of a character in a religious painting, rose above the threshold. Its own luminescence did nothing to appease the horror of its true nature. A bell seemed to toll from the bowls of the Earth in low tones that made the bones in his shoulder revolt. His arm squirmed of its own volition like a creature trying to escape the trap of its own physical being. This was not how he imagined his own death. He had never been a religious man, and maybe this was his punishment. For what else had the abilities to remold existence to such degrees than a God?
“Gods be damned.” He muttered, pulling his leg back and swinging it with maddening force at the weakened fence. With impact he felt the tendons in his leg snap and recoil into his midriff while the entire length and height of the fence shattered like a pane of glass, dragging the sky and the ground with it in a chain reaction of impossible fractures. He pitched forward, clawing at a vacuum so complete his eyes dripped from their sockets, as if in pursuit of all the light that had suddenly been sucked from the universe.
***
The Almost Remembered
***
Nathan woke up with the sun’s arm stretched out across his forehead like that of an inconsiderate bedmate. Even to his half-unconscious grasping mind, this was much in keeping with his manifold expectations. He would get up soon, and ooze into his slippers. He would do this not only out of habit, but because he already knew he was going to do it. There was no point in denying this fact. And simply because he knew he was going to do it before the fact, was no indication that he could change his mind-- do something else. It was as it is with déjà vu, which he was fairly certain this was not. Déjà vu simply did not last days on end, you see.
He knew quite instinctively everything that would happen next, yet he had no power to change it. It was a sick compulsion that led him to fumble into every foretold snafu in a sort of uncontrolled physiological ignorance. It was the force that had once guided his hand in that one last violent saw, seconds after realizing he was about to slice open the webbing between his thumb and forefinger with a steak knife in trying to pry apart some frozen meat patties. Perhaps there was some unconscious or supra-conscious part of his mind recoiling in bloody massacre seconds before fulfillment of the prophecy, but the ID was always infuriatingly subjected to the causations of ignorance. It was driving his inward self mad.
He shuffled to the bathroom in one stretch of a yawn. He stared in the mirror and tried to think of something random to do. He ached for the freedom to be impulsive, but even the random thoughts that came to his mind were pre-dictated by the a priori thought train that lay like an elastic fog over his mind.
“Fuck it.” This was his cue to stop thinking for the day.
He showered, shaved and dressed. He had to put on his monkey suit and pander to the inferior for little green pieces of paper that stood for credit. This knowledge was a comfort at least, because it was universally undeniable.
He took a piss. He grabbed his keys. He kissed his wife. He got in his car. He drove to work. He worked for eight hours, going silently insane.
“I’m making busses. I’m just making busses out of uniform, yellow pieces of metal.”
“Excuse me?”
He snaps to and realizes that he is answering a question from a customer.
“Have a nice day Ms. Hawthorne.” He blushes and hands over her change. She gives him a wary look as she leaves.
People were beginning to have trouble understanding him.
On the drive home, he started thinking again.
He had an inkling once. A shred of shade in the blinding light; he often confused shapes for faces. Windows and streetlights with innumerable chances for reflection; therein lie worlds that sheltered phantoms, the twitch of a sidelong glance gleaning them weeping from their refuge. Meaningless objects were suddenly metaphors for things grander than himself. He couldn’t remember who it was that said it: “We only attach meaning to the things we don’t understand.”
This was all wrong. Whoever said that was a nut job. The telephone was for long distance communication between two people, not a metaphor for physical disingenuousness.
“The world just isn’t what it used to be.” He would tell this to his cat, Schrodinger. He was a good cat because he pretended quite competently to understand English. It had something to do with a certain ubiquitous look of wisdom in his eyes. It told of unconscious propaganda, a covetable evolutionary trait.
Ptolemy3.
Such vivid dreams…
What is that, a stretching ceramic gas cloud? White, as the inner dense swirl is green-grey and incandescent, it could be a man. A woman more likely, because of the elegant tapering of limbs, but it is only a silhouette and could be distorted. Nothing could really be that tall…
That was the day he remembered Hilliard Cole in a dream, then went and told him about it. He felt like such a fool.
“Hill, have you ever uh, tried to remember yourself?”
“What the bloody ass are you talking about?”
“Nothing, just shopping for lima beans!” He grabbed the can off the shelf in triumph and threw it in his cart. He even bought the damn lima beans, and sat they did for two weeks in his cupboard. He was pretty sure he could find a metaphor for that too.
***
The Forgotten
***
They say there’s essentially no difference to your brain between watching television and perceiving actual reality. In memory it’s all the same, a collection of sounds and images crammed into the cerebral cortex and filed for later perusing. The main reason why people can tell the difference between the two so easily is because the television never really speaks directly to the person watching it. It’s a vicarious simulated experience, which tends to help make the separation easier for the viewer. But what would happen if the television suddenly did start speaking to you? Saying things like:
“Don’t kill yourself, Hill! Everybody loves you! You have perfect skin and teeth! Male pattern balding? Suicide is not the answer! Do your coward race a credit! Could you really go through with it after seeing this?”
And then, as if the terrifying, satirical audacity of that wasn’t enough, it cut to this:
Shot of a large skyscraper standing alone in the decimated ruins of what was once assumed to be a bustling metropolis. The effect of this singular building untouched and polished to a sheen amongst such utter and uncanny decimation, is truly unsettling. The windows on every single floor suddenly burst outward violently and thousands of tiny flailing silhouettes are ejected with the glittering spray. They are soon identified as people by the trademark motions of their panicked fluttering descents. A commentator begins speaking in the disinterested tone of a wildlife observer.
“In this experiment, by using unique gravitational fluctuations, every single occupant of the building has been launched out into the open air, along with computer chairs, large wooden desks, framed inspirational posters, pencil sharpeners, water-coolers, coat racks, paperweights, telephones, purses filled with Children’s Tylenol…”
The voice continues to list mundane items in a monotone drawl as the camera zooms in shakily to catch the carnage on a more intimate level. At first it seems that those on the first and second floors are the lucky ones, as the cameras are fortunate to catch them bleeding on the streets from their relatively short falls, some lacerated beyond all recognition from the precipitation of razor sharp glass. But as the other bodies begin to hit the ground it turns out this is not the case. Many of them are too injured to avoid the falling bodies as they crash into them at terrible velocities, making basic soup out of all parties involved.
At this point your poor little brain would probably be in a tailspin, especially if your name was Hilliard Cole. Especially—if only to further muddle your sensibilities-- it repeated this for hours on end in an insect voice:
“Hilliard Cole, this is not a test. This is not a test, Hilliard Cole. The time for panic is long past. Hilliard Cole, this is not a test…”
“Yes,” Hill whispered to himself, in answer to the question first posed: Could you really go through with it after seeing this? And then again louder, “Fuck yes.”
Any man, meek or great, would be capable of doing anything after being faced with a sight like that. However, whatever had orchestrated this didn’t understand people very well. It wasn’t threats like this that kept him from offing himself. It was the challenge of knowing. He had to see it through to the end; he couldn’t leave well enough alone, despite the terror that had invaded every cell of his body, making him impotent and jelly-like, and completely irrational. For a rational man would have killed himself long ago.
But that wasn’t the whole story. He had definitely taken suicide into consideration, but had finally decided that whatever force he was reckoning with was far too powerful to let him do anything it didn’t condone. But supposing it was omnipotent, then why bother trying to dissuade him in the first place? Maybe free will was the experiment here. If that was the case then he was grateful that he missed the boat on gravitational fluctuations.
He clicked the T.V. off and shuddered violently, an involuntary reflex that had become commonplace as of late. Six days now, and it felt like a religious event. He wondered what the seventh might have in store for him, apart from this seeming limbo where demons talked to him through the television set.
What would it be today? He wondered. Television was absolutely no longer an option. The terrible images were too much to bear, especially following the dreams he had had that night. Would it be the long walk again? He grabbed his coat off the rack, where a perfect copy of it still managed to hang. The same event transpired where he slipped on his shoes. Two coats, two pairs of shoes, two of everything he laid his hands on. There was another one of him out there too; he was at work right now but would be back soon. He preferred to not be home when he got back; it was too unnerving to observe himself wandering around the apartment, acting as he would if everything were right with his life.
He opened the door and another door stayed in its place, as if untouched. This door was of no consequence to him, he walked through it, out into the approaching dusk.
He craned his neck and cast a glance upward at the night sky. Something else he noticed after he had become immaterial: there were some odd shapes in the sky at night. Three bright fluctuating objects had surrounded the moon in a triangular formation. They were each no bigger than a large star, or a planet would seem. The one on the bottom-left seemed to glint the brightest, like a small mirror catching the sun’s rays in the desert might, if it was being pointed directly at your face. The thought disturbed him, so he tucked his hands in his coat pockets, hunched his shoulders, and began to walk.
“The long walk it is!” He screamed this venomously, spitting abrasively into Tracy Farmer’s pretty little face as he passed her on the sidewalk. The spittle shot through her like a projection, and then she did the same through him, in the same manner. He backhanded through her head for the hell of it, and continued on his cabin fever filled rampage.
The way out of town was an easy enough route. It’s where everyone was always headed that was ever worth a damn. He liked to have considered himself one of those in his better days. The feeling of leaving town was just about the best feeling in the world for him. He came up to the sign, and sighed stepping into the thickening fog.
***
Effigies
***
It was a beautiful day in Flemingsburg, the birds were singing full praise of this fact from their perches far above the head of little Gregory Tiche. He sat in holy covet of the two prize specimens he had just discovered in the little wooded area behind his house. He had in his possession two live toads, captured in a jar. His tools, which lay on the ground next to his muddy sneakers, consisted of a crowd of nails, a brick, and a hammer. Today he would start his early training as either a scientist, or a sociopath. The difference was in the method, and what essentially marked the separation between a curiosity that was either morbid or well-grounded. There was actually very little by way of telling between the two. Both sadists and scientists had the same curious look on their faces when they worked, interestingly enough; a strange half-smile, head cocked to the side, eyes full of wonder. Needless to say, the moral cutoff in this situation was dubious at best.
He grabbed the first toad in his hand and peered into its averted eyes as it squirmed in what seemed to be theatrical effort.
“Mr. Mulberry, we appreciate your contribution, to the world of science.” He orated to the amphibian.
He set Mr. Mulberry on the grass and held him pinned with one hand as he brought forth one of the nails. He positioned it above the right elbow of the toad with his pinning hand and grabbed the hammer up. With one fell swing he drove the nail through the arm bone and into the ground. The toad croaked noiselessly in an almost comical display; opening and closing its mouth like a fish out of water. Gregory imagined that he could hear the guttural cry of some man off in the distance. He put it out of his mind in order to focus on the task at hand.
At this point he no longer needed to hold Mr. Mulberry down with his one hand, and instead was free to let him jerk and pivot painfully around the fulcrum of his impaled appendage. Taking a nail between his thumb and forefinger and holding the hammer in his other hand, he put the tip of the nail to the toad’s throat. From what he had learned in science class, if he drove the nail through right about… here—he moved it up a centimeter—then he could skewer the brain. He brought the hammer down hard, sending one singular spasm through the toad’s body before it settled into its rigors. The experiment was a success, however… this time he had clearly heard a scream from some distance behind him. This one was different however; it was a woman’s scream.
He turned around to see the front door of a house a few blocks away burst open and a woman running frantically from the threshold; she seemed to be quite upset. He was about to stand up and investigate when he heard the sound of glass on concrete. He turned back around to see that his jar had overturned and Mrs. Mulberry was well on her way to escape.
“I don’t think so!” he said, grinning as he stooped to pick up the brick. He walked over casually to tower over the escaping toad and held the brick at arm’s length. He let it drop directly on the toad with a sound that could only be described as a slop-crunch.
Over Gregory’s shoulder, four blocks away in the middle of the street, the screaming woman suddenly folded in on herself like an accordion, becoming in the span of less than a second nothing more than a textured stain, accompanied by her very own corresponding slop-crunch.
***
Mirror Man
***
There is a shimmering glass bead surrounded by a darkness so complete that it negates itself. It rotates in all directions at once and sounds of a thousand angels playing the harpsichord, singling low in a single syllable.
It says: “OHM.”
This, one can only assume, is the universe as viewed outside of being.
Glorious.
Glass beads shatter, salvation decays into memory. Sodie becomes conscious, and the world is suffering.
He becomes aware of the DNA memories first. Sodie is from many worlds at once, and yet he is born into nothingness. All of his memories are of dead things.
Sodie was born into a sea of amniotic memory, thus not technically a newborn. Nevertheless, the untold devastation from which he was wrought brought sky-wracking cries from his twisted maw, scaring even the specters of the Nihil back into the light.
Or so it is told.
By whom it is told remains mystery to this day, for nothing from the Nihil save Sodie has ever had need for lips or lids or lobes. One could say he was something special. His suffering alone kept him in constant transformation. Ever dying, never dead; he simply didn’t have the capacity for it.
Say the screaming past was cleared from his sight like brush, and he could see the beckoning light; he would never be allowed to reach it. Tragically, his spirit subsided in half-lives, thus cutting each step towards his demise in half; never reaching zero.
Blessed zero intermingled slyly with eternity.
Sodie had been alive for mere seconds and he was already several lifetimes sick of existence. There were too many of him inside, all longing for release.
And sometimes he dripped.
He would come to call it his “Olfactory man-gumbo…” Then he would smile wryly; born mercifully with some cleverness. The masters, without any concept of humor, would only note the cracking and leaking of his lips with some concern.
The masters… memories that have not happened yet. Promises of ascension?
As for his current situation: he could only tell of darkness, darkness and vertigo, and perhaps the rushing of a great waterfall in the distance. And memories, so close at hand with nothing else to occupy his thoughts-- maybe be a synthesis of limbo and hell? Helmbo… Limbell... Words tumbled through his head without focus or purpose.
“Good day creature.” A booming heavenly voice, nay! A human voice; close by. What sort of trickery could it be? He wondered to the best of his baffled abilities.
“You speak a familiar tongues man-human-man…” his voice erupted biliously, startling him into silence. He tried again. “Humor my—eye touch—faces, show…” ptomaine bubbled in his throat, filtering his words into a gurgle. He wasn’t used to speaking yet, especially with members of extinct species.
“There is no light in this place yet. Would you care to see the light?” The voice cooed in amateur emulation.
Sodie whimpered and his ear fell off. It hit the ground (?) and disappeared. Another began to bud in its place immediately.
“I… I?” He stopped there, lodged by a sudden and monumental existential confusion.
“The Hecatoncheires?” The masters! He knew not to what he owed this knowledge, nor was he reckless enough to probe it.
“Sol Niger!” Sodie nodded fervently.
“Now you’re getting it.” The voice gloated. “Come now, you’ve a purpose first, believe it or not.”
“Where…?”
“Where are we, you ask? Why, we’ve fallen off the edge of the world. Keep an eye out for a man on a tortoise, he knows the way back.”
“Whether ‘tis nobler…”
“Contemplating death already my sticky friend?”
***
Alchemy
***
Day 79, Flemingsburg: Suspicions of Entropy Dilation
The universe tends towards dissimilation. This is a universal law and it applies everywhere in the known human cosmos. In this particular case, subject 23; a dangerous number, (despite being a man of science I’ve noticed that when working in matters of the subconscious, a little healthy superstition never hurt) has displayed certain strange tendencies. We see here a sort of decelerated dispersion of order. This is an unforeseen consequence and must be studied carefully.
Preserved by what I lovingly refer to as the “Timeline Ouroboros Effect,” I hypothesis that the contents of the subconscious are specially preserved on a more intimate level with surrounding reality. It is only a matter of time before the ID of subject A becomes so different from the prominent inner psyche of subject B that a crack will form and the two will be empirically distinguishable.
I believe this is what the Hecatoncheires have been looking for all along: the dynamic spiritual tension that is the secret to human potentiality.
Regarding “independent” studies:
Second subject is coming along as expected. Dissolution of morality is beginning to make itself known. The illusion of free will has been successfully transplanted. Interesting side note: it still remains unclear as to which is the illusion, between free will and determinism. Both seem equally viable when worked out mathematically. Perhaps it is all just a matter of relativity.
Either way, this is my hypothesis: Without the burden of free will a man can be shaped to understand the cosmos deterministically. If you say this or that will happen he has no choice but to accept. If you say you will commit said atrocity he has no choice but to accept it as a turning of the gears in a clock-work cosmos. If someone is no longer required to shoulder any blame of existence, the sin of omission that is referred to as evil should rear its ugly beautiful head.
-S. d’Artagnan
