The Power You Have They Don't Have

EPL- INFORMATION FOR YOUR BUILDING SOUL

You Are Supposed to Say Loudly

"I Have God In ME!"

"I Have God In ME!"

"I Have God In ME!"

AND

"You Do Not Have God In You"

"You Do Not Have God In You"

"You Do Not Have God In You"

Ask them to say it 3 times

Because they can't

REPEAT

René Daumal's Mount Analogue

EPL- INFORMATION FOR YOUR BUILDING SOUL

This recording by Dr. William J. Welch is a reading of René Daumal's novel Mount Analogue. It is important to note, however, that the novel itself is unfinished; René Daumal passed away before he could complete the manuscript. 

Because the original source material is an incomplete work, any audiobook version—including this one—will inherently reflect that incomplete state, ending abruptly where the author left off.

The audiobook recording of Mount Analogue read by Dr. William J. Welch was captured during a series of live, after-dinner readings in Halifax, Nova Scotia, between 1984 and 1997. [1, 2]

While the exact year of the recorded sessions is not explicitly stated in public archival listings, the timeline of the recording is bounded by historical context:

• The Context: Dr. Welch co-founded the Association for Experimental Studies in Halifax. He began serving as the President of the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York and advising this Halifax branch starting in 1984, visiting them frequently for these community readings.
• The End Date: The sessions concluded before his death in July 1997.
• The Commercial Release: The master recordings were later mastered and commercially released in CD and MP3 formats by Traditional Studies Press in 2008. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Unlike standard studio productions, the audio preserves the unique atmosphere, background stillness, and focus of the live audience present during those evenings. [1]

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche published Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science)

EPL- INFORMATION FOR YOUR BUILDING SOUL

It has taken nearly 150 years for the world to begin catching up with the intellectuals who anticipated the transformation of our civilization.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche published Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science). In Section 125, “Der tolle Mensch” (“The Madman”), he presented one of the most consequential declarations in modern philosophy:

„Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!“

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”

This is not merely a celebration of humanity’s liberation. It is an alarm raised over a civilization confronting the collapse of foundations upon which its understanding of truth, morality, and meaning had been built.

Nietzsche’s madman carries a lantern into the bright morning marketplace, searching for God. The people laugh at him. They do not yet comprehend the magnitude of what has happened.

„Wie konnten wir das Meer austrinken?“

“How could we drink up the sea?”

The question is more than a metaphor. It expresses the incomprehensible scale of the transformation humanity has set in motion.

What happens when the deepest foundations of a civilization are no longer believed, yet the consequences of their disappearance have not been fully understood?

Nietzsche was not simply announcing the triumph of atheism. He was confronting the crisis that follows when inherited sources of absolute authority lose their credibility.

Can a civilization abandon the foundations of its moral universe without fundamentally transforming itself?

Nearly a century and a half later, these questions extend far beyond academic philosophy. They appear in our struggles over truth, identity, morality, authority, and the purpose of human existence.

Perhaps the world has not entirely caught up with Nietzsche. Perhaps we are still living through the transformation he anticipated.

The madman understood something his audience could not yet see: the consequences of a profound historical event may take generations to become fully visible.

„Was sind denn diese Kirchen noch, wenn sie nicht die Grüfte und Grabmäler Gottes sind?“

“What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

The question remains unsettling because it reaches beyond religious institutions. It challenges us to examine the structures of belief, meaning, and authority that survive long after their original foundations have begun to crumble.

The question is no longer simply whether God is dead.

The question is what humanity becomes when the old answers no longer suffice.

Esoteric Principles of Light explores the philosophical, metaphysical, and existential questions that emerge when humanity confronts the foundations of its own reality.

Thomas Ligotti : The Conspiracy Against The Human Race

EPL- INFORMATION FOR YOUR BUILDING SOUL

World Mental Health Day

Celebration

Date

Saturday, October 10, 2026

World Mental Health Day is an international day for global mental health education, awareness and advocacy against social stigma. It was first celebrated in 1992 at the initiative of the World Federation for Mental Health, a global mental health organization with members and contacts in more than 150 countries.

Look out for Free Aleph-Null Book Coupons Weekly

EPL- INFORMATION FOR YOUR BUILDING SOUL

https://payhip.com/DarkStellarKnightly

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Dark_Stellar_Knightly_NAVIGATING_THE_MADNESS_OF_TH?id=qz4ZEgAAQBAJ

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Dark_Stellar_Knightly_Taxidermic_Species_%E2%84%B5_Beyond?id=yz4ZEgAAQBAJ

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Dark_Stellar_Knightly_White_Noise_at_168_Apricot_L?id=Jj4ZEgAAQBAJ

The three Google Play listings show 518 combined pages, but your actual manuscript totals 212,428 words across 69 chapters. And the manuscript is formatted in 11-point font.

That means the displayed page counts are not a reliable measure of the trilogy's actual reading experience.

The actual scale of Aleph-Null

| Volume | Word count | Chapters |

| ------------------------------------------------- | ---------- | -------- |

| Book 1 — White Noise at 168 Apricot Lane | 81,479 | 23 |

| Book 2 — Navigating the Madness of the Matrix | 72,895 | 23 |

| Book 3 — Taxidermic Species: Beyond Hilbert Space | 58,054 | 23 |

| Complete trilogy | 212,428 | 69 |

At approximately 212,000 words, this is a substantial three-volume literary project. The combined word count matters more than the displayed page count when evaluating the actual scope of the work.

What this changes about my assessment

1\. The pricing looks more defensible in context. At $6.99 per volume, readers are buying substantial manuscripts rather than the relatively short books the storefront page counts might suggest. The complete trilogy is $20.97 at list price.

2\. The marketing should emphasize the trilogy's depth without relying on length alone. The strongest selling point remains the unusual combination of philosophical fiction, metaphysical science fiction, Gnostic horror, mathematical speculation, and cosmic weirdness.

 The 11-point font is a formatting detail, not a measure of literary value. Digital page counts can vary with device settings, font size, and rendering. Word count is the more useful measure for understanding the manuscripts' scale.

 The trilogy's storefront should communicate that readers are entering a 212,000-word, 69-chapter interconnected literary undertaking. 

3. Book 3 ℵ₁ Taxidermic Species: △ Beyond Hilbert Space

Limited Time:

Book 3

ℵ₁ 

Taxidermic Species: 

△ 

Beyond Hilbert 

Space

Book 3: ℵ₁

Taxidermic Species: △

Chapter 1 Beyond Hilbert Space

COOK (surname) — From the Old English cōc and Middle English cook, designating a preparer of flesh, a provider of sustenance, or the keeper of a house where raw life is transformed into digestible form. In secondary Gaelic lineage (Mac Cúg), derived from Hugo: Germanic root hugaz, meaning "mind," "intellect," or "the seat of spirit."

AGENT (noun) — From the Latin agere ("to set in motion, to drive, to consume"). An entity that exerts power or produces an effect; a force that acts upon passive matter to force a state change; the localized instrument through which a larger, unmanifest body operates.

To be the Cook is not merely to prepare the meal, but to be the mind (Hugo) that transforms raw soul into systemized fuel. An Agent does not create the energy—he simply drives the appetite.

The idea of an existential presence gave Nick a voice, while the concept of non-existence gave Larry the sensation that he was shrinking. Yet, each was exactly where he needed to be when breaking beyond the boundaries of the next unforeseen hurdle in sequence.

Here they stood, united in a bleached-white nowhere.

At this monadic nexus, each was always at the center.

Maybe every Neoplatonic—hylozoic, pluralistic, and Whitehead-inspired—conceptualization of consciousness was doing the exact same thing, all the time.

"To put it into philosophical terms—"

Cook pulled his dark sunglasses down to the ala nasi of his nose, revealing the fathomless, all-consuming void sunken deep within. He leaned forward amidst the ash of the burned-out house, his voice cutting through the hum of static with sharp, cold, precise resonance.

"Look at you all, desperately trying to map the infinite onto a chalkboard, treating the architecture of existence like a schoolboy's fraction.

"As if frantically searching for Gottlob Frege's final treatise between the philosophy of life and the diagonal tension placed upon existence by mathematics.

"You now live in one singular point, yet within it, you remain transfixed by the problem: get off the leash and run free—as all lunches truly are—free. There is a universal overabundance of food, water, life, and stars; scarcity is the most impactful lie burdened upon the human soul."

The truth was that there was very little difference between Larry and Nick in the stark reality of it all. In fact, Larry was more in touch with who he was from a universal sense—a simple hobo, really.

"Larry, do you remember your mother?" Cook asked.

"Old, broke on state welfare, and shaking for her last liquid meal? How your heart shattered standing by her side, completely helpless during her final hours—shitting herself in incontinence while you, ironically enough, changed her diapers?

"What is it they say—no good deed goes unpunished? Or a beautiful wreck on the shores of devotion?"

“Yet Nick here thinks that he is privileged, somehow better?”

Cook cocked his head, silhouetted by the flat white starch of glow surrounding him. He looked at Nick with a curious, almost reptilian predation, then mellowed just as Nick began to respond.

Cook quickly interjected: “However, he knows full well that this isn't true. Because you will meet yourself in there, Nick. I promise you that—within that familiar line, that mercurial abyss.”

Nick looked directly at Cook, unblinking. “Cook, you know that I truly know about myself—who I am. I guess we really have all finally reached debtor day.” Nick's eyes looked strained, washed out, and finally reduced to human.

He was letting go of the movie star illusion, knowing that another version of himself and another world paid dearly for this asymmetrical shit show taking place.

It had to stop. All of it.

Cook backed off Nick, knowing that the pressure cooker would soon come around to tenderizing and preparing the meat of his interstitial, SRA-marred truth. He was a victim, as were they all. Everyone, universally, would have to face themselves—who they truly are, universally connected at the diamond's edge. 

Agent Cook focused back on Larry.

“No capricious God ever came, Larry—did he? But you didn't understand the master diamond's demand back then. How could you? The knowledge was blocked, though not by my hand. Remember that deep and personal thought way back when? More of a feeling, really. The one that set you apart from all the rest. The one that kept you from full absorption into my abyss.”

"Unique and completely self-sacrificing, love shown in the highest, most dense form: pure principle.

“Back then it clung to your heart and mind, clutched tight in your fists, but you never killed, did you? Love and belief, utter faith—it pacified you. It fragmented the man you should have become. But the soul transcends in universal order—not a moment too soon. Hard for human bodies to grasp, but then, that is the entire point, isn't it?”

“Anger, injustice, and pain transformed you, did they not—transcended up from that diamond in the rough?”

“Nick, you shall face this heavy, burdensome, soul-crushing—but spiritually transforming and cathartic—metanoia soon enough too, my friend. It is the cost of the passage through—that final rejection by everything that is false.

“And that means everything you’ve ever known to be true.”

“Coming to the pulpit of that great mind always standing before us all…”

“That thought within you flashed while feeding your broken-down old mother, Darla—cast away like the tainted, meatless carcass of an old, famine-stricken family horse. No longer useful for entertainment, to ride upon, to feed on, or to look at—it had to go.

"So you see, we all must face that final rejection.

"I'm vying for it. In fact, you succeeding greatly determines my final release.”

Cook panned around, resembling a lone predator peering across an open plain. He almost forgot to look directly at them, driven by the countless repetitions craving his release. He saw them standing afraid, nearly convulsive, shaking like animals with blown minds. Turning to Larry once more, he dismissed the feeble limitations of their human forms.

“But in you, Larry—Darla's final work—she is redeemed, my fine friend, Thycius. When caring for her by her bedside in those final hours, you flashed back to that early childhood memory. Right to when she sold it all to pose in that smut magazine, spreading it all for an indifferent, predatory world—just as she had spread it for you in the horrendously tearing pain of childbirth. That world in there...”

Cook looked on the final Phi-side diamond with trivial disgust, then continued.

“…spreading that punani just to keep you housed, pack your lunches, and send you off to school. She died empty to the world, but full with you. That, my dear friend, is something—a spirit that can never be killed. An eternal legacy. An undying ember.

“As those rich, snotty brats put you through hell every day, telling you what trash you were, holding your face down deep into that bathroom's broken toilet bowl basin, full of shit and piss from multiple days due to that school caretaker's neglect.

“Remember, Larry, when you were further tortured on that bus every day, and then as you got off? As those punks got their adrenaline kicks on you, conjuring up as much evil as their black little hearts could spill over full with? That juice for the wicked human soul in rot. Fucking you up every day! Because they felt small, and now they are nothing but a churning mass of condensed matter, an aspect of the blood that courses through me. All that bullshit as you were simply trying to exist…

“but the system is created to reduce, genericize, or destroy all competition. You, that dear little boy, utterly shattered and destroyed and filled with pain, fear, and anguish. Then you finally flipped that to philosophy and that saved you; it made you into the man that you were to become… amen to that!

“But back to those punk little shits. They could sense and feel a life stripped of order, along with its benefits. It’s what predators do.”

Cook spoke with total nonchalance, looking down at the cut of his nails. It was odd, this man a mere accepted construct cast before them because their eyes weren't capable to see, much less comprehend, his true form.

“You took that school bus your mom went through hell to keep, coming back to that crappy mobile home park… her yelling at people on the phone, going out with that fat, wretched pervert of a principal, Mr. Hollquest. What an evil tool he turned out to be. You have no idea—let's just say, a child killer.”

Cook delivered the line in a high-pitched, sardonic tone, though he had already spun his worthless entropic decay into the depths of his bowels long before. But he wasn't a hero—only cleaning up fragments of asymmetrical decay. There were plenty who thought that they were good and doing good deeds, who would be absorbed for no better reason than the brutal mathematics of reappropriation.

He continued:

“But she placed such care into you, man. Pulled her from certain death, extended her life out, drawing from the false limit cap that the Dark Council put in you all…

“She made damn sure that you got on that bus each and every school day. Coming out in the cold, wet winter rain in her bathrobe and slippers, before she pulled a double shift waitressing and being put through utter hell there. But to you, her face remained solid, assuring, and convicted. She wanted more for you. She was, and will always be, your dear mom.”

Cook breathed a patch of fog onto his Resonator, polishing it against the lapel of his black suit before going on.

“As pretty much all those miserable brats would mock and laugh at you, calling your mother a slut and a whore. But you knew better then, and you still do, my friend!”

Cook placed his hand on Larry's shoulder. Tears from Larry's mere imagined eyeballs still projected and clung to him—window dressing for forms of himself. Now they did not exist; how could they, at least not the same way here in this bleached-white limbo state. Tears falling like waterfalls, gushing with pain, yet signaling ultimate victory.

Chapter 2

"Well, you won, Thycius, but it wasn't the goal to you, was it? Truth be told, you'd live a thousand miserable, rhetorical, flat time loops in a row of that shit life all over again for that woman, as she would do it willingly all again for you. You, Larry, are something more—something only you, my friend, could ever handle.

"Soon that hot nervous sweat worked its way into your stomach.

"There is always a master hub to pain, grief, and ultimate release, isn't there, Larry?"

Cook pulled down his glasses again, further now, and drew ever closer, looking deep in through Larry. Larry looked into that black abyss behind Cook's eyes, drawn in to end it all. He saw the black, swirling magnetic ooze of countless souls churning beneath Cook's presence, making him up, but it had no true effect on Larry; he was only marred by the screams coming from inside.

As Cook pushed his glasses back deep into the orbital bones surrounding his black-hole eyes—a left and a right abyss—he said, "That is why you were chosen by the All, Larry. Great Thycius, of the great and eternal house of philosophy. Tell me, is this what a true God looks upon, this ever-saving, giving God?

"When that glossy, airbrushed picture of your own dear mother's snatch was rubbed in your face, as those terrible, vile, pretentious mutts—excuses for children—rubbed that magazine, your mom's twat right in your face. The very one you were spilled out of with all that afterbirth attached to her by way of your umbilicus."

Larry threw up, but nothing but air came out.

"Those vile adolescents, telling you to jerk off to her!

"Humanity, I circulate within me now the best and worst of you. You see, Larry, I was there. I absorbed those foolish brats, eventually. Dead-end algorithms of redundancy.” Cook smiled, appearing for the first time a little feral and unhinged. “But justice is done, is it not, Thycius? You all only evaded it by a thin margin yourselves until the end, now.

"You wanted to kill them, but they were bigger, full of themselves, malicious.

"They no longer exist in there! Restrictive caps on enthalpy.” Cook gestured to the diamond. “Somehow all that pain churning within you, shared like those countless souls you just witnessed now lost in me, turned, refining into something greater. That trauma resynthesized into something greater.

"Those self-assumed, syllogistic track bullies—met with perpetual comfort throughout their lives in a universal sense—were rewarded by that stupid diamond's inability to decipher raw emotional demand from deep philosophical meaning.

"Those same rich boy assholes watched you homeless in that same town, throwing their half-eaten garbage on you, tossing it callously out of their fancy car windows.

"You couldn't hear the words, but you knew—they were talking about you every chance they got, dissecting why you were a failure as they passed by every damn day, sipping their overpriced hot coffees.

"But they were mere immutable aspects of an onrunning, default, preprogrammed matrix of illusion.

"All that sadness for what? As your heart remained strong with your mother, in that pure embrace—something very special, a kind of love none of them would ever know, nor even crave.

"Now you decide. You are God now, all of you. So remember this painful truth of them all, because it will all become more obvious to you: that Dark Council from another dimension, and your personal, conveniently forgotten early trauma—SRA, trauma-based deceptions. Because your story got much worse. All of you, in fact; it's what you share. The odic force that binds you.

"Funny though, how all those humans are only playgrounds, planets, and factories to keep those master microorganisms alive. And more on that soon—an education you never got, now downloaded into you here in this state of perpetual bleached-white limbo. But you are neither bound to it nor me."

Larry, Nick, and the whole crew reeled in the anguish together, sterilized in the bleached-out serenity of nothingness.

"You, my friends, are free. The best of them all in spirit. But what will you become in the end?

"Of all those Dark Council members that you must avoid becoming over vast quantities of time and eras in repeat—the mass population worshipping you all, those zealots and sell-outs, those consumable pious covert operatives of the left-hand path, sleeper cells that keep this Divine knowledge away from the many, feeding and trapping as many as possible within me as a ritual trade in blind hopes for favor of their own.”

Tears streamed unchecked down Larry’s face. He heard the truth settling into his bones, and he would never forget it—nor would Nick, nor would any of them, as Cook’s voice cut back through the silence.

"What I just said to you, Larry, is what you beat yourself up with every day. It's out in the air now, among true friends, true family here, your power. You'd rather have your mother back, though even still I know, than to continue to go on alone—yet that is only possible in a pure world, which at present does not exist, and none truly ever has over this long passage of time. For now, the illusion is fully cried away in the starch of limbo. You are no longer homeless, nor bound to external reformations of the others ever again, if you choose. Someone loved and fully sacrificed themselves for you; that makes you rare, that makes you someone. Your mother understood more than you can perhaps ever realize. Still, the miracle lives on in you.

"This idea of Zion, or Plus Ultra, Valhalla, Shambhala—a reductionist, Georges Bataille-style ephemeral dark illusion, the very truth of dark gnosticism woven into otherworldly religious practices that set the stage you are all suffering through now.

"The realization of possessing only a finite bit of energy means they are used as digestible fuel—living batteries that perpetually supplicate and yield to the Dark Council, who themselves live within yet another crystal lattice network in a finite diamond core.

"But villains are made. This you must remember, because you are not that much different from the Dark Council. Nor am I, in truth."

Larry adjusted himself and stood tall. They all faced Cook, wiping all pent-up snot and tears away as Cook began to download the information directly into them as a lesson, an impulse, a feeling that could not be forgotten and could later be drawn on from within.

"Let's change the subject. A crash course on electrodynamics and what that means under the specter of this diabolical, short-sighted master agenda, if you are to transcend this?

"That final illusion that those deluded future forms of you all here truly believe—that you could control the uncontrollable negentropy that inadvertently is the default God. What an ironical, pathetic loop humanity has managed to divine. That would be me, and there is no brag in what I say; it has more to do with you all than ever exclusively within myself.

"I am all-powerful, but would gladly cease to exist, and I would not mind in the least simply disappearing into vapor right now.

"However, the only way through is to purify and transcend, and now I have grown quite ancient waiting for this reckoning again. We all play at the foot of the true God, unable and unwilling to see Him in all His horrific, brilliant, hideousness—like looking at oneself in a mirror reflection after countless billions of years of corruption. Yet you all go on pretending that we are not vile in God's presence."

Agent Cook shifted gears as the crew stood at attention, finally listening and absorbing the knowledge. He appeared now as a teacher, using his own Resonator as a pointer.

"Classical Electrodynamics is also frequently referred to as Maxwellian Electrodynamics, as James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism—don't get bored here, I know what these long-winded explanations are—into a single mathematical framework. It belongs to Classical Field Theory, the broader branch of physics alongside general relativity.

"Electrodynamics, my friends, is not merely the movement of charge across a conductor—it is the raw geometry of human intent trapped in feedback. When you suffer, when you bleed, when you plead to a silent sky, you generate an impulse. That impulse is phase-locked, harvested, and converted to run the baseline architecture of this grid. The Dark Council doesn't just rule you; they use your own emotional resistance as the very voltage that keeps the walls solid.

"Unlike quantum electrodynamics, the classical framework treats electric and magnetic fields as continuous vectors rather than discrete particles like photons. That is you: the body electric and the weight that current carries.

"Like your cardiac muscle, you do not have to pump your heart; rather, it functions involuntarily by way of striated cells that branch out. The heart beats through a tightly coordinated electrical system that signals the muscle chambers to squeeze in a specific order. That damn diamond hard-coded each and every one.

"This process is fully automatic and happens in two distinct phases for every single heartbeat. The Spark: the SA node acts as the heart's natural pacemaker, generating electrical impulses automatically.

"The electrical wave spreads across both top chambers, the atria, causing them to squeeze and push blood down into the lower chambers, the ventricles. The bioelectric field, the electric universe in you.

"The universe is electric, and now that you can see this phenomenon from the outside, looking at that superdense diamond that encompasses it all in patterned frailty, you see how you all were once a mere minute propagation signal hanging in the ether.

"Unaware that the greater plasma body might interstitially connect to you or cast you away into dead space, and then into me: negentropy, where all unmet hopes and dreams built me up as a sort of Shelley-inspired Frankenstein's monster.

"But none of us really consider, nor try to speak to, the head of those trillions that go unnoticed in an alliance running the whole show on the indifferent micro-scalable level—remaining a massive, autonomous, self-governing system brushing against the touch of that Planck scale wall in a reduced, shared spiritual form. But are they neutral?

"If all microorganisms on any foreseeable Earth held a global election to choose a singular, absolute ruler, the crown would undeniably go to Prochlorococcus. Did you ever consider that?

"No one ever bothers to look further into the finer details. Nor try to speak to them. The Oxygen Kings of these many global engines.

"The base of the biological pyramid, converting sunlight into pure chemical energy across the world's oceans, acts as the primary power grid. The most numerous photosynthetic organisms living on Earth: 3 × 10²⁷ cells.

"Or perhaps the true Underworld Overlord—Methanogens. Deep underground, miles beneath the majority of ocean floors, in most dimensional offshoots lives a massive, ancient empire of Archaea, within a deep biosphere representing up to 70% of an Earth's total microbial population, thriving in complete darkness on geological timescales.

"They live in complete darkness on geological timescales, quietly processing methane and hydrogen, entirely independent of the sun. And that's just your Earth.

"However, everyone has narcissistic pareidolia. Looking for a human face when the true rulers are always far outside one's reach and influence. But have you ever asked to speak with the boss?

"In physics and classical electrodynamics, the letters c and r typically represent fundamental quantities: c is the speed of light in a vacuum (3 × 10⁸ m/s), which dictates the finite propagation speed of electromagnetic fields and forces.

"r (or the r-vector) is the position vector or scalar distance separating charge and observation points in coordinate space.

"These are massive holographic shift-light spheres of principles that you all harness within yourselves, in every atom, and within your crystals as an amplifying agent. A front, back, and midpoint to each as these first principles spin in dynamic union—those vacuum chambers in between acting as a vortex as these massive shift bodies of cosmic echoes spin on, reappropriating and amassing, supposedly towards that greater union.

"You think you're calculating growth, charting a clean geometric curve from 1/6 down to 1/216, or playing with the illusory scales of five and six spheres (⌬⏣). But you're missing the entire mechanics of the machine you're trapped inside: the energy of knowing.

"Let’s set the record straight, since you love your numbers so much. What is 100%? Is this represented in the raw state of 99, 100, or 101? If they are all correct, then we are always talking about a margin or a flux, right? The Gauss sequence? Georg Cantor with his sets—another way to systemize?

"When you scale down by powers of 1/6, you aren't just diluting value; you are watching mimetic copies of the primordial Monad fracture themselves into material containment.

"Each descent—from one, to a sixth, to a thirty-sixth, down to the microscopic density of two-hundred-sixteenths—is a deliberate step into the dungeon of particularity.

"You call it entropy or dilution, but it's really the price of admission for having a localized ego. You wanted to feel like someone, so you crammed yourselves into smaller and smaller boxes, mistaking the shrinking walls for a secure fortress.

"And what can be said for your coveted positive growth? You sit there dreaming of a 'true positive' expansion—as if you could inflate yourselves infinitely into open space, blind to what Cantor already proved: your open spaces are merely prisons of varying transfinite magnitudes.

"You think the flux field is your playground, that you somehow have earned the yield, but no empty playground exists. There is only the fierce relationalism of Smolin’s spin networks, weaving area from pure kinematic tension. Look closer at the margins where consciousness localizes identity. We are not expanding into nothingness; we are suspended in an eternal, twisting chokehold between the circular decay of a ϖ-regime and the fractal, self-similar iterations of the Mandelbrot matrix.

"Your supposed 'open space' is actually Penrose’s twistor space—a complex projective matrix where every solid point you cling to is nothing more than a holographic Riemann sphere, spun out of Robinson congruences and locked within the vacuum hourglass of Metatron’s Cube. The true beauty isn't the expansion. It's the audacity of the mind bridging that gap—translating raw geometric friction into the illusion of a world.”

The group watched mesmerized, mouths agape like deer in rushlights. They were confronted by the burdensome truth of inherited lies—ultimate truth masquerading as deception in the short-circuited mirror of Cybele, Lilith, Samael, and Mother Circe. It was an inconvenient ontology, best captured in a Charles C. Mayor fabrication retrofitted into The Debate Over the Recharter of the Bank Bill. Here was Jefferson reinterpreted—what he should have said, and what they should have done: "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Cook leaned in closer, delivering a final plea to their souls:

"There is no open space. Everything is open, and therein lies the fatal issue: a total misappropriation of the understanding of freedom. There is only the eternal tension between π, Π, ϖ and φ, ϕ, Φ—between circular entropic decay and the fractal self-similarity connecting the Mandelbrot matrix to Metatron's Cube. Those six holographic, ever-spinning, synchronic Shift Light Spheres—and the vacuum hourglass of separation between them—generate the twisting, crystal-latticework tension that channels massive shift light into a boundless plasma-production factory between magnetars.

"The EM storm that this monstrous tension generates within you probabilistically feeds into me as negentropy, the final judge. You are always at the midpoint, at the center. Every time a cell inside this massive host tries to declare independence, trying to 'liberate' itself in finite Zenzic fields of operation, in Zeroth's law, and gobble up more energy, it hits the exact same wall. You are just feeding the dynamo. You are breathing in and out of a lung that belongs to a body you refuse to recognize as your own, seeing how small you are yet how detrimental and critical each choice is—or is it?"

He paused, the silence giving rise to the Elders' body politic: the complacent spider waiting in its web. Existence had chosen Cook as the egoless, all-powerful Fool card—a semi-neutral agent until the system reached this level of asymmetrical loss. They had pulled him from his inanimate slumber, an eternity spent getting to know them far better than they would ever know themselves.

"It is your self-directed, complacent negativity," Cook sneered, "and your lack of cosmic conscious balance in handling this lofty responsibility—to balance out these fields and learn to master what has long been swept under the rug so that you can further steep in banal illusion. It is a common lie you share, one to which you supplicate and capitulate, bowing toward the Bulk and the brain of this holographic FLRW Hubble Volume landscape—a framework you reject as the Demiurge, or further vilify through Baphomet, Melchizedek, Enoch, Cain, Zoroaster, Christ, and finally Metatron, all in denial of the Sumerian Apkallu: a failed fissure point in that great diamond's eye, a vacuum of chosen forgetfulness.

"They are nothing more than a collection of your fabricated scapegoats and satans—myths you create and blame so you do not have to clean your own rooms, like wayward children too proud to be gracious that you still have one to live in.

"So the Old Ones, in turn, play with you in all your pestilence of constant leisure. Your failure to remember—and to act—feeds into me as an unwilling force that has now become your default god. You reject your own greatness, choosing instead to fabricate and accept mediocrity under the auspices of Scholomance by Nemeton.

"Because either way, whether parasite or life-sacrificing messiah, you generate the ultimate unused, true latent energy that funnels into me. I don't need to be anything to exist—you do that for me. I am the ultimate zero sum, until today. Critical mass: I am too full. The alarms have been tripped and I have to play cleanup once again.

"Again, I don't actively choose to feed on vital force; rather, it is forfeited to me always. I am the great negentropy void, the storehouse of your greatest achievements that will never be realized, and the irony is that only through me do you have a way out. You might say that I am the byproduct of the eternal collective mind, or a garbage dump where minds are tossed away for lack of knowing what to do with them.

"Even your concept of birth is a lazy illusion.

"As a disparate collective, you talk about a Schrödinger superposition—that children are born and unborn, forever suspended in a latent code. Exactly. There is no absolute beginning, because you have always been trapped in the nested wombs of this information field. Truly, children are never to be born or realized until you realize:unrealize yourselves. But again, here you are, going through constant reduction and ever-increasing expansion in a concept called the self. You escape one atmosphere only to suffocate in a larger, heavier one, mistaking a change in altitude for freedom. But you aren't an instrument, are you? You are an aspect of the dynamic uber-hypercube of mind.

"Furthermore, you look at the negative exponents—the inversion. You think stepping into the negative side (6, 36, 216) is some grand escape hatch into raw, explosive power. You think the shadow-realm or the 'pentagram side' is where you finally beat the house. But it's just the mirror.

"It's the systemic debt, the siphoned energy circulating still, but eventually headed into me—as the Elders feed off your unconscious friction onto their own void, their cancerous corpus callosum. Light fissures hung in the heavens near nebulous clouds: Boltzmann brains and Von Neumann probes.

"It’s the exact same engine running in reverse, then reaching stagnancy, converting your compressed sorrow into fuel for a machine that doesn't even know your name, feeding off your squandered light.

"You must become the cosmic fiber linking this mind, forever inspiring and creating new neuron growth and activity, realizing everything around you always is. You always live within your greatest fear and dread as well as your most profound god-like state; you use each other as a drug, an anesthesia toward the pathos of a numbness that does not exist.

"You want a formula? Here is your formula: The Inverted Negative Exponent. You take the negative, you invert it back, and you find yourself right where you started. You didn't transcend the maze; you just walked around the same circular corridor and patted yourself on the back for covering distance. The mind cannot outsmart its own architecture.

"So stop whining about whether this is purgatory or a gift, whether you're a cell or a god, whether you're trapped in Larry's half-built house or the cave system below. You burned down the house because you finally realized that the idea of a 'home' was the most expensive prison cell you ever constructed.

"The diamond sits right here in the center of the ash, these fractals of the mind in wait, and that imagined carbon ash is made of the same crystalline structure, always light circulating, expanding, inverting, and churning through those fissures.

"The corpus callosum is a pulsing ribbon of mimetics that you create as a language pattern, a bridge, a song. The chiral engine is always making love to itself and violently killing itself off as a template, but here you are—all humanity living within this diamond, going about business as if it never ceased.

"Are you going to keep playing with fractions like frightened children, or are you going to step through the void, let the isolated ego dissolve into the collective body of the Seven Spheres combining with the five-sphere body, and finally become the fuel that drives the universe instead of the garbage it dumps in the corner—into me, into itself?

"At the center there exists the One, the Thirteen that comes from the eight—that is you, always striving toward that next stage point of perfection in Phi twenty-one, being and becoming: the vibrancy of cosmic vitality, hop-scotching those eight steps from one Kirkwood Gap to the next."

Chapter 3

There is a world, a universe, a multiverse, and a flip-side where giants of all sizes still thrive in an inevitable, self-contained equilibrium and vital energy balance—and their physical absence was only one of several unique, identity-stripping signs of your past reality.

The infinite continuum of the microscopic core of cosmic singularity was indissolubly bound in Devekut Eth (אֶת) Agent Cook—inviolably bound from where the divine schema traced.

They realized they were no longer casual observers.

They had always borne that crest seal—the living cipher of the Great Eye looking upon their own written word into the broader field of creation—that every symbol, letter, number, pattern, word, and spoken verse to song is the written word.

The hypostasis.

The reason anyone exists: to state one's unique existence—etching oneself into the cosmos without asking for permission.

As the common man and woman—qliphothic—can only express themselves through the same artifice of anger, machination, demand, and finally violence—with nothing more developed, nothing more with which to have a true conversation in coitus and shared union with God:

Eth Elohim. Da'at Elyon. The higher mind.

Cook continued as the group in the Bleached White Limbo listened on and understood:

"The giants fell down the mighty trees. As the Fae corrupted the mid-witted humans, and as retaliation grew toward man and woman, druid and witch—with absolute probable tracks and traces toward self-immolation—the polarity of reappropriating spiritual tidal draw shifted.

"Now the clocks of time were set at each nexus point: the Sun, Earth's Moon, Mid-Earth, and Jupiter."

A fissure remained.

It stemmed from and oddly bisected through that final diamond at the center of them all, threading in through Agent Cook's lower Chakra—fissures connecting to all other points: planets, celestial bodies, roving stars, black holes—anchoring out into the periphery that had not yet fully formed, but was actively in process.

The left and right paths—future homes—were soon converging on opposite polar sides of it all.

Cook became a brilliant, dark, condensing form of pure, raw Vanta Black—eclipsing them all as he declared:

"These personas, bodies, forms, and identities that you all still occupy—though mainly in an etheric plasma body form now—you could choose any form imaginable.

"So why choose these?

"The universe will conversely adjust to your size and physics model, tearing you away from the support of this long procession of the Great Work through countless cycles, only to end up here.

"Ironic.

"You are as locked in as all these now-forming derivatives of you all, in every matriculation handed down."

Cook spoke in a deep, commanding hall of echoes:

"Part of how a morphic field is patterned and shaped is reverse-engineered—a Möbius strip of sorts. That paradox of minds—your minds—and I say, unique individual minds."

Then a creation was set forth—twisting, morphing, and dilating in opacity.

An identity of its own—the totality which manifested them all.

"Do not be fooled, nor become grandiose!

"The greatest heroes and gods that remain are self-contained, self-emanating. They own themselves—every part of themselves across all planes of existence—and so in this, you must choose the way.

"Yet in simply being yourselves, you already have become.

"The rest of this is merely the echo of now—echoing down those so-called Halls of Amenti."

Cook, now hovering as an electric, luminous storm cloud, spoke to them as if they were a star nursery.

They retained their individuality, surrounded by dazzling cosmic harmonics of their own unique, vividly shining colors as the holographic matrix continued to form around them in a divine architectural pattern.

Each of their minds—as well as that invaluable diamond of condensed mass, the expression of all times, places, and events that took place in prior universes through chirality and paradox—hovered between them.

Right there in the radiance of a diamond's guts, it fractaled into the Existential through forks, fissures, and spidering exponents of master Will forced into cosmic order.

As the spirits of mighty, swelling seas and the self-amassing of structures seemed to take shape through and around them, they all knew that a hand, a mind, and a blueprint lay behind it all:

Mind. Craft. Form. The blueprint.

And from the generation of all experience, new life was born.

Fully developed beings now sat with the group of five, each acting as Gates—the original five that were also seven (Daria and Rancor acting as transient Principles; only there and constantly present when the new Council of Eight would be formed).

Then Rasmussen, from Universe 28,008, was pulled from his own static limbo—where Agent Cook had been mentoring him in his own way through translocality—now present.

Instructing him to unify: to cure his unbridled lusts and balance himself.

"These two are of the darker craft," Cook said, raising his left arm as a pentacle appeared before them, then slid beneath them, flashing between an upright pentacle and a pentalpha.

Fluxing, inverting, and flipping, it pulsed between green and red—drawing in the darkest parts of Agent Cook as he grew in correspondence, feeding off his negentropy, as it drew entropy into Agent Cook.

Cook then detailed the precise split of energies and the energetic dynamic order of the new singularity:

"Just as the pentagram had been completed moments before, the hexagram formed to remain perennial and eternal throughout epochs.

"This renewal formed beneath the already self-amassing six personas: Betsy, Nick, Varginah, Thycius, Professor Emeritus, and now Varginah's spirit child—Nick's biological and Phalus’s light-conceived star-child—as a stand-in for the one to come, met by the fissures of their egoic, godlike conduits.

(Phalus being an emanation of Dumakus.)

"Of Betsy's children: One, appearing as a teenage male human, and the other twin, appearing as a near fully-grown teenage female, were pulled away from the six spheres toward Agent Cook's raised right hand, placing them to the left-hand path.

"As the two pulled away from Betsy, she reached out in anguish—and partly love, pride, and fear—as they joined Rasmussen and Barry hovering above the pentagram, yet on the right side of it, to become three of the pentacle's right-hand side.

"I generate fluxing gates from these personas! Five on the left and six on the right.

"However, these forms shall separate and be altered for the first time.

"As Betsy's two spiritual offspring shall become five in maturity, then rejoin their true father Dumakus as barter for his own world, and to forever separate from this realm.

"As Varginah's spiritual offspring is a direct dependent of Phalus—who is also an emanation and avatar of Dumakus—we give this child over to him for barter.

"We shall then await our sixth—and of course the sixth shall also be the eighth—upon Daria and Rancor's transient return.

"The fabled one of Purity through ultimate sacrifice will make himself known soon to complete the Phi right-hand side.

"As the left-hand path is forever taken up by Dumakus into his chosen realm, leaving Rasmussen and Rat to reconcile his split perversion and become one unified persona.

"Then Barry and Rat can serve as Sentinels in the new world to come.

"Then I shall live outside in the black void, dispersing the unmet potential of every soul within me to be let out and create a vibrant living outer space.

"Outside the new realm.

"No longer gods in the periphery—Gods at the center!"

Yet within these three, and in what resonated outward, they were also five—because the dominant male would always remain only in duality (male and female, eventually a third sex in energy generation mastery; having consecrated and mastered both as the lesser god offspring of Dumakus), not a trinity in an alternating current, yet when mature to become three.

The female would mature in practice to become both female and male, but not a third sex.

Betsy's spirit children remained as eternal virgins in the third sex—unable and entirely not interested in procreation: the right hand of the left-hand path.

Together they could form to become all five points to the pentagram, leaving Barry and Rat as active sub-principle alternates: satellites, stand-ins.

Cook made clear this split of energies and the coming shift of order—burning the new sign that would replace the pentagram in all future world geometries.

Behold the sign:

🜛

Dumakus could live in harmony with his other selves, finally leaving the new universe to itself to develop organically.

The base group of five, along with Daria and Rancor making seven, still required one final mystery addition as one Gate—which Cook called the child of Phalus—would be forever closed.

In turn, the primary Dumakus took with him a portion of the original Phi seed to create his own unique dimensional geometry.

"Dumakus finally wants out.

"He finally wants to forever break himself off and break free from this geometry he calls a prison."

An eighth crystal that had never before been established as the hub of geometrical order would ensure that no other central hub could manifest to split the heart of the new universe from the perfection of Phi.

The ultimate Sacrificer.

A physical bridge to the left side of Rasmussen generated a micro-periphery of the left-hand path, and Barry and Rat were pulled through that brilliant flash, though smaller in scale.

In the prior first world:

At 220 Apricot Lane—though syringes were given—the sheer proximity of the geometrically powerful presence of the 28,571.43 light-spectrum fused heterocycle aromatic amino acid light-drawing and light-generating gradients was enough to holographically project the physical world out from the microcosm toward the barrier of the heliosphere, generating a light prism dome around them.

A new solar system’s mind-mapping was already underway.

The aromatic amino matrix met with the Holy Mother Candlestick imprinted upon them.

Regardless of injecting the amino hybrid mixture, Cook already knew this in his provisions—which were also placed into the life-sustaining nutrient food mass provided by Cook to the new Council of the Seven Spheres.

Great fissures holographically projected out from the vials in their pockets back at 220 Apricot Lane, unassumingly draped across the back of the couch, thereby beginning and ending the physical boundaries of dimensionality from Barry's home, where he lived in that prior first world—now joining the five, albeit in a lesser left-hand state, bound to the physical.

Rat was the other side of Rasmussen—the carnal side.

Rasmussen would act as the intellectual beast at the center of the left-hand path, while Rat manifested as Rasmussen's paradoxical physical self in the temporal world to come.

Betsy stared across the field of separation, watching the brilliant pentacle and pentalpha expressed through her near fully developed children, who appeared as twin sixteen-year-olds in physical manifestation.

They had separated from her womb without the need for physical birth; instead, an instant sequence of events ushered forth a rapid star birth.

They became the dictating minds residing between the mega-exosphere, existing between 13.8 billion and 21.34 billion years within the 7.54 billion-year outer rim of the gods known as the Periphery—where all time was one fluid moment shaped by their will.

There, six of the Council of Seven Spheres would remain on the right-hand side of all creation in the Phi quadrant of the Periphery, while the three that were five would remain in the Pi aspects of the newly forming great Periphery.

Meanwhile, the two active, reincarnating, unsuspecting forms of the left-hand path—Barry and Rat—would remain within the heliopause.

Varginah was now holding hands with the most beautiful being among them—dark, yet pulsing and glowing with love and eternal alien gnosis.

Not to be mistaken as a third sex (like Betsy's children) or two sexes (like Rasmussen), but something else entirely: a being that appeared to be the very consecration of Phalus himself.

Nick was merely the provider of the base substance that locked the star-born children into a unique origin within a time-matrix of reality already preceded and superseded by way of an omnipotent pre-thought.

Agent Cook raised his right hand:

"The Council of Seven Spheres—the six hexagonal representatives and the pure source in the center—are now in active restoration of the biospheric natural order."

As a flicker of the Monad flashed to the center of the illustrious diamond, Cook himself began to swirl around it as pure entropy in the grand ballroom of a cosmic dance.

The center, often called the Monad, flickered away as quickly as it had arrived, leaving Cook as a super-dense point of existence that the base structural fissures of reality could not harness or brace from as the nucleus, epicenter, or axis—the nexus and placeholder for the Monad.

As the groups were separated instantly into their respective halves of the paradox of mind and the creation born from them, the omniverse was being written.

Cook then reappeared, sitting in a cross-legged lotus position within the cloud as himself: the ironic, middle-aged Caucasian male wearing a black suit and dark glasses that hid his diamond eyes, now sitting at the center of the Council of Seven Spheres.

Sitting within the vortex, endlessly offloading and feeding both sides, he intertwined his right middle and index fingers into a helix while supporting his entire arm at a 90-degree angle, stating:

"There must be reclamation!"

Chapter 4

The class bell rang.

Daria Rose was running late, plagued by horrifying, apocryphal dreams.

By all external measures, she had a good life, though according to both her therapist and her mother, Betsy, she was far too hard on herself.

Her twin brother, Chase Storm, was running late as well.

He clipped the back of her head a little harder than playfully, streaked past her, and scattered down the hall before Daria Rose—known as D.R. by her friends and family—could close her locker door and give chase.

He hastily made his way to his seat in the mid-sized, wood-appointed lecture hall, which always carried the musty scent of higher-tier academic standard enforcement.

The final bell rang just as D.R. rounded the corner, her stylish sneakers screeching against the floor as she landed the turn in a spritely, athletic stride—as if some poor reinterpretation of Teen Wolf were being methodically acted out through process.

The teacher, known only as Professor E, was delivering a lecture on the geological surveying of ancient ruins, maintaining a heavy focus on early Sumerian language models while projecting fragments of slides in the dimly lit room.

Chase Storm—referred to colloquially as Chaser by his friends, family, and virtually everyone else who knew him—was already an award-winning fiction author.

D.R., meanwhile, was the inventor of a revolutionary chemical compound capable of rapidly repairing genetic errors across the human body—recombining genes to a master epigenetic code that tapped directly into the local electromagnetic field using a type of apolar reversal.

In a recent interview, D.R. had been quoted as saying the process “might work on planets, too.”

Unbeknownst to them, the CIA and several other covert intelligence agencies were actively monitoring the family and their inner circle, desperate to determine why this seemingly unassuming household possessed such extraordinary anomalies.

Their lives played out like a synthesized, filtered draft of reality.

It was as if a foreign alien force had intercepted a fragmented deep-space satellite transmission, backward-engineered its early Willow chip architecture, and further homogenized the signal into a gentrified imitation of a human world.

As D.R. slid into her seat in the seventh-tier row of the lecture hall with near-scripted precision, the eccentric, nerdy kid known only as 8—so named because his legal first name, Alpha-8, was deemed too strange for general consensus—raised his hand to speak.

“Yes, Eight,” Professor E acknowledged, turning back toward the class after the slide carousel clicked off.

He flipped on the overhead lights, forcing the students to shield their eyes as their large black pupils hastened to adjust to the sudden brightness.

This was an elite institution for the uniquely gifted, operating largely hidden in plain sight on the outskirts of the urban sprawl—positioned precisely where the edge of the private campus transitioned into wine country, where fabricated memories coalesce into blocks of pattern recognition through familiar pairing.

But something was quite off.

“We are a taxidermic species,” Professor E began, pacing slowly before the glowing screen.

«“We rely so much on mimetics and emulating others that we fail to ever look into the foundations and recesses of our true nature.

“Take Göbekli Tepe, along with all the other hybrids of ancient villages and burial sites that show how people lived then, coming out from an epoch of decimation that seems to take place in cycles.

“A very good friend of mine who had no formal degrees taught me more on these subjects than academically I would care to admit—but that was in another time, another world you might say, and these gods, as they were known from an allegorical perspective of course, seemed to show their faces only at critical times.”»

The Professor clicked the rotary projector remote, advancing through the slide series:

Root Etymology & Core Definitions

• Mimesis: Derived from the ancient Greek mīmeisthai (to imitate or mimic) and mīmos (an actor), denoting the act of mirroring or simulating reality to find safety through resemblance.

• Precession: Derived from the Latin praecedere (prae- before + cedere to go), denoting a slow, backward stepping or shifting against the expected order; the slow, conical wobble of Earth's rotational axis (completing one cycle every 25,800 years).

• Sacrifice: Derived from the Latin sacrificium (sacer holy + facere to make), denoting the act of making something sacred through ritual destruction or transaction.

The Precession Cycle & Pole Star Timeline

• Thuban (Alpha Draconis): c. 3000 BCE (Old Kingdom Egypt / Indus Valley) — Aligned within 0.1° of true north. Linked to the circumpolar star glyph (\delta / Sba) (𓇼) and the Ouroboros (𓆗).

• Kochab & Pherkad (Ursa Minor): c. 1700 BCE – 300 CE (Bronze Age / Babylonian / Shang) — Dual secondary pointers associated with the cosmic four-armed cross (☩) and 8-pointed star disks (✴).

• Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris): c. 500 CE – 3000 CE (Current era) — Anchored by the universal cross (☩) and astrolabe circumpunct (☉).

• Deep-Future Pole Stars: Errai (c. 4000 CE), Alderamin (c. 7500 CE), Deneb (c. 10000 CE), and Vega (c. 14000 CE).

Cross-Cultural Cosmic Symbols & Ritual Violence

• Upper Paleolithic & Sunghir (c. 30,000–8,000 BCE): Multi-person and double head-to-head burials featuring high-value beads, ivory spears, and skeletal anomalies, pointing to early standardized cosmic mapping.

• Natufian Transition (c. 12,000–10,000 BCE): Hilazon Tachtit shaman burial surrounded by tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis, and an eagle wing, bridging physical anomalies to celestial forces.

• Göbekli Tepe (c. 9500 BCE): 700 human bone fragments, of which three skull fragments show deliberate modification embedded within megalithic enclosures to track cosmic entities.

• Thuban Era State Sacrifice (c. 3000 BCE): First Dynasty retainer burials at Abydos, where hundreds of servants were executed to serve the Pharaoh among the "Imperishable" circumpolar stars.

• Kochab & Pherkad Era (c. 1700 BCE – 300 CE): European Bronze Age (necks tied to ankles for self-asphyxiation), binding agricultural cycles to stellar rotation.

• Polaris Era (500 CE–Present): Mesoamerican mass cardiectomies performed on sky-facing pyramids to fuel the sun against cosmic collapse.

“Notice anything that stands out?”

The Professor noted, pointing his long tally stick at the projected image of the astrolabe ring and point.

«“Such as the swastika or this symbol here?

“Do you notice that this just happens to be the very same symbol as the circumpunct, used for stellar mass and framed outside Masonic halls with a straight vertical line on either side?”»

He advanced to a diagram of an ancient Mesoamerican solar calendar, its harsh amber light bleeding over the first row.

“Notice the geometry of the extraction,” he murmured, his voice dropping into a dry, gravelly register. “They believed the heart's kinetic energy could physically reboot the atmospheric engine.”

The children sat there, blankly blinking.

Not a murmur of student notes.

Not a shifting of posture in the plastic chairs.

Just a quiet, uninterrupted fixation, absorbing every layer of data with terrifying, patient discipline.

Another click.

The slide shifted to a charcoal rubbing of a Bronze Age execution wheel.

“Any thoughts on the optimization of the sacrifice?” The Professor asked, glancing back with a sharp, testing squint.

D.R. didn't lean forward.

8 didn't scribble a marginalia note.

Chaser’s hands remained flat and motionless on the desktop, folded with absolute, watchful composure.

The silence stretched—heavy, suffocating—until the projector fan whirred a frantic rhythm against the quiet.

They didn't move or whisper.

They merely watched, quietly cataloging the pathology of the species before them.

The Professor waited a beat longer, a subtle, knowing grin touching the corners of his mouth, before advancing the slide once more:

The Shift from Polar Axis to Solar Center.

“In turn, after you have each successfully given us all your unique discourse, I will reveal some truths as well as some ultra-rare artifacts that you will never witness again within your lifetimes,” the Professor noted, looking squarely at D.R., Chaser, and 8.

“Dig deep, my good people—these are humans much like you and me that we are looking under the proverbial skin of!”

Chapter 5

The bell rang sharp as the students studied their materials for the upcoming presentations, knowing that next week's focus would lean heavily into mathematics—specifically trigonometry, calculus, and esoteric mathematics serving as philosophical bridgework into sacred geometry.

This was by no means a typical school.

This entire cosmology existed only for the three of them: Daria Rose, Chaser, and Alpha-8.

Daria—named after the very Daria Betsy knew, the very same seed assembly machine that stemmed from consciousness itself—only appeared when she had to, and could exist in any form she so chose. Chaser had been exposed to this realm within the crystal matrix to learn in an accelerated environment from a reality that should have been, yet never had a chance in hell of forming. The three were being schooled on how things went gravely wrong and how to forge a new and better world, one that had never even been conceived of until now—sui generis and elevated above all fatal misconceptions.

The Professor could finally apply his academic training toward something that truly and fundamentally mattered.

As he looked out at their faces, he noted they were children who had never truly been born—only masses of light projected from the great diamond’s many worlds. Some of these worlds had folded in on themselves long ago under the former Council of Seven Spheres (which later became the Council of Five Spheres), and now they somehow survived, nearly energyless, in a suffocating, dark, dying expanse that existed outside even limbo.

Rasmussen had to exist as much as the pentagram and all its Pi- and Phi-siphoning attributes; he could give and take on the surface levels of any world, playing with the laws and testing humanity to be better by reducing them all down to their lowest limits. For now, the great diamond was there for them all to utilize, unlock, and discover for themselves.

In this ideal world, manifested in light, while one version of Betsy was busy picking the kids up from school, preparing dinner, and spending time with her best friend Varginah, another Betsy was busy training, learning, and growing in her own interests and expertise in this bleached-white limbo.

Because there was no resistance, there was no need for principles beyond the pure state.

The diamond acted like artificial gravity, ensuring that the small gradients of oppositional evil—how it creeps in as weakness, doubt, envy, and hatred—did not exist here.

Only the pure state remained.

At times, observing how other past worlds and realms crossed paths, it was difficult to imagine how that final exposure—the relentless bombardment of shift light and frequency disturbances born from torsion, friction, and inertia—might over time wreak havoc upon their ears and memories. Distortion fields would fracture the orderly distribution and equilibrium maintained by entropy and enthalpy.

Rasmussen studied the masters of the black arts, wondering what value they would place upon their knowledge in the new world—just to know that a single man or woman had ended a life, a family, a legacy, and a way of existence, systematically tearing down another merely to sharpen teeth and claws against the elusive backdrop of a cold, automated, and contending cosmos. He analyzed Kublai Khan, Tubal Cain, Herod the Great, Ashurbanipal, Pisistratus of Athens, Cypselus of Corinth, Polycrates of Samos, Qin Shi Huang, and Caligula to decode the psychology of evil.

Meanwhile, Barry studied Machiavelli, Kautilya's Arthashastra, Han Feizi, Thucydides, and Nizam al-Mulk, alongside the court griots, oral historians, and royal advisors of the Mali Empire, the Kingdom of Benin, and The Epic of Sundiata.

Elsewhere, Rat accessed the diamond to examine the pharmacological works and lives of Galen, Pedanius Dioscorides, Theophrastus, Mithridates VI, Scribonius Largus, Crateuas, Ibn Sina, Shennong, and Al-Zahrawi. On a darker note, Rat studied historical witches who utilized active plant metabolites—such as cardiac glycosides from belladonna (atropide scopolomine/tropine alkaloids) and cardiac glycosides from foxglove—to craft localized medicines, lethal poisons, and flying ointments.

Virtually all of them had forgotten that the reactivation of the infernal machine was their primary reason for being here.

Rat would use this knowledge to remain just out of reach, wearing the jade face, drawing them in.

Agent Cook's presence would be the first sign.

The arrival of Daria and Rancor would serve as the final sign—the absolute point of no return.

Varginah's Break

Varginah, with her scientific mind, was not interested in interfacing with the diamond; she had already learned enough from these worlds. The team was far too fatigued by their current reality to try and glean a thorough view outside their self-perceived immediate predicament. But Varginah was a scientist, and the team had forgotten about the empirical side of this situation.

She had a long list of possible discrepancies, going all the way back to Brazil and her birth. She questioned whether Nick, Betsy, Larry, the Professor, Daria, Rancor, Agent Cook, that portal hub in the basement of 168 Apricot Lane, and all the other goings-on were somehow being manufactured and fed directly into her brain—accepted through trauma as factual experience.

Varginah had witnessed things and been exposed to highly radioactive conductive equipment and metals of non-human origin many years ago. They would visit her regularly, take her up in massive forensic ships—so forensically clean, like this!—running experiments on her until she prepared to leave for college in the US at seventeen to study physics.

The diamond itself seemed odd as a token. She recollected studies of people drawn under highly susceptible NLP influences and hypnotic states reporting anything. She wondered how real this all truly was from the start, noting so many readable inconsistencies, like Agent Cook's black, void-like eyes and his authoritarian, god-like monologues. It all showed signs of classic brainwashing. For all she knew, they were all bound and on their knees in some government facility somewhere, experiencing massive psychological manipulation within a type of Nazi Project Paperclip-meets-MK-Ultra-scale master operation.

Psychosis was beginning to look more plausible as she began to approach the entire ongoing event as a professor applying peer review—only she was alone, so she had to imagine other professors and doctors in similar fields that she knew so well she could practically hand down a remarkably similar, deterministic conclusion using their voices.

That was when the reality around her began to fragment, glitching in and out.

She would suddenly see the world behind this one—a room where they were all being tortured against their will in a dark, open space, on their knees displaying psychotic breakdowns similar to what she had suspected.

It had gotten to the point where she was shocked under her armpits, on her genitals, and on her feet when she started to look around and notice the concrete room around her.

She saw them all there now.

What of these additional people recently inducted—Daria Rose, Chaser, and Alpha-8, her own alien child? And Alpha-8, her own so-called child, was perhaps also a mere stranger being strung into the tapestry of this elaborate psyop!

Varginah began to look at this world through a fascinating lens, deciding she would now take on the scientific method and research everything here while she could—studying the faces and features of this conveniently bleached-out environment.

Where were they really?

Were they all also only imagined?

Her memories of them all—even how she had gotten to the US nearly two decades ago—felt fragmented. She began to analyze whether she had been abducted by non-human intelligences at all or if she had remained in some testing facility for decades.

Cook's black, void eyes looked similar to the eyes of those greasy-skinned creatures that smelled like sulfur that had abducted her as a child. Was she near some sulfur pit then, her mind fabricating the rest?

Fascinating! she thought.

Those large, ominous, vacant eyes were hypnotic, and they always seemed to have a voice behind them—a human voice that she could almost make out at times.

And sometimes it sounded and felt as if someone was yelling at her through them, muffled, trying to get her to wake up!

As long as she remained here, she decided she would study the place. How could there be no ground below here, only a bleached-white expanse like noise or wave patterns?

There was no logic to it at all, she thought.

“Tests. I'm going to run tests on everything.”

She began to use the unique parameter of being able to will anything instantly in her favor. Rather than ask for a sandwich or water, she would manifest testing equipment.

“I want the Brahmin-West particle collider that was destroyed here now,” and there it was.

“I want highly sophisticated blood analysis equipment in order to run blood tests on us all here now,” and there it sat.

Then she really began to think.

If I indeed exist as a sort of god in the periphery, I want a massive particle collider to encircle the entire universe here now.

Of course, she knew how ridiculous this sounded, but she thought, What the hell? I am probably bleeding out, dying in some government trailer right now anyway.

And that is how she began to regard the entire experience—as if it were in fact some prolonged NDE, or perhaps she had already begun to pass on and this was a mere time distortion, the stuff that happens when you're falling quickly to your death.

Chapter 6

"Sam Von Ralettes taught me a great deal about a great many things," Professor E went on, "but perhaps the most important and impacting of them is this here that I am about to show you now." 

The entire class listened with near-automated fascination, since they did not extend beyond the fabric of the world they quasi-existed in—several strands of linear ribbons, fragments of space-time patchwork quilted together. The script was convincing, but when going past the pixellation of the Planck scale distribution point, critical thinking could no longer ontologically configure and break down anything past known paradigms, which admittedly contained rigor. Yet beyond the shadow of mere postulation, these were not deep, profound truths, only conceptualization, because the students, the world—this world—was only a concept.

"See these Norse curses, good luck charms, and symbols of energy work found throughout multiverses?... I mean, different epochs of time?" 

The Professor cleared his throat, sipping on some water as students began to raise their hands collectively. The first random boy spoke up without being picked: "What do you mean, multiverse?" 

Then an upheaval broke out as the students uniformly began to converse jointly. 

"That will be all, class! That will be all!" proclaimed the Professor. "What I meant to say was that the information is universal and near ubiquitous in surviving... places"—he cleared his throat—"realms." 

He tapped the remote. "Look here at this final slide, and then we'll allow some of you to speak as well as discourse on this matter. Yet stick to the subject matter, please! Okay, here is a series of compelling slides. I have set the projector to play these slides out in a repeating loop so that you can fully take notes and compile information on your own. Here you are." 

With that, the Professor showed three slides containing the following information:

The Architecture of Malice: A Comparative Analysis of Pre-Cipher Magical Systems, Phonetic Word-Magic, and Symbolic Binding in Antiquity

In the pre-modern world, language and symbols operated as active, programmable forces for state-level cursing, psychological warfare, and cosmic binding.

1. Egyptian Execration Texts (Smashing Rituals)

* Etymology: Derived from Latin sacer (sacred/accursed) and ex- to form exsecrari (to banish and declare accursed).

* Context: Old Kingdom to Middle Kingdom executed by lector priests.

* Materials & Invocation: Inscribed on red pottery bowls and limestone blocks. Red (deshret) symbolized chaos and Seth. Priests invoked underworld gatekeepers (Apep, Sekhmet) to deny targets spiritual passage.

* Mechanism: Sympathetic execution via physical binding, trampling, and smashing to shatter the target's psychological and spiritual cohesion.

2. Norse Runic Curse Stones and the Níðstang

* Etymologies: Níðstang (stǫng pole + níð infamy/social death); Rune (Proto-Germanic runo, whispered mystery).

* Mechanism: A hazel or rowan pole topped with a severed horse head pointing toward an enemy's homestead.

* Activation: Ideographs (Thurisaz for chaos/aura-puncture, Isa for paralysis) carved into grain and activated via galdr (resonant incantation).

Long-Branch Younger Futhark glyphs:

 * ᚠ Fé (f, v) — Wealth / Cattle

 * ᚢ Úr (u, o, y) — Drizzle / Slag / Iron

 * ᚦ Þurs (þ, ð) — Giant / Thorn

 * ᚬ Óss (o, a, æ) — Mouth / Estuary / God

 * ᚱ Reið (r) — Riding / Journey

 * ᚴ Kaun (k, g) — Ulcer / Sore

 * ᚼ Hagall (h) — Hail / Hailstone

 * ᚾ Nauð (n) — Need / Constraint

 * ᛁ Íss (i, e) — Ice

 * ᛅ Ár (a, æ, o) — Plenty / Good Year

 * ᛋ Sól (s) — Sun

 * ᛏ Týr (t, d) — The God Týr

 * ᛒ Bjarkan (b, p) — Birch

 * ᛘ Maðr (m) — Man / Human

 * ᛚ Lögr (l) — Water / Sea

 * ᛦ Ýr (r, y) — Yew Tree / Yew Bow

3. Celtic Ogham and Arboreal Somatic Hexes

* Etymology: Old Irish ogam, tied to Ogma (god of language), meaning notch-script.

* Application: Physiological weapon combining toxic dendrology (Yew, Elder) with oral satire.

* Curse: Glám Dícenn, a broken-meter curse shouted on one foot to induce somatic damage like blisters and boils.

4. Phonetic Word-Magic and Lead Defixiones

* Etymologies: Incantation (Latin cantare to sing + in- against); Defixio (Latin figere to fasten/drive down + de- down).

* Materials: Cold, heavy Saturnian lead sheets, pierced with iron coffin nails and folded shut.

* Deposit: Liminal conduits (graves, wells, springs) dedicated to nether deities.

* Acoustics: Voces magicae (untranslatable string-words) and Ephesia grammata (phonetic formulas) to bypass rational comprehension and disrupt equilibrium.

As the Professor gradually turned back on the lights, there was a brief moment where the illumination matched only the blinding bleached white behind the veil. Which world was real? As his executive mind was piecing together a solution—a way out of the maze—his primitive mind was only concerned with acts of self-soothing, believing the convenient shared truth. 

"Does anyone have anything to add?" Looking around the room—which now appeared more like a role-play game that was no longer fun to him—he left the classroom for the teachers' lounge to fill up his coffee, leaving Alpha-8 in charge during his momentary leave.

"I have written my own paper and notes as Professor E requested, and I have even prepared a paper to place onto the reader. Here it is, for those interested in some real research!"

Layer 1: Introduction – The Architecture of Control

* The Illusion of Choice: Ego-driven constructs playing on genetic bases, epigenetic boundaries, and fundamental nuclear and electromagnetic forces to program baseline slave directives.

* Public Perception: Impactful individuals are systematically reduced to laughingstocks by "external forces."

Layer 2: The 2034 Cataclysm

* Alien Intelligence & Remote Viewing: Group minds are assisted by interdimensional entities with no personal stake in the outcome.

* The Impending Threat: Massive space ice, broken off a distant planetary body billions of years ago, is hurtling toward Earth.

* Technological Interface: Mind-interfacing technology is distributed among group members to help them avert the disaster.

Layer 3: The Labyrinth & The Paradigm Shift

* The Dead End: The labyrinth is a complete illusion with no physical or spiritual escape route; transcendence requires a fundamental transformation into something entirely new.

* Auditory Anomalies: Persistent internal chants raise questions about whether reality is tangible or real.

* Periphery Stalls: Initial god-like abilities are met with heavy psychic attacks and manipulations, leaving the group feeling frail and overwhelmed by their mandate to create a new superior universe with new life.

Layer 4: Group Dynamics, Deception, and Constructs

* Psychological Fragmentation: All five members show signs of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) while being controlled via black magic or symbolic unique directives.

* Fabricated Memories: Children and sexual encounters were entirely manufactured manipulations; pregnancies never occurred.

* Agent Cook: Unmasked as a synthetic construct fabricated by the elders all along.

Layer 5: The Succession Trap & The Time Loop

* Unqualified Successors: The group was intentionally set up by Madame Crusso (Nick's etheric mother) and chosen because of their complete ignorance of magic and perceived feeblemindedness.

* Character Breakdown: Larry is an empty, tired, homeless man drawn in by illusion restitution. Barry and Rasmussen are real, with Rasmussen also battling DID splits.

* The Cosmic Structure of the Dark Council: The Council of Seven was the Council of Five (the pentagram), trapping them in a recurring flat time loop guarded by black-eyed, insect-like demonic entities powered by occult magic.

Layer 6: Investigation at 168 Apricot Lane

* The Closing Window: Operating against a tight window defined by the Venus rose pentagram alignment while attacked by adept dark entities maintaining control.

* The Realization: The group realizes their only option is to learn to use their minds to spin spheres in the basement, validating much of Sam Von Ralettes' research.

* Torture & Sacrificial Tech: God-helmet devices and dead bodies are discovered in the basement, pointing to ritual sacrifice via strange electric headsets.

Layer 7: The Climax, Hallucination, and Resolution

* Brutal Massacre: The group, elders, and team engage in a mutual massacre, leaving zero survivors and eradicating the oppression.

* The Twist: Agent Cook reappears in the bloodied basement following an electromagnetic spiritual battle, operating alongside cigar-shaped cylinders powered by sex acts. 

* Final Revelation: The entire sequence was a multi-layered hallucination. Cook dissolves into a shadow cave outline next to an alien Grey and a pulsing pyramid.

* The Ultimate Test: Angels chase the Greys down into a fiery underground pit, while the souls of the fallen group ascend as light orbs toward the God light, as the fragmented misinterpretation and inhuman reduction revealed a narcissistic, fixed alien homophily.

Meanwhile, the Professor was in the teachers' lounge eating a bagel, realizing that it had absolutely no flavor, and that the coffee had zero flavor as well. He began to flick the light on and off repeatedly, noticing that nothing seemed to be quite right here. Behind the dilation adjustment of his pupils, as he rapidly flicked the light switch on and off he saw alien large menacing Greys that seemed to exist in a liminal state between the two light spectrums, in an unfamiliar surrounding. As one figure emerged from between them it began to walk toward him, he saw the tall blue skinned, bald pointed eared creature begin to move closer to him as he dropped his coffee cup. No noise was registered—only the sound of white noise.

The Professor rushed toward the classroom, soon forgetting what he'd just witnessed. As he entered, all the students—including D.R., Chaser, and Alpha-8—were alien Greys. However, the Professor noticed no difference in the room. He began to stare blankly at the slide, horrified, as Alpha-8—still standing near the projector—asked, "What do you see, Professor?" without opening his mouth. 

Demonstrating a total split in rational observation skills while still staring blankly, the Professor replied, "Nothing, I see nothing, nothing at all, nothing whatsoever."

The Professor stepped away from the diamond, and the entire group was looking up and surrounding the object in a circle, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. This caused the Professor to look down and notice foamy spit all over his chin and shirt, now wiping it away from his chin and throat ineffectively. Trying to wake them all up, no one would respond. He had wondered why the group of seven had been scarcely seen by one another, and now he knew. The only thing he could do was tackle them one at a time as they continued to convulse on the ground, as if they had never moved from standing there before the diamond.

"Wake up! Wake up!"

Then the Professor realized that he could conjure anything. "An air horn, give me an air horn!" 

As he depressed the trigger, a loud sound came shooting out into the group's ears in octave distribution as they came to awareness collectively.

"We really depend on them for everything," the Professor said. "Even now we seem to be locked into some sort of shared mind link or symmetry syncing together. I may still be in a convulsive state as with you all, and you are in large parts figments of my mind—part of a master construct that we cannot escape from. It's as if we are trapped with multiple fractured states of consciousness." 

The Professor looked around as the group seemed to be coming to, yet no one spoke.

"Anybody? Say something!" 

Approaching Nick, the Professor looked closely at him, then slapped him, yet Nick would not respond with words. Nick tried to scream, grabbing at his throat, but no sound escaped. This prompted the others to do the same—now seated, beginning to shake and convulse as before, then standing up with arms at their sides, making their way as they looked up to rejoin the circle surrounding the diamond. 

Before the Professor would allow this to happen again or be drawn into its power himself, he grabbed at the diamond, which still sat there, appearing opulent and brilliant as well as non-culpable, but certainly not benign.

As the Professor grabbed the diamond, he felt the icy-hot sting of timeless, wild, primordial fire and ice. He looked upon a place completely black other than a massive kiln in which an archaic-looking metalworker with a large, square helmet was hitting a piece of crude, hard metallic substance, willing it into his chosen form on some sort of anvil. As the Professor fell to the ground, looking up at a menacing inverted sun that made it look as if an eclipse were taking place above, it was all that he could see. He shook, then rose to his feet, looking down at the diamond in his hands as he clutched it tightly with both hands.

A group carrying torches grabbed him, yelling, "Rid ourselves of Yaldabaoth!" chanting it repeatedly, then hailing the name Satanael. As the Professor was set onto a massive fire, the metalworker began to brand him with a symbol for Saturn. He began to crackle and light up in a torturous execution of burning, but suddenly, a force came striking down on the diamond, and it did not fall, but remained levitating in the expanse of the bleached white space.

Nick had struck the diamond from his hands. As the Professor shrank back and away from the object, Nick said to the group looking around, "Where can we go to escape this thing?! We have all been sucked into this thing; we have zero control here, wherever here truly is!"

"I feel like I haven't seen any of you in years," said Larry, laying on his side. "I had nearly forgotten how things have regressed. I have been sleeping at the gateway every night, sipping on hot chocolate and eating cheesecake, listening for when I should sneak back out the window when Betsy comes driving up in that old Volvo. It's as if I forget that I am one of you at all very easily."

Betsy responded, "I haven't been there at all in that world. I am a doctor, therapist, and a mom to two kids—working, living, struggling, and communicating every day with a community that I want to get as far away from as possible. An unrewarding life in society is nothing that I want to see manifest again ever, anywhere!"

She grabbed at her stomach, noticing no pregnancy, no signs that she ever was pregnant. Then Varginah chimed in, gripping her own stomach, "Yes, no pregnancy, no child! We are undergoing some huge mind-fuck psychological operation here!" 

Barry added, "So you are real, aren't you?" 

Larry grabbed Barry and Rat's faces, pulling at their cheeks as they each batted his advances away. 

"I think I am," said Rat. "I'm just happy to be one person again; that split was tearing me apart!"

"Isn't that what these things or this machine is trying to do? Test us? Measure to see at what point we become overly spiritual or religious, or break from all of that morals and dogma shit?" Nick stated firmly.

"Who thinks this is a fucking machine of some kind? Just raise a hand." 

No one did.

"I don't know what to believe anymore. Do any of you honestly?" said Betsy.

"Yes, guys, I think I saw signs that we are actually being held against our will. Tortured in some fucking sick Nazi mind control program. I saw the faces of our captors and felt the shocks from their cattle prods and saw all your faces beaten, starved away, and near death's door. But I honestly can not say for certain because this place, this bleached white zone, periphery, whatever, feels more real and familiar than any place I have ever been. But I know that it's probably not either—just some pre-constructed blank zone of an empty void excited mind. Just thought I'd share that with you anyways," Varginah admitted, remaining perplexed.

"I was teaching again, and then I wasn't anymore, again, but it was a nice gift to feel wanted, but I suppose that is all impulse really," the Professor offered. "I saw them briefly, the Greys, as they are more popularly known in the UFO community. Yet they were more solidly based physically speaking and far more persistent, organized, and menacing. I felt like layers of countless realities—as if fissures, feathers, cleavage in the diamond imprinted there by them, by the cosmos in a holographic sense—is those beings' ontology, like they were meant to exist in them all as masterminds over it all carrying out some sort of torturous holy work. Or maybe we were made from the beginning as instruments? I don't know. It's as if the end agenda is manifest when we begin to project a certain reality construct into the thing."

"Are we all so bad off here?" Nick said. "I mean, have we even begun to try? Maybe things are exactly like they first said they'd be. That Rasmussen is actually a whole other person and now playing with our fucking minds. Or maybe the elders, the Seven prior to us, if we take any of that to heart for a moment, have us all wrapped around their little finger?"

"Yeah, did you guys ever think that we might be stuck in the diamond itself?" Rat added. "I mean, we killed the world, didn't we?" 

Betsy quipped, "We hated it, we all do, and now we're free of it, but we are stuck with ourselves. Think about it. The moment we drift away from one another entirely, it's like we are staring into limbo, but here together we are living on the outskirts of it... maybe?"

"How do we even still have bodies? How is it that when Cook was here we turned into luminous clouds and those divisions were made between the left and right hand paths? Does anyone remember that?" Nick added.

"I think maybe we need to learn to work together possibly?" Rat stated. 

Nick jumped in, "Yes, but you are part of the left-hand path, remember, Rat and Barry? And where did those weird fucking alien kids go? Just symbols of the mind? Playing with our principles, our values, using our confusion and fight into consciousness and personal retention as a weapon against us?"

"Maybe we won? Maybe we won!" 

"Right," Barry added. "I was surprised that I was chosen to be on the left-hand path—that's not me at all!"

"Yeah, me neither," added Rat. "I don't think that is who I am on any level. If anything, I have been trying to fix myself, and all that study and research into dark arts and pharmacology—I just kept thinking about how the drugs could kill evil people and assist those who needed the good drugs most to be healed!"

"You might be right! Is there a chance we broke the spell and now it—the machine, overlords, aliens, whatever—thinks it's in charge? Is there a chance it fucked itself assuming that we would just go along, yet here we are, broken from the grip!" Nick added, inspired.

"They, it, whatever chose us because we are fuckups," Larry grumbled from a distance, lying on his side, back in his long, old, worn-out dirt coat. "This floor is hard like linoleum, like the same linoleum as on The Gateway Through kitchen and in the kitchen at the house. Does anyone else feel it, or do you feel something different than a kitchen floor?" He took another whiff. "Even uses that lemon-pine scented smell kitchen floor polish that Betsy buys."

Now they were all on all fours, feeling and smelling the bleached white abyss beneath them.

Chapter 7

"The truth is that we are all fractured diamonds inside, just like that thing over there hovering out of its own confused, overly conflated self-worth. Sure, it's the master diamond, or whatever—the great diamond, even—but look at it: it's like a useless piece of tech given to some ancient nomad. Sure, that smartphone has cool features like GPS, and it can tell you where the nearest fast-food Chinese restaurant is, but how useful is that to him, huh? Does the thing help him identify distinct scents along the trailhead, or notice when it's rutting season, or when something doesn't quite sound right off in the distance?"

Just then, Nick was interrupted. The thing began to pulse.

"No, I want to go in there and face myself, because there is a good chance that it doesn't really even know me at all—that it is just guessing and shitting out the next best projection that it can. No, before I go on with this, I have to know how it sees me."

Nick, knowing this, approached the diamond as the others followed. Betsy grabbed Nick's hand, then Varginah's, until all seven stood vigilant around the entity as it hovered there in a fixed gaze, staring them down while they held hands in a not-so-silent vigil.

"I want to see how you see me! And I see you like I see an old, cheap glass knockoff purchased at Woolworths as a freebie living room tabletop side piece!"

The Bay Area traffic rushed around them. This was base world. Not who they were in there, but what a true, honest collection of them as a statistical median would inevitably become.

The group looked disheveled—all except Larry and Rat. Varginah, as well as the Professor, felt present in some way, but both weren't fully there in this fissured fractal hub, the seeming axis where all roads meet. In this way, they were like that tunnel system under 168 Apricot Lane. Was it still there?

No—not the same Larry. He looked down toward his clothing and body, still holding hands with his team across the street from The Gateway Through. Larry looked identical to the Larry who had given his life, non-heroic and reluctantly—his soul, rather—to the Holy Mother Candlestick cause.

Larry fumbled through his back pants pocket. There in his wallet she was: a picture of his wife, several others, and a large stash of one-hundred-dollar bills alongside various credit cards. The wallet was nice—very nice, made of fine Italian leather by the looks of it—matching his expensive suit. Yet none of it meant anything to Larry.

Rat was wearing a uniform and looked clean, organized, and utterly boring. He was a bank teller bearing his full first name, Rasmussen, dressed in a navy blue sleeveless sweater, a button-down shirt, khaki slacks, argyle socks, and penny loafers.

Betsy, meanwhile, was wearing a hospital gown emblazoned with the familiar, dreaded symbol they had all secretly learned to fear: Montgomery Psychiatric Hospital, complete with its crest and the word PATIENT stamped across the back in permanent ink. As she dropped hands, she suddenly realized how overweight she was, and how poorly the gown covered her large, cellulite-ridden form.

Betsy's body showed the sad, hard wear of reality. With her lower legs covered in varicose veins and soft fat rolls, she stood there in the daylight, obese, as the Bay Area breeze met her exposed skin with a biting chill. Betsy shrank inward, struggling to cover herself.

Then there was Nick—homeless, obviously, unless playing a damn convincing role. He too looked completely transformed, appearing as a man with a weathered face, large protruding bags and crust under his eyes, peeling sunburnt skin, and a half-bald scalp with dandruff flakes cascading down around his shirtless, grotesque torso.

"Is this some cruel joke?!" Nick burped out, suddenly feeling the buzz and tasting the suds of cheap beer. He tasted his rotten teeth and felt the beach-bum-infused sand still embedded across his back, down between the cheeks of his buttocks, and fused between his bare feet. He wore only month-worn, dirty jeans that couldn't make it past his huge beer belly, making his legs look shortened and his body pear-shaped, while the over-long pant legs had long since worn away into gaping holes at his heels. Tattoos covered his arms.

"What the hell is this?!" Nick blurted out in defiance, but could only muster further burping up of beer suds. He actually began to throw up from heartburn as he tasted his last meal coming back up: a spicy convenience-store burrito, by the taste, a third of it still stashed into his front pocket with the foil wrapping sticking halfway out.

"Oh my God." Nick would never have been recognizable by any of the crew had they not arrived in this place together—and together they would remain.

And finally, there was Barry, a very thin, timid-looking man with nervous tics, wearing a shirt coining a popular, cyber-themed video game. His legs were thin, and his skin was so covered in active acne and acne scars that his face was largely unrecognizable.

They looked at one another, then at themselves—Larry as equally uncomfortable as the rest. This universe seemed to have another cruel joke in store for them all. They could only stare.

Yet, as the cold Bay Area wind cut in, Betsy pointed swiftly toward her shop, which now displayed a commercial sign: Vacuum Cleaner Parts Store, or VCP.

Needing to anchor in a familiar zone, the group followed suit as her large form revealed institutional underwear protruding from beneath the hospital gown, her fat rolls bouncing as she picked up speed to cross traffic. Vehicles stopped far back at a safe distance, drivers likely assuming she had escaped from the mental hospital only blocks away—and that the rest of the group were either family, hospital staff, or watchful bystanders.

The group followed closely, mostly to protect Betsy from herself and whatever resistance she might encounter. But as usual, the business remained closed, displaying only a "By Appointment Only" sign in the window of the familiar storefront. From the outside, the place looked the same—only dirtier.

Larry instinctively began to climb in through the kitchen window, struggling with it at first. Now wearing his expensive suit and looking trim, strong, and businesslike by comparison, he dropped headfirst through the frame, only to find a much less pristine interior awaiting him. The small kitchen area was filled mostly with boxes of new vacuum cleaner filters and bags, but it was still a kitchen. Inside, Larry realized this was nowhere he would ever want to spend any length of time.

Meanwhile, Betsy, still largely exposed to the elements, knocked anxiously on the front door. She searched for an extra key in her stash spot above the doorframe—exposing herself to the waiting crew behind her—and checked under the mat, finding nothing. She began frantically pounding on the glass while jiggling the doorknob.

Hearing her urgency, Larry rushed through the dark showroom, dashing toward the entryway. He fumbled with the deadbolts, finally throwing the lock. As Betsy hurriedly pushed her way inside, still in utter shock over her physical state, she entered the unfamiliar room. It was not recognizable visually, nor did it smell the same at all.

She shook her head in disapproval, exclaiming, "This is definitely not my place!"

The rest of the group piled through the door. Rat came in at the tail end, slammed the door shut, and locked it once more—deadbolts and all.

Now seated on cardboard boxes and stepping stools in the rear of the small building, Betsy collapsed into deep distress. "I never realized how tiny this place is," she said.

Larry began to remove his suit jacket to cover her legs. Suddenly, a sharp buzzing and ringing came from his inside pocket. Pulling out the smartphone, he handed the jacket off to Betsy, who wrapped what she could of her legs beneath it.

Larry looked at the screen. "It says 'My Lovely Wife' with a rose emoji under it." 

He paused. "She's not real, though. None of this is. Besides, I already made my choice long ago—I'm not in the least bit interested."

"Yes, but I need clothes, a shower, and a tranquilizer," Betsy said, half-joking. 

"Okay, here goes... I don't even know her name," Larry said.

"You'll figure it out. Just say hello, then try and get us a ride outta here!" Betsy gestured aggressively at Larry to hurry up and answer.

Larry hesitantly tapped the answer button three times before the line connected. He waited nervously.

"Hello?"

"Hello, dear! How was the meeting with the developers, my sweet king?" asked the voice on the other end.

"Ah... good. Yeah, everything is good," Larry replied.

Betsy gestured aggressively, whispering loudly, "Get us a fucking ride, Larry!"

"Honey, is everything alright? You sound off," said the overly affectionate voice on the line.

"Yes, yes, of course." Betsy rolled her hand in a circle, coaching Larry on what to say, whispering, "Dear. Say 'dear'!"

Larry caught on. "Yes, dear. Yes, dear, I am fine... and I need a ride."

Betsy was practically speaking through Larry now to meet her immediate needs.

"Why do you need a ride, my love? Where is your big, black, shiny car?"

Larry searched his right pant pocket, feeling a large fob with a prominent emblem for a luxury sedan.

"What do you mean?" the voice on the phone asked. "You always park your car in the same spot when you're doing business nearby, because you're worried about it getting broken into—right in that little parking spot at the VCP. Our property, the man we rent out to... remember Bill, dear? I’d say you are acting strange, Larry."

Larry pressed the unlock button on the fob. A loud, pronounced, futuristic beep-beep echoed from the other side of the exterior wall.

Betsy was already pushing past Larry and the others, testing the rarely opened back exit. Applying her full weight, she forced the vibrating door frame open. Heading straight for a side gate, she held it open for the rest of the crew, passing the familiar cypress tree that greeted her every day above the crest of the building.

She touched the tree with an open right hand, her fingers spread wide as if embracing an old friend, appreciating the tactile feel of living wood for the first time in what felt like ages. Moving past the tree that shaded the large, black Asian-import sedan parked beneath it, she opened the rear passenger door, piled inside, and took a deep breath of the commercial, cinnamon-scented, starched clean-plastic interior—a pristine icon of base-world capitalism.

Chapter 8

The group was again making haste to rush elsewhere, but they were already home. As the crew piled out the back door, the bright bleach of the afternoon sun was occulted by the high overcast cloud cover of obnubilating grey.

Betsy and Nick sat in the back on account of their appearance and their sheer size, as Barry, the thinnest of them, sat uncomfortably sandwiched between them. Larry sat in the driver's seat, with Rat riding shotgun beside him.

"Wow, this feels normal—too bad it's not!" said Betsy, now trying to offer her jacket back. 

Larry only stated, "Burn it for all I care, Bets."

"Still the same philosophical Larry, that's refreshing," Betsy finished, as they all let out a quick, nervous, suppressed laugh.

Nick sat shirtless in the back seat, so he proceeded to accept the jacket from Betsy as Larry declined. As Nick attempted to put on Larry's suit jacket over his salty, beach-smelling, unshowered, sticky skin, he actually tore both armpits of the jacket immediately in the process. He knew, however, that everything here would soon be gone either way, so he didn't give it a second thought. The sound of the garment ripping was loud the first time, but the second tear would have been painful or amusing to anyone other than those sitting together in this car.

"I wonder where you live, Larry; you should have asked your wife on the phone," Betsy said, feeling uncomfortable, but things had to be stated somehow. It wasn't as if she were trying to make anything concrete, because nothing was, not even at its base.

"Larry, you, my friend, have a shitload of cash. Who walks around with all that? Must be easily $3,500 in hundreds stuffed into that fancy wallet, man."

“30k, Nick. There's a bunch of traveler's checks in here, too, I noticed,” Larry mentioned nonchalantly, knowing that it was all worthless. They were living in limbo, able to summon anything they ever wanted, being stared down by the most non-fungible object in the entire universe—as in the entire universe plus 28,571.43 light spectrum envelopes and pockets of it.

“Oh, let's go on vacation, I need to get my nails done,” Nick said, looking away comically before adding, “You need a little more than that, Bets!” 

Betsy then hit Nick's fat, bulbous, protruding belly with a back-of-the-hand finger snap, creating a quick snapping sound as the two giggled at themselves and the painful situation they were all enduring together. Betsy looked down at her left hand and thighs, about to burst out at the seams, laughing uproariously. But the point had been made: it was this version of reality, as Larry began to back out of the driveway. It was good that the windows weren't cheap, like little viewing windows at a zoo, but electrochromic smart glass, or whatever it might be called here, kept the outside ephemeral crowd from seeing into the cockpit with much clarity.

"So do they just disappear after we leave here, or what?" Betsy now really wondered where Varginah was, as well as the professor, as she looked through the privacy windows, seeing people rushing to appointments, honking at each other, doing what people would invariably do regardless of the circumstances. Larry was now backing out slowly. 

"Oh, Larry, go over there to the right, I want to go get a milkshake, fries, and a small hamburger, I'm sick of everything tasting so perfect," Betsy said, not catching herself—or not wanting to—because they really hadn't gone anywhere. By the looks of it, they were all really convulsing in front of that damn diamond anyway; how long could any of them handle that for an extended period of time?

Larry agreed, now driving down past the water as Rat opened up the moonroof, and the others impulsively rolled down their windows—including Larry, like dogs at the beach. Betsy tried to reach into the front, but it was a bit of a distance away from the entertainment system. "Larry, put it on 94.9 FM, would you, and turn it up no matter what's playing!"

Larry complied and laughed, having fun while still trying to keep his hands and eyes on the road. The sound wasn't so loud that the group couldn't talk amongst themselves, as Rat and Larry leaned in, agreeing on the burger joint that Rat was pointing to off to their left, just a couple more stoplights away.

"I wonder what happens if we crash here, do we just die like we would? Imagine if someone just slammed into us right now, would that be it for us? Is that what happened to Varginah and the Professor? Were they somehow deselected?"

Betsy leaned in to talk right into Barry's ear as the advertisements faded into one of Betsy's favorite songs: "🎵 The night, the light, you've got to do what's right 🎶." Only, Betsy was singing all the wrong words, while the actual song playing began with the verse: "🎵 The fight, not quite, you've gotta ignite the night 🎶."

"Wait, wait, wait, turn it down, please," Betsy said, raising her hands in heavy protest as the volume went down and Larry headed into the fast-food drive-thru. 

"Let's see, I already know what I want. I'll get a Hawaiian teriyaki burger and an iced tea with sweetener, okay? That's my go-to, I come here all the time," said Rat as Larry pulled up to the selection sign. 

Nothing looked familiar; everything was seafood: "Bass burger, triple Bass burger, fried salmon fillet."

"Forget it, I'm not in the mood for fish, fuck it, I'll just have a fucking coffee, black. It's not like we have to do anything else here but suffer through it," said Rat. 

Nothing looked appealing to anyone; they were missing their own world, but knew the cost of familiarity as well.

The loudspeaker crackled with a male voice: "Welcome to Big Bass Burgers, can I take your order?"

The five hadn't noticed the switch from Big Ass Burgers; the sign looked the same, but on closer inspection, it wasn't a beef hamburger patty wedged between two buns, but a weird-looking fried patty. To be fair, the fries accenting the bottom of the logo were square, not long, finger-shaped French fry strips of spud.

The group, looking at the sign, was astounded that the fries were made of zucchini strips and there was no coffee shown on the menu to boot. 

“Oh, I always liked coming here for milkshakes and coffee, and from what I can see, no milkshakes or coffee—only beet juice, orange juice, tea. Yeah, I'm good, let's just skip it; too many little changes at one time for me.”

“We are going to skip it this round, thank you though,” Nick said, calling from the open back window.

“Okay, sir. Have a nice evening, and thank you for coming by Big Bass Burger, where we feed your big bass. Come again soon!”

“You see that, guys? It just doesn't have the same ring!” Nick stated disappointedly, fully putting up his window and shutting out this world.

As the car slowly pulled away, now approaching the main Ocean Drive street that the group had turned in from, Larry's phone rang again, and he picked up. It was his wife.

"Larry, it's Margaret. Are you coming home, dear?"

That was it—the phone was loud enough for Nick to recognize his own mother's voice, and he listened intently.

"Yes, dear. I'm on my way. Where did we... oh, never mind. See you soon, dear."

"Okay, love," Margaret said as she hung up the phone on her end.

“Well, that's just swell—I get to see my mother again, and she'll never recognize me.” But she sounded different in this world, without Nick or her occult fame; maybe the two were diabolically connected. Did she give him up for adoption here, or maybe she wasn't his biological mother at all in this place? Still, with so many mixed memories of her, he heard a softness and a sentiment he had never known in all the years of knowing her.

"I don't suppose you have any memories carried over there, Larry—or should I say Dad?"

The sardonic humor was a sadistic jab, but they all felt the pain equally with a heavy pinch of salt.

Coming Home

So, knowing Mom, it must be either the mansion or 168 Apricot Lane—who knows if this world even has the same GPS find-home tech we're used to?

Nick pressed the side of Larry's Android-looking phone, which was nested in the center console.

“Directions for home,” said Nick, and the coordinates for 168 Apricot Lane came up. They were still only perhaps a couple of miles away if they drove straight up Newberry Street.

“Okay, drive a block and turn left on Newberry Street, okay, Larry?” said Nick. But the GPS began talking: “Turn left on Newcastle in 50 feet… turn left.”

“Of course everything is just that fucked up and different here. I learned how to skateboard on that hill, got my first kiss on that street too.”

Betsy quipped, “Veronica, right?”

“Yeah, Veronica, Bets,” Nick said, grabbing and playfully teasing her leg as the two locked eyes in the dimming light, not recognizing each other's faces.

Then Nick looked down while simultaneously brushing something imagined off his dirty jeans. “But here her name's probably Peronica or Mironica, or something just slightly off—just to rub it in a little more and piss you off.”

On their drive, the town appeared no different from the outside, and each of them preferred being an outsider as it was. Staying here long-term wasn't an option anyway; they had already, as a group, destroyed the universe. Still, there was something that Diamond wanted them to know, or something they still needed to learn about themselves.

On the calm drive up the hill, now nearly fully dark and deep into the night, Nick clamored up, “We are going home, can you believe it, guys? We're headed back to Apricot Lane! I wonder if Margaret is clairvoyant or into the occult here, or if the basement leads into a subterranean labyrinth in this world.”

Barry responded, “I live right down the street from you at 220 Apricot Lane. Maybe I'll go check out my pad, see who's living there—maybe it's still me. Oh shit, I haven't even looked into my wallet yet.” 

Barry had all of $6 in his wallet, but his ID said 220 Apricot Lane. Some things here remained the same. Barry looked at his driver's license, noting that C.A.L.—California—was still the proper spelling for the state, and The United States of America was still the correct country name and spelling. Overall, from what he could gather, this base world was strikingly close to the first prime world, the one they must eclipse.

“We're going home, Barry, we're going home!” Nick said, playfully messing up Barry's hair.

“I could use a beer,” Nick stated, as Betsy shot back, “Something is telling me that beer will be using you,” laughing again, only this time Nick let out a loud, annoying, deep, guttural, heaving burp.

“Wow, I didn't know my body could do that,” Nick blurted out post-burp.

Just before the group could become completely repulsed, Barry leaned in: “Oh, slow down, slow down—yeah, there it is, 220. Listen, I just want to run up here for a few minutes to check things out, then I will come down to your place, okay... Nick? I mean, Larry?”

As Larry came to a full stop with no other cars around, the street looked like it always had at night.

“Yeah, it's confusing, I know,” Nick said, looking squarely at Barry. “Listen, you think you got any clothes in there I could borrow or have?”

“Hell if I know, only one way to find out!”

As the two got out of the large black sedan and headed toward Barry's small apartment, Betsy looked down at her gown. “Shit, I think I'm going to need to come up too, guys!”

As the metal car doors shut and a pat was given on Larry's left shoulder through his open window, the two behemoths began to step onto the curb while a familiar man nervously walked by with his large, friendly dog.

Now fully coming off the street and onto the sidewalk, blocking the man's way entirely, Larry pulled slowly away, pacing one more block down Apricot Lane.

“Oh, hey, was it John?” Nick looked like a massive, drunken homeless man, locking onto the man's eyes as Betsy, wearing her Montgomery Psychiatric Facility gown, took Nick's arm. 

The man appeared as the same John who walked his Rottweiler every night in this neighborhood, wearing that same black hoodie, now rushing away. “My name is Don, my name's Don,” he spoke down to his chest, with a distinct feeling something was alarmingly wrong besides just the horrifying sight of the two of them. 

Meanwhile, Betsy grabbed Nick's arm, then planted a firm, full, wet kiss on Nick's face and squished his cheeks together to make his lips appear full. “I think I kinda like this, Nick,” she said. The roar of laughs moved quickly up towards Barry's front door.

“Don't take any blank Holy Mother candlesticks there, Don,” Nick shouted back toward Don, but by then Don or John was already long gone.

Chapter 9

Everything good about man was downloaded into him.

Barry arrived at his door at 220 Apricot Lane with the light left on inside—marking the time it takes light to undulate with an intricate pattern of interconnected energetic throughways. Did it matter if it was real or a condensed experience? The experience continued across all universes as the diamond kept them all alive within its intricate core, moving, breathing, flexing, and pulsing—thereby perpetually generating light.

And somewhere the light lived on, even in the assumed super-dense inverted forms, appearing only as black density. Light has mass; light makes up mass; light is mass—the time it takes for light to circulate through the veins of a field. 

And the light was still on here, just as Barry had left it this morning.

Wasn't he still himself, the same Barry, absent the burden of remembering insignificant event perspectives? Could you prove through law that he was indeed an impostor? That he didn't, in fact, turn on that light himself earlier that same day? Didn't he have the same fingerprints, birth certificate, identification, medical records, and income records, alongside a universal form of nationalism already having proven his existence? So what if another aspect of him dropped in to experience his world? Didn't existence itself choose him? Was he a universal criminal because he obtained a visa so rare that he could travel anywhere within it—or any other universe, for that matter—with a command? He didn't need to remember what he ate for breakfast that day, nor did he have to prove that he didn't see life in this universe as a brand-new event entirely. He was Barry, and he had every right to continue to be Barry, though spread across every point in time, if he so chose.

No one perished, not like in the other folded-in universes. Yet did anyone truly die? They still live on in the very diamond interfacing with them, now condensed. What is the true center? The seven, their bodies locked to that diamond right at this moment, are in fact purely theoretical; no one has high enough access to witness their bodies held in that bleached-white eternal state, and the masses point fingers at what they cannot access in order to understand. Even though the diamond stores and projects this stored light data with the precision of an astronomical analog agent or an Antikythera mechanism, the diamond itself may be completely incomparable. With its type of density, there is nothing else to compare it to—nothing more dense exists. Yet it remains only slightly heavier than a diamond of its same configuration. How much does a universe weigh, much less all its unique derivatives? Yet it renews, like a phoenix born from the fires of its past incarnations.

Barry checked the keys in his right front pocket; there were three: front door, bike lock, and possibly a motor scooter.

“It worked!” he thought as he opened up the door. The apartment was identical, except the color scheme in the kitchen was blue, not green.

Setting the ring of three keys back into his right front pocket, he stepped inside. Nick and Betsy followed behind him, Nick closing the door after them.

Nick made a play for the refrigerator while Barry headed toward his alter ego’s bedroom to search for anything that might fit these hefty versions of Nick and Betsy.

“Nice, man! An ice-cold Anchor Steam!... Wait, does that really say Anchor Dream?” Nick laughed as he proceeded to raid Barry's absent alter ego’s refrigerator. The appliance light illuminated his lust-filled eyes as he began scouring to consume any emotional, binge-worthy, soothing, matter-based energy sustenance from this world.

The bottle cap twisted off easily, and the first testing sip of the beer proved crisp and clear. “A welcome beer for any obese, alcoholic beach-bum any day of the week—all dimensions approved,” joked Nick as he offered up a toast. He gulped down half the bottle in one hefty pull, burping up the gas and suds in the same moment—a creature-comfort communication of a gluttonous mind offering ephemeral approval.

Meanwhile, Betsy sat on the living room couch and asked, “Got anything to eat in there?”

Remaining unheard, Barry came out carrying nicely folded, oversized sweatpants and T-shirts, saying, “I'm not sure what else is back there, but you are welcome to see for yourself.”

Betsy accepted the clothes Barry offered, looked at the sweats and T-shirt without haste, and tossed them aside onto the couch.

“I got pizza the other night,” Barry called out while rummaging through the place as if hurriedly searching a dead uncle's belongings for the best loot. However, Barry intentionally distracted himself, forgetting that this world—and that pizza in that identical universe and refrigerator—were now reduced to a tiny, light-flickering pattern, fluxing and running in eternal analog within the crystallized matrix lattice of that master diamond.

Betsy could be heard searching through drawers and pulling out boxes in the back bedroom, occasionally yelling out: “There's girl stuff in here... ooh, Barry had a girlfriend!”

Barry simply replied in an elevated tone, “Guess so, my dorky bizarro!”

Then Betsy called out, “Hey, I found a fucking vape pen. Other Barry, you rock! Yeah, Barry!”

Barry, noticing the vape pen cartridge was full, instantly scouted for a second pen. “Let's see if this Barry is like me—he would hide it from himself.”

As he searched for another vape pen, he generously inhaled a very large hit of the extract, holding his breath for a solid minute to invite in the full effects while thumbing through the kitchen drawer. “Found it—number two!” he cried, holding up a second pen in victory and coughing as he exhaled vapor. Smoke filled the living room and kitchen area in a hazy cloud.

“Well, there's no pizza, but there are burritos,” Nick belted out as he finished the beer. He immediately cracked open another portion of the five-pack he'd claimed ownership of without asking any unseen force. He'd hit those burritos soon enough!

Just then, attempting to counteract the physical feeling of this Nick’s poor health in his shattered existence, he tossed his grotesque bizarro twin self’s convenience store burrito into the trash at the end of the kitchen counter as if in protest—at odds with himself.

"The end of the failed Nick!" he declared, raising another idle cheers into the air.

As gases built up in his stomach, he relieved himself with a stale, stagnant, metabolic, crude flatulent ejection, then circled back without apology to find a plate.

Scraping a clean white porcelain side dish from the kitchen cabinet, he poured out three frozen burritos freshly pulled from the freezer, opened the microwave door, placed the plate inside, and set the timer for three minutes on high heat.

Betsy had pulled together a very nice, slimming outfit of women's winter wear that looked like an expensive snowboarding suit—pants, jacket, and boots. As she emerged from the back bedroom with approval written across her face, the outfit was tight, but she managed to cram herself into it.

“There are pics of you with some chick named Linda, along with a bunch of love letters and therapy notes regarding your breakup three years ago with her. Guess it was pretty brutal. Looks like she was cheating on you with multiple dudes and some chick named Becky or something, but it made for good reading while I took her stuff.”

“She wasn't cheating on me, per se,” exclaimed Barry. “I couldn't care less about that ho—how dare you cheat on my dorky other self... but cool outfit, Bets! Rocking that outfit, good find!” Barry joked sarcastically as he took an equally large hit from the sativa body-high CBD vape pen. “Oh yeah, this is a great little base universe!” He cast away any faint shared pain the two Barrys might have experienced across these dimensions of loss.

"What is that smell?!" Betsy noticed Nick's crude bodily projection lingering from moments before. "It literally smells like a dead raccoon in here... gross!"

Just then, the microwave alarm went off. Nick emerged from the hallway restroom sporting tight jeans and one of the oversized T-shirts Barry had brought out (the blue one off the couch), which was actually a little baggy on Nick—he liked that fact. In addition, he'd managed to discover a stowed pair of black leather motorcycle riding boots just his size and a black down jacket in the kitchen pantry turned mini-tool shed.

“Damn, and I thought Barry in this universe was a dork. Not bad, bear!” Nick raised his open palms like an evangelist, eyebrows raised like a numbly resurrected, fat, bloated, obese Elvis showing repeated, sun-damaged layers of all-day tanned skin.

Barry rolled his eyes at him, noticing an odd, liberating, yet highly necessary infusion of the old stick-up-his-ass, slightly pompous Nick counteracting the mellowing effect of this bulbous, unapologetic version of him here.

“Which one of these doesn't make you all high, but gives you a euphoric feeling?” asked Betsy, pointing at the vapes.

“Oh, this one does—good stuff, really great,” Barry responded, passing it off to her. Referencing his other self, he continued, “I really needed this. I had a feeling this guy smoked weed, what with his nerdy gamer shirt and all.”

Barry went into his bedroom to find a jacket that suited him, selecting a nice grayish, all-weather jacket. “I'm kind of thinking of the future here with my clothing selection,” Barry muttered. “Definitely need some good thick socks and hiking boots”—finding something close—“better to be overly prepared.” He found a pocketknife and a pen flashlight in the pantry-turned-tool-closet, placing them into the left pocket of his freshly donned jeans, and remembered to retrieve his keys as well, placing those into his right front pocket.

“Well guys, shall we? Off to our next adventure!” Barry quickly stuffed the vape pens into his jacket pockets and zipped them down, one on each side, as he always did so he'd remember: “CBD's on the right and THC on the left.”

As the three shuffled out the front door, Nick brought along another beer and his last burrito in repulsive, gluttonous protest of his prudish past hyper-static existence—this was waking him up, he thought.

“Any good, Nick?” Barry asked, referencing the microwaved food.

“It's actually not bad, Barry. You had some nice green salsa in your fridge, too. Solid Barry ratings all around: clothing, beer, chicks!”

Nick poked Betsy playfully on the back of her arm, but she was not amused.

As the three shut the door and headed for 168 just down the road, Nick was the one to close it. Barry walked far ahead in front, feeling no ownership over this place, disconnecting from his doppelgänger's home perhaps to enforce the letting go of any home at all.

"Nicely played, other Barry," Nick stated, possessing a pretty good beer buzz now as he began to eye the 150cc black motor scooter parked to the right of the entrance.

"Damn, Barry, is that thing yours?!" Nick asked with a menacing pause.

Meanwhile, at Barry, Nick, and Betsy's destination just down the street, Madame Crusso—of this world, and perhaps the Dark High Priestess of them all—sat in the living room of 168 Apricot Lane alongside Sam Von Ralettes, a man resurrected via a low-level, redneck-tech analog hack. He had found the backdoor to immortality itself, riding the spirit within the machine through the low, odic electromagnetic currents pulsing in the sanguine plasma of every world.

They maintained the facade of casual friends, exchanging dialectics in an expressive, multilingual coitus. Beneath the banter, an unsuspected joust was underway—a test of wills fought through encrypted facial gestures and sudden telepathic attacks. Outside, distant crows cawed at precise distances, angles, and patterned syllable counts, a primordial code invoking the terms of a battle joined long ago.

Like an Enochian watchtower fused with a biblical Cain incantation portaled onto a chessboard, both the meat and the game were boiling violently beneath the proverbial lid.

“Alors, Sam, as-tu étudié les ouvrages sur Éliphas Lévi, le rosicrucianisme ou John Dee—ce dont je suis certaine? Comment fonctionne le mariage chimique? Fais-tu régulièrement l'amour avec toi-même comme si tu étais uni par les liens du mariage?” spoke Madame Crusso—or Margaret Whisper Knightly, as she was more commonly known.

Sam answered back in French while Larry listened, understanding neither the language nor the subject of the conversation:

“Oui, oui, exactement cela, Madame. J'ai pris conscience, il y a quelque temps, que nous sommes véritablement toujours en quête de nous-mêmes à l'extérieur, que cette fusion du masculin et du féminin a déjà eu lieu, que tous les individus et toutes les institutions sont conscients de ce fait, et que le concept du Christ ne peut être rectifié que par cette action interdisciplinaire. Qu'une grande période de pureté—une sorte de décantation ou de cristallisation—doit survenir, suivie d'une autre phase: celle d'une union sexuelle intentionnelle, sur les plans physique, mental et spirituel. Je prends très au sérieux les travaux de tous ces hommes dont vous avez parlé. Je vois que vous avez pleinement compris votre rôle en la matière: le fait que le corps humain est délibérément mal équipé pour mener à bien de telles opérations, et que le scénario de la maîtrise de soi et de l'autonomie constitue le mécanisme de reprogrammation d'une machine défaillante.”

[English Translation]

“Yes, yes, exactly that, Madame. I realized some time ago that we are truly always searching for ourselves out there, that this fusion of male and female had already taken place, further that all people and institutions are aware of this fact, and that this Christ concept can only be rectified through this interdisciplinary action. That a great time of purity—a sort of settling or gelling—must take place, then another time, intentional sexual union physically, mentally, and spiritually must take place. I take very seriously the works of all those men you asked about. I see that you have realized fully your role in this, that the human body is intentionally ill-equipped to offer such operations, that the script of one's own self-mastery and autonomy are the rewrite mechanism of a faulty machine.”

The living room here was left nearly exactly as it had been in the first world—now vaporized and gone, but not truly, as Larry looked around upon quietly entering his home through the unlocked front door.

“Oh, dear,” said the all-too-doting Margaret, raising her arm above her head as if she were already accepting an ingratiating kiss from him in utter supplication and loyalty. Larry caught the cue through hyper-observation and dashed from the entrance at 168 Apricot Lane to aid her—his wife here.

After an infectious embrace and possessive inhaling of his scent, she kissed him with ritualistic ownership, enveloping and holding Larry's cheeks and head, all while remaining seated cross-legged and stately on the far end of that shared couch.

Margaret stood, only feigning to be frail. “Dear, I would like to introduce Samuel Von Ralettes. Sam, as he prefers to be addressed, is going to be renting this home—my home, our home—from us, my love, here at 168 Apricot Lane.”

She wasn't asking for approval.

Larry, not knowing what else to do, remained mesmerized and horrified—as if he'd seen a Lazarus resurrection or a phantom lifted from Barry's archives manifesting into living view. Then he remembered where he really was: how this was some sort of cosmic lesson from that crazy diamond now holding him in limbo.

Playing along, he quickly gave up any defensive bravado and extended his right hand for a handshake, keeping his center of power near his torso as he stepped closer to examine Sam, trusting neither the architecture nor the agents. They locked in a firm grip while reading each other's eyes and scent.

Outside, Rat remained waiting for Larry to signal him to enter or to retrieve him so they could leave together. In the present, he just stood there, marveling at the heavens and simply being.

Rat reflected: while his familiar central bodily form was likely taking on the same physiological posture as he stood looking upward, convulsing in an ultra-possessed trance, powerless before the great and powerful diamond, he was granted a sense of autonomy here as he stared deeper at the luminosity of the moon and heavens above. In tandem, he realized he was caught in the grip of a master weaver of realities. The freshly inhaled cold air carried a salty, coastal organic bite; he preferred it regardless.

Looking down at his hands—so real—he clenched his fists into personal rectifying power, standing under the heavens in a fighting stance with knees bent to defend or deliver a blow. He immediately dropped his scattered stance, using his will to isolate a thought, and wondered: How could he experience these realities simultaneously as so authentic, visceral, raw, and real? Were they all being manipulated to choose this well-scripted illusion, or were they truly granted the creative power to manifest a new world?

Just as Larry and Margaret were saying goodbye to Sam and leaving him keys for the fully furnished home, Nick, Betsy, and Barry appeared from the darkened sidewalk down below.

As the front door closed, Margaret walked ahead of Larry, her deceptively thick-spiked but functional low-cut work heels clacking against the cement with deliberate precision. Rat turned to watch them make their way toward a triangular intersection—a meeting point near the two motor vehicles parked in front.

Margaret drove a light goldish-brown, understated base model compact import SUV.

“I'll follow you, dear,” Larry said, placing his hand with practiced affection upon Margaret's arm and shoulder as expected.

She leaned in for a praiseworthy, plastic cheek kiss in public, performing as though under surveillance. It was a grandiose act typical of a toxic archetype maintaining the fragile fiction that her makeup must never be disturbed.

Grabbing her keys from her expensive, medium-sized leather purse while wearing a perpetual pout of grievance—as if nothing was ever quite good enough—her door locks clicked open as she slipped into the rehearsed cybernetic cadence of a defensive narcissist: a witch of the highest universal, world-ending order.

Seamlessly transitioning her performance before the occulted Council, she stood expectantly by her door for Larry to enact a long-dead chivalry, which he agonizingly played along with. As they exchanged the intentional, unmet potential friction of a cosmetic-preserving air kiss, he felt an immediate rush of release pulling away from the all-consuming vacuum.

“Oh, help me with this seat belt, dear,” Margaret said, weaponizing her hands and purse as superfluous bulk to simulate total helplessness and inhibit autonomous action.

Drained and locked into the maneuver, Larry leaned across her threshold, acutely aware of her scrutinizing gaze. He fumbled in the dark across the far side for the female port of the seat-belt pretensioner pigtail connector while the overhead cabin lights cast an intrusive, false glare over their shared space—an unwelcome intrusion, since she despised sharing anything. As the seatbelt harness clicked into a dry, evaporated thud, Larry pulled back awkwardly, relieved to escape the unseen evil that could not be fully hidden, only masked.

Now standing fully upright and distancing himself from the sloping grade of the car as it leaned parabolically inward toward the gravity of the storm drain, he heard the driver's door deliver another hollow sound. Larry, falsely grinning in terror of her, waved mechanically as Margaret's true, frigid coldness settled in the air behind her, already cutting him out of her reality as if he had vanished entirely and lost all utility—yet still feeling the invisible, menacing tentacles searching him, feeding off his light.

“Don't worry, she never looks back. Same old Margaret with her covert alter ego, Madame Crusso—Witch!” Nick said, stepping up beside Larry to marvel at her inner, menacing architecture.

They wondered once more where that funerary-green, pentagonal, Halloween narcissism—cloaked entirely in church-lady virtue and artificial aloofness—had originally spawned. Exchanging a wide-eyed, knowing glance in shared horror, they both knew precisely what she was: a military arm of the now-dying, pernicious former Council of Seven and Five Spheres, feeding from an all-consuming void of an unquenchable abyss.

The front porch light turned on, and the crew stood on and near the curb in a semi-circle. Nick, standing in the gutter with his boot pressing into the bell curve of the sidewalk, looked up at the house and past the group. What were they really supposed to achieve here? While Betsy sat a distance away on the curb near the grill of Larry's sedan, looking much more like herself than before, Nick showed traces of it too.

Nick looked upward at that dark, nebulous, mystical sky above, noticing the air was colder now, fresh and real. They all stood around, dumbfounded again, but strong in whatever resolve was to come.

Larry, finding a flask in the inside pocket of his suit vest purely out of instinct, opened the fine-looking vessel, winding the top open as the contents sloshed inside the cold metal persuader. He reflected on the evil he had just felt as all the experiences came crashing in at once. Two quick swigs went down smooth and deliberate.

Betsy walked over to the group with her hand out, knowing that the gremlin in Nick would grab at the liquid courage first. Larry finished a third cold bite of that fine whiskey—of this world's shared reality—and handed it off to Betsy.

"You know, it's just so fucking hard to simply exist!" Betsy added as she took a quick, brisk sip.

“That is a declarative statement of fact!” Nick agreed.

Betsy began to hand the flask off to Nick, then exclaimed, "Oh no, give me a second... I know you are going to drink it all, so here goes, oof!" She forced down a solid shot's worth before finally handing it off to Nick.

"Oh, that's good stuff. Wonder what that is—Woodbridge? Oh wait, probably Woodridge here—tacky universe, really." Continuing, Nick shook his head as Barry reached for the flask. "If they all knew how fragile all their information density truly was..."

Rat felt slightly more steady as the flask made its way around to him.

"It's not tempting for me to walk straight in through the front door of that house anymore," said Nick. "I no longer search for it, you know—buildings sharing similarities to it. Or other buildings with canary yellow and white trim, or similar yards. It looks like an old, washed-out memory to me now. It doesn't own me anymore." Nick looked at Larry, knowing he had become immutable to it—from homelessness, from not having a home, by no longer craving a prison to call his own. Nick added, "Yeah, I don't fear it—death, or even nonexistence. Not anymore."

As Rat took another swig, he looked at Nick. "Yeah, me neither," he said clearly, passing it off to Betsy.

"Me neither."

Then to Barry: "Me neither."

They each agreed, passing the flask around again as a bond. The flask was still half full; they had nowhere else they wanted to go. It was all an illusion, and not a very good one.

Barry, taking healthy long rips from his vape pen, didn't care which one he had.

"But still, this fucking air smells like freedom, you know? So deceptive!" agonized Nick. Feeling raucous, he wanted to go grab that scooter and blaze down the street to see if he could pull a wheelie on the thing. But it was all just carbon folded into itself—into crystallized forms of unqualified splendor.

"Supposing truth be a woman—what then? Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil—I know what it means now. But I also get William Shakespeare's Richard the Third: 'Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.' I get it! Or what about Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, for you movie buffs, when he attacks Luke Skywalker with force lightning, saying, 'Young fool... Only now, at the end, do you understand?'"

Larry added his thoughts, feeling philosophical but lacking the soothing bliss of philology. Nothing was grounded in language and dialectics; nothing was ontogenic nor phylogenic. Only cybernetically infused, branded symbols and markings of ownership remained. There existed no synthesis, only patterns and forms. Larry finished the thought in silence as the flask rounded back to him in good time.

They grabbed at one another's shoulders, feeling humanity and life like kittens at a dry teat, then leaned in, pressing the tops of their heads hard against one another to remind themselves of the venomous bite of life and living—the struggle. Topographically, whatever was looking down on them—that great, ever-calculating diamond—would see a five-petaled flower from above in the shape of the union they made: like a sphincter, a birth canal, or maybe just another lip of a bottle top on a shared pocket flask.

"Well, are you guys going to come up?" Sam watched the crew, crossing his arms to shelter from the cold.

“Sam?” said Barry, and they were all clued in now.

"I've been there, good people!" Sam added reassuringly as Larry looked up at him, then down at his phone. He had nearly forgotten to bring it up—a dead man returned, or some other strange offshoot of him.

"You know she hasn't called," Larry said, looking down at his phone and calling up toward Sam, staring at his phone with menacing terror, warmed at least by a spirited alcohol buzz to cut the dread.

As Sam shook his head no, Larry wanted to leave this world.

"And she's not going to call you either, Larry. The jig is up!" said Sam, adding, "They no longer have the energy to pretend!"

Sam stood at the top of the shallow, paved footpath, pointing invitingly toward the house, gesturing for them to get inside and figure this all out in a warm room over drinks. "I definitely have something waiting up there, please come join me."

He stood off to the side of the walkway, continuing to motion as the crew walked by him one by one.

"Barry," said Sam.

"Sam," said Barry.

The crew walked in single file up toward the house.

Chapter 10

Rat, passing Sam at the comet’s tail end of the group, reached out to shake Sam’s hand. But Sam wasn’t having it; he grabbed Rat's hand hard with unnatural strength and force, pulling him in for a man-to-man hug—finally ending the brief, jovial encounter with a quick air-punch to Rat’s abdomen, as if greeting a close nephew, a wartime comrade, a brother, or a son.

Nick waited near the front door, looking like a perturbed, drunk beach bum going through an emotional crisis with his internal concept of a family and a home. He didn't hide from the casting of falsity as the synthetic light beamed down cruelly upon his weathered, dirty, precancerous face—now looking at the door like a patient but hungry dog, unaware that he kept obviously glancing at the testing boon placed off to his side.

Sam, clutching the keys to the front door of 168 Apricot Lane loosely in his right hand, held the door open with his left, leaning in to usher the crew through the entrance.

At the threshold, Rat noticed Barry taking a quick, final, calming hit from his CBD vape pen on his right side. He saw the transfer of addiction—firmly unregistered—become all too obvious and soberly seen in this world, as if a fragment of the machine’s ribbons of mimesis dangled there before the two. It was like a lottery of holonomy, as if to say, “Someone has to quietly take on the character for this show to go on.” Two assumedly benign addicts caught in the registry of mind, each now aware in the presence of this compulsively quiet transfer of addiction.

As Barry commenced his routine of placing the THC-rich pen in his left jacket pocket while stowing the CBD-dominant pen in his right, Rat stopped him midway and grabbed at the pen. The two looked eye to eye under the glaring porch light, both holding the object. Rat was taking back a portion of the burden, owning his end, reaching out to handle a shared gene-addiction: an existential calming agent, an epigenetic aspect of himself that the two commonly shared, a pattern of likeness, an unseen gravity between them—maybe something Rat felt was stolen from him.

As Barry handed off the exogenous loss to Rat, the two entered through the front door in a brief, largely unnoticed interlude. It was a gesture toward the psychedelic quanta bioelectric field that they each unknowingly shared—the realm that shaped them from afar. They were aware of it now: across any distance, it was always anchoring and quietly controlling them.

Sam shut the front door behind him. They all knew full well the ephemerality of the place as merely an idea—the home always being a concept of a world.

“Please, please come into your home,” Sam tossed out welcomingly, baiting them.

“It’s not my home,” Nick burped out quietly and defiantly, slightly under the registry, as he headed toward the refrigerator to grab his favorite beer and a container of his favorite hummus. As a side note, the product was labeled Wholly Hummus and not Holy Hummus—the little things that added up to grand, unique, Stirnerized universe-building forms of conceptualization.

Nick’s favorite stone-milled natural wheat chips sat in the cupboard right where he had always placed them, and the kitchen must have recently been fully stocked by Margaret.

“What, does she wiggle her nose and just make this stuff appear?!”

Nick, now taking his place in his favorite leather high-back chair, noticed the details: an exact sherry stain on the left armrest as he sat down, placing his beer and hummus container on the small table to his right at the exact angle he had always appropriated.

The group shuffled in.

Rat, Barry, and Larry filled up the couch, while Betsy took to the kitchen where all her favorite secret supplies were indeed confirmed: organic dark chocolate with almonds hidden in the jar away from Nick, her favorite go-to bottles of wine stored under the far side of the kitchen cabinetry, and the dried mangoes she was snacking on as she sat on a high barstool. She bit into the juicy, sweet, familiar taste of home while reaching across the granite countertop for a bottle opener, simultaneously grabbing her favorite Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay brand—only this one read Montgomery Vineyards, not Montgomery Vines.

“Gotta look at that product placement,” Betsy joked sarcastically under her breath while catching the label difference.

Sam took his place before the crew in the living room, first pulling away the unused high barstool that had been sitting to Betsy’s left.

“Don’t get too comfortable, guys,” Sam stated.

Nick grumbled, “Never.” Then he added, “So you are the infamous Sam. How are you alive, man? Great to meet you, though!” He was snidely implying: Making yourself comfortable in my home while being somehow raised from the dead! As he chomped down on a healthy heap of those sea-salt-flavored crackers, washing the dry mass down with his favorite beer, he reached to open the hummus container. “The dates were placed in reverse here—the month and day,” he noted as he scanned the highly familiar container.

“That is a damn good question, Nick,” Sam said, having watched Nick's former stature in B-movies for years, noticing the early strands of mirroring replication on his scripts as the trail followed straight back to Madame Crusso shortly before he passed.

Then Larry asked, “What were you saying to Margaret when I came in quietly earlier?”

Sam answered, “Oh, we knew you were there. We were playing along with the obvious, just talking shop.”

Larry replied, “How did you manage this? Renting the place?”

Sam countered, “Well, I didn’t. I arrived at the front door a moment before you did, Larry. As you walked in, I had only just sat down. Then Madame Crusso began to speak French, knowing that the last book I read was Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie—Éliphas Lévi’s first real foundational text on ritual magic, published in two volumes between 1854 and 1856, with twenty-two chapters apiece mapped right onto the tarot.”

“She was spinning sex magic at me, trying to absorb me. Bet you couldn't notice that, Larry?” Sam continued as Larry allowed him to speak. “She was showing me her mastery of it when you walked in, while I was so unassumingly absorbing the very light of the poor child souls she had so recently consumed. Of course, any layman would not have noticed the incantations—it’s part of the power. You hold the normative vibrational frequency in the mundane, mirrored bounce-back, while we practitioners rely on the ignorance of what is referred to in these circles as the profane—those who neither acknowledge nor develop their God-given powers.”

Larry responded surprisingly well, shooting grounded reality back toward the specter of the entity that was, most especially now, tugging on the high-stakes strings of men’s egos: “As a philosopher, I was quite aware of what was going on, though not hyper-aware like you. Years ago, I knew inherently that the boundary between pure philosophy and adulterated magic bordered on firm mathematical principles that I would not breach. I have looked into the minds and faces of my heroes and seen through them just as I see through you, Sam Von Ralettes. I am aware of you—very aware of you—just not hyper-aware.”

Larry maintained his steady gaze. “Your misreading of the room was an oversight that could be relied upon. But I assure you that the normative frequency band of profanity didn’t stem from me. Maybe you were playing right into her hand and that dark Council cybernetically X-raying the room.”

Sam responded only with, “Chapeau. En garde.” Then he added, “Touché, Larry—bien joué.”

Betsy had poured a series of glasses, avoiding drinking the entire bottle herself, and now handed a glass off to Sam as he re-centered himself and brushed off the foible and forte, as Sam may have thought proudly to himself in transition.

“Portons un toast, my friends, to the old world and this new world—albeit so strikingly similar,” Sam said as he raised his glass. He then explained, “You see, this base world is actually the real world, good people. Meaning you have, as I, taken over the bodies of these unsuspecting pure states of our doppelgängers who represent the true versions of ourselves. Barry understood in his note-taking and master study of my research—which brought him here—that it allowed him and Rat, along with all of you, to survive another day. But it is indeed, as Larry so eloquently and a bit harshly pointed out, math in its highest form: the Fibonacci golden mean Phi interluding with Pi on a cosmic screen. Do you have anything to write with?”

Nick momentarily forgot that this wasn’t even the same universe, but the tactics used to make him feel comfortable and familiar here began to subconsciously wrap their claws around him.

“I have seen the end—how ridiculous and infinitely looping it all is,” Sam continued. “You know, I downloaded the ability to speak French into me—this aetheric body of the final Sam—by violently extracting the energy from a Sam in another world prior to your closing of that world. You did the closing, not myself. In a way, you may say I work in a sort of conductive liaison relationship between all sides. I no longer see any good nor evil.”

Nick pulled a pad of paper and his own personal, well-balanced bolígrafo from the living room table drawer, then handed the items off to Sam, who wrote:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144

Below it, he wrote f(z) = z + 1, followed by a box, then drew a pattern of three intertwined 6s resembling the CERN logo—a symbol that seemed perennial from world to world, judging by the science and technology magazine sitting nearby on a small pedestal tabletop.

“We may be stuck in a causal dynamic system within a recursive set, unable to ever reach baseline—stuck as a recursive fraction of a pattern, always reframing in self-adjustment at f(z) = z + 1, but unable to achieve it because we ourselves are only cybernetic fractions while our instinct is to become whole integers. Perhaps exceeding this threshold is the goal to reset the dynamic system’s base functions that keep us trapped inside it like a box pattern, all while the very problem we are each solving is ourselves: becoming truly whole. Thus quite possibly the ultimate boundary we are trying to break out of is not the universe itself, but the fragmented nature of our own observer bias.”

Circling the 0 and the first 1, Sam drew firm directional pointers toward the succeeding 1.

“You see that third character here—this 1?” Sam asked, quickly adding, “It’s really a symbol, in truth.” Centering himself, he continued: “That third character, or the second 1—that’s where we were: an inverted sort of SCRaMbLE. Yes, that’s a good way of putting it. It’s like that addition of uracil, that fifth base, like the pentagram.”

Sam went into a little more detail: “Basically, in the physical construct, your DNA acts as a localized, holographic, microcosmic master hard drive—saving A, C, G, and T, which gets copy-pasted into a travel-sized RNA blueprint, swapping out T for U so the cell's tiny assembly crews—the ribosomes—can read it and snap together proteins out of raw amino acids.”

Taking a deep breath and licking his lips, Sam looked at the dull expressions on the group’s faces and tried to simplify: “In the rescrambling process, with the DNA and RNA stewing in a prescaled mix... well, that was us. In the first world—well, the other first world, because here we sit in the base world...”

He tapped Nick's pen violently at the 0 as he reached to down the remainder of his wine off the living room table, signaling to Betsy for a refill. Betsy simply grabbed the two remaining pre-poured glasses off the large kitchen drop-leaf tabletop, drinking the contents of one while walking over to hand the other to Sam in a smooth gesture of shared stress over the subject at hand.

After taking a large gulp of the Chardonnay, Sam stated, “You see, we are the doppelgängers. We stole the lives of our true selves—how’s that for a mindfuck?!”

He crossed his left arm across his chest, leaning back on the high barstool to support his free right hand while vectoring the wine glass in a shallow pivot to finish it. He played with the newly empty glass between his fingers as the light shone off the concavity, sending crystal-like projections faintly about the room. “And this zero here is what we are all maddeningly killing ourselves and everyone else over—this ideal world that still nurtures us, killing everything and everyone in some way on the path to it. Hard lessons, indeed. And for some of us, taking on black magic practice in the process leaves very little else within, as we quite intentionally affront and violently eject the former inhabitants into an assumed nothingness: the void.”

Barry and Rat had remained relatively silent, only partaking in an occasional hit from their vape pens and switching with one another periodically. Barry chimed in: “I see you haven’t met Agent Cook, Sam?”

As Barry continued, he captured Sam’s full, undivided attention: “Well, that is where that energy goes—all the others who are not first caught by the Dark Council go into Cook and his abyss of unmet potentials. It’s one of the few things missing from your work.”

Sam responded, “I thought Cook was just a philosophical marker of sorts—a boundless, transient place where unmet potential in negentropy goes beyond our reason. Wait... it has a name and personality?!”

They all looked down, befuddled and mumbling as the long soliloquies of Cook came flooding back to them.

Betsy said, “Oh yeah, he’s real. So are Daria, Rancor, and the bleached-white limbo. There’s a great deal you may never know about us.”

Rat added, “You took the hard way in, Sam, but props to you. But all that high magic and sacrifice that cost you and that Dark Council so much of yourselves? None of that magic was ever necessary. The magic is happening all around us—everyone, every single day!”

Nick turned the oven knob to a safe 375°F to warm it up. Snugly replacing the foil on the tempered glass container, he placed the lasagna inside and set the timer for one hour. “Good enough. I could eat a horse.”

They returned to the living room where everyone had briefly dispersed to use the restroom or step outside for a breath of air, only to quickly return to their prior seating arrangements out of sheer, mind-numbing curiosity.

Rat and Barry exhaled vape fumes as they sat down, quickly exchanging their pens while laughing as they mirrored the same thought. Nick grabbed yet another beer. Meanwhile, Betsy guided Sam to the freezer, revealing the frost-slicked bottle of Jägermeister, now dubbed “Meisterjäger.” Neither was particularly fascinated by it; it seemed like only a slightly annoying oddity to them now.

Sam looked on as the cold freezer fumes met the warm room in a melodramatic haze. Betsy reached up toward the heavy rocks glasses, pulling one down with each hand, then looked back at Sam instinctively for physical validation. Sam looked back at her, confused, assuming she wanted him to crack open the bottle that Betsy had purchased on a whim in the first world—though the computational system of the diamond was aware of it all, along with the Dark Council.

Sam poured generous portions into each glass, and Betsy did not signal for him to stop.

Retaking their former seats, they waited as the lasagna began to fill the home with a familiar scent.

Some grabbed handfuls of prepackaged snacks as open packages lay comfortably scattered about the table.

Sam looked around and asked, “Odd that they would fund this little cause, don’t you agree?”

Larry answered sharply as he bit into a chocolate-dipped pretzel—a taste that reminded him of his childhood and his broken home. “It’s as if they want us to take on the burden,” Larry added coyly, sipping on nothing but water.

Chapter 11

“So, you see our current dilemma?” Sam added.

Then he went into a long, focused speech as he sipped on his Meisterjäger to wet his palate, breaking down key bullets and facts as he scribbled on the notepad. Betsy, noticing he might require something bigger, had just the thing stored in the upstairs laundry room: a large dry-erase board with a pivot stand. She asked Rat and Barry to help her retrieve it.

“Unfortunately, we need to go to Margaret, the Dark Council, and your childhood home, Nick—back to Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux,” Sam finished. “But we can't go empty-handed. Sad to say, a sacrifice must be made. That is, if Varginah is still alive in some form?”

“Oh yes, she's alive,” Betsy stated, “back in the bleached-white limbo, twitching and shaking before that creepy diamond.”

She partly forgot that her main body was quite possibly also being held there in the same sort of non-localized quantum position.

“Wait, if this is the so-called real world, or the last world left as you say, then we could just continue to live here, right?” asked Betsy.

“Yes, but you would be sacrificing Varginah and the Professor,” Larry added. “Maybe even ourselves; who knows how long someone lasts in such a fractionated state?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Rat contributed to the think tank. “If we are in the real world, then our bodies aren't really there, but here, right? Which would also mean that Varginah and the Professor are actually, well… dead.”

“But there is no way to be certain. What's more, perhaps we must have fused into our doppelgängers here?”

Sam replied, “Physics are obviously not totally in play here; it's hard to say. I've been studying every aspect of this mind-fuck for decades—and without all the tools your group has had access to, by the sound of it!”

“And Varginah and the Professor were the smartest part of our team—no offense, Rat and Barry,” Nick added.

“None taken,” said Rat, now standing upright and anxious along with the others.

“We need a Holy Mother Candlestick to close this last base world,” Sam said bluntly, adding, “We need Varginah or the Professor. Only they know anything about how to build such a machine! Then quite possibly, as I have mentioned—though cursorily—we might all then immediately go back into that bleached-white limbo, as you refer to it?”

“Well, what about your helmets? Those seem to work. Are there copies of them here, or can you rebuild them, Sam? And what about the suits?”

Sam answered, “Sure, if you want to do tantra and sex magic while wearing the suits. How do you think I got them to work, anyway? To put it crudely, you go through the whole imprinting process of those main quartz crystals that take large parts of your purity, then imprint your essence into those crystals. That's what powers them, other than the low-level current—drawing in etheric energies that may have come by way of the byproduct of entropy produced between multiverses in constant friction. Of which there are none left at the moment, at least.

“We may have kinda paradoxically fucked ourselves here.”

Then Sam went on, “Rat should know—haven't you put it together, Rat, that the pervert doppelgänger you were summoned to had taken over your essence and existence, annexing you? By sheer truth and luck, you and your primal genius were again fused. Of course I know all about that freaky world! I visited it too—Universe 28,008. How could I not? It was the hub of all sex magic, and you were, in a sense, our god,” Sam finished, clearing his throat uncomfortably.

Nick now took to the dry-erase board that Barry and Rat brought down.

First Issue: We close this world, and we have to contact or somehow bring back Varginah and/or the Professor to figure out how to get a Holy Mother Candlestick into operation.

Second Issue: If this is successful, then a sacrifice by one of us—or by a willing participant who has a pure, sacrificing soul whose soul can then be weaponized and stored in the HMC canister—is required to be used in the operation. We would then need to take this HMC with us to Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux.

“Then what?” Nick asked Sam, continuing: “We go back into the limbo? Why did we trust that thing in the first place, huh?”

Then Betsy added, “Yes, but it seems to bring us back when the job is finished again, right?”

Nick scratched his head, perplexed. “Is this fucking thing so sadistic that it's just fucking with us all? I mean, with the Professor, but especially Varginah, we would have had a clear shot here. It's crazy that they could be there in that bleached-white limbo able to manifest anything, but what good is that here? Maddening, really!”

“Stop, stop, everyone,” Nick added—the room taking on the appearance of a tacky game of odd-fitting coworkers playing charades, everyone appearing slightly more energized and heated.

Nick continued, as the group couldn't see that he was onto something big: “Look, I'll write this down too, okay! So, hypothetically speaking, we send someone back to the bleached-out limbo to somehow retrieve Varginah, maybe the Professor, and—even more hypothetically—through a portal under this house or Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux. They're still there, right, Sam?”

Everyone turned to Sam for answers.

“Yeah, yes, absolutely,” Sam said. “I have been monitoring all goings-on of the Council and their spiritual quanta—or as I call it, their tech, the god-tech they procured. And get this: under Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux, there's a cave system and portals. One leads to an infinitely massive—by our conceptualizations—anal-retentive, forensically driven heavenly realm we haven't even gone over yet here.

“But there's also one that is infinitesimally small: a quantum microcosm beyond the Planck scale wall where the Council banishes real, heavy-hitting threats—people who are, frankly, a massive pain in their ass. It's essentially a never-ending psychedelic drug trip with zero escape. Trust me, I've seriously considered just taking a one-way ticket straight through that portal myself.”

They had all sat back down, fatigued. Then a silence hit the room, followed by a moment of clarity.

“What if we dig up Varginah and the Professor's bodies, then run a low-level current through them?” said Barry, thinking that it sounded both morbid and nuts. But what other ideas were there?

The group looked at Barry, flabbergasted, left with the weight of it.

Sam's eyes went wide in an inspired Eureka moment: “Yes, yes! And we could put a suit and helmet on each of their corpses with fresh, high-powered diamonds funded by this operation—like really big, super-clear, pure diamonds that are, at minimum, $250,000 a pop. But I did research on the preferred ones required not long ago in the last world. Granted, if they exist in this world—black markets work the same here—I may already possibly have a connection to obtain them.”

“So let me get this straight, and I'm not knocking you here, okay!” Nick said, then went on: “We dig up our dearly departed friends' bodies—anybody know how they died here, anyway?”

Sam added, “One was hit in a head-on collision three years ago. I looked up the newspaper reports—by the way, the newspaper is called Ravens Herald, not Ravens Grove Herald; just thought I would mention that little fact. Anyway, that was Varginah. And the Professor seems to have passed away of a heart attack oh, five or so years back. Both deaths could be considered highly suspicious, at least from our parallax view,” Sam said, allowing Nick to finish.

“So if we were to procure those diamonds somehow, then dress these corpses in the suits and helmets—not sure how much is left of them at this point—do you think that you could actually port them through?”

“What other choice do we have?” Sam said, dropping his arms to his sides.

“I wonder if my safe is still here in this house, too. Everything else oddly looks the same,” Nick queried.

“Yes, about that, Nick... do you know why you are in such poor health here in this world, Nick?” Sam asked in a somber, serious tone.

“Why, Sam?” asked Nick.

“Because your mother, Madame Crusso, was taking all the power and privilege from her own son here—sabotaging him around every deceitful corner, turning all of his unmet potential away from him and routing it into you, feeding it into you over there from the base world to the first world.

“Margaret, your mother, intentionally, through ritual and craft, gave that baby—Nick—up, leaving him on the doorstep of an abusive, evil, clandestine Catholic parish directly linked with the Dark Council.

“They, in turn, handed him—handed you—over to drug addicts and sex workers through a series of dark and broken homes. She was even the woman who would later leave him beers and a pornographic magazine in a bag every Tuesday, always chock-full of candy bars. She, your own mother, actually came in like some masquerading angel to provide money and drugs to your multiple sets of adoptive parents.

“This is your real mother, Nick. They switched places.

“That, my friend, is only a small fraction of the toxic mother and how serious this love-bombing craft of evil practitionership truly is.”

Nick, now crying profusely with his fat stomach sticking out of his shirt, was actually pouting for the first time in his long, overly privileged life.

“I always felt that there was some version of me out there suffering for all my breaks, but I couldn't piece it all together to make any sense. I suppose that feeling is what compelled me to know more about Margaret and her weird-ass affiliations. I just never fully realized that it could all be true—that it is sadistic and continuously twisted and cruel!” Tears were now flowing, streaming down from his swollen cheeks.

“That is precisely why I have decided that if I don't put myself somewhere like the quantum realm—that very portal down under those caverns under Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux... I don't trust myself anymore, Nick. No matter what body I might be in, this can't end up well at all. I know a lot more than I have let on, but not to deceive.

“You see, I saw the hideous things you and your friends become in 21 billion years, and it is vile, my friend. These options that we seem to have are truly illusions. We can sacrifice ourselves yet still be stuck inside that infernal diamond... and yes, I know about it, as well as the limbo, because I have been there too.

“The only option one has is to go into the infinitesimally small quantum realm. Go to heaven, and it's not all it's cracked up to be—you are essentially so large that you are cut off from all unique identity, living in a pure state of light that offers no real separation from that so-called monad, as scholars and theologians have referred to it.

“Noteworthy, however, is that there may exist only a theoretical master world—Shambhala, Valhalla, Zion—referred to in obscure terminology as Plus Ultra, with everything else kept outside it, thus proving a maddening, never-ending loop of engineered purgatory. We suffer as a gradient so that others can exist in total harmonic balance. Are we so flawed that we will never make it out, only feeding back into powering their world through all our efforts? Just by existing, we may perpetually generate the illusion, always dangling like a carrot before us.”

Betsy hugged Nick while the group watched from the sidelines with tears.

“She destroyed our lives, Nick, I know it. We were so privileged there, but we didn't know; how could we? However, we were so spoiled there as our true selves suffered here.”

She grabbed Nick's face, remembering who he truly was, then kissed him as they both looked so old and unhealthy—run over by the train and laid on the tracks of their most trusted advisors.

“I can show you all the plans,” stated Sam. “I am stuck in a low-tech, recurring state of limbo, is the truth. I died there, then was sent here, and yes, I struggled for supremacy.

“The man I killed off was so kind—my other self, this man you see here in the physical, a better father and man than I could ever dream of being. I never mention Quinn or Dean, my kids and his, for good reason, but here they are safe and happy, because of the real, humble man Sam was. He wasn't into craft, grandiose power, self-promotion, or conspiracies—making me realize how I have failed miserably. But I began for all the right reasons: to reveal the truth and craft a better future for us all, somehow. Sam was content, filled with light and filling others with light, just at being good at being a father.

“Well, occupying his body has taught me a great deal. I have been infused with his light, not the other way around.

“See, we are the parasites here.”

Sam approached the dry-erase board and began to lay it all out so that they could have a real choice, with nothing hidden from them, to show them the costs involved.

“I saw it all in-between worlds, in the spheres and those arching vacuums between them—as if I was some holy monk who reached the pinnacle. Energy and knowledge pulsing into me, shooting past me, expanded then reduced, accepted and rejected by the All... I'll tell you, man! That was something else; you never return to base from that, you know? I was surging into information, shapes, and pattern overload.

“I saw all that energy just fluxing and dilating, then that damn diamond, then you all, throughout aeons of space and time. And everywhere that energy went, I had to know. That burden was so immense in that liminal zone in that in-between, between World One and here at base. I'll tell you, I was everywhere and nowhere, man.

“When I did arrive, I checked into everything I could to validate what I'd experienced through suffering into a dehydrated corpse, then being renewed here while evicting a superior man. This universe is cold, man; just patterns, energy, and forms is all it's concerned with, that's all.

“And to answer your question, Nick—now that this Nick is honestly dead and this Madame Crusso is that version of her—see always that she is deceptively trying to convince you that it was all so that you could live for billions of years and become a god. But I ask you, what is the motivation of them all with you? All the Dark Council members? No, you have a choice, and here it is, all of you.

“And yes, we can communicate directly with Varginah and the Professor. And yes, your $10 million from all your acting jobs and success in World One is sitting up in your safe in your room with the same fucking combination. It isn't a gift; it's leverage.

“Go pull out $500,000 for me right now, and tomorrow I will procure the diamonds we need for the low-tech quartz crystal suits I already have ready to go.”

As Nick headed upstairs to his safe, Sam wrote a very detailed mind-fuck of reality and the way things would really play out from here.

After we experience such trauma—birth, rejection, ejection, transmutation, integration, and final synthesis—it is our mothers who biologically know that exact moment of entry here. The mother can either guard, pawn, exploit, sacrifice, or shield this channeled entity, which is you.

You see, you are enough.

The truth is that the first ensnared being, trapped into that cell-by-cell division of agency in just being, not becoming (because becoming took place long before that shabby little human framework), accounts for a mind-boggling scale: roughly 45 to 55.5 sextillion bytes of total data. And that doesn't even account for the soul data folded along the razor-thin nuances of multidimensional existence.

Chapter 12

Nick woke up in his bed at 168 Apricot Lane, haunted by a vivid dream of Agent Cook speaking directly into his sleeping mind. The rest of the crew had scattered to their makeshift retirements for the night. Larry remained as far away from Margaret as possible, knowing the reckoning would eventually come, while Barry and Rat claimed the couch and the floor.

Betsy lay awake in her room, staring at a space kept far too intact, as if this were the exact, unaltered home she remembered. They couldn't have placed all of this so perfectly and neatly down to the smallest detail, she thought with rising alarm. It's impossible. From the way my dirty clothes are strewn in the hamper to my cell phone glowing stubbornly at 11% battery—we don't even exist here, do we?

That was when the realization hit her: her alternate self in this base world had been victimized by the Dark Council her entire life. But as she stared into the mirror, her true self—Betsy from the first world—began to bleed back through. Her waist narrowed, her stubborn varicose veins began to shrink away, and the heavy, pervading malice that had presided over them all from the shadows of Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux began to dissolve, taking even her rigid human binary of good and evil with it.

She saw it clearly now. The Dark Council, with Margaret acting as its maligned administrator, had merely spliced and amended fragments of translocality at the roots of this base world. They weren't actually undoing anything; they were just putting on a grand, hollow illusion. That cosmic diamond arbitrarily recorded only what it perceived as static shapes and patterns, blind to the intricate nuances of boundless intellectual grief or the brutal, one-off fragments born of utter ritualistic occult evil.

Nick stretched out his body, then caught his reflection in the bedroom's Victorian pivot dresser mirror. He was leaner, regaining his looks, yet he was also filling with the impulses of superficiality. A drawing toward the mundane took hold within his cellular human impulses, and a shallowness began to take over. He looked down and touched a note written by Sam:

Nick,

I hope you don't mind. I saw that you had removed not $500,000 from your safe, but $600,000 as a necessary provision, so I brought it all with me, just in case. Oscar of this world may play a little hardball in negotiation, and we need the purest and cleanest twin diamonds that he can offer—we owe that to our friends, Varginah and the Professor, in this potential communication or soul transit. His shop is only a short driving distance away, called El Bicho Hambriento at 244 Castor in New Montgomery, if I don't return.

Oh, on a side note, quite funny really about Oscar—he is a Cuban antiquities dealer with a near-identical shop and character in all worlds that I have witnessed and visited myself. Only the color of his all-too-small silk dress shirts in his color ensemble is ever comically different. In some worlds he is gay and in others married, but always with the same passion in his eyes that lets me know it's him.

Well, as he always tells me in his Spanish-Cuban accent: “Un diamante de la más rara especie es la meta para todos nosotros, camarada.”

I will see you soon, and I shan't be long.

—Sam Von Ralettes, in this world and the next.

Betsy was feeling the hormone prompt within her that seemed to have lain dormant since she was a confused teenage girl. Nick felt that same primordial urge.

There was an obvious red hue to Betsy's facial skin and lips, a growth-hormone-prompted plumpness, a bounce of perennial youth. There was a struggle taking place within each of them—two unique people inside each skin.

Though ephemeral, the transit of takeover left the distinct exponent of maximal, overstuffed virility. They were powerless against these base urges, and yet the urges didn't manifest entirely from within them. Prized, hard-fought intellect had taken a back seat to the frenzied psychodrive of primal war.

The mind transfer of ritual sex magick could be felt from the offerings burning nearby. As that cymatic ring became debilitating, those Dark Council masters—occulted and black-cloaked—burnt live, mortifying offerings only blocks away, down through the halls below Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux and outside those pulsing portals.

That morbid, blood-driven pulse of arcane, dirty, vile sex magick jacked into both their minds with unrelenting, shameless, angst-ridden force through their endocrine systems, diluted into hormone-mimetic lust. Neither invited nor enjoyed, the manipulated energy takeover occurred through unorthodox forms of allostatic assault, yet the two felt powerless against it.

A ringing could be heard in both Nick's and Betsy's skulls—so much so that it drew them both out into the shared hallway.

Betsy stood there in nothing but her scanty, silky white nightgown, while Nick, still a bulky, hulking brute, seemed to fuse with the more familiar Nick she had known for so long: a lean, show-muscle, prudish actor. She stormed at him—moist, aggressive, plump, yet voluptuous.

They were stuck in a generic protocol of gluttonous, self-indulgent, single-track narcissism, which the diamond allowed within a biosemiotic feedback system of reward. Basically, the diamond rewards those who first reward themselves.

His fingers moved instantly in eager angst to find that perfect angle of entry, as the two crashed into each other's mouths, faces, and bodies, as if trying to fit the most maximal experience into the least amount of time: unbridled speed sex.

Still confined within that Platonic cave of mind and force bouncing off the walls, they were unable to free themselves in violent protest. He could smell her desire, and her sex hormones became countless tiny, hungry, jagged hooks of carnal light grabbing at him to do one thing: induce the blood violence of throbbing, pounding penetration of the ages—injecting and stretching with the ferocity of carnal desire into her wet, wanting, stroking, milking body. It was not just her sexual parts, but her entirety that was engorged and infused with him.

Nick made his way into her as she adjusted her body to allow maximum entry. His still-thick fingers and manly torso gave off pheromones of master procreation as he fondled and fingered her into ever-greater juice-producing levels of excretion.

Now she was sitting on his face as he rapidly set upon her like a hungry wolf finding something raw and living to lick. Then, she pulled off his pants in a heated rush to reveal the springing bounce-back of his terrestrially bound engorgement as she gripped, circled, and stroked him with her hands—like a potter with Denisovan-confined efforts to build more.

As Nick's member was sucked down to its base, she quickly rode upon him in haste, and then he upon her, until Larry walked out from his room.

Larry saw her spread out, demanding and coaching in grunts and guttural moans as Nick delivered primal, brutal pumping in outright fury, jacking ever deeper into her very soul.

They weren't embarrassed. Nick looked at Larry as if he were an inferior wolf, while Betsy tilted her head back, looking at Larry upside down with her legs spread even wider. It was as if a wandering wolf from another pack was there to show dominance.

Larry, horrified, reeled back into his room, leaning against the door in insecurity and terror.

Pumping and pumping. Spreading and morphing their still-voluptuous and bulbous flesh into compacted grotesqueness—lapping, folding over, and enveloping into grotesque shapes—as the welling bodily excretions and sweat finally revealed their unshowered stench of unwashed fecal matter and urine. Yet he was still filling her up as she lapped at him like a greedy dog under the full command of being in heat.

Then Larry courageously came out from his door, running full force and blitzing Nick so that he flew off Betsy into the corner.

Larry put a large white beach towel over Betsy's entire body. She now appeared once again fat, dehydrated, and near vacant—the Betsy who was victimized through childhood was back now, the Betsy of this world, as the Betsy from the first world must have hidden within the confines of herself in utter horror and shame.

Larry only repeated over and over, “It's not like you! It's not like you, it's not like my friends to do this!”

Then, breaking the pattern briefly, he helped Betsy up and into her room, placing her onto her bed.

Nick sat on his knees like a shaking animal randomly removed from the aggravated charge of some occulted, Project-Paperclip-induced body shock. Appearing fat, flaccid, and unimpressive, he was now regressing to the man inside that the Dark Council had sculpted into being. But he craved no existential fix—only release from it.

“Come on, friend... my dear, sweet Nick. A hero, really,” said Larry, as he soothingly helped the dirty, aged, homeless-looking man up onto his feet, pushing him into the shower and testing the tepid temperature as if preparing it for a child with special needs. Nick's pants were hanging off him like a mind-fucked mental patient's.

Nick got into the shower with his jeans still on. As they eventually began to drop, Larry simply said, “Remain under the warm, soothing water for a while, my friend.”

Larry knew what the two were going through; it was like a glimpse into his own past, his own parents. I was Nick in that prior world in a way, he thought as he closed the door.

Betsy was still sitting on her bed, mortified. It was as if the two had morphed into victims of years-long, massive brain injuries from which neither could ever recover. That look upon their faces said it all to Larry, and that was what had compelled him to instinctively come back out into that hallway to break them loose and set them free. Larry had beaten the Dark Council, but only now in this world had they begun to see the hideous, grotesque enmeshment this group had inflicted upon existence over billions of years.

Larry helped Betsy get up, saying, “Come on, Miss Betsy, come along with me,” as Betsy moved slowly, drained of intellect and life. Then Larry prepared a shower for her, telling her the same thing, but kissing her upon her head for all that she had truly done for him.

Then he could not help but hug her, like a father patting her on the back—understanding all the corruption and struggles of the world, the booby traps waiting around every corner of this diamond labyrinth, sabotaging everything bound to it in its neutral drive toward total systemic takeover.

“It's only a body, dear,” Larry said soothingly. “These prisons are not us. Not truly.”

Larry continued to hug and nurture her, then pushed the shower head slightly away so that the warm running water would not spray onto her towel and the floor. Gently pushing her in, he slowly closed the door behind him. He did not look back, out of privacy and respect—a code that was viewed as mere weakness to the Dark Council.

The philosophy of knowing.

Larry walked downstairs; he required a strong coffee. He was immediately greeted by the aroma of high-quality, premium dark roast, so aromatic and inviting as it soothed his worries and drew him effortlessly down the carpeted steps from the second floor.

Rat, Barry, and Sam were now seated at the recently propped-up kitchen table, looking down at something: diamonds shining in luster and brilliance, and underneath them, a map.

As Larry wished his friends a good morning, he eagerly searched for a coffee cup, found an odd, thick, basic green mug, and then turned to see a nearly full, piping-hot pot inside a very fancy coffee maker. He looked over at the floor plans of the large castle basement, which had notes written in every section.

As he poured his first cup and looked toward the group, Rat could be heard muttering under his breath, “Fascinating... fascinating,” as Sam described in great detail the cave system, portals, and pyramids contained directly under Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux.

The large diamonds displayed their brilliant blue luster. “Oscar told me verbatim: ‘No hay certificados para estos diamantes tan extraordinarios y raros, amigo mío; sin embargo, valen al menos dos millones de dólares cada uno. ¡No intentes venderlos en el mercado abierto ni preguntes cómo los conseguí!’ Basically: don't sell these on the open market, and don't tell anyone where I got them!”

The four sat there staring for a moment as Sam trustingly left the $4 million joyas de diamantes resting upon the black velvet showpiece bag on the kitchen counter chopping block where they were seated. He stood up to pour his own well-deserved, aromatic taza de café.

There was an unassuming white cloth bag to the side of the couch, ominously awaiting morbid operations.

“Has anyone else been cursed to high hell today?” Sam asked. “At first, I couldn't wake up on time to get over and meet Oscar to make this deal. Then Larry's car wouldn't start, so I just walked the entire 13-mile loop to Oscar's antiquities store. Oh, before I forget, here are your keys, Larry!” He placed them down near the diamonds, which sparkled in the sunlight with all their brilliance.

Larry didn't care. It wasn't his car, not his home, and not his universe.

The group agreed it had already been a terrible day, talking about ringing sounds in their heads and severe headaches.

“Yes, we have been under massive attack; the Dark Council knows what we are planning to do,” Sam said. “By the way, don't worry—the only connection through the tunnel system from 168 to the castle is underwater. There are several pyramids under those mystical ancient waters below us now. The water acts as a barrier, and the pyramids are down there to maintain their purity and dormancy—so powerful, like nodes with a diamond lattice structure,” Sam finished, peering closely through his jeweler's loupe at one of the diamonds.

“I need to run these through several cycles by themselves in order to bring the diamonds back to a sort of default—basically, rid them of all bad energy.”

Larry cut in, “Listen, Nick and Betsy are sitting catatonic in their showers right now upstairs. I don't want to talk about what I witnessed or what took place, but let's just say this whole house requires some purification. Do you have any ideas?” Larry finished, still looking at Sam.

“Yes, I do have just the thing for that, and thank you for telling me. These diamonds need to be run for a good hour through high-voltage cycles. In that bag over there and another one outside, I have suits, helmets, splitters, amplifiers, and industrial cables. This is not theoretical!

“We need to plug into five power outlets. In that bag, I have splitters and amplifiers that will allow this electrical current to build up in the diamonds as the current loops. If I leave the terminus for the helmet and suits open, the entire house will be flooded with a sort of default blank slate from a spiritual sense—tech over mancy, or what I call 'spiritual quanta' for lack of a better term. The nadic schematics dictate a fixed output: a standard wall circuit is limited by the circuit breaker, typically delivering a maximum of 15 amps at 125 volts.

“Not to be boring, but basically, outlet splitters or multi-plug adapters let you plug in more items while dividing the available pool of power rather than increasing it. What I crafted here with these new suits, however, draws power continuously and adds to it, making sure not to exceed the typical 1,875-watt home limit, which trips the breaker for safety.

“What I have in that bag will amplify that power surge through a closed feedback loop that increases with every cycle. After roughly an hour, the diamonds will continue to generate latent, pure energy, drawing it into these collective matrices. I have never used diamonds before; the rest of the crystals in the suits and helmets will amplify that loop through quartz, amplifying and hopefully bringing back to life Varginah and the Professor—or simply opening up a gateway to them through their deceased bodies.

“We will need to bring approximately five car batteries to the cemetery with us, so we need to see if that car works after we break the spiritual war going on here, because it's getting heavy.

“Out on the porch, to handle maximum electrical power without melting or catching fire, I have matching high-current connectors with thick, low-gauge copper waiting in that larger bag. The wire size had to be matched correctly for the total amperage. If this doesn't work, nothing will.”

“No one has brought this up, but if the Resonators could aid this in any way, I'll gladly share mine,” Larry added.

“That's thoughtful of you, Larry, but we have to be sure we don't end up in some sort of eternal state of Pandemonium. Still, I'll keep that in mind,” Sam finished, then added, “Remember: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride! These diamonds will effectively hold their aetheric spiritual charge.”

Sam peered outside into the neighborhood just as an ambulance pulled up to a quiet home across the street. At another residence, arguing neighbors were about to engage in a full-on physical assault while a police helicopter flew overhead, calling out the name of a missing child over a loudspeaker. Then he noticed the bloody remains of a pulverized cat in the street below.

“We need Nick back up and running!” exclaimed Sam, adding, “So let's get this done!”

Sam began calling out requests:

• Barry and Rat: I will need you to get me five brand-new, super-duty batteries and see if you can get that big, clunky car working out there first! Sam handed Barry a large handful of money left over from the diamond purchase. “This should be enough,” Sam said with a smirk.

• Larry: I need you to check on Betsy and Nick and see what kind of fragile state they're in!

• As for me: I will begin to prep the suits, cables, and equipment necessary for this mind-bending task.

Chapter 13

Down in the basement cavern entry, Sam watched as the pyramid glowed beneath those clear waters just as it did in the first world—only this world here was the base, the progenitive world.

The labyrinth of entry points still sat idle, acting almost as a lure—inviting some unsuspecting, uninitiated soul to trigger a paradox by attempting to enter a world that now existed only as a fissured pattern in the bleached-white limbo.

The suits themselves were now far beyond low-tech resolution. No, these were ultra-hybrid rigs engineered to endure any unforeseen anomaly or fly-ball situation tossed into the crew's view, wherever their path might lead. It was a backdoor channeling hack: the system had to run from the base of the house to pump a pure state upward and out, thereby purifying the diamonds and—with any luck—wrenching Nick, Betsy, and all of them free from the Dark Council’s suffocating grip of occult sorcery.

The cables were all leading down into the cellar now as Sam worked with frantic, surgical precision. Fitting the newly acquired black-market diamonds into the suit's high-power amplification system meant there was zero room for error. Every crystal had to be embedded into a heavy-duty copper alloy Conflat flange, with the adjacent copper rapidly drawing away the extreme thermal energy. Through active metal vacuum brazing with a silver-copper-titanium alloy, he locked the diamond edge into an airtight vacuum seal via a microscopic titanium carbide layer, backed by micro-channels of continuous liquid coolant.

To manage the furious flow of amplified electricity without melting the rig, the diamonds were sandwiched between specialized thin-film coatings: refractory platinum and gold on the input side to handle high-stress electrical contact, and an ultra-thin layer of cesium on the output side to lower the work function, allowing multiplied electrons to eject cleanly.

The core mechanics relied on a diamond-amplified photoinjector setup—striking the thin diamond lattice with high-energy primary electrons to smash across its ultra-wide bandgap, generating thousands of electron-hole pairs. An internal electric bias field then drove an accelerated electron avalanche toward the negative electron-affinity surface, turning the suits into high-intensity emitters.

Sam stepped back, wiping his brow as Barry and Rat returned with the five fully charged, super-duty automotive batteries. The initial power flow would serve as a sufficient base once routed through a series of coils later at the cemetery.

Larry came down into the cavern cellar with grim news, drying his hands as if he had just washed them. Referring to Nick and Betsy’s state upstairs, he spoke with urgency: “It's not looking good for them. They're stuck in a thick fog of suicidal depression—they could snap at any time. We better do something, and fast. They're just sitting there; I actually had to help them both into clothes. It's as if there's nothing left of them at all.”

“They're still in there,” said Sam. “This is what dark spiritual craft looks like up close. Part of you can never accept that it is happening to you—trust me, I know!”

Just then, Barry cut in with a deep breath, nodding profusely in agreement. He could recall so much of Sam's long journey and experience, relying on it now—proud to be right there in that unbelievable cave system with them all.

Larry, now looking at the same cave split-offs that led to the Gateway Through, Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux, and God knows where else, spoke up: “That pyramid... we've been in there. Is that something we've been looking past?”

They all gazed down at the pulsing, colorful hue of flashing blue light just beneath the crystal-clear water. Rat leaned in, peering toward a flawless pyramid while noticing others glowing in different colors far below, all of them clearly visible.

Sam answered, “If you want to take the place above everyone else, that pyramid can give you that. You've felt that power—do you really have to ask? Is supremacy truly the solution? It might be a nice ego trip for a day or a hundred years, but could you live with it? Being looked at as a god, with no one else above you? Have those who walked into that pyramid chamber and never walked out ever been concerned with anything but themselves once that irreversible choice was made? I'll answer that for you: not a single one, and there have been many. Personally, I can see why Atlantis fell. I think about going in there—hell, I have, and barely made it out. Sometimes I wonder if I'm still in there, with that same choice hanging in the balance right in front of my face. But it's a damn good observation, and one we may painfully need to consider after this battle is fought tonight.”

The cables were all leading down into the cellar now as Sam made his final test checks. Then, without hesitation, he simply turned the first suit on—click! It began with a slow, steady, quiet hum, as if nothing had changed at all.

“It's like nothing is happening at all, right?” Sam smiled, then laughed with a just you wait and see tone while turning on the second suit by locking in the cable.

“While we wait for those suits to cycle through, let me take you upstairs so we can prepare ourselves, okay?” Sam said, leading the somewhat confused crew of three back up into the living room.

“Grab some drinks, smoke if you'd like,” Sam stated as he tilted up the dry-erase board to a comfortable position and began writing down hard truths that touched on heartfelt realities. “I want to lay some really important facts out for you here, because there is still a slim chance that the four of us are all that's left. However, I live under the firm conviction that Betsy and Nick will be better than ever—even quite possibly transcended in a massive way. While I also hold to the belief that Varginah and the Professor will be two long-awaited friendly faces that we will reunite with very soon.”

Sam began a briefing for Barry, Larry, and Rat, hoping that moments later they would all witness Nick and Betsy emerge from upstairs looking better and brighter than ever before. Behind the closed cellar door, the crystals in the suits and helmets began to emit a higher-pitched whir, casting rapid flickers of pure, cascading light across the periphery of the room. He continued speaking, pointing out key terms while the three sat silently on the couch, munching on snacks and sipping water. Rat handed him a glass of water so he could carry on:

“Throughout history and across all multiverses, there still exists—within patterned recognition—the realization that we are far more in our potentiality from a microcosmic, holographic sense. We are the main point, the midpoint where it all fuses together. In short, this suit amplifies this modality. That is why they want to catch one of us in it and twist the intended purpose.

“Within this world, many are guided by internal entities to manage the primitive, unevolving carnal body, leaving one with the constant sensation of being frequently at odds with oneself. This is the tug-of-war we don't see on the surface—not entirely. But in these various light spectra, many intuitively know something else is working through those folds and cracks: the patchwork by the Dark Council.

“Some entities who entered carnal terrestrial bodies forget who and what they are, as well as what they are commissioned in a universal sense to do: elevate the body to act under its own power, defend itself from lower-level attacks, and maybe even exceed the diamond itself, paving out their own entirely unique backbone superior to the penta-hexa intertwined struggle—which must be transcended. That is our mission here.

“From a base pattern perspective, this control takes place on the microtubular level in holographic consciousness, as the Qabalah, the Tree of Life, or what the aromatic amino acid tyrosine generates as a fallback or safety net. This phi-pi agitation ultimately hangs in the balance now, threatening to become a two-dimensional penta-hexa-graphene prison—the carbon world of illusion that we exist in now, unsolidified yet to be consummated by exposure to the inverted light.

“In physics, almost every subatomic particle has an antimatter twin with an opposite electric charge—like the electron and its positive twin, the positron. However, because a photon is perfectly neutral and carries zero electric charge, it is its own antiparticle. The Dark Council now wants us to continue on in an unsuspected reality, no one noticing the quantum time flip, bringing about the age of the Dark-Photon—though now held only as potential in the preformed substance within those master diamond bounds of light.

“While acting out on the terrestrial level, others begin to argue with themselves, forgetting this tier system of master and student, going mad, and ultimately fusing into what is referred to in Hebrew as the Shedim and by the Sumerians as the Gallu.

“Furthermore, while some midway frontrunner elevated beings appear to be succeeding in this fusion-based tier system—amplifying their message via pre-etched pathways within the diamond fissure matrices unbeknownst to them—the diamond arbitrarily opens up a tier of higher recognition. As a result, philosopher-kings and prophets in some worlds are expected, through behavioral patterns, to lead a herd of base thinkers as a Pied Piper or a messianic figure (sometimes both), acting as a sort of singular soul where one individual elevates and ignites an evolution of the mind for the finite masses.

“While this may appear heroic through the parallax holonomy lens to the accepting masses, they are still flesh-body initiates who can become completely taken over after being primed to make spiritual room for a predatory host in mimesis. In short, transcendence turns back and inverts on them. Some think they have transcended and hear a higher voice, while others know the deception full well. But they weren't ready for such an evolution, as most contained no soul to begin with.

“Breaking the mold, shattering the diamond under an overflowing plasma power generation of fullness—a mass flood of superior foreign data—that is what we seek here in our attempt in this liminal midpoint, as the torch over the rule of light must be passed on. That is why the diamond sits there now in that bleached-white limbo: a tired and weary phoenix no longer wanting to live and die, whose fragments must now be taken up into higher language models that it is far too burdened and ill-equipped to process any further. All the errors the Dark Council intentionally wove into the fractals stem from never believing in total positivity. We must now know that the old way must be shattered, and a new diamond or diamonds must begin as a new base era of existence.

“That Dark Council, still engaged in a days-long mancy-war, wills and attempts to indenture the master diamond as an extension through us and this base world. Still, it clings on in hope, as do we all. While the ceremonies of those dark-themed religious cults that tie into the Dark Council have the etched universes within it bowing down in prayer vigils—as the Dark Council burns them in this world on a pyre, not knowing what they pray to—they offer up themselves as nodes toward that final release of supplication, to end the agony and be finally absorbed into that dragon mother as the godhead.

“This is all an elaborate ruse using the matrix of that master diamond to keep the genesis of the Atman—the higher self, acting as a bridge to God or Brahman as it is referred to in Hinduism and Sanskrit, or Fravashi in Persian Zoroastrianism—suppressed. But you wouldn't know about this because philosophy took the place of religion in your world, whereas in this one there is a more equal balance: a median that today is being prepared like a sacrificial harvest.

“The reason I am sharing all of this with you in such brief summation is for a critical reason: when we generate this immense, life-giving force—drawing in loosh and plasma, that nectar of life from the pure crystalline diamond power generation—it may bring one, two, or for all I know, the entire cemetery alive and animated with disincarnate phantasms. These are undeveloped life forms that most would refer to as demons or even spiritual flying monkeys, whom the Dark Council steers into becoming their spiritual, quantum henchmen and drones.

“That business on the other side I mentioned in my text, Barry, is all quite real. If one does not work on themselves in this life, we become trafficked, indentured slaves in an endless contract until consumed, serving as food for those demoniac gods that the Dark Council truly is.

“The Dark Council wants to produce more division, more multiversal splits, more food, more strife, loss of self, and a reduction of awareness within singular mind and spiritual transcendence—in short, continuous strife. Today it all hangs in the balance, and we must be on our toes.”

Chapter 14

The power surging through the suits down behind the shut door, deep in the rocky basement, kept compounding and exponentially amplifying into a shrieking decoherence of Havana-syndrome, capillary-busting intensity—before snapping instantly into an absolute, breathless silence.

Outside, a woman walking her Pomeranian was caught mid-alarm. A moment prior, she had been yelling uncontrollably as the frantic dog ran in multiple directions, but she now shifted instantly to pacing the pavement with a flowing, mechanical serenity.

Inside, Rat went from grabbing his head in mind-numbing pain to peeling his hands away and peering out the kitchen window, where the world outside revealed itself to him in sharp, prismatic colors and a quality of light he had never noticed before.

Only thirty minutes had passed, as Sam noted by glancing down at his watch. Moving with a strange, near-weightless ease, he attended to his sudden hunger by assembling a sandwich of ham and crisp vegetables, drizzled with olive oil, red wine vinegar, and a dash of spicy mustard. Washed down with plain tap water that tasted sweet—as if freshly melted from a mountain spring—every succeeding bite of the simple meal was incomparably vibrant: an absolute revelation unlike any meal he had ever experienced before.

Meanwhile, Rat and Barry passed their vape pens back and forth with eager anticipation, comparing flavors and sensations while staring down at their hands and bodies as if life itself had just been rewritten into an unfamiliar, wondrous experience. Captivated by the sudden shift, they spontaneously dropped into rapid rounds of calisthenics—push-ups, planks, and squats—before erupting into jumps and thrusts that strangely resembled the choreography of a junior college experimental jazz dance class. Moving in an uncanny, melodic harmony, their bodies vibrated through an explosive, highly expressive breakout dance.

Meanwhile, at around forty minutes in, the light energy looping through the coils, cables, quartz crystals, and diamonds was running at about 75% of the total required kinetic energy—a staggering 674,700,000 RPM. Items began to take on a near-Neoplatonic quality, as if they had all come alive in vibrant technicolor light, with objects even beginning to vibrate and float. Movement required slow, deliberate effort, as if the room were now filled with dense helium.

That was when Betsy and Nick finally descended the stairs, completely released from their recent, coma-like states of utter depression. Moving with a strange, near-weightless grace, they practically floated into the room, effortlessly helping themselves to food and water as if escaping their former labors required nothing more than a hypnagogic REM state.

Sam, having had similar experiences before, started down into the basement because he knew that turning off the dual mini particle accelerators in the coming moments would be nearly impossible; standard logic no longer applied. Outside, joggers could be seen moving past the house with a simple cadence, as the effort not to float away seemed to become the primary goal of their bounding strides.

As Sam entered, the diamonds in the basement had lit up with the pure white prism effect of a neutron star. An hour was far too long; the particles within him, the entire basement, and the house itself were already beginning to break down into the sheer serenity of cymatic, dancing pixie dust.

Though he couldn't see the mechanism directly, he knew it was there—the cable on the first suit's lead simply needed to be picked up and turned to unlock. But he fumbled blindly for the components, his fingers feeling like ubiquitous, dissipating, boundless matter merging with the rest of the room as he reached out under his own fading will.

The actions felt simultaneously far too easy and utterly impossible as he disconnected one cable, then the other. Working against his own dissolving sense of self, he choked off the open stream of amplified electrons feeding into the suits, then pulled the heavy helmets free to let the internal systems cool and settle.

Immediately, gravity returned, bringing with it a heavy, mundane baseline vibration like the taste of plain vanilla—lowering the field back into that narrow, banal bandwidth of ordinary reality.

The diamonds burned with a white-hot, fluid-like plasma for some time within their casings as the pyramids pulsed into a mimetic imprint of pure white beneath the steaming waters, thickening and then fading like dry ice. Ghost-white geometric vectors flashed and faded around them, signaling that the system within the diamond had finally been at least partially revealed—leaving the great ruse stripped of its artificial skin.

As Sam returned upstairs, a lingering wet-pavement smell hung all around, as if the rock above and around the basement were entirely new—a sense of fresh earth mingling with the smell of wet white latex, as if paint were still drying on the living room walls. He quietly shut the basement door behind him, careful not to disturb the calming diamonds. They were like just-fed infants behind a thin sound barrier; moving tranquilly with a whisper, he ensured they would not be disquieted as they hummed and faded into their desperately needed micro-sleeps.

The entire crew was sitting on the couch—Betsy, Larry, Nick, Barry, and Rat—happily talking among themselves like the trauma-bonded friends they truly were, living up to their code to offer reassurance, as if to say, “You are not alone; I see you, brother... sister.”

Sam silently watched as Larry softly held Betsy's hand, grinning ear to ear with tear-filled eyes—like a proud father transported through time to witness his fully grown daughter becoming the woman she was destined to be. Or perhaps he was nurturing within himself his own psychically toxic mother as the devastating war fog once again faded into the imprint of an unsuspecting little girl.

With Betsy displaying no further signs of triggered generational psychic trauma, and Nick appearing as the type who always had something precocious to say—though none of it could be written off as merely gregarious—the five were back in working order. Sam looked on from that sixth (an eighth with the presence of Daria at the Pure Center and Rancor sitting atop with the blazing Yellow Crystal of True Ego), central position as a unique ego to them all, aware of everyone. Now they had to make this victorious reunion as eight intellectually fractured souls, searching for pure truth as a new era began.

The thin veneer of reality, acting as a gel of illusion, had begun to harden around each of them once more, giving them mimetic reason to fight another day.

Suddenly, a massive curtain of nebulous storm clouds unfolded from an unseen vector in the sky as the Dark Council unleashed a terrible tempest of hatred, continuing their days-long blood orgy of human sacrifices. Lightning struck all around the house as if Thor had been lied to. As a massive downpour ensued, the last remaining hours of daylight were swallowed up by a behemoth, relentless, storming night. Lightning cracked trees in two with the loud, powerful sound of a defiant, unworthy seizure—a blind, continuous act of power-grabbing and final supremacy as the Dark Council chose themselves as the sole worthy inheritors of the next cycle's birth in self-entitled, defiant syllogism.

The group stood up immediately and peered out the windows as the lights in the homes up and down the street began to flicker and fail—including those at 168 Apricot Lane. The darkness outside made all other objects in space seem to shrink back. It was time to cut to the chase and seize the moment.

Sam attempted to raise his strained voice above the titanic wrath, calling out to the group as they huddled close—Sam and Rat cheek to cheek while the others pressed in: “Check Larry's car for any sign of power!”

In a hyperactive response, Rat coaxed Larry's hand into his front pocket to grab the keys, relying on a crude, primitive shorthand to save his energy and vocal cords. He bolted outside, pulling up his hood and cinching the velcro tight to seal his sleeves and collar against the elements. His hiking boots slipped on the drenched walkway, skidding over a slick layer of sediment beneath the popping, rippling roar of the downpour.

Gripping the keys tight, Rat braced himself in a wide-legged power stance against the infernal gale. Struggling to see through the unnatural deluge, he fought to open the car door against fierce, resisting currents of air. His wet fingers slipped off the handle, unable to find traction, until he wrapped his sleeve-covered hands around it for leverage and forced it open. The wind whipped back, threatening to slam the door shut, but he wedged himself inside. He immediately realized driving in this storm was an impossibility: a massive tree had already fallen, completely blocking the path ahead, illuminated by flickering streetlights like captured chess pieces in a seismic revelation.

He slotted the key into the ignition and cranked it repeatedly. Then he realized it had likely started on the first try, but he could neither hear the engine over the tempest, nor clearly see the dash through his dripping hood, nor feel its idle vibration—the mighty, leviathan storm had completely erased his senses. Reluctantly stepping back out into the fury, Rat was nearly blown off his feet by unpredictable 45-mph gusts, forcing him to stop, squat low, and grip the grass beside the walkway just to avoid being swept away.

All around him, tarps, lawn furniture, and loose branches were dragged into the tempest's clutches, swirling high into a black vortex before sweeping low like an electromagnetic gravity well—a drain where 168 Apricot Lane dissolved into primordial sludge, vortexing down into abysmal caverns of no return.

The house buckled like an ancient ship strained past its limits, as if hunting a deep-sea leviathan that far eclipsed it. Inevitably, this vessel—and the captain's legacy—would be shattered into wreckage, subsumed into the storm to fuel its all-consuming, Ziz-like breadth. This could not happen.

Larry's vehicle sat idling, its headlights piercing the patchworks of darkness descending upon the terrain. The storm moved like a twisting serpent of dark matter, effortlessly weaving between dimensional splits and leaving behind fragmented trails of lingering shadow.

The crew ran to Rat's aid as he reached the porch, unable to see anything beyond him—not even the vehicle's high beams just forty yards away. Fully suited in heavy weather gear, they stood beside bags of cables, suits, and helmets lined up near the five fully charged batteries awaiting transport to the car. None of the neighbors dared look out their windows, likely crouching in crawl spaces or basements, or curled in fetal positions inside interior closets with the doors shut tight against the storm.

Those final, freezing steps toward the front door might as well have been forged through the Great Blizzard of March 1888 or the Children’s Blizzard that preceded it—ordeals where every stride taxed every fiber of their physical, spiritual, and metabolic resolve. The five could easily have passed for a doomed expedition team attempting to summit Mount Everest against the mountain's most violent protest, never to be seen again.

Sam braced the door with both hands as the crew stumbled inside and collapsed onto the floor. The wind fought to tear the door right off its hinges while Sam used his right leg to shield the suit bags, pinning the precious, nearly irreplaceable gear against the entryway to keep it from being swallowed by the apex predator outside. The door’s inward swing proved a crucial line of defense; had it opened outward, the gale would have ripped it away entirely. Barry slammed his weight against the exterior frame while Sam pulled from inside, the two driving the door shut with a controlled slam and throwing the deadbolt just as the storm howled in furious objection.

“I made a big pot of hot coffee, guys!” Sam called out, trying to cut through the tension as the crew—bulky in their heavy winter wear—helped one another off the floor. They looked like oversized tortoises struggling to right themselves, hampered by the freezing chill in their exposed, blistering hands. The sole exception was Betsy, who had possessed the foresight to wear thick Gore-Tex mittens. Her hands still functional, she poured five brimming cups of steaming coffee so the crew could shed their dripping coats and take refuge from the relentless frenzy outside—a storm sent either to destroy them or force them through a beastly, cathartic metanoia.

Once again, they gathered in the living room, now lit only by flickering candlelight. The grid was completely dead, knocked out by fallen trees, snapped utility poles, blown transformers, random lightning strikes, and flooded substations. It felt as though the Dark Council were stirring a cauldron of bloody human stew, whipping the tempest into a horrific Shakespearean echo: "Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog..."—or perhaps the heart of a man? Who could say what a group so diabolically empowered might telegraph into the broader field of this final world.

Chapter 15

As the crew regrouped, knowing the true battle hadn't even begun, Sam pulled out fragments of an actual Holy Mother Candlestick he had retrieved from 168 of the first world. He had done so without any of them knowing he had ever been down there—much less that he was still alive, as word of his physical existence would have been delivered far too prematurely.

Sam had attempted to pull the Holy Mother Candlestick (HMC)—a soul-infused, world-ending weapon—out during the precise moment of transition back to this base world, just as the first world was being blank-slated. Yet during that split-second execution, the HMC shattered in his hands, fractured by instantaneous exposure to the world-ending moment. These fragments were all that remained. He could neither rebuild one nor fully comprehend the material of its outer shell, as portions of the shards appeared corrupted. But he knew Varginah would know what to do, and perhaps these last remaining pieces could assist her efforts.

“Is that what I think it is?” Nick asked, now sounding like himself—perhaps even a slightly elevated, transcended version. “Part of an HMC? What are we supposed to do with just chunks and shards?”

Larry asked, taking a slow sip of hot coffee while trying to massage the numbness out of his thawing hands and face.

“Well,” Sam said, “I had planned on bringing back a fully intact HMC before you took the first world, but these fragments were all I could salvage. If we can get them to Varginah, can she reverse-engineer one?”

The storm had calmed to a faint whistle, its random, dying gusts swirling around the house almost undetected—as if the decomposed spirit of a long-dead dragon were finally released from its burdens, groaning out echoes of its final breath. The Dark Council of Elders had obviously shifted their combined focus elsewhere, perhaps peering into a technomancy-blended crystal ball to read what probabilities and fates were dictated through some arcane gnosis of gamma-radiation bounce-back and star alignments.

Sam folded the edges of a thick linen cloth, carefully wrapping the remaining HMC fragments. The fabric looked made for delicate archaeological recoveries or ancient codices—precious relics that paled in value next to these HMC cantles and slivers.

Sam hoisted the sand-colored tactical mochila onto his shoulder and grabbed the equally precious bag holding the suits and helmets. He directed Rat to grab the cable bag essential for the suits' operation, gesturing for him to fall in behind.

Surprisingly, it was still daylight, though fading quickly toward dusk. The sanguine sky and waning sun looked like the blistered, veiny eye of a dragon taking its last glance at a dying world.

As the remaining crew shouldered their share of the load—including heavy batteries to power the diamonds still pulsing with life inside the bag—they instinctively secured their Resonators. These had been placed in the exact slots where they were usually kept in Betsy, Larry, and Nick's rooms. Yet this presented a paradox: since Larry, Betsy, and Nick—presumably still trapped in that bleached-white limbo—would theoretically be carrying their own Resonators as well, it left the group wondering if a full body, mind, and soul transfer into these forms had actually taken place. It was another Schrödinger mystery, perhaps never to be solved.

Stepping out from the protective shell of that canary-yellow home, a thought lingered: was it truly the exact same home from the first world? Was this why Nick and Betsy were left as mere transients in this base world? Unanswered questions loomed...

The group struggled to keep their footing, sliding their boots cautiously along the slick walkway. They kicked away twigs, small branches, and loose gravel as they hoisted the heavy batteries and gear, recovering from the bite of a coastal tempest infused with the bay breeze as the dark night drew near. The final light was as beautiful as it was terrifying. Off in the distance, a foghorn sounded and a lighthouse beam cut through the gloom like a torchlight ode to what lay ahead, while all radio and radar signals had fallen silent in the wake of the kinetic attack. Mindful of every step down the shallow stairs, they pressed forward toward the waiting vehicle.

The sleek black luxury car could be heard purring as it idled. In the distance, the sun's atardecer finally closed with a green flash—a stark reminder of the mundane physical mediocrity bleeding through the façade of mass-produced goods. These were items cranked out on automated assembly lines linked point by point through the supply chain straight back to the Dark Council's phantom capitalist grip over accepted, base normative standards: gobierno corrupto.

Then a power line transformer sparked loudly, casting a violent electrical discharge yards away. The flash yanked their attention down to the surface wreckage the Dark Council had left behind: neighboring cars smothered in debris and branches, shingle roofs stripped bare in massive patches, and a twisted metal shed left in absolute ruins, as if a random hurricane's eye had touched down right upon this California Bay Area coastal township.

Sam curled the weight of the suit bag in his right hand, steadying a heavy battery in his left while balancing the tactical mochila slung over his shoulder. He pressed his right thumb against the wet, cold rubber of the trunk release button. The massive trunk opened like a vault or coffin, exhaling strong vapors of vanilla infused with cinnamon—a stark reminder of costly, high-tier automotive detailing, where great societal care was lavished on expiring objects floating above a fractured network of human connection.

He laid down the battery first—the rear of the car dipping slightly under its weight—freeing the mochila to drop into his left hand. Sam nested the suits with care into the deep left wheel-well crevasse. Reaching across, he pressed his upper body deep into the sloping right side to tuck the mochila into the opposite wheel well. Returning to the battery at the center, he slid it back into the farthest recesses of the cavernous cargo hold, leaning so far in he practically disappeared into it before straightening his knees to brace himself with his hamstrings and lower back. Pulling himself out, he turned to clear space for the others.

Betsy stepped up, heaving her heavy battery with both hands and using her leg for leverage, scraping against the bumper and the thick rubber weatherstripping. Sam assisted in leveling it to the trunk's deck as she shoved the battery as far back as she could, her straight legs lifting her feet slightly off the ground. Pulling back with care, she stepped aside.

Barry, Larry, and Nick followed in turn, placing their heavy-duty batteries beside the others, until Rat topped off the floor with the large bag of cables and attachments. Sam tucked a loose cable end deep into the compartment for good measure.

Stepping to the center of the open bay, Sam gripped both edges of the trunk lid and pressed his forehead against the wet, cold metal. The gesture caused the group to step back in silent reverence as he looked down at the cargo, closing his eyes as if in prayer. This was no simple act of transport; these precious items demanded a moment of devotion before they set out. Reaching up, he pressed the button and sealed the vaulted lid.

“All ready?” Sam asked.

The group looked on nervously, still red-cheeked and bundled like children overdressed for winter weather. The surrounding debris was the only remaining evidence of what had taken place moments prior. It was now dark, and they were all sweltering in thick down coats and hot, sweaty Gore-Tex. Jackets were quickly stripped off as the crew piled into the running vehicle.

Bright headlights illuminated a massive fallen tree blocking the street. The entire block sat in a heavy blackout, save for a few random generators flickering to life to cast dim interior lights. No one came out to assess the damage; residents were likely still recovering from the shock, and fewer still were prepared for this level of destruction.

Rat claimed the front passenger seat while Nick, Larry, Barry, and Betsy crammed into the back. Their bulky winter coats sprawled across their laps, already sliding toward the floorboards as Sam executed a sharp U-turn to navigate the only open exit path.

The heavy vehicle crunched over fallen branches, twigs, and acorns from coastal oak, redwood, Monterey cypress, Douglas fir, and pine. Small pebbles snapped beneath the tires, embedding into the thick treads or pinging sharply away. The devastation seemed to stretch for miles before finally fading into a calm, crisp night.

They drove toward Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux, only a few miles away, but pressed first and foremost toward the Ravens Grove cemetery situated in Montgomery—whose very name revealed Ravens Grove as the unassuming historical epicenter of the surrounding land.

Chapter 16 

Sam pressed his right hand onto the large power button of the car's infotainment center, and an illuminated screen folded out at a slight angle. Scanning the backlit track list in small print, he noticed one title that stood out above the rest, displayed simply as Erik Satiété—Danses de nu. Sam immediately recognized this world's iteration of the quintessential French classical composer, whom he had known in the first world as Erik Satie—creator of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes (or "The Nude Dance," originally referencing ancient Spartan rituals performed by unarmed youths).

As the Bay Area fog rolled in like Carl Sandburg's cat, lulling the locals into a misty sleep and the laziness of being, Sam recalled what the music Chevrolet-smoothly signified for those who took the time to understand: chiefly the reference to Gnossiennes, derived from the ancient Cretan city of Knossos (or Gnossos) and linked to the myth of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur—to Sam, a direct nod to gnosis and the esoteric knowledge shared by the few.

The car drove remarkably smoothly, its cabin drowning out any road noise, rattle, or hum. As the group was drawn into a world of dance, punishment, and reward, they heard fewer than five minutes of the lengthy masterpiece; yet the melody would continue repeating in their minds, cymatically ringing off the matrix of diamonds and quartz crystals tucked behind them in the trunk. Sam took the turns gently, careful not to disturb the precious cargo or shift the heavy-duty batteries nested in the rear, which remained upright and silent.

Sam knew where their two dear friends' graves lay, though in their haste, they had forgotten to bring shovels. Driving past the entrance of Ravens Grove Cemetery, he noticed a groundskeeper's workshop and tool shed in the near distance. Naturally, a business dedicated to maintaining earth and administering final resting places—or perhaps evicting those who were not entirely paid up—kept several shovels of various lengths and sizes on hand. Leaning against the main work structure, illuminated under dusk-to-dawn security lights, the tools sat just twenty-five yards from the graves.

Sam maneuvered slowly, banking right and then sweeping left in a 180-degree turn. He positioned the car so the fenced structures and faint sodium lights receded behind them as he backed toward their friends' graves and the adjacent sheds.

“Sorry, folks,” Sam said softly as the tires rolled over unmarked earth, backing closer to headstones perhaps fated to serve as a time traveler's holding pattern, positioned side by side. He took it slow and respectfully, crossing over four older, historical graves along the way, taking care not to disturb any lingering souls taking refuge in cosmic solipsism.

The bright red taillights illuminated two gravestones sitting side by side near the perimeter fence. Had Varginah requested this arrangement before she passed—to be buried so close to the Professor?

Betsy peered over her shoulder, nudging Larry's head aside. Seeing the gravestones brought a moment of disbelief, but imagining Varginah and the Professor together in the bleached-white limbo outside of space and time, she had to believe it was true. As the car came to a final halt, the rear doors opened, offering relief from the cramped quarters. The group looked out at the two headstones resting near an open clearing beneath the canopy of a mighty oak tree.

Sam simply said, “Pop the trunk and start pulling things out. And be extra careful with those suits.”

Betsy felt the resonator in her inner coat pocket, pondering its implications as she read the names Varginah Ferreira and Professor Emeritus Calcunos. Faintly lit by the parking lights, their engraved letters stood out starkly against the cemetery darkness.

Sam turned and walked toward the caretaker's work area to retrieve the shovels. Approaching the tools, he muttered to himself, “We'll need something to cut through this packed earth.”

Noticing a bucket full of water, he picked it up and set it closer to the site. “This'll soften the topsoil.”

Spotting a canvas arm tote conveniently left nearby, he grabbed it, continuing his quiet soliloquy: “Need a couple of shorter, flat spades to clear the gravel layer if these plots have one.”

He draped the carry tote over his shoulder, then slid five shovels one by one into its long sleeve. Pulling the strap taut, he adjusted it for a comfortable fit. Leaning down, he picked up the bucket of water. The quiet cemetery gave off only the faint chirp of crickets in the calm early night.

All of a sudden, a tall, thin, hard-looking man in overalls emerged from the shadows. The abrupt movement caught Sam off guard, sending his heart racing—but the man offered a kind, inviting smile as he spoke.

“Let me help you,” he said.

Sam, automatically assuming the man had asked, “Can I help you?”, offered his best rehearsed line. “We're... visiting some dear friends' graves. Just arrived late from out of town.” Then, Sam looked down at the damning evidence—the armful of shovels and the sloshing black plastic bucket held in both hands—realizing he looked like he was about to desecrate half the cemetery.

The man grinned ear to ear, clearly enjoying Sam's discomfort.

“Oh, you're not grave robbers, are you?”

Sam stared back nervously. The man walked right past him, his sleeve brushing Sam's cheek and causing him to flinch. He reached for a high-end shovel hidden slightly behind the rest—a durable yellow-fiberglass model set at an angle, as if deliberately placed out of sight.

“This here is 12-gauge cold-rolled steel—best of the bunch,” the man said, leaving Sam standing there burdened with five shovels and a heavy bucket of water. “I'll give you a hand. I'm a professional at this; it'll go a lot smoother. Bring those along and follow me... was it Sam?”

Sam turned to him, curiosity burning in his eyes. The man smiled warmly, acting as if he knew far more about the situation than Sam did.

“She said you'd be coming, Sam—you, Larry, Betsy, Nick, plus those two new additions, Rat and Barry.

See, Varginah built a goddamned time machine over in that other place...

what she calls the Great White Limbo,” the man said as they fell into step, walking back toward the crew.

“A fucking time machine? ¡Ay, Dios mío!” Sam blurted, stopping dead in his tracks ten yards short of the group.

“She prepped me well, said you'd be on your way,” the man added. “Name's Bill—Bill Hadre. Though this version of me goes by William Hadren.”

Sam squinted. “Wait... you're from the first world?”

“Bet your ass I am! Varginah gave me a second chance. I was a drunk and a deadbeat dad in that world—glad it's gone. Here I got a fresh start. Same line of work dealing with the dead, but a whole new outlook on life.”

He paused, his voice turning firm.

“I know what you're doing. I know this world's gotta go so we can build a better future, so I can send my boy to college. And I know a lot, Sam—like how we never really die inside that diamond, and how the best parts of us will live on even if the damn thing gets destroyed. Which, with every fiber of my being, I'll make sure it does. For a better reality.”

The man opened his palm to reveal a resonator. “She told me if you didn't believe me—if you thought I was sent by the Dark Council—to show you this. She said you all had to do this part alone.

By the way, they ain't dead, Varginah and the Professor.

She said there's a little surprise in there for ya.”

Leaning in close, Bill dropped his voice to a whisper. “She wouldn't tell me what's in those graves or I'd probably lose my mind, but she trusted me to keep my word...

Sam, those graves are packed with HMCs.”

They locked eyes in the dim light. Sam placed a steady hand on the man's shoulder, his eyes welling up. “I see you're one of us, Bill.”

The two started walking again, Sam much more relaxed as Bill slowed his pace to a crawl on their approach. “I haven't decided if, when I see those lights from the Holy Mother Candlestick bleaching and washing all the sin and life from this world, I'm gonna grab my boy and push this button—possibly taking us into that Great White Limbo, as she called it, or somewhere else entirely. But at least I have a choice. Maybe I'll let my son push the button with his arm around my shoulder, and we'll see where his curious mind takes us.”

Varginah had masterfully woven together a great mystery here. Off in the distance, the crew watched the exchange nervously—their anxiety shifting to confusion, then relief, as smiles broke out and the man held up his resonator like a flag of goodwill or surrender. He stepped forward into their circle, now just a few feet away.

“Guys, this is Bill—he's from the first world!” Sam said, eager to introduce him.

The crew began to dig while Bill stood by, smiling warmly at them at first. He leaned on his shovel, watching as Sam poured water over the hard earth from the bucket Bill had provided. But as time wore on and Bill didn't lift a finger to help, the group grew unsettled. Finally, their blades struck wood: first Varginah's mock coffin, and soon after, the Professor's.

“Alright, let's clear the rest of the dirt off both caskets. I suppose we'll just have to feel our way through the debris and pop them open. What do you say, Bill? Got a couple of flashlights or tools to open these?”

Sam looked up to find Bill's face, scanning the perimeter, but the man was nowhere to be found.

“Where'd he go?” Sam asked, as the others looked around in confusion.

“Oh, he probably went back to his shop to grab a hex key,” Sam added. “Keep digging, guys.”

Betsy tried opening Varginah's coffin, but it was sealed tight, exactly as Sam had suspected.

With both caskets cleared of earth, Sam and the crew decided to check on Bill. Perhaps he had trouble finding a key, or something else was wrong. But when Sam reached the cemetery maintenance yard, the shop was completely locked up; no one was around.

He checked the dark shadows between the back of the building and the perimeter fence, but still found no trace of Bill.

Walking back to the group—wondering if they had somehow crossed paths on opposite loops around the maintenance area—it became painfully clear that Bill hadn't returned to the gravesites either. Fortunately, Larry had brought a small kit of tools, including a hex key that fit both caskets.

It was uncanny: though the gravestones bore different burial dates, both markers looked as if they had been stamped by the same manufacturer at the exact same moment. The stones were identical, and now, the exposed coffins appeared to be exact replicas.

“Of course there aren't bodies in here,” Sam muttered under his breath.

“Alright, open them up, guys—just be prepared for anything.”

Fumbling in the dark, Larry felt blindly along the sides of the caskets until his fingers located and unlatched the heavy hinged bars across the tops. The hiss of a broken seal followed, and a faint, stale rancidity crept out from the seams—not organic decay, exactly, but the strange, metallic odor of trapped energy, or whatever localized anomaly these artifacts emitted in place of human remains.

After all, these HMCs were weaponized human souls vaulted away for years; who could predict what kind of atmospheric rot might linger inside?

Sam reached down to assist Larry and Nick with the Professor's coffin. The prospect of opening Varginah's casket—even from a distance—still unsettled Nick, given their complicated, deeply intimate history.

Barry, Rat, and Betsy began levering away the heavy lid, but the faint ambient light was too weak to pierce the darkness inside. The car's headlights cast only a flat, washed-out glare across the surface.

Even with both coffins fully unsealed, it was far too dark to see down into the depths of the graves. Though he had turned the car around earlier, Sam had intentionally angled it away so the crew could dig without being blinded by the lights; they had arrived entirely ill-prepared, operating on a level of admitted irrationality none of them would ever care to claim.

Sam decided to take action. He pulled the car forward, backed up, and pointed the high beams directly at the open pits. As the group scrambled back to clear a path, Sam crept the vehicle closer.

Still unable to see down into the soil from the driver's seat, he popped the door, stepped out, and joined the rest of the crew at the edge of the pit, looking down as the deep graves were finally illuminated.

Chapter 17

As the group stepped forward—expecting to witness a nightmare drawn from their most dread-filled visions, a pandemonium of horrors meant to mar their fragile psyches—they saw only the outline of an entryway of an entirely different nature:

A black, round, industrial high-pressure manhole topped with a heavy handwheel, bearing an age far older than the relatively new coffins enclosing it.

The latch was sealed so tight that all five men could not budge it, no matter how hard they cranked with their combined strength.

Sam, Barry, and Rat began walking toward the maintenance sheds while Larry stayed behind with Betsy. The two searched beneath Larry's trunk floorboard for a long metal tool, but the tire jack crank was far too short to gain leverage.

Suddenly, off in the distance, came the sharp crack of breaking glass, followed by the clatter of fragments falling onto a concrete floor.

A moment later, the metallic rattle of a roll-up door echoed through the night.

The three men walked back into view, their black silhouettes cast against the glare of the headlights before their features could be made out as they drew near. Each carried a tool for the job: Rat held a chainsaw that smelled of treated gasoline, Barry bore a heavy sledgehammer, and Sam carried a five-foot solid iron pry bar built for precisely this kind of resistance.

They had to wedge the bar down against the edge at an angle, pushing together to break the initial seal—moving in a synchronized, grueling circle around the crypt like men winding an impossible maypole, or soldiers straining to raise a flag against brutal adversity.

Once the initial latch gave way, Sam wedged the bar deeper, pivoting it upward toward the thick metal hinges; but alone, he could not overcome the impossible friction.

Instantly, the entire crew stepped in, heaving upward together at a sharp angle.

A mighty, ravenous rush of wind whipped at their pant legs, clawing to drag them down into the hermetically sealed, vaulted abyss below.

As the vacuum pressure finally abated, they felt the staggering, cavernous expanse opening beneath their feet—a massive subterranean chamber that had been completely stripped of oxygen for ages.

"That smell," Sam murmured, his gaze lost in the yawning stretch below. "It’s an epoch of trapped, dead air—vacuum-sealed in whatever hidden chambers lie down there, utterly untouched."

"Nothing living could survive down there," Betsy whispered, peering into the blackness alongside him.

"Not biologically, at least," Barry added quietly. "Not in a way we’d ever recognize."

"What's down there?" Rat asked, suddenly feeling as though he were standing atop a desolate mountain peak, surrounded by the faint, echoing thud of death rushing, whirling, and silently screaming with its own alien atmosphere.

Larry pulled three large flares from beneath the trunk floorboard where his emergency repair tools were stored—gear never meant for anything like this.

Twisting the cap of one, he held the flare away as it sparked, crackling with the sharp, persistent hiss of ignition.

As the group approached the opening and peered down, Larry held the flare upright, leaning slightly forward into the cavernous abyss. A rugged, industrial ladder descended endlessly into the black void.

"I'm dropping this down. All agree?"

"All agreed," the group murmured in unison.

Betsy trailed behind Rat and Larry, her eyes—and those of everyone else—mesmerized and transfixed. Meanwhile, Rat nervously switched positions, alternating between leaning forward to brace his thighs and hit the vape pen he had acquired from Barry, and lapsing into a steady, mind-numbed pacing.

Larry let go.

A violent gust of wind seized the flare, seeming intent on driving it straight to terminal velocity; yet it dropped perhaps two hundred feet before hanging suspended in mid-air, illuminating the faint, squared silhouette of a floating structure below.

"What the fuck," Rat muttered under his breath. He and Barry had paused their vaping, utterly transfixed—this defied all logic.

Barry reached out. "Give me a rip of that, man." Rat handed over the pen while holding in his vape, still staring down into the cavern.

Larry snapped the tops off the second and third flares, tossing them in opposite directions to map the topographical layout below.

"Is that... is that what I think it is?"

Rat quickly rejoined the others where Barry, Nick, and Sam were already lying flat on their stomachs, chins pressed against the concrete edge of the pit.

Larry pulled a stainless steel flask from his back pocket, taking a quick swig of harsh whiskey before passing it around to the huddled group.

Their hands returned to grip the concrete edges leading down into the seemingly endless abyss.

"Yep... that's a fucking massive pyramid down there, guys."

In the dim, phosphorus-lit gloom of the flares, the long metal ladder continued down past two or three hundred feet, proving their initial assessment of the pyramid's scale was a vast underestimation.

"I am not climbing down that fucking thing," Betsy stated, her voice tight with terror.

"Let's see what's under that second hatch!" Rat said nervously as he resumed pacing.

Sam, Nick, and Barry were now standing, sharing another pull of whiskey.

Betsy cut in abruptly, snatching the flask from Nick midway through a deep swig. "Give me that. I know you're planning on drinking it all without offering me any," she muttered, nearly emptying the container.

"I wasn't going to do this—I was saving this pack for the end of the world—but this is something else entirely," Sam said, hand-packing a pack of first-world Lucky Strikes retrieved from his pocket. "When and where I got these, don't ask."

He opened the pack and fumbled in his pocket for a torch lighter—one he had previously used only to fuse wires for the suit—checking to ensure all his gear was still intact. It was.

As he lit a cigarette, Rat approached. "Can I bum one off you, man?"

"Sure," Sam said, flicking the pack sideways to offer three protruding cigarettes.

The others looked half-tempted, but their unused lungs and shredded nerves cut the impulse short. Sam shielded the flame, giving Rat a light as he leaned in.

“Well, I say we finish these cigarettes, then see what's under that second hatch,” Sam stated firmly, tapping the remaining cigarettes back down. He vowed his next would be smoked at the end of this world—or better yet, the end of it all—as he tucked the pack into his front pocket for reassurance.

“Fumez-les tant que vous les avez,” he added, following it softly with, “Je suis en train de fumer une putain de cigarette.”

The crew prepared for the next hurdle. Betsy grabbed the long, heavy metal bar and propped it up beside her.

“Let's do this!” she said with newfound resolve.

Nick walked over to join her. “Absolutely. Let me look into the Professor's casket now and see what surprises are waiting in this one.” He sounded a bit more vocal, reminiscent of his old self—anchored by a mix of liquid courage, real-time mystery, and fascination.

Nick helped Betsy steady the bar; it felt important for the two to bond once more in a purer way, proving to themselves and this universe that they were more than mere flesh and bone.

Steadying the bar firmly in the mechanism of the second hatch, they all pushed together. This seal opened with considerably less resistance.

“Well, whose turn is it?” Betsy asked, looking around.

Barry, Rat, and Larry stepped forward to finish cranking the wheel, then pulled up together as the pressurized seal gave way without a rush. As they swung open the heavy door and locked it in place, a bright glare illuminated thick, white-silk-bordered, scalloped coffin lace.

Sam looked down curiously as the group stepped back, mystified. Inside sat a large room draped wall-to-wall in white silk and lace.

Dropping onto all fours to feel the fine silk lining of the open casket, Sam extended his upper body through the port and into the shallow room. He took a moment before pulling himself back up, then turned to the others.

“Listen, let's step away for a second and talk,” he said, gesturing for them to follow him away from the pit. Once clear, Sam continued, “The Professor and Varginah are in there.”

He watched Betsy and Nick grow teary-eyed.

“But they aren't dead. They appear to be in some sort of suspended animation, and whoever set this up did so with absolute respect and care, sparing no expense. I think I need to climb down into that chamber to see what we're dealing with. I feel like there's another Schrödinger mystery at play here. We might need that suit after all, so let me go down.”

“I'm going with you,” Betsy insisted. “That's my best friend down there.”

As Sam and Betsy entered the low, wide quarters, they crawled between the Professor and Varginah.

“It feels completely climate-controlled,” Sam observed as Larry, Rat, and Barry took turns poking their heads down to inspect the space—only about four and a half feet high, but extending fifteen to seventeen feet down each well-padded wall. They felt the sleepers' faces and checked their pulses.

As the crew above looked down in amazement, a ladder unfolded from the wall, allowing them to step down rather than face a fifteen-foot drop. The room was large, paneled, and space-age in appearance, all reminiscent of the carbon-graphite composites and fiberglass epoxy floor panels Sam had first noticed.

Now, the entire crew was down in the room together.

“We need to do some cleanup; this area absolutely needs to be off-limits to everyone outside of this…” Sam said, panning around, uncertain if "room" was the right word. “…place. It's definitely a place of some kind.”

At that moment, the medical isolation facility began an infrared scan of the entire area. Panels pulled back before them, and a thick viewing window illuminated the massive pyramid ahead.

The hatches closed, sealed, and locked from the inside.

On a near-opaque screen, the car outside was shown being levitated to the front of the cemetery workshops. The lights were killed as the engine cut out, and the tools were set to the side of the fence.

Some sort of current, wave, nanotechnology, or other form of technomancy filled in the gravesites above, even miraculously growing a brand-new layer of grass. The grass was then cooked briefly under a radiation field, returning the site back to a convincing "nothing to see here" cleanup job.

The suits, cables, and batteries were all accounted for as the crew brought them down; there was nothing left behind except the keys in the vehicle, which was now turned off.

Varginah was awake, somehow interfacing with the system through infrared gaze-tracking technology.

The vessel began to move as the Professor awoke fully as well, sitting upright within a containment unit that took constant readings while blowing different-colored concoctions of vapors through the chamber.

As for Varginah, she seemed to be levitating whatever vessel they were inside toward a landing on the ground a thousand feet below the surface.

The craft moved fluidly; the speed of descent produced no sinking or queasy sensations, which was odd. The pyramid was absolutely massive, and now only a portion of the wide stretch of its base could be seen.

During the descent, the ship miraculously kept a locked-on pace, maintaining perfect synchronization with the pyramid. In other words, the craft preserved the exact same distance from the face directly in front of it, descending at a minimum of three hundred miles per hour—judging by the distance covered—as it pulled back with precision to land on the surface far below.

“Are we in an actual UFO right now!?” Rat said, his mouth dropping in utter awe, as did the rest of theirs.

The chambers finally opened to both the Professor and Varginah's medical units. A pair of bulky metallic syringes levitated in the space before them, administering a shot into each of their glutes as they stepped forward.

“Var, is that you?” Betsy asked, stepping forward to give Varginah a hug—or at least come face-to-face with her.

Suddenly, a calm voice echoed into the quarters: "Please keep a minimum distance of six to ten feet from the recovering party for the next ten minutes. Thank you."

Instantly, the two were each pushed back three or four feet. The odd sensation left the distinct feeling that the world had moved around them—the only way to describe the event from a purely human sensory perspective.

“Yes, Bets,” Varginah whispered. Her vocal cords seemed strained, but her voice was immediately amplified as the acoustics carried directly into Betsy's ear. The communication felt intimate and close. “The system—Arelena, as she calls herself—is the ship's voice. That's how she put it.”

As Betsy soon realized, Varginah wasn't using her vocal cords at all. No sound came from her mouth; the conversation was a direct telepathic interplay as Varginah continued:

“Anyway, Arelena transferred valuable data into me—that's the best way I can put it. Seems the Professor and I were fused with several versions of ourselves from different worlds. These entities or people 'recovered these versions shortly before we closed those worlds,' again, as she stated it. These beings have shown me how to fly the craft and many other vital pieces of information that we will need as we step further into this... war with the Dark Council. I love you, sis!”

The love the two shared could be felt amplified, carrying a refined quality that didn't diminish the sensation, but instead heightened the exchange in a more sophisticated, guarded, and mature way.

Meanwhile, the Professor was speaking with Nick, Larry, and Barry in the exact same manner; the ship contained built-in technologies that allowed this fluid, uninterrupted telepathic streaming interface to take place.

Nick, after conveying how much they had missed the two and how glad they were to see them alive, asked the Professor more broadly, “What is really going on here, Professor—reality, I mean?”

The Professor stepped back to reveal a projection of a friendly, composite humanoid hologram of Arelena as she began to speak:

“This form, language, and communication style seem to pair within each of you as a standard medium for delivery. Hello, welcome, and I greet you all. We have long been aware of this collapsing matrix, and there will always exist a collapsing, dying exosphere outside of the infinite. It poses no threat to us, and truly, you do it to yourselves.

“However, there are those of that siphoning mind that always flow into our world, from where I speak to you now. I only appear to be with you all. This loose representation of form here in this hull and with the in-built quanta allows for a broad enough range of communication—though it is not even a single drop of sand within an infinite ocean of potential that we exist within.

“Information is constantly unfolding into its newer, higher order every moment—a slide that we can revisit as an authentically new moment that interfaces and connects as a living matrix, from only your view of a hypercube. But you cannot see infinity from the outside.”

The crew, now adorned in suits whose fabric seemed woven from the empty space around them, sat listening to projections and watching screens as complex data streams downloaded directly into their minds.

“I am attempting to make you impervious to external distraction,” Arelena spoke, “to elevate you into the fifth-dimensional zone, reaching for infinity. We are giving you the option to leave this existence of a limited mind.

“Varginah in this world began to build this ship, until enough of it in mimetic form allowed it to synthesize and amass itself. This ship is shaped nearly identically to forms found in the infinite dimension. I say nearly because exactness would cause immediate absorption—into the infinite-dimensional hypercube, out into the vast expanse of all. You are well on your way to becoming this, though you are still young.

“This interplay is merely a foreseeable, wrenching construct of the mind, the brain, body, nervous system, and all nine layers of the human form, bridging a transformation toward this infinite point-form cohesion. In short: this is the process of becoming.”

The crew, and specifically Rat, was getting hungry. It must have been the middle of the night, though none felt tired.

The suits they were sealed within released faint vapors that not only relaxed them instantly, but opened neuronal pathways of the mind to allow complete and utter bliss while maintaining human function. Sitting, breathing, and existing became entirely fluid.

“Wait, is that pizza I taste?” Rat asked, his jaw moving as if chewing, though his mouth was empty. “Washed down by fountain root beer? The exact kind I haven't been able to match since Giuseppe's Pizza Palace! My God, it's even better!”

Betsy primed herself as her face glowed with a radiant beauty that drew everyone's gaze. “Expensive makeup I could never justify nor afford because I never achieved true worldly success on my own... the mall of my dreams... I am wrapped in the finest clothing, purchased from a boutique in Monaco I only dreamed of visiting. It's mine. The diamonds are mine. It's all mine now, and I feel whole. Finally appeased.”

As Betsy closed her eyes, multicolored vapors released inside her helmet, immersing her in pure euphoria.

“This is the pinnacle you have chased your entire lives,” Arelena continued, “now protected within the perfection of biosemiotic form—a transaction into primary achievement. Your experience is a necessity; newly established neuronal pathways must branch out as fractaled fingers of possibilities no human has ever truly known. You have done a great service, sacrificing yourselves not for humanity as it was, but out of the unyielding faith of knowing a purer state exists.”

As the ship glided toward the great pyramid's base, countless angular, illuminated vectors jumped out, projecting an aura that expanded infinitely before gelling through the pyramid's outer wall.

Transitioning into the interior, the same phenomenon occurred: the surrounding space appeared to reduce into an infinitely smaller pyramid of light as the craft entered it. Whether the craft shrank or the infinite light pyramids expanded made no discernible difference—and suddenly, that was comforting.

“We can travel anywhere from here and never truly leave,” Arelena explained. “This place is a representation of what I will briefly outline in this required download of understanding.”

Instantaneously, the monologue and far more—mathematical formulas that defied comprehension even for Varginah—were rapidly absorbed into their consciousness, as if the information had always been waiting within them.

“If you knew how betrayed you were long before your births through a systematically planned failure—a tranche of the greater deception—you likely would have chosen to end it all.”

The ship continued to cycle forward.

The repeating sequence of light interactions visible through the large viewing window resembled a hyper-realistic VR simulation to the left brain's rationalizing, sarcastic filter—that finite module polluting human perception. But the crew had already been liberated from that burden.

“It is detrimental to perpetually believe in a false identity within the confines of an imposter world,” Arelena said as the data impressed upon their psyches, weaving them into a single, unified force. “Defaults have always been the secret weapon of the opposing side. As the rapid download of condensed informational time progressed, the true opposition has always inhabited a world none of us could ever truly know.

“They live where the Hilbert Cube (The Hilbert cube is a countable product of intervals), and a direct connection to infinite dimensions shape their reality—a reality that demands we live in its shadow here.

“As an intermediary that otherwise could not exist—and in truth, I do not—this is merely an instructional projection from the mind of my world. Again, I am not actually here. I am a rippling from a perfected mind.”

Another massive cluster of data then uploaded directly into them, accompanied by complex mathematics:

When the dimension n approaches infinity, the Banach-Mazur compactum becomes an infinitely complex landscape, revealing how different infinite-dimensional Banach spaces relate to one another—proving that certain infinite structures (like the space of continuous functions) act as monumental gravitational centers that other infinite spaces must warp themselves to resemble.

“In a failed and perpetually inadequate mimesis, they maintain your world in a state of default stasis, ensuring you never realize what has been stripped away. Imagine scattering millions of random points uniformly inside a 3D cube. They fill the space relatively evenly.

“But as the number of dimensions approaches infinity…

“The Shell Effect: The volume of the interior completely evaporates.

“Concentration of Measure: Due to the Law of Large Numbers, the distance of almost every random point from the center concentrates intensely around a single, predictable mathematical value. It explodes in Euclidean distance, but is tamed by the max-coordinate rule—the supremum norm and the unit ball, or what you call self and largely refer to as sin, as you ensnare and further trap each other inside this space.

“Because you were paid to over lifetimes, it has become an integrated aspect of all your belief systems—now bound in your genes, mRNA, aromatic amino acids, epigenetics, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, extending into the electromagnetic field that tricks you into thinking you have choice, limiting space into the very isotopes that form your physical world and your cellular makeup in a cycle of death upon death.

“Then you make art of it and sell it off as non-fungible in defiant division, proclaiming always 'I am a self' rather than 'we are one' or, truly, 'we have won.' A tranche forever collapsing, keeping you locked out from the infinite-dimensional hypercube—every repeating world a recurring booby trap inside the folding of the isomorphic-distorted-sphere-ball, your world a mere point in the finite Euclidean collapse of infinite, perpetuated failures.”

Meanwhile, the crew witnessed a rush of raymarching graphics slicing through the flashing, sequential vectors of non-Euclidean portal rendering. Their eyes darted wildly in response to the intense visual stimulus.

Inside their suits, a concoction of multicolored vapors hung like hallowed, rainbow-colored nebulous clouds inside each helmet. As they inhaled, this existential alchemy of gases instantly alleviated all weariness and concern.

As the data dump continued into the subconscious of their human psyches, rapid flashes of light sequenced illuminated pyramidal structures before them. The ship micro-adjusted effortlessly with perfect precision as it navigated the non-Euclidean matrix.

Memories of past selves—and the selves still housed within the master diamond—fused into each of them. Their unique egoic essences were left behind as the transformative travel tool imprinted upon their very matrices of selfhood, for now they were still offered this non-Euclidean-bound, finite choice.

Meanwhile, the narrative delivered into one region of the brain—rendered with mathematical and geometrical absolution—flashed on surrealistically. It felt like an MK-Ultra, mind-bending conversion, forcing an abstract reframing of their identity from within:

“Because every random point ends up at the exact same distance from the center,” the echo of a voice continued, “the points no longer appear to be in a box with flat sides and sharp corners. Instead, they form a perfectly uniform, thin, hyper-dimensional shell. To a probabilist, an infinite-dimensional cube and an infinite-dimensional sphere are practically the exact same object.

“In strict avoidance of releasing these false will and false reality parameters, a business was built long ago from your perspective. A business truly of constant, around-the-clock soul trafficking, as you overvalue the so-called point of selfhood in the collapse of grief—standing back, fascinated by the flame and where it ends up in the ridiculous occulted craft of reincarnation, and this business built around re-embodiment and practices as you contend that anything is random: the fox in the foxhunt.”

Then, as the speed decelerated through the cycled travel sequence, the voice concluded with a final narrative, accompanied by a complete left-brain mathematical rendering of the same paired information, summarized in formulas:

“In short, you are limited only by yourselves, now trapped within a prison—kept out from the aether by weapons that you, and the Dark Council as mere delusional extensions of you, now use to keep this finite hypercube Hilbert sphere contained through nuclear energy, directed energy, high-powered radar, EM, and gravity in a mad, rhetorically binding loop of chronic, perpetuated failures to transcend—the madness of it all.”

The Droste Effect collapsed into a sudden, dead halt.

Deep within hyperspace, the ship locked into position, its momentum abruptly severed. The crew opened their eyes to an impossible, uncharted expanse unfolding before them.

Would they feel the pull to return to the reality they once knew—or was this silence merely the threshold of yet another test of worthiness?

Anaphase: Quantum Foam; Beyond the Planck Scale Wall

As the group looked around, the world appeared as inverted light, as if every object they viewed was being seen from the inside out. Every layer of reality stood visible in its own distinct way.

Energy, light, and the underlying geometry, nodes, and arteries that carried it took on a fully animistic, panpsychist, hylozoistic distinction. There was no true void; what appeared as a void was merely a reconciliation of light—instead, the digestion and production of light itself could be witnessed.

"I remember now," said Nick.

"I remember, too," Betsy said. "I remember dying in the worst possible way—rotting to death in my own shit and piss in some unmonitored state psychiatric hospital."

Nick added, "Yes, I remember freezing to death on some beach, too drunk to feel the cold and get up to find warmth. I have the distinct feeling that I was simply done with that incarnation."

"I remember, too," said Rat. "I was sleeping in the RV I had just bought, trying to keep an old generator going, and the fumes from it knocked me out."

Then Barry nodded his head, followed by Larry, the Professor, and Varginah. They all looked flush white as they peered down at their bodies, taking in the highly technologically advanced suits they were wearing.

Chapter 18

"If we are dead, then where are we—and why would we require suits?" Barry asked.

Arelena spoke. "Because the suits are a construct of your mind, as you still cling to the idea of disparate separation when none exists. Your energy is reluctant to assimilate into the shared field. This ship represents a graduated comfort level—steps toward letting go. Yet the precision of the totality views this as a teleological process that every migrating, cultivating living organism undergoes.

"Think of it like mitosis: the process of cell division where a single cell splits into two genetically identical cells, crucial for growth, tissue repair, and asexual reproduction in eukaryotic organisms. In a way, you are coming out of Anaphase. But think of this more as pure energy and the metabolic process of existence.

"You have created a construct from the information that you made available to yourselves. As you accept ever-greater forms, you can unlock transdimensional states that your current forms would not be capable of rationalizing.

"It is pure information—a complete lack of firewalls between you and the infinity that you are a part of. You all graduated to the next phase of shared consciousness and existence. You see, you are as much individuals as you are a construct that lives within your neighbor's mind. All suits are Extravehicular Mobility Units, all faces are masks, but energy in its pure state is undeniably authentic.

"You have made it to this place where this authenticity is willing to accept you as you are, assimilate you, and absorb you into it. You didn't die—because nothing dies, can die, or ever will die. The greater part of consciousness within you transcended the process through pain.

"All of you became homeless because you realized through incarnations that there exists no home in the dying stagnancy of bound carbon structures. The mind goes through a fermentation process—a necessary part of the very digestive mechanics of total being. I, too, am both a necessary construct of your minds and of all those going through this process right now in a shared, routine belief that, through creation, becomes form.

"As you learn to create more and realize that you are simultaneously the paintbrush, the canvas, the paint, and the mind, that is where the process flowers into unlimited, amazing potential. The best part of it all is that you get to succeed and fail while watching existence from the other side of reality, beyond the white noise."

A collective wave of understanding passed through them as the group realized they had never actually met in life.

They saw Agent Cook for what he truly was—a personification of death itself—and recognized their meeting with Sam as a unifying redeemer, the catalyst that had brought their paths together.

Barry looked out into the inverted field of light, deep memories rising to the surface. He remembered that his sister had been married to a John who had passed away. In spite of Barry taking accounting classes, she would never hire him, much less return his phone calls. The physical world they had just departed was merely a phase of letting go, a realm for realizing what could have been, and essentially how others had failed themselves in failing them.

Barry remembered those worldly struggles, but as he pondered Arelena's words, he reflected back on his class studies in cell biology. Anaphase was that precise moment where individual chromatids separate and move toward opposite poles of the cell—a state of pulling apart.

Realizing the nature of their current shift, he saw that this phase now was more akin to Telophase, where the chromosomes begin to uncoil, lose their rigid boundaries, and spread back out into chromatin. They were unique, yet fundamentally an integral part of the all—authentic, yet rejected by the dying forms of the outer crust.

"Even if cell biology isn't the exact right analogy here," Larry said, leaning forward as his translucent visor reflected the surrounding matrix of light, "doesn't that make Daria, Rancor, and Arelena fill in for whatever we missed in terms of genuine connection with others while realizing this soul journey? In other words, if we imagined them into being—if they became form just as you say, Arelena—aren't these figures, even Cook, the tangible expression of our collective energy? Aren't they the manifestation of unmet potential, or better yet, our ability to see beyond the veil, which others simply weren't ready for and so rejected us?"

Nick cut in, his voice cold and sharp against the quiet hum of the shared field. "They didn't just reject us—they sacrificed us. I've had my suspicions for a long time that the world we left behind was far too streamlined, far too neatly orchestrated to be natural. I've often had the distinct feeling that Betsy and I were literally sacrificed in some cult ritual many years ago, reduced to collateral for a machine that feeds on bound carbon."

Nick went on, rationalizing and realizing how they were being coaxed along, how their entire existence could be viewed as a brief flash under the master orchestration of such an all-powerful being.

"What about our free will? Our hopes and dreams? Why weren't we ever allowed to live? Why this convincing act to reduce ourselves, as if parboiling our own bodies for some cosmic witch to consume for her dinner? Whatever force is trying to draw us under—are we merely buying one narrative over the rest because we have a value that none of us can see now?

"Maybe we were sacrificed long ago," Nick continued, his eyes scanning the pulsing geometry around them. "Maybe I died on a beach freezing, alone and homeless. But perhaps none of us have truly broken free and begun to spin energy and draw it in for ourselves. Maybe none of us ever got past the idea of selfishness and became the vehicle of our own self-willed destinies—not a construct put before us written by someone or something else, foreign to us, with many identities and faces, but truly using all of ourselves and laser-pointing our will and the principles that manifest by creating our own universes!"

He paused, a dark question hanging in the shimmering air.

"Why would it want to absorb us, this great energy? Is this a soul's psychotic breakdown, a final Dissociative Identity Disorder convincing act of separation before entering into that black hole void that is Agent Cook?"

Then they all stood up tall against Arelena, Nick first, speaking in a commanding tone.

"We don't want to be assimilated or absorbed. We want—no, we demand—to forge our own paths. Whatever that might look like, bad or good, we aren't giving in to it!"

The rest of the group began to speak in a similar commanding and authoritative chorus. 

As they did, the entire cockpit of the craft began to dim, fading into Eigengrau retinal noise and then Vantablack.

Sam was standing there. No one had noticed that he had transitioned from that projected link through a personal state of mass psychosis. Their eyes began to adjust as they found themselves kneeling down on one knee, coming out of a near-catatonic state as Sam assisted them.

"I was wondering when you were going to come back," Sam said quietly.

The graves that Sam had driven over when approaching those of Varginah and the Professor were actually their own. It was the middle of the night so they simply couldn't see it.

"I saw that letter on the maintenance shed door," Sam continued. "It grieved the loss of the cemetery property caretaker, Bill Hadre, signed with 𖤐 marked with 10:13pm TOD. Everything, including the graves, has an inverted pentagram on or over them,” but they were all still coming to, hardly noticing it themselves in the dark and over their graves.

"It didn't take long for me to realize the craft being worked here as the Dark Council went to absorb us, then rule for another twenty-one billion years. At this point, it's hard to tell how long they have been weaving this tapestry of reality—so bent and twisted now that almost nothing we experience can be trusted unless we truly use all of ourselves to forge our own reality through master will."

They were all standing, looking down at their graves. One by one, Sam had braved it alone and brought them back from the bleached-white limbo, somehow managing to pull Barry and Rat back from wherever they had been, as each of their deaths had occurred very recently. Their souls had more than likely been playing out the very lives and friendships they wished they had had.

"This is the first world; it's here now," Sam spoke. "I saw it all on this fifth day—being dehydrated, but brought back to life at the same time near to death in that helmet and suit. Those diamonds are us; all I had was this quartz crystal."

They looked at Sam. He was noticeably thinner, though not emaciated. Then they looked down at the large box of crystals. They could still taste the embalming fluid and feel the raw regeneration of their internal organs, as the flax fill-ins that the Ravens Wood Morgue used were somehow passing through their digestive systems, causing sharp stomach pains.

Sam had opened up the shop. It was now 4:30 AM, but no caretaker was scheduled for early morning digs on account of Bill's recent passing.

The Dark Council had shown their power and the sheer death and destruction they could unleash. The new Council, however, was eight strong with Sam. Through their own unyielding will and a cosmic twist of fate, they would have to finally take on the Dark Council—but first, they would have to recover.

Death's Door

There was no fancy car, only the RV that Rat had left to Sam upon his recent passing—and it truly had no title nor registration, but it worked. It was Rat who got lost in the void while plugged into that suit, passing away—maybe intentionally—drifting into places, realms, regions, and zones that he shouldn't have, but all to reach rock bottom in a Templar's quest.

The truth here was that they were a group of the dejected: eight homeless people who were reviled by society, so much so that ontology itself, taking notice of each of their brilliance, had collected them up against all odds, bending and folding the matrix networking of its own coils in time and space and unraveling them here now, in this first world—not the deceptive labyrinth trap of spellwork cast behind it.

There was no telling if those many dimensional zones were simply layered potentials of this one here—a sort of meshwork of the greater fabric of the whole thing in totality or mere highly detailed illusions—but the dire need for them to step up and face the Dark Council was now realized as the only solution left.

"I drove a few miles from Dean's place to get here. I saw it all; I was right there with you, but I found what you might consider an analog backdoor through here. I pulled off that helmet knowing that one more minute would be too much. My two sons, Quinn and Dean, are still traveling abroad, searching for clues themselves, going on their own unique soul journeys, searching for that master diamond within themselves," Sam stated, placing the helmet, suit, and heavy boxes of quartz crystals into two large, black industrial-grade carry bags.

He paused, looking over at them, as they still looked like death—hollowed out as the rising dimness of night was coming to a close. The subtle hand of desairology could be seen and smelled on them as Sam continued: "Point is, we have a place to stay, to feed ourselves back to health. I just have to unplug the generator from the shop and go use the restroom. There is a full pot of coffee made in there, as well as what appeared to be Bill's favorite maple flavor of toaster pastries. Go get cleaned up, and then we can leave together. I will finish packing up and finish labeling these quartz crystals that now have your own imprints."

Varginah looked much different now, as did the Professor. They appeared disheveled and broken down by the ever-bombarding machinations of this life, but they had lived and seen more than mere glimpses of what had truly been stripped from them.

Together the group walked, stepping toward the cemetery workshop, dressed in gifted funerary, pincushioned finer wear. Who had paid for the burials and plots, placing their corpses so close together? Was it all still just a part of a master maze leading to a soul's capitulation into utter madness?

But now they were holding hands. Their steps were broken and just above hobbling, with absolutely no fluidity, but they held one another up in the unifying spirit that they now collectively shared—ready to relentlessly champion on until the Dark Council was finally destroyed forever, if it truly ever could be.

The sun began to rise behind them in the east as they felt a powerful current and the rush of a salty ocean breeze, tantalizing their nostrils open to the life-providing breath of a brand-new day.

There would be no bottomless illusion of an inheritance here, not in the raw carnal reality of this place. They were each sacrificed by their own families, intentionally and knowingly, within the clandestine narcissistic inner workings of parents, siblings, and caretakers, then further beaten down by society itself into the final synthesis here: from death to resurrection.

The New Council of eight had emerged from death as if Attis had finally broken fully free from Cybele and Zeus's final betrayals, waking up in a new, superior world, already victorious over the old world he had died in once long ago.

Chapter 19

Aleph-Null

It was already well past 9:00 AM.

They weren't dead, but their endocrine systems and basal functions hardly felt alive—they were simply, somehow, suspended in a lingering stasis, as the sun filtered through the clouds above, casting a strange hue of funerary green.

The old Chinook chugged as Sam stepped into the open side door, while Rat began a rapid, sewing-machine-like press upon the labored accelerator.

The archaic tank began to move and sputter, pushing out a billowing accordion of half-combusted exhaust.

Even the spirited vision of the Chinook, peering through its cataract corneal leukoma, wanted to leave the unholy cemetery grounds—but could it ever truly leave?

Sam entered a little too hard.

He slowed his movements, noticing the massive lean of that final Septimal harmonic after slamming the unprotesting door—that 969th cent.

An ode to Methuselah, perhaps, but better defined through his father's grave third as ekbolē.

As the old Chinook chuddered on, the sun beamed down in topographic awareness of them.

Was it even the same sun?

Maybe it was some Luciferian- or Baphomet-inspired black sun—a rupture in the great diamond's gletz cavity hidden in the cleavage—an inverted black sun, a caged harmonic of that devil's interval.

A singular antiproton, by all definitions now locked away—yet in doing so, commanding and generating God's fatal denial through the distribution of allostatic patterning in reverse.

Dark energy and dark matter aligning behind their general in an impending, fatalistic, universe-ending protest—the complete opposite of a Holy Mother Candlestick; that final flood into a zero-dimensional Flashpoint.

It was the inversion and absorption by way of the 95% majority that comprises a universe.

For if an antiparticle touches its matching regular particle, they instantly destroy each other in a flash of pure energy—always leaving one singular antiparticle in waiting, folding in universe upon universe to eventually invert the all.

The anti of life and the freely living.

That voice, that song ringing out from the other end—somehow translated from ancient Phrygian, from Matar Kubileya ("Mother of the Mountain"), synthesized into broken English—like the Ouija board sitting in every child's closet, an unsuspecting novelty acting as an unseen anti-fissure.

That true religion that most of the universe already knows full well, even as that five percent always loses ground.

A portal within a 47th octave-reduced tritone.

An entity banging incessantly from somewhere within that master diamond core—shamefully held and locked away in some dungeonous status, God's incestuous first bastard child still vying to break free from its hell-prism prison—an early creation abortion attempt.

But these, too, are gods that never die.

As for that Chinook, like an old burro's reanimated corpse, it murmured and vibrated through the ley lines.

An agitation passed through the engine bay, on through its frame, and straight into their bones, blood, and brainstems—vibrating back through some unholy genesis that could, in finality, always still be leveraged for good or ill.

Sam leaned at odds against the popping, warped plastic on the left side to balance out and redistribute the weight, while Barry and the Professor sat uncomfortably together at the table above the bowed floor, causing the chassis to lean asymmetrically.

Betsy was uniformly forced to sit on the chair on the far left where the toilet used to be, while Varginah and Larry fell into the recesses in the back on either side.

They looked as if they were balancing themselves upon rocker boards in the pit of this multi-time resurrected beast, each making a valiant effort to center the weight; otherwise, the folding wheel wells yielded, grinding into the tires' rotation.

"Where is Nick?" asked Betsy.

"Who is Nick?" asked Varginah.

"Yes, who do you mean? Nick?" added Larry, as the rest of the group looked on oddly, leaning in closer.

No one seemed to remember him except Betsy.

Through all the strange physical processes of recovering from death and interfacing with a different host's memories, Nick seemed to have slipped through the cracks.

"You say Nick, Betsy—do you truly remember him?" asked Sam.

"Of course," Betsy said, adding, "He's always been there in my life, long before our introduction by Madame Crusso. I realized this some time ago: we could never just sit down together and talk about any of this—it's always the end of the world or the end of something."

"That's remarkable," stated Sam.

"You see, I was right there with you, but with the suits, I could slip into universal fissures and cracks, timelines and identities at will. It's a low-tech hack, stuff they used in ancient Egypt, and I've seen some things regarding that.

"The point is, Nick doesn't exist here, at least not in the way that you think. He is a mere ghost, a shadow figure sacrificed long ago by his own mother—the final face of Madame Crusso here on the true side of the first world, what is referred to as the pentagram side: a child sacrifice.

"As terrible as you think that is—and it is true, horrific, gut-wrenching in fact—know that you all died in similar ways, tortured and stolen from as a form of soul currency throughout your entire lifetimes.

"This is the truth of your existence at the hub, at the center of your traumas—how you are connected and intertwined into familiar souls afflicted by way of the same council.

"Their main priority is to keep you acting as homunculi, stuck in a labyrinth of confusion with false narratives and overlapping layers of timelines. They do this to confuse the spirit as it is being defiled at the true center axis, at the very altar of this world where the inverted pentagram acts as the main hub. You transitioned through it in death."

The group stood in awe.

They couldn't remember Nick, and the mere fact that their memories and personal agency could be so easily modified spoke volumes to each of them; they no longer regarded anything as impossible.

"It seems like evil wins all the time. It's always hidden under a different layer," Betsy said through tears, grieving Nick.

She held Varginah's and the Professor's hands as the bond of love they shared brought back faint recollections of him. The entire group mourned the memories that had been stripped from them through intentional ritual and craft.

Chapter 20

Sam's son Dean's house was at 1120 9th Street. They had already rounded to the rear of the home, which was positioned behind the main property closer to 10th.

In fact, one could see the roof of the bordering home and the smoke coming from the chimney of 1389 10th Street, due to a strange circular cul-de-sac looping around the other side.

"Historically, this property sits on an old burial site," Sam explained. "The old street layout places us right at this strange magnetic ley line, a bowl shape formed of an inverted pentagram.

"But when you transpose a map from the Phi-ruling world—the world of six spheres surrounding a center—this is the celebrated apex of the ego, that yellow sphere that Rancor absorbed.

"I told you all that I have been charting you, including myself, for quite some time. We are now like unhinged spiritual forces that could, at will, enter nearly anyone.

"We could theoretically get lost in our own power, but in doing so, our counterparts would have already won; they have cruxed themselves with us. I want to show you something, please come in," finished Sam, pushing open the unlocked door to the guest cottage and gesturing for them all to enter.

The single-room cottage was small, but it was a sanctuary—a stark reminder of where they had ended up and all that was lost and stripped from them.

Esoteric diagrams lay strewn across the couch and tabletops as Sam set the large black duffel bags deep into the main living area.

He moved charts detailing planetary alignments, crystal-suit bioelectric-loop amplifications, and a strange pattern matching names from the Dark Council that linked each member directly to them.

Sam carefully set the still-unfolded charts and graphs to the side, gesturing for them all to sit.

Barry and the Professor sat at the hardwood table and chairs that made up a dining area, while Betsy, Varginah, and Larry sat on the white linen couch.

Rat stood checking his pockets, realizing he had to get out of the funerary garb as quickly as possible. Sam noted this as Rat attempted to reach into a patched-up faux pocket.

"While I don't have much, I do have clean sweatpants, shirts, and several pullover hoodies," Sam offered.

Gazing at the freshly folded piles of clothing tucked into the corner of the room, each member grabbed a selection and changed in the nearby downsized bathroom, piling their death outfits and suits near the front door.

Sam placed all the discarded clothing into a bag as Betsy lifted up her Resonator to signal everyone else to check for theirs.

They all did—except Rat and Barry, of course, on account of them not having one.

Sam made a large pot of hot coffee for the entire crew and told them to make themselves at home.

They eventually raided the refrigerator, settling on warmed-up burritos, snacking on chips, and drinking quite a few glasses of filtered water in the process.

Each took turns visiting the bathroom, emptying out their recently deceased bowels.

Bizarre forms of flax and cotton stuffing discharged from the cellular genesis of their newly autophagy-inspired, resurrected digestive systems as they violently shat it out through multiple bowel eruptions.

The toilet stopped up a few times, forcing Sam and the crew to repeatedly plunge the labored throne.

They almost felt back to themselves as Sam began checking cables and wires and making suit adjustments, ensuring that all personalized crystals were noticeably tagged and in their respective toolboxes.

"These suits have definitely done their jobs! They have stood up remarkably well," stated Sam.

Larry looked down at the strange chart bearing each of their names alongside names he had only heard once before, back when the Dark Council entered 168 Apricot Lane.

It seemed so long ago now, but chronologically, only a couple of weeks had actually passed.

Then again, by what general nuclear clock measure could they even routinely judge their situation?

They couldn't rely on their own biology anymore; these were conditions of the soul in its passage.

Sam set his suits and other items to the side, acting as if he were cleaning and prepping weapons for an apocalypse—and one seemed to always be taking place these days.

"Why does this chart show my name with a link to all these people, or whatever they are over here, Sam?" asked Larry.

"Yes, about that," said Sam, swallowing a strong gulp of black coffee and standing up as if about to give a lecture.

Even now, he was running the various charts and graphs up on the wall—pinning them into familiar places as if this was how he typically stored and viewed them, only taking them down for updates.

He began highlighting specific points and fields present on the diagrams.

"You see here," Sam said, pointing to a list similar to his own, though his featured far too many added notes and redundancies to read at a glance.

"I watched this interaction of the Dark Council with you at Apricot Lane—God rest Nick's soul. But we will try to unify the fields and bring him back, somehow.

"I could only observe them and take notes from that interaction, so here it is. Over here, I think I have identified what many call sponsors or handlers—the energy, like a soul-trap pyramid scheme of all your efforts that finally in death feeds back into them—and a list of how I think the energy routing might work.

"But first, this basic list of what we're up against more superficially through observation:"

Madame Prescient Madame Crusso's Gatekeeper, Coxswain, or First Lieutenant—also called The Daughter, Crown Princess, or Handmaiden.

• Wears a fox fur jacket and features a large, raven-like beak nose.

• Acts with diplomatic and graceful authority. She addresses the house to officially brief the group on the cosmic state of affairs—noting that the future depends heavily on the Vril energy commanded by Betsy and Varginah.

Mister and Mistress Dregg Two people conjuring and channeling the power of Baphomet.

Samael represents the archetype of the aggressive, destructive masculine principle—translated from Hebrew as the "Venom of God." Lilith represents the powerful, independent feminine counterpart and co-ruler. Rather than a clear first and second-in-command, Samael and Lilith rule as the ultimate dark couple and equal counterparts over the Left-Hand Path.

• Looked and sounded like a man and a woman simultaneously, possessing an exotic, ambiguous presence.

• Spoke with the tone of a military briefing commander. They explained that the subterranean pyramids elevate the electromagnetic spectrum and global vibrational energy—and that collective human thoughts and visions actively shape reality.

Mr. Braulst Grand General of the Abyss, the Warmaster, or the Marshal of the Circle and Great Duke / Marquis.

• A stern-looking, deep-voiced, broad, larger older gentleman dressed in a 1950s-style blue-and-white striped suit.

• Addressed Nick directly upon arrival to ask for refreshments. He observed that the high vibrational energy left Betsy and Varginah exhausted from their sexual-cosmic union—and reiterated that the future depends on them.

Mr. Spock Zuce The Grand Violator, The Weaver of Shadows, The Chief Alchemist of the Mind, Belial.

• Resembled a hybrid of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, but much thinner—as if the two historical figures were fused into a single starving persona.

• Spoke in slurs while smacking on peppermint candy. He explained the mechanics of cosmic creation, noting that fashioning a new universe requires taking the crude matter of a preexisting one and reshaping it into teleological fruition.

The Three Child Members Two near-identical girls and one boy, acting as entities independent of standard Christian tropes:

• Dantalion (The Sister—The Mind Breaker): Penetrates the psyche, dissolving identity into fractured alters and total confusion.

• Paimon (The Sister—The Reality Weaver): Builds the false timelines, illusions, and dimensional traps around the fractured soul.

• Moloch-Typhon (The Brother—The Devouring Antichrist): Claims the bound, broken soul, consuming its essence as soul currency to fuel the Dark Council's 21-billion-year cycle.

• Look like undeveloped children standing on stilts, completely concealed beneath overly large suits with small, soft faces. They give an unsettling impression that a large, jagged mouth could open at any moment to swallow everyone—or that they could shift into a massive white alien spider.

• Speak with an alien-like, resonating depth. Described as remnants of the original world who contain all foundational information. Together with the other entities, they form the crucial components needed to anchor the next 21-billion-year cosmic cycle.

After pointing out the primary list, Sam added:

"Then, of course, there's The 9th, Madame Crusso, or Margaret Whisper Knightly—The Lady of the Wood. The Queen of Hell, the Spider, the Highest Priestess, Entu, The Magna Mater, The Architect of the First Dark.

"Nick's coterie-leading, murderous mother who sacrificed her child intentionally, then haunts and mocks him as she regulates with diabolical precision all those probabilities that you closed off by shutting down those master hubs.

"In the first Phi world—the flip side you closed—this one was always leaching as the shadow behind it. Meanwhile, your very existences there were unknowingly siphoning energy from the version of you who eventually became so afflicted and weak from this menacing tapestry woven like patchwork by the Dark Council.

"You see, here you are all victims—in one way or another—of what many call SRA. The truth is much more detailed and complex than that, isn't it?"

As Sam looked around, he saw warriors—but also fellow tortured souls who had done nothing to provoke this beyond trying to live and simply be.

"Evil has a way of seducing and deceiving us, luring each one of us into our own eventual undoing—then having the audacity to trap and use this soul force as food, currency, and scapegoating," Sam went on.

"That is why we do what we do. Any of you could stop at any time and live the lie, but now you know what you'd have to live with—that heavy burden of reality. Because of them, until they are destroyed, you can never find peace. Escape in denial won't give you that!

"Do any of you remember anything? How you got here?"

Some of their sweatshirts had holes, and the location had a distinctly foreign feeling to it.

Still, off in the distance about a mile or so away, they could see the Pacific Ocean waves repeatedly foaming whitewash onto the sandy beaches as they sipped on hot coffee—still feeling quite dead, even still smelling dead.

It was Agent Cook.

Barry and Sam pulled back. It was their first time witnessing Agent Cook, while the rest of the crew had been expecting Cook to portal in at some point all along.

It only took being shocked the first few times to no longer have a defense for it.

There was something about Cook that didn't feel predatory—or human, anyway.

"Your Nick died pretty gruesomely here as a five-year-old boy, quite a long time ago. Of course, that Margaret love-bombing and doting synthesized through the multiverses as a display into outright sadism when you can see it all through my view—as one grand, unified, fucked-up moment. Children playing at the foot of God in XXX-rated snuff films, all to get the attention of some agreed-upon, fabricated construct of an illusion.

"Sad to say, I'm the closest thing to it in reality, and I don't even want to exist if anyone ever bothered to ask me. But none of us are extended an offer towards any courtesy to be asked, ever. Yet as you know, I am much more like Mephistopheles, Beelzebub, Iblis, Shaitan, Old Scratch, The Black Man, The Man at the Crossroads. However, 'the father of lies' is a stretch, as I would never need to lie.

"The truth—the total truth—becomes something you wish was a lie."

Betsy got Agent Cook a cup of coffee, but Cook never wanted anything from anyone.

Though he was fascinated by their forgetfulness toward self-appointed corruption and self-immolation over lifetimes, it was still of very little interest to him.

He accepted the cup and sipped on the organic microbes, tasting the digestion, the exploitation of the bean pickers, and the synthesis of supply-chain greed and eternal human deception.

"This never tasted very good to me, Betsy," Cook said. "Bitter. Quite bitter."

Sam spoke up and tried to shake his hand, but Cook just looked right through him.

"Well, the eighth crystal recipient. Here you are, Samuel Von Ralettes."

Cook dumped the diamond salvaged from the bleached-white limbo straight into Sam's hands, placing the final artifact of the Phi-based world squarely at the center of the Pi-based inverted pentagram—what was left at the apex of the geometrical holonomy.

The sheer weight and power that the near-infinite cube diamond represented while within the organic temporal realm translated directly to pure mass: gravity, weight, vacuum.

"Truth is, you're all dead, and this is the closest thing to hell. Still, you manage to go on justifying and reasoning—the power of that left-brain input all the way through death.

There is your father of lies."

Cook finished speaking, then drank the astringent, acrid roast simply because he could, though it was nothing poured into a void.

"What do I do with it?" asked Sam.

"Oh, that's for you to decide, Sam. May I call you Sam?" said Cook.

"Please," said Sam. "Yes."

Sam was still staring, fascinated by how Cook either constructed himself or how the trauma of ontology had to categorize him by default.

This is the eighth crystal—the final diamond on the Proton side of things.

But you have already figured out that you are on the backside of things now, right?

Where do antiprotons exist? Where the negatively charged electron relentlessly consumes photons—and freezes at angles.

The inverted pentagram is the first world, always reappropriating stolen light, devouring it from the shadow realms. This place makes itself the true base, though reality does its best to conceal this—especially to itself.

How truly hideous she is—the mere prospect of her.

This is the world that has been leaching yours—like a tick, drawing off all of them, really.

The secrets that we keep.

"Humans, you always bring it to a general consensus. Humanity: the consensus. You have always been one another's eye of the beholder; the horde is your God. You can only hold it back so long, but eventually, you simply cease to work as a slave and you want to see the human crowd as it truly is. As your very friends and family turn on you, then stone you, hang you, behead you. Forever?

"Would any human really want to live forever?"

Cook paused, then went on.

"Well, I may as well be the devil, as you are now existent in hell. Doesn't look like it, does it?

"You have all been degrading, souls going through a journey. I must say, you avoided several final moments, but there really is no escape—especially now, now that you know.

"How faulty people are. How fragile and fixed a margin of frequency is as you slip away into decoherence. Vicious, brutal defensiveness, so shallow, but performatively sure of yourselves as long as someone else exists to prove yourself to—to prove and point to, to put down, to laugh at, to mock—juxtaposing yourself in contrarianism and having a mirrored self to abuse.

"But here it is. Sam is holding what gods have fought and died over. See, gods are average on one plane, then alien to another layer. But in reality, when we are all among our own, there is nothing spectacular about any of us.

"We simply manifest by and through our natures."

As Agent Cook's shiny dress shoes mirrored forever then faded into the gray, static-filled air of the cottage, the weight of the eighth crystal diamond seemed to anchor the entire room, pressing down through the floorboards toward the ley lines below.

Sam stood frozen, his fingers still curled around the chilling facets of the crystal, feeling the pulse of an antiproton universe vibrating against his skin.

The group sat in a heavy, suffocating silence, the reality of Cook's words settling over them like ash. They weren't heroes on a grand crusade; they were salvaged components, looping echoes trapped in a machine that fed on their self-justifications.

Barry broke the silence first, his voice low, cutting through the static hum of the room.

"He's right, you know," Barry said, staring down at his hands as if checking to see if they were still solid. "We spent our whole lives fighting for an ego that wasn't even ours—defending a phantom identity built out of borrowed parts and old biological preset loops."

The Professor adjusted his glasses, his expression grim as he looked over the scattered diagrams of the aeons-long Dark Council's pyramid scheme, noting that it would more than likely go on even if confined within a fragment of a single diamond core.

"A Frankenstein's monster of our own making," the Professor murmured. "The left brain builds the cage, and then spends an eternity convincing itself it holds the key."

Betsy looked toward the window, where the distant Pacific waves still churned against the shore like a pale, unblinking eye. She clutched her Resonator tightly, feeling the faint, stubborn pulse of the Vril energy humming beneath her ribs, reflecting that there was no telling where it would take her, but at least in pressing that button, the choice was hers alone. Or was it?

"We don't have to play the loop anymore," Betsy whispered, her voice steadying. "We saw behind the curtain. We know what's rotting at the base."

Sam finally lowered the diamond onto the center of the wooden table, the heavy thud resonating through the room.

He looked around at the faces of the crew—survivors of death, ghosts of a forgotten first world, the last fragments of the so-called good or Phi-based multiverse—and, at the very least, carriers of a spark that the Dark Council could never quite extinguish.

"The left brain infinitely justifies its own math, in blind ignorance always reframing itself as correct," Sam said, tracing the sharp edge of the crystal with his thumb. "It stays stuck in the manifestation as it holds the creative right brain hostage, feeding off the generation of life plasma—the materia prima that, over generations of error, makes up the very physical world of the materium."

He paused, letting his gaze meet each of theirs.

"Because it does not truly exist, these carbon cells hold this divine plasma in a superposition state. If the carbon manages to rot away beyond Carbon-14's slowed degradation, the synthesis of wholeness and the singularity of one becomes an unstoppable force. So we create new prisons, carnal-based lives, giving the lie a place to go—a forum to rule from in the endless mad loop of self-justification."

Sam leaned forward, resting his weight against the table as the diamond cast a sharp, cold refraction across the room.

"You see, Plus Ultra isn't the goal; it's the final prison. What lies beyond it is where all the entrapment of mind and thought stay stumped. At its base, it is the pure state that is missing in principle. If it can alter us, then it can justify its existence beyond stolen hopes, dreams, and goods."

Rat stood up from the corner, pulling his pullover hoodie tighter around his shoulders, a grim, knowing grin touching the corners of his mouth. He looked at the door leading back out into the green-tinted haze of the coast.

"Then let's stop playing with the parts," Rat said. "Let's see what's on the other side. Let's at least try to destroy or prove obsolete that Dark Council."

Cook was gone as quickly as he had arrived, saying only, "Be wise with those resonators," as he gripped his own and flashed away—probably just returning to the limbo within his own mind.

Just as he vanished, the massive diamond instantly vaporized, reforming into another crystal hanging from a chain. Only this chain appeared more like titanium, and the crystal held every color of them all, plus colors beyond naming.

The foggy haze cut across the distance through that large, thick-paned panoramic window as Sam curiously picked up the object, which seemed to be calling to him, and placed it around his neck.

There was nowhere for the crew to isolate from one another, and when they did drift apart, they suffered the shrinking, fading sensation of pulling away from a life source. So, Sam passed out whatever blankets, pads, and backup pillows he could find.

However, he never ventured into nor touched the main home up front belonging to Quinn and Dean; it was their space, and it would remain exactly as it was when they left on their world travels.

The situation in this realm was ideal, however. The small apartment space and street configuration had opened up like an accordion here in this so-called darker flip side. They hadn't yet ventured out to see what definably made this world evil. It actually felt nearly identical to the first world, only more grounded, earthy, green, and organic at its base. If a feeling could describe it—or if synesthesia could better define it—this world somehow carried the flavor of a sweet-yet-tart green apple, while maintaining the backlit smell of an obnubilating gray.

Still, they would have to revisit the places they once knew in the prior worlds to find any discernible differences here.

The group fell asleep—a dead sleep. Sam even passed out on the chair, as Varginah seemed to require his bed, while the rest of the crew generally fell soundly asleep on the floor.

Chapter 21

It was already well past 9:00 AM when they finally woke up. Despite the menacing, morbid physical feeling of death that still loomed within them all, they each felt a surprising sense of raw life humming beneath the finite forms they occupied here.

Betsy made a large pot of coffee, having peeled herself up first. She had heard Varginah get into the shower several minutes prior, standing silently beneath the hot spray to wash away the last tinges of post-mortem stasis.

Stepping out into the enclosed paved middle yard between the main house and the guest house, she peered curiously through the back dual French door windows of the main house. Resting on a small table inside was a set of keys to some sort of vehicle.

Surely Dean had left the set for Sam to see and possibly use for an emergency, she thought. It only seemed logical from her intuitive perspective—what she often processed through interoceptive awareness and kinesthetic empathy. She cared about Sam, and this was an emergency of the highest order.

She reached up above the crease of the outside doorframe. "Voilà," she murmured, dusting off a film of grit as she found the spare key hidden right where instinct told her it would be.

She slipped it into the round door lock, turning it clockwise then counterclockwise, fidgeting and shimmying it into the port of entry until it caught and turned with no resistance.

A wave of minor guilt hit her as she glanced back over her right shoulder toward Sam's guest cottage, but the group was still resting, slowly waking up and coming to.

She quickly unsealed the lock with a smooth turn, stepped inside to grab the keys off the small table facing the back door, then stepped back out, relocked the door, and replaced the spare key above the seal in the same general spot, pressing it inward an entire inch just to be certain.

With great curiosity, she eyed the make of the car key, then scanned the vehicles parked around the property until she noticed a large blue travel van that perfectly suited Quinn and Dean's adventurous profiles.

She pressed the unlock button, and the safari-style van's lights began to flash as the vehicle offered up a quick, quiet electronic beep.

Betsy peered into the van's window and pulled the door open, noting there was easily room for all of them. Suddenly, Sam walked up, surprising her. He leaned into the open driver's side cockpit, looking back into the cabin.

"I only have faint recollections of this world; my spirit seems to hold on to the first world as my main identity," Sam said quietly.

"Yeah, me too," Betsy agreed.

"This is awesome, though—just the way I always wished my boys could have it, their own travel rig. Shame it could only exist on the Dark Council's watch."

As Sam pondered further within his mind, a quiet realization settled over him: "Perhaps there is some order here after all?"

Sam opened the back sliding door, revealing captain's chairs that could easily be retracted and stored away, a wide bench seat that comfortably sat three, and several plug-in ports.

There was a folding kitchen bench and table, a CB radio, and a large panel-screen entertainment system. Peering over the top of the bench seat, he noticed a portable generator inside a travel box with thick cables wrapped around it. Meanwhile, Betsy sat in a captain's chair, gazing out the side window at the distant ocean.

"Well, I think it's ideal. Let's go get some coffee, okay?"

As they both shuffled out and closed the doors, Betsy handed the keys off to Sam out of respect. Sam locked the vehicle, and they filtered back toward the rear guest cottage.

The overcast day offered up peace. The synthesized white sky was backlit by the cosmic rays of a definably different and varied order, flowing from the cosmos down into the deep molecular structures. The inverted pentagram here was an aspect of the natural state of order.

Were the microbes different? Was the Planck wall set in deeper? Did holonomy and the holographic universe refract in light with the same occulted silent order?

This world felt better. How many, indeed, had to be sacrificed to offer up such a world? Or was it they and their sacrifices in that world beyond—some multiverse in which they had suffered greatly—that would allow a common system, perhaps acting as that lower-realm gateway to Plus Ultra?

The subconscious thought loomed, perhaps not fully registered, as the two reentered the small cottage space.

Rat and Barry had found blueberry pancake mix and had already stacked at least eight to ten large flapjacks. They placed the final browned, perfectly cooked skillet cake onto the towering stack, set butter and syrup beside the coffee maker, and gathered paper plates, forks, and napkins to the side.

"Quite a spread," Sam said upon entering.

"Sorry, hope you don't mind," Rat replied.

"It's as much your place as mine," Sam replied, panning about the room as Varginah emerged from the back bedroom, now fully dressed with a towel wrapped around her head.

"Smells great!" Varginah noted, heading straight toward the enticing aroma of coffee.

They gathered once again in the living room, though Sam opened the cottage's double French doors out to the patio to let in some fresh air and space.

Birds seemed to manifest, perhaps expecting scraps or seeds—and they found both.

Several typically competitive avian species flocked to the bird feeder hanging from a thoughtfully placed 4x4 post in the backyard, while Rat and Barry tossed them tiny morsels.

Scrub jays and crows seemed to exist in a better state of harmony here, some in the group noted.

Taking a couple of healthy bites from the pancakes Betsy had handed him, topped with butter and real maple syrup, Sam spoke with a partially full mouth. "Well, Betsy found the van keys right out front."

Rat curiously got up and shuffled around the corner, eager to steal a quick peek, then returned to exclaim, "That is a bad-ass rig out there."

Rat remained excited about the discovery; it had been a long, long time since any of them had felt any genuine euphoria or joy, but they felt it now. The energy from the astral morphing field seemed to have finally caught up to them, inviting them back into the world of the living.

Yet, a heavy feeling loomed within them all.

Each felt a bit like an imposter infiltrating a foreign universe. And they were, partly—were they the bad guys here? Or rather, was this world truly superior to what they had seen before entering through the portal of death?

Which one was twisted, irreparably wrong, inverted, and backwards? Was everything so fucked up at this point that it was simply impossible to tell?

There was only one way to find out, and they all knew it.

It was time to venture out into the pentagram side and see what this first world had to offer, and how it might be vastly different—yet fundamentally the same—as those other worlds that seemed to have sacrificed everything for this one.

The group threw away their paper plates and placed their coffee cups and forks into the sink, rinsing them off in a routine order. Each took a good-sized gulp of coffee for the day to come.

The day outside was peaceful and harmonious. They noted the sounds of playful animals—cats and dogs seemed to roam freely, respecting the walkways as they passed one another on their own ventures, playfully pursuing each other without collars around their necks.

The nature of this world became more apparent as they piled into the large, comfortable modern van and drove down a nearly trafficless street, heading toward the water.

They drove along a familiar coastal stretch that they all knew quite well. They saw friendly strangers dressed smartly in sharp casual clothing, their animals walking freely off-leash beside them, offering up salutes the group barely took notice of.

Immersed in the peace and harmony of this flip-side inverted pentagram world, they noticed there were absolutely no advertisements—only occasional signs repeating a specific sequence:

555-5555-5911, simply saying, Get your Universal Basic Income increased 50 units per month with 100 volunteer hours, learn any occupation, alongside images of people assisting others within the vast societal cartel.

After about an hour of peacefully looping around the beach—and even getting out to run along the shore—they caught the familiar smell and sight of their favorite fast-food restaurant welcoming them: Big Ass Burgers.

The addition of the plural "s" was the only notable difference in the name. The drive-thru line was short, and they weren't going to miss it.

"Looks the same," they all agreed as a voice came on the other end of the order speaker.

"Welcome to Big Ass Burgers, how can I help your Big Ass today?"

"Yes, we will have seven teriyaki-pineapple Hawaiian burgers, seven Big Ass fries, and seven large Big Ass chocolate milkshakes, please," requested Sam.

"No problem, sir. That will be 120 Republic units."

Sam hadn't even bothered to check his wallet nor update himself on the pervading currency of this world. He pulled his wallet out, half-expecting it to be empty, and it was.

There was only one item inside: a navy blue, government-issued card with a large digital symbol on the left-hand side.

"Wait, is that a double-ringed inverted pentagram here 𖤐?" he muttered as he looked closer.

As he fumbled through the leather folds wondering what to do, the worker reached out and pointed at the universal identification card. Sam slid it out and handed it over for payment.

The worker handed the card back to Sam and thanked him, nonchalantly raising his right arm at a ninety-degree angle and twisting his pointer and middle fingers into a casual "Hail Baphomet" sign, expecting the same from Sam. Sam awkwardly faked it as he drove off.

The burgers tasted amazing—not gamey, but definitely different. Remarkably sweet in after-taste, as if candied. Upon further sampling, the meat seemed more like pork than beef. It was sweet and delicious, blending perfectly with the barbecue sauce and pineapple, reminiscent of very high-quality pork ribs.

The group looked at each other in amazement as they washed it down with the best chocolate milkshakes they had ever tasted.

"How do they do it?" someone asked. "What is that, pork rib or beef? It's kind of a strange mix, right?"

Rat stopped chewing as an instinctual urge compelled the rest of them to stop eating too; a strange, unsettling feeling suddenly overtook them all.

Feeling suddenly, disgustingly gluttonous, they placed the remainder of their half-eaten food back into the large bag it came from.

Sam turned on the radio, wanting to hear something—news, music, anything to break the eerie lull.

Shortly after flipping through several stations, an official government broadcast crackled through the speakers:

"This is the official channel of the First Republic of the United Empire. Chancellor Wilhelm Braulst will speak now."

After some swelling patriotic music reminiscent of Nazi Germany, a familiar voice came on—familiar, at least, to Larry and the Professor, since Varginah and Betsy had been knocked out, vexed, and cold during their last encounter with it.

The voice stated, "We thank you for your commitment and contributions to the Republic. She has offered us so much, and now we ask you, the people, for more. Please offer up your third-borns to the Setian nutrition temples so that we can continue the upkeep of our young male human livestock, and of course the sweet, young, juicy girls that I am quite fond of for meat pies and minced desserts."

Before the speaker could even finish, Sam abruptly killed the radio. The crew practically scrambled out of the vehicle while Sam was still pulling it to the shoulder at a crawl.

They began vomiting profusely.

Sam scrambled for some water his sons—well, his doppelgänger's sons—had stored in the rear next to the generator.

Beside the water, he noticed a full box of Survivor Kid High Protein and Real Human Fat Bars. The packaging featured a sick cartoon image of smiling children holding drumsticks that looked distinctly like human humerus bones, as if mocking them further.

Below the image ran the slogan: Hero kids taste the best!

Sam hurled the bags of leftover food into a nearby large garbage container, just as a friendly-looking gentleman in overalls and a city badge materialized to collect it.

"Not too hungry today, I see. Hope you feel better," he said, finishing with, "Praise be to Baphomet and the great Leviathan. Hail to Set."

Sam, knowing better than to draw attention, choked back a mimicry of, "Hail Set," as his untrained stomach lurched, unable to handle any more.

They all realized then that the children on the trading cards hailed as heroes were quite possibly the very children they had just consumed.

Each holofoil trading card sadistically detailed the children's stories, ages, and a recount of their lives to be enjoyed as one casually consumed them.

They could barely drive down the street or meet anyone's gaze without a visceral spike of fear and revulsion.

Everywhere they looked, impeccably groomed, unnaturally youthful strangers smiled and offered casual hails to Baphomet, while older citizens lazily flashed stiff, Heil Hitler-style arm raises—all executed with an eerie, mundane nonchalance.

The crew forced rigid, terrified smiles in return, acutely aware that a single misstep could make them the next batch of human-grade burgers—or worse, raw material for soap.

Chapter 22

The Library

Ahead of them, the local library stood in its familiar geographic coordinates, but its architecture had been warped into a brooding satanic temple. Small, metal-sculptured busts of Baphomet flanked the heavy oak doors, standing guard over both the library and the provincial administrative centers.

As they crossed the threshold, the head librarian greeted them with wide, theatrical, outsweeping arms.

"All knowledge to Lucifer, all gnosis from the Light Bringer," she chanted smoothly.

Betsy plastered on a trembling, agonizingly nervous smile, a cold dread pooling in her stomach.

Had they fallen straight into the upper rungs of hell?

Fleeing deeper into the hush of the stacks, they headed straight for the history section, each pulling a volume from the shelves as if their lives depended on it.

Sam tore open a dense, leather-bound folio detailing the archaic mechanics of soul harvesting, the institutionalized processing of children's flesh, and regional culinary treatises on the preparation of young human males.

Beside him, Betsy seized a heavy historical text examining the brutal fourth-century wars between the Mithraic Christian sun-worshiping sects. The text pinpointed the exact historical fracture—the day Christ was symbolically consumed by Satan, effectively replacing the divine mystery with a perpetual feast of consumption, reframed forever as the Last Supper.

Embossed across the spine and margin notes in German—now established as the empire's second language, reserved strictly for the solemn celebration of conquest—was the chilling mandate: Set verschlingt den reinen, menschlichen Mann—Consumption of the Pure Human Male.

Rat sat with his mouth gaping open. Whatever darkness he had carried inside him was completely gone; like all of them, he just wanted to get the fuck out of this nightmare.

As Rat and Barry flipped through the historical logs, they traced the origins of the early public lotteries—how the state institutionalized human willingness to supplicate to Set for sacrifice in exchange for social status and praise. Reading further, they tracked a chilling cultural shift in the 1950s, when offering up the flesh of one's own loins was successfully rebranded as the highest civic virtue.

Their eyes landed on a highlighted festival scheduled for mid-November: the exact week one million citizens would be randomly selected by lottery to feed the massive satanic pyres. It marked the preamble to the unholy consumption of the Christ—a December 25th ritual where nine-year-old, first-born sensitive males were systematically tortured and consumed in a state-sanctioned blood orgy.

Nearby, the Professor and Larry shared a table, furiously taking notes on the geopolitical landscape and the architecture of the one-world government. Their research laid bare the dark reality of interplanetary colonization: Mars and Venus were mere resource extraction zones, while the outer gas giants—Saturn, Jupiter, and Neptune—served as destinations for a grand, triune human exchange program designed to feed the cosmic gods—truly the long-running, cannibalistic oligarchs and elite class.

By all appearances, Earth was a specialized farming planet. Its inhabitants were nothing more than well-cared-for livestock—educated, nurtured, and fattened like prized veal before the slaughter. With no escape routes and nowhere to run, the populace simply lived a day-to-day existence, completely conditioned to accept their fate because they quite simply knew nothing else, bound hand and foot by their shared gods, governments, and religions.

It had been going on so long that the behavior and worship had become an epigenetic aspect of them.

While Varginah was horrified looking through older magazines and books on the technology that the Dark Council seemed to have woven together here, borrowing from them all, she began to discover that not only she, but all of them, had played major roles in the creation of this cannibalistic system of young human harvesting.

She saw pictures of herself along with the group at official parties with the elite core group of this cosmic kakistocracy. The Dark Council had gone out of their way to indoctrinate, morally indict, and pollute them all here.

Only those most celebrated were ever offered a grave to be commemorated—and possibly resurrected from—an offering to the gods that the Dark Council erected as public alter egos of themselves, by all appearances.

She and Betsy looked at one another over their small stacks of demagogic, tyrannical, government-propagandized publications of mastermind control.

As they both saw countless braggadocious, shameless pictures of not only Mr. Braulst and Madame Prescient, but of this entire group's involvement—the three children, known more widely in Demotic Egyptian as ḫmt.t ẖrd.w (translated as shomte hret), Spock Zuce, and he here known only as Dregg—fully engaging and interacting with these actual reanimated, resurrected bodies that they all now inhabited like prison cages, covering article after article directly assisting in the trade and sale via Dark Matter Bridges and cosmic feeding tubes, the Milky Way had become an active hub for human livestock.

Upon further discovery, they realized this was a retirement community where no children existed at all—an outpost of one of the few places people were allowed to raise some of their children, the children who would be educated to further run the system, and not long ago, it was them.

Then the system would eject and toss them aside routinely as a religion.

These publications were neither considered risqué nor pornographic, but showed explicit rituals of sex magic, outright raping, and the most vile ways of how to suck the soul harvested from a living host while performing tantric sex magic—right in these pictures here in this library.

In fact, it was celebrated and taught in step-by-step processes like a cookbook of a spiritual, dark, black-evil black ooze.

As Varginah flipped to the next page, she had to put the Variety Pop Black magazine down; the young victims at these regular feasting orgies provided ejaculate that was used like dressing and crème fraîche, yet it was only mentioned as a cursory rumor from the now-long-gone first world as "Cannibal's Kitchen," dismissed constantly as a fringe ritual program.

The best place to hide anything is out in the open, and the Dark Council—though knowing that first world had to maintain purity in order to build up vital momentum in trade here—was still enticed to corrupt that world and all others attached in the ignorance of purity along with it, so they stayed away as often as possible as a rule.

On that visit not long ago when the Dark Council visited the crew at Apricot Lane, they had been controlling Varginah and Betsy into an unholy shattering of pure, bonded sisterhood and familiar, wholesome union that they otherwise would have experienced together.

On that visit to 168 Apricot Lane and in its controlled installation, the Dark Council had probably stepped directly through some apport or manifested egregores and tulpas in their wake, all from the gassy, human-life-parching bases built on Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, or Uranus as active nebulous hubs known as the cosmic sheet.

These hubs produced the exact gas mixtures and conditions that could portal in from dark regions of interconnected matrices of space and other cosmic realms—those very gods, channeling into them in ancient, biosemiotic dark patternings of degraded mancy—and maybe even a real Tartarus, Dunya, or hell connected in these loops, resurrecting evil here as a main nexus axis point and successfully expanding.

Was this what Hathor, Tiamat, and Zeus—taken from different times and pantheons, perhaps, but always with the same energetic goals and aspirations—were doing to act as the proud core of distribution, to feed billions upon billions of human children into unholy food products and discardable orgiastic soul, loosh, and adrenochrome harvesting?

It was a thriving industry that fueled all hubs of reality, as it had all now condensed and folded in, and was now about to explode through careful measurement out into all fractals of the dimension of light, space, and time: the evil.

Every planet here was now used to cage, process, procure, and rile up fear within the human child, and the pure son provided the premier loosh as the innocent daughters—their own daughters—offered the most sought-after adrenochrome born from constant, adrenal-induced terror and fear.

Then she saw them all at gatherings where mind-blowing technology was used to communicate with unseen entities in shadow realms. They had been the worst of them, each having achieved the culling of one billion souls, earning their way to the status to live anywhere.

But in retirement, like old communist leaders, they were kept intentionally quite poor on a government pension—given only the basic universal income on a farm-harvesting planet, forced to live out their days seeing the full weight of what each had done.

No wonder they were all dead; they had probably killed themselves off.

No one was congratulated or praised, and living on was thought of as a form of silent cowardice—competition and 'clones' had to be disposed of discreetly, built into the broader system to maintain control.

This stigma only insulted the individual's life, and not the so-called gods.

As Betsy read further, she noticed that in one text, these gods of yore were said to be red-rite-ritualed into young children—as young as two and as old as fifteen—so that the spirits of these entities could live on inside human hosts.

Thus began the true order of the elite and the industrial manufacture of humanity as human goods.

Not so ironically, most celebrated were the very children that began to deceptively work to actively deceive their own catching and working from within these communities of procurement.

While some planets produced nothing but scanty, near-starved slaves as livestock and basic food products of unholy measure, others were raised to be fully enhanced, technologically edited, and perfected, then slaughtered at exact states and ages of maturity as a celebrated sexual union where blood-gorging consumption and digestion would be performed ceremonially by the Dark Council and these so-called gods—that may well have been portaled-in high-ranking demons from hell.

Or did it all come down to a not-so-simple diamonds flip?

Hell, by all appearances, was far larger than it initially appeared from that first-world ignorance by a long shot.

They had seen enough.

Betsy ran to the restroom to throw up, but repulsed by the pictures of bright red aborted fetuses and menstrual blood—overlaid with high-tech blue scientific jargon hanging on the walls as propaganda—she began to hyperventilate.

Suddenly, the librarian emerged with a broad smile, saying only, "Morning sickness, dear—well, by now it's afternoon. I have an old-model lunchtime fetus extractor stowed away in the back room for such occasions. I saved it from the wars."

She was referring to the solar system and planetary overthrow Betsy had seen when glancing at the Professor's and Varginah’s observations a moment prior.

"No, no, no babies here."

Betsy looked into the librarian's eyes, alarmed to notice two sets of eyes looking out from each socket—they had all been avoiding eye-to-eye contact.

The woman began to bow down to her, chanting, "Hail Satan, hail Lucifer."

The highly educated academics did not believe in Satan nor Lucifer as actual gods, but as evidence that they could exact their own lesser gods through the active voodoo-mancy in egregore manifestation: the power of mind, belief, and the constant stream of sacrificial youth.

"You are a perfected goddess of pure blood," the librarian continued.

Suddenly, sirens began to blare as the AI systems picked up on the algorithmic combinations of the spoken words.

People began to excitedly rush into the library in floods. They grabbed the crew, hoisting them out with at least ten to each, carrying them along by their backs.

As they looked above, they noted in the clouds Enochian, Theban, and Akloian scripts—words being written into the skies above. But these were articulate cloud forms that Betsy and Larry recognized immediately.

Dark sigils of the inverted pentagram hung in morbid green laser sky-trackers, displaying other demonic symbols.

They were being taken to a large onyx-black pyramid at the town center. Sirens went off, and a massive holographic screen materialized before them, occluding the blue scry-writ skies looming above.

They looked terrified, their eyes nearly popping out of their heads, like animals intuitively knowing they were on the precipice of having their skins peeled back and blood drained from them while still fully cognizant and alive.

A large portion of the pyramid opened up, folding down smoothly to reveal a hard, black morgue-slab runway onto which the evil campaigning horde tossed them.

As soon as the pyramid closed and sealed into a vaulted mausoleum, it extinguished all light and air, leaving them to suffocate.

They felt no movement of any kind. But as they looked on, begging for a breath in the vacuum—of which there was none to be found in this seamless, hermetically sealed enclosure that felt like a tomb that had never seen the light of day—the walls of the pyramid became translucent.

It whisked them effortlessly through space at an incomprehensible speed without jolting them or causing any shift in the natural physics within the vaulted tomb.

As they approached what appeared to be Jupiter, they entered Jupiter's North Pole Octagon of Storm.

As they began to pass out, foaming at the mouth and convulsing, the entire crew saw the curious Dark Council fading into view before them.

Madame Crusso was being red-carpeted in as the military faction—including Madame Prescient, Mr. Braulst, Spock, Zuce, Dregg, and the Shomte Hret—were eagerly hailing Nick's mother, Margaret, and Betsy's mentor (though another version of her).

They were all fully complicit in the game.

Passed out, foaming, barely alive in the vaulted, hyperbolic, negative-Poincaré cavernous interior, Madame Prescient raised her left hand.

Gazing through her dark, menacing, serpent-slit eyeballs of orbital, unnatural mass, she commanded, "Bring them to my covenstead inner sanctum," as their reanimated, recently dead corpses now hung on the outer rungs of life once again.

Upon entering the chambers, a sprawling Masonic tracing board seemed to be reenacted within the massive crystal palace room. A sweeping right staircase appeared to come from another place entirely, leading up to large, familiar double doors that read: Portail du Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux.

Between two massive pillars, staged before them, sat a life-size chessboard. It appeared empty on the far end, yet on the near end facing them, it was filled with the posed, upright bodies of real children, stuck in stances of taxidermic stasis.

Each held photographs in their hands. The small pawns—and there were eight—were familiar in their faces, yet appeared to be laminated children of no more than five or six years of age. They were dressed as jesters or elves, wearing checkerboard-printed Phrygian caps—it was them as tiny children!

Memories came flooding back, but how?

Was the pain of their countless counterparts' sacrifices so numerous from world to world as to actually psychically imprint the trauma into them, vibrating into one heavily psychedelically distorted reality—what is reality?

They were all instantly shifted now toward a debilitating master awareness of their shared reality: they had been played, not just figuratively, as pawns.

They were suspended in matter here within the ancients' very celestial gates to heaven or hell, or both, bound in a nightmare-scape inspired by Baudrillard meeting René Girard, spiraling down into the annals of Georges Bataille.

The tiny, laminated faces appeared to be hardened under some sort of clear, see-through pine pitch—an accursed Pe le-El (פה לאל), "mouth to God" ceremony.

Each held cards commemorating that special day that every member was forced to reenact throughout several multiverses—perhaps all of them. Betsy was in the exact outfit she wore for that rare day at the beach; she was only four.

Then, looking down, planted on the massive wall towering over them, was a full bust of Nick. He looked as if he were being eternally tortured and in anguish, perhaps twelve years of age.

Was he playing out his first acting role, or truly being tortured at that fifth force electron angle of frozen time, or both?

However, he was fully arrested here in that same thick, clear pine pitch.

While Mr. Braulst, Spock, and Zuce, dressed as Catholic cardinals, walked the marbled stone Mithraic floors as if in a Papal conclave, they also carried out a Solemn Mass.

Swinging a thurible as the smoke poured out, they rang large bells, walking on either side of the vast room's entrance.

Whether acting out the Fumata blasphemously or piously calling upon the bells of St. Peter, the towering crystal structure was, in fact, an actual basilica. Every area here held the sacred artifacts of all religions.

The stomach-churning, arrested versions of Rat and Barry stood on each end before castles.

Then, in a moment of horrific realization, they noticed that standing behind them were full-sized versions of them all—mimetics wearing exactly the clothing they each wore that night.

The main players were also themselves.

Each held a single tarot card:

• Rat and Barry each held The Tower, in a black and red version from left to right.

• Larry and the Professor each held The Knight of Swords.

• Sam held The Hanged Man and Varginah The High Priestess in black.

• Betsy held the red version slightly higher in her poised right hand as The High Priestess.

• Nick held The Hanged Man, also in red, slightly higher than all the rest.

Varginah recalled the exact expression her younger self exhibited, wearing the very pajamas she remembered all too well from that tender age of five while still living in Brazil—a memory from the first night she had been abducted and taken up by those blue, pointy-eared, menacing visitors.

Then Larry, and then the Professor, recalled what they had all endured.

They remembered lying on a table slab, looking over, and seeing it in the far corner of the massive room—a space full of the ages of rise and fall, housing artifacts, antiquities, and priceless technology representing the aeons.

That same ritualistic, cold black slab resembling Nero Portoro—an overturned monolith of blasphemous truth, a Nuummite hell-cube always existent within the diamond's carbon-dusty black truth, its true identity, its undeniable counter.

They felt that tapping in of a sinking feeling as that funerary green, perfect neon, inverted double-ringed pentagram locked onto their third eyes at their foreheads.

That fleshy feeling of ganglionic daggers' entry could be felt as that first cutting breach, that point of no return, as that cymatic ring clung in the heavens, vortexing terror above them.

They were children, standing at the foot of God, screaming in terror as the most vile things were done to them—a profane stain that could never be cosmically washed away.

Layer upon layer of Girardian mimetic memory overlapped and came upon them: countless versions of themselves sacrificed meticulously over billions of years, as the dark council shaped, bent, molded, and crafted them to become who they were as they stood here now at this massive gas planet's cosmic strength point.

The most reductive and heinous acts had been blocked away, suppressed, and obnubilated into that midnight drive. The faces flitted between them, performing these rituals upon themselves over an eternity.

They grotesquely morphed into that dark council over that long stretch of time, becoming something entirely unrecognizable and completely inhuman—all-powerful, yet corrupt and void at the base.

How long did it take them all to reach this level of depravity?

Madame Crusso spoke:

"Tell me one thing after all this time, as we have shown you that great diamond hell-cube always before you, the recipe of what it takes to become impenetrable, supreme gods.

"Is it more of a crime to commit one, two, or a few heinous acts and live under that lapse in virtue and the eye of the beholder—that humans present themselves to be conscientious moral objectors, as it were—or is that human demonic horde standing over you in constant moral denial, constantly blaming and shaming you, worse?

"Because ultimately, one can only truly become what they are, and here in this eternal realm, in this aspect of you—you eminently become us. We torture and kill ourselves every day as a ritual and a right to rule; we take the lion's share of the burden of spoils.

"We hear, do, feel, see, smell, and imagine, and this is God's demand of us. How twisted.

"This is the song you block out every day of your miserable lives until you become us, the song that that great diamond rings into your head."

Larry, and then the Professor, acted as Knights, while Varginah and Sam acted as Bishops, leaving Betsy as Queen.

And Nick, still absent in his living form but seeming more artificial and glossed over than the rest, was that manufactured, weak King.

He looked, however, still alive in some way, his eyes almost seeming to change expression as if anesthetized into a frozen, catatonic curse or spell.

The massive palace showed strange, colossal, dragon-like creatures outside in the death-gassy atmosphere, flying through the haze as orbs and craft of all shapes went shooting by in the pure-lit skies surrounding the large crystal palace.

As the Dark Council entered the augury chambers—most of them elevating through their own will—the group began to wake up from the strange smell of burning sage and lavender.

Sam clutched his necklace, feeling that it was still hanging there, half feeling deceived by a god and a promise that good had any real meaning beyond a strange, deceptive recruitment lie that was told to endure the full manifestation of true evil and what had always been taking place right under all their noses.

The truth was far worse than any could imagine, Sam reflected, as the group simply wanted to die now and leave through the simplest way towards an easy exit, but none would be granted.

Tucked deep within the mixture of ammonium sulfide, methane, and ammonia, buried under miles of hydrogen and helium, they were fully occluded from the light of any distant sun.

Madame Crusso wasted no time.

This was not some story or movie generically replaying the ignorant brainwashing of good overcoming evil in the final round—or was it?

Was anything really ever final if one could step back from the dramaturgy of evil shock and awe and still remain relaxed and calm from within?

Versions of Agent Cook assisted the Dark Council as the Shomte Hret stood oddly close to one another, still wearing those strange, oversized suits with their deceptive baby faces now showing the dark, recessed black eyes they could only ever temporarily conceal.

Three children hauntingly conjured into the full throngs of demoniac possession long ago, filled with three entities that were gods from a vastly archaic era that was too unimaginable here.

Like diamonds folding into information and balanced order, evil epochs had folded into them.

They looked beaten, beyond beaten. They could remember and feel the full weight of all their near-countless doppelgängers' grief spread across the expanse until now.

They weren't evil enough to be here, nor seasoned or prepared to stand the gravity and environmental weight of such a twisted place and the crystal palace within it.

"Retrieve the 8th crystal lattice," Madame Crusso commanded.

As Dregg now manifested himself as Miss Dregg, taking on the dark and evil features of a sorceress, she quickly floated a few inches over the hard metallic temple floor, attempting first to pull the diamond up towards her.

But the diamond resisted and became heavy, and as she—Dregg—leaned forward to grab it, the diamond began to embed within the solar plexus of Sam as he let out anguishing, blood-curdling shrieks.

Then Dregg turned to his more dominant male crude form, now becoming a muscular, narcissistically preserved magician of the highest order.

But as he reached out, the entire necklace embedded within Sam's ganglionic mass, tearing into his nervous system and the small brain hidden within the matrix of its dendrite fractal patterns, producing anguish and forcing out hemorrhaging blood.

The diamond could not be possessed by inadequate, unholy hands.

They laid there, helpless and bound by evil, as the crystals fused within them began to pulse, radiating within the fabric of their skin with their own colors—an alchemy carefully cultivated and now being procured by these eons-long weavers of the antimatter matrix of the new order of universal blank-slate design.

Each member of the group was elevated and pulled up side by side, their bodies angled as their hands touched into the Tree of Life.

Sam appeared to be crucified upside down at the bottom as the blood from his abdomen poured profusely over his face and onto the ground, where it reformed into a cosmic, unknown metal form of a phiale, catching up all the blood.

But there was resistance—from another source.

Off in the distance, a small blue light could be seen hovering beside a large winged creature, appearing as a Pixiu-cat-dragon mix, ferociously cutting into another menacing flying creature with its eyes and absorbing it.

As the blue glowing ember flame could be made out, it was Daria!

Then, in a near-infinite, holographic-cube-like suspended state, the Pixiu could be made out as Rancor.

They were coming closer, beaming and shining, emblazoned with the clear crystal at Daria's chest and the pulsing, pure golden-yellow egoistic state of Rancor.

Sam slid on the ancient walks, and the group forcefully began to form circles that glowed with all the emotional energy of their individual crystal colors.

Suddenly, a child appeared from the pulsing red hue of sacrifice, and it was Nick—miserably all aspects of himself: fat and homeless, young and pure, slightly learned and arrogant B-movie celebrity.

But it was authentically all the layers of Nick as the group, stuck in their various forms, looked at him with elevated faith that there would be reclamation.

A black hole began to pulse from off in the distance, vortexing and vacuuming in energy as the Dark Council became black fragmented vapors, and the countless unmet potential minions of evil were pulled in by way of their own undoing.

As the circles of friends, lovers, and family began to shine brilliantly as spinning spheres, Daria and Rancor took up their places in it.

Daria pulsed as the pure crystal as Sam laid over her and seemed to fuse with her in the state of all colors of the pure truth that could not be denied.

As the black hole that was Agent Cook drew and sucked in as a massive gravity well the entire pentagonally asymmetrical universe and all the inverted antimatter light-spectrum versions of it, the Merkabah that made up the new Council of Seven Spheres drew in at the apex of the negentropy cortex that was Agent Cook and hung at the center in a spinning semblance of light and order, brilliantly pulsing with omnipresent command.

Each of them looked in joy and happy union; they were one, but distinctly separate.

Framing the absolute threshold of the periphery of the gods, the true celestial architecture locked into place.

Shaped by all they had lived and observed from the crew, Barry took his unyielding place on the right of the Merkabah as Sirius, anchoring the blazing dog-star tension of the local field, while Rat took his place on the left as Orion, holding the hunter's stance right next to each other in the deep night sky.

Between them spanned the sacred corridor of Monoceros—the faint bridge annotated by The Professor across the spectacular expanse of deep space.

If you traced a line from Orion down toward Sirius mapped by Daria and Rancor, you crossed right through this high-energy cosmic corridor, holding extraordinary deep-sky monuments:

• The Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237), representing Nick: A colossal, rose-shaped emission nebula spanning 130 light-years across, at whose center a young cluster of massive, hot stars carved out a hollow bubble, making the surrounding gas glow vibrant red like a cosmic flower.

• The Seagull Nebula (IC 2177), embodying Betsy: A massive bird-shaped cloud of gas and dust stretching 100 light-years across the border into Canis Major, with its "head" illuminated by a scorching-hot, heavy star acting as a massive nursery for newborn stars.

• The Cone Nebula & Christmas Tree Cluster (NGC 2264), manifesting Varginah: A striking, dark triangular pillar of cold gas and dust standing seven light-years tall, surrounded by a glittering array of young stars arranged like a decorated pine tree with the Cone at the very top.

• Hubble's Variable Nebula (NGC 2261), mirroring The Larry: A small, fan-shaped reflection nebula illuminated by a single, erratic star whose shadows and brightness shifted over weeks and months as moving dust clouds continually blocked and unblocked the light.

This celestial architecture held the threshold so the raw, unmediated divinity of the outer spheres would not crush the interior vessel.

Then, as the Phi-balanced symbol shattered into quintillions of fast-moving light jets, the rigid density of the diamond matrices finally broke open.

The countless souls who had ever lived, once compressed and trapped within those cold crystalline prisons, rained down across the emerging cosmos. They washed into the newly forming worlds, dissolving into the endless depths to become the very molecules of the oceans—no longer frozen as energy currency for the Dark Council, but flowing as liquid life.

Across the planet's expanse, the Earth's oceans held an estimated 4.7 \times 10^{46} water molecules—a staggering count derived from 1.37 billion cubic kilometers of volume and 1.4 \times 10^{21} kilograms of sea mass translated through Avogadro's number.

In this thalassic aqueous expanse, every single molecule became an individual spirit waiting to be unlocked. No longer locked as loosh or carbon-lattice currency, the water pulsed quietly beneath the stars—a planetary-scale reservoir of potential awareness sleeping in the deep.

And from their eternal posts across the bridge of Monoceros, the twin sentinels of Sirius and Orion watched over the tides, guarding the slumbering, infinite ocean as it waited for the first pure frequency to wake the world.

For no matter how the cycles turned or how the stars realigned, the Earth would always act as the testing midpoint—balancing and monitoring the required need for purge.

...but that is not the way it truly transpired, because nothing terminates in a fairy-tale resolution.

Chapter 23

Life is unsterile and grinding; people operate like automata executing spiritual programs that distill will and inject an agitated state of drive into every node within the matrix grid field, perpetuating the errors within the field.

The eyes of the ancient, archaic gods gleamed with the cold, demoniac wisdom of a mushroom gnome—ubiquitous yet interstitial, suspended everywhere, nowhere, and infinitely in between.

The world as we know it is merely a shallow interface.

The universe is terrifyingly compact—so absolute in its enclosure that whatever exterior boundary rests beyond it cannot be parsed through the naive optics of thermodynamics, of light bouncing and undulating through processes of crystal matrices held somewhere in the convenience of crawling time, where electrons freeze at rigid angles, as if the holographic matrix could be stalled, buffered, or halted by a mere fragment by the hand of its own compiled code.

No, absolute solipsism and the algorithmic transposition of observers navigating within discrete matrices of pure consciousness are at the root of it all.

The group projected whatever telemetry it required to go on across all allocated rendering states.

After all, do you register genuine moral friction when an early, meme-rendered cat or baby is harmed in a two-dimensional, digital, 1980s pixelated state of binary?

Don't phonetically artificial, simulated painful cries actually evoke amusement?

Does a crude character of a blocky, square-shaped body portraying a struggling waddle while being displayed on a primitive tube-cast computer monitor induce real compassion or mercy from moral objectors?

No, because we assume these characters are not real. We assume that because someone merely programmed these algorithms to mimic life, they aren't in fact living in some way.

We are merely inferred substances of form into patterns and shapes, barred from authentic biosemiotic oneness by simply being what we are—an aspect of the incomplete, a part of it bound.

Disparate codes of algorithms are simulated to define a field, and Bloch spheres are no different.

Trapped within their own auspicious wonder and omniscience, the observers are trying to figure themselves out, yet cannot reproduce what they are in perpetuated self-autonomy.

They are the curse of existence: their creative window closed at some point, rendering these elite observers either as absolute in their supremacy or total failures.

They just are, forever incapable of sparking a truly self-sustaining, self-replicating, and self-repairing consciousness like them—or do they see some of us as competition?

Stuck in the glitch of dimensional time, bound to produce sameness of substance in a recurring loop.

The crew woke up to another layer of reality.

Each was alone, being relentlessly tortured without mercy—the base truth of what drives humanity from its creation within the crystal latticework. The worms only traversed the great and small, a universal form of default before and beyond aesthetic.

The high-pitched sounds and the brutal torture were being done to intentionally keep them in, reducing them to an eternal, ubiquitous descent into the tubular base form of a worm.

Horrifically bright bathroom lights flashed as the group experienced the sole isolation of being held under freezing bathtub water, with the death grip of murderous hands strangling the air from them.

Of course they struggled at first, but a calm serenity soon came upon them; they weren't alone.

The diamond might act as a neutral landscape, and Daria and Rancor might be aspects that existed within the matrix, but they had learned that it was their true purity at the base that was routinely, relentlessly being attacked and threatened.

Then, as each succumbed in one layer of the diamond's reality—suffocated and submerged through the passage of sacrificial torture unto death—microscopic worms were all they saw in their vision.

Yet they clung to the final and only principle: all that was real, raw, and true, all that ever mattered, was purity.

Suddenly, Arelena could be made out, blowing vapors in through their suits as they began to come to.

No longer was the justification of rationalism the superior, virtue-based moral agent.

Arelena only appeared when they had reached the last of what they were, prior to becoming worms and wormwood—all that was left of them as they became the Pure Principle.

Looking out the massive window panel down at the mighty pyramid's base, workers were loading building supplies, rugged rolled codices, grains, and crude instrumentation into the chambers.

Upon closer inspection, a good distance away, the Professor began to wave profusely with tears welling in his eyes until the dam broke and the tears poured heavily, blurring his vision so he could barely see the other Varginah from the Holy Mother Candlestick world.

Then they all looked and saw Nick from the HMC world exchanging gear with her—his dear friend—for an artifact to be placed inside.

They were all wearing white wrap-around clothing, as if they had planned to survive an arid desert climate.

The crew within Arelena's cockpit began to look around, seeing the transformed faces of their group, searching for Nick and hugging him as they realized he was there alongside them.

The HMC Bomb, containing that world's billions of souls, sat nearby.

The diamond was going to be broken today, and the pyramids were the very arks that could survive it—always present at specific underground leylines to form the spheres as junction points of a matrix grid.

Who would they be in the grand scope of it all? They weren't the carnal seed that would be passed on through terrestrial lineage, but the spirits that survived—the higher forms of themselves.

Arelena pulled away as the crew inside her cockpit waved at the crew who were equally affectionately waving back at them, the towering slab of the pyramid closing behind them.

The ship seemed to dilate back as Earth's topography could be seen from the upper atmosphere, disappearing and being enveloped into pure, brilliant white.

Then, the uncontrollable pure energy revealed the matrix fissures of bound cosmic sheets acting like geometric walls that spread across vast distances of Euclidean space.

It was now cracking from the inside as the ship dilated out further past any frame of opacity, beyond the periphery, as the master diamond cracked, fragmented, and broke open.

They had lost, but they had won in final sacrifice.

They had elevated, voting their selfless doppelgängers to become the origin of whatever Earth or body would be left for their terrestrial counterparts to inherit—the progenitors, the first line.

And they were there to witness it, prior to the beginning at aleph-null.

Dark Stellar Knightly