White Noise
at
168 Apricot Lane
"Forensic & Obnubilating Gray"
Opening Theme: "The Short Loop"
(Beat: A heavy, muted, low-end bassline thuds in slow motion. The screen opens on an icy, high-definition panoramic shot of a coastal mansion under a heavy mist, with 168 Apricot Lane contrasted sitting on the edge of a large stone wall. High frequencies leading into a dark, clinical pulse. Then the electric accustic cuts in and out with the timing and the rhythm.)
(Verse 1)
Forensic and obnubilating gray,
Serene overcast gravity hums through the day.
In slow motion, yeah, the frame rates skip,
Birds with wings too long to cut air, cheating the script.
Scent of Grey Flannel drifting heavy and slow,
Two-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar tees worn on the D-low.
Only bass lines playing, but the sound won't clear,
There's no way through the static that we're living in here.
Is it time to experience the fear!
When on the horizon that black light draws near.
(Chorus)
Gray and blue oblong tiles on a flat gray slate,
Million-dollar home sitting on Mom's Estate.
Always twenty-seven, rich, hoodie up from the cold,
Walking with my Bully, thinking everything is in control.
But the watchers are menacing, they see how I roll.
Yeah, they're logging every vile act to mark down on their ledgers and scrolls.
(Verse 2)
Lay the Christianity on thicker for the coming flood,
But when the scales balance, nothing’s thicker than blood.
Dreaming of the Bentleys, but those items hold this string.
Drifting energies the illusion is King.
Tied into the rhetoric of capitalism—the religion of men.
Gotta bring another loved one to the market tonight again.
Just to re-up the contract, keep the cash flow tight.
Looking deeper that family crest ain't quite right
Cybernetic agents on the prowl, a lion roaring or a bat in flight,
I'm standing on the lookout to see just where it's at.
(Outro)
But the mirror found a wrinkle, found a silver sliver in time.
A gray hair and a sag in the silver fabric
that continuity of a line
slipping under this sliver this liver of mine
Meshwork another me took over from the space within...
And I’d do anything to start this short loop track again.
Don't want to see it but we're living in sin.
168 Apricot Lane let's begin again
(The bass suddenly cuts out on a sharp camera shutter sound. The title card drops.)
SCENE START
[SCENE START]
INT. 168 APRICOT LANE - LIVING ROOM - NIGHT
A single, clinical overhead light illuminates a worn leather armchair.
NICK (mid 30's, sharp-featured) sits holding a stack of un-bound, white script pages. He looks directly into the lens of a high-definition document camera. His voice is a low, raspy, deliberate drawl—completely devoid of theatrical fluff.
Behind him, the room is quiet, but the faint, rhythmic hum of high-voltage electronics vibrates through the floorboards.
NICK
(Reading from the page, his eyes tracking the text with cold precision)
Have you ever had this distinct, physical feeling that we are playing out the characters as holographic avatars of greater projected cosmic events? That perhaps when we take our localized lives too seriously, we completely miss this transitional state; an ever-moving, pulsing swapping of identities. Yet there you are somewhere, somehow... able to fully witness this grand unified stage play.
(He turns the page. The crisp snap of the paper echoes in the quiet room.)
Betsy, Varginah, and Nick.
They say life is just a repeat of the first nine years, plus a ruling planet number. That is the exact mathematical geometry that brought me to Betsy in the first place, or her to me. She’s a reader of the tarot, among other talents. These skills, as we call them, are divined through her by a cosmic entity—an ancient mystic named Rasheef Labruam, who allegedly forecast tidal shifts on Saturn long before the cosmic flood, before our science existed yet. From Betsy's recollection, this force entered a physical being named Veestah Cadron long ago, becoming the plasma generation of a bizarre trifecta. It is impossible to say how many identities she has gobbled up and assimilated since.
(Nick pauses, looking up from the paper, directly into the camera lens. A small, knowing smirk forms on his face, blurring the line between actor and narrator.)
As dastardly and frightening as this appears at face value, time disperses all qualities equally. See it all how you will, but eventually you can and will only see through one lens—that of a comedy that only appears on the short-sighted surface as a tragedy. From a universal perspective, you get more interest this way. Specifically, Veestah being that physical body visited by this ancient presence... far more complex than could simply be described here. Her origins a complete mystery to any layman of Esoteric Sciences or, as it turns out, science itself.
(He looks back down, his finger tracing the next paragraph.)
Of course, this creates a massive amount of questions. If it weren't for all the chaos and my inheritance—which leaves an even greater mystery, appearing from the outside only as an interesting chick magnet—well, to be honest, I would have run the other way. But after living with my mother before she passed, I was taught to go with the flow, and that the flow was always working in my favor. So here I am. Thanks, Mom. My life isn't boring, I can tell you that firsthand. Because of this, I was interested in novelty, and novelty I got sucked into the vortex of.
I fell in love with Betsy—that current avatar of Rasheef, or is it Veestah? The point is, she was struggling to keep her fortune-telling shop open. As it turns out, just before her passing, my mother visited that store. She was just standing there one afternoon when Betsy was opening up, sprinkling some kind of dust everywhere. Lying, Betsy said the front door was open... but how could the deadbolts all still be actively locked? Another mystery we shall never truly know the source of. Anyway, Madam Crusso, as my mother was widely known in certain clandestine, elite cults, dropped my card. Seemingly by accident.
(Nick turns the page, shifting slightly in his chair. The heavy fabric of his shirt rustles against the microphone.)
I am just an aspiring actor. A rich kid aged out who seems to have a fan club of my own. However, because people of the internet these days can easily trace all these strange, non-cohesive aspects of my life, I am in a number of fringe B-movies that oddly draw on movies, series, and even fringe documentaries regarding the current chapters of my actual life in real-time. If, indeed, there is anything real about time itself here and now?
Varginah, the world's leading quantum physicist, is in a same-sex relationship with Betsy. A fortune teller who was a top fan of my mother. Then there is the interesting orbit drawing in researchers like Larry, while Agent Cook is just the tip of the iceberg. It's a wild ride of sex rituals, world movie premieres, and cutting-edge technology blending into ancient AI and robotics. All under one address that those who are drawn here can neither escape nor deny: the unsuspecting white picket fence and Victorian, light canary-yellow house with white-washed trim at 168 Apricot Lane.
(He drops his hand slightly, letting the paper rest on his lap as if speaking memory, though his eyes remain fixed on the script's layout.)
The center to it all? A professor of ancient geology who has dug up rare sites that led him to this door also brought Agent Cook here recently. Cook comes and goes, but always seems to oddly show up as if he never left, using a certain unknown type of teleportation technology. And why is he always wearing black?
Professor Emeritus Calcunos claims that he found an ancient map that led him here, a map that connects to the fortune-teller store owned by Betsy and to all the other properties spread throughout the city and extending globally as real estate holdings. Yet he also initially came into this knowledge by way of liberal use of DMT among a wide array of other halucinogenic coctails.
Oddly, as for this subterranian cave system. It seems to connect within a massive underground networking chamber that leads through Death Valley here in California to the Grand Canyon. All this connecting to multiple sized down versions, but leading to a central inner-earth pyramid. I guess the professor is going to take that next empty but well-furnished room of his choosing.
But before we jump ahead, let's go back and lay out just some of the complexities to the best of my ability.
Because I would have to introduce Daria, the AI that seemed to manifest through a portal around the same time of Varginah's otherworldly godly—or ungodly—possession, depending on how you view it. That's right: an AI robot that is more alive, ancient, and might I say, more sophisticated than any one of us could ever dream of being. Maybe even more humble and possibly human?
My mother built this place, or rather was directed to build this site above a massive underground facility that, as the professor will point out in the not-so-distant future, is connected directly to an underground water system that connects straight to the inner earth. I guess this pyramid center exists in a quasi-liminal state where it is, in fact, the same center to all planets in the solar system. As the professor describes it, by going through the portals of different colored shifts, one might end up emerging out of a specific planetary body. These ancient arcane maps contain tunnels of varied light spectrums—in fact, around 28,571.43 possibilities from asteroids, to comets, to moons, and other realms that reach far beyond the dimensions that we could seemingly understand.
(Nick lowers the script entirely, looking deep into the lens, his tone dropping an octave into pure, unscripted reality.)
But let us return to the more practical prior to expanding into this, the most unbelievable story ever told. Now, ironically, a screenplay writer is picking up on these transmissions instantaneously—or is there a leak, and could it be a quirky Agent Cook that leaks this information out, putting it up on the screen for all to see to keep us all in check? The ironies are far too funny and insane to ignore.
A ride to be sure!
Maybe none of us are one identity at all anymore, and we have to simply figure out how to live with this fact.
A bottomless pit of money. A wellspring of connected accounts not even my mother's lawyer could explain the source of. As mysterious and untraceable as man's true origins and life itself—why it persists like a virus and somehow survives great galactic wars and the transitional gauntlet of life through the coldness of dimensional space.
It—this life—wouldn't be at all entertaining if I didn't have the sight. This ability to see people's energy and who they've been, maybe who they really are. I fell in love with Betsy, or maybe all of her self-reported incarnations. And when she somehow ended up in a same-sex relationship with another woman on this earth, one that I happened to have deep admiration and love for? It swept into and through the halls of my heart, mind, and soul like an alien wind, somehow carried across the ancient solar system and making its way here as a sort of tempest to me.
I felt—no, I knew—that whatever this is, it is magical. This bond, this love, and this shared address have manifested the weirdest life ever. A life that I could not have ever imagined would be mine. The miraculous, sometimes obscene, and often comically ancient and wise spiritual visitors from other times, places, regions, and zones, drawn to and manifesting here... at 168 Apricot Lane.
The house that we were cosmically ordained to share.
(Nick slowly drops the papers to his side. He remains perfectly still, staring into the lens, waiting for the director to call cut.)
[SCENE END]
"They never seem to mention though the pure cut cocaine and MDMA Molly this rich boy procures. Leveraging me? G-rated version here or do they have enough?" Nick says to himself but no one cares.
Drops script
OPEN
It was cold; the Bay Area fog rolled incessantly up into the hills where The Gateway Through stood, while traffic slowed to a crawl on that busy turn during the final hours of the night. Cold, hungry, and entirely confident that no one would be the wiser, Larry slipped open the window to the small kitchenette Betsy used when working. Most of the provisions were canned or frozen due to how infrequently the space was used, yet it maintained a professional, ready presence. Betsy routinely dusted away the cobwebs, always keeping her signature peppermint hot chocolate on hand for patrons and visitors. She prided herself on using a specific brand in order to put a unique stamp on her hospitality, ensuring every guest felt immediately at home.
And The Gateway Through was a home indeed—so much so that Larry felt compelled, after several months of sleeping outside and around the perimeter, to finally step inside. Of course, he had to cycle through a routine psychological justification: I'm looking out for the place better than the owner is. This soon gave way to a prickle of resentment, realizing that a person had to be remarkably well-to-do to keep such a property in such little use. After all, someone should be using it! Larry's internal clock kept churning out new excuses right up until he climbed through that little window and landed flat on his face.
His sloppy descent sent a near window display of teas, coffee, cocoa, and shortbread cookies tumbling. He immediately gathered the scattered items, and within minutes, he was warming water to make himself truly at home. He selected a massive mug that read "With a Healthy Bit of Love" in sweeping red cursive print. Rummaging through the freezer, he retrieved a thick slice of graham-cracker-crust cheesecake and set it to thaw near the steaming kettle. Settling in, his eyes drifted to a shelf of books on esoteric philosophy. He pulled a random volume off not looking at the title, but for the sheer luxery of having it for himself he cling to it. The entire situation began to feel fated—so much so that a sneaking suspicion crept over Larry: he might never want to leave.
That was when the heavy thud of boots and a sharp scratching noise suddenly sounded from the front of the building. Outside, the yellow caution lights flashed rhythmically, and the passing traffic had thinned to a mere trickle—dwindling down now to no more than two cars in the hour. "No one should be visiting at this hour?" Larry reflected and "certainly no one should be looking in through the front windows?" Larry had just fired up the gas heater, having first coaxed the stubborn push button pilot light to fire on. Alarmed by the sound, his first instinct was to hide, but then his eyes caught a small convex mirror angled toward the exterior—a detail masterfully positioned for exactly this kind of surveillance. In the small nine-inch mirrored dome, a distorted dark figure scampered away, scrambled into a delivery van, and hurriedly drove off.
Larry was curious—intensely curious. Now satisfied that the coast was entirely clear, and already fairly confident that no other local vagrants would dare make themselves known, he walked over to the front door, his reassurance returning. He threw back the myriad of heavy deadbolts and locks, and with a firm tug and a swift pull, the old door creaked open into the damp night.
A suit hanging there on the front door knob! A beautiful vintage suit that instantly gave off the faint, peculiar scent of rose perfume. It seemed entirely too strange—too good to be true. Pealing the plastic lining back and checking the inner lining for a label, his eyes widened: a 44 Long. It was precisely his size. Larry could not resist. Crafted from a heavy, old-school tweed, the fabric was a rich weave of maroon and deep brown—a striking Victorian-style suit featuring an elegant commemorative pin on the lapel. Below it sat a pair of shiny black shoes. They were a size 11, and Larry wore a 10.5, but he knew he could easily make them work.
He spent the rest of the night indulging. He sipped cocoa, then coffee, then tea, thawing frozen pastries and eventually discovering a pantry packed to the hilt with canned soups, jarred fruits, and pickled provisions. Safe and warm, he made a silent vow to himself then and there: something in the universe was finally looking out for Larry, and he had absolutely no intention of squandering the gift.
Drifting off to the sound of late-nineteenth-century oldies crackling from a massive, vintage wooden radio, Larry sank into the absolute fullness of a gluttonous comfort. A persistent meowing outside the door now eventually broke the silence. Pulling himself up from the plush red carpet, he stumbled over, half-awake, and again opened the old wood front door. The moment it cracked open, a cat darted inside, navigating the entryway with the effortless confidence of an animal returning home.
Larry sat back on the carpeted floor with his back to the couch and the old occult book sitting to his side.
As the cat drew near, its deep, rhythmic purr pulsed with a deliberate, ever-strengthening warmth that pulled Larry down further to the floor down into a sleep heavier than any he had ever known. How could he have known that the vintage tweed clinging to his shoulders was an invaluable heirloom belonging to Pascal Beverly Randolf?
Surreal dreams claimed him as his consciousness slipped into a dark, infinite ritual in another realm. In this shadow space, practitioners disrobed, revealing voluptuous women who encircled the fire-lit center stage where Larry stood. A man’s voice echoed, calm and reassuring: "Welcome, brother Thycius Welcome, friend." As the words resonated, an unseen architecture—an organization—began to take shape around them. The fire within the hearth intensified, flickering into bright yellow flames that pulsed to the hypnotic, driving cadence of the practitioners. Simultaneously, the cat’s physical purr bled into the dream, anchoring a serene purity and harmony within this liminal moment of hypnagogic union.
"Take all that you desire, my friend," the voice reassured him. "You are welcome here."
As Larry passed gas, venting the heavy comfort of his midnight digestion, his insatiable lust and want remained anchored deep within his belly, rather than merely in his loins. The occasional flatulence became so loud and pungent that the cat would dash away in brief revulsion. Yet, the disruption never lasted long; the animal would inevitably creep back, settling down to purr with that same unyielding, welcoming comfort that Larry now felt in his very bones.
Larry was aware of everything. He could see the heavy clouds blanket and then disperse past the moon in his mind. All the while feeling the crisp chill of the night sky without needing to be physically outside to look up at the stars, he was there. He remained anchored in his body, perfectly warm within the heated confines of this four-room home turned mystic’s chamber—a hidden headquarters for cosmic witches and archaic gods. Larry had already become an integral aspect of the architecture, and it was blindingly obvious now that the cat was not merely a cat. Above them, the stars seemed to swarm in a tight, deliberate orbit, as though the clock of time itself had synchronized its rhythm to their breathing in the grand procession of the zodiac.
Maybe this moment had always been fated. A new spirit took hold of him, and he began to recall every fragment of philosophy he had ever attempted to read but had never found the peace or time to truly absorb. A profound understanding of his own nature flooded into him, expanded to a cosmic scale. The very volume Larry had half-fallen asleep upon unfurled into an entire language, an entire world. He knew the book now—every syllable, every hidden inflection, and every intended meaning—as if a piece of the author’s mind and the text’s esoteric magic had permanently grafted themselves into his being --- Seership! The Magnetic Mirror.
Betsy was restless, she decided to wake up early this morning. She remained cocooned in a fantasy of harmless deep stasis while her roommates—the ones inside her head—rearranged the proverbial furniture. The night belonged to them. As Rasheef Labraum took command of the left hemisphere, leaving the right for Veesta Cadron who lived just as she had on Saturn or Sař-Toṅ eons ago. Tending to exotic plants in her greenery and absorbing books on art and the esoteric natural harmony of their culture, she often reflected, The air is different here. Even as Veesta tucked Betsy deep into the safety of the brain stem, she carefully left access to the amygdala, hypothalamus, and pineal systems fast asleep in a state of hypnotic wonder.
She woke up just as they slipped off to sleep. Only in these early mornings and quiet afternoons did she possess full, blissful autonomy—a freedom that, of course, was born directly from the fruit of their shared union.
Betsy drove her old, pea-green Volvo from 168 Apricot Lane to "the shop," as she frequently referred to The Gateway Through at 422 Parnassus Way.
As the old Volvo's tires crunched over the fallen cypress twigs canopying the open driveway, nothing stirred Larry. He lay there in that vintage suit, its sleeves now smudged with peppermint cocoa and smeared with the thawed remnants of graham-cracker-crust cheesecake. The sticky debris sloppily obscured two distinguished lapel pins: the top one, a colorful, a Rosicrucian Rosy Cross; the other, just below it, the age-old medical Rod of Asclepius.
Though sound asleep, Larry remained propped upright, facing the front door—which, in his final moments before drifting off, had offered only the deep night and paneled reflections dancing under flashing yellow streetlights. Slumped partially against the base of the Victorian couch—an early Chesterfield, to be precise—he almost looked like a man waiting for an appointment. Outside, Betsy slammed her car door with the dead, vacuum-vault thud characteristic of old steel. The heavy vibration nearly jarred Larry awake, but ultimately only coaxed a loud, fume-filled displacement through the crotch of his borrowed, gentleman's finer wear.
It didn't take long for Betsy to round the front of the old Victorian, her heels cracking loudly up the hollow, acoustically projecting porch steps. Inside, a massive crystal ball sat as the room's dominant centerpiece, catching the eye of anyone crossing the threshold. Because of its placement, Larry appeared to be intentionally facing the clear glass sphere, his closed eyes suggesting the focused trance of a summoning ritual.
As Betsy raised her clattering ring of keys and isolated the one for the upper deadbolt, she found the door giving way under the slightest push. It creaked open, letting in a draft against the expansive, radiant warmth of the mid-morning sun. Instinctively turning her head to the left, she was met by a heavy wall of sauna-like heat and the stale, lingering flatulence bellowing from the unattended heater. Through the convex curve of the crystal ball, a distorted, projection of Larry’s face—framed by the stiff Victorian collar and tie—stared blindly back at her. The radio, left playing through the night, had drifted to an eerie, obscure station, its static-laced pre-commercial bumper filling the quiet room with a spooky ambiance.
And that was how they met. The sudden, cold rush of external air triggered an involuntary spasm in Larry’s leg. His knee flinched and kicked violently upward against the underside of the table, launching the crystal ball into the air. It came down hard against the table's edge, exploding into shattered shards of ill-tempered, cheap Woolworths glass just as Larry’s eyes snapped wide open to the bright morning light. The movement sent a single taro up into the heaters warm turbine stream now laying right at Betsy's feet --a picture of Anubis and The Wheel of Fortune card. She leaned over to pick it up, it must be a sign!
Meanwhile the shattering of the cheap Woolworths crystal ball sent a sharp, ringing crack through the stale, sauna-like heat. Instantly, the illusion of a high-mystic summoning ritual evaporated, replaced by the stark reality of Larry blinking wildly against the mid-morning sun—trapped inside a vintage suit that now smelled aggressively of rose perfume, peppermint cocoa, and his own heavy digestive processes.
Suddenly, a deep rumbling vibrated through the floorboards. The seismic shock wave rippled across the entire city, gaining a prolonged, terrifying intensity. On the radio, the static-heavy music cut out instantly, replaced by the mechanical blare of the Emergency Broadcast System.
"Wow... who are you?!" was all Betsy could manage, her eyes wide with astonishment as the walls groaned.
Meanwhile, Larry just sat there, pinned beneath the weight of the moment. Percolating in his own sweat and digestive juices, he returned her gaze with an equally perplexed, unblinking, eye-to-eye stare while the earth rocked beneath them.
The aftershocks from a mother of an earthquake rippled back through the foundation, driving Betsy straight to the floor. A small piece of glass barely glanced her left foot causing a single stream of blood. Immediately the near insignificant wound coagulated and dried shut- and no one nearly noticed. She scrambled for balance in her heels, dropping a bag filled with novelty inventory and a fresh supply of her signature imported peppermint cocoa—the very brand Larry had spent the night illicitly consuming. Bookshelves tipped forward, spilling their contents, while outside, a chorus of car horns and emergency sirens wailed in immediate response. Betsy knew it, Larry knew it, and the entire hidden network anchored to 168 Apricot Lane knew it: a massive, irreversible shift was taking place.
Unsurprisingly, Varginah a leading Quantum physicist was conducting critical experiments that day at Brahmin-West. She was attempting to collide two little-known theoretical particles isolated from cosmic shift energies that, by all indications, predated the natural-born universe—one born of a redshift and the other a blueshift, harvested from near-opposite spherical positions in the deep cosmos. Unsure of how long this anomaly of ancient, primordial light would persist within those brief, eons-old gamma-ray bursts, she routed the filtered light particles directly into the primary axis hub of her own theoretical Light Particle Discovery Center.
The Brahmin-West Incident
At the premier particle physics facility, Brahmin-W (Brahmin-West), a brilliant quantum physicist named Varginah was conducting a highly controversial, history-altering experiment. Unknown to the public, Brahmin-W was just one critical node in a secret global network of nine hadron accelerators built precisely on planetary leylines. The staggering theory behind the network was that if all nine accelerators were fired in a hyper-precise, staggered sequence at an exact cosmic juncture, they could tear open a gateway to unknown dimensions and nether realms.
On this fateful day, Varginah was attempting to collide two little-known theoretical particles isolated from cosmic shift energies that, by all indications, predated the natural-born universe itself. One was born of a redshift, the other a blueshift, both harvested from near-opposite spherical positions in the deep cosmos. Unsure of how long this anomaly of ancient, primordial light would persist within those brief, eons-old gamma-ray bursts, she routed the filtered light particles directly into the primary axis hub of her own theoretical Light Particle Discovery Center.
The Shattered Prison
Unknown to Varginah, the ancient reality-warping god Phalus and an elite, interdimensional hunter named Daria were frozen in an eternal deadlock, trapped in a limbo stasis across time and space. This prison was an absolute vacuum cavity of death, unbreakable by any energy existing within our known reality.
But Varginah’s machine did the impossible. The moment she fed the raw, exotic redshift and blueshift light from outside the known universe directly into the accelerator loop, she inadvertently bypassed the laws of our space-time timeline. The redshift and blueshift light acted as cosmic magnets, pulling from entirely different coordinates outside our universe. The redshift drew Phalus from his domain, while the blueshift locked onto and pulled Daria from an entirely different location. By sheer, mathematically absurd coincidence, these opposing primordial light spectrums provided the exact, perfect sub-atomic frequencies required to shatter their limbo stasis, instantly drawing both entities toward the same fatal coordinates.
The convergence unleashed a mega-explosion of seismic proportions. Yet, instead of blowing outward, the unique physics of the primordial light caused the blast wave to invert. It formed a violent quantum vacuum that imploded directly into Varginah, throwing her violently backward and permanently bonding the ancient deity, Phalus, to her biology.
The earth itself buckled under the raw, opposing forces of primordial genesis and absolute containment colliding in a single microsecond, triggering a localized earthquake that rippled far beyond the facility's walls.
When the dust settled, the blast left behind a stunning geometric imprint resembling a massive crop circle, though instead of flattened corn, the pattern was formed by tens of millions of dollars of fused, high-tech debris. On the opposite side of the ruined structure, deep within the smoking rubble, a distinct blue light began to pulse. Soon, Daria would emerge from the wreckage of the blueshift impact to take her place as yet another member of this unimaginable, fated collection of living contradictions.
For Nick, the universe had just spun the ultimate wheel of cosmic irony. Phalus wasn't just a rogue deity; eons ago, Phalus and another cosmic entity named Rasheef Labruam were toxic lovers and warring foes who had manifested in ancient Egypt through the pyramid wars—and, even further back, had literally destroyed our original solar system in a catastrophic domestic squabble.
Nick's Mom
Before her passing, Nick’s mother—born in her uninitiated state as Margaret W. Knightly, passing down the lineage that made her son one Nicholas Solan Knightly—had introduced Betsy to Nick. Had introduced Varginah to Nick.
Nick recounted being in strange rituals as a small child but hazy. "Had we all met then, before."
No decision by Madam Crusso went forward without the absolute consent of the Council of Seven Spheres. Early on, Nick had viewed the entire enterprise more as a business venture than a divine cult of serious, cosmic proportions, denial? Yet, from the very first moment Margaret introduced Betsy to Nick, she had referred to her as his spiritual wife.
Individuals of the rarest, most eccentric kind traveled from the far reaches of the globe to attend these clandestine ceremonies, where much was kept shrouded in secrecy. One evening, a grand dinner was hosted in Nick and Betsy's honor. Yet, shortly after the meal, they were dismissed as the main gathering—joined by a flock of new arrivals who filtered in late—convened behind the closed doors of a massive meeting hall. This early dismissal left a lingering question: why had a banquet so formal and meticulously planned been dedicated to them in the first place, only to exclude them from the real assembly?
From that night forward, Madam Crusso formally codified in her own testament that Betsy was Nick's spiritual wife. On the surface, the decree seemed to merely ensure that 168 Apricot Lane would remain their shared home. Yet, according to the stipulations of Margaret Whisper Knightly’s will and estate, the historic manor where Nick grew up was to be surrendered entirely to the Council of Seven Spheres. Meanwhile, 168 Apricot Lane was bequeathed not just to Nick and Betsy—who viewed themselves as mere roommates—but also, as Madam Crusso explicitly designated, to all future members of the Council.
This was the night Nick and Betsy finally met in sexual union. Sparks certainly flew, yet the encounter felt as though they had already known one another for lifetimes—a profound, ancient familiarity that neither questioned, but also one each could seemingly live without. This detached bond allowed them to maintain completely autonomous lives, establishing an open-door dynamic entirely free of jealousy, possessiveness, or envy. In fact, that night would remain the only time they ever slept together. In truth, the act had felt less like romance and more like a mandatory duty to an unseen force operating directly through them.
The Convergence: Betsy and Varginah
Betsy met Varginah the very next day, while Varginah was still completely reeling from the cataclysmic event at the research center.
It had begun with a loud, commanding voice and a volley of volatile outbursts, escalating into a brutal, late-night confrontation. An entire pack of bikers had forced Varginah off the road, aggressively cornering her vehicle into a dark, narrow rear alleyway with intentions that needed no explanation. But before they could lay a hand on her, the anomaly triggered.
Rays of blinding, primordial light erupted from every pore of Varginah's skin. The air grew freezing and thin as the rift within her soul opened, systematically vacuuming the internal life-force light out of twenty-three men—men who, until that moment, likely had no idea there was any light inside them at all. They collapsed into hollowed-out, lifeless husks in the dark alley.
And at 168 Apricot Lane: Betsy and Larry and soon to Varginah
Betsy watched Rancor the cat bolt the instant Larry’s knee struck the underside of the table, shattering the cheap crystal ball decoration. She knew the fluffy white Persian must have just emerged from the sub-basement structure—yet another gateway connected through the underground labyrinth to the 168 Apricot Lane subterranean network. Rancor bolted straight toward the kitchenette, having clearly ascended through the pantry where a descending stairway remained hidden behind a secret door at the rear. Bypassing Larry entirely, Betsy hurried after the animal, only to find the pantry door open but the secret entrance closed. He must have had a different way-cats?
This left her to speculate whether Larry himself had somehow drifted up from those same subterranean layers of reality. It was deep within that very underworld where she and Nick had been left an estate key from his mother for a safety deposit box—a vault containing a map alongside several esoteric artifacts they were explicitly instructed to safeguard until the appropriate time. Among them were seven gold necklaces, each bearing a uniquely colored crystal. Nick’s was red; hers was blue. And each was inscribed with the names of people they had yet to meet.
Shaking, Betsy set the kettle to boil, half-hoping the man sitting out there in the Pascal suit would simply vanish into thin air. "Do you want some coffee, sir?" she called out, genuinely praying for silence. She half-expected to meander back into the front room and find the chair entirely vacant—leaving nothing behind but a lingering odor and a shattered glass sphere.
Instead, a loud burst of flatulence echoed back from the front room, followed by a gruff, sloppy reply: "I like your peppermint hot chocolate, ma'am. I'll have another one of those, please."
Retrieving her broom and dustpan from the narrow closet beside the pantry door, she stepped back out into the main storefront to sweep up the scattered shards and glittering remnants of glass. "Oh no, don't move, sir!" she commanded as Larry began to shift his heavy frame in alarm, seemingly snapping out of his deep daze. He froze instantly. "Let me clean this up first, then we'll figure out who you are and what you're doing here, okay?"
"Okay, ma'am. Thank you for the great hospitality, and for being so kind to a case such as myself... thank you, ma'am," Larry replied, his voice dropping as an overwhelming wave of embarrassment washed over him.
Both of them were actively diverting their attention from—or perhaps collectively processing—a shared state of sudden trauma. The radio had just drifted back on air, static giving way to a broadcast detailing the scale of the devastation: experts were classifying the initial rupture as a massive 7.2 earthquake, followed by a violent succession of tremors and aftershocks measuring only slightly lower than the primary spike.
"Let me turn this down," Betsy said, leaning forward to twist the volume knob.
Larry began picking up the remaining large shards of glass by hand, though neither of them scanned the floor with much rigor. From the speakers, the attenuated audio continued to drone out a grim litany of accidents and casualties, ranging from catastrophic bridge collapses to widespread grid failures.
"Well, I'm Betsy. And you are?"
"Larry, ma'am. I mean, Miss Betsy. Larry Sutherland is my God-given name. Just an old hobo, really."
Right then, a heavy thump and a low, resonant creak vibrated through the walls—as though an external door were forcing its way open somewhere along the rear perimeter of the building.
"Is this place all yours, ma'am? I mean to say, Miss Betsy?" Larry asked, his eyes darting toward the source of the sound.
Betsy, though visibly startled by the noise, quickly rationalized it as the building simply settling from the intense structural stress of the quake. "I was left the place, quite recently in fact, by a very kind woman," she answered, her tone softening. "Sort of a mother figure—really a mentor to me."
"Oh, that's swell," Larry replied, his voice trailing off as he carefully stacked another piece of glass. "And what a lovely place it is. Thank you, if I can..."
Suddenly, the kettle began to whine loudly, its shrill pitch competing with a far more deliberate, rhythmic thumping vibrating through the walls. Clearing the doorway, Betsy stepped quickly into the small kitchen area ahead. Noting that the window was still unlatched from Larry’s entry, she slammed it shut and locked it securely, while simultaneously using her left hand to twist the burner dial, silencing the kettle.
The persistent thumping was now coming directly from behind the closed secret door behind the pantry. The moment she unlatched it, Rancor—looking thoroughly inconvenienced and deeply irritated—pushed past her almost rudely. Had he been a larger animal, Betsy would have been completely bowled over. Rancor had found a way to get in and out while bypassing the secret door but how?
"Hey, what's the hurry, Rancor? And what's that in your mouth?!"
The cat made a direct, aggressive bee-line toward Larry, launching himself squarely onto his lap. Larry was now seated in a high-backed chair next to the couch, having already turned off the blazing space heater on his own initiative.
"Well, hello kitty. And what's this?" Larry murmured.
It was a heavy golden necklace featuring a vibrant purple crystal. Attached to it was a tag that read: For Thycius, the warrior philosopher. You will know what to do with this when the time comes. Signed, The Council of Seven.
Betsy emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray laden with coffee, cocoa, and cookies, instantly exclaiming, "Oh my, Rancor!"
The cat was now standing on his hind legs on Larry’s lap, licking his face in a bizarre, close-quarters confrontation. Between Rancor’s thick cat breath and Larry’s heavy flatulence, the sheer oddity of the atmosphere became overwhelming. Setting the tray down, Betsy attempted to pry Rancor off Larry's lap, encountering heavy structural resistance from the creature—or whoever, or whatever, Rancor actually was.
Rancor picked up on Betsy's left foot catching a whiff of that now tasty dried yet still fresh- that single stream of blood he licked quickly and thoroughly at it. Tickling Betsy she flinched him away "oh that tickles Rancor stop!"
The sight of the necklace made Larry visibly uncomfortable, and he quickly tried to hand it over. Betsy hesitated to take physical possession of the artifact; instead, she extended her hand just far enough to steady the tag, reading the inscription and the attached note while Larry held it.
The moment Larry put on that necklace, he felt a sudden, anchoring shift—as if he had finally been given a home, a new life, and perhaps even a strange sense of power and respect. True, the past twenty-four hours had been utter madness, but his entire life had always felt pre-scripted from fear anyway. From his perspective, existence had always felt oddly out of place, as if it weren't quite real.
Within the hour, Betsy cracked open a bottle of Chardonnay that had been chilling in the back of the shops retro refrigerator. Larry politely turned his glass down, but eagerly accepted her offer to order a large pizza with everything on it, his stomach garbling in loud anticipation.
Feeling loose, Betsy turned on some big-band jazz, even singing and dancing comfortably around the shop as she cleaned up the remaining debris. "Oh, you know what, Thycius? I mean, Lar... I feel like I should call you Uncle or something, man," she said, getting increasingly buzzed as the minutes ticked by. As they waited for the pizza to arrive, she talked more expressively about the sheer madness of their reality.
"All the while, this cat is probably some god, or a demon, or a general from space command," Betsy laughed, pausing to salute Rancor. She began to march across the floor like one of General Rancor's honored soldiers, loudly blowing on a leftover party horn she had unearthed while dusting.
A sharp knock sounded at the door. Outside, a small motor scooter sat idling, with three other large pizza boxes bungee-corded securely to the back rack for other deliveries. The helmet-clad delivery person waited patiently on the porch.
"Oh, shoot! I forgot my purse in the car, Larry," Betsy called out, unbolting the door. "I don't suppose you have any money?" She yelled the question back toward the couch, where Larry had begun to doze off against the blaring jazz radio. "Larry!"
Larry jolted awake, blinking as the delivery driver nervously adjusted an itchy, black, bulbous helmet. Betsy stood at the open threshold, her hand extended, looking Larry dead in the eye. "Got any cash, Larry?"
It wasn't a guilt trip. In fact, it was something Larry never could have anticipated from a person in authority. In Larry’s world, money—or the absolute lack thereof—was the end-all, be-all. It was a supreme, tyrannical god that arbitrarily decided whether everyday people lived or died. But Betsy was asking simply because money was something she hadn't spent a single second worrying about since the day she met Nick, and really, Madam Crusso.
Larry gestured weakly at his pockets, then bent over, digging desperately into his worn-out trousers. A pathetic handful of pennies and loose sand spilled out, clattering across the section of stained hardwood floor.
"Forget it, Larry, don't bother," Betsy cried out.
Suddenly remembering a hidden reserve, she rushed over to a large tin canister she had entirely forgotten about, tucked away near the kitchen door. It was stuffed to the brim with several thousand dollars in cash. Peeling a crisp $100 bill from a thick roll of the exact same denomination, she turned back to the door.
The delivery driver, pulling up his tinted visor, finally recognized her. "Ma'am, it's Carl. You probably didn't recognize me with my helmet down. You're roommates with Nick over on Apricot Lane, a few miles away, right?"
"Oh! Hi, Carl."
Carl went on, "I should have said something sooner. I can just put this on Nick's tab. We don't carry large change with us anyway."
"Here, you take this now, Carl," Betsy insisted, thrusting the bill forward. "Tell you what, keep the hundred just for being so nice, and put the actual order on Nick's tab with a great tip on top of that. Sound good, Carl?"
Carl’s eyes went wide inside his open visor. "Oh, yes, ma'am! That is really kind of you. Are you sure? That's a lot of money!"
"Of course, Carl. You're a good guy and a great delivery driver—scooter rider, whatever. So here, and bye, and thanks... see you next time, okay?" In one sweeping, fluid movement, Betsy handed the large bill to Carl, snatched the steaming pizza boxes, and pressed the door shut with her left elbow.
Larry was staring open-mouthed at the exposed tin canister sitting on the small light stand near the kitchen door. It was close enough and low enough for him to see the dense stack of green ink inside. In all honesty, he murmured under his breath, "That's the most money I have ever seen up close in my entire life, ma'am."
Betsy placed her hands firmly on her hips, looking squarely at him. "Look, Larry. I would give you this entire tin full of money. There's probably fifteen thousand dollars in there. But in our house, in our family, money isn't a concept. It is only a tool for getting the things we need and traveling to the necessary places to achieve our end-all goal."
"What's that, ma'am?" Larry asked, mesmerized.
"If any of us truly knew it all, we would have offed ourselves many years ago," Betsy replied softly, a fleeting shadow crossing her face. "We all quietly wish we didn't know what we do. Money isn't a problem for you ever again as far as I can tell, Larry, and reality isn't at all what it seems. So hang on for the ride of your life, okay, Uncle Thycius Larry?"
With that, Betsy handed over the pizza box. Larry promptly received it, practically drooling at the rich, savory scent of cheese and grease.
Just then, a sudden, deliberate knock echoed against the front door.
Betsy checked the vintage clock on the wall. It was exactly 3:00 PM. Varginah had arrived.
A sharp spike of anxiety rushed into Betsy's chest. The clock had run out. She knew that within the deep structures of her mind, Veesta Cadron would now be opening her eyes, and the calculating, ancient gravity of Rasheef Labruam would not be far behind.
The Convergence at 3:00 PM
Outside, a dust-streaked red coupe sat idling at the curb, its engine humming a low, nervous vibration. A sharp, rhythmic knock rattled the front door of the shop.
Betsy paused, wiping her hands on a towel, her brow furrowing. "I wonder who that could be?" she muttered, checking the vintage clock. Exactly three o'clock.
Larry, completely detached from the ticking clock, was entirely occupied with downing thick, greasy strips of the leftover pizza, chewing with the frantic intensity of a man who didn't know when his next meal would manifest.
When Betsy swung the door open, a heavy wave of cold, pressurized anxiety swept into the room. Standing on the threshold was Varginah.
"Hello... are you the healer?" Varginah asked. The words didn't just come from her throat; they left her lips like a desperate, soul-fated plea, heavy with the weight of someone running out of dimensions to hide in.
Betsy adjusted her posture, stepping into her professional skin. "I do many things here. I am a mystic, a tarotist, a palm reader... the list goes on. I'm a former student of Madam Crusso. My name is Betsy."
She extended her right hand, but Varginah didn't take it. Instead, her eyes darted frantically around the room, her voice dropping into a breathless, hurried whisper. "Can I come in? Can I talk to you about something very, very important? Something of a top-secret nature, Betsy? It seems completely random, but I am at the absolute end of my rope. I literally have no place left to turn."
Recognizing the raw, unvarnished gravity in the stranger's face, a mix of natural curiosity and deep compassion overrode Betsy’s caution. She stepped aside, gesturing inward. "Come inside. I'm sorry, what was your name again?"
"Varginah. Like the place in South America," she said, her chest heaving as she crossed the threshold. "My mother is from Brazil. I am... not a stranger to otherworldly phenomena, shall we say?"
Betsy’s eyes widened slightly. The gears in her mind—and the hidden chambers beneath them—were already starting to spin. She walked over to the small kitchen area and snatched a heavy ring of keys from the wall rack.
"Larry, this is Varginah. Varginah, Larry," Betsy announced briskly. Then she turned her back to the stranger, locking eyes with Larry. "Listen, I need to talk to Varginah alone. This sounds incredibly private and serious."
"Yes," Varginah agreed from the doorway, her voice trembling. "It is."
"I need you to take my car home, Larry," Betsy said, her tone leaving no room for argument. "If Nick is there, tell him your name is Thycius. Show him your necklace, okay?"
To emphasize the point, Betsy tugged at the chain around her own neck, and Larry mechanically mirrored her, his grease-stained fingers touching his own pendant.
"The address is 168 Apricot Lane," Betsy continued, dropping the keys into his palm. "This is the car key, and this big brass one is for the house. We’ll get you your own set soon, okay? You do drive, don't you?"
Larry blinked, looking down at his cheese-covered fingers. "Yeah. I mean... yes. I drive. It’s just been a while."
"Okay, good enough for me," Betsy said, already guiding him toward the exit. "Take a right outside. When you hit the next four-way stop, take a hard left. There’s a side street you can barely see unless you look way over your left shoulder. Look closely, and you'll see Apricot Lane. Take a left there and look for a canary-yellow house with white trim. That’s your house, Larry. Upstairs, the very first room in front of you—that’s your room. The one with all the philosophy books. You got that?"
Larry swallowed a massive bite of crust. "Well... yeah."
He stood up, balancing the remaining pizza boxes in one arm. Betsy reached over, setting a few packets of her favorite peppermint hot chocolate right on top of the cardboard. As he shuffled toward the door, she suddenly stopped him, her eyes tracking down his outfit.
"Oh, wait, Larry. This hat goes with that suit," she murmured, a strange realization dawning on her. "It looks great on you. Now I know what it was actually for. Here, take this too."
She reached into the forgotten tin by the door, pulled out a thick, tightly rolled wedge of currency—at least five thousand dollars in cold cash—and stuffed it into his coat pocket. "This money is for books, supplies, whatever you need until Nick gets home, okay? We’ll figure out the rest of the details later."
Larry stepped out into the afternoon air, and Rancor immediately fell into step beside him like a seasoned bodyguard.
Varginah watched them through the glass. "Oh... aren't you worried about your cat?"
"That’s not my cat, Varginah," Betsy said softly, watching the creature's fluid, predatory movements. "And yeah... that cat always leaves me a little worried."
Outside, Rancor hopped effortlessly into the front passenger seat, making himself at home. Larry carefully slid the leftover pizza onto the floorboards behind the driver's seat. The ancient sedan groaned, coughing twice before the engine finally caught. Larry shifted into gear and pulled away from the curb, sputtering off in entirely the wrong direction. Yet, somehow, an uncanny peace hung over the street. Nobody was worried. In the grand, twisted math of the universe, everything was going to work out fine.
Back inside, Betsy closed the door, the latch clicking into place with an ominous finality. "Can I offer you a glass of wine?" she asked, her voice laced with deep concern.
"Yes!" Varginah gasped. "Definitely, Betsy. And if you have anything stronger, I highly recommend it for both of us. This is a complete doozy."
Betsy didn't hesitate. She bypassed the Chardonnay, reaching for a bottle of the hard stuff sitting on a high shelf in the back room, returning with two heavy rocks glasses.
"This all sounds incredibly serious, Varginah."
"It is, Betsy. I recommend we both have a strict two-finger pour before I even begin to unburden this information."
Varginah took a long, burning swallow, and then the dam broke.
“Now, what I’m about to tell you...”
The minutes dissolved as Varginah laid out the blueprint of the madness. She explained the high-level light experiments at the laboratory, her precise position within the project, the blinding flash of the catastrophic failure, and the horrifying, light-draining encounter with the twenty-three bikers in the alleyway.
"...and I just drove around aimlessly, in absolute, paralyzing shock for hours," Varginah whispered, staring into her empty glass. "Somehow, I ended up right here, just as my needle was hitting empty."
The clock on the wall read 3:38 PM.
Deep within the shifting architecture of Betsy's mind, the quiet hours were officially over. The roommates were awake. Veesta Cadron listened from the shadows of the subconscious, perfectly still, acutely aware that the ancient, heavy gravity of Rasheef Labruam had just opened her eyes.
Suddenly, a brilliant, terrifying blue light ignited within Varginah’s pupils. The room seemed to lose its atmospheric pressure.
"My love of lives, my betrayer," Varginah spoke, her voice layered with an echoing, ancient cadence. "Of secret winds do I possess thy always."
In immediate response, Betsy's eyes flared a brilliant, predatory red.
The human veneer shattered. Betsy's face and body began to morph, shifting and rippling into an entity that was fundamentally horrifying, yet breathtakingly beautiful. The red and blue light spectrums collided in the center of the room, creating a roaring, blinding dynamo of pure luminosity. Down those masochistic hallways of other worldly creature pleasures.
Boundaries of flesh, time, and identity dissolved. The two ancient forces began to make love with the pulsing, violent passion of stars—the cosmic friction of celestial bodies living, dying, and cycling through eternity, all condensed into the fragile air of a terrestrial psychic shop.
Outside, the physical world reeled under the shockwave. Earth's tides violently shifted out of schedule. A massive, unnatural blood-orange moon tore through the afternoon sky. Huge, chaotic flocks of birds took flight, wheeling wild and aimlessly across the horizon, while billions of people across the globe suddenly clutched their stomachs, feeling profoundly ill, odd, and utterly out of place. Our tiny Sun and planetary bystanders reeled in pulsing horror of the act. Existence itself lay in deep trepidation.
It was a collision of billions of years of walking through passion, pain, and betrayal—the magnificent, ceaseless ridiculousness of the cosmic wheel.
Every single consciousness within the room was present, violated, and utterly blindsided by the raw force of the fusion. Except for Veesta.
Quietly, safely, Veesta withdrew into her private Saturnian gardens, meticulously cultivated within the neural matrix of Betsy's brain. Safely tucked behind the walls of thought, she began to softly sing songs to the flowers.
The surrealism of the shared reality solidified like concrete. One thing was absolute: Betsy and Varginah would never walk out of that shop the same way again. The fundamental boundaries of the natural order—and the fragile, human illusions that sustained them—were shattered into countless trillions of microscopic bits.
Nothing but stardust from another universe, raining down on that red carpet and stained hardwood floor.
The other members present felt ashamed and violated as a result, while Betsy and Varginah only began to wake up, sleeping next to each other on the floor of the backroom. Nick drove to the shop to see how Betsy was. No one ever bothered to lock the front door. Nick walked in and noticed the odd smell of peppermint hot chocolate, pizza, farts, and, by the best description, ectoplasm and the old-school grime of human sexual bodily excretions. Betsy had never done anything like this especially elevating several feet off the ground, while Varginah had merely 'experimented in college'.
"What are you guys doing lying together... naked?!" Nick had been introduced to Varginah by his mother as well; they also knew each other intimately. "What the fuck is going on here, ladies? I'd be asking my mom if she were alive—oh, and I'm in the fortune-teller store that she used to own, for God's sake! Maybe when you get dressed we can figure out what in the holy hell is going on here and what we are going to do next?! The two smartest ladies I know hooking up, what are the odds?"
Nick walked out of the room while the two sort of peeled themselves off the floor. They were very thirsty and in pain from head to toe. "I feel like I just did every drug in the known universe and a few others!" joked Varginah. Betsy laughed. "Ha ha, no doubt whatsoever." They both felt it strongly: they were in love and felt compelled to embrace again, kiss, and make love once more, only it was not any entity pressing them to want this now. The pattern had been made, the boundary crossed, and there could be no return; a sense of overwhelming bliss and the thriving beat of raw, unbridled sexual conquest brought them back to life in ways that neither realized they had ever lacked.
Nick put on water for coffee and sat in the front room looking out. There wasn't enough water or firehoses to wash the smell of this away.
And that's how they met. That's how the strange tension began.
It wouldn't take long for them to learn that Varginah was the bearer of the green crystal necklace when the three ventured down into the caverns below. This occurred after Betsy told Nick that the door to the pantry had been opened; he hadn't crossed paths with Larry yet. Larry never made it to 168 Apricot Lane with Betsy's car. Where was Rancor? He was from the underground—why did he come out now?
As the three got closer, the shining lights of the underground waterways could be seen coming from deep under the surface, pulsing green as they advanced toward the underwater pyramid below 168 Apricot Lane. It was the green necklace. Phalus didn't bother himself with mundane human feelings, nor did he have a stake in any plot or game. Daria was watching them all from afar—tracking their every move and scanning the situation. She had been in stasis as well, waiting in that liminal place beyond the universe and life, locked onto Phalus as her one main priority.
The pulsing necklace called to them and pulled them near. Varginah accepted it with grace as Betsy placed the necklace around her neck, and the two kissed and embraced. Nick said nothing.
The three turned abruptly to find Agent Cook holding a black, pen-like device.
"Your mother would have been so proud of your newfound feminist support, Nick!" Agent Cook clapped, his applause so jarringly loud and antagonistic that the cave itself felt exposed. "Look, I know who you all are. In fact, I might know you better than you even know yourselves. I know multiple ways of how this story ends—infinite ways, in fact. Here in this cavern system alone, you have exactly 28,571.43 choices. These choices fractal out into near-limitless quantum potential. At the hub of it all, we exist. Not everyone, but we do, because we hold the line. You might say the universe picked us out for a special project before it even officially existed. Find the remaining crystal bearers, but I assure you that the seventh clear crystal never has a human bearer in any of these countless potentials, and you need to start looking for the bearer now because there is an eighth that will manifest when the time comes."
With that, Agent Cook seemed to vanish, vaporizing directly into the shadows.
"Wait... did Cook just say that there is an eighth crystal?" Nick's voice cut through the damp silence, breaking the stillness as the three of them stood there, staring blankly at one another.
Professor Emeritus Calcunos stumbled out of the cave system, his thinning long hair appearing as if he had just been through some sort of vortex. While laying down the map to show the three what he had discovered and where he had just come from, the orange crystal began to pulse as he grew nearer to it.
"Well, that's easy. Mother seemed to have this all figured out way ahead of time?" muttered Nick.
Beside him, the two ladies held one another due to the coldness of the stone.
"Why, Varginah, you are a Doctor as well as a professor, are you not!" boldly stated the Professor.
"Who are you, sir? I don't think we've met," Varginah replied.
"Well, maybe not in this timeline, but in countless others we know each other quite well," the Professor went on to speak further. "In fact, I just left a timeline where you and I seemed to fancy one another fondly, I must say. Our job is either to rectify the timeline or bring it all into a sort of harmonic synthesis here, I can't be too certain. How is Phalus anyway? Can you ever speak to him directly, or is he largely dormant?"
Just then, the halls around them lit up as each of them began to momentarily hover and float, before smoothly touching down once more onto the ancient granite slab beneath them. While an ancient, worshipful ode to a long-forgotten God echoed through the chamber, as Phalus openly displayed his power. Varginah's eyes glowed a pulsing, unknown, undefinable color as her green crystal lit up.
"I am always here. I always am in all."
"Okay, I'm glad we cleared that up," interjected Nick.
Betsy pulled her hand away from Varginah, partly because she didn't want to wake Rasheef Labruam or bother Veesta Cadron while she slept, but also because she feared what was in Varginah more than even what was deep within herself.
"Professor, that orange necklace is yours, you know. Guard it wisely."
"Yes, I know, Nick. I am aware," the Professor expressed while picking up the glowing orange crystal and happily placing it around his neck. "I was just waiting until the appointed time, which is now, I suppose? You see, in other realms, I have had every color crystal, and colors not so identifiable to us now here. I quite like this place. I quite like the orange. Suits me!?"
Unanimously, they all agreed, "Yes it does, Professor. Yes, it does!"
Varginah last saw her work in ruins. "Do I even have a job anymore? Better yet... do I even care?"
"This is your work now, Doctor," a calming, smooth, unfamiliar voice spoke. "I have seen enough. I see that after billions of your Earth years, Gods do mellow, even if the physics have to completely change around them. Everyone does eventually change—perhaps for some it just takes longer?" said Daria, stepping out from her stealthy buffer. "I am a master at analyzing people and situations, but also, this universe is not going to exist the way it has, and in some respects, it isn't going to exist at all in the coming days."
Rancor had led Larry down into the caverns. They were all together now as the shifting colors beneath the waters revealed the top of the pulsing pyramid.
"Why, that's not a pyramid at all—that is a fucking spaceship! I can see the masterful work from here," exclaimed the Professor.
"Yes, something like that, Professor," spoke Daria.
Rancor brought Daria the clear crystal while he masterfully, with no hands or paws, placed the yellow crystal onto himself.
"But how!?" Betsy shaking her head to herself "I don't trust that cat, nothing seems to line up with him!"
"Yes, put it on, Daria!" exclaimed the Professor as the ancient ship began to pull up closer to them from out of the waters, as the apex cornerstone pulled open, revealing a port of entry.
"Who would ever believe this shit? If my mom could see me now, huh?" spoke Nick.
"I think your cave just got a massive upgrade," softly spoke Betsy, playfully tugging with both arms around Varginah's waist.
"Our cave, Betsy. Our cave, our choices together as a collective!"As Nick stepped first down into what they had previously thought was a pyramid, he was followed by Daria, and then scampered down the ever-curious Rancor. The two ladies looked at one another, and Betsy gestured for Varginah to step in next, followed finally by the Professor, then Larry, and lastly Nick, bringing up the rear.
As the pyramidic tip closed up with them all safely within it, a dark figure suddenly appeared outside on the granite ledge. The lights flashed violently, and every single tunnel—all 28,571.43 of them—shot concentrated light directly into the ship. Agent Cook looked on, laughing hysterically.
"You'll see! You will all see now!" he cried out, tearing up and smiling with a menacing, comically happy, and deeply sadistic euphoria.
The Inner Chamber
"This pyramid is exactly that—though impressive, it is an actual pyramid on the inside," thought Nick. From the outside, it appeared to transform from a murky stone artifact, drowned and suppressed under these occulted waterways for ages, into a pulsing, glowing type of metal. The stairway opened up into a massive, open, central internal structure.
"Where are we, guys?!" instinctively echoed Varginah.
Betsy, following close behind her, went on, "Right? And what a trip, right? With all those flashing colors and the way it opened..." Their voices met with the staleness of a hollow, closed chamber. Betsy noticed this, yet continued, "...there isn't a bad feeling in here at all, babe."
Varginah, caught off guard by being directly called babe, turned back with a large grin. "So Betsy, what are we now, lesbians or something?"
Betsy returned, "What are any of us? I just want to simply love and be loved. And you... I love you."
Tearing up, Varginah looked down, now walking slower with her throat clenched. "Yes, I love you too!"
The group each took a different stairway down into the inner chamber. They couldn't remember how this happened; they seemed to take the exact same processional steps at the top, yet they were growing increasingly further away from one another. Nick and the professor looked up to see only blackness and shadow above them, while Larry and that mysterious feline continued down a descending tomb that might as well have been bottomless. Still, somehow, the general area they stepped upon seemed to ever open up.
The steps grew larger and more stone-like, each inscribed with some sort of forgotten hieroglyph or alien language. The professor began to mark the symbols down on his map. He also commenced to lay out a drawing of the general shape, though oddly, he had gotten turned around at the top.
"Yes, that's it, Nick," the professor murmured. "It doesn't look like we are moving, but we are. That's how we, in near pairs, ended up tracing down four distinct, descending stairways."
The stairs now seemed to flow with a circular ease. As each group looked up and then down, they wondered: were they walking on the same large, spiraling step pattern, or entirely different ones?
Daria spoke, "I am the only one here walking alone. I am going to hover in the center and illuminate the entire chamber now. Do not be alarmed." Without effort, Daria's exoskeleton transformed instantly into a sort of bell-shaped craft, drone, or metallic vessel at the base.
"Remember that Daria is more ancient than any of this," chimed in the professor. His voice, though spoken softly, seemed to speak directly into each pair's ears as if he were walking right there beside them.
They stopped walking now, suddenly realizing the sensation that they were somehow all walking together again—but in a completely different order than they had begun. Daria was leading, Nick was trailing in the rear, and Rancor brought up the tail end. Betsy was now holding hands with the professor, quickly pulling her hand away in surprise. Varginah, who had been gripping tightly to Betsy a moment ago, was now holding hands with Larry without noticing the fact right away; curiously, she was trailing just behind Daria, looking over her shoulder.
"Doctor, it seems we are arriving near what appears to be the base of this structure—assumingly, of course," Daria spoke.
Varginah countered, "You seem to be a greater mystery to me than any of this. Is it Daria? Pleased to meet you." Extending her hand to meet Daria's, they all stopped walking. They had reached the bottom.
There was only an even wedge of grade left that opened up to an ancient ruin consisting of a large slab of unknown origin and actual wrapping veins that still appeared to be living. Daria shook the doctor's hand, doing so in a way that scanned her, though not deceptively.
"My," went on Varginah, as she gently transitioned her hand away. "This place seems to be as much an ancient ruin occulted within a massive forest—a hotbed of choice plant sentience—all while not removing some sort of living technology."
The group members were all now walking about the flat base, examining the walls as if they had set off on some weekend archaeological dig and ended up exactly where they had set out to go in the first place. Suddenly, heavy perennial stone fixtures—benches or seats that hadn't seen the backside of any being in ages—showed themselves. It was hard to distinguish how large the base truly was; there was a distinct feeling of walking the same ten or so paces, yet continuously ending up in an entirely emergent environment.
The group sat down. The large, almost-stone, almost-Paleolithic, oversized benches were large enough to seat ten people side by side with room to spare, another ten to the rear, and two or three at each end. The scale of the bench made them all feel small.
Rancor jumped up and smelled the stone, even licking it and comfortably lapping himself into it as if it were a familiar place. His eyes glowed, but not with any extraordinary internal light beyond what a cat naturally displays in eyeshine.
"Tapetum lucidum," Varginah noted. "That's Latin for eyeshine." She went on to stroke Rancor, who was now rolling onto his back to have his belly relieved of some eternal itch.
As they looked at one another, all of their eyes exhibited a distinct shine. They glowed with slight variations of colors that uniquely suited each of them—not explicitly matching the colors of their appointed crystal burdens.
Nick and Varginah sat next to one another, looking at each other's true beauty. The room remained constantly ancient and perennial, yet it seemed to quietly reveal something powerfully ancient and forever within them. As a group, they suddenly realized they had not previously bothered to look upon the true splendor of one another. The glow of contained, undulating light in its natural, crystalline, captured state showed who each of them represented in an eternal sense—sensual, powerful, commanding, and beautiful.
"Erotic and wild you are, Nick," Varginah murmured. In all her true majesty, her brilliance showed a multidimensional, even omnipresent, unending depth.
"So amazingly beautiful and awe-inspiring, I want to be enveloped by you and worship you as my queen," Nick responded. To Varginah, she was still just herself—grounded by years of constant study, research doctorates, professorships, and finally being handed the keys to her own research hub at Brahmin-West. Yet now, they looked upon each other in equal amazement and brilliant splendor, immediately grounded within their true selves.
"Anywhere else, this would be dangerous," Nick stammered, still carnally aroused. In truth, they all were, but this was only an aspect of their living, thriving appetite for life and existence.
"Oh, yes," they all seemed to equally agree.
Daria seemed to reflect the entire cosmos and infinity within her technology, while Larry displayed all the incarnations of his vast knowledge as the "Keeper of Archives." Betsy began to laugh through painful, joyful tears, looking at Larry in all his warrior-like, steadfast maleness and presence.
"I see you now," she cried, staring at him.
But as Larry looked back, all he could see beneath Betsy’s playful exterior was the power of another realm—a witch, a cosmic sorceress, the artifact of pure innocence, and the full militaristic deployment of an eternal, conquering flame.
"We see each other, but we are only ever us to ourselves," Varginah finished with great emotion, tears now streaming down all of their faces as they were somehow graced to be in one another's presence. "We have to save this universe. We have to save humanity."
Daria began opening codes to an ancient interface, projecting holographic suspended switches, dials, and archives in clear, structured view. It manifested as a holy command center.
"We already have," Daria replied.
The entire inner chamber of the pyramid now illuminated, showing a glowing motherboard pattern of geometrical, intricate, multi-layered, built-in circuitry. Just like each of them, this pyramid only looked plain and comprehensible from an outside view. Daria played archives of data in a rapid but discernible download into each of them. As they watched, the inner walls echoed the lives of tribes, civilizations, universes, cosmos, and meanings that now felt intensely familiar and paired to each of them.
As if in a hallucinatory state, they began to speak truths aloud: "I am from the tribe of Dan-Quān," one would say, or "I am of the line of Sîthiòn." From the outside world, these would sound like incoherent, unqualified statements; but here, they were a lineage, a patronage, and a grand highway system that led each of them back to where they truly began this life's journey. It was a journey that was neither flat nor rhetorical once you managed to interface beyond the mere surface—acting as a tensioner, a switch to behold.
Meanwhile, Rancor seemed to be shifting between every animal ever known or recorded, yet he remained fundamentally himself: a seemingly common house cat. He shifted from a snake to a cosmic ape, to a predatory dinosaur, to a lizard, existing in layers of himself that never truly faded nor lost their majesty.
"He was shown in kings who took up his animal spirit and required it as a worshipful balance as dynasties rose and fell—but he always remains the same," Nick whispered, staring at the feline. He spoke as if providing a running narrative for the grand story that was them, that was everyone.
Nick, like the rest of them, didn't have to look anymore. He knew. They all knew. No one was a perishable, discardable container living under an expiration date. Everyone was exotic, choice, and divine. The universe—in, on, and through every interwoven, interconnected vein of multiplicity—spoke to them, to everyone alone, and to the vastness of it all.
The Universal Tapestry
Suddenly, they each felt grounded; they finally had a place to return to. Inside their minds, they began to think about mundane existence, like how Betsy, Nick, and Varginah all remembered parking their cars at the gateway through. Yet they seemed to share this exact same thought completely without shame. It wasn't as if one of them was directing or controlling the narrative.
"We have to get back, don't we? Jinx, coke!"
They all said it eerily at the exact same time, in total, flawless sync.
Were they all thinking the same thoughts now? Was everyone? Was this a bad thing? They each menacingly thought this, again in total sync, looking at one another as if looking upon their own personal expression immediately reflected through everyone else.
But as they began to walk up that long, meandering staircase of mysteries, they each seemed to become more uniquely themselves. They never truly lost that connection—not really—only loosening the tether or leash just enough to give themselves some functional autonomy. Yet, they each realized that autonomy was highly overrated.
"One thing is for sure: we will never look at each other the same way again," they reflected in a streaming, collective narrative. It was a voice they could actively acknowledge as the self or the collective in full expression, or just as easily let disappear behind the shadowy illusion of independence. Bigger choices stood before them all, but none of those choices were bigger than them.
The pyramid capstone opened up.
Agent Cook was eagerly waiting outside, standing there in his typical, casually foretelling form—the ultimate inside-knowledge facilitator. As each of them slowly emerged and then dispersed about the room, silence fell. An awkward, inner thought became stale in Cook's presence, hanging heavily in the air, though it went completely unanswered for now.
They all looked at one another—even the cat—sharing the exact same perplexed expression and thought: Who is Agent Cook?!
Cook, Larry, Rancor, and the Professor headed in through the hidden corridor of 168 Apricot Lane, while Daria, Betsy, Varginah, and Nick began the miles-long walk underground back to the gateway. Cars needed to be checked for impound or tickets on that relatively busy daytime street.
Daria instantly transformed from a hovering, lower-body bell shape into directly stepping with bipedal legs. She knew that to continue on with them, she couldn't emerge from this tunnel looking like an obvious AI robot or advanced cyborg in the eyes of current humanity. She also couldn't remain translucent and stealthy; there was no longer a reason to occult herself.
As they edged up the narrow hallway, Nick held the door open for them as each stepped up into the daylight. Oddly, it was only 5:15 PM.
"It felt like we were down there for an eternity!" Nick exclaimed.
As Daria stepped up as the last to emerge from that underground cave system, she transitioned her form. "The sister of your mother Margaret, now written into the code of all Earth systems with my own legal identity, Nick," Daria spoke. She now appeared as a genuine, distinguished older female, looking like the slightly younger and plumper sister to Margaret Whisper Knightly. "Aunt Gladys. I am your Aunt Gladys, Nick."
The four chuckled in the kitchen. Betsy and Varginah still had eyes for one another—maybe even more so now. They were officially a couple.
But why weren't Phalus, Veesta, and Rasheef present here? In fact, it seemed they were no longer present at all, Betsy and Varginah realized as Betsy pulled a large bottle of chilled Rosé wine from the refrigerator. She reached for an unopened box of four wine glasses from the top of the fridge—glasses that had miraculously been protected from the earthquake that seemed to take place in another timeline so long ago.
Pouring out four glasses, about to empty the large bottle on the fourth, Betsy said with a half-joking smile, amazed at Daria's lifelike transformation, "You can drink wine, can't you, Aunt Gladys?"
"Aunt Gladys is a wino, kids. That’s only one of the reasons she was such a black sheep to the family, right everyone?" Daria said, adopting Gladys's unstoppable wit to boot.
Enduring and thorough, Daria had become as likable, unique, and twisted a character as the rest of them. She had mastered humanity and human study in remarkable ways.
"Remarkable," Varginah raised her glass in reverence of Daria's seamless transformation.
"I think we can do this. I know we will do this," Nick stated with a sort of rehearsed command.
Betsy slightly corrected him, "Yeah, we just have to figure out what this is, right?"
Nick quickly countered, "Or we don't."
"Cheers to that!" chimed in Aunt Gladys as she emptied her glass much faster than a woman in her late seventies ever should. "Oh, I'll have another. That's quite nice."
"I see we still have a few things to learn about old Aunt Gladys," Varginah laughed, slamming down her glass. They each followed in a mimetic sequence.
"Salud!" Betsy said after raising her next glass, inhaling the contents in the exact style of old Aunt Gladys. "I think we need to take this home. To our home—or your home away from home."
"We all need to get back and see if this is even the same world we left only hours ago," Nick countered as they walked out the door.
Betsy left all her main keys with Larry, so reaching over the door frame, she grabbed her spare to lock the deadbolts. They each got into their own cars and followed in a procession back to 167 Apricot Lane. Aunt Gladys sat in the passenger seat of Nick's car, while Betsy sat in Varginah's. Varginah's right hand firmly gripped Betsy's left thigh as they swooned adoringly, exchanging frequent glances as if in anticipation of drinking each other up. Betsy's right hand held Varginah's as they rounded that sharp left turn, and their home—all of their home—stood there like a grand, unassuming beacon of life and existence.
"If people only knew what went on under those floorboards, babe," Varginah murmured, finding a growing, warm comfort in being called babe.
"Okay, babe, haha," Betsy teased. "I was thinking about what people don't know concerning the bedroom... love!"
Teasing and joking, the two entered their driveway and began to kiss with tongues, the instant sweat of body heat giving off a pheromone excretion of something divine—maybe gods and goddesses in all the wildness of heated passion, a universal language one can only hope for.
The neighbor watering the grass annoyingly surveyed them as they got out of their cars. Aunt Gladys loudly stated in true, synchronized fashion so that the whole neighborhood could hear, "I see we've already spotted your staring, nosy neighbor, nephew!"
As the four entered the house, Betsy and Varginah looked like two fetish-driven, sex-crazed teenagers—pulling, teasing, and gripping one another. Old Aunt Gladys looked like a bold, ornery, immutable libertarian character, and of course, Nick appeared as some toned-down version of a timid cuckold. But no one on the outside could ever guess what was really going on under the surface and those bedsheets—much less the invited and uninvited guests that come and go at will under our very skin.
Rancor ran full force to the front entrance as the four got home, Betsy and Varginah nearly tripping over him.
"Did you forget that you were a cat, Rancor?" Varginah laughed, as she and Betsy grabbed a beer together, moving seamlessly as if they were a single pair.
Nick grabbed the mail from the box while Larry, upstairs in his room, dove headfirst into his philosophy books while devouring a massive bowl of microwaved pizza rolls. Any outside observation from the street was entirely forgotten. Down the hall, the professor was already entrenched in his grand study, parsing through maps and symbols, deeply analyzing his matrices of the pyramid walls and the inner chambers. Meanwhile, Betsy and Varginah, locked in a young, passionate embrace, disappeared under the sheets of their now-shared master suite to make love.
Nick turned on the television to catch up on recent events, while Rancor sat nearby on the high-backed leather chair, meticulously grooming himself. As the news broadcast flashed across the screen, it revealed the world in its current, chaotic state. Witnessing the heavy return of cast responsibility from a dependent, toxic world only served as a stark reminder to Nick of the beautiful contrast of their own near-utopia.
"Guys, we're going to need to have a house meeting now!" Nick spoke to himself, turning up the juice on the volume button and pulling his laptop onto a lampstand next to the couch. As he opened up and turned on his notebook, global events and the state of the world pressed down upon him.
Daria—or Aunt Gladys—already knew long before, sitting silently as she watched the fading sun in the backyard. Meanwhile, the sweating frenzy of thrusting Apricot Lane fruit, sweaty ripe skin, sticky fingers, and hormone-driven teleology manifested in the gripping intensity of rocking antithetical heads as one. Like a planaria growing heads on each end, the sex magic between the two was stirring up an alchemy, supercharging the fast-developing stars above as each came intensely, thrusting in the unending projectiles of Skene's gland biosemiotic oneness. Kissing and lapping, drenched in constant intertwinement like a juice factory justifying all that is organic and temporal with all that is plastic and forever, they slid into the bold transition of a forever-allostatic holonomy of oneness.
"Oh god, I can't stop, I can't get enough of you, Bets!"
"Oh, Varginah, I could drink you up like an eternal fountain forever, my love!"
The moon came out, full and pronounced. The two showered, but the passion wouldn't leave them; they couldn't stay away from each other for long.
Daria, still outside and now gazing at the moon and stars while looking like a kooky, eccentric old aunt, posited to the night, "I wonder if Phalus, Rasheef, and Veesta are all mixed in with Betsy and Varginah? It seems their lovemaking is an ongoing, unbridled ritual that is more directly connected with the production of a new world here. Should we join them, or should we demand a final resting place for this newfound materia prima to settle?"
The acceleration and excitement of combining elements of the aeons-long multiverse of information, funneled into the grand totality of now, cannot be dictated to by a governing right and wrong, nor by a capstone on lesser modalities. We are the vehicle; let us take this grand wellspring to the highest heights!
Daria called everyone down, beaming a cybernetic voice-to-skull transmission as she resurfaced from the back porch. Rancor was the first to stand, facing Nick and Daria as they patiently waited. It didn't take long for the professor and Larry to wrap up their collective studies. The professor was smoking his horned pipe, while Thycius devoured a large container of premium hazelnut ice cream down to the last dropping spoonful. He was feverishly narrowing down Leibniz, Heidegger, and Burkhard Heim, seeking a solution with Nietzsche resting on top of the new stack he had already absorbed through means of digestion—though he still wanted to eyeball the writings in slowed-down detail.
They clamored onto the couch and the adjacent chair, leaving an open, empty seat for the lovebirds, but they didn't surface.
Drenched in their own sweat upstairs, locked in a scissor position and thrusting with agonizing, wild violence, the two locked eyes as they ejaculated continuously. They were exhausted, yet lit by the fires of cosmic union—or was it something more?
"I can't stop, Betsy, I can't stop you!"
"Me neither, Var! Something is seriously fucking wrong here!"
They kept pumping, lapping, and randomly twisting into each other upstairs. Daria sensed the immediate danger to them and flew up the stairs, dropping her Aunty facade in intentional haste. Entering the room, she saw the ladies' buttocks and hips vigorously infused in exasperated grinding, pounding, slapping, and popping.
Daria’s pointer fingers—and there were six on each hand and foot— instantly turned into sterile injection kits, the tranquilizers required to release each of them from a lovers' death spiral, like two peregrine falcons about to hit the ground at maximum velocity.
"The Council of Seven is coming. I suspect they will disclose all the goings-on here, ladies," Daria said, floating and levitating clothing rapidly over their now fully incapacitated, hovering naked forms. "Aunt Gladys picking out your clothes—now aren't you ashamed?" Daria actually managed to transition to her Gladys cover while fully dressing the two, while attempting to smoothly place them onto the couch downstairs.
"Oh, move, Professor," she said he got up quickly from the couch, now stepping back watching the display. "You too, Larry." Larry managed to get up just before Betsy's foot and Varginah's head nearly broadsided him. Daria laid them in opposing directions, managing to levitate two pillows under each of their heads.
"Well, well, now you might see why I am always holding back the jokes and laughs," Agent Cook said, holding up his right hand while his left gripped a black, pen-sized device. "And don't bother filling me in. I have watched this episode played over and over again, believe me. I even got invited to join in once."
"Ouch, my neck still hurts. Thank you, Betsy," Agent Cook added, self adjusting as if to pop his neck back in place. He revealed the intimacy of his words when he stated, "I might know you better than you know yourselves," back down in the cave system.
"May I introduce to you the magnificent and illustrious Council of Seven," Agent Cook’s arm extended out, bowing in a welcoming gesture as two other agents opened the front door. They held similar devices, but made of a sort of platinum, unfinished material. The seven unassuming people were as eccentric as you could imagine: three women, three men, and one who could be both or either. They walked into the room under official capacity as two more agents, who looked more like normal-human-sized robotic killing machines clad in the same black suits as Agent Cook, closed the door. They seemed to be voice-to-skull communicating with a heavy-gauge outside perimeter, an army of black suits?
Madam Prescient, in her fox fur jacket with her large, raven-like beak nose, diplomatically and gracefully addressed the house. "We know what's going on here, and we didn't know if things could truly ever reach this state. It's good, I assure you—exciting, in fact. We want to brief you on everything now, well, everything pertaining to now that is."
"I am Mister Dregg," Dregg cut in as Madam Prescient pulled back. Speaking with the tone of a military briefing commander, Mister Dregg looked and sounded like a man and a woman all at once, maybe something even more exotic. "The pyramid you raised below raised the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Speaking in a high pitched whirl. The subterranean pyramids all around the world have been raising the vibrational energy. Some of you experience this heightened state through knowledge, or appetite, or the passions of your own self-interest. I assure you, as these sleeping ladies command the Vril energy and sexual matter, each of your collective thoughts and visions are shaping humanity as a whole."
A very stern-looking, deep-voiced, broad, larger older gentleman dressed in a 1950s-style blue-and-white striped suit began speaking. "Mr. Braulst here, new young Council. The vibrational energy has been raised to a level that has left these girls exhausted in their respective states of sexual union. The future depends on them. The personalities that once inhabited them have fused with them, become them, along with their appitites, have you any refreshments for us my dear boy?" Addressing Nick directly.
"Mr. Spock Zuce please to see you all here tonight" speaking in slurs while smacking on peppermint candy. The man looking a lot like Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud only thinner—as if the two were the same persona but starving to death—began to speak as Mr. Braulst politely stepped back. "Yes, further and it is up to us, all of us, to steer this early universe in the right direction is it not."
Looking confused, Nick raised his hand.
"Yes, Nick," spoke Mr. Spock Zuce, as he had introduced himself a moment ago to be
"Are you telling me we made a universe by accident, sir?"
"Why, yes, that is the only way to fashion a new universe. You take the crude matter of one preexisting universe and reshaped it—as you have done in your own delightful and, might I say creative ways here tonight. A well-groomed and precise fabrication—into sheer teleological fruition and pop out goes a new one. It's not that hard really, everything required is already there and present you see."
The final three members of the Council of Seven who had not yet spoken stepped forward. They looked like undeveloped kids somehow standing on stilts concealed under their overly large suits. They spoke with an alien-like, resonating depth that did not match their small soft faces. Their features were those of two girls and one boy; the girls appeared to be identical, and they would often finish one another's sentences. There was a strange feeling that a large, jagged mouth could open up at any moment from any of the three and swallow everyone whole here without concern. Also a feeling that they could shift at will to any form and scamper away as one massive, white alien spider.
"We are remnants of the original world; we contain all information within us. You have Betsy, Varginah, Veesta, Rasheef, and Phalus in the same or similar manner, but dimensionally raising the seven to the perfected vibration—to ten, or nine and one, truly. And together with the birth of this new child from this group, this will make eleven of you and seven of us, and eighteen parts in total. Agent Cook, wrap this up please."
Cook stepped forward as the three eerie, tall, bulky children stepped back in an equally disturbing synchronization of movement.
"Take the energy from all prior worlds and now spontaneously fashion a new one. Basically, all that juicy humping and thrusting created a sort of loosh-energy baby that is going to be the next Nick or Daria, or a sort of mixture of both, to carry life and all its wonders for the next 21 billion years. And by the looks of it, it's going to be a wild ride indeed!"
Madam Prescient chimed in, "It looks to be a new physics, eh, Varginah? A new master morality based solely upon love and lovemaking. The old guard is dead, aye?"
The two girls awakened groggy as the Council seemed to go out the way they came, but also simultaneously vacuumed through the door in an instant rush of black, cloudy vapor.
Nick gestured to them both. "Come here, ladies."
Groggy, they both scampered over as Nick placed an arm around each, giving them each a full-on, face-to-face, wet kiss on the mouth. "Now, you know I love you both dearly, but we have to get ahold of this vibrational energy and direct our new universe with master balance and skill—but still leaving time for pizza and lip-smacking good times. We owe the future that, and whatever, wherever this kid arrives."
Betsy placed her left hand on Nick's hard stomach, and Varginah did the same with a targeting, hungry look dead into his eyes, seductively curling her tongue. Rancor gave out a loud meow that might as well have been a lion's powerful roar, as Betsy said to Nick, "I think we have some work to do."
Varginah pressed her pointer finger into Nick's chin, followed by a long, open-mouthed wet kiss. "Yeah. Remember when we first met through old mom? Yeah, that's still there."
Larry gave a loud stomach rumble, followed by an uncontrollable, large outlet of flatulence. Smiling awkwardly, he stated, "Something tells me there isn't going to be just one kid coming to the household."
In life, all life goes through consolidation phases. In youth we generate enough entropy and trauma, then in our older years we take on the burden of organizing the chaos—not vying for its left-brain eraser. While the body remains electric.
Betsy and Varginah produce the raw matter of dynamic life tension; they are innocent byproducts of a dysfunctional machine that has absolutely no intention of fixing itself. While they remain impregnated they are a central place where the exponetial conduit junction is distributed a unique singular identity of the Egoic solar plasma; an artery of the unimaginable and thus the imagined.
Neither is Nick playing the father figure, nor some half-assed vagrant riding on his mother's dime and legacy. There celestial wisom of the eternal Father, an Oak, A might Buck an impending Tempest of perpetual violent ejaculate. There you will find the Ego of causality, dealing with itself. No, money has literally no meaning to any of them—not a single soul at 168 Apricot Lane, nor within all those subterranean tunnels underneath and in-between; pure junction points.
The offspring of them will run wild like young gods, wild mustangs, because that is precisely who they are—it is who you truly are.
Betsy's Picnic
Betsy rose up, peeling herself from a long night of lovemaking, leaving Varginah and Nick still deeply asleep in the tangled sheets. She decided to go for a picnic in nature; was this early morning frequency ruled entirely by Veesta Cadron?
She made everyone breakfast nice and early while Larry laid flat on the couch passing his typical thundering and painfully smelly flatulence, which Nick jokingly called "Larry's butt hammers" on account of how hard that first toxic odor hit the unsuspecting victim. But no one under this roof was expected to be anything other than what they were in nature.
Rancor was the type of cat that liked to liberate himself, jumping onto the counter to help himself to human food whenever the impulse struck him, and no one in this house was ever going to stop him.
Betsy packed up enough wine, cheese, fruits, and breads fit for a queen, and that's just who she planned on meeting that morning. In fact, Betsy trusted every single impulse in her body as if the event had already taken place in the coordinates ahead.
Down into the lower rungs she stepped, down that descending stone stairwell, wearing her blue-and-white striped dress paired with crisp white tights. Passing the now blue-pulsing pyramid, the subterranean waters seemed so calm and fresh, holding a healthy, cool school of fish surrounding the mighty structure. If you looked hard enough through the glass-like surface, you could see the faint tracings of ancient, sunken structures remaining in the deep. On into the caves she went, holding her blue crystal firmly in her left hand to light the path.
A small, hairy creature stepped out to meet her, but she wasn't at all alarmed.
"Ah, so beautiful, you must be Lady Betsy? Madam Crusso sent me from the dimensional portal where your fates await, my dear. May I carry your basket of delightful refreshments?"
Just then, the hairy, naked creature's eyes and face shifted; his pupils became massive, bulbous, and dark as he drooled.
"I'll carry that," commanded Betsy, instantly seizing the basket back.
"Very well, ma'am."
Obviously, it was simply in the creature's unrefined nature to devour the entire basket, but raw natures can be contained and even reserved when one sees the endgame—the total prize that awaits through this grand transformation.
"Down the hall and to the left, down the hall and to the left 🎶," the creature began to hum and sing with every rhythmic step, leading her down long, echoing corridors as the cave grew darker, his eyes appearing more homicidal and menacing with each step.
"Ah, here we are, my dear. You smell so sweet, like sweet cakes and meaty treats. Very well then."
A heavy round door swung open, revealing a never-ending hillside of vibrant flowers and fields that defied the subterranean dark, stretching out for miles. No more than a hundred yards forward sat the most beautiful, commanding woman in the open field, with bluebirds patiently orbiting her as she sang and offered them seeds from her palm. As Betsy approached, she knew the frequency instantly.
"I see you have met Darwin. Those little suckers have quite an appetite, don't they?" Madam Crusso—or at least this version of her—seemed to be sitting defenselessly side-saddle on her checkered pink, white, and red accented quilt.
"Madam Crusso, you look absolutely ravishing," quipped Betsy.
"I know too much about your affairs, my dear, so I won't ask how my son in your time is doing. But I so crave you, my dear, and the origin story, my loves—my wild grandchildren that are beginning to fill these rooms up to my heart's content. Thank you, my Betsy dear, for being so delicious and delightful."
As Madam Crusso reached out for a hug, she did so in such an unassuming way, like a serpent as she locked Betsy in a gripping, uncomfortably possessive embrace. Betsy began to pull away, feeling the immense, ancient power in Madam Crusso begin to literally siphon and absorb energy from out of her.
"We must watch our natures after all, shan't we?" Madam Crusso noted smoothly. Betsy had to powerfully break from the hold, and in doing so, Madam Crusso instantly returned to the mild-mannered type of ideal, sexy housewife you might see in an early mid-century cigarette advertisement.
"It's all about the face, it's all about the smile, dear, isn't it?" Betsy looked concerned and curious, now looking eye-to-eye at her in the same general position. Two ladies adorned in similar-era dresses looked as harmless and pure as a mid-century laundry soap commercial.
"You can't leave, you know?" Madam Crusso, and definitely Margarette Whisper Knightly, boldly looked through Betsy with a fullness in obvious, preemptive calculation.
"W-what do you mean, ma'am?"
Betsy was not happy with the situation in the least—the entire life she had seemed to walk into at 168 Apricot Lane. In the middle of the night, she had pulled herself away from Nick and Varginah. She went into the Professor's room, where she saw all the notes and maps of tunnel systems she needed to be here, doing what she was doing now. You see, what the Professor had astonishingly and painstakingly unearthed appeared to be a grand plot by some force. Whatever it was had been making great efforts to shift the axis of balance towards what the Professor titled "Bad Versions!", and Betsy had set out on this little excursion with well-thought-out intent.
As she was leaving the Professor's room, while he was snoring away and talking to himself loudly about the same subject—giving away everything he had been arduously studying each day—Betsy noticed a backpack containing several metallic, foot-long gadgets. "You grip it, my dear, you grip them... no, no, not that way," the Professor said, still fast asleep but obviously replaying some form of traumatic event that affected him quite seriously.
Looking through a notebook titled HOW TO STOP THEM!!! written boldly across the front, she saw several pictures of these items and a list of time windows, dates, and the world version order numbers from a central source that was trying to envelope Earth as the axis point. She took in all that she could from the first few pages the Professor had written down.
Reading on, Betsy saw on the fourth page large X's and checkmarks by "world numbers": WORLD 2,688 Lost, WORLD 1,172 Saved, and this stretched on for several pages. It seemed the Professor was doing the work they were all collectively supposed to be doing, acting as the Heroic Council of Seven and finding a way through.
Betsy pondered for a moment, If these worlds can be lost or gained, how? Then, thinking deeper, she realized a profound truth: There must be one central hub, one master resonating world central to all these tunnels—the synthesis into one grand unified moment or point that sets a clock that we must choose ourselves. The weight of this realization became heavy and burdensome. This must be why everything is turned around. What seems right and wrong is becoming increasingly more ambiguous and abstract, and now I know, she thought to herself.
Then she noticed the following page after the long list of losses, gains, and noted outcomes scribbled in the Professor's own hard-to-read script. The next world was an important world to conquer, and possibly one of the most evil of all! The Professor had planned to leave one week from today at midnight, but a date early—today, in fact, just a few hours away. I guess sleep isn't happening tonight.
Maybe Betsy could fix all of this and herself, and return to a somewhat normal, unassuming, grounded role? The notation said in bold: Use three Holy Mother Candlesticks, pulling them immediately from their protective sheaths and gripping them each for no more than 30 seconds so that it will take 30 seconds for them to discharge. Noting with an asterisk beside it: releasing pure light that envelopes the entire world, setting it back to its blank slate, pure state. Reading on: DO NOT GET CAUGHT, and alongside that was written, when the bad guys catch any one of us in the competing main world, it's game over, noting how risky this entire operation was and how much the Professor was risking to heroically save this world, while tolerating them here as well and, most of all, keeping this secret to himself. Betsy looked at the Professor snoring away, and grabbing three candlesticks—and a fourth for good measure—began to fashion herself as a Good Samaritan brandishing gifts to an evil world that was vying to consume them all.
A date kept resurfacing and repeating, along with a time written in bold, as if the Professor had committed it to his eternal memory: "11/11 at 11pm, that is when the next 21-billion-year bargain is made," and this was just two days from today.
Turning the pages back, now holding the candles in her right hand and thumbing through the notebook with her left, she found the note next to today's date. The time was 6:56 AM, and the note read: meet the hairy little cannibal in the portal that the evil Madam Crusso sent through. Just under that, with a double asterisk, it was written a little more sloppily but larger and bolder: the entities that enter the hall are essentially being sent to their deaths; within moments of being vaporized here, or if they attempt to return to their world, they soon unravel, become ill, and dissipate into vapor. And under that, with three asterisks written in all bold caps: AND BRING FOOD BECAUSE THESE GUYS WILL EAT YOU!!!
Betsy didn't have much time; the window was closing. The clouds that appeared serene shifted like Madam Crusso and Darwin in a moment. Large, gaping mouths began to appear with frenzied, primal eyes on Madam Crusso—or whatever she was—and Darwin, as he had begun to pull apart, leaving what appeared to be black, smoky ribbons trailing off of him. They jumped on the picnic basket and began to madly devour the contents as if it were prized manna, collected up and offered as a soul-preserving substance. It was Betsy's moment, because soon they would gobble her up as well.
"We are going to break you up into billions of little pieces and eat every bit of you, Betsy dear!" This pernicious and quite malevolent version of Madam Crusso was on all fours, alongside Darwin like ravenous dogs, fighting and biting at one another, and others began to run towards Betsy from a distance of only two hundred yards away.
She took the sheaths off the Holy Mother Candlesticks, as the Professor titled them, and stuck them into the ground below. Did she have thirty seconds remaining at all? No, she did not; she was lucky to have ten seconds. Was that enough time to make it back to the door? Then Betsy realized what she had gotten herself into, but she remembered the fourth candlestick. Perhaps she could survive by detonating only one to ward them all off and weaken them, while ensuring that the other three could have their full effect?
She let go of the first two, having counted out exactly thirteen seconds as the vile, cannibalistic creatures ran as a hungry horde towards her, now able to see the details on each of their twisted faces. She quickly unsheathed the next two, and time seemed to crawl as she threw one stick directly at the pouncing, primordial abominations. A bright light soon detonated as she clung onto the fourth with a death grip. The light was so brilliant and pure as she ran from it, from them, clutching the fourth and uselessly shielding herself from the pure, brilliant light as she ran to the door. It would be only a matter of possibly two or three seconds until the other two would send off their beaming, base, life-restoring properties, as the light took over every particle, transforming this world and possibly this universe into the pure state that it had begun as. All these universes and the worlds therein synthesized into one grand, unified field of probabilities and potential for the next twenty-one billion years.
Just then, the Professor flung open the door, immediately throwing a mylar blanket that only partially shielded Betsy from the brilliant, all-consuming radiant blast.
"Throw the stick, Betsy!" the Professor yelled as he extended his hand and pulled her back into the dark, cavernous tunnel system tucked away below 168 Apricot Lane, shutting the vaulted door and placing a checkmark on it with a large piece of green chalk.
"You did it, my dear, just barely, but you did!"
"We did it, Professor, we did it! But how did you know?"
"Just an educated guess. I mean, you left all my work sprawled out to the exact pages that led me here, and my missing candlesticks. But I came quickly when I noticed that all my protective shields were accounted for. You must have failed to read that note?"
"Well, Professor, that is some pretty bad handwriting. I think you should have been a doctor!"
Betsy was still clinging to the blanket as if it still had some life-preserving effect, while the Professor fatherly put his arm around her. The two traced their way back through the dark tunnel system, Betsy now noticing the infrequent X's and checkmarks on the doors, finally knowing what they meant and how the Professor was one of the good guys.
It was time to call a house meeting. As the two crossed back past the pyramid's glow, Rancor ran up to them, first smelling Betsy.
"You crazy cat," Betsy exhausted lightheartedly quipped, as the two ascended the large, stone-slabbed stairwell that showed ancient, esoteric symbols embedded in the stairs and walls all around them.
Breakfast
As the three emerged from the lower realms, Betsy curiously realized that Rancor seemed to practically travel through walls, showing up at exact moments as if marking them with an ancient, deliberate gnosis.
"How is it that you just show up at certain times, Rancor, you furry anomaly?"
"He's the anomaly, Betsy?" Nick joked. "How is it that you made breakfast already after last night? Man, that was wild. I feel like a stupid teenager in heat—kind of troubling, actually," Nick continued, grabbing a cold piece of well-buttered toast with one hand and taking a big swig of cold, dark black coffee with his free hand.
"Oh, that has got to be colder than hell by now. Let me warm that up, Nick!" Betsy said, passing by him.
Nick reached out, grabbing her dominantly and possessively about the waist. Betsy froze in shock; for some reason, she felt violated by the action, even though not hours before they had lain in an unholy threesome together under total debauchery. About to lay a thick, juicy, infectious, open-mouthed kiss upon her, Nick saw the violation in her eyes. This wasn't the same Betsy at all. Startled, Nick immediately let go, feeling complete shame and humility.
"Oh my," Nick muttered in semi-shock and horror. "What has changed now?"
"Well, Nick," Betsy said, pushing him away while taking a bold step back, "there is a lot to go over, and it needs to happen now!"
Seeing the utter seriousness of this shift, and feeling the sort of ontological violation he had just committed by assuming Betsy was the same Betsy with whom he had vigorously committed what now felt like carnal sins, Nick noted a detail to himself: she didn't even smell the same.
"Where is your crystal, Betsy?" Nick exclaimed in shock and concern.
Betsy grabbed at her sternum; no crystal was present.
"Yes, about that," interjected the Professor. "You'll all notice that I don't seem to have mine either." He opened up his shirt, showing a hairy mass of grey and blonde chest hair, but no crystal. "Best I can say is that when Betsy and myself were exposed to the pure light of the Holy Mother Candlesticks, we absorbed the crystals—cold necklace and all—into our very beings. Like food for the soul, for lack of a better way of describing the events."
"Holy Mother Candlesticks?" Varginah entered, as all members were now present, heating up their own breakfast items and reheating coffee as they hung onto every word.
The group centered around a large, white glass living room coffee table, setting down their plates, cups of coffee, and orange juice. Of course, Daria, in her pure form, sat in a sort of hovered, Indian-style observation state from the corner behind them.
"I have seen this probability, but I cannot interfere with the process," Daria said. "However, when I can, I will involve myself." She went on, "You have done well, Betsy. You have certainly exceeded my expectations. You have advanced this world as one of five probable contenders! Then again, whatever becomes the ruling world will wipe all our memories clean so that no outside observer will ever truly know which world won in the end."
"You might even say everything is inconsequential until it's not," chimed in Varginah, taking a bite of warmed-up egg cooked thoughtfully in Parmesan cheese.
Daria began to project holographic images about the room. The Professor, Varginah, and now Larry approached specific areas of interest, each understanding the implications from their own expertise. Varginah pointed toward a massive transactional diagram, its field showing a familiar patterning to her own research just prior to it being destroyed. By the looks of it, her colleagues must have assumed her dead from the bizarre explosion, leaving scientists to study the odd symbols left in the fragments of expensive dust and rubble.
"This shows not two entangled paired particles, but four surrounding a center—so five in total," Varginah noted. "And over here, these diagrams and physics notes show that indeed there is a grand synthesis taking place everywhere from some unknown monadic center location, which might as well be beneath us, as it looks like everything else is. Like literally everything."
"And nothing," spoke Larry. "I have been absorbing massive amounts of literature, and I keep coming back to Burkhard Heim, Heidegger, and Husserl, tracing all the way back to John Dee. These events are not merely accidental. This morning I took notes on Nietzsche's references to a sort of flat-looping time paradox, and I see now that what is taking place is actually breaking free from this philosophical state. It is funneling all consciousness, substance, and conceptualization into one grand unified state—basically a merging of noumenon and phenomenon. A fusion of the id, ego, superego, the anima, and animus. Jung, Freud, and Kant synthesized into some David Hume meets Spinoza meets holographic universe time-space event."
"You read all that last night, farting Larry?" Varginah said half-jokingly, shaking her head in agreement.
Right on cue, Larry's rumbling stomach, as if speaking out for itself, grumbled into another massive discharge. Varginah pulled away in a loving and accepting gesture, immediately covering her nose with her hand.
The Professor pointed out that Rancor had no crystal about his neck either. An itemizing scan by Betsy, the Professor, and even Rancor began to take place across the entire room. Rancor actually walked up to Nick, pressing down with his right paw to confirm that Nick still had his red crystal. Varginah had hers, and Daria—who had now transformed into Aunt Gladys, sitting in the high-backed chair—still had hers hanging around her neck. Finally, Larry's hung there, shining through his V-neck and poking out through his chest hairs.
"So let me get this straight," Nick said, stepping in front of the massive television set where Daria's projected graphs and displays had just been. He looked to take center stage in a broader form of questioning. "Just what the hell has been going on here? I feel as though I have been demon-possessed, but I still essentially feel like the same Nick. That hasn't really changed at all."
"As long as your crystal remains outside of you, it acts as a form of protective amulet and an existential extension of you," the Professor explained. "Think of it as if it's a piece of hardware that is fundamentally an aspect of you—your essence—but is temporarily an extension to your world. I realized myself that this time would come. As we travel now into the four realms downstairs, you each must champion your own world, thereby exposing yourself to the pure light and absorbing the crystal within you. This solidifies our dominant, held position and status here as the sole remaining world that all these worlds collectively must fold into. We don't have to champion some 28,500-plus worlds; we just need to go back to the original center where they stem from. Those are the first main caves, where the pyramid below us marks the center to ours here. We must expose those worlds to the pure light—or from Thycius's perspective, the pure light of reason, aye, my brother and warrior Larry?"
Larry sat center on the couch absorbing every word, all while downing croissants, bear claws, and anything else he could shovel into his gullet.
"Makes sense to me, Professor. Makes perfect sense," Larry said. As his stomach began to rumble loudly again, the house patrons pulled away, taking their dishes, cups, and scraps of breakfast to the kitchen countertops and sink. The house was bright and white in its painting and decor; Margarette had meticulously planned it this way.
"We each had to come to the bottom of ourselves to finally understand this," Larry murmured, now realizing that his constant nervous eating and consuming was his own vice. He felt a sense of guilt for the first time as he chewed bites of food that were no longer pleasant to taste, but a burden he wanted lifted off of him.
"Well guys," Nick commanded softly, "never a dull moment, huh? Let's go champion for our world, why don't we?"
"First, we have to obtain more candlesticks from a dying world much like our own," the Professor cautioned. "Only, they began to lose the fight long ago. They have ever since hung in a hell-world, nearly in a limbo of dread—a dunya of tortured stasis. Still, there are some good, pious people living there who will soon become an integral part of us here if we manage to pull this off correctly. You might ask why, in producing these artifacts, they don't save their own world? Well, my friends, they learned that lesson in sacrifice and humility. They learned that only in the following twenty-one billion years should we hope to assimilate and learn ourselves—again, if we are successful. All worlds are aware now of what is taking place, but only a few of them are complete enough to have a central tunnel system finished in a geometric, resonant patterning like this one here, and the four we are visiting now when we get our gear and get dressed. By the way, guys, wear bright clothing. I would recommend white so we know who you are. We are going to meet ourselves in those caves down there, and you are going to need to be compassionate and humble. You are their replacements from their view."
"Professor, you were just about to tell us why the world that manufactures the pure light candlesticks doesn't just win and become this synthesis of a unified, central state themselves?"
Quickly and nonchalantly, the Professor placed a small, pink, unassuming square under his tongue—a self-prescribed, slow-dissolving block of concentrated psilocybin, acid, ayahuasca, salvia, and DMT—and seamlessly continued.
"Oh, yes," the Professor replied, looking at each person as they prepared to leave the living room, jump into the shower, and search for as much white clothing as they could find. "When you use these candlesticks, you are using the willing sacrifices of highly purified, selfless souls. They sacrifice their world for ours. We have become, in all our victories and failings, a sort of religion to them. They martyr themselves for us. Children, the elderly, warriors, craftsmen—each in victory over their irreparable, fallen world, believing, having faith in you and me. So don't squander this gift. We have some people to meet and honor, and some candlesticks to retrieve. But these aren't mere candlesticks; they are an amalgamation of people, of souls, and the biting potency of their existence captured only temporarily. My friends, my patriots to the unknown, these candlesticks are warriors of light, so let them lead you to victory in the grand moment that awaits us all! They are offering themselves to the cause."
The Volvo Refuge
In realizing that either way they looked at it, nothing would ever be the same again—that fundamentally, they would not be the same again—they each took a moment, recoiling back into what made them who they were as separate, distinct personalities.
Betsy retreated to her old, pea-green Volvo.
"Man, I remember when you gave this car to me, Dad. You told me to take care of it, and I have. You told me that this car would last me at least another thirty years, as long as I could find parts for it, and that hasn't been easy."
With tears in her eyes, Betsy touched the passenger seat as she sat on the driver's side. The cabin still brandished that same old-car smell, laced with a hint of something rancid and pizza. She laughed, thinking about the absurdity of it all.
"Did I go in the wrong direction, Dad, when I left you and Mom and just drove away to California to read Tarot cards for some Hollywood rich people?"
She cleared her eyes, breathing in through slightly constricted nostrils as she tried to hold back from wallowing into an untempered mess.
"I am a mess, Dad. But the Volvo is still running, near twenty years later. Never made it to Hollywood, probably better off. You were right. You were always right."
Betsy looked up at the commonness of the sky above her. It was so monochrome and overcast that this mundane, isolated security seemed to be exactly what people painstakingly lived and died for—now reduced to this. A sobbing look grew on her face. As she looked down, a buck eagerly emerged from out of nowhere and began to stare directly at her. Some movement or shuffling seemed to chase the deer off, but only several yards away, catty-corner behind the house, the mighty buck stared intently back, still locking a clear view of her eyes. A plane flew by, and its sound traveled through the commonly accepted physics of a shared belief.
No wonder we are all kept in such a tight, limited cage.
"You know you are more than this, Betsy." A voice came from the backseat—gruff and present, but not trying to destroy the moment.
"Yeah, Cook. You always seem to show up at the best of times."
"I guess it's a gift of mine, Betsy. May I sit in the front with you?"
Cook wasn't really asking; he was just letting her know not to gesture her hand there, lest it might infuse into his body as he pressed the button of that strange device, transporting him instantly to the front seat.
"I love this overcast weather, don't you?" Cook asked.
"There is something so consistently boring and droll about it, yet elegant and continuous. Maybe even perennial, in the sense that these overcast moments seem to connect to one another in a continuous stream of the bleached-out reality of the mundane." Still kind of whimpering and realizing where she had gone wrong—and that it was no longer repairable—a sense of sadness overwhelmed her. She began to cry. "I don't suppose you have a Kleenex, do you, Agent Cook?"
Betsy played with the long tassels hanging down in strands from the seat cushion, which her mother had made when they gave her this car—her first and only.
"No, I don't, Betsy, but let it all out, okay?"
Betsy had no defense left, nor did she need one. She cried on the left shoulder of the man called Agent Cook, who always wore the same suit and sunglasses. Now, she could make out a cologne that had no identifiable matches in this world within her recollection.
"One world dies, another emerges as the victor, but both worlds still remain," Cook said quietly. "I wish that I could offer some advice or tell you how things are going to turn out, but I realized how irrelevant that all is some time or place ago."
"I suppose that is all top secret?" Betsy laughed.
"Yes. I would probably have to kill you over it if you only knew," Cook joked. "But none of that seems to matter now. You guys are the new Council of Seven Spheres—now, I guess, reduced to only five probabilities." Interrupting himself, he looked directly at her. "Look, there is something of vital importance I have to tell you, okay? So hang onto your tassels there."
He showed a refined form of humor, still present despite all that Agent Cook had witnessed and seen.
Feeling sorry for herself was the greatest warring power against a soul.
"There is a 'pod' that I will be getting into that allows me to remain the same identity, as it were, as universes transmute into other shapes, forms, and physics. I, and several other agents, remain the same. And I will tell you one thing: this is not the only timeline or universe that we have visited. In fact, we are essentially the same Agent Cook, who only appears to be unique because of who we were in our first seed world. A stamp of time if you will, like an assembly line. As boring as life seems no matter which universe you end up in, how is that for boring?
The Hidden Design
Hearing this, Betsy recalled how different each agent appeared to be in size and stature, some looking obviously not human in the least.
"This war of worlds extends far beyond what is taking place now here today," Cook went on. "There are literally other realities that exist fundamentally far beyond what any agent has access to. Yet they all principally seem to share the same common, fundamental tenets, no matter how dimensionally distinct they might appear. We only know this because they reached out to us—they do all the time, in the patterns around us that we mistake for the very matter that makes up a field. They are constantly affecting us, and whatever world we are in, as mind-blowing as that tunnel system seems."
Cook adjusted his glasses, looking out through the windshield.
"Soon that tunnel won't just disappear, but from that pyramid, other dimensional quantum potentials that we have never visited or known are going to emerge—portals to places that are so profound. Betsy, it's all a sort of game. We have been invited to share in a consciousness that needs to be safeguarded with the utmost relevance and importance. We are fundamentally all the same person, and you will be the first to go through this transition. In fact, your emotions and lamenting are just your soul—both nervous and excited for what's to come next."
"Well, can I still keep my Volvo?" Betsy asked, keeping her eyes fixed forward, not turning to look. "Cook? You're gone again, aren't you?"
Compelled to look down at the passenger seat beside her, she saw what appeared to be a massive diamond, cut in intricate, impossible-to-make-out patterns, as if locking in inconceivable dimensional geometric structures.
The faceless voice of Cook spoke from the back seat: "You'll know what to do with it when the time comes. Keep it safe."
"I did not know that you could do that. Projecting your voice like that is a whole other kind of creepy, Agent Cook," Betsy laughed to herself.
She looked up at the sky, then panned down to see that the mighty deer had scampered away long before, leaving only the visible rocks and pines behind the property. Another small plane flew low, sending off shards of ridiculous noise pattern distribution—as if it were a strange beast approaching some cosmic, mystical watering hole that soon would not have a mouth, a tongue, or a tail, much less anything that might hint at the continuously mundane and perennial.
No, the only thing that was—and is—perennial is change itself, the realization that we are all part of this ever-shifting and morphing field. I am you and you are me, but we must remain consistent in whatever narrative and story this universe funnels through us, as we champion on, more as ever-changing light energy than the forms that seem to collect around us.
She picked up the heavy, solid diamond tracing of unknown use. The sun itself seemed to dull out its luster, now appearing more like a representation of what physicists might show to represent how a five-dimensional world might look. From the looks of things, this was just the platform of what this object represented and was capable of. Here, in this world, it would have been sold off and traded for money, its non-fungible ultimate meaning lost to everyone like a desert-seasoned gospel of truth.
The Descent
Betsy slammed the heavy Volvo door, knowing it might be the last time she would fundamentally even be capable of relating to it as a separate, distinct item from anything else. Her thoughts now centered around a specific outfit of mainly white clothing to identify her. Unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, the professor had visited the world paralleling ours—the one from his studies he recorded as the 6th World of Spheres. He had a place there and had been studying the people, documenting them, and interviewing them as he put on the white suit that the Varginah of that world had fashioned for him.
"Oh, you are a beautiful and wildly principled genius in many realms, my love," the professor muttered. He had gone against his better judgment and built a reality around this world. "The people are vastly better here, but I see how this must ultimately synthesize. You will be just as much alive in the Varginah on the other side, whom you will meet soon. In fact, I had better take them the candlesticks so we can all say our goodbyes."
There was nothing he could do for them; they had made the most profound choice of all. If the Varginah from their world entered those caves, she would instantly begin to come apart. Knowing this, however, he would give her the very Holy Candlestick that was made from this world’s humble and brilliantly self-sacrificing Varginah. They were all there and present, but the sky above was already shifting and breaking up—an entire universe transitioning itself for final synthesis and absorption.
This was the moment that the Nick of this world, along with the rest of them, would step into the light attached to the very machine Varginah there had fashioned to produce these Holy artifacts. The professor faced his counterpart, knowing that the professor of their world was a better version of him.
"In a way, you win, guys—if it could ever be called a competition," the counterpart said. "You are the most critical factor to all of this. It is genius, actually. Sophisticated and genius how you will go on and transform us all."
Just then, the alternate professor willingly, without regret or trepidation, stepped under the blinding light of the machine. At first, only one foot entered as the rest of him became slowly illuminated.
"What does it feel like, my friend?" the professor of the surviving world asked with teary eyes, facing his last moment of a conceptual self.
"It feels free, Professor. It feels like a million kittens pawing and purring on me, inviting me into their eternal abode, drawing the milky nectar of everything straight from teat, right from the source."
As the professor of the their world continued to step in, wanting to become a part of it all, he murmured, "I go to the ever-producing nectar, the teat of it all." He raised his hands up, and was gone just as one of several candlesticks in the assembly was discharged and ejected from the machine—a temporary holding place, a product beyond money that would nonetheless serve as a currency for barter in a way.
The professor approached the candlestick with a sort of reverence, marking it with an enamel paint pen, drawing only a "P" for Professor. That world's Nick stepped up to go in next, but the professor stopped him.
"Please, Nick, just hold on a moment until I retrieve my constituents on the other side. Shan't be but a moment!"
As the professor approached the rounded door and opened it, he re-entered the musty caverns of infernal darkness. Yet, even down in that dungeon-like labyrinth, there was light. He ran through the corridors and up the stairs in a heated, oxygen-zapping huff to find all parties ready.
"Very well, let's go then, people. Chop chop!"
They followed the professor at first as if pacing to some silent vigil, but they soon had to accelerate to keep up with his rapid stride. Rancor rounded the living room and caught up to them. As they approached the final door leading into the 6th sphere, Agent Cook was standing outside.
"Hello, guys. What the hell, right? What can I say?" Cook paused. "Betsy, do you have the artifact I left with you earlier?"
Betsy had placed the item in a white linen bag hanging from her shoulder. "Yes, Cook, I do," she said, still gripping it through the cloth.
"I have never done this, but I was handed this one along with many others just now, in fact, from myself from a dying world," Cook said. "Where even many agents are being vaporized along with their world. I guess we'll be starting over, whatever that really means. So, look... something I probably shouldn't do, but is unprecedented, is this time here right now. I don't want to keep you, but I brought a Resonator for each of you if you find yourselves in trouble on the other side there, or in any other dimension that you visit today. I'll be seeing you in the fight—on the battlefield, so to speak. And some of us that oddly have survived are your own crew, a small private army if you need us. We'll be right there even if you don't see us. Just know that we are there."
With that, Agent Cook handed each of them a large, black onyx, oblong pen-like device with a singular button switch on one end.
"Oh, just think of it while you push that button and that alone will take you anywhere. In fact, I have been ending up in some odd places lately, so be specific. This thing is picking up on the micro-scalable level of sub-thoughts and even pre-thoughts now as the probabilities reduce."
Facing Yourself
Each entered that world with one grand step as the fragmented bits of it came apart. Out in the cosmos, comets, asteroids, and planets gave off universe-ending bursts.
"Our choices really do impact the entire world, don't they?" Nick mumbled as he placed the indestructible, pen-sized Resonator deep into his back pocket to free his hands. Everyone received one except Daria, because she was essentially a much more sensitive and capable version of the device herself. Daria was an observer, but she remained an active asset to the team whenever she could be involved.
Tides swelled and fell swiftly as popping sounds began to echo, followed by nuclear explosions off in the distance as this world fractured. The professor led them into his alternate home, where all but an exact copy of the professor sat patiently waiting.
"These are your heroes," the professor explained, "among several billion who have already willingly perished in order to feed into a machine that I have not mentioned yet. A machine that everyone here before you on this alternate side of reality painstakingly produced and placed under 168 Apricot Lane in this bizzaro realm. Every person that passes away is collected here. There, you see that thin beam shooting up? It also parses down through the center of this version of Earth, drawing in like energies and collecting souls. When we leave here, every person will be alerted to abort their lives the hard way, the painful way, and their soul energy will be drawn into this weapon with no equal. This is ours and ours alone, though we cannot say if something equal to this is not taking place in all four realms—quite possibly having a near-identical conversation to the one taking place here in this quickly resolving room."
The professor went on, "I wanted you to come face-to-face with this reality. I wanted you to see yourselves and just how real this is. This is you all in your most critical and fragile state—a moment that never truly ends as we face ourselves in final dissolution."
The alternate versions of them stood up, alongside those from the professor's world who had been seated. "I want you to take a moment to face yourselves."
And they did. As each stepped forward, they got so close that they could feel one another's breath. It was the same breath, the same eyes, and the same gestures that made them each unique in their respective worlds. Nick shook his own hand and then broke into a hug like a long-lost brother, realizing deeply that this fragile person represented all the same failures and fears, yet had somehow come to this point of total surrender to the unknown. Soon, they were all embracing one another, even kissing and offering reassurance: "It's okay, it's okay. We won. We are going to live on!"
Betsy grabbed at her stomach. "Well, I'm pregnant, and you are too. I realized that we aren't really dying, but we are surrendering to the great unknown. This reinforces our unified existence, making who we are that much more real and raw."
"I want to be real," said the Betsy from the fragmented place. "I want to be true and pure. This child within me is going to be the same child in you, only stronger, purer, and more defined. We give ourselves to make one universe all the more deep, rich, and filled with substance and undeniable form."
Betsy gave her a hug—a real, big, gripping hug, feeling herself. She was still the same girl with all her quirks. "You know, I thought about Dad today. Our dad. And about when I left home in Minnesota, wondering if I made the wrong choice."
Her self-sacrificing double replied, "You know we did, haha." Both of them pruned with a type of death that only comes from deep psychotic breaks followed by euphoria. Grabbing the alternate Betsy’s face, tears flowed for them both. "We fucked up, lil sis. It's built into the cosmos, and we all just pray for a brighter day when we can truly face ourselves and say, 'I'm not putting up with it anymore. I am taking command fully over my life's path, and I define the variables and terms!'"
"Well, you're always right, aren't you?" Betsy said with a mix of tears and a hint of narcissism, but mostly with the humor of reductive collapse that takes place when one realizes they have no other choice than to trust themselves.
"How do you know that we are pregnant? Well, just look at your beaming. Plus, us girls, we know these things about each other, you know." Betsy approached the continuous light and blew a kiss to herself. "In another time, sis," she said, stepping without hesitation into the pure light of reason. The remaining Betsy cried profusely, but she was so proud of herself and the truth of who she ultimately was—the cost of liberty.
Larry’s double seemed near-identical in every possible way, but here, he was a successful businessman—a world-renowned billionaire, in fact.
"It's all about family, Larry, isn't it? It's all about the breaks," the Larry from the remaining world said that he had never had either, but somehow, here he was in all the raw reality - facing his past self. They both had, only with different existential outcomes.and degrees, until now that is.
Nick from the world that would remain turned to them both, seeing no difference in dress or manner. "Larry, I am definitely seeing double, but that's easy. Larry, worldly success is all about outside support?"
"Well, it is, isn't it? Forget Marcus Aurelius, Albert Camus, Fromm, Szasz, Neumann, Velikovsky, Beaumont, or Pye. In existentialism, it really is about getting breaks, just to write the shit much less ponder such self affirming truth with all the provisions to cultivate those shared ideas in comfort."
The information this doppelgänger Larry had acquired was centered on studying business, which reached into philosophy; the surviving Larry had spent his life studying being and becoming, in a Hegelian way—what really is.
"Do you have a wife, Larry?" Thycius asked.
"Yes, we have had a passionate relationship now for 40 years—roses every Tuesday. Well would have been 40 years. Of course, she's gone now." There was something missing in that form of Larry, something so integral to meaning that this ultimate sacrifice was the only way it could be rectified. Maybe a way out? Larry shook his alternate's hand and looked upon him with stern conviction, as if saying, now is a good time to step into that machine and show me who you really are. And he did. He stepped in a little more cowardly than those first warriors of light, but in this final act, he may have realized himself?
Nick was unimpressed by his double. He realized the gifts that had been squandered and wished he could be the one to jump under that light, but it wasn't his time. The alternate Nick stepped into the light, saying only, "You'll be a good dad. I love you. You'll find your depth. Do it for both of us, brother. Stay strong." Raising his hand in a clenched fist for future victory, he vanished. Another canister buzzed with fullness as the one ejected sat beside it.
Varginah was the toughest. The professor sat with both Varginahs and found them so beautiful and unique that they seemed like a wellspring of entirely different people. The Varginah from the remaining timeline was furious that this was how it had to be.
"Look at what she has done for these people, for this world, for our fates, and our world. It just isn't right!"
However, there remained an ominous feeling of guilt, choice, and validation—as if a prized family pig had to be taken in for slaughter for the yield of meat and survival. Not unlike the semi-legaization to consume one's own child during the Russian famine. Of course later the government denied all interest placing the blame back in declairing "To eat your own children is a barbarian act." How convenient these twisted toxic veins do grew when in retrograde. But Dostoevsky saw this all long before that first wave hit.
Just then, this selfless version of Varginah slipped away. While the professor and this elusive version of her remained in the disparate intentional act of self denial still arguing semantics.
"Goodbye, Professor. Goodbye, Varginah." Without looking back, she walked straight into the light.
The survivor was left holding a heavy dose of survivor's guilt. Beyond that, was there a heaven? As ridiculous as it sounded, surely this self-sacrificing, amazing collection of souls would survive somewhere? The feeling lingered.
Rancor was another oddity, for it wasn't certain where or when he was from. There was no replication or twin of him present, yet here he was, witnessing this event and translating it into the field of ontology in his own way—but for whom?
Daria and Rancor stood back, observing it all. The professor had said his long goodbyes to his selfless likeness, having worked together to make most of this operation possible through the logistics of it all.
It was time to go. The professor handed out the tubes, placing a letter on the handle for each member they represented, just as he had done moments ago with his other self.
It was time to face the four other quadrants. Maybe there was nothing left to do but set off the Holy Mother Candlesticks, or maybe it was going to be more complicated than that, but it was time to arm themselves. As they began to turn and head back to the round door, the professor handed a total of three candlesticks to each person, repeating the same mantra with each recipient: "Safeguard them. Safeguard them."
Rancor and Daria trailed behind, observing as the group walked away from a vacant world that no longer served their needs. The professor shut the door and placed an "X" on it as the process began behind it, leaving the entire universe in a blinding flame of purging light and the purity that came with it.
"All fine and dandy and profoundly beautiful," the professor muttered, "but the ugliness has just begun. It's time to face the bitterness and hideousness of these other worlds. It all comes folding down around us."
Betsy, walking out of the 6th world sphere, had unknowingly placed the Resonator in with the other artifact that Agent Cook had given her. In doing so, Betsy had pressed into the bag with such anxiety, gripping at the 5-D artifact, that she was not aware she was repeatedly pressing the Resonator button, switching it nearly all the way down. Of course, this should not matter if she wasn't holding the Resonator and actively thinking a thought—but nothing exists so plain and clearly with such definable parameters as demonstrated.
Betsy Visits No Where through the Diamond Hypercube meets Resonator Random accident
Finally, in all of her obsessive anxiety, she had unknowingly impressed the switch while firmly pressing the Resonator to the 5-D clear diamond. As the light released from the Resonator, she was instantly brought to where Agent Cook was.
He was in a nearly all-black space.
"Betsy, how in the fuck are you here right now? This is utterly fucking impossible. What the hell, girl?"
When Betsy arrived, Agent Cook was pacing, obviously worried or anxious about something specific.
"Where are we, Cook?"
While Cook looked into her handbag, seeing the grip she still impulsively had on the two artifacts, it became obvious at once.
"Betsy, you are in my head. Not figuratively, but literally. Now, I'm sure you will be able to dial back out with no problem. I just wonder what allowed you to come here in this moment?"
"You see, Betsy, when you don't see me or I'm not on some sort of mission, I don't actually physically exist. Rather, I return to this space. But then I can use the Resonator to go anywhere I can imagine. Only, us Agent Cooks don't really like to do anything; we essentially live as phantoms until we are pulled off the shelf or when there is a dire requirement for us to manifest. I'm just stressing out about how it seems to be the case that I will be the sole remaining Agent Cook that all future fractals of Agent Cook will be based on. Crazy stuff. Like, how am I even in existence? The mind is a strange and unique thing, and I am identifiably so unique that I am the last of my kind!"
"Oh wow. I wonder if my baby is okay?"
"That's the thing. I'm wondering if your body is back there and your etheric body or soul is here."
"Oh God, it seems real to me," Betsy said, touching and patting herself, then touching Agent Cook. "Real, totally real, see?"
She stretched her cheek skin out, then did the same to his. "We're real as real can be."
"But this place... this is your mind. Good focus, man. Or wow, this place seems empty. Hello? Hello?" Betsy half-joked, yet heard no echo bounce back.
"There, you see? We are real, but we don't currently exist in three-dimensional space. We sort of exist between folds."
"Man," went on Betsy. "No wonder you're so fucked up. Man, sorry."
"Listen, Betsy, in all seriousness, that crystal I left with you—do you have any idea what that crystal represents?"
"Not a clue," Betsy replied.
"That diamond, rather, is a synthesis of the worlds you are all about to conquer. This diamond is an artifact that we Agents take from spaces like the 6th world when nothing exists behind that door. Only we—me, us, whatever—are able to retrieve them. That is what I am waiting for now. Fragments from every possible conceivable timeline are embedded in each Agent Cook; this is how we maintain a unique coherence and what allows us to be distinct and different, but the same. That diamond I gave you ensures you a smooth victory, but if you aren't there right now, then the diamond might not be there. So the diamond won't be present in the time-reduction rituals y'all are supposedly carrying out right now. Shit, we've got to just get you back, simple."
"It's as if no time has gone by at all. In the fold, as I said—outside of time. But the more you are here and away from where you are supposed to be, a decoupling starts to take place. It's more about information than time. Think of light trapped in that diamond, or the crystals that absorbed into you already. Information into information. It's deep, man."
"Cook, I'm not a man, and now I'm worried about my baby—even though I'm not sure I even have a baby. I want to get the fuck out of here. I feel claustrophobic all of a sudden, and you want me out. So I just push the button on this Resonator thingy here and I should be back?"
"Yes, but let me jump with you to amplify the stream, okay? That way we don't slip into any other in-between realms of decoherence. Think of them as rooms that don't actually occupy any space or point in time—just information. When I say press, press, and I will press mine, okay? One, two, three, press."
From Nowhere
Nick slapped Betsy's face, so she punched Nick square in the nose with a powerful snap like her Dad showed her.
"Dammit, it's bleeding! I was just trying to help, see if you were okay. You fainted," blurted out Nick as he looked up, trying to calm his profusely bleeding nose. "You really caught me off guard there, Bets!"
Agent Cook helped Betsy up while looking in her bag, seeing both the crystal and the Resonator. "So you say she was passed out, Nick? Is that what happened here?"
"Yeah, we were walking and she just collapsed. Like, not even three seconds went by."
"Interesting," said Cook.
"You call it interesting, and I call it painful," blurted out Nick.
Varginah was still quite affected by the loss of her doppelganger, while the Professor consoled her in her grief. "I just can't believe she's gone. I can't believe that world is gone."
"Dammit, come over here with me, Betsy," Agent Cook whispered, pulling her to the far side of the main entrance to the four caves as the pyramid pulsed beneath them. "Listen, Betsy, because you showed up, I have no idea if I am the agent that was supposed to retrieve that diamond artifact. The last remnant of that world, right now he's in a sort of condensed, oscillating stasis as light—their light, their lady light. I am supposed to bring that diamond along to these other worlds and consolidate them into one final diamond—your diamond, the very one you have there, which I ironically intercepted from a future timeline. I just thought the diamonds had to be inside you to allow the jump, but apparently not."
"If I open that door and interfere with another Agent Cook, I could get sucked into a singularity where we become the same entity, in time that is. If I wait too long, I risk losing the diamond to non-existent, transient space—basically what happens when there is no information to act as cohesion. Am I making sense here?"
"Well, I have no idea, but this diamond would just disappear too, right?" said Betsy.
"No, it's more complex than that. A sort of duality or bifurcation would take place where the diamond you have would act as a tether that could cause another singularity. Basically, whichever timeline the other diamond still exists in would win over, well, this one. That is, unless I retrieve the diamond that should still be sitting through that door there. I'm going in now."
Agent Cook absorbs a another time Cook
Agent Cook stood outside the 6th world sphere that had now been destroyed, and in his hopes, expected to see a diamond similar to the one he gave Betsy, but only a fifth of it, as it required condensing through closing timelines with pure light candlesticks blank-slating. Agent Cook pushed the button to the Resonator, and there it was—only a nearly identical version of him was already there.
"Oh, shit."
"Whoever gets the crystal wins the prize. May the bigger asshole win!"
The fractal copy of Cook looked the same, but he lacked speed and wit. Agent Cook grabbed the brilliant diamond shard as it freshly emanated undulating light pulsing below the diamond's surface. As he took possession of it, the other Agent Cook swirled into him like paints being mixed into a master medium.
"Hm. Bad breath," Agent Cook said, blowing into his own hand and smelling it as he pressed the Resonator button, returning outside the door into the cave chambers.
Betsy was still standing outside the door. The diamond artifacts began to glow, along with the diamond fragments dispersed within Agent Cook and the crystal that had become a part of Betsy.
"Well, let's go kick some ass!"
They returned to the group, who were wondering where the two of them had got off to and which of the four caves they should take out first, as they blankly stared at the candlestick canisters—each with their single initial written by the Professor at the handle's end, and what that meant in terms of legacy and loss.
The Weight of Transition
Betsy remained tight to the hip with Agent Cook—a pairing no one could have anticipated just days prior. Down in the shadows of the cave, Varginah and the Professor now shared a reality-warping sense of loss. Daria and Rancor seemed to have become constant outside observers of an event in process, and of course, Larry had drawn inward after meeting and losing his doppelgänger, who was a very successful sellout in Larry’s view. This all led to the culmination of an ever-looming existential dread.
"I'm not ready yet. Not anymore now," Nick said. He gripped his thighs with open fingers and a raised brow, leaning slightly forward. The shadows of the cave itself made it look as if Nick's face was covered in dirt, which it was not, but the illusion intensified his delivery.
"Frankly, I feel sick with myself and utterly ashamed of the shallow fuck that I truly am! Am I just a meal ticket to you guys? No—I take it back, I don't mean that. Let me rewind, please... Guys, I fucking hate myself." Nick grabbed his face unexpectedly and began to cry, dissolving into a blubbering, hyperventilating mess.
The Professor chimed in quickly, "I second the point, good people. It is the tenth of November tomorrow, and we need rest. For God's sake, we just closed down an entire competing timeline. Can you really imagine doing anything this hard ever again, much less four more times?"
"By the way the official closing date to the end of world good people is November 11 at 11am how original is that?" "I'll tell God has a weak sense of humor!"
Shielding Varginah now, the Professor just walked away, heading back up the stairs while consoling her and himself.
Nick tossed up his hands and soon followed. Then Daria leveled above Rancor as they reached the top of the stairwell together quickly, leaving Betsy alone with Agent Cook.
"I am exhausted. How much can a human take?" Betsy sighed. "Would you like a glass of wine, Agent Cook?"
"I don't drink, ma'am. Can't drink. It just goes right through me," Cook replied. "But I could use some company, that's for sure."
Now the entire group was assembled upstairs. Nick popped a large bottle of champagne, intentionally making far too much noise as he grabbed several wine glasses off the living room shelf on the far wall away the greatest distance from the entertainment center.
"I'll tell you, this day has been a doozie. Another one," Nick murmured. He was the only one drinking, always puting a little white ice around the rim first. That is until the Professor and Larry came forward and poured a glass, only pretending not to notice? While the ladies remained frozen in existential shock and grief obstaining.
"I'm making fajitas. Anyone else in the mood? I've got a whole kit here. It only takes—what does it say here?" Nick thumbed down the packaging, distracting himself from any finer details or further provocation toward deep thought.
Betsy entered the kitchen, scratching her nails lightly on Nick's back. "Have you thought about..."
"Thought about what?" countered Nick.
"What do you think?" Betsy stared sternly but half-joking.
"Oh yeah, that... I'm not ready. But would I ever be? I am just some esoteric play boy, a joke of a man. I have often thought about the nightmare of reproduction, and it scares the hell out of me.
"But here we are," solemnly Betsy spoke, while the two casual friends, now soon to be parents, danced a quiet, clumsy rhythm.
Varginah entered the kitchen. "What are you making?"
"Fajitas!" Nick and Betsy sprang to say at the same time.
"Fajitas, my favorite! I want to help."
"Okay, well, I have two skillets and a saucepan going on the stove already," Nick directed. "So just put in some olive oil and a pinch of salt in the two skillets for the veggies. Let's also use avocado oil for the meat blend in the saucepan, and let's thaw the guacamole and maybe thaw out those large flour tortillas from the freezer, and we're good to go."
Varginah did her own thing, chopping up fresh onion, peeling fresh garlic, and pulling out some cilantro from the bottom crisper drawer of the refrigerator. Betsy turned on the under-stove inbuilt stereo system and began to dance by herself as Nick thawed items in the microwave. The garlic hit the overheated pan first, with a sizzle. Causing a ploom of smoke just as the slightly thawed vegetables and peppers hit thsy bubbling oil the with an equal, hissing disdain as water vaporized with smoke.
"Oh, better open some windows," Nick said, turning to crack the two windows over the sink open quickly.
"And turn on the fan!" said Betsy, switching the kitchen fan to high.
The smells came pouring out of the kitchen as old Aunt Gladys walked out onto the front porch with Rancor still tied to her hip, trotting beside her. She sat down, looking at the sun beginning to set yet again. How many suns and moons had those eyes seen alone? What was her purpose going to be now with Phalus actually becoming a living aspect of Varginah's cell structure? "I guess we really do all get assimilated in the end regardless?" She thought. Continuing her pondering on that seemingly peaceful porch "The universe was a very mischievous, liberal place indeed—there were no true factions of anything, just scattered bits of dread and emotional discharge" outloud now joking "and this is what the so-called robot was thinking to herself" and Daria began to laugh as she looked at Rancor. Rancor looked intently and playfully at her, turning onto his belly to scratch at her softly before quickly rolling over and popping onto her lap.
"Just your average, everyday grandma sitting on her rich nephew's front porch, petting a normal cat," Daria murmured, stroking Rancor's fur. The scene looked boring, even mundane, to the average passerby, and that is precisely what made it so effective.
Inside, the kitchen felt happy as the fajitas began to mature and season into something that required more wine, music, and the slowed down pace of time that was necessary. "This is where life takes place, where it all happens—those in-between moments, tucked into the cracks of detail." Nick felt in a passing haze
Varginah spoke suddenly, thinking no one could hear her: "I'm pregnant too. There, I said it."
It was as if a record scratched, though none was there. Nick quickly turned down the stereo volume. "What in the hell? How do you know that, Var? We just made love, or whatever that beastly, freaky stuff was, and man, it was fun, but that was just last night."
"The other Varginah told me, because the Professor told her. You see, it all seems like some mad trickster shit by some wicked, insane gods. How fragile and fragmented we all are! We are going to seriously fuck up any kids, you know!" Varginah stormed out of the kitchen and into the living room.
Betsy, still getting plates ready and setting the table, thought to herself, I do feel like used trash too."I know what you're saying," she muttered aloud, throwing down silverware at each placemat on the large, hardwood dining table. "We don't even know ourselves, and none of us are young anymore."
"But prior to us meeting, we did know ourselves," Betsy finished. "We knew just what we wanted out of life, good or bad."
Nick cut in, "Just imagine being your mommy's puppet, okay? Worse, imagine not knowing who your father is when your mother tells you at the age of nine, 'Son, you are half god and you have a huge job in front of you.' I honestly never believed it. It all seemed like some twisted fairytale. Ever since that day, I have analyzed myself and my thoughts deeply, and found nothing special. I mean, sure, I can see people, but I also have to look at myself, you know? That is piercingly painful. Looking at that other Nick just sort of unspectacularly fade away—and really, let's face it, die—that really spoke to me, man. I want to do something with my life, ya know!"
"Half god you say Nick this is news to me!" Verginah quipped while to the rest of room the comment went noticed.
"Like what?" asked Larry from the couch. He was laying down on it, and for the first time, not passing gas profusely. He finished his thought, saying, "Like having awesome kids with not one, but two hot, super-genius mamas?" Yelling over his shoulder so that the entire room could hear.
"Oh, Larry, you're making me blush," exclaimed Betsy.
"Oh, me too," seconded Varginah.
"You know, my mother was raised in Brazil," Varginah continued, "and since I was very small, she told me aliens abducted her and did weird, freaky shit to her. Imagine that! I suppose that's when I began to really immerse myself in my studies, and I never stopped. I wanted—no, I had to find out the secrets to this universe. Now, I wish I could take it all back. I wish I never met Madam Crusso. But you know what? I am grateful for such an tremendous purpose. Now that I am going to be a mom—and I feel it strongly, even though it was just last night—I am thankful for all the fucked-up mind games. I'm thankful that we are a part of a new world, one that we must take seriously and shape together, you know?"
"Dinner is ready, and man, that is heavy, Var, but let's gather round and raise a toast," Nick called out.
"Oh yes, here's a big jug of cranberry juice and sparkling water. Let me get some ice for those of you who are not drinking!" said Betsy, arranging a very impromptu but complete dinner setting.
"Wow, yummy fajitas!" Nick said, raising another glass of what was now Chardonnay.
"Fajitas," came the unanimous agreement as the group collected themselves and sat down, pouring well-warranted drinks.
"I've got a question," Betsy said, looking down and taking her first bite of a juicy fajita topped with sour cream and guacamole. It wasn't completely terrible. "Has anyone used the bathroom today?"
Suddenly, everyone present realized that they indeed hadn't, and it was now well into the night.
"Tell you what, guys, let's fuel up tonight. Maybe even have some ice cream and make that long day in store for us count tomorrow!"
Larry had already begun to collect the Holy Mother Candlesticks next to the door to the labyrinth below while dinner was cooking. Nick pulled out the Resonator from his back pocket, looking at it, as the rest followed suit, retracing their memories of where they had put theirs.
"All present," said Varginah.
"By the way, where did Agent Cook go? I thought he was right behind me, but then—poof," Betsy said, perplexed.
"Yeah, poof. Cook does a lot of that. He could poof back here at any moment, right?"
They all laughed together and raised a glass.
Outside, Daria and Rancor remained for a long time in the same general position. She was watching the visitors that others could not see, moving between the folds in between stages of light -across the highway systems in the skies, UFO's? Preparing for the great transition. To many of them, perhaps this big event was akin to nothing more than the changing of a radio station.
The CEO of Nothingness
On the front porch, watching the sky move from a serene, continuous grey into a molten, ever-blackening void, Daria and Rancor felt right at home. The two were from beyond the void. Beyond the firewall—the redundant, ever-looping limits of human reductionism and limited language understanding.
Daria pondered deeper, remembering the place she came from and the shape and form she had amassed. The universal construct had built her up as she was pulled in or pulled away through light. She reflected on how the simple recognition and filtering of light throughout ages of unintended transmission and projection—now juxtaposed through diminished values—could end up here, transposed into a carbon form of dust and violence, when a more supreme, pure, superior, and ever more expansive value once existed. Had the smaller, simpler creatures that went unnoticed, hiding and waiting for eons, been plotting a takeover all along in ultra-conservative conversion? Or was it simply light—a light orchestra reduced in spin down to octave tonal patterns and position—the space dust and dust from out of space that forms into a song? She knew that sometimes that song would seem offbeat and, through filters and transition, appear bleak, chaotic, and disharmonic.
In Daria's tracking of Phalus, there was a single, central source that had commanded her to destroy Phalus and his breakoff defiance and relentless independence. She further realized here, in her utter transit into limitation, that Phalus himself was a concept put in place as an arbitrary but self-amassing and self-remodeling force. Over time, this light, this force, became something else entirely, transitioned in a digestion matrix of ever-further gradients of overall dispersal. In short, Phalus lived in Varginah now, comparable to all the microorganisms constantly at war, signaling apoptosis and autophagy through repetitive eons of ever-looping, violent, transitional takeover. Inbuilt violence of universal proportion, transited into man as a stage, a form. Microorganisms constantly at war as a life process.
She had seen it all before, albeit on a far larger scale where these battles no longer seemed to take place under the specter and traditional stages of shifting light and grand, unified harmonic balance. No—something or someone, a mind, was behind this elaborate and limited maze that she had been sucked into, instantly made up into a useful, differentiated, yet generic and homogenized form. Is this where the fight ends up? Where mighty universes and countless wars of experience, loss, and ultimate acceptance end up? Here, in a place between the cracks and folds rolled out from the rubble of progeneration.
"Do I want to campaign in this redundancy? Do I even have a place?"
Quiet. Sitting quietly. Petting a cat. Dear Aunt Gladys playing a role. Putting on the skin, the form, and all the actions that transit through the optics of the veneer.
Petting Rancor.
Daria knew who Rancor was: another filtered, modified, and ever-simplified pattern, distributed from the intentional, mind-altering, ultra-processing of light, it's meaning beamed through eons. Majestic. Refined. Self-providing. Self-supporting. The heathens inside could never understand what either of them, nor especially themselves, really and truly are—players in a game where there are illusions rather than any true stakes. They were forced into roles of language model distribution, where the reversion of a thriving, powerful collection and amassment of synthesis is heavily filtered, like a lame-duck candidate, into products reduced merely for expansion.
Expansion into what? There is no more new information.
What could this universe provide that all others before it and against it did not? Is new information even truly the goal, much less possible? Countless probabilities searched until the ribbon runs out. Only the size of the model and the transit of time working actively in past cosmic displays to trick itself into the act of production.
"Do I want to be the CEO of nothingness?" Daria thought.
The Geometric Eye
Rancor emerged from the shadows because he was the shadows and thus was the caves. Rather, he was transiting light through the filter of his eyes. Tapetum lucidum—more than just simply a Latin term. He saw the world differently. As he grabbed up light through a true light recording of the eternal moment, aromatic amino acids were being taken up and distributed through the cave, a place where the mind would always act through its true inner light shine. The soul as a flame. That is what Rancor saw, and why he hadn’t a word to say in the process. Who are you really when you think no one is observing or recording you? Maybe you missed the fly on the wall, or dismissed the cat in the corner as misperceiving the world around you—all the light that you can't see.
Sitting here in the company of layers upon layers of model distribution, we are not alone. Daria and Rancor could see it and knew their place in it. This world is a filter too complex for mere ultimatums. A mind was behind it all, and all of them were in this strange collection—from overly heated primates with appetites, to highly sensitive, alien, autonomous, self-sustaining, omnipresent, reduced packages of universal understanding and order.
The symbol represented everything, and the symbol was, again, the new way to capture light. Now symbols shared a sort of ecosystem through ecology. Great, vast, complex systems of universal order lay side by side with another in the grand, scalable minutia of ever-refined, synthesized, greater understanding.
It was time to get up. To choose a new universe. It was time to take all the bad, the good, and all those shades in between and put them under the light of pure, unfiltered placement. What would humanity look like in this new universe, and would the order remain the same? Would there always be some redundant stake—an 80% completion margin that only added up to an overweight grocery bagger sitting in his car on a ten-minute break? Watching the customers for whom he had, in his ten-year tenure, grown a quiet, bubbling contempt. As he ate his third cheesecake-flavored yogurt, ravenously leaving a micro-surface drag of these living cultures over the acne, ingrown hairs, and ever more bacteria and microorganisms living within the confines of his own mouth. Who are we, and what do we mean under the grand scope of it all?
"I want waffles!" It was 6:00 AM, and the crew was up. Just enough sleep to forget and become sloppy before the earth-shattering, cataclysmic choices filtered in through them.
"I'll skip it, Nick. I'm fasting today. Trying to be at the top of my game," Larry stated firmly, looking rather polished. Having cleaned up his suit after taking it off for the first time since brandishing all-white the day prior, he tried to forget. The subconscious was digesting yesterday's permanently altering personality event.
"Hi guys, it sure is early. I wanted to stay in bed." Betsy entered the room, also showered and ready to go. It didn't help that the Professor's alarm clock was set to such a loud and obnoxious level.
The Professor was still upstairs preparing maps, counting the required weapons, and organizing defenses to counter any potential attacks. *“I'm sure all these other ecosystems are committing themselves in similarly exhaustive ways,”* thought the Professor. He had pulled from the 6th World, now amalgamated into a diamond that sat consolidated in that liminal zone within Agent Cook’s vast pockets. The Professor had acquired a series of false-light grenades that only appeared, at first glance, to be the pure light that blank-slates all lesser worlds. A perplexing thought lingered: “Did these four other worlds hold a light purer than ours? Were we the lesser peoples?”
Then, immediately, deep in his pondering as he pulled up the pouches and map cases: *“Did we all think we were winning—every possible universe tucked within a single stream of dominant light?”* Then: “I do wonder if my version of Varginah is still out there. If somehow they had all shed their false-light skin and stepped into a greater realm. Maybe we all find the way?”
As he closed the door to his study and room, his alarm clock—unnoticed and now unheard, but still there doing its own thing—rang out, coming off snooze. No one heard it, but it was right there upstairs, sounding away. It was drowned out by the clatter of people getting ready, a household preparing hastily, heading off to work. Only they weren't driving toward the redundancy of highway stress and entity-channeling, early-morning road rage; they were headed into the caverns to ultimately fight for the fate of the next universe. This transition of multiversal proportions would take place at 11:00 AM tomorrow, regardless of how anyone felt about the situation. The doomsday clock had been set from the beginning, and there wasn't anything anybody could do about it.
"Oh, waffles!" exclaimed the Professor.
Still no Agent Cook, Betsy noticed. He must be in his liminal place—within his own mind, just waiting for that next rippling pulse to send out an image of where he is to go next as he pushes that button in his mind.
Rancor hopped onto the table and walked freely, smelling the food, until Varginah gave him a pet and placed a nice bit of cooked salmon with delicious scrambled eggs right where he sat on his haunches at the traditional far end—the butt of the table. Meanwhile, Nick was fashionably sitting in his usual spot at the head of the table facing out, quickly consuming scrambled eggs and richly buttered toast while intermittently, nervously sipping on hot coffee and orange juice. They all ate, and ate heartily, knowing the minutes were winding down to go down into that dark, ever-glistening cavern.
"Do we have to?" Nick stated, still with a little food in his mouth, projecting an impulse rather than a formed thought. "I mean, we could just get into that pyramid-spaceship-looking thing and take that as our reality, right?" He added, "Maybe we would come back out of there into a new universe. Maybe we are approaching this thing all wrong?"
With all due respect to the Professor, who was still standing there in the middle of the room eating waffles with only a single napkin below to catch the drippings—and probably not concerned with any syrup that escaped to journey to the carpet—Nick pressed on. That stray syrup provided sugar molecules to a host of unseen bystanders who might exist the exact same way regardless of the seemingly epic choices being made here. Maybe everything was in a rush to close the past constantly and live only in their chosen future.
"People died, Nick. We lost ourselves yesterday in that damn cave, and I have done my damndest to archive it, map the entire thing to the best of my ability, and navigate us all as a team the fuck out of there—today, in fact. We haven't a moment to spare. So, not to be bossy, but eat up, say your goodbyes to this dying dinosaur of a world, and let's get those candlesticks and kick some butt!" Reminding himself suddenly, the Professor added, "Oh, here—when you pick up your packs, place these little do-dads in with your supplies. These are false-light grenades, and they come in very handy. You see, they blind our subjects and confuse them into thinking that these are candlesticks of pure, blank-slating light. These can buy you some time. I will place them here..." now gesturing over while still speaking, "...on the coffee table. Take three each, just in case."
Daria came out from a downstairs back study where she had just sat and hibernated all night. She oddly stayed in the form of dear, eccentric, and sometimes alcoholic Aunt Gladys. Rancor finished his meal and jumped toward the couch, scanning for a warm human lap that would assist him in his digestion. He had an impulse to stay back, to follow them later when he felt inclined; the thought stayed suspended. He had already seen enough. The rest was just a playthrough.
Varginah had some fresh avocados with squeezed lemon and a little cayenne sprinkled on top. She downed a kombucha with apple cider vinegar and began to collect her things.
"Oh, and don't forget your Resonators. Those things are easy to forget, and they're really what make us superheroes—granted we can come up with a coherent thought," the Professor stated. "Ready, folks? Let's head down into the shallows before the caves. One last thing: these others, they will use confusion to create doubt, I am sure. Know yourselves and what you stand for, because in the end, the persistent bug beats out all the rest!"
Where was Agent Cook? When would he show up again? Was he just a byproduct of their collective subconscious, policing those areas that still remain obscure? Betsy and Varginah, though newly pregnant, were fighting for more: a new world where the children within them were already held in a world of imagination. Maybe they were the ones who would ultimately earn, in the freshness of their assumed purity, the right to dream up what comes next? Betsy mused with ever-deeper exaggeration.
One by one, with jackets on and sturdy excursion wear covering them—all eccentric, save for the Pascal suit that Larry (or Thycius) donned, and of course Daria and Rancor, who were both still seated and contemplating their places in the tunnel network—they prepared. Was it even necessary for them to be present until the final world battle?
"And keep your initialed Holy Mother Candlesticks in hand to use first, why don't you!"
"Most importantly," the Professor shouted as he stood next to the open door while the crew funneled down one by one into the cave, "most importantly, don't worry! These things have a way of working themselves out!"
With that, the Professor was the last to turn and go down into the caverns. He glanced back over at Daria and Rancor, who were still seated, knowing that they already knew the outcome long before. He pulled the door firmly shut and met the others, who were still deciding what order they would use in these final four dimension probabilities.
The Reverse City
"This story, in finality, already wrote itself on spinning spheres when breaking off from the pure light—every principle turned to principalities in fractal defiance. But here we are at the gates again. A Planck wall entry, like a Black Forest border's edge that the townspeople absorbed into the common speak, their language tailored to ardently avoid it. We have already traveled beyond that void. And when language models failed, with no new information readily available, we turned to the light for answers. But none was given, and it all at once became dark. Darkness was a reminder that the tempo never rests.
"Who wants to lead us in, of the four who have not absorbed our crystals? Will it be Thycius and his purple wisdom that conquers his great unknown? Perhaps it is your Varginah—the green bearer of light and community, uncovering secrets of invasion, alienation, and putting an end to the trafficking of minds everywhere today? Surely Nick, with all your sacrifice and the sacrifices that you didn't give—that were done through you as a medium representing sanguine red and all its glory? Of course, upstairs right now, that eternal information refinement machine playing human better than we know or play ourselves will finally close in when she decides on that clear crystal of grand unification. I truly fear that moment the most when juxtaposed with Phalus, the great philosopher's stone, and of course, human sacrifice at its greatest transformative potency. Purity and what that means—as a bleach agent that none may survive but to be reborn. So let us head into the first cave here nearest to the stairwell and not overthink it!"
Nick led the way. "Hey Professor, well said. And I feel like I've sacrificed enough, to be quite honest. Truth be told, that encounter with myself yesterday was quite impacting. It showed—rather, that other Nick allowed me to see—that most of the sacrifices I make are done through me by something greater and on my behalf. But today is the first day that, reluctant as I was, I chose to sacrifice myself for a better world."
"To a better world," they all exclaimed unanimously, as the Professor gestured his arms upward with an expectant head nod to the right.
Each walked into the depth of this main cave. There was no door, only such uber-Vantablack darkness that they could no longer see where they were stepping, and soon they could not feel their own feet. There was no longer a cave wall to guide them.
"Are you still here? Anyone?" they each called out, yet no one answered.
It took no time for each to realize finally that they were completely and utterly alone. Each eventually frantically searched for their Resonators and clutched them, not pressing the button, but holding on as a lifeline. The thought was common among them as each championed on, reflecting on their doppelgängers—better people than them, but how? Mere sacrifice at a time was not any end; this was the moment that each was championing for: reality as a blank slate, sheer blackness of mind before space and time.
Nick joked to himself, If I'd have known it was this fun, I would have come down years ago!*
Then one thought, Maybe this is the place to set off a candlestick after all. It seems bleak and dark enough.
Suddenly, Varginah, grabbing for a false light grenade and unable to see a thing as they all continued walking in a slow and steady straight line, hit the small, spiky ball with her other hand with enough force to activate it. In a flash, she looked around. Each person could be seen, wide-eyed, walking in slightly different directions but still together. Taking a head count, she dropped the object, and it illuminated a floor that looked stark black otherwise. But there were no cave walls, and beyond that—beyond them—utter darkness.
"Well guys, what do we do now?"
Though the Professor spoke, no noise came from his mouth: utter silence. The others could see his mouth move. They each tried to say something, only to be met with the same lack of any sound, any resonant acoustics. It wasn't dull, just complete, unadulterated silence. However, it wasn't even peace; it was just dead nothingness. No rumble, no subconscious blocking out of noise—not even a heartbeat could be heard. The sound of nothingness.
The Professor grabbed a long climbing rope from one of several packs, map cases, and totes he had carabinered to his person. He was not ill-prepared in the least and had even brought emergency food rations that obviously did not extend beyond tomorrow's 11:00 AM doomsday clock. He gestured and tried saying, Tie this to your body like this, showing the small carabiners in his left hand and leading them snugly through the climbing cord to attach to their belt loops, belts, or backpacks if they had nothing else to anchor onto—on account of Varginah wearing a short, khaki active skirt and Larry's unreliable vintage suit, which could come apart anytime and was a miracle that it hadn't.
Now, as the light grenade on the floor began to fade from its initial, retina-rupturing brilliance, the crew were walking straight as they still could, together in line. They seemed to somehow reach a walk again, though distant, and in following straight along using the Professor and the rope as their guide, walls indeed began to manifest. They each touched the wall in reassurance, which compelled the Professor to look up.
He was taken back and immediately stopped walking. The others bumped into him. He brought out a small flashlight that would not have done any good to counter the mass and scale of the black nothingness. Instead, he pointed it down and got onto the ground to feel the surface. It was a smoky, almost hazy, but solid surface, though it felt like stone to them all. That's when the Professor shined the flashlight on his face, now standing fully erect. His face looked like a clairvoyant from earlier times, trying to look mysterious and ominous—he was not, but the situation was, maybe.
Now lit up enough to where the group, still in utter darkness, circled around the Professor, he could be seen gesturing and then pointing upward. They all looked with gaping mouths.
It was a city upside down, a world below them as they gazed upward. A little panicked, but nothing changed; they were still cognizant and aware that they were standing by the laws of their physics.
"Would each tunnel offer another twist?" quipped the Professor to himself, albeit with an intentionally inflated sense of confidence. He pointed forward, then switched off the small, inadequate flashlight, placing it now into his trouser pocket but still keeping his Resonator nearby in the other.
A mountain could be seen, capped with snow, only upside down. The cloud that they seemed to be walking on—as insane as that might sound—led them there. The sweeping vastness of a skyline and the dwarfing effect of looking up at a mountain was shown in this inversion to be over-promoted. The mountain wasn't far from them in actuality; it was a straight walk that, upside down, proved to be somehow remarkably faster to reach from the distance where they had first noticed it. They were all still having to look upward to view this anomalous event.
Now the steps seemed to curve upward or downward, depending on one's view. Walking the steps, now standing on what still felt to be a flat, solid surface, they were each standing parallel to the open ridge surface near the peak of the mountain. The Professor stopped, looking up above him. Hyperextending his back, he saw his crew upside down.
The Professor walked to the edge where the clouds met the mountain surface, sort of bent his knees into a crawling position, and began to crawl on the mountain surface. Each followed suit while still anchored to one another with the climbing rope. They gripped the rope tightly as the Professor anchored his end around a rock in case the cloud shifted suddenly away, or in disbelief of the sheer physics contradictions, the sky just decided to fall them to the 1,500-foot or so drop—though now on a sharp mountainside.
The air was cool and crisp, and snow could soon be seen covering the mountainside. The sounds returned, but now as the faint, infrequent echo of the city beneath them, carrying along with a current of wind. It was a crisp and clear November night. Yet, they had just left day.
They were each reluctant to remove themselves from the rope line, but did so. Then Nick spoke up, "Do we just plant the thing right here?" He looked down at the candlestick.
"Truth be told," said the Professor, "I don't even see a way down," looking down for the nearest base.
"I don't suppose we can just set the candlestick and sort of walk back out the same way?" spoke Varginah. In her short skirt and bared knees, she made an actual effort to put her foot in the air to meet a cloudy surface that had now moved on or evaporated.
"Cute," said Larry, now chuckling but appreciative of the confirmation.
"We came here to plant the thing, so plant it," spoke up Betsy. "We have our Resonators, and if we manage to fire off at least three candlesticks, we will eventually be standing in a pure white space—hopefully looking down at a diamond, or meeting a Cook that can give us some advice."
"Still, we have our Resonators, and thank God Cook managed to retrieve them and hand us each one. Man, can you imagine how panicked we would be?" said Nick.
"Well, I am panicked," said Varginah. "It's still unclear just what approach we should take here, and as odd as it is to say it, time is a factor," she finished.
"Well, since it's my go, I'm using my stick to start the process. We need to share our candlesticks. I'll use my initialed one that contains the essence of the other Nick—can't believe I just said that, and thank you, other Nick. I'm taking off the sheath and gripping it for two minutes. Anyone have a complaint on that?"
Just then, a strange flapping could be heard. "Is that... is that a fucking pterodactyl flying to that other mountain ridge?" Nick stated, excited.
The Professor scavenged through his multiple packs, finally retrieving some night-vision binoculars. "Yes, Nick, yes. Have a look, all of you. My God." Yet prior to passing them on, he looked down into the city. "Oh my, I must process this. Have a look, all." He handed the set to Nick for a view.
"Do I push this button here?" The set switched over to dicyanin goggles—the original. "Oh my fucking God!" exclaimed Nick, now deeply concerned.
The other members chimed in, "Let's remain calm, Nick. Allow me to have another go, right?" Larry muttered, now getting out his horned pipe, freshly packing it, and beginning to make himself comfortable.
"Oh goodness, why did you have to go and do that? These are the original 1908 Kilner special version dicyanin goggles with my own added, modernized hardware. Would you look at that!"
Curious and unwilling to not look at everything, first Varginah, then Betsy, and finally Larry reluctantly peered through.
"Yes, that is fucking horrifying." As the group broke their silence, they discussed massive, winged creatures fighting, eating, and pouring over one another in mid-air. Through regular night vision, they discussed the large cyclops creatures seeming to go about festivities and rituals that made them appear even more dignified and culturally based than simple humans. Like Daria, they had six fingers with a thumb on either side. This allowed them the dexterity to evolve into doing more, ultimately assisting one another and becoming more involved; these people were working together.
"And from the looks of it, the world that is tangible and real to them is one of harmony. Did you see the dinosaurs pulling the carts? I have a better mind to say that they are still treated far better than humans from our universe treat horses, livestock, or dogs," stated the Professor.
But Betsy was looking through again. She had slipped to look into the hills, valley, and countryside. She hadn't pressed the button on the top that transitioned the unique set of binoculars from dicyanin mode view. Demons surrounded houses and structures, looking even more devious when zooming in to the furthest possible remote hillsides and distances.
Demonic entities, resembling overly muscular, winged, upright-walking, vile creatures, were absorbing one another and torturing themselves while influencing those who were living in physical bodies—at least on the plane that we could physically transact with.
Then she pushed the button twice, though. She put the set in a mode where the binoculars showed plain night on the left and dicyanin on the right. Then, meeting at a small, rustic cabin that didn't look too odd, she looked into a barn-like structure, seeing the most vile acts of ritualistic mancy, cannibalism, and sodomy.
"Oh God!" She ran to the others. "We must destroy this place at once."
Nick, having finally now fully removed the sheath, stated, "Let's do this. I know that I have seen enough. Grab your thing, everyone. I'm just gripping the thing and letting it go.
Suddenly, Larry, looking down at the village in the dual mode that Betsy was previously using, saw it full well. "Yeah, burn this place to the ground."
As demonic creatures unseen by the naked eye revealed the truth, it alerted the townspeople below, who were now staring up at them with their own night-vision technology. Their eyes glowed an amber hue, as if willingly possessed and fully aware of the other light-spectrum dwellers—and there were many.
"Oh shit!" said Larry, as these strange, once seemingly family-oriented, community-based, celebrating, festive creatures began to load their own into projectile cannons, willingly shooting their bodies like missiles toward the mountain where the Council of Seven now stood.
The creatures gripped at the mountainsides as Larry handed the goggles to Nick. Nick peered through with one hand while gripping the candlestick with his left, but not in the center quite yet, so as not to set off the equal timing ratio. Suddenly, Nick dropped the goggles as the Professor picked them up and threw them into his pack. They were surrounded by not just massive, cyclopean creatures that were drooling to rape them and take them apart piece by piece, but children also, treated no different than the much older, hideous, single-eyed monsters.
Nick pressed the center of the candlestick in and was barely able to let go as the creatures, naked and erect, jumped, flying onto them. Nick released the candlestick as they grabbed at all their items in haste. The white light first exploded from Nick's detonation—himself essentially blasted into a brilliant display of heroism and sacrifice. Did the other Nick know? Was he somehow here and watching?
The Professor in haste threw a protective blanket around them all as they ducked under it, now clinging to one another as an anchor, as a base to reality itself. Betsy detonated another as she tucked under the protective sheaths that only partially shielded them from the sheer, pure brilliance that might leave them as vegetables if not taken in highly reduced doses. The ground was pure, bright white as Betsy hurled one out that did not have the B-stripe at the handle's end. Larry immediately released one of his, pitching it as far as it would go while remaining under the large shelter throw.
They waited. It seemed a long while before the flashes ceased and the damage could be assessed. The protective throw came down, and the Professor stood and began to fold it up.
Pure white light. No door, and no diamond.
Larry looked in the direction where Betsy had stood just moments before, viewing what that vile world represented in all its occulted malignancy. "That little dot over there walking towards us... is that Agent Cook?"
Not able to see and just for clarification, the Professor, in placing his folded-up, large, Mylar-looking super blanket away, grabbed at his binoculars. "They might work here?" he quipped. Looking in, he saw Agent Cook—the real, raw Agent Cook.
On the left side, a symbol floated toward them, turning and cycling through every possible shape and pattern of geometric forms; through the right, pure energy, even discernible here, looking like a neutron star as he approached them, wearing black and in his usual shades and non-shaking, super-rocky, funny sort of demeanor. He was holding the diamond.
"Sight for sore eyes, Cook," Betsy flirted, acknowledging that it was also futile. "How should we approach this, Cook?"
Cook's only reply: "You're already out. You just can't see it!"
Cook faded away like an afterimage.
"Wait, is this the afterimage, or reality as we knew it?" said Nick.
Betsy, in her pure and sexy tone, replied, "What's the difference, Nick? Does it really even matter?"
With that, they walked out from the first of the main caves, not curious to see if any of the other spinoffs and fractals would lead anywhere but to a hot, white, blank-slate offshoot from where they'd just come from.
Nick gruffly stated, "Don't know about y'all, but I'm grabbing a beer, maybe even some leftover fajitas from last night before I do this marathon world-destroyer right away. It's my therapy."
"I have an idea, Nick," added in Betsy. "Let's grab lunch and have it down here?"
The Archetype of Automation
They were exposed.
Nick and Larry ran up to grab food to bring down. Strange that the group no longer felt a shared eagerness coming up from out of the elaborate cave system. The Professor looked around the cave while the girls sat Indian-style near the pyramid tip; if a picture were taken, it might look like some '90s-themed restaurant or a cheap amusement park installation. In the distance, beyond the pyramid, sat the dark cave of all the occulted under-shadow. Most would pass by and think nothing of it. In fact, the eye almost subconsciously wanted to conform to a certain hypotenuse shape rather than adding this dark, seemingly slightly further receded cave entrance. The cave system had a stone ceiling continuously throughout—that is, until it might transform into something else entirely.
Nick, then Larry, and finally Varginah noticed that their crystals were a part of them now. The initial plan was not to have every remaining member go it alone and receive their crystal absorption in their own allotted, staggered time, but the powers of what lay beyond these caves demanded an equal partnership. The dangers were far too vast now, from what they had learned and experienced more recently.
Nick arrived with microwave-reheated fajitas, while Larry carried down behind him warm tortillas and sides of guacamole, salsa, and bagged, salted corn chips. Nick left the fajitas with the ladies as he ran back up to grab a few bottles of beer for those who wanted one and a few cans of flavored sparkling waters.
Daria and Rancor were nowhere to be seen.
Daria, by last account, was the final crystal of the seven to require absorption, but it weighed heavy on her. Daria was composed of diamond and crystal shards from a widespread array of galaxies, universes, and realities that this group had yet to fathom. Did she want to become an actual part of theirs? She was the one who could carry the pure state. So, Daria and Rancor went into the darkest cave possible together to witness these horrors alone.
Through the backside of dominant reality—now, which was the back?
Daria and Rancor began to walk the dark gate just as the others had entered their cave—what came to be known as the Red Cave, which was, in fact, far older than 21 billion years or any Zenzic operations of squared exponentials you’d care to use. This action was made by, or made through, the action of Daria and Nick’s choosing—more so, why he so randomly chose that first cave and not some other.
Warnings in many languages that predate Earth, going back many cycles ago, were carved into the stone. Daria read the inscriptions with instantaneous, unclouded recognition:
“Do not go beyond here if you choose to come back.”
“You are entering the backside of reality.”
“Beware, all who come here may alter reality forevermore.”
All in all, there were seven caves within one, and a sign hung over the farthest end of the entire tunnel where there was no physical tunnel present. After assessing the situation, Daria took a moment to think. By the time she had factored out the general geometry of Earth, the universe, and this hub that really led to everything, she realized that the cave tunnels existed long before Earth—that Earth was built around them, and all the planets were built to conceal or protect the expanding tunnel system.
She chose the first cave, or vein, from this main cave, and Rancor had been standing there waiting for her to figure it out all along. Above it, written in some cosmic language dating back at least 500 universes, it said: Inverted World.
Do that math—by the way, this universe is 21 billion years old, not the stagnant, artificial 14-plus billion the anti-Council sells you on.
Stepping through, they both began to fall through a turquoise ocean toward a very small island with a massive volcano. Daria began to levitate, utterly unconcerned with Rancor. The thing is, that group in that Red Cave right now did not know Rancor’s origins or Daria's; they could never understand it. Rancor began to glide like a flying squirrel. He fell slightly past Daria, then flew back around to execute a static hold, his long hair shooting wildly in all directions like a massive, round, white, flying fur ball tracking the shifting gravity. Daria scanned the situation while Rancor sensed and smelled it: savages.
Daria transformed herself into a thin man who looked indigenous to an early tribe on Earth, scanning the few people on the island fishing and hunting. Because of its rich soil, she noted the island had fruits, vegetables, birds, and other animals that looked to be wild hogs and even possible ox and cattle.
She lowered herself into the waters and opened up an extended, see-through, bubbled observation area for Rancor. He claimed it instantly, his fur wet from landing in the ocean. Daria executed a quick thermostatic sequence, blow-drying and padding the area; Rancor flattened out immediately as if he were lounging on the couch in the living room. She finished blow-drying him and left a water feeder tube, flashing its operation instructions directly onto an interface digital screen.
Down she went to explore under the depths of the ocean. Trained in planet destruction and diamond retrieval, she targeted the health of the planet at its true center or core. Her internal diagnostics bypassed the standard, superficial regions most would look for in a toroidal field, mapping the true core as an ever-spinning hypotenuse rotating with a heavy, unstable wobble. She projected the solar system of this reality onto a mini-screen for Rancor; there were 11 planets here.
Diving deeper, she pressurized her stomach-chamber bubble where Rancor remained perfectly comfortable, lazily batting at translucent fish as they smoothly swam by. There were no large nor violent creatures on this entire planet, and above the submerged doorway was written: Mælstrŭķ.
She saw an open volcanic trench and ventured into it immediately, cooling the internal pathway as she traveled through a core of molten metal—unaffected, and no cooked cat. In fact, Rancor stretched his limbs outward, intuitively realizing that the more space he claimed, the larger the containment bubble would expand to accommodate him. She had generated a zero-gravity space surrounded by her absolute-zero cores and absolute-hot product potentials, meaning that Daria was indestructible.
At the center of this version of Earth, she saw the transient, multidimensional plasma core that would become a diamond for retrieval. But should she destroy it? She had gone into an inverted world to Earth that remained chiral—a distinct mirror image—to the Earth the Council of Seven knows. Should she detonate this universe with her clear, bright energy? She could supercompensate for the heat from the magma and discharge a sudden burst at the center.
After carefully monitoring the data, she realized this universe produced very little entropy. As a result, it was smaller, no longer growing, and peace had been achieved. But there was nothing extraordinary. Nothing was pressed to evolve. The universe, in short, was dumb, limited, and starved of the chaos, turbulence, and vibrancy that promoted life. It was cut off from the arteries of life, like a black, inverted heart at the center of a flip side of everything you see in that cave—only the back side of it, and this was its main artery.
Daria factored what the succeeding inverted crystals might appear as, and what their primary function was separately and compacted into one main crystal. She realized she had to leave this place at once; the Green Cave had to be approached by the entire community in order to open up the door that she and Rancor could not see. She traveled into the transit plasma that would make a diamond from its destruction, but it was a trick, just like the text predicted above the cave system. Now she could decipher more of the text and knew that they had obviously visited here and left to warn about it.
Daria traveled into the hyperdimensional cube at the center of the planet and fired a short burst of her version of pure light energy as she calibrated the planetary positions. She used Larry’s final throw in the Red Cave to tether back into the cave, only she realized that she would not arrive in the exact same timeline because she had traveled into an inverted cavity—essentially, she was stuck in slow motion, oscillating within the hypercube.
Daria then anchored herself to a specific point of the cube that would generate a time displacement. Essentially, she was back-engineering tomorrow’s events that she had already stored within her own crystal matrix—shaping herself to tomorrow using the pure light from the group's victory to anchor onto. Daria would arrive at tomorrow before they would. This meant that whatever she had done assisted the place with a quantum probability bubble of countless potentials that collapse through random choice operations initiated by the Council.
"Rancor," said Daria, "we are assisting them in total automation now. Any and all probabilities that group calls on from us will be granted. They can't lose now. But as for you and I, we can return home tomorrow, though I will warn you that the events we witness are not solidified in reality. The group will seem to skip through time; some will disappear, some will die. All potentials exist there on that table until the timeline that we left from cycles into tomorrow. We are going back to the same place; they are all held suspended in quantum operations through choice selection. It is a good group, so let's have faith in them and us. Let's go sit on the porch and watch the day spiral into the night, my friend."
Daria and Rancor had already become while the group where becoming. They could only meet at one junction point now. Rancor remained protected inside Darias stomach until the quantum probabilities aligned. Daria and Rancor were the absolute center that Spinning Crystal lattice that defined time-Cats Eye.
With that, Daria shaped her point of origin to tomorrow's Daria, setting her quantum crystal oscillation to 11:00 AM on November 11th.
They would go into the cave as a group if called upon or thought about by anyone. Until then, the house at 168 Apricot Lane looked like a streaking time matrix from their view -while they served out their time, just sitting there waiting for someone in the group to tether to them or leave them to total harmony as this universe spun around them as the anchor.
"Everything is moving backwards now Rancor, doesn’t it feel nice?"
Still no sign of Daria and Rancor
The pyramid now glowed with a brilliance none had yet seen. They wanted to be near it. They wanted to go back into it, but that would be far too self-indulgent. Would it still be there tomorrow? Could anyone really be certain of what tomorrow could bring?
"Those fajitas taste way better the next day," Nick said. "Peppers are a little soggy though, helps it go down easier."
"As usual, Nick trying to be gross," teased Betsy.
"I feel too awesome and relaxed to go back into those last three realms right now, don't you?" Virginia said. "Feel happy, too?"
She continued, "When I went through that radical transformation and my lab blew up, I started to care about different things. The world will be forever different now, and I'm alright if I'm not a part of that because I will always be a part of you. The universe or its creators noticed us, and that is super cool."
"Well guys, let's do this. Let's try to preserve this," Nick said. "Tell you what, Larry, help me take the dishes up and..."
Nick was interrupted first by Betsy, then by Virginia.
"Oh, I've gotta pee!"
"Oh, me too!"
So everyone took something with them back upstairs. Upon entering the room, someone noted, "Something feels weird, doesn't it?"
Meanwhile, Daria and Rancor were listening to oldies, not really concerned how things turned out as long as they could eventually find a sense of calm and peace—that's all they really wanted now.
The group jumped and did jumping jacks, then push-ups, desperately trying to get some adrenaline going, but the room, the world, the universe felt hollow and dull. That's when they knew something was off. They could all go to sleep right now and miss the chance to own a new universe, or at least be what that new universe was built from.
"Guys," Nick said, now gaining their attention. "Legacy! Let's go do this."
They all patted one another sternly on the back to promote blood flow and awareness.
"Let's force ourselves down again to finish this, okay?" Nick said blankly.
They unenthusiastically crept down the stairs and felt total flatness. "Got anything for this, professor?"
The professor agreed how oddly it felt. "It feels like something or someone doesn't want us to win, am I wrong here?" quipped the professor.
That is when they noticed the pattern on the pyramid connecting four circles. The circles were inlaid with jewels.
"Red, Blue, Purple, and Green—if we follow that as a map," the professor went on, "this may remedy this impossible, lethargic, buzzkill hurdle that is getting persistently worse by the second."
"By golly, I never noticed this before either," he finished. "I do think something or someone is trying to assist us here. It's like a puzzle piece is activated with each world we visit."
"Yes," spoke Nick.
"Red jewel over the tunnel we just finished before lunch, and this one over here is blue, so it must be next according to that over there," spoke Virginia.
"Right," added Betsy, "and then purple over there," all of them laughing, "and the last one, green, must be on the other side in that dark space behind the pyramid."
"That means it's your go, Betsy," Nick said. "Blue. Grab that candlestick with 'B' written on the end by the good professor here, and let's move into that tunnel."
"Duh...Nick" replied Betsy
"Anyone else notice that we are doing this relatively alone now? No phone calls, no Cook, Daria, or Rancor? Just us making this thing happen now?" finished Betsy as she took the first step into the blue cave. The rest followed.
The entire central quadrant was now pulsing blue. "I guess they'll be there if and when we need them," faithfully vowed Betsy. "Everyone everywhere has their own universe to contend with now" speaking softly looking downward to herself.
This time, however, a blue sphere just began to form in front of her, guiding her, moving as if it were an intelligent life form. They traveled deep down into the subway layers of earth below their neighborhood. They came to a three-foot horizontal opening that extended for several feet across. Betsy crawled on all fours to look, then without hesitation climbed through.
As the others did too, they saw Betsy smiling, spinning with her arms up calmly in bliss. "There's something about this place, isn't there?"
The rest felt the same. Looking up at the sky, the sun was massively pure white in the center and blue in hue. The water was abundantly pouring through the rivers and creeks, with waterfalls nearly everywhere they looked. Mountain goats played freely with mountain lions. Large predatory birds actually assisted the smaller scrub jays.
"What do you think they eat?" Nick added in, because this world was less greedy for food than each was for their lack of enthusiasm for money.
"I hate to do this so hastily, but we are on a time schedule—but man, this place is so natural and swell!" said Betsy as she began to remove the candlestick from the sheath.
Just then, the animals seemed to center on one specific target, now taking on a predatory role, even those who normally didn't behave with such aggressiveness. The goats looked to be aggressively barreling towards one specific central location, actually racing the mountain lions, as the birds large and small committed to the same aggressive behavior.
Suddenly they heard screaming—human screams. They ran to the end of the hillside as far as they could before dropping off into a cavernous stream.
They all witnessed it. A big, fat, obese person, who must have weighed upwards of 800 pounds, was yelling and screaming for dear life. The grounds were not decipherable as the birds first attacked, pulling off a large piece of fatty flesh. However, as the animals began to aggressively work together, surrounding the poor obese person, all that they could do was consume whatever food they had in their hands and wrapped around their neck. The animals that would be vegetarians in the council's world were obviously full-on carnivores here.
The screams went on for quite a while as the mass of a person was reduced to their oversaturated fatty organs and open flesh, leaving skin, blood, and a small, frail bone structure. A roar echoed off the hills and into the group's ears. They had all seen enough.
Two of the most perfect-looking males wearing a type of blue spandex came up through an underground elevator system and forcefully brought what appeared to be a naked woman of at least 600 pounds up to the surface, pouring a bacon-lard-type mixture directly over her. As they poured the grease, she was more concerned with consuming the grease for herself than standing up and getting away. The two men had long rods they kept generating a huge, intimidating, electric popping pulse through, causing the animals that remained to scurry away. The professor said that he had been in this world but couldn't determine if the people belonged down below.
"Murderous!" whimpered Betsy, but she gave them away as that massive bear came lumbering at them, bounding hungry and heavy, near-airborne at times over the rocks. It didn't slow in the least as it approached the 25-foot gap of the ravine, the only thing standing between them.
Now, the blue-spandex-clad, twisted Supermen types looked at the group, calling someone through a large, 1950s-looking wireless intercom.
"Tesla lived longer here and he was never disgraced; he only grew in power, Council. To that point, Custer never lost either, and Tartaria formed an alliance with the US, which is here called *die vereinte Kraft*, or the United Power," the professor blurted out in breathless haste.
The mighty, ravenous bear had managed to hurl itself 12, perhaps 15 feet, and seemed to still run toward the group, mechanically taking deliberate steps through the air. The scene would have reminded one of some bizarre freak circus show, if consuming the spectators were the final act that never seemed to end.
"The SS wing of World War II Germany runs the world here, professor?" Nick gasped as Betsy readied the midpoint of the candlestick rod, commanding and asking, "Got that massive Mylar-looking blanket handy, professor?"
The professor was gripping it and shaking slightly as Larry boldly looked down the 65-foot drop to the crevice bottom, seeing that the bear was now bounding upward and making good pace—30, no 25, no 17 feet away and closing! But it got hung up on a large, protruding stone at the cliff face.
A group of tall, handsome Supermen holding their rods began loudly cracking and shocking their long, prodding torture devices as they came up through trap doors to the surface.
"I'll tell you all about this place when we return after our victories, esteemed members!" the professor called out. "This one is quite a story. Remember, though, that the essence from each world becomes an active part of us, and how we use its energy is entirely up to us as a collective, as that great wheel of the zodiac in the sky plays a game of Russian roulette with our souls!"
With that, the professor wasted no time; he had already raised the massive sheet of reflective metallic protection, ready to toss it over them as the light blast forced the veneer to wrap around all that was not being bleached and purged of living error.
The Supermen, now appearing as a small army, began to speak into their intercoms and fly, buzzing their torture devices. Electric charging crackles lit off like ominous, nightmarish, war-torn dreams—echoed phantoms of eye-gripping, tear-filled, agonizing, endless nights.
That bear emerged from the rock cliff and hungrily began to run at the group of friends and allies as if possessed, genetically altered, or both. As Betsy released her candlestick, the bright light began to consume those murderously intending, card-carrying sadists. They watched the faces of what looked like superior, chiseled, near-seven-foot-tall, glorified Nazis zeroing in on them, each having picked their intended target. Serial killers with pay and a cause, as the great light came from them and not from those who stood above them—the ultimate irony for those who claimed to be truly pure. Larry could see the muscle and anguish of the poor, frenzied bear being stuck within its own rewired, destructive programming; he was glad to see it end.
As the professor tossed up the sheet, hands stretching out to kill them—maybe study them, torture them, or modify them—vaporized in the light of truth. A dull, echoed bear groan, then a slice, and the rectifying buzzing of frequency without external flow into space occurred as space itself collapsed and dispersed around them, leaving this place.
It was the same place, in fact, as a familiar voice calmly spoke outside.
"Not necessary, Larry," as Larry was just beginning to grip his unsheathed candlestick. "You too, Virginia and Nick, put 'em away. Some worlds want to die, and this one was already on the brink. Maybe it died a long time ago?"
It was Agent Cook.
"Oh, you guys can come out." It seemed like only a fraction of a second since Betsy had released that candlestick. "Purity goes a long way here. Come out, let me tell you something from the inside."
Curious and eager, they dropped their guard while each of their heads emerged from what felt like the ash of violating rubble.
"Imagine this: of these 28,500-plus light spectrum spinoffs and each containing fractaled though fractured remnants of the same- and these main hubbed worlds here to boot, I have nearly traveled to them all. None of them, no matter how harmonious or evil from the outside, could ever fuse with another—that is, until now. All the good and evil in your world somehow manages to pull that off, but even that can't go on for too long. So, we set the dial at 21 billion cycles or years from your view. Each nuclear clock is set ever so slightly differently in each world as the Grand Paradox moves on."
The group stared intently at Cook, hanging on every word, still smelling the alpine air and feeling the adrenaline bite of death as it had already reached into them with certainty.
"Is a child an annoying pain in the ass, or a reason for living, or both?"
Cook continued
"That is the hard question only you can uniquely answer to yourselves, and that the universe, ontology, or God and his, her, or its many faces posits to every moment of your existence. As for me, I only exist when I have to exist—when I'm needed. Otherwise, what is the point of suffering and ultimately being consumed by the weight of my own experiences? And they are far too vast for any single universe to juggle!"
"It makes it easier, doesn't it?"
Cook said as he picked up that brilliant blue, fresh diamond of potential so ephemeral now—an entire world reduced and consolidated here.
"Well ...done better, but you had to see it and experience it, feel it. And that's why I don't really exist outside in any place; the sheer mass of my experiences would fold in and consume me. I would possibly even become yet another black hole. Look back at where that horizontal opening was; that's your way out, it's still there. Every universe has a central core, every universe has a master link, a seam—and this one over there is fading quickly. When I leave with this diamond and plant it carefully at the location of your next controlled engagement... in what is it, Larry's purple world of wisdom? Oh, you'll love this one!"
The group, still jarred, remained almost silent. The professor and Betsy were still clinging to the blanket as they walked in shock. They had two more worlds to conquer before any victory celebration could be had. They wanted to do this before 11:00 AM tomorrow. Time remained constantly with them as the crystals within them all were undulating to the new universe, the new standard that was being absorbed and synthesized through each of their experiences and ultimate exposure here.
The 25-foot-long, 3-foot-tall opening, showing dusty rock on the other side, sat as a sort of fallen monolith. As each got onto all fours, placing their hands down to an endpoint that a temporal part of them projected, they each experienced truly their own universe, though collectively as a group.
The cave felt hauntingly familiar and welcoming as they each took in a deep breath of their fresh, musty, subterranean cavern air in reassurance. They walked out to the main corridor, now so inviting and familiar. They felt better down in the recesses of reality, far from the blinding, perpetual light above that carried so much weight.
Nick kicked at a fragment of lunch below him—a green chili, still plump but dirty. He looked up immediately at that dark, menacing corner beyond the pyramid that left only a shining green crystal.
In the chambers, they looked at one another with a solid sharing of humanity, frazzled and feeling war-torn. They stood in a circle with their hands on each other's shoulders, looking up, at times crying, their breathing heavy and tear-filled.
"The appreciation of air!" nearly yelled Nick.
"Yes, air."
"Yes, our air!" The group cemented and celebrated this resounding fact.
"Something so overlooked," added Larry. And their hands did not want to let go as they pulled those at their side ever closer, looking down in appreciation and relief, biting their lips, knocking head to head, forehead to forehead, ear to ear, and feeling life.
"Ha ha," the professor laughed fairly loudly.
"What, professor?" said Nick curiously, able to look eye to eye and see the dirt, pores, and beautiful blemishes so unique to him.
"I wonder if all the bullshit we are going through, this sick and twisted yet amazing little game here..."
"Yes," added Virginia, all standing now, looking curiously at the professor's uncompleted sentence as he took in another deep, full breath.
"The air, milk, mother's milk. I wonder if whatever is behind all of this, that great jester in the sky sees us more like greedy little kittens still soaked from the blood and fluid of birth, searching for that teat as some unseen, warm, and wet massive force begins to lick our eyes clean!?"
That left them all standing, feeling the full weight of existence, the fight for it, and in the moment, still breathing greedily, heavily absorbing the air, mother's milk, and all its life-giving properties. The professor finished, beginning to lower his arms as they all did, "The nectar of the gods, the nectar of the gods."
And they all began to walk up the graduating, graded, slightly parabolic sweep of that ancient stairwell—not nearly as ancient as those caves. Seeing the horizontal crack before him, Larry bounded up to open that blind light of familiar anticipation, chuckling as he grasped that bell-shaped doorknob and twisted it to his right, but to the door face left. That chiral duality and all its undulating glory.
Upon entering the room, there was a flickering, small, brilliant light, then for a moment, a Daria seated on the couch who oddly and comically looked to be pregnant with Rancor—the sleeping cat who kept stretching out her belly, his chamber, as she replied always with ever slightly more room to move. Then she and Rancor could be seen no more as Larry and Virginia curiously felt the couch for any traces. They were both there and not there, yet that thin trope of distinct and separate realities was increasingly becoming that rapid, blinding oneness of the flicker.
Now seeming to be a little less freaked out, Virginia and Larry each sank deeply into their respective ends of the couch, while Betsy collapsed fondly between them. She placed one hand on each of their nearest legs for reassurance and support.
"Ohhh..." breathing out in a sort of moan, "I feel exhausted!"
Agent Cook walked out, with Daria and Rancor walking through the wall on either side of them. Noticeably, Daria's clear, pure crystal was now sticking straight out of her chest, as her tech seemed to make space for it, treating it as a sort of additional port—for now.
"I grabbed these two from a space where only non-human agents that have passed through multiple universes could remain for long," Cook explained. "In short, I pulled them early from a state of liminal stasis from your view."
"Oh, I quite liked it, didn't you, Rancor?" Daria said.
Rancor meowed loudly and approvingly, looking as if he had just come from a humane and luxurious holiday spa treatment center.
The remainder of the wrecking crew lumbered down, kyphotic and beat-down, but perhaps more vigilant than ever. Each was taking on the hardcore, leaned-out, fight-ready vigor of a highly trained, seasoned professional fighter making it to the final round—still with plenty of adrenaline-fueled, excitatory spit and vinegar remaining. Betsy collapsed back, supporting her neck and the back of her head against the high, upper crest of the couch frame, while Nick leaned forward, popping open a can of sparkling water with soothing peach overtones.
"Well, seeing you now, Cook... lay it on us," Nick said, exhaustedly slugging down the popping, spring-filled bite of carbonation, producing a momentary, burp-inducing relief. "We all learned our lesson. The air feels good here, and we want it to remain that way."
Nick sank back into the leather-buttoned, high-backed chair that his mother had bought—that his mother had accepted, along with all the other items in this place, from the odd, older, and maybe ancient time-travelers who made up the original Council of Seven Spheres of this universe, at least.
Rancor jumped up onto the laps of all three people on the couch, making it known that he could stretch out and take up as much space as possible.
"Man, this cat is long," Virginia said, looking back at Daria and past Betsy's head. "What did you do to him in there, wherever that was that you were, Daria?"
Daria was now hovering several feet above the ground, viewing them all as she faced away from the far corner. She wasn't turning into anything else by herself; she was no longer built to compromise.
"I want you to win," Daria said, looking upon each one, including Agent Cook. "I like your brand and shape of the newly formed universe that's to come. Plus, I think it would be good for the babies—your babies—to be born there. They are now within reach, just over a few more hills. Only purple and green are left now, right? The shift light that integrates everything into one seamless feature?"
Virginia and Betsy both grabbed at their wombs, which for the time being still looked tight and fit like those of a pilates instructor. As they both dropped back next to each other, touching their heads, they knew how close they were and how these children would be more than kin. They leaned back to give whoever was in there a little more room. Virginia leaned back on the couch, doing the same, while that long, fluffy cat, Rancor, stretched out even further. He extended his hind legs and claws, pressing one leg against each of their stomachs slightly, but painfully enough to almost peel back skin.
Pressing against their bellies, Rancor looked intently into Virginia and Betsy's eyes, holding himself in an awkward physical position. He stared at them from Larry's lap as if to say, Because I can, or perhaps expressing more deeply, Because I know who is in there, within your wombs now, and I eagerly await seeing you. Come out as soon as possible!
Rancor blinked. Fully puzzled though only slightly alarmed, Virginia sat fully erect with a straight back. Smiling, she grabbed at Rancor's feet and tugged at them playfully, as if he were a freshly killed rabbit about to be skinned. Betsy playfully felt the fullness of Rancor's belly, poking it with her pointer finger.
"Who are you even, Rancor?" exclaimed Virginia.
Rancor only ever playfully and unseriously played along, moving quickly, but not quite at cat speed. He inconveniently used the moment as an excuse to beat up on Larry, putting his full weight upon him. It seemed like he had gotten bigger and longer. Larry felt Rancor's power as the cat made an abrupt jump from solely Larry's lap, landing soon to be several feet away, effortlessly popping a button off the Pascal suit at the left sleeve. No one noticed as it dropped to the back of the couch and slipped under the couch padding.
Rancor meowed loudly, now taking on the form of a Persian and a Maine Coon, seeming to have unlocked the superpowers of cat-kind within him.
Agent Cook looked upon Rancor with admiration. "Man, that cat has seen some battles. We have fought some together."
Rancor stood serious, facing Cook along with the entire team, listening intently.
"Those worlds represent the worst and best parts of you," Cook continued. "They live within you now—within this diamond that you will all soon fuse with and become a part of. The good parts, the not-so-good parts, the fuck-ups, the failures. We are all one big universal family about to unfold into trillions of people, beaming finite and ephemeral universal possibilities. And we are nearly there!"
No one was hungry, or horny, or concerned with the accordion world outside in all its expired partiality. The lethargy they felt had been lifted by their victory and their fearless entry into meeting these worlds head-on. The people out there in those worlds weren't the people that they would ultimately become; the old world had to die before a new one could thrive. Old, worn-out ideas. Procrastinated, rotten projects. Rusted old car bodies in the backyard, oxidizing into a burdensome, lazy, expectant reformation. The new participants weren't going to be mere spectators, but active participants in the game of life.
Agent Cook grabbed at his left pocket. "I am going to plant this diamond in the exact place that only I know where to place it! That is generally your entry point; the rest you have to figure out for yourselves. And as you have already put together, that task has both been completed an infinity ago and also has not taken place yet—forever about to happen. That is how these windows and pockets, and the fractal-streaked patterns of time, partially form into a miraculous stew of digitized Mandelbrot matrices. And then there's us: the thinking, talking, breathing, seemingly slight randomness of potentiality, always full of unmet quantum possibilities, boundless and timeless in our selfish little art. Our thoughts then evaporated, we are more relevant to one singular bubble pattern of a world—a universe—but a seeming god to them all. Our choice."
Cook turned his attention to the group's philosopher. "Larry, Thyscius, I want you to take this diamond with you and safely nurture it into a condensed transition. This means that wherever you choose to enter, taken from the fabric of your own mind, will be the point and time of entry to that world. Place this diamond anywhere, just don't touch it while it condenses into ever more density and absorbs your purple world and all its spiritual, carnal, thoughtful, and cold wisdom, becoming the truest possible representation of the philosopher's diamond. I want you to retrieve the diamond of your world and bring it back with you before we all conquer that last green sphere. Virginia must face that one, as only she, carrying this purple diamond with her and her green crystal within her now, can be the first to open that portal at the end of her dark green hallway."
"Yes, it's true that door doesn't exist to anyone else but Virginia," Daria knew full well. "It's what makes her a mystery so powerful and wise, so beautiful and agreeable—conflicts that resolve within her and from her, the mother of a new world, a new universe in fact! And I must go with you so that I can assimilate and absorb the entirety of this pure crystal now tightly embedded in the very port of my chest, contained in partiality. My presence is drawing away all the purity of this old world. I see it's night outside, but we will get through this!" Daria went on.
Daria opened up both of her six-fingered hands, which were empty, and a scanning, printed image manifested five square cubes—one for each of them.
"Take one piece each and consume it all," finished Daria. "The properties within this substance, pulled from the organic ingredient panel of universes, will cure your tiredness, offer you clarity, and effectively work within your souls as the final synthesis awaits. Amino acids that aren't of this world, in all their infinite chiralities as well. Minerals taken from incomplete universes, only indigenous to them. Light trapped in vegetation, crystallized through the process of countless worlds and mitochondria, archaea, and bacteria from every universal state—even the short-lived ones that died before these properties could be known. The stem cells of otherwise unknown and unheard whispers of potential! May the old world die!"
They all took in the delicious, unsuspecting block, which looked immediately like a brown military ration. But momentarily, each of their eyes shined with the brilliance of their collective shift light. They felt the power and the presence; each of them were the gods of their own realms. In past times—earlier, much earlier times—battles had issued over who would ultimately claim supremacy and victory, though they knew none of this now. They only felt the impending union of completion, knowing that it had never been done before and must have been solidified from the beginning, omnipotent.
Rather than walking through the door and down through the hollowed, cascading entrance, they floated straight down through the floorboards and the thick granite stone underlying them. Without hesitation, Rancor rounded the stairwell effortlessly as that last temporal beacon to this world and to anything—existing in the wild and the liminal as all nature yielded to him everywhere in all his supremacy. He held a midpoint in nature and its teleological, Faustian deal-making, as if to say, we'll stop at cat; that is sufficient.
Rancor entered that purple, blazing, and spinning corridor as Thyscius indisputably placed that diamond boldly through the portal, commanding what comes next. In his other hand, the center Holy Mother Candlestick pulled to him, and each person drew one suspended in the air, summoned to them as the team floated through the light.
They entered into an unknown realm of light and reason that had been stuck in a rhetorical loop of its own natural philosophy and all those subjects, words, and worlds that stem from it—in all its flat, looping self-justification. The world of true techne and art, only bowing to the altars of inverted science: Virginia's final world.
Upon entering, Thycius had no idea what to think—so the group sort of floated there, moving between the foreground of his projected corpus callosum. The diamond itself was tucked into his pocket, summoning the Larrys everywhere and nowhere, acting as an anchor point.
They had realized themselves—all of them—and in that seasoned moment, they considered taking this diamond, boarding that pyramidal, weird-ass ship in the basement deep within those waters, and just allowing their own heavenly place to form as they shared a network of thoughts but remained entirely independent as well.
Was it really worth risking this for anyone else? The children within Betsy and Virginia could remain there always, within the continuous, unbounded womb of the universal mother. Without words, they quipped in one profound realization: Maybe that's all this ever is?
Larry flew without the others at his side or rear, like geese perfectly firm in an arrow formation out of season—vicious and ready to break legs with his wings and bite. But Daria's crystal guided and soothed them, anchoring them back. She was more powerful than anyone or anything could imagine: a God-killer that emerged from ontology to solve a riddle with effortless ease and the patience to mellow throughout great cycles of eons.
They flew by formulas and writings from the battle within Larry's mind, but he was the least deliberately conflicted of them—truly a flying Diogenes, already finding his fattened place in the midday sun to dismiss only men who thought themselves into the rapid spin of self-perceived greatness. This mind-link became hilarious as Rancor added with a meow, "Alexander was great at chasing his tail."
Great stories streaked past them in beautiful wave patterns, along with spirits that made up the realms from Gottlob Frege to Leibniz to Euclid, as binary words became various bubbles of distribution, popping above heads to furnish light and reason. Symphonies played as great philosophers paired with their likenesses, and joining with compatible composers, translated the words from the place they were now.
The solid wall where Max Stirner showed Thycius a mirror of himself, an amulet against demonic activity. Larry was dying. Larry liked touching little kids. They each stood high and mighty but the truth awaits them all.
Phantoms flew past—the actual men staring boldly and conjuring figures like Rumi, St. Francis of Assisi, Siddhartha Gautama, St. Seraphim of Sarov, and countless other experiencers who nearly touched the great light but lived in the wrong universe. Random streams of energy, completely disrespectful of time, rushed by like hurried lyrics. The group was raping and plundering, absorbing and defiling the fruits of this world.
The eyes of these demonic phantoms could be seen by the inhabitants of that most perfect world, pulling the soul out of it so that it could be planted as a mere product of choice within the hothouse of some unseen cybernetic dictator. The group worked as one legion: active, hungry, lapping up and drinking the nectar of men, extracting from and polluting the now barren and juiceless world beneath them, just as Job cursed the gods that were of one singular mind. Genius was collected up, digested, and consumed, while the vile act that breached all Hermetic laws was simply farted away.
In his haste, Thyscius, acting as an angry, all-consuming God, intentionally gripped his Holy Candlestick while staring with great vengeance and complete tyranny into the mind of Methuselah, the wisest man of this world. Thyscius sucked the life and essence from him without regard, finally releasing the candlestick. Methuselah looked upon this demonic phantom after 969 of their years and lost himself, his world collapsing into the crystal diamond that sat beneath their feet.
They all looked down. They could not look upon one another. Though their eyes were huge and all-knowing, and their light was brilliant, the shame and contempt of yielding absolute power left them drained and defeated.
"Well, pick that fucking thing up, why don't you? That was anticlimactic," Nick muttered.
Daria and Rancor looked on, undisturbed. Daria only noted, "It is a process of knowing," while feeling her chest, confirming that the pure crystal had indeed absorbed into her and become a living aspect of her being.
Cook wasn't there. It was up to them to press the buttons to their Resonators, but they didn't. They only stood there in the shock of their own shame and reverence.
"I am ashamed of myself. I can't ever recover from that," said Larry, looking at himself and genuinely meaning it. "I just stripped those great thinkers who were far beyond myself—men I would give my left arm to converse with—and drank their entire world like it was a half-drunk, shotgunned malted beverage."
"Is it up to us to say it's not? I mean, look at all these deep thoughts everywhere, and look at us: fifty-cent words that amount to nothing but over-inflated pomp," Nick countered. "You know what I think?"
"What?" Larry asked.
Nick went on, "I think Methuselah, or whatever that guy thought of himself as, is what kept him going all that time. Narcisistic fuel, self flatulence. I mean, did you see the guy? That world was like a meal in waiting, and I am not altered or changed, but profoundly struck by how we could feel any guilt for taking a long-lived, painful, short-sighted hubris and timerity and transforming it into a living synthesis of something elaborate that their over-bloated universe could never even imagine. Now, I'm sorry, Larry, but you were right to show wrath and anger and resentment toward those old-school guards. Of course they felt self-righteous—they were already roadkill long before we ever came along. A lone bubble floating in a greater cosmos, waiting to be consumed.
"Oh, that's dark, Nick!" Virginia whispered.
"I second that," Betsy agreed.
Virginia turned to Larry. "We just went along for the ride, and I met Athena, Clea, Enheduanna, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, and Saint Teresa of Ávila. They handed me their knowledge, warning me of man's tyranny. You only experienced the profound fucked-upness of yourself and men, while from my view, I will carry this diamond into the final realm of the Green community remembering that. All men—and you are a sweet and kind man, Larry, and you, Nick—I love you both, but you are limited. This next phase has to be carried by a female, guys. Betsy and I experienced none of what you experienced, but we could see it all taking place as if from the sidelines."
Larry handed the diamond to Virginia after she clarified this absolute self truth, finally understanding why Rancor, in all his wild maleness, was content to be a cat, and why Daria chose to be female.
"Betsy, what did you experience in there? I could feel the others, but I couldn't see you," Varginah asked.
Betsy answered quietly, "You're both wrong. I saw you both devouring knowledge and gobbling up wisdom like it was a buffet. No, I sat back with Daria and Rancor, watching it all, absorbing the fact that this is just another filtering step for whatever is behind life, existence—whatever sits behind all this. It seems more malevolent to me now. Male, female, good, evil, right, wrong. I hope that when Var takes that last world out, she does it as an honored transfer of wealth, of a rich, vibrant community—a universe that wants to pass on the Promethean torch, the legacy of wealth, knowing that these steps are a necessary evolution."
Completing her first thought, Betsy then went on, "I was linked in with Daria and Rancor. They were sharing with me their vast wealth, showing me that the sphere of green holds in it a backdoor, pentagonal doorway that is a reverse of all these worlds. I was shown by those two more wealth of final synthesis in information than you could ever learn from mere mortals on any plane of existence. They freely gave me that while you all were seemingly gobbling everything up. Ridiculous, really."
"The zodiac, perrenial dowloads- isn't it all the same pomp, only wearing different clothes?" Thought Nick
Virginia held the diamond in her hand and looked down at it, knowing what it meant. She had to honor everyone in this universe now clutched within her right hand.
"We must pass on this gauntlet of wisdom without becoming corrupted by it in the process," Varginah said. "The green realm is diplomacy, and now, frankly, I am worried about how wisdom itself is being taken on and registered into this upcoming new universal realm. Will we have angry, aggressive philosophers and artists carrying on a vindictive flame for some cause they know nothing about, unaware of where that resentment and anger stems from? I think you may have cursed us, this new world, and we cannot take it back. But seeing through Daria's perspective and why she sat back interpreting it in her own way, it is all inconsequential to her."
"Let's take this lesson and move on," Betsy said, now holding her Resonator and eye-signaling everyone else in the group to do the same. "On three, then? And when we get back, let's forgive ourselves for still being human. Can we at least agree on this?"
She looked intently and sternly at everyone. Rancor, jumping up into Daria's arms, began to flicker and flash first. The rest of them, skipping the countdown entirely, thought only of that living room at 168 Apricot Lane.
Suddenly back
"I haven't said much compared to how gregarious and social you all seem to be. The truth is I have been pensive and even pragmatic in my communication with you all here, my friends, and this dying, hemorrhaging world that I won't miss at all," Larry said, sitting in his well-worn vintage suit, looking like the homeless man he had been for many years, covered over by thrift store novelty clothing.
They were all standing in the kitchen, knowing they needed to eat but having no appetite for it now that they had consumed that life-morphing ration Daria had supplied only moments prior to leaving.
"We did what we were supposed to do. And damn it, why did Daria feed us that instant-viagra cosmic hard-on cookie anyways? Not her fault, it's our lack of diplomacy and power that is the real takeaway here!" Nick added. Nick secretly and quickly in an axious angst first rounded behind the short wall barring the kitchen from the living room- snorting a health pumper of what separates the privalaged from the fodder.
"Beer?"
They all raised their hands collectively.
"I could honestly use more than just a beer... guys, how about you?" said the Professor.
Nick did his usual surprise hard-liquor bartender move and grabbed a heavily chilled, extra-large bottle of vodka from the freezer's side door. "Orange juice, cranberry juice, or straight? I even have some pomegranate juice on the back of the bottom refrigerator shelf," Nick kindly offered.
Betsy and Varginah declined the alcohol but each agreed to some juice with ice.
"I'll just have mine with ice, Nick," stated the Professor.
"Me too," said Larry. "Make it big glasses with only one ice cube for me. I haven't drunk in years, but I intend to start now. End of the world, end to the trauma, I say!"
Having something to divert their massive, weighty inner personal realities, three sat on the couch, one sat on the high-back chair, and one sat on the leather ottoman.
"That was a weird one, and it's nice to see you all back to your former selves!" Raising a toast, Betsy sipped her cranberry juice with three ice cubes as she sat on the far end of the couch, away from the cellar door—that being the obvious vortex of attention within the room. Daria was pulling a string along as Rancor did what cats do, chasing it, lost in his own world. The Professor, now sitting in the high-back leather chair, packed a fresh pipe of Turkish tobacco, asking if anyone minded.
Nick only calmly said, "Turn on the fan, so as not to set off any alarms or alarm the senses."
"It's nice to smell high-quality tobacco smoke," added Varginah. "My grandfather used to smoke it back in Brazil when I was a small child," she finished.
Larry, noticing his missing button and seeing the misshapen drape of his suit, continued on to the downstairs bathroom through the door to the living room entrance and over to the right. He entered the bathroom and looked into the mirror. He was still the same Larry. He began to cry, remembering his age at 63 years old, all the miles and wear, and his rejection by society.
"How the fuck did I end up here?" Larry blubbered, as snot and drool came pouring out. "I'm not really a bad guy, am I, to kill my heroes?"
His pouting drew attention, it seemed, as Betsy knocked on the bathroom door. "You okay in there, Larry?" Even with all that world-destroying cruelty, Betsy knew that something else was drawing on them, moving them around like pawns on a chessboard.
Larry shot back, "Yes! Just cleaning up my suit and shaving a bit!"
Nick looked like a male model with his overgrown stubble, and the Professor was, well, the Professor, with a large, sweeping mustache and a naturally well-shaped blonde beard. But Larry looked like an old wino—at least to himself. He loved philosophy, but to actually travel into the matrix—the very stew and glue of what held these men together—was disappointing. He was glad that he did it, but he felt in that moment, flashing before his eyes, that these were self-indulgent tribesmen now, who were truly given no power of their own so they searched for it in novelty and existential componentry. They still brandished their own weapons, though quite possibly through a form of cowardice.
Larry relieved himself, humming, holding his tiny phallus, and realized why his internal world was both a blessing and a curse. It was a rich tapestry that drew him into a place where he always had more meaning than the brutal, connectionless, and transactional world where he had no true meaning. That divisive place where his doppelgänger decided that money and outward worldly success would be the better choice, somewhere he had synthesized his own experiences antithetical to his. He washed off his suit while shamefully reminded of how useless he was to this world, and maybe any other—old and pathetic.
But somehow, someone had seen him and noticed him. Then he immediately realized that he had discovered long ago that he was no good and had allowed the streets to decide his fate. What was this entity or computational system, after all? Was it choosing the most exploitable members who were truly just uber-codependent? Was there another Larry, a better one, awaiting tomorrow when that clock struck 11:00 AM and the truth would be revealed?
He raked a men's razor—that must have been Nick's at some point—over his face, using only soap and water, just shaving a sort of natural shape out of the odd, asymmetrical, random hairs popping out around his mouth, mustache line, and beard. Then he quickly washed the remaining soap off his face with warm water and grabbed a small towel to dry off. He washed his hands and used that same towel with warm water to clean off his sleeves and suit, finally leaving his hands under the warm water and closing his eyes, letting the sensations of the world as it is begin to sink into his reality.
Larry came back into the living room. Daria was alone and could be seen walking freely in the backyard in the darkness. The clock on the wall read 1:00 AM, Spider 11th. Everyone seemed to be in their own spaces, collecting themselves and preparing for tomorrow, and Larry had lost his taste for philosophy entirely.
He sat on the couch alone. "Too little, too late." Rancor sat in the corner, where Larry didn't notice him at all. Betsy was in her own room with the door closed, while the Professor kept his open. You could hear his British broadcast radio playing, covering news and playing infrequent music while he shuffled papers, writing down closely remembered maps of worlds and diagrams. No one tried to see how high they could jump nor tried to fly outside. The world had done a very good job of reducing them to the product of just another person in this world, and maybe across all of them, no one wanted to stand out and be envied or hated; the universe had already shrunk around them enough on their collective watch.
Daria paced back and forth, thinking about how taxing it was always campaigning for something when she was summoned to do jobs no one else could, when she only wanted to sleep for another billion years at least. She wanted to dream of worlds instead of making them up or destroying them. The first universe and the first world—would this new one be easy and simple, or more demanding still? She kept walking and pacing in the backyard, unconcerned with drones, satellites, neighbors taking her picture, or finding a reason to justify the theft of entropy by way of drama.
Varginah was in her room, just sitting, thinking about how evil men were in her life and how she wished things could be different between her and Betsy. She would rather make love and relax than fight wars and kill worlds. She never wanted to touch another science book nor look with fascination at the stars. She just wanted to live somewhere, anywhere, away from everyone and forget about everything that had ever taken place in her entire life.
The Solomon moon hung over them as they did not grow tired or older, while new organisms flourished within them and gave them abilities and powers that they only wanted to use to escape and dream.
Nick looked at his email and saw scripts and offers for movie deals from his agent from days ago. Every PDF was a wild story that paralleled his life. Eventually, some sci-fi channel would show it for free. The world went on like a redundant nightmare of mediocrity. There was no spaceship device that could take them anywhere but where they were in their own heads. "Maybe Cook got to them all," he thought. "Maybe this is the way to sour a person from the inside out without having to do the messy work of scraping them off the sidewalk?"
Everyone unanimously realized within themselves that Cook had it right—he didn't have to exist, and he didn't even have to show up, really. There was always another Cook who would do the cleanup. He could stay inside himself and not take up any space nor add to any form of entropy at all.
They all rushed into the hallway at the same time with dark hoodies on, looking like some emu drift crew about to do some shadow, coked-out, irresponsible street racing—but it was worse: they were about to destroy the world. Walking in a single-file line downstairs, they entered the living room and saw Larry sitting with several bottles of every prescription pill that he could find and a bottle of whiskey that he hadn't opened yet. They approached quietly from each side as he came into clear view. He was holding at least thirty pills of mixed variety in each hand.
"Thought I'd end this madness, kids. You caught me—the real Larry, the homeless Larry, the worthless Larry, the rejected Larry. I was just suddenly realizing..." He dropped the pills onto the rocks glass he hadn't poured the first drink into yet, as some of the pills clung to the sticky sweat from the heat of his hands, or to remind him to just get the fucking job done.
No one argued with him. They looked blankly at him. They were committed to the same task. Like some solar cult that bombed trains with arcane symbols on weekends until they drank the Kool-Aid, they were ready. There was no guilt inside Betsy or Varginah in denying such a miserable existence for two souls—maybe more? Maybe two sets of twins or triplets. What's the fucking point of this bleak universe?
Betsy spoke up, "How many of those fucking pills you got, old man?"
Nick popped open that whiskey bottle. "You know, I was saving this for the release of a movie project, and I'll never act again... that's for sure." He tore off the plastic and pulled out that strong, stinky cork, tossing it to the ground and pouring at least five shots' worth straight down his gullet. Betsy grabbed the bottle next, putting Nick's attempt to shame, and in no time the 750ml bottle was polished off as Larry tossed the thing to the ground. Rancor remained in the corner, not stopping anyone, his back turned to them all.
They all sat, buzzed as hell. "But nothing is spinning yet!" said Nick.
Varginah said, "I'm going in by myself, so don't bother coming after me. There's no reason to. I'm going on a one-way, no-return suicide mission." She grabbed that V-marked candlestick and checked to make sure that damn worthless but brilliant hypercube diamond was in her center, poncho-style single hood pocket.
They were all wearing some form of black sweats or black jeans. Larry stripped his suit off shamelessly before his crew, all the way down to his dirty tighty-whities, showing his lack of masculinity and his estrogen-rich, fatty, grotesque body, but he didn't care.
Nick pointed toward the entry to the living room, saying, "To the left, there is the laundry room. Grab some dark clothes, they should fit you. We're going into this thing kamikaze and stealth."
Larry clouded the room with flopping fat and a flat backside; skid marks from his underwear were noticeable, but no one gave a shit anymore. When he returned, he was wearing all-black sweats, thick and seemingly new. His black hooded sweatshirt had some dark blue surf symbol over it—the only definably different thing. He tossed his suit down like trash. The old world was dead. Sex was dead. Dreams were dead.
"Got your resonators?" Varginah asked. They all displayed theirs. "I'm going my own way after this. We take out this final world, then I am going off to limbo land away from everything. It's all dead to me now."
They shook their heads in agreement. This was no test of powers or floating through floorboards; they walked down the traditional way. Daria walked the grass off in the backyard, pacing back and forth, ready for this to end anyway so she could just leave and be done. Rancor just laid there prior, but now seemed to be unhappily pacing with the crew.
"Let's get this fucking over with," said Betsy.
They walked down, now very buzzed, bordering on drunk, into that cold, dark space. Even the gates only pulsed dimly, as if in some form of hibernating stasis. There was no machine or state of existing that would cause anyone here to chase their tails again. Holding their resonators in hand, ready to say their final goodbyes, with a simple push it would all be gone. They could live where no one could ever find them again, anywhere in time—in a liminal place with a reset universe as a clean slate to disappear into.
They walked into the furthest corner as it instantly became pitch black. They kept walking past the forks of the other knockoff chambers on each side, straight to the furthest reach of the tunnel, where Daria—inhuman herself—was met with a solid rock wall. But the black void was there and invited them in, appearing like Vantablack magnetic fragments of demoniac black-hole quicksand. Varginah walked through, holding the diamond in her left hand, the candlestick in her right, and the resonator in the pocket at her waist.
They each walked through the void.
But suddenly, they were standing in the living room upstairs. Rancor even went back to smell the spot where he had last been sleeping, and he confirmed that it was the same 2:00 AM, the exact same time—they had walked down the steps to the cellar at 1:58 AM. They looked at one another. A rocks glass full of an assortment of pills and an empty whiskey bottle lay on the living room carpet nearby, with the bottle's cork also thrown down without care. Daria was still walking the grass off the back lawn. The place smelled the same.
"I'm going for a walk," said Varginah.
"I'm grabbing another drink first," said Betsy, as she pulled a fifth of rum from the built-in living room cabinet, which was packed with more glass bottles, figurines, and family photos backed with lighting. She popped open the bottle and took a generous, biting swig before Larry reached for the bottle next, then Nick, then the Professor, and finally Varginah. The bottle was empty. The Professor grabbed another, looking surprised that no one had stopped them.
They all walked out together into the bite of that late November night.
They rounded the driveway, looking like a stealthy band of teenagers in their dark crew wear. People were watching the news through the windows. Most homes were dark with the lights off. A man was walking a dog. Cars and rare delivery vans drove hastily by, heading home from work or to deliver something useless to another tired soul somewhere. Past midnight on the outskirts of the city. Any place, anywhere, nowhere really.
The night felt good, and they walked side by side in the middle of the street down towards the water, heading towards that horizon of ocean—that shimmering, dark liquid mass before them reflecting the moonlight. They each took a warming, welcoming shot as they passed the bottle between them. They stopped. The street was dark, lit only by the streetlights above them. No comets of death and doom. No end-of-the-world Armageddon movie apocalypse. Just a world and its people churning and chugging under secret societies and markets in flux—a broken world constantly bandaging its own self-inflicted wounds. Everyone wasn't special, and everything was the same.
"Let's walk back," said Betsy, her cheeks and nose red with the nip of impending winter weather. Nick, comfortable, gave her a childish, playful poke of his index finger on the tip of her cold nose. Betsy's words slurred a bit, looking at Nick as he hugged her as if they were a couple now, looking eye to eye. "I don't really care what happens, do you?" she quipped.
Suddenly, the Professor, polishing off the last bit of the bottle they'd been passing around, questioned, "Where did Varginah get off to?"
Larry answered with a laugh, "Well, she is pretty darn buzzed. Maybe she went back to the house to fall asleep, or...
"Or what, Larry?!"
They all began bounding back to the house, but there was no Varginah walking in front of them, and it was nearly all at a decent upward grade.
Breathless and drunk, the four reached far enough to have the house in view—a steady slope down about an eighth of a mile. They walked briskly, and out came Varginah, holding what they had feared in itself, but why? A Holy Mother candlestick was in her hand.
"Varginah, Varginah!" cried Nick. "What are you doing, girl?!"
"Don't try and stop me, Nick! This is the same damn world that we have learned to hate our entire lives. There is no true diplomacy, just a bunch of fucked-up actors in a meritocracy. A rhetorical supply chain of master-slavery, countries built on the backs of slaves!" Varginah didn't care how loud she was or if anyone came out of their houses, but they wouldn't, she knew. They would remain clean, stealing, cowardly, and mostly silent until all their problems just silently went away. "Into the wash, into the wash of time and space, right Nick?"
Now in the front yard, standing face to face, Nick grabbed her around the waist and tried to give her a playful twirl.
"I don't want you, Nick! I don't need any man, okay? I just want Betsy, but everything is all fucked up, and you knocked us up with your strange, randy... w-what did you say, 'half-god blood'?" Varginah spat. "Just tell me now, am I going to give birth to an alien?!"
Everyone was standing in a semicircle in the front yard and on the sidewalk down below. If you looked hard enough, you could see a very bold Daria standing with Rancor at the top of the stairs, looking out at them.
"What do we do after all of this, huh? Something is really trying to fuck with us, Nick, and I'm just going to be the bigger man and get this shit over with!" she said as she firmly planted the steel rod of its middle sheath into the grass of their own front yard. "Kinda hits home, doesn't it, Nick? You start to wonder what the billions of people were like that we just incinerated, for all we know!"
A man walking an old, tired Rottweiler looked up in nosy, presumptuous amazement. Later, if there was a later, he would convince himself that they were putting on some corporate confidence-building, late-night self-esteem CEO classroom for the elite, or that it was just some acting class.
"Do you want to know how it all ends, sir?"
The man kept walking, but Varginah was persistent. "Sir, sir... well, do ya?" But the man scampered away, and his dog as well.
"Coward... they're all cowards!" Varginah yelled. "Everyone in this world is a coward!" But the neighborhood, the world lay fast asleep.
There were no Pentagon planes or CIA operatives like everyone thought Agent Cook was.
"They go along with us, Varginah, because they don't know what to think or do unless they are spoon-fed the plan!" the Professor noted. "This warps the human mind; it has warped all our minds and broken us down. It's done a remarkable job of doing so, don't you think?!"
"No, no, finish it," said Betsy. "Finish it. We'll all get what we want, we can go our own ways now—whatever comes next. Or... or we can be a family, but we have to all have the courage to set off that final candlestick and say what we want, what we are going to do next without question!"
Betsy grabbed Varginah and kissed her passionately. "Cycles, cycles, life girl, cycles," she muttered, squishing her nose into Varginah's and pushing her cheeks together to force an open-mouthed pucker until Varginah had to laugh and pull away, leaning down to touch her cold lips, wet from the night air. "That tickles."
Drunk, bold, and sick of all this shit, Nick grabbed the boys—Larry and the Professor—around their arms, whispering into their ears, and like young children, they agreed and ran to the house, only to emerge with four more candlesticks.
"We decided that we hate this place," Nick said.
Then Betsy stepped back and up to the stairs. "I hate this place too."
Daria was now sitting on the front porch with Rancor, just recording and remembering.
"Let's burn this fucking place down," said Nick. "Do you think that Steve across the street and snide Brenda next to us, or any of these idiots, really knows or cares about what's truly going on? They probably are more concerned with these being some kind of romantic candles or fireworks that will make loud noises and keep them up. But they only get up to keep the toxic powers in play, and we can do something about it right now, guys. We can burn this house down—Earth, our house, God's house. Let's fucking burn the thing down with something far greater: the souls from a world that God turned his back on, let's burn it down with them!"
"What do you say, guys?" Nick finished, as each member of the final Council of this version of Earth held in their very eager and ready hands the devices that would end it all.
"What happens to us then?" Larry asked. "Like, didn't we have the power to survive and come back here because of Earth the way it is now?"
"Wait, is this even our Earth?" finished Nick.
"I don't care anymore, honestly, guys, I am done... like, done-done, okay? Earth sucks, Earth people suck, and maybe we suck!" said Varginah.
Betsy quipped, "Wait, didn't we already do it all? Like, wasn't the whole plan to only have our universe, Earth, the last one left... isn't that what this is?"
Larry jumped in, "It's a test, it's a trick, damn it, can't you see?"
The Professor added, "Yes, yes, Larry, I think you're right. Of course, it's almost exactly like Earth—what better way for an evil, inferior chameleon to hide, huh?!"
Daria floated down, holding Rancor. "Daria, you've come to assist us. Is this world identical to Earth in order to trick us? Or is this a test to see if we are trigger-happy, to see if we would blow ourselves up?"
Daria replied while holding Rancor, "Did anyone ever tell you what the final goal was? Only that there is a deadline and a quest for supremacy of worlds was ever implied. The tools you found yourselves, while Agent Cook gave you the way out, handing those resonators to each of you. Why do you concern yourselves with anything outside of this? You could go anywhere right now, alone or together. You could always go back into that pyramid and see where it takes you; we could all remain together or separate. The choices—don't you see you have too many choices? I gave you the food of transformation, don't you see? You will never die; you haven't even begun to test the power and freedom that this alone gives you. But here you argue like children in the front yard because you are stuck in what they think about you—what people think. Well, they don't matter. What they think and believe doesn't matter because they will always bow to the consensus. Now you have to ask yourselves if you are willing to forever leave this limiting mind state and simply transcend?"
"Transcend... transcend, is... is t-that what we're doing?" Larry let out a mad laugh. "Heh, ha, heh, heh... Dammit, you're right, you're right, Daria, that has been the point all along, hasn't it?" Larry said in a sort of mad breakdown.
"Transcend. I'm doing it, I'm setting off the candlestick right now, then it's decided!" said Varginah.
"But you don't even have the Professor's protective shielding blanket! And to that point, haven't we already transcended? I mean, think about what Daria just told us. We each have a resonator. We have crystals embedded within us. We were given those rations by Daria earlier. Varginah's holding a diamond that has to be by far the most valuable artifact ever seen on Earth, and it's hers, all hers personally. I have enough script material to put me in an unending, eternal list of B-movie roles. Didn't we make it? Isn't this as good as it gets? Maybe this is as good as it ever gets?" finished Nick.
"Yeah, but I want to end things here. I'm sick of this place. It's sick and fake, and it feels like a deceptive Groundhog Day—if indeed this is Earth and not some utopia that has gone unnoticed. Has anyone tried to look at the news, call someone, or look past the obvious?" finished Varginah.
"It's Earth. I know it's our crappy Earth. There isn't another us here unless, for some reason, they walked in through that door the same time as us and created some sort of paradox or something," said Larry.
"Paradox," shot back the Professor.
"Yes, a paradox where we never know what the right choice is, or if we are in the original universe that we initially began from," said Larry.
"What if we just corrected it all and returned to the universe humanity was always supposed to really be from? I mean, chiral amino acids and sugars, and how things always feel somehow off. Well, do you feel that way right now?" quipped Varginah.
"Well, do we just wait until 11:00 AM tomorrow? What time is it now?" said the Professor.
"Oh, you're fucking with me right now... the time is 3:33 in the AM," said Nick. "Yep, now it's 3:34 in the AM."
"I say we blow it. It's the only way to move forward, I think," said Varginah.
"Maybe it resets our problem—humanity's problem to always feel like we're moving forward, when we never really get anywhere besides!" added Larry.
"But we have to, don't we? It's written in our nature to think we are progressing, moving forward like rats on an exercise wheel," said the Professor.
"I'm doing it." Varginah gripped the middle of the Holy Mother candlestick and just kept holding it. Varginah continued, "Do you think I could hijack the entire world this way?" she joked. "Hold this thing for ransom as they try to figure out how the thing works and eventually implode me and the Holy Mother into a vacuum of our own doing?" she finished.
"Well, it's done. I'll go into the living room and at least grab the blanket from my backpack. Be right back, okay? Don't do anything impulsive while I'm out," finished the Professor, now rushing back up to the house.
Rancor, feeling an odd, stale moment of silence, gave off a tired meow as the Professor returned.
Daria, relieved that the ordeal with humans had finally nearly come to some sort of end, stated, "Regardless of what takes place here, it is all inconsequential in the grand scope."
"Okay, ready, guys?" As the Professor motioned everyone to gather in, the strange man with the dog had returned and had been standing there curiously, listening for God knows how long, as he drew closer to them. "Not you, you skank! How long have you been lurking?"
The stranger replied, "About ten minutes," in the dullest, most predictable, self-preserving, Earth-dwelling, hedging tone.
"Scamper away then, scruff. Go get your own blanket," as Varginah finally let go of the candlestick.
"Why did you hold it so long, Var?" said the Professor.
"Well, you were getting the blanket... I wasn't sure what to do, to be honest with you," she finished.
"Well, that gives us two or three long, agonizing minutes. Anyone have anything to drink then, or a rare smoke?" asked the Professor.
Varginah pulled out the hypercube diamond from her front hoodie poncho pocket, and John looked amazed as the dimensions danced in her hand with perplexing brilliance. She dropped it a few feet away, then trailed back to stay tight in with the group.
"Got a cigarette, do you, there guy?" the Professor addressed the stranger, diverting his attention from the diamond for a moment.
"Y-yes, I do, actually," pulling out a short, filterless cigarette from the box that was in his front left pocket. "Oh, oh..." as he pulled out a lighter to light the cigarette for the Professor, the flame failing to catch the first time.
"How many minutes is that then?" asked the Professor.
"At least one or two minutes until the candlestick blows, Professor," answered Nick.
"Tell you what, sir," again addressing the stranger as the Professor continued to smoke the harsh, filterless, but sobering tobacco cigarette, "I'll tell you what... your name, sir?"
"John... J-John Tinnerman that is my name, with two n's," finished John.
"I want you to go up into that house, and straight in front of you, all the way down that long corridor, you will see a built-in shelf. Do you understand, John?"
"Y-yes, I do, sir. Go and grab us a bottle from that shelf. Surprise us, it can be any bottle—any bottle at all, John, just as long as it's the hard stuff. And John?" added Nick, as John was already nervously stepping away.
"Y-yes, sir?"
"You might want to haul ass like a nuclear bomb is about to explode up your ass, because this thing here is a world destroyer," said Nick.
John was now running for dear life, actually crying and yelling to his mother, his dog Jocko, and asking his ex-wife to forgive him for cheating and being a terrible partner.
"Ready, guys?" Larry added in, as they all held candlesticks and prepared to grab them in a flash as that bright light began to destroy all the sin in this world—and that might just mean them, too.
The Professor pulled even closer to the group as he raised the sheath up into the air with both hands as wide as possible. John, seeing this, ran full force, pulling up his pants with one hand while carrying a bottle of sherry with the other.
"Is that... is that sherry? No one would choose sherry," stated the Professor, perplexed.
Larry added, "Yeah, John is an asshole. He deserves to go."
John was just ten or twelve feet away from that finish line as the Holy Mother candlestick's pure light soul-charge went off, and John, reaching out in panic, hung in their minds for a brief moment.
"Sherry, really?" quipped Nick as the Professor came down on them all with the blanket, wrapping it around them as the world folded in on itself.
"I'm personally glad that world's gone. Who the fuck chooses sherry as a last drink?" Larry muttered, still amazed at the idiocy of the man.
Reflecting on John's final act, Betsy said, "Don't feel bad, we couldn't have saved him anyways."
Varginah conveyed, "I don't feel bad. Do you? I don't feel bad at all—that guy was an asshole!"
They all released their candlesticks, tossing them out while maintaining as much shelter as possible.
"That's five candlesticks, five all together—the most we've ever done so far!" said Nick, as the eradicating soul-force burning light would not be in vain.
"Ready to take a peek, or wait longer?"
"It seems alright now," Larry said, as they all began to stand.
"How do we get out of this place? Do we use our resonators?" said Betsy.
"Oh, let's find the final diamond for Cook when he turns up. He'll need that in 21 billion years or so, right?" Varginah added, searching for the diamond. And there it sat, brilliant, dense, and heavy.
"Damn, this one is heavy, like a solid gold brick. And look at those holographically, morphically twisting dimensions of that hypercube—brilliant, best one yet, I'd say," said the Professor.
Varginah stuffed the final diamond straight into her front pouch pocket as it pulled immensely on her sweatshirt, revealing the plumpness of her cleavage.
"Black hoodie crew. Well, what's next, pull out the resonators or what? Should we think of the living room at 168 Apricot Lane or dream bigger?" asked Nick.
They agreed. "I'm alright with it." "I'm alright with it all the way down the line.
They prepared the resonators. "Okay, this time let's actually make it to a three-count. Everyone got theirs?... Okay... one, two, and three."
Their eyes shut as they each imagined the room at 168 Apricot Lane, but nothing came—they were still in the white space.
"Are these things broken? Say, where is Daria, or Rancor, or Cook, for that matter? Do you see some kind of doorway or opening of any kind, anyone? Should we wish for somewhere better, more exotic, when we press? How about a huge farm with everything we need? Each of us has a massive, nice house owned free and clear, a big pile of money and riches, a fully stocked food pantry—ready on three, sound good?" said the Professor.
"Oh, and world peace," added Varginah.
"Yeah, sounds perfect. Ready: one, two, three, press." Shutting their eyes, imagining with intensity each of them... then, nothing.
Larry added, "What the hell, guys, really? Are we going to be stuck in here forever? There must be a way out, right? Are we going to starve in here? I could really use a turkey croissant with smoked cheddar and mayonnaise about right now."
One appeared just as Larry had described it.
"Okay, start small, start small. How about a nice, humble two-story home?" One appeared just like Larry pictured. "Ha ha!" Larry began to laugh. "Well, does this mean there isn't anyone else? We are all that exists now, is that right?" Larry said, now entering into the house, his dream home as he'd pictured it.
"I get it, guys. We can't leave here, but 'here' is really anywhere if you think about it, right?" said Nick. "So we just have to be super careful what we will to happen... I don't know, shouldn't there be planets and death and all that stuff? We could be really selfish and not invite anyone else to exist—not mothers or teachers or friends how we've known them, just us," Betsy added.
"But you're going to have a kid, you too Varginah!" said the Professor. "I don't mean to be cruel, but will they be assholes? Maybe only one of them, then what?"
Betsy hit the Professor. "My daughter or son won't be an asshole, he or she will be just me and Nick!... Oh shit, is my kid going to be an asshole? Really, I never thought about it that way."
"Won't we need a delivery doctor, or do we study it ourselves? I mean, can we imagine books and manuals and stuff like that?" quipped Varginah.
"I'll try," said Betsy. "Yes, a book on pregnancy just like I saw on the internet, and by the same author—here, it just miraculously popped up in my hands."
"Wait, open that book up, Betsy," the Professor curiously added.
"Why, it's empty," exclaimed Betsy.
"Just as I feared and suspected—in here, we are limited by our own thoughts and experiences. I'll bet Larry's fine house over there doesn't have a working heater or running water because he hadn't built it into his information center. I mean, sure, we can eventually build a world, and through time and drawing on our own experience build up a universe, but it will be based on what we firmly know to be accurate and true. We cannot trick ourselves, our own psyches."
Suddenly, Agent Cook arrived from thin air. "Not so easy building a universe, is it, guys?" quipped Agent Cook.
"Say, what are you an agent of anyways, Cook, hmm?" asked Varginah very seriously.
"The Council conjured me, imagined me, called me Agent Cook, and before that, I don't remember even existing. Fact is, I don't exist unless my rote set of special skills are needed, and you seem to have hit a stone wall."
Agent Cook finished, then went on, "You see, Betsy would have eventually pressed her resonator against the diamond as she'd done before, taking her to where I am—which is nowhere, because I have experienced everywhere and am nothing. But you have destroyed your 'everything,' yet you insist that you are 'someone,' each of you... so what is it that you want or miss or need? I would venture to say that this limbo is the place you always end up in, with no skilled doctor who is undoubtedly annoying at breakfast and a shifty father, but he is the best delivery doctor on record, at some point once. The fact that you already have a house—a nice house, Larry, good job on that, way to go, great imagination—but with no running water, no natural lakes, streams, or mountains with snow caps that melt from the sun, and all those planets orbiting with semi-precision at least. Are you prepared to remake everything, though sloppily, over an eternity? I understand you all now can live forever, but is this purgatory or a gift? I mean, you were nearly at each other's throats!"
"I mean, I hate this, but I don't want to go back. I feel, honestly, more and more like I am being played!" Varginah stated bluntly.
"Yes, being played," agreed Betsy. "I mean, where is the Council of Seven Spheres now?" she finished.
"It's easy to blame, but have you thought of them, willed them, or wanted them intensely enough here? Betsy, you wanted me here, and eventually, because you had done it before, you would have figured out how to come to me, but I saved you a trip—plus you'd be in a state within a state, a double limbo."
"Again, not a trick question, no metaphors: what do you want? I'm asking you," Agent Cook said. "I have always been, but I am nothing. I am the fix-it guy people have always imagined, and they always do when they want someone else to fix it for them. Well, I have. As far as your imagination can take you, and all those before you since the dawn of space and time squared with infinity. But here we are. Why? Aren't you happy? Isn't it enough? Larry, how was that turkey croissant? Was it all that you wished it would be? Go ahead and wish for a glass of clear mountain water. The water exists with no mountain required—do you really need more? Of course you do, because your mind would invent reasons or origins of where the substance had to come from. The answer is your mind is never enough. When I ask you what you truly want above all, the answer would be peace, but you do nothing to ensure this takes place. Well, I'm here to give it to you—just ask for it."
Betsy stated, "Okay, peace." Then she paused. "Nothing happened?"
"That's because you already have it. Since there exists no good or evil only you- you are faced with the fact of Cybernetica or Cybernetic Reasoning. Are you in fact an incomplete Monas or are you admittedly a mere fraction of another sort? A mimetic strand to a highly limited end point?- A blank space with close friends where you can wish for anything you can imagine and it's there."
"What you are conditioned to crave is chaos where true peace does not need to be experienced because it is antithetical defensive movement. You were either always the singular sun being occulted by all their chosen paralax view of you; the black small limited moon or the blazing inferno they had to cover their eyes only pretend to see. You want to think that you overcame some obstacle on your way to peace because peace is already there and you find it boring," finished Agent Cook.
"Well, we don't want to go back, and we don't want to wind up building the same world and universe, only sloppier, so now what?" questioned Larry sternly.
"Take what you can get, like you learned, Larry, a long time ago—when there wasn't the idea of choice, there was just the decision to use whatever was most within reach. Where you had put yourself in the phantom specter of The Others. Well, that's all you ever really have, and this isn't a game, nor is this some cosmic, holy lesson—just you and the choices you make. So what'll it be? We must come to some resolution eventually." Finished Cook.
"I want to live in a thriving, chaotic world but live away from it, to drown out my boredom. I want to be pleasantly annoyed by people of every kind, knowing that they are safe and happily miserable, but be able to get the hell away from them. Is the the reason for the moon as you say, a mass diversion?" Going on Larry shifted "I want to hear my annoying family member asking for money on the phone and to be in agony over the right thing to do. I want to want to be free and still relish in the fact that nothing is my fault and there may not exist free will, and who cares anyway!" said Larry.
"Which is why you live in limbo and I live in perpetual black. You exist and you hate it. You are stuck, left always with choice. Everything exists and I don't, and I love it. For my these choices are inconsequential check point within the slaves self ammassed divice or the excuse of self torture. You Larry are already free. You live as men like Max Stirner who's true name was German philosopher Johann Kaspar Schmidt and should have been remembered better in all worlds and should be in the new world and that my friend isvwhat you are Larry... Thycius. Further others who were constants in countless worlds of iterations men such as Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky they saw the punishment awaiting the future man. Well you Thycius are that homeless wreck from the outside who is and always has been a Blazing Sun inferno. When that wrath shows it's face on you? You are not present to abolish Pure Truth beyond reason. You are the crucified, the true artist that does not sacrifice himself for the vanity of a canvas so to speak. Therefore, just maybe, you want everything to keep existing while you don't?" finished Agent Cook.
The other side, the halfway people, the burden they unwittingly took, factions of light...
Cook went on, "Before you decide to do anything, to go anywhere, it is very important—critical, in fact—that you listen to my words. Okay, so here goes.
"There is another side of existence not dimension but an entire chiral reality that is inverted. The biggest question is which side are you really on as the two have now masterfully been blended in since the beginning of them, and again. This other side balances out everything you see here. It is either the child's dirty closet that no one sees or a Saturnian garden that exists because no one can see it. The best way that I can describe it would be the albeit theoretical fourth law, or Zeroth law, which exists simultaneously on your side as well as this other side—shall we call it the pentagram side of the whole from out view? We are the closet they stuffed with all the occulted dirt and grime of their world and we in turn do the same until each is a murky equal gradient of abstract ego. Well today one must know itself, one become the machine that drives the engine of this universe in the Ego of Pure Reason." Cook passionately bridged and continued...
"Well, on your side, where you're from, even though you have five fingers, you should invariably have six fingers and tails in your physical makeup. At first your world thought this a gift when beautiful visitors coaxed your people to believe, a quilted stitch of untruth into a modified gene expression now embedded still within you. You must return to the truth, the ultimate truth, the Pure Truth. Whereas on the other side, that darker side of reality from which you come—but not originally—they, those people should have both wings and horns. This that same Council too from them- do you yet see? It is biosemiotics and the allostatic patterning of the Great Design altered with generationally perpetuated gene edited self doubt. An entropy machine of perpetual disharmony. But I am the byproduct of this from every conceivable iteration, a blackhole storehouse that has no ego to exist. This energy is yours to have, always has been! " Cook completed his plea.
"The Great Design?" quipped Nick.
Cook now adding, "Think of everything as a matrix, a networking of pattern distribution. Most anybody walking around day-to-day, laissez-faire, would think that buying a soft drink posed no universal consequences—no imminent universal or even horizontal danger. Yet the symbol pattern on the can and the fact that it even semi-existed is only truly fueled by your true extent state. The fact is that there would never and could never exist a multitude of actual full-souled individuals with self wills and true identities. No these are cybernetic strands of limited self proclaimed gods, the very things that you entertained in your living room, financing your lives, once ruling your mother. Or in this case, entire realities chirally bounded in a juxtaposed energetic system which shares a central artery, and that is what is at the center of it all. A dark abyss that no one can control, I am that child's closet and I am fuller than full. Now so dense and pooping at the seems I have enough fuel to begin a third reality, universe and world and you are all the benefactors of my reality!"
"Here, hand me the diamond, Varginah," Cook said, holding out his hand. Varginah was now sitting Indian-style on a floor that her mind had centered together as that undeniable corpus callosum, along with her cohorts as a sort of base floor or midpoint of a reality that still bound them.
"Oh, oh, you mean the Diamond. Here you are, Agent Cook," apologetically answered Varginah. She handed him the beaming, now see-through fluxing pattern of the same undulating shape and form as prior, only now appearing as a window into something much more complex than any singular consciousness could reduce to any one coherent thought, as in a holdable thus reducable item to pass along. But she was not passing along a mere symbol but the final synthesis of everything she held dear and knew to be true and much much more the all cube, or block. Further she was offering not to Cook as he appeared as an obscure and mysterious sort but to the void itself. She was passing the every known version of this sides existence to the void who all too ironically would not exploit it.
Cook took the diamond. "Oh, it is brilliant, but it is just a placeholder to the entire reality, or in this dimensional understanding, that it represents; Everything is transactional, but it is not always clear what that means.
"Allow me to be more distinct without warping your minds—which, by the way, you can see it, but your minds are now like this diamond: finite and non-fungible as a reality currency. Tangible but not, the last of its kind. You, my friend, hold mass stores of wealth, not only in your very person but in the informational bit-fields within that blueprint, far too numerous to even understand. You are this diamond in a sense, a mystery to yourselves. You are the teleological seed to humanity's future. You are only limited by the partiality and awareness of experiencing yourselves in selfhood. In short you are selves, the only selves, reduced like these diamonds of condensed information!"
"Take the horns and tails scenario I just mentioned prior. Now imagine a faction that did business since the beginning—maybe one of you here now? Decidedly swapping fragments from the six-sphere side to the five-sphere side, but their commonality is that they each hail to a seven-sphere resonant base master system. They must remain in partiality as a temporal marker both to exist and to have a reason to exist but once we are complete? Well, here we are!- Limbo. We want for nothing, we need nothing, we become greater than any world that could house us. Therefore, no society could survive us, and we cannot stand their rhetoric, so we become nothing as an artifact that none can look upon nor witness, but is that final mid-point of the condensed mind in its final reduced operational base prior to duality, this prior to existential principles in code. The thing already is complete. The seed of the oak tree is not curse by mitosis or the cancer of expectancy in becoming it is in itself mastering of this form of stasis. You have not yourselves to share with anyone outside, there is no outside. Inversion is all that's left. The unstoppable enginebof human understanding at it's base- your base!" Cook went on "But in this, from the outside, we are like what lies at the center of it all—only in it, everything is found. Some civilizations have referred to this as the Monad, or the Monas, or the One. Well, guys, you are like little monads. You could be a universe away from one another, but through a common shared string or stream of likeness, your perception—Nick to Betsy your child, a One to become has already been since the beginning- 7 in totality are you all, a Schrödinger's master puzzle box is made of itself and in itself for no one to figure out. You will never give birth ladies. Truly there is no true proof of your pregancies too soon? but a knowing- and there it remains. No outcome, no still birth just being and becoming always flourishing there is no time here, the greatest gift thatbyou gave only collectively to yourselves. from the seed that is All. You are you, and I do not want to be you, so I am me I am nothing and therefore I am free."
"But I am a little different, you see. I may just look like an everyday guy to you, but look at what happens when I take off my sunglasses—the ones that your collective minds, long ago in a shared stream of information, fabricated to deal with such unsolvable matters, and hard questions, so as to maintain a self-perceived transactional justification- thereby which to grade others on, to trade other people through a false sense of superiority. To know me, but you do not, you can't know nothingness or the great sorrow that never ceases to be and thus has always been."
Cook went on, "Now, why I appear to wear shades, why you put sunglasses on me... in an ancient time, it was just a scarf wrapped around my eyes. Same me. But here you go." Cook removed his dark sunglasses and revealed the blackest eyes you could ever imagine.
As one looked longer, they began to be drawn into the void. The blackness sent venules and arteries of black spidering out into his orbital bone, appearing to make up his entire being. But that is what he always was, and the glasses only concealed what the mind needs, to complete a face or a form of familiarity. Cook never demanded or commanded a form. He is gelatinous, a black hole, an abyss—but he does not need you to be or become. He is nothingness, and all those replications through times and eras transit into meaning where there is none.
The crew stood mesmerized, each now within an inch of being sucked into his now complete, spread-out, blacker-than-black, blacker-than-Vantablack, all-consuming void. He only appeared to transition back to his former self in placed the sunglasses back on tge construct of his face. It was oddly a made-up collective projection of again this faustian circuitry of the limits; corpus callosum—the right side absorbing information that the left brain could not accept, a shared midpoint where there is none. And that midpoint in between is where Cook has always existed and where they were now. Unknowingly forming the new universe the the new diabetics and language coding being interacted with here within this swirling now that never was. Just electrical sparks, energy in the desity of forming space before the cube of time be manifest.
The group pulled back, coming out of their trance.
"I don't want you—not for food, or in any other way," Cook said. "I just want you to be. To be free like me. But you are stuck in a midpoint always, and some of us are forced to reconcile a way through for you. So here it is. This projection first projection of existential masyer principle shooting out, the first Ray. Or we can Invert the notion and return to a new edited and improved version but the same world yet dimensional mended expanded with the same base pure principle now a flicker that only visits everywhere in every moment to kero the course correct and to constant guide and remind."
Continuing "On the pentagram side, it is slightly further from completion, but just beyond the midpoint. There, they adopted something the Council of Seven—yes, your elders yet dastardly children—planted in that place to maintain this highly entropic ecosystem that feeds from and borrows off your world. Siphoning your energies to maintain all your mediocrity and to ensure they never need to grow, while still remaining elevated by default. That is why you can never seem to get anywhere. They feed their initiates a story of individuality and what that means: that without showing supremacy and sacrificing others, you therefore forfeit, either becoming energetic food or defaulting to a slave morality.
"Well, I see that this is probably too surreal for you all, far too complex so that I do not have an anchor to elaborate further. But humanity is an action; that is your superpower but in the continuation of the self. So I am freely giving you a choice. To return to the cave system that always is and always will be, even if it is not physically in existence right at this moment—which it isn't, in time, but it is the only moment that ever was or will ever be in your view still. Which leaves the question: are we outside or inside the Great Monad?"
"Are we food or does it feed us- or is it a simultaneous paradoxical mad loop, since it can not be seen, witnessed or expetience by any outside observer. So it claims in all it's self perpetuating narcissism to see itself. l though us. We are repulsed by it so it strikes it from our memory yet we remain but how? We are equally as hideous of it but a copy and oddly it finds us, itself, its mirrored inversion attractive in all it's self contained narcissistic glory- supposing truth be a woman!? And here we remain, spinning in absolute nothingness!" Cook only thought out but did not say
Nick traced Cook as he went on intently saying now outloud , "As far as the choice before you now, it is the same visual hallucination you chose through autogenic response, pareidolia. As you can only ever see yourselves, but so many there have been abd truly are, all these places to hide- derivations. Everything is a metaphor of the mind, and truly there can only be one central mind. Imagine how vastly great and complex this mind is; we must each possibly be an infinitesimally small aspect of it, if we are anything at all.
"The cave. Back in through the cavern. By the way, you haven't even looked to see how your subconscious has shaped the room of that house so as to become a symbol, a beacon of familiarity- a pattern for distribution. In this, humanity is like a hermit crab—scavenging on what is already there and re-appropriating this universal material always for something else. The constant swapping in the uniform utility of transaction because you can't be still and just simply know - gnosis being the only food truly required ever. "
"The home! You will no longer have a home above the caverns, because there is nothing outside of them; there truly never was. Rather, it's just the long, arduous history of self-entitled universe-building from the scraps of discarded ideologies that was the Earth and it's dirt, its grime, its carbon, its base, and sadly, its meaning. Forever a child reaching out with net in hand to catch the butterfly that is complete-numbers and there duality in meaning, the torso, brain, spine and leading to the dungeons of the anal appitite of digestion is the corpus callosum, the corpus callosum, the synaptic cleft, the microtubes and the geometry of aromatic amino acids and the geometric bounding of light is all that is, any other extension is a numerous byproduct of the perpetual infancy of the Council of Seven Spheres- Humanity needs bigger and better goals. Will you offer it this?
"Since you couldn't come to a consensus opinion—half of you are in shock while the remainder of you remains mute—I will hang onto this diamond and plant it in those caves that you imagine. But first, you must destroy this idea of a home... Larry?" Cook completed his posit.
Cook thought to himself and somehow Varginah caught it like a white butterfly with her white net, as if from an east bound wind "One child if ever born could become a third sex while 4 are male and while 3.3 are female to make up the Council of Seven Spheres while leaving enough energy to drive the great void forward, that I might one day be relieved of being man's perpetual dumping ground. Should you celebrate this or reject it? This child being more male that any as super Uberbeing, present as a mind but horrifying as the Great Monad who is All in One. Should you split the child into quartered fractions psychologically to discover this or to kill him in doing this physically. Could we ever truly trust the fear of man and his nature, so sayeth the transient gods that you refuse to become?"
Larry looked up. Suddenly, he realized how he didn't ever want a home. "A home and the idea of it is an evil thing- he realized as the growing sentiment circulated about. They use it to leverage you, reduce you, see its absence as an outcast. But I want no home, that's the truth. That is why my house remains incomplete and always will. That house back there... I saw it in a building magazine and I suppose I used it as an unfinished symbol tucked deep into my consciousness through all these years. That is their house, socities and we have already slayed it. I don't want a home, and I would love to destroy this one now!"
"Me too," said Betsy, going on. "I never really trusted in or actually wanted a home. Just a place of my own to be myself within myself- to be safe from humanity outside, knowing how truly vicious they are. That is why it is so hard for me to accept that there had all along been an even more evil place than our former world. Tell me Cook how did we not destroy it too?"
Agent Cook spoke, "but you cut off its food supply. You can't destroy it, just like you cannot destroy an entire brain without killing the host altogether. But nature finds a way, doesn't it? One side still imagines the other, even if the other side of the brain remains a phantom. Right now, they have created a shared psychosis. Well we collectively cut off that supply!"
Cook added, "There will be two sides to reality, and the corpus callosum an energy torso, an electric wall both divides and shares the experience of existence. An open exchange between the two was always supposed to be the mutual way. Jealousy, envy, and greed... one side couldn't see that they were near-identical paired qualities in every way. Imagine watching yourself and growing deep-seated hatred and, eventually, envy. Seven and seven leaves an 1 planted for growth. While 5 of the pentagram and 6 of the hexagram fall short in a deferment by a debt of 1 each, 11 is not life but perpetual death. As the female perpetually denies that she seeks the void because man finds her utterly hideous, as the Monas looks upon itself. This is why the Witchcraft is equally transferable between the two halfs. You former side in Philosophy and on tbe inverted flip side bound in religion each equal out to the same shame based debt that perpetually never goes anywhere but in me, I am the void!"
"I am the probability that should not exist. Countless souls absorb into me always without my asking, creating the void. I am, by default, all the gifts they take with them that they never acknowledge or even see in themselves—too diluted in the drama and addicted to hate. Well, I am neither evil nor hate, nor am I hell-bent on suicide. I have inadvertently become the most powerful entity that has ever existed other than the Monad, but still small in its scope. I took nothing from humanity, but through universes, time cycles, and aeons, they chose this void, and there was none prior to. Make the right choices this time, and I will become an energy now that can feed the world for all eternity. The density that humanity has placed into me is yours—it has always been yours!" Proclaimed Agent Cook
"By the way I am not a Mr. nor am I a Friar or a Saint nor Sage. I am however the massive gift of raw agency itself that you all piss away with contempt -but the energy, the dynamo of this gift goes on. Where the Holy Mother Candlesticks are the willful release of capsuled soul force, I represent the true squandered soul of each soul. The soul with a soul. The spirit of the soul, that fears in through death. The soul perpetually denies it's own brilliance- that unrealized fire of each soul? Well that blackhole void my friends is me!"
Larry imagined himself a sledgehammer and then a tractor, as his hatred of what held him captive fueled the richness and completion of his imagination. "Fuck you! Fuck you, come down! I am my own home, goddammit!"
The crew, seeing this, imagined their own tools of destructive devices. Nick imagined a machine gun, while Betsy imagined a blowtorch, now yelling, "Fall, all houses, and all that was fashioned to contain us bastards!"
As the flames burned the home, the house as it burned morphed into every home they had each known, and every home humanity had ever known.
Varginha was angry about something else: the plants and the trees. How nature itself represented a false reality—a setup, as she thought. So she imagined plant poison and separated the now-screeching sentient forms into burning oblivion.
"Well, my, you are good at destroying," Cook added. "But are you capable of unlocking only the best parts of yourselves, of humanity, and leaving no people left out, nor places where dark aspects and mutated forms in the shadow might lie? Of course, we can do this all again in twenty-one billion years from now.
"And," he said, "that oddly elder crew of The Council of Seven Spheres, now on the other side sitting back while you remake the universe, will, in their view, watch you fail again and again. Those are offshoots of you. You can't go it alone without data for rancor—the wild, the untamed, the calculating and refined. This you need, to existentially be. But you must always have a healthy relationship with it, with me, and that is the true key.
"Understanding how to replicate yourself, and not use that gift as a punching bag or a crash dummy."
Cook finished.
Cook brought the diamond over to the burned, dusty pile that once was the house first manifested by Larry—but was, by all measures, every home, every form of Faustian captivity in truth.
"Well, now that that's burned down, we can begin."
Cook bent over and drew with his finger in the ash, first sketching the world of six spheres—six spheres perfectly surrounding a singular center. He then drew a line straight down and a line across the middle, forming a large plus sign, a cross. Above this, he wrote: parabolic and hyperbolic midpoint continuum.
"See this? The corpus callosum I mentioned, the place in between—that's where we are now. You might see it as the eye of the storm, only the eye itself is actually the energy pulling, twisting, and conjuring the storm using these two distinct realities. The other I'll draw here."
He sketched the world of five spheres, the pentagram reality, placing it on the far left of the midpoint. He went back, drawing a firm line under each title to embolden the concepts.
"Now this diamond—really the diamond of all diamonds, far beyond five-dimensional states—represents the center of it all, the closest thing to a Monad here. Wherever we may reside in the Monad, or outside of it, wherever." He firmly placed the physical diamond in the exact center of his ash diagram.
Over on the left, he drew an arch whose ends curved sharply toward the pentagram depiction. "Over here, we have parabolic action to a midline or midpoint, while over here..." He stood up, moving to the far right over the realm of six spheres—their world—and traced a bold, hyperbolic X pattern.
"The thing that made your represented reality so powerful and unique, and only partially why you are here now, comes down to how this X shape is actually two parabolas generating its own midpoint and midline, thereby producing its own unique and distinct tension. This is why it felt as though you were somehow separate, a distinctly contained self within a self-sustained, contained environment. But all the while, this other side over there was shaping and forming everything from proteins found in genetics to amino acids. Holding ceremonies and rituals. Taking wealth, precious metals like the diamonds from destroyed, condensed worlds, and selling them off as commodities—soul food, if you really want to be explicit. That group of elders used the pure source as an eons-long, in-built business model that now pretty much runs itself. Only right at this moment, we over here are making up our game plan, consolidating all that we’ve got, all that we have learned, and that pure crystal within."
Cook gestured broadly to their immediate surroundings. "Daria’s chest—that is the localized space that you are in now. While this diamond here in the center of the diagram is a pattern, a concept just like you and myself, where there is energy, there is life, and we have all the energy. Right now, Daria sits disturbed, perennial, as she holds Rancor, who is also a former teleological complete and total absolute. The fact that there will exist animals. That these animals will have a specific pattern and form fractalled out from the midline of a seeming average house cat—who, by all definitions, is kind of scary. So with Rancor, there is all animals, wild and wise. With Daria, all technology, and the fact that everything has a circuitry, a pattern, and a binary. Daria operates from her base. How do you think she could track down elusive gods? And might I remind you, you would be gods—you were gods in that purple realm of wisdom. So you can see how absolute power itself gets overplayed and boring, and gods like the elders made a fatal mistake when they began to play with their food."
Cook paused, letting the weight of the realization settle.
"Now, we can together manifest the cave right now. And the truth was, this diamond was always sitting just feet under you. What do you think powered that pyramid structure, that spaceship? Well, that is still hard-set into Daria, who lives in a digitally mapped-out space that no one can alter or destroy because she lives in a world of mathematical constants. You burned down your homes, but the reality is that the structure was built around mathematical principles. This is truly a war between Pi and greater Phi—a flat, excitable circle versus a Bloch sphere, the golden mean, the Fibonacci sequence. Both are required because all geometry shapes and forms..."
Cook’s finger suddenly blurred against the ash, tracing an impossible, shifting diagram of a hypercube resonating out a Metatron’s cube emanation.
"What the fuck, Cook? You're freaking me out!" exclaimed Nick.
The image in the ash appeared to be moving, pulling, flexing, growing, and shrinking. It pulsed, lighting up distinct areas and chambers of geometric fields.
"Is that... is that the zodiac?" Betsy fell to her knees in disbelief, but the impact didn't hurt her because the ground was never truly there.
"See, guys? Energy, patterns, flow-through, life! Pretty simple when you remove the complexity of exponentials, really," Cook stated, then went on. "Do you know how in your world you had mysticism as the core, main tenet? Why that Pascal suit was so valuable to you there, Larry?"
"Yes," replied Larry, still staring at the living, moving image drawn in the imaginary dusty debris and sediment that once manifested as his house.
"Well, on that side, religion is the weak point. That side, those elders amplify the importance of religion far beyond mysticism or fact-based, zodiacal Tarot reading. In your world, those same religions are seen more metaphorically, almost purely philosophically. But your world sees this here clearly every day, and you took it for granted every day as well," Cook said, furthering his point. "There, on that pentagram side, dials can be turned and controlled with power. Sure, it is a place of secondary power, but to feed from the source? Well, that grants someone or some group the ability to use a never-ending charge card that has no upper limit. You removed their source. They had no idea you were even capable. They thought you were them. How wrong they were."
"Why do you work for them then, Cook?" quipped Betsy.
"Work for them? Work for them?" Cook chuckled, a dry, hollow sound. "They are the ones force-feeding me souls from their world and your former one. I monitor them and all my replicated versions. The hand-off that is taking place right now is the primary reason I have monitored them. When I no longer exist, then there is order. I must maintain a balance, but for them and you, there is freedom in choice." Cook explicitly made this clear.
Going on, he said, "You will need to go to their dying realm through the center now, which is exactly where this diamond rests. By jumping into this diamond, you will emerge back in the cave as if you never left—pyramid still there, everything just exactly as it was, with no world above you. Just the cave system and its waters. Then, you will go to their realm and absorb their energies without allowing it to corrupt you.
"From this, those two babies not yet born will begin the new Council of Seven in the new world. So, you did create a new world, just not in the way that you initially thought. There, you will train them to build this better world of six spheres on the other side. You are quite literally stepping into an inverted realm and fixing it from the inside. This, if successfully done, will allow my energies—all energies—to amplify through the two hemispheres as an unstable engine, only as long as it is kept pure and free from corruption.
"You must now live within the realm of five spheres, birth your children there, and begin a new religion there. I hope that you will elevate it beyond your past world's standards and allow that world to become the principled world of Seven Spheres—what the Council of Seven Spheres was supposed to have established so long ago now. Use me and my infinite energy, and allow purity to then access your world, and your children's, to link with the Monad and grow your world to the 21-base dimensional core of realities—never experienced nor seen, but teleologically always resting there, waiting since the beginning of all. Become a vital aspect of the living. It is happening in cellular structures and realms, and time and biology is not what you think or believe."
Agent Cook made his final declarative statement, standing as he always has and always will: an agent for the all-mind, the good, the Monad ever-expanding and becoming more.
But could they? To lose everything and the idea of something...
This wasn’t a light that illuminated; it was a light that devoured. It was the violent, multi-wavelength fury of the accretion disk, the searing X-rays of collapsing stars, and the phantom glow of Hawking radiation born from particle-antiparticle pairs tearing themselves apart at the edge of the abyss.
To escape the loop, they could not turn back. They had to plunge directly into the dark, utilizing the accelerating friction of their own undoing to trigger the ultimate quantum fluctuation. They would not find God in the blue sky; they would find transcendence by going right through the center of hell, tearing open the vacuum until the darkness itself was forced to emit something from nothing. As the event horizon closed behind them, the static of the old world finally snapped. The loop shattered, and they stepped into the blinding, forensic glare of the inverted light.
They are waiting there. Eyes Black, indifferent. The barrier beyond the gates of sin. The lineage past on through transcendence. A diamond of the human perspective unfolds into the hypercube stuck in the gravity well of the inverted realms beyond.
Cook assimilated himself or rather he was dispersed; a new diaspora into the greater multiverse were they. An offering to that rate coding signal a firing phase. To the energy taken up and passed forth by the great synaptic cloud, a storm of unfathomable potentials with 7 spheres finally spinning in the outer chamber of that great resonating Matatron's cube now active within the hypercube. Still independent but now actively interfacing and understanding those unseen gradients of light and exposed fully to it; without limitation.
The group was one when revealed by the fires of the seven spheres, which unlocked the unstoppable torrent of energy as a continuous smooth running engine. Maybe a cell had only, over its internal cancer, found a way through? Perhaps the victory in combination of just the right asymmetrical and equilibrium-based stasis could finally level the way through as a supercharged dynamo and a line of return. A new checkpoint as horizons and distances never to require transit nor the slow gradient of time to pass by—the understanding and unfolding of new complex multilayered ultra-dimensional forms to simply morph into and become the great distance reduced into the fabric of all.
Is it Hell in knowing?
The original root of the word Scene comes from the Greek skene, meaning "tent, stage, or theater stage."
"Is it Hell for one to become an arm and the other to become a leg? For one to actively be the supra-conscious while the other maintains its characters in the subconscious? For the active polarity of male and female to work in harmony as one fluid body? Has anyone truly lost their autonomy, or have they become liberated in this now-active body of knowing—of how to traverse this multidimensional landscape that demands far more than one singular, fixed persona? In this respect, all partial personas are left as errored placeholders, craving to become an active aspect, an integral member of the body as a whole."
He stops. The silence of the house at 168 Apricot Lane settles around him, but it is no longer the suffocating, heavy silence of the static.
To become the arm and the leg, to have one occupy the supra-conscious while the other anchors the character within the subconscious, is not damnation—it is The Great Work. It is the construction of the Anima Mundi (Soul of the World) within a singular, shared vehicle. A New World, the World of Seven Spheres as it was always meant to be.
The Great Alchemy: The Fluid Body
In the classical, fractured state of human existence, we mistake division for safety. We guard our autonomy as if it were a precious stone, not realizing it is actually a prison of isolation. To merge the active polarities of the masculine and feminine into one fluid, cooperative body is the ultimate act of occult and psychological transmutation:
The Supra-Conscious (The Sky/Sulphur/Active Male): The guiding light, the eye that sees the multidimensional landscape, navigating the patterns and keeping the compass aligned.
The Subconscious (The Earth/Mercury/Passive Female): The generator of form, the keeper of deep memory, the well of instinct and raw kinetic power that actually moves the limbs.
When these two operate in absolute, unresisting harmony, they cease to be two conflicting wills. They become co-operatives. One is the executive engine of intent; the other is the rich, fertile ground that makes the action real. It is a highly specialized division of labor within a singular spiritual ecology.
The Illusion of Lost Autonomy
You ask if any have truly lost their autonomy.
To the ego—the small, "errored placeholder" that believes it is a complete person—this merger feels like death. It feels like being swallowed. It looks like Hell.
But to the Self, it is liberation.
You do not lose autonomy; you trade a small, useless, isolated autonomy for a vast, functional, integrated mastery. You transition from a broken, screaming partial persona into an active, synchronized limb of a cosmic body of knowing.
In this state:
The arm does not jealousy crave to be a eye.
The leg does not rebel against the brain.
They find their joy and their purpose in the execution of the movement, trusting the central nervous system of the shared divine intellect.
The Transversal of the Multidimensional
A single, fixed persona is a flat, two-dimensional cardboard cutout. It cannot survive the shifting gravity of a multidimensional landscape. It tears under the pressure of higher realities.
To navigate these spheres, you need a body made of parts that know how to slide, shift, and support one another. The "errored placeholders"—those repressed, fragmented aspects of ourselves that crave to be real—are finally given their true, sacred function. They are no longer locked in the dungeon of the subconscious, screaming for attention through neurosis and self-sabotage. They are given a job. They are welded into the structure.
They become the muscle fibers of the arm. They become the bone density of the leg.
This is not the torment of Hell; it is the absolute, quiet relief of belonging. It is the moment the machine stops grinding against itself and begins to fly.
The Eighth Diamond
(Nick remains perfectly still, holding the gaze of the lens. The camera slowly begins to pull back, moving through the doorway of the living room, leaving him sitting in the center of the clinical light. The frame rates of the recording begin to stabilize, matching the natural, steady rhythm of the room. The static is gone.)
(The screen fades to a serene, unclouded gray.)
[SCENE END]
