Mother Horse Eyes Part 3 (Posts 61-90)

(Note: This creepypasta was originally told through comments on Reddit. It is also super long, so it's been split up into parts)

Mother Horse Eyes Part 1

Mother Horse Eyes Part 2

###### 61st Post / Date 05-19-2016 at 19:12:39 EDT

I approached the Oily Ones' hiding place with subtlety. Alert. Not disturbing. Letting everything flow through me. I did not search for anything but allowed all to reveal itself. The smells were disturbing. Awful. I could smell our kind, the mingling scents of multitudes. They seemed to have marked everything without any regard for each other.

In front of the portal sat two of our kind. They were monstrously round and swollen, their form distorted. Dull eyes followed me without curiosity as I approached. Even as I came within the dangerous range, they showed no interest. Was it a trap to bring me in close?

They did not attack. I passed them and came to the portal. Slowly, I pushed my head through the folding threshold. The inside was utterly bizarre, made of mostly box-like shapes in arrangements I could hardly comprehend. There was no grass, no trees, nothing belonging to the form of the world. Instead, there were straight, flat shapes folded around to cover everything, above and below, all sides. In the distance, some our kind were walking around within this odd space, as slow and swollen as the ones outside.

The smell was worse than outside, even more confusing. I saw and smelled uncovered droppings everywhere. To not cover droppings was unsubtle. It was a moral outrage. Still, I pushed through the portal and entered the space. The ground was hard and slippery and smelled of legions. Everything was silent, a deeper silence than I had ever known. I knew now that I was cut off from the world for the first time in my life. I was alone.

I moved forward. I wanted to shut out the smells and sounds, but I let them pass through me. I was terrified, but I let the terror pass through me. I wondered if I was being unsubtle, if I was disturbing the world, if I was inviting deadly misfortune. But I felt no insight on this matter. The answer would make itself known soon enough.

As I moved deeper into the space, I came upon a giant Oily One.

...............

l call her Angelica because she is Angelica. There's no doubt about it. Oh, she looks different this time, but I think Angelica will look different every time she comes to me. She is also much shyer this time. Such a shy little thing! But the way she moves, that pure, lovely way -- there's no mistaking it. It's Angelica again. How wonderful! How lovely! Would you think I'm a silly old biddy if I started crying? If I got on my knees right then and there and started thanking God? How he is great. How he has seen fit to bless me.

...............

I have been investigating this space, and I have found much confusion and monstrosity but no answers. There is a single oily one which stays here, as well as many of our kind. All of them, the oily one and our kind, are monstrously swollen and distorted. The oily one in particular reeks of corruption and disease and death. She cries to me like a lost whelp, but I keep my distance from her. I avoid the others of my kind as well.

This space has many spaces within itself. Each of these spaces holds a thousand mysteries. It is everything I can do to not be overwhelmed, to let the mystery flow through me. Darkness has come and left, and I am terribly hungry. The oily one comes to me with food, wonderful food, but I am afraid to take it.

I wonder, what exactly am I looking for? I am looking for some answer to the mystery of the oily ones, but what form will this take? I cannot know. All around me are forms I do not recognize. I must not look for anything. I will simply become a part of this place and let the answer show itself to me.

...............

Angelic has been here for over a day, but she hasn't spoken to me yet. I think I understand why. The last time she came to me, I was the shy one. I was the one who was afraid of everything, afraid of the world, in despair because of the first time she left. Now I have been restored, and she is the shy one. It is my turn to help her, to give back. I've tried to give her some of our cuisine, but she hides. I don't think she's eaten anything since she found her way in here. Poor thing.

...............

Hunger forced me to come close to the oily one. She set down some food and I took it, keeping an eye on her. She has an awful, fleshy face and giant, pale eyes. She often sings like a bird. Abomination!

It was the first time eating the oily ones' food since my kitten died. Would this food kill me? Only time will tell. My form commanded me to eat, so I ate. The food was absolutely wonderful, as the oily ones' food always is. I am trying to follow the art of subtlety, but there can be no subtlety in this unholy den of madness.

I believe I have investigated almost every place within this giant place. There are many portals in here which lead to various small places. They open and shut in different configurations. But I have watched them carefully and gone into almost every small place and found no answers.

But there is one place I have not yet gone. It is perhaps the only place yet unseen by me. It is the place where the oily one goes when darkness comes. I think she sleeps there. I heard her making strange singing sounds from within, frightening sounds. She keeps the portal closed at all times. It only opens for a moment when she goes in and out. I have tried to get a look inside but have not been successful.

I believe there must be some answer within this space. Everything has a form, every form is a story, every story makes sense. There must be some reason for the oily ones, for their random kindness, for their random cruelty. There must be an answer, and that answer must reside within the hidden space, for it does not reside anywhere else.

I will wait. I will go inside.

...............

Sweet Angelica is starting to warm to me. We eat together. She's still very skittish, but she shows up promptly at dinnertime and eats like a little lady. She doesn't chat with me, but I think she will start to soon. I ask Linda Mercychowder to be Angelica's special little friend and show her around the house. Of course, Linda responds with, "Oh, Madame, I'm too busy with my modeling career! Can't somebody else do it?" Meanwhile, the little strumpet flirts all day with Chester Barrington, but that's another story.

...............

The oily one came to me with food, and I found myself crying out to her, as if I was a little kitten again, as if she was my mother. What has happened to me? How could I regard this horrid creature as my mother? I knew that I would have to become a part of this abomination to unravel its mysteries, but this is too much. I want to leave, to go back to the world, to go back to the fresh air and light. I must gain access to the hidden space soon, or I will go mad. I am losing myself.

...............

Little Angelica finally talked to me! Now she talks all the time. "Mother, mother! I'm back!" she says. "Oh, I've missed you so much! But I knew you would find me again! You will find me every time!" Oh, it's joyful. She's still shy and doesn't let me hug her, but to hear her voice again is such a blessing.

I notice her following me to my bedroom every night, so tonight I let her in. None of the other ladies or gentlemen are allowed in there, but this is Angelica, so she can sleep with me. She stays in the corner of the room until I fall asleep, even though I sprinkle cuisine all over the bed. I hope that soon we can sleep together like we used to.

...............

I finally gained access to the inner space, the space which was to contain all the answers to the mystery which has tormented me for so long. I suppose I have not properly practiced the art of subtlety. I have pushed my way into a forbidden space, snooping and seeking and striving and upsetting things. I suppose it is only fitting that I was greeted with such misfortune.

There were no answers in the hidden space. None at all. Just more weird shapes and bad smells. There was nothing that seemed of any significance. I discovered nothing at all.

And so, the oily ones remain as much as mystery to me as ever. Why are they so monstrous? What is the reason for their kindness? Why do they give us food? Why do we call to them like mothers?

I guess I will never know. I have fled that awful space and am gratefully among the trees and grasses again. I will never go back there.

...............

Angelica is gone. I haven't seen her for two weeks. She stayed with me in my bedroom one night, and I really thought we were getting closer, and then the next day she just disappeared. How could she leave like that?

I want to die. I want to die. I can't want to die. I told myself I wouldn't feel this way anymore. I just can't feel this way. No more. I need to call my sister. I need help. What's happened to me? Please God.

I've been lying in bed all day, weeping. All around the room there are pictures of the very first Angelica, my darling girl. In the pictures, she's not sick. She's eating ice cream, learning to swim, playing cards. I showed them to the new Angelica, but she couldn't understand... After all... she's just a cat.

...............

To hunt prey, you must simply become an ordinary part of the world. Look around, my darling kitten. What is happening right now? Nothing at all. Yet the leaves rustle, the grass sways, the birds call, the gnats dance. All of this is just part of the world.

Part of the mystery.

*Title: "...bring evil from the other side of death"*

###### 62nd Post / Date 05-21-2016 at 04:13:16 EDT

The old crone became one of the people, and the people soon began to love her. After her bruises and cuts had healed, she became swirling and bubbly like a young woman. At any time, the people could hear her musical voice babbling on without end, telling stories from different bands of strangers she had met. It was a strong flow of words that could bring anybody into it, even me. She was also very lucky at finding clams, pulling them from the waters whenever she liked, and she sometimes snuck away from the river and came back with rare treats, like snake's eggs and red beetles.

The people did not like to go far from the waters of Mother River. Her protection stayed close to the banks, and the rocky land was known to be stalked by spirits of death, fanged evils which became wolves and lions. Even our little cats stayed close the alders and the rushes. But the crone had no fear of such spirits and wandered off among the rocks whenever she pleased. The people whispered about this, but it was known that the crone was once a stranger, so it expected that she would keep strange ways.

One day, near the end of the gentle season, the girl Rima disappeared. She was with us in the night and gone the next morning. We searched for her, going up and down the river and sneaking as far as we dared into the rocky lands, but there was no sign of her at all. Some of the women recalled that she had gone with the crone into the rocky lands that day, and at night she had slept near the crone with her two gray cats.

Now there was argument among the people. Some accused the crone of talking with the spirits of death. Some accused her of being a spirit herself. Others said she had at least been foolish in bringing Rima out to rocky lands.

I was undecided. I did not like the crone nor did I trust her, but people often talked about things they did not know anything about. The flute player Maed argued that the crone had been a great friend to the people, giving us three pearls and much food and telling us the stories and songs of the strangers. I knew that the stories and songs of strangers were worthless, but he spoke very beautifully.

As the people argued, the old crone simply watched us, her shriveled stranger's face making no sign at all, her eyes just as calm as the wide waters. Finally, one of the great men asked her to explain herself. She spoke slowly, in trickling words, and the people became silent as they listened. She said that the same thing had happened to the Painted Backs, who were the last group of strangers she lived with.

First, a few valuable young women had disappeared in the night, one by one. Then young men were taken. Finally, the Painted Backs were set upon by another group of strangers, monstrous men as white as cave fish, able to take the form of the eagle and the lion, powerful with evil and cruelty. There was much slaughter, and all were taken away except her, as she was protected by Mother River.

This brought great fear to the people. The women whispered and burbled while the men showed their chests to seem brave. One of the great men said that this crone was bad luck, that she was somehow muddied with evil spirits. She had brought disaster on the Painted Backs, and she would bring disaster on us. The people agreed. Her journeys into the rocky land had tainted her with evil, and we must get rid of her.

The crone said that the evil had not come from her and was not her fault. She said the evil came from Mother River herself. At this, the people became angry. Mother River did not bring evil. She brought the clams and the berries and the cleansing waters, but she did not bring evil.

One of the people's great men picked up a rock to brain the crone for speaking against Mother River. The crone showed no fear. She said that Mother River brought both luck and evil. If we were to accept Mother's luck, we would have to accept her evil. But there were ways to increase luck and lessen evil. She said that she had tried to teach these ways to the Painted Backs, but they had not listened and so were destroyed. Because they had not heeded her words, their lives and deeds ceased to flow and were dried up into dust.

We all scoffed at this nonsense. Nothing like this was mentioned in the Deeds of the Fathers. So we argued about whether to brain the crone or drown her. In the end, it was decided that we would simply leave her behind, but many of the people grumbled and were unhappy. We left her there at a bend in the river. As we walked away, she made a sign of respect. I expected that she would ask for her pearls back, but she did not. She stayed there by the river's bend, staring into the waters.

Later that day, we washed ourselves in the waters to rid ourselves of the evil that had tainted us. In the days that followed, Mother River seemed quiet and sad without the pretty face of Rima and the constant voice of the crone to keep her company. The people wondered if we had made the right choice. The flow of the river was hard to know, and nobody could see the cold depths under the glittering surface. But as the days passed, and we finished the long song of tears for Rima, things became gentle again.

Then another girl disappeared. It was the same as before, gone in the night without a sound. Now we knew we were being visited by evil. It was not just the old crone who was muddied by evil. Still, we argued whether the crone had brought the evil or not. So much could not be known, and these arguments flowed nowhere. One of the people remembered that the crone had spoken of a way to increase luck and lessen evil. What if she could prevent us from being destroyed like the Painted Backs?

Now there were many arguments and threats, and one man was almost drowned until he was saved by his women. It was decided that this evil was very powerful, and we would have to surrender to it or be destroyed. There was no choice. So, whether the woman was lucky or evil, whether she was helping us or tricking us, we would go to her and do as she said. Killing her would not help. If she could bring evil from far down the river, how much easier would it be to bring evil from the other side of death, which is so close to life? No, we would go to her.

I and another man were chosen to go back down the river and find the old crone. She was still at the bend where we had left her, staring into the glittering waters. She smiled as we came to her and asked what we must do.

*Title: "some thoughts about addiction. who knows."*

###### 63rd Post / Date 05-22-2016 at 04:40:17 EDT

If you are horribly burned in a fire, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. If you shatter your spine, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. If you are addicted to drugs and your life has turned to utter and total shit, you can take drugs to relieve the pain.

And that's how the trap works.

Imagine if the only cure for burn pain was fire. Imagine if the cure for back pain was whacking yourself in the spine with a hammer. The drug addict is caught in an analogous situation. The only fast, reliable remedy for the psychological pain of drug addiction is drugs. There are other cures (a notable one is *not* doing drugs), but they are all slower and less reliable.

Somehow, the lure of feeling better now overrides the hope of feeling better later. This is the basic mechanism of addiction. The behavior of an addict is perfectly logical in the short term and perfectly illogical in the long term. Because life exists in the long term, addiction is illogical overall. What is surprising how easily addiction can ensnare people who are perfectly intelligent and self-disciplined.

You can go to certain parts of any sizable city in America and watch drugs addicts totter around. Looking at their blighted faces, their filthy clothes, their total lack of self-regard, you would be forgiven for thinking that they lack self-discipline. How could you think otherwise? When a person can't be bothered to shower, much less get a proper job or just stop smoking crack for more than a few hours, what else could you call it but a lack of self-discipline?

Imagine the Nazi troops at Stalingrad, encircled by the Soviet troops, fighting against total annihilation. Would you look at these troops, these underslept, unshaven men in stinking unwashed clothes, and accuse them of lacking self-discipline? Would you say, "Tut-tut, these Nazis are an undisciplined lot?" Of course not. You would understand that their shabby state is not from a lack of self-discipline, but rather because they are concerned with other things. Dire things.

While there are several notable differences between Nazi soldiers and crack heads, the same principle is in effect for both. For both, there has been a terrible reordering of priorities. The showering, the clean clothes, the job, all of these become secondary to fast access to the drug. If showering and clean clothes got them fast access to the drug, they would walk around looking like a detergent commercial. You would never see whites so white.

But they don't need clean clothes. They don't need showers. They need drugs. The drugs are the solution to everything.

Highly self-disciplined people are actually quite vulnerable to drug addiction. It is because they believe that they need to control their feelings. They often seek to simply eliminate bad feelings, just as they seek to eliminate underperformance from every other area of their lives. The demon of addiction looks at their grand self-discipline and giggles with glee. It knows that it will be precisely this self-discipline that will bring them to heel. They will self-discipline themselves right into total obedience to the drug.

As an example, look at Prince and Michael Jackson. Were they self-disciplined? Definitely. The world has hardly seen such self-discipline. They were obsessive workaholics, devoted to their careers, and they propelled themselves to the very pinnacle of professional success. They both knew the dangers of drug addiction and fastidiously avoided drugs. Keep in mind, avoiding drugs in 1980s Hollywood must have been like avoiding water in a swimming pool at the bottom of the fucking ocean. Yet they managed to do it for a while because they had self-discipline.

Now they are both dead. They were both destroyed by drug addiction. In the end, self-discipline was not enough to save them. Why not? Because self-discipline is just a talent, an accomplishment. And like any other talent or accomplishment, it can be turned and made to serve the dark master.

What then is our defense against this menace? What is the answer?

*Title: "A large stewed tomato, rather ugly."*

###### 64th Post / Date 05-24-2016 at 01:38:30 EDT

It simply appeared in the primitive infraspace one day, like a hungry lion showing up on the edge of a village. Over the course of a few hours, it breached a multitude of hardened systems, going where it wanted, taking what it wanted, seemingly capable of breaking any form of crypto. Then it disappeared. That was in 1991. More than a decade passed before it was seen again.

By the time it reappeared, it had already become something of a legend -- in the sense that people scarcely believed it had ever really existed. Most experts had convinced themselves that the original episode wasn't what it appeared to be, that prime factorization techniques were still secure, that the attacks had actually used fairly mundane techniques.

But it came again and did much as it had done before, this time on a larger scale, one commensurate with the more highly developed state of the infraspace. Nobody could really be sure this was the same entity responsible for the original attacks. It was only known that both sets of attacks involved the same almost magically advanced capabilities. Now, at least, we knew we were dealing with something real.

In the years that followed, it appeared sporadically, accessing government systems, defense systems, nuclear systems, RL infrastructure systems, social networks, no-latency communities, whatever it wanted. And as time went on, the appearances grew more frequent.

Naturally, the governments of the world were extremely alarmed. A lot of accusations and threats flew back and forth. The activity proved that our best crypto, even our best physical security, was inadequate. But what could be done? We couldn't just roll back the information technology revolution and put everything in manila file folders. So we looked for new techniques to protect ourselves. But it was a lesson in helplessness. It defeated everything we came up with.

After the first attack, it began to use a technique of taming satellites and transmitting information to random locations in the middle of the ocean. We trained instruments on these locations and sent ships racing out to find whoever had been receiving all this stolen data, but they never found anything.

Then one day, an attack occurred, and a tamed satellite began transmitting to a location in the Atlantic just a few kilometers from where a Royal Navy frigate happened to be. When the warship arrived at the location, the satellite was still trying to open a connection with the surface. There was nothing in sight, but they quickly detected a very large object on their sonar, coming towards the site.

Was it an accident? With all those millions of square kilometers of open water to choose from, would it accidently choose a location near a warship, of all types of vessels? No, I think it wanted us to see. Personally, I think it has guided every step of its interaction with us, slowly revealing itself as its powers have developed, slowly drawing us in closer. It's sad. Some of the others believed that we were valiantly struggling against it. But I don't think we were ever struggling against it any more than a rat struggles against a maze.

"A large stewed tomato, rather ugly." This was how it was described by the skipper, apparently not a poetic man. The video shows an enormous glistening mountain of flesh rising out of the ocean, dwarfing the warship, expelling streams of water out of myriad holes that cover its surface like giant pores. A latticework of huge purple veins runs between the holes, pumping dark globular objects along the structure's surface.

The visible portion which emerged above the ocean surface was shaped like a round hump with a slight ridging along the center. The sonar record paints vague picture of what was beneath the water, apparently an oblong object with a number (as many as twelve) of thin appendages as long as the main body itself. The conceptual artists of the day produced a great many imaginative monstrosities based on the information.

After it surfaced, the warship assumed a "defensive posture," meaning it backed off, and waited. The metallic cylinders appeared shortly after. These were much smaller than the Iwo Jima or Novaya Zemlya cylinders, but much more segmented, with thousands of cubic portions flickering in and out of existence like bad pixels. They lasted for 3 minutes and 13 seconds before vanishing as suddenly as they appeared. A moment later, the fleshy mound expelled an enormous geyser of what was apparently air and seawater, like a whale blowing out of its blowhole, and dived beneath the surface.

The warship attempted to give chase, but was unable to track the object on sonar. It seemed to fragment and disappear. Eventually the warship returned to the site and took samples of the water. Mixed amongst all the random plankton and fish cells, there was a fair amount of human DNA. In fact, we were able to trace some of it to specific people, and this was how we proved conclusively that this creature, later to be called a "skin ship," was related, in a literal sense, to the so-called Artigas portal, which was actually underwater several hundred kilometers away from Artigas, Antarctica.

So, in the end, it turned out we had built it. We had built Q.

*Title: "Defeat the Ancient Queen"*

###### 65th Post / Date 05-24-2016 at 16:06:58 ED

It started as a field trip twice a week. Get out of the home for a while, go play video games. Not just for a little bit on the staff's phones, but for hours on real rigs. Before then, my favorite thing was when we took walks in the woods behind the home, but this was even better. It was funny because the game we played was called Children of the Forest, which was basically where you walked through the woods fighting enemies.

In the game, you had to remember all these different paths, which were always branching off in different patterns. And you'd fight different enemies that all had different patterns. There was a lot of memorizing stuff and making decisions. Everybody liked the first 20 levels or so, but after that, most of the other kids got frustrated. Instead of going on, they just played the first few levels over and over. But I kept going higher and higher.

The final boss was called the Ancient Queen. You were always advancing on her castle, this huge dark castle that loomed in the background of every screen. Sometimes you would see her floating around her castle, just a shadowy bird-like shape, and she would taunt you from afar. "Come, my child, come and face me!" That kind of stuff. Man, I wanted to get her.

Even as a little kid, I got really obsessed about things. I wanted to beat the Ancient Queen so badly. I got to level 100, then 200, then 300. At this point, every branch in the path offered like 40 choices, and they came literally every second, plus you had to do the enemy patterns, sometimes mixing two and three enemies at once, kind of like playing two melodies at once on a keyboard. It got pretty insane, but I kept advancing. I was relentless.

It was nice to finally be the best at something. I was way better than any other kid. I mean, no other kid went past like level 40. Sometimes they had me play online against other people. There was a kind of battle mode. I beat everybody.

At first we could only go to play games like twice a week, and everybody was just dying to do it, since there was nothing to do at the home. But after a while they let me play whenever I wanted. This made the other kids jealous, and they started shunning me, so I just played even more.

I played all the time. I started sleeping at the game place, and I played from when I first woke up in the morning (or night) until I went to sleep at night (or morning). They brought me food while I played, whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. One of the people at the game place tried to spoon feed me while I played. It was creepy at first, but I got used to it.

I had pretty much gotten used to the fact that whenever something was really fun, adults would come in and take it away or tell me to not do too much of it. Or something bad would happen, and it would be destroyed. So when they told me I could play this all I wanted, it was like the ultimate freedom.

The ultimate freedom. Funny that.

I remember lying in bed one night, and I heard the theme music playing down the hall in the game room. The game was so fun, but kind of cheaply made, and it had this chintzy flute music that played over and over. I heard it now in the middle of the night and wondered who was playing, since I was the only kid there and the doctors never played it. So I got out of bed and snuck down the hall to see who it was. The game place was kind of creepy, with all white halls and everything smelling like plastic, and I was a little scared, since I was only 8 at the time. When I got to the game room, it was totally dark. Nobody was there. The music seemed to vanish. It had all been in my head. That's how much I played it.

I was obsessed with that damn Ancient Queen. She was like this huge mythical creature in my mind. In the game, she only had like a dozen taunts, and I must have heard each one hundreds of thousands of times. They were burned into my brain. When I was on the high levels and everything was flying at me at once, I kind just cleared my mind and let my hands play the game, if that makes sense. In these times, I would daydream about the Ancient Queen. What would it be like when I finally faced her? What would she look like? What would happen?

It's strange, but sometimes I imagined her as looking like my mother. That strange face that barely remembered.

After a few months, they gave me the surgery to install my direct sense jacks. After playing the direct sense games, I forgot all about the Children of the Forest and the Ancient Queen. I had found a beautiful, wonderful world where I was powerful beyond belief, where I wasn't just some little girl who lived in a home and didn't have any friends. So away I went...

A few years ago, I went back into the CIA files and found a copy of the game to see if I could finally beat it. I got past level 800. After that, it became simply inhuman. So I botted it to see the ending. It took a long time to build a proper bot. It really was a fiendish, clever game. Finally, I got one working, but it turns out that there is no ending. You get to level 1024, and it just resets. You never meet the Ancient Queen.

What's worse? Finding out there is no Ancient Queen? Or finding out there is one?

*Title: "We have to open up the box and see what's inside"*

###### 66th Post / Date 05-24-2016 at 20:03:54 ED

Society is built on interfaces. You take a complex thing, put it inside a sturdy box, and put some simple buttons on the box so that people can use the thing inside. The box makes it easier to use and prevents people from breaking it. For example, you can take the machinery of a clock, put it in a box, and put two hands on the outside along with a knob for winding it. Take all the machinery of a car, hide it behind a dashboard, and give people two pedals and wheel. Take all the circuits of a computer, put them in a box, and give people a monitor and a keyboard.

Interfaces receive input and produce output, and that's all we need to know. The clock gets wound, and its hands show the time. Input and output. As far as the user needs to know, what happens inside the box is magic. This allows stupid and ignorant people to use complicated things, as long as the interface inputs and outputs are simple.

Toyota uses millions of kilograms of steel every year. Does the CEO of Toyota know how to make steel from scratch? If he wanted to beat a guy up, could he go digging in the ground for some ore and whip himself up a batch of steel to make a pipe? No. He uses interfaces to get steel. He buys steel from an steelmaking company. Except he doesn't personally go down to the steelmaking company with a bag full of Yen, saying, "How much for a million kilos?" He uses a bank. Except he doesn't even personally go to the bank. He has a subordinate who does it for him. All these people and institutions are interfaces he can use. He employs a system of layered interfaces, both metaphorical and literal, to control things he doesn't really understand. We all do. The point is this: don't go messing with the CEO of Toyota. I assure you, he could get his hands on a steel pipe if he wanted.

The word "interface" refers to the input and the output, but it also refers to the box. We think of interfaces as existing in order to give us access to things, but they are also there to hide things from us. The idea is that some things are better off hidden. Everything will go along fine so long as a certain input produces the expected output. But when this stops happening, we have to open up the box and see what's inside. Sometimes we don't like what we find.

*Title: "The way of Fathers"*

###### 67th Post / Date 05-25-2016 at 04:19:32 EDT

When the old crone told me how get rid of the evil, I said the names of my Fathers, all of them in a row, and I spat on the ground. It was too much to bear. I had been told to bring the crone back to where the people were camped, but I wanted to hold her down in the water of the river and be done with her.

She said that we must wait for the next moonless night, then lead one of our young women deep into the haunted rocky lands. One of the monstrous evil strangers would come and take her away. If we do this, the evil strangers would leave the rest of the people alone, and they would not destroy us as they destroyed the Painted Backs. She said we must do this at the beginning of every dry season.

It was absurd, but we took the crone back to the people as we had been told to do. She told the people what she had told us. The people listened and were silent for a while. I spoke up as the son of one of the great men. I said her plan was evil. The people's strength is their young women, who are ripe and bear sons. To give them away is a humiliation. It is the way of cowards. When we make war against strangers, do we not take their young women for our own? We should make war against these evil strangers. We should set up a night watch, and when the evil strangers come to us, sneaking in like cowards, we should slay their men and take their women. This is the way of the Fathers. This is among the Deeds.

Many of the people agreed. Even though my words were clumsy, they still had the flow of truth. However, some of the great men seemed irritated, because I spoke first even though I was not a great man myself. One of my uncles asked the people if the Painted Backs were cowards. Were they not at least as numerous as the people? Were their men not strong? Did they not join us in war against the vile Grub Eaters and fight like lions? Yet they had been entirely destroyed by the evil strangers. It was not the act of a coward to prevent this. The people had many ripe young women, and just one was not too much to give away. To go against the flow of a powerful evil like this was unwise. It would bring destruction.

This led to much arguing among the people. Nobody knew what to do. I became angry. I shouted that the crone was a witch trickster. She had probably kidnapped the young girl Rima and sold her as a slave. I said my uncle was a fool. Some of the men had to lead me away from the camp so that I could calm down before blood was shed. When I finally came back, all had been decided. On the next moonless night, the crone would lead Rima's younger sister, Rona, out to the rocky lands. I was outraged, but did not say anything. The people were decided, and I could not go against them.

Then Maed, the flute player, spoke up. He said that it was cruel to send such a young girl out to the rocky lands to be taken away by evil. She would never see her mother and father again, nor the people, nor Mother River herself. With many beautiful and flowing words, he begged the people to change their minds. Now the arguing began again. The people were decided, but some of them lamented for Rona.

After Maed's words, I felt an opportunity. I asked the great men if I could go with Rona and the crone to the rocky lands. I would make sure that the crone was not tricking us and face the strangers to see if they were as the crone had said, monstrous men as white as cave fish, or if they were just ordinary men.

I was sure that the crone was trickster and that the evil strangers were just a lie she was telling. I expected her to protest, and I planned to show the people that she was lying. But instead, she just bowed and said that this was a wise and fair idea. She said I was very wise to doubt her, even wiser than some who were older than me, which made my old uncle grumble. She would be glad to show me the nature of these terrible beings so that the people would believe her.

This surprised me. The old witch was more tricky than I had expected. She offered to take anyone who doubted her out to the rocky lands to show them the evil menace. Nobody but me was "wise" enough to go with her. Now I became worried. Was the menace real? Would I encounter something monstrous out there in the rocky lands? Was I swimming against the flow of something sinister and powerful?

*Title: "Charm & Grayscruff"*

###### 68th Post / Date 05-25-2016 at 19:15:08 EDT

I had to go. To back down would be cowardly, not something that belonged among the Deeds. But I would have to be very careful out in the rocky land. Maybe the crone was telling the truth, and the monstrous evil strangers were real. But more likely, she would try to kill me out there and blame it on the strangers. That would get rid of me and make the people even more afraid.

Rona, the crone and I set out the next day. I let two women walk ahead of me, with Rona weeping and the crone whispering strange things to her. I stayed behind them. It was hard to look at poor Rona's red weeping face, and I did not want the crone near me. I had taken the fishing head off my spear and attached the war head. I also had my black stone knife hidden inside my tunic, and I brought my two favorite cats, Charm and Grayscruff, in my satchel. They both rode in the satchel well and were very clever and watchful. I wanted to be ready for any sort of trap.

We quickly left behind the gentle trees and bushes of the river land and went into steep, bare folds of the rocky land. I had only been away from Mother River's voice a few times in my life. Out in the rocky lands, there was nothing but the occasional stirring of the wind, which was not warm and burbling like the river, but thin and whispering. All around, I could feel the evil dryness and death that covered the land. Dust blew over the tilted rocks, and here and there were animal skulls and stalking black birds.

The sun was sinking down from its highest perch when we came upon a huge, smooth stone which rose above everything else. It was round like the top of a bald man's head and large enough that many men could stand on it at once. The crone said that this would be the place where the evil stranger would arrive. I asked her what we must do. She said that we only need to wait for night. Rona would go atop the stone. The stranger would come.

Rona did not weep now, but looked at the stone with glittering eyes. The crone ran her hands through Rona's hair, gently pulling out the tangles, and Rona smiled at her. I asked her if she was afraid. The crone had told her wonderful stories about how the strangers would treat her kindly because she was coming to them willingly. They would take her across the rocky land to another river which was far greater than Mother River, wide and flowing with sun-gold waters, and they would make her into one of the great women of their band.

I kicked the crone over. She cried out. I told her if I heard her voice one more time, I would paint this evil rock with her brains. She became meek. Rona protested, but I told her that the crone was a trickster. I tied the crone's hands behind her back with my belt and stuffed a wad of cloth into her mouth. There would be no tricks from her now.

I brought Rona and the crone atop the rock and looked around. The rocky land had many folds and hiding places. Still, the high stone was not a good place to make an attack. I let Charm and Grayscruff out of my satchel, and they stretched their legs and sniffed the rocks. If they felt any evil in the land, they did not show it. I walked far around the giant rock and searched among the cracks and folds in the land to see if there was anyone waiting. The whole place seemed to be empty. There were a few dry, dead bushes, so I gathered firewood.

When I came back, the sun was sinking behind the rocks, and long curving shadows lay across the bare world. I built a fire, and Rona and I ate while we watched the sky turn orange and purple. Finally all color fled from the world and darkness fell. With no moon, the small fire was the only light except for the stars. I told Rona to stay by the fire with the crone, who lay on her side, seeming to sleep.

I withdrew from the small circle of light and lay flat against the still-warm stone with my spear by my side. I was completely hidden in the darkness. Looking away from the firelight, the world was a perfectly black. Grayscruff startled me as he appeared out of the dark, sneaking up the rock to sit by the fire. Charm soon joined him. Maybe it was too dark for even the cats to hunt. Or maybe the land was too dead.

A long time passed, and there was no sound but the fire. The crone seemed to sleep. Rona added wood to the fire and drowsed. The cats lay side by side, like a man and woman. I wondered if I had ruined the crone's plan, if I would just lie on this rock all night with nothing coming. It was better than being stabbed in my sleep. More time passed. My thoughts became loose and wandering. I imagined the waters of the river flowing through the weird folds of the rocky land. My eyes closed.

I opened my eyes again. I wasn't sure how long I had slept. Everything was quiet. The fire still burned well. Rona and the crone slept. Grayscruff and Charm were still lying next to each other, both awake, both looking off into the darkness, both looking in the same direction. I looked out into the darkness. I couldn't see anything out there, just far stars over the blackness of the land. Were the cats watching something? Their eyes were wide.

I found myself slowly wrapping my hand around the shaft of my spear. The cats did not take their attention away from what they were looking at. Maybe they had both heard noise, a pebble falling somewhere. Grayscruff slowly, carefully got up, keeping its gaze fixed. Charm did that same. I pulled my spear close and gripped it tight.

The cats both jerked their heads slightly in the same direction, following something. Something was out there. It was close. I pulled my knees up under myself and held my spear with both hands. I listened to every noise, everything around me. I knew I was outside the light of the fire. I would hear anybody coming up the rock. Still, I wished desperately that I could see what the cats saw. It was awful to not know.

Charm and Grayscruff crouched and turned their bodies, ready to flee, but still watching the thing in the darkness, their wide eyes glowing in the fire. Slowly, they raised their heads, following the thing up and up, until they were looking almost straight up. They must have been watching a bird. That was the only thing that could be that high. I let out a relieved breath. A gust of wind made the fire shudder, and the cats both jumped, scrambling off into the darkness.

Rona screamed. It landed just in front of her with a flap of wings and a gust of wind that scattered the fire in a spray of sparks. I was on my feet, holding the spear out. The brightly burning pieces of wood showed its shape, like a giant pale man with huge wings instead of arms. It stood for a moment with its wings spread, far larger than any bird, but with no feathers like a bat's. The firelight shined through the thin wings, showing the creature's long bones and the streams of blood that flowed under the skin.

It turned to look at me, and I realized that the scattering of the fire had brought me into the light. It could see me. My war spear felt like a frail little stick in my hands. Its face was like a rock lion's but with awful black teeth and huge, filmy eyes. It was just as the crone had said. She had been right all along.

*Title: "Mouth like a Spider, Cock like Snakes"*

###### 69th Post / Date 05-26-2016 at 03:20:11 EDT

Rona had fallen back onto the ground, and the evil thing stood over her. It was far taller than a man but very thin, with a waist hardly bigger than a cat's and legs like a mantis. As I stood there with my spear in my hands, the flaming wood lying scattered all around me, looking at this thing in the shifting darkness, it seemed less and less like a man and more like an animal, one of the sneaking, starving animals of the rocky land.

It folded its wings behind itself, and its teeth shuffled in its mouth like a spider's. Rona was screaming, the horrible sound ringing off the stones. I knew what the spear in my hands was for. I knew what I must do. But I could not move. I was held in place by an evil cowardice.

The thing crouched over Rona, and its cock rose from between its legs, very thin but longer than any man's. It separated into many different parts, like the petals of a flower opening, like a man spreading his fingers apart. The many parts grew longer, very long, and wound like snakes through the darkness toward Rona, seeming to sniff the air. They found Rona's body and went inside her -- inside her mouth and nose and ears and in between her legs. Her screams ended at once, and the snake-like parts lifted her body into the air.

Many seasons ago, shortly after I became a man, I had killed a rock lion while it was at the river's edge, watching the waters for fish. I had simply found it there below me as I came to the edge of a small cliff. All I had to do was leap down and drive my spear through its shoulders, and it was dead. When the people found out, they made me feel like I was greater than even the great men, at least for the rest of the day. The only other living person to kill a rock lion was already gray and almost toothless. It was said that I would become a great hunter. But Mother River provides so much for the people that we do not hunt often, and I hadn't killed anything since then, except a few boar.

Now I ran toward the great and evil thing, my feet slapping quick over the bare rock. I lifted my spear and leapt and drove the heavy war head right into its side. The spear went deep into its body, and a spray of black blood exploded out of the wound. It let out a sound like an awful bird call, and one of its wings unfolded and hit me hard enough that I fell back. Its wings flapped wildly, spraying fire and sparks everywhere, but it could not fly and fell back down onto the stone. Black blood poured out of its side.

I pulled Rona away from it, but she was limp and moaning, and the awful snake-like things were still inside her. I pulled them out, one by one, but they were sharp and cut my hands, and they came out of her body covered in red blood. When I had freed her, I took her up and grabbed my spear and slid down the side of the rock and stumbled through the blackness until I found a ridge of rock to hide behind.

There were a few bits of fire left on top of the rock, but they soon went out. I was in total darkness except for the stars above, clinging to Rona, who made no more sound. I waited there in the utter blackness. Rona did not stir, and I felt the warmth slowly flow from her body. By the time the first gray light of morning came, she was dead.

As soon as I could see well enough, I went back up to the top of the large rock. The thing was lying there, its wings spread wide and coated with black blood. It had bled enough to cover the entire top of the rock with blackness, which had dried and become thin flakes that blew away in the wind after I stepped on them. With my spear gripped tight, I approached it again. Its body was the same sort of pale color as the morning sky, and was covered in tiny glistening hairs. The mouth was like a spider's, with sharp black teeth. Its cock had become just a shriveled little thing, with no sign of the long snake-like parts.

I went down the rock again to where I had left the crone. She was gone. My belt lay in the dust, sawed in half. Maybe it was just as well. I did not want to see her again. I called for Charm and Grayscruff but there was no sign of them. I left the evil rocky land as fast as I could.

The weird rocks all looked the same to me, and I did not know the way well, but I found the river before the sun had climbed to its highest. It was a different part of the river than I had left, and nobody was there. I made my way along the banks, looking for the people. There was much to tell them. Would the other winged strangers soon try to set upon the people? Would we have to make war against them? If it must be so, then let them come. They could be killed like any other men.

The sun was still above the trees when I first saw men walking along the river, their faces the normal color of sandy river mud, not the evil white of the winged stranger. I called to them happily, called the names of the Fathers, but they did not answer. I came closer and saw that these were not the people. I took my spear in both hands. These men were Painted Backs. They stood silently by the river, their war spears in hand, signs of victory and triumph painted on their chests in bright blood. They watched me with strange, filmy eyes.

*Title: To the New Children of the Forest*

###### 70th Post / Date 05-27-2016 at 03:35 EDT

It's really difficult for me to tell a story with just words so please bear with me. I am trying to tell you the story of who I am and how I came to be this thing, but I have trouble organizing my thoughts into a single linear flow. I wish I could just *show* you the entire story all at once in all its many dimensions. Then I could make it clear why I hired somebody to put a pellet of poison into my own arm. But as it is, I must use the ancient art of written narrative. So here it goes...

Imagine spending your whole life in a cramped stinking prison cell, counting the days, scratching tally marks on the walls. Then one day, that big iron door creaks open, and you're whisked you off to a glamorous party full of beautiful people and delightful games, and everybody you meet is toasting you for being a genius, for being the great hope of the human race. That's what it was like to plug into the direct sense feeds after living at the children's home.

I can't describe that first day in the feedrealm. Though I have not cried in 24 years, I still get the ghostly feeling of tears coming to my eyes every time I think about it. To be looking around at the homefield environment, everything glittering in a new way, shining in colors that do not exist, all of it stretching out before me, all the main gateways open and waiting to be explored -- the feeling of that moment, of being a small child looking out at the beautiful new vastness of the realm, was the most magical thing I have ever experienced.

What I want to impress upon you is this: Every step I took towards slavery felt like a newfound freedom.

At first, it was just games and social mixing with other kids. We had all played the mysterious *Children of the Forest* game and scored highly on it. The game had been an entry exam of sorts. It turned out that I had scored higher than anyone else. A lot higher. This made some of the other kids jealous, but most of them seemed to look up to me. I had never made anyone jealous before, and I had never been looked up to before.

Social mixing and share-streaming was easy and fun. You had time to think of what to say, which video or ani to post to the stream, which paste to link up. It was so much more exciting than being in real life. I had a good memory and could work the Assisted Recall pretty well, so I made a lot of friends.

They told us we would all be going to Harvard and Standford and Tsinghua, that we would be famous mix stars and government stars, that we were the future of the world. To be fair, they couldn't have known that most of us would be dead before we were 20. That all of us would be dead before 34. But they knew damn well we wouldn't be going on to normal lives. We were part of an experiment. After we got used to the feedrealm, they began the conditioning.

I realize that you might not know what the feedrealm is, so maybe I should explain a little about it. The feedrealm is basically just another interface for sharing information and carrying out transactions. It is based on the metaphor of 3D space. That's why it's called a "realm." You can move through it. You can go up and down and left and right. It feels like swimming through weightlessness.

They made it this way because that's how the human mind works. Our brains evolved to exist in a 3D space. We naturally imagine things as existing in space, even abstract, non-spatial things. We think of the future as coming toward us, the past as receding behind us. Powerful people are considered "above," and the powerless are "below." Items belong "in" some categories and "outside" other categories. None of these spatial relationships really exist but they are useful metaphors because our minds are suited to processing things in 3D space.

It has always been theoretically possible, even trivial, to create a 4-dimensional or n-dimensional feedrealm. But since the human mind isn't made to process so many dimensions, it was considered pointless. But recently, a genetic mutation dating back to the stone age was discovered which allows certain individuals to experience and comprehend feedrealms of four and higher spatial dimensions.

While this mutation may have been useless for stone age people living in a spatially 3D world, it was also harmless, so it somehow survived. Though its initial origin is something of a mystery. Anyways, now scientists were able to hook people up to 4D feedrealms. Early test subjects described the experience in terms ranging from "nauseating" to "utterly horrifying." It was theorized that maybe if children were conditioned from a young age to exist in a higher dimensional environment, they would become accustomed to it. But such conditioning was deemed unethical.

Enter the CIA. Their motto: "Where ethical approbation ends, our work begins." They used their global genetic database to identify children with the genotype and collected a group of them to begin conditioning. And that brings us back to my story (see? a spatial metaphor!). At first we were just playing around in the feedrealm, getting used to it. Then they started the conditioning.

How do I describe higher dimensional space, so-called hyperspace? Nauseating and utterly horrifying are exactly what it felt like at first. Everybody hated it. We cried and tried to run away when they made us go into the hyperrealm. But of course, there was nowhere to run. We were all lying in hygiene beds, where almost all of us would lie until death. They forced us back into the hyperrealm, a little at a time, just showing us simple shapes at first to acclimate us. But how do I describe it?

It was like watching things pass through each other, but without touching each other or covering each other up, in ways that made the brain go, "Gah! That's impossible! Stop it!" There were plain gray boxes and cones and infinite planes and bottomless abysses, and the shapes would move slowly along and do things that were simply impossible. Some of the kids never got used to it. They hated it and dropped out of the program and disappeared from the feedrealm.

But I kept going, just like in the Children of the Forest game. I got used to 4 dimensions, then 5 and 6. I was a leader. I taught the other kids tricks for how to understand what they were seeing. And it was cool being in hyperspace, seeing everything at once like that. Was hyperspace mind-bending? Sure. But not nearly as mind-bending as hypertime. And not nearly as horrifying.

*Title: "Nobody cared until it came to swallow up all the little white children"*

###### 71st Post / Date 05-29-2016 at 03:07 EDT

A friend from rehab invites me to an H.A. meeting. Shooting boy was never among my vices, but I go with him. The meeting is out in the suburbs, and it is packed. Every bit of floor space is filled with folding chairs, and every chair is filled. I want to leave as soon as I sit down. It is like being in a crowded elevator for an entire hour. I can feel the coffee breath on my skin.

It is disturbing to look around at all the kids in the room. How are they all so young and fresh faced? The alcoholics tend to be much more beat up. All those years of excess capillary dilation give our faces a meaty quality. These little heroin addicts, on the other hand, come into the rooms at 19 with the glow of childhood still on their skin.

My friend's arms have no track marks. They are smooth and doll-like, no major veins left. He is 21. I've been roommates with kids like these for the past few months. They don't know who Norm from *Cheers* is. They don't know how to empty a dryer filter or take care of a teflon pan. But they know how to cook up black tar. They know how to find veins.

It quickly becomes apparent that one of the meeting's regulars died last night. Everybody is upset. People start crying. My desire to not be there grows exponentially. I didn't know the kid. I feel like I've stumbled into the wrong funeral.

The kid's sponsor talks. He's an older man with a gray goatee. He was guiding the kid through the steps. The room looks at him to say something comforting, something with the ring of authority and wisdom. The room is full of children in the grips of a problem that their parents cannot understand. Here is a grownup who can understand.

He talks about meeting the kid's parents at the hospital. His eyes grow damp. He recalls haltingly that the parents were very polite. They thanked him very politely for trying to help their son. He looks down at the floor. There is no more to say.

Later, I relate this story to my roommate Shawn. He says that this has been going on with the blacks for years, but nobody cared until it came to swallow up all the little white children. He says that most problems come to visit black people first because black people are God's chosen people. They must be chastised.

The program tells us to be more open-minded and less judgmental. I am trying to be more open-minded and less judgmental about Shawn's beliefs. At first glance, his beliefs are paranoid, ahistorical, conspiracy theory hogwash. At second glance, they are appallingly anti-Semitic cultural appropriation. But my sponsor says it is not my place to enlighten him with my views. I only need to be a decent roommate to him.

When the Jews were sold into captivity, their narrative survived. This was not so for the slaves of America. At least, nothing like the Torah was passed on. The American system of slavery worked to destroy the history of millions of people. But I wonder, how much of the Jews' history really survived? There are certainly parts of the Torah that don't have the resounding ring of authority and wisdom e.g. the talking snake or the talking bush or the Nephilim or 90% of everything else. How much of the real story actually survived?

It must be tempting to place oneself into the context of a mythical narrative that goes back thousands of years, that extends forward to the end of history. Instead of just being this lost little individual, you become the inheritor of a grand spiritual legacy, part of a grand struggle, one of the chosen people.

A new roommate moved into the house a few days ago. His name is Donnie. He's in his mid-forties, and he's a former Marine. I show him the Iwo Jima segment of my story and ask him what he thinks.

*Title: "A Lifetime of Spiritual Failure: I used to drop mucho acid and believe in God. Then I became an alcoholic. Now I don't what the fuck is going on."*

###### 72nd Post / Date 05-30-2016 at 03:30 EDT

When I was in high school, I liked dropping acid. One of my favorite books was *The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test*, which tells the real-life story of a band of early acid-heads and proto-hippies called the Merry Pranksters, who invented a lot of what would become tropes of the 1960s such as dressing up in weird shit and riding around on a painted bus while stoned on drugs.

I was especially intrigued by an experiment which was carried out by the Pranksters in 1965. One day, a few of the Pranksters put a sign on the front gate of the group's compound that read, "The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Beatles." At the time the Beatles were the biggest band in the world, and the Merry Pranksters were largely unknown. Moreover, none of the Pranksters actually knew the Beatles or had any idea of how to contact the Beatles. Nor did they make any attempt to do so. For the Beatles to show up at their house in California was extremely unlikely. Despite all this, the Pranksters put this crazy banner out on their front gate. And they fully expected the Beatles to show up.

To understand the Prankster's behavior, you must understand the effects of LSD. This is true in a general sense and with specific regard to that banner. You see, sometimes when you take LSD, something strange happens, something beyond all the weird hallucinations and thought distortions. Sometimes you get the eerie feeling that coincidences are happening all around you. You might be listening to music while watching TV and notice that the pictures and the sound seem to synch up. You might open a book and notice that the opening passage has an odd, unmistakable relevance to the current moment you are in. At times, you almost feel like you are conscious of things before they actually happen. You imagine your friend walking through the door, and a moment later she does. You look at your phone, and a moment later it rings.

Sometimes these coincidences pile up so quickly that you get the feeling that there is something behind it all, that all the seemingly disparate and unrelated phenomena of your life are actually part of an underlying order (or pattern or structure) which is normally hidden. This order seems to be a cosmic phenomenon that pervades and controls all of existence, something which has always existed but which you have been blind to until now. The existence of this fundamental order comes as a revelation because it is completely different from the ordinary mechanism of cause and effect that you are used to, that science uses to explain things. This feeling, to me, is the essence of the LSD experience. LSD leads to a sudden awareness of meaningful coincidences which in turn gives rise to an awareness of an underlying cosmic order which is acausal.

The "acausal" part is important. A true coincidence is when two things happen which are clearly related but which cannot possibly be related by cause and effect. For example, let's you are watching a show on TV about zebras, then you walk out your front door and see a zebra trotting down the sidewalk, dropping zebra shit all over the place. The two events have an obvious connection, but it's hard to imagine how that connection could occur through cause and effect. It's not likely that your TV viewing choices *caused* that zebra to escape from the zoo, nor it is likely that the two events have a common *cause*, unless somebody is playing an elaborate prank on you. Such a coincidence could be considered meaningful if you believe that it is evidence of the aforementioned underlying order. Otherwise, it's just some weird shit that happened randomly.

During my high school years, because of my little LSD hobby, I became obsessed with meaningful coincidences. I was always looking for little signs from the cosmos and hidden connections between things which weren't causally related. I tried to predict things. I looked for symbols and tried to fit the events of my daily life into cosmic patterns. I got into Nostradamus, the I Ching, stichomancy, all sorts of shit.

Unfortunately, my attempts to ascertain the underlying structure of the cosmos were heavily clouded by my own immature narcissism. You'll notice that people who believe in past lives tend to see themselves as great figures of the past like Caesar and Van Gogh, rather than the anonymous turnip pickers and fishwives who actually populated most of history. Similarly, I was convinced that the cosmos was sending me indications my impending greatness, rather than portending my eventual descent into alcoholic mediocrity. Yes, it was revealed to me that the world would end soon, I would be a Christ-like figure of greatness in the coming apocalypse. I shit you not. I really believed this stuff. Luckily, blogs had not become popular yet.

Then I took my final acid trip. It was a bad trip. I don't want to get into the details, but let's just say that I saw some shit, and I never wanted to take acid again. All my life, I had been hoping to be visited with a grand revelation, and now I just hoped I was never visited by another one. It filled my head with all sorts of crazy shit. Not truth, just madness. I decided that whatever was underlying the cosmos could stay lying under the damn cosmos. I wanted no part of it.

Oh, I guess I should tell you what happened with the Beatles banner. In putting out that banner, the Pranksters had hoped that they could tap into the underlying Acausal order of the universe by simply welcoming the Beatles, rather than by reaching out to the Beatles or pursuing them. But the Beatles never showed up. At least, they never showed up in a literal sense. A couple years later, the Beatles released The Magical Mystery Tour film, in which they all dressed up in weird shit and rode around on a painted bus while stoned on drugs, precisely as the Pranksters had done. So, in a sense, they did "come to" the Pranksters. Of course, this can all be explained by ordinary cause and effect. The Pranksters helped popularize a social movement which eventually spread to England. Or you can invoke a mystical explanation, saying the Pranksters somehow sensed that the underlying pattern of the cosmos would bring the Beatles around to their way of doing things.

After I stopped doing LSD, I started leaning away from notions of cosmic patterns, and I became more convinced that any understanding of the universe would have to rely on cause and effect. My earlier attempts at mysticism began to look like embarrassing folly. I came to regard all that meaningful coincidence stuff as bullshit. I figured that LSD just overstimulated whatever sort of coincidence detector might exist in the brain. You could dress it up in a fancy word like "synchronicity" and give it the imprimatur of Carl Jung or whomever, but it was nothing more than magical thinking, as old and stupid as stone age tribes.

I had been perceiving connections between things where none existed. There are no meaningful coincidences. A coincidence is only meaningful if you can find a casual relationship between the two phenomena, and if you can, it is no longer a true coincidence. The universe doesn't send people signs through the I Ching or Nostradamus or any of that silly shit. If there are rain clouds in the sky, it's a sign you should carry an umbrella. That's an actual sign from the universe. The other stuff is just a load of crap.

It was with this mindset that I entered AA years later.

AA is a god-centered program. The main idea is that you can get sober if you live according to god's will instead of your own will. People in AA often talk about watching for signs from god and listening to instructions from god and so forth. As you can imagine, I was less than impressed. I was appalled. I felt like I was being dragged back into this narcissistic mystical bullshit that I had thankfully left behind. I felt like I was being asked to roll back my little personal Age of Enlightenment and go back to the Dark Ages. Fuck that. I wasn't going to do it.

One night at a meeting, after months of listening to this spirituality shit, I made my feelings clear. I told them that spirituality was the hugest load of horse shit ever foisted upon human culture. Spirituality, I opined, was like a thought virus that gets passed on from one person to another. It was basically gonorrhea of the brain. And AA was one of the biggest fucking disease vectors I had ever seen. I told them they should be ashamed of themselves for preying on people who are in a vulnerable state just to convert them to their bullshit spiritual beliefs.

Rather than the stunned silence that is the dream of every r/atheism subscriber, they just told me to "keep coming back" and moved on to the next guy. It turned out that little rants like this are semi-regular occurrence.

Having no other good options, I kept coming back. I asked a lot of people why they believed in god. They almost invariably brought up meaningful coincidences or magical signs. I became more convinced than ever that it was all bullshit. I argued a lot with one guy in particular. In recovery, you meet a lot of people who are like Ned Flanders with tattoos, people who lived dirty and then cleaned up and became extra-square, but they still have their tattoos. This was one of those guys. He told me a story about how he was in prison, at the end of his rope, and he prayed to God to send him a sign. Just then a little bird alighted on prison window and sang him a beautiful little song. God, he knew at that moment, was real. I almost dislocated my eyes they rolled so hard. What a bunch of silly shit. How could a grown adult believe this crap?

I read the AA literature, mainly to bolster my arguments against the program. AA literature is very sneaky. It knows that most atheists follow the tradition of Western secular humanism, which values open-mindedness in contrast the close-mindedness of religionists. So the literature portrays atheism as close-mindedness. Atheists are encouraged to be more open-minded, more flexible, more willing to accept the idea that they don't know everything about the universe. I wondered if it was fucking opposite day. How were these spiritual nutcases going to portray spirituality as open-mindedness and atheism as close-mindedness?

I was simply asserting that in my entire life, I had never seen any convincing evidence of god. That wasn't close-minded. That wasn't presumptuous. It was the opposite. I was willing to accept the evidence presented to me by the world, unlike religionists who turn a blind eye to it. I told heavy-metal Ned Flanders that if the skies ever opened up to show me the majestic glory of god, then I would be happy to fall to my knees, because either god existed or I was in the presence of a technology advanced enough to be god-like. I told him that I was perfectly willing to believe in god, if I was ever presented with a shred of credible evidence for his existence.

Soon after, I was presented with precisely that.

Who knows. Maybe it was a coincidence.

*Title: "Let's play with our audience..." AKA - "How I opened your Mind's Eye to the Meta-Narrative around you"*

###### 73rd Post / Date 05-31-2016

I think it's possible it could be written on the fly. The story gives the appearance of vast scope because the storylines are from different eras and areas, but rather than a broad panorama, it only provides thin slivers of insight into each time and place. Everything in between these slivers is left to the player's imagination. And given the author's hints at branching timelines, he or she is not even necessarily required to link these little slivers together.

People also point to the various stories' interconnectedness and claim that the work has a structure too intricate to be improvisational, but how much interconnectedness is there really? For example, the stone age story has cats in it, and the cat story has cats in it (obviously). This is a point of similarity (obviously). But what is the significance? So what if both stories have cats? Is this meaningful coincidence or a meaningless one?

The same question could be asked about the children of the forest or the various Marines or the demon penises for which the author has such fondness. Yes, these elements recur, but to what end? Perhaps, like somebody on LSD undergoing a false revelation, we are drawing connections where none really exist. Perhaps these are meaningless coincidences.

The story employs a number of "call backs" where it makes reference to something which was not mentioned in quite a while. This gives the appearance of careful preplanning. But call backs are actually a pretty easy to improvise. The author can just look over the story, pick an element, and bring it to the fore again. Like a prime factorization problem, the problem is easier to create than it is to solve. A successful callback is really more of a testament to the reader's intelligence than the author's.

And btw, whatever happened to COMPANION-12? That seemed like it was going to be a thing.

But anyways, all this is speculation on my part. It's an interesting question: how can we know whether the story is improvised or not? The author does occasionally make direct responses to other Reddit comments and make reference to current events, but as you said this could just be a sort of superficial improvisation, where most of the story is actually fixed, but a few of the details are improvised. The author could also be combing through reddit for the right comment to give the appearance of improvisation.

Are we watching real choices in action, or are the events of this universe occurring along some deterministic path? Is there any way to find out? Maybe some sort of test should be devised. But that would require the author to play along.

*Title: "Back to the 80's." AKA - "I really wanted to be Brooke Shields when I was 15!"*

###### 74th Post / 06-01-2016 at 01:15 EDT

OK. Now I'm in my bedroom.

The bedroom smells like...bedroom.

Actual bedroom. Oh, so definite.

It's a smell like wood and blankets and stuff. Sharp. I wonder how they decide on the bedroom smell. I move my arms around and bounce a little on the bedsprings. My body feels really natural and comfortable. Everything looks sharp too. There are no weird color trails like in acclimation. Cool. Really crisp.

I stand up and take in all the little touches. It's an attic bedroom with a slanting ceiling and wood panel walls. Night outside the window. Mood lighting from a nightstand lamp. Clothes and a skateboard and other random teenage stuff scattered on the floor. Walls covered with posters. INXS. The Cure. Michael Jackson in a yellow vest. Very definite. Or should I say "groovy?" Did they say that in the 80s?

An interrupt comes through. "ATLANTA COMPLETELY DESTROYED IN FULL-SCALE--" I use my illegal bypass to cut off all interrupts. Ugh. I hate sports interrupts. I'll have to figure out how to change that setting.

I notice a can of Pepsi Free sitting on my nightstand. I pick it up. Still cold. I crack it open and smell it, and the fizz tickles my nose. It really smells like soda! I take a sip. Wow. Hmm. Not very good. Maybe it's a low quality render. Or maybe I just don't like Pepsi Free. Still, it's pretty amazing to be tasting something in a feed. This was really worth it.

The doorbell rings somewhere downstairs. Oh, definitely! We're starting. I head towards the door and catch myself in the mirror. I'm supposed to look like a girl named Brooke Shields at 18 years old. Wow, she's pretty. What a render. The eyebrows are a little intense though. I consider toning them down, but I don't want to get caught up in character design. If you change one thing, you end up changing 50 things, and it goes on forever.

I head out into the hallway and pause for a moment. The smell just changed. Now there's a hallway smell. Carpet and drywall. I laugh. I take a step back into the bedroom, and the bedroom smell returns instantly. I step into the hallway again. Hallway smell. Bedroom smell. Hallway smell. Bedroom Smell. I snicker at this. The smell changes just like that. Why they can't make it more natural? What a give-away. Oh, well.

I head down the stairs. The furniture in the front hall looks really cheesy. I pick up a lamp and toss it at the wall. It smashes apart, and the bulb explodes with a spark. I look at the shards. There's bits of powder and all sorts of little details. Yow. Very certain.

"Undo that," I say, and the lamp fades away and reappears on the side table.

I open the front door. A guy stands there with swept back blonde hair and a baggy red and black jacket with the collar popped and the sleeves rolled up. Nice. He gives me a killer smile and says, "Hey babe. What took you so long?"

A blast of electric guitar hits me, and the guy floats up out over the front lawn, becoming two stories tall and striking a sexy pose. Colors fill the night sky. Sparkling starlight showers him, and synth beat kicks in. An announcer shouts, "Corey Lancer! High-school hotshot and rock n' roll renegade! He's a fast talker with a slick attitude, a guy who can make anything happen. All the girls want him, but all he wants is one thing: the Ferrari 288 GTO." A red sports car comes flying out of the sky and does crazy circles around Corey while he strikes more sexy poses and the music thumps. "It's the fastest street-legal car in existence. Only 272 produced. This is Corey's dream, Corey's obsession, Corey's life. He'll do anything to get one, and he needs your help! Can you get the car? Can you win his heart? Are you ready for *80s Turbo Ascension*?"

Hmm. Shit. I should've looked the summary closer. I'm not really into cars, and this doesn't really seem like a very interesting narrative. Still, Corey is really well rendered. Blonde hair, blue eyes. A bit of mischief in his smile. I like it. I wonder if he'll be controlled by an AI or a Filipino. He floats back down to me and returns to normal size.

"So what's up," he said, with a devilish little grin. Wow, this is A stuff.

"Just doing my hair," I say, flicking my huge brown mane off my shoulder. This Brooke Shields lady has an absurd amount of hair.

"You chicks," Corey says, leaning forward and giving me a kiss.

His mouth tastes like bubble gum. The kiss feels perfect. Yow. Just definitely. I feel Corey's chest through his shirt. Skinny, but nice. I think about toning him up a bit. Nah, it's better to just go with his default settings.

"So, listen, there's a race tonight at the SpeedMaxx track," Corey says in his cute California accent. "The Crystal Cobras put out a challenge and they're taking all comers. The prize is--"

"I don't really like racing."

Corey thinks for a moment, a character animation. He looks cute thinking, his sharp eyebrows pressed together. Now he's taking too long, and it's getting awkward. I think he's controlled by a Filipino. Or maybe there's lag. He snaps back into action.

"OK, listen. There's going to be a dance-off at the Club Heatwave. The Crystal Cobras put out a challenge, and they're taking all comers. The prize is $100,000."

Dancing? Yeah, that would be one way to try out my body. "Sounds groovy," I say.

But I can't help but think of another way to give this body a test drive. I slip my hand down into my tight purple skirt and feel my pussy. Oh, yeeks. They really have everything working down there. Should I do it already? Just five minutes into the narrative? Oh, why not? Everybody does it right away. Corey looks really good. I wonder what kind of cock they rendered him with. But no, I should at least go half an hour without slutting it up. Dancing will be fun.

Corey holds out his arm like a gentleman, and I take it. He leads me down the front walk towards his car, a smeary old junk ride with dents and rust all over it.

"Sorry, hon. It's only temporary," Corey says as we come up on the car. "I promise you, by the end of this week, I'm going to have a Ferrari 288 GTO, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It's my dream. It's my obsession. I'll do anything to--"

But I'm not listening. There is something in the bushes by the road. I wonder if this is actually one of those fake-out horror narratives. I really hate scary stuff. I bend over and look into the bushes. A pair of shining eyes stare back at me. Eww. What the hell? There's an old naked lady hiding in the bushes.

*Title: "Illicit Whispers"*

###### 75th Post / 06-02-2016 EDT at 03:45 EDT

*Illicit Whispers: A Spicy Rendezvous with Sensitive Temptations [NSFW]*

Yerk. This naked old lady hiding in the bushes looks like the beginning of a storyline I don't want to go down. I really wish I had looked at the summary closer. Who knew something called *80s Turbo Ascension* would have artisanal porn in it? I consider saying my safe word to stop the narrative, but I don't feel like going through the loading process again. I should have loaded my feed splits, but I rushed through the set-up.

The old lady's boney arm snakes out of the bush, and she grabs my ankle. Oh, certainly not! I yank my leg away and curse at her. Corey is looking at her with the same confused animation he used a moment ago. Is he already using the same animation? That's kinda low-def.

The crazy old lady comes stumbling out of the bush, her saggy old boobs flopping around. Yow. What kind of narrative is this? I pick up a nearby potted plant and smash it on her head. It breaks apart pretty nice, full of high-def dirt. The lady falls on the ground and starts moaning.

I back away to watch how the scene develops between Corey and her. It looks like her leg isn't quite attached to the rest of her. You can see the meat inside her hip. Really low-def. Corey just stands there, cycling through different animations. He turns to me and shrugs and says, "Hey, babe. That's life."

I stare at him. Is this how the storyline is supposed to go?

He runs his hand through his hair and says, "Cute skirt."

What the hell? This narrative is bugged up. "Let's go," I say, going to Corey's car and opening the door. It's an old hand-drive with a fixed wheel.

"You want me to drive?" Corey asks, coming over.

"Yeah, maybe you better."

A minute later, we're cruising down the freeway, listening to some oldie about a girl named Jessie. The scenery looks cool, with the blue freeway lights passing by and an old-fashioned neon metro in the background. Corey is running through his back-story, talking about that Ferrari or whatever.

I can't ignore the fact that I feel a little bored. I'm just ten minutes into my first direct sense feed narrative, and I'm already a little bored. Was the surgery really worth all that money? I don't even want to think about what it cost. I slip my hand into my skirt again and touch my pussy. It feels really nice. Everything is super sharp. I think about fucking Corey again. But I can't just go back to feed-fucking all the time, every day. Why am I always bored with narratives after 10 minutes? Why am I bored with everything after 10 minutes?

We pull up in front of Club Heatwave, a big glittering building with a neon sun shining above it. A line of gleaming black limos snakes through a colorful crowd out front. We park in the player spot across the street and head to the grand entrance, Corey leading me by the hand. Music thumps from within. People are waiting in line, but Corey says something to the bouncer, and we slip past.

The entrance hall is all mirrors and neon. I can feel the beat of the music passing through my entire body. That's cool. The singer tells me to get out of his dreams and into his car. Ha. The inside is filled with shadowy bodies dancing through strobe lights and lasers and artificial fog. Cheesy but kind of fun. It even has that fake fog smell.

"Wanna get some practice in?" Corey asks, giving my bum a little squeeze. Oh, this one is naughty. We head out on the dance floor and start to cut it up. Wow. Corey's dancing is terrible. It looks like a motion glitch. I guess they had to give him some old moves, but did they have to make it this bad? This is kind of ruining the storyline.

I look across the dance floor and see a tall man in a black suit with black hair standing perfectly still among the dancing crowd. He is watching me with dark eyes. There is a sort of glow around him so that I can tell he's going to be part of a storyline. I lean over to Corey and ask, "Who is that?"

Corey stares at the man for a moment, then runs his hand through his hair and says, "Cute skirt."

What the fuck, Corey.

The dark man crosses the dance floor, coming toward me. The other dancers don't move out of the way, and he passes right through them without breaking his stride. Some programming. Now he stands in front of me, looking down at me with his gleaming black eyes. Oh, wow. What an incredible render this guy is. I mean, this is outright art. Like Rembrandt level. Say what you will about the game's production, they really know how to build hot guys.

The man has the face of a gorgeous, forlorn angel, just inhumanly beautiful. The skin is paper white, and underneath run thousands of tiny branching veins that seem to throb with his pulse. Such obsessive definition. His lips are perfectly soft and fleshy-looking, like nothing I've ever seen in a feed before. I lean toward him for a kiss. A smell comes off of him, something I can't quite place, sweet and rich, and we are kissing, and I can taste what I am smelling, sweet but metallic. Wow, this guy can kiss. I think this is what real kissing feels like.

I pull my head back and touch his face. The flesh is very nice. I can see the dark blood throbbing in his neck veins. Then I notice Corey standing right there, looking at us all confused. He looks like a cheap plastic doll compared this new guy.

"What gives?" Corey asks.

"Fuck off," I say.

Corey gets this really heartbroken look on his face and says, "Listen to me, Zhenzhen Sobakin. You'll break my heart if you go with any other guy. You got that? You are the most special, most beautiful girl I've ever met."

I can't really get into the speech because it's too early in the narrative for that kind of stuff, plus he pronounced my name wrong.

The new guy reaches out and grabs a handful of Corey's face. Literally, he just sinks his fingers into the face and tears a huge, bloody hunk out. Blood sprays everywhere. Holy shit. I guess this is a horror narrative. Is this guy like a vampire or something?

Faceless Corey keeps standing there, spurting blood out of his head hole. I push him away. The new guy squeezes the hunk of flesh like a sponge and lets the blood run down over my face, then starts licking it off. Yeep. This must be some kind of art-porn sampler narrative. I've really, really got to start reading those summaries. Crucial.

But the new guy's tongue feels good on my face and neck and I start licking him back and we start kissing and undressing right there. My pussy is absolutely tingling, and I can feel my heart beating fast. I wonder what my real pussy and my real heart are doing while I'm lying there in the hygiene bed. Forget it. I need to fuck this guy. He strips off the black suit he's wearing to reveal a perfect white body and a huge, beautiful cock. Oh, yes. This is going to be good.

He lifts me up with ease, and I grip his powerful, muscled arms as he slides his cock into me. Ah, heaven. I hold onto him and close my eyes and let him fuck me. My pussy feels superreal. I can taste Corey's blood on my lips. The man kisses and sucks on my neck. I open my eyes and see that everybody in the club has stopped dancing. They are all standing still as the music plays in the strobe-flashing darkness, watching this guy fuck me. God, this narrative really combines a lot of different kinks. Who wrote this shit?

Now I'm feeling like a thousand different things in my pussy, most of them incredibly good, some of them new, some of them way beyond anything I've felt offline. The man's eyes are on me, and I'm mesmerized. The other people in the club are all slowly walking towards us, surrounding us. Pretty soon, they're packed around us like the paparazzi in a fame simulation. Public fucking isn't really my fetish, but I don't want to have to stop everything and set up a new scene. Some of the people reach out and touch my tits and my hair and my face. With this guy's cock in me, it all feels good, so I don't stop it.

Despite the fact that I'm on the verge of cumming, I can't help but notice that the light in the club has changed. It seems like it is coming from two angles, making everything seem doubled. I feel like I'm looking at the man's face from two angles, seeing four of his eyes. It's a weird effect, and I wonder if there's something wrong with my visual line.

Next to me, a woman in a pink dress opens her mouth, and her jaw floats away from her face. Her head floats off of her neck. Beside her, a man separates into a dozen slices. Godamnit. This is definitely a fatal glitch. But I'm so close to cumming. And it's going to be fucking fabulous. I wonder if the narrative can hang together for just 10 more seconds before it crashes.

All around us, the people begin to break apart, becoming floating parts. The weird lighting effect becomes more intense, and the man's seems to be made of four sections, except each section is his entire face from a different angle, and they're all crossing each other but staying in place at the same time, and eight eyes are watching me. Oh fuck. This is hurting my brain. Fuck. I can't take this. The narrative should have already crashed back into safety mode.

I say my safe word. Nothing happens. I feel my stomach drop in terror, except it drops at four different places all around the room. Oh, god, am I stuck in a crashing narrative? They say it can fuck you up. I feel myself falling and expanding. One of my hands feels like it is way off on the horizon. Another is ten stories below me. Body parts are swirling around us, showing all sides at once. The man is staring down at me with his awful eyes. How are they so awful? His face is as giant as a mountain range. As the entire sky. I'm seeing too much. No. Above and beneath. Everything has too many sides. Screaming. He has dozens of eyes. Thousands. Thousands of sides. Thousands and millions and millions of eyes. God.

*Title: "You need to learn Statistical Proxy -Fucking- Distillation Tracing" AKA - If you don't know how to predict and manipulate reality I can't teach you"*

###### 76th Post / Date 06 -03-2016

When we got to the Clearview hospital, it was like Karen said it would be. The emergency room was flooded with patients coming in from Atlanta, but the readjustment center was empty except for a lone staffer who was watching the lobby's wall set and praying. The set was showing footage of the black cloud over Atlanta. Or maybe it was Denver. Or Riyadh. 12 cities had gone up in the last hour. They weren't the largest or most powerful cities in the world. Hefei. Zhengzhou. Bengaluru. What was the pattern? What the hell had Bengaluru done to anybody?

Karen said there was no real pattern.

> this is Q's opening move. her entrance into the world. she wont destroy everything. but she will kill and kill until she thinks we are ready for her demands.
>
>

I found a wheelchair by the readjustment center's entrance and wheeled Karen down to the EMRT room. Somewhere, a hygiene bed's life alarm was ringing. I ignored it. My goal was to get Karen some muscle treatment. A single treatment probably wouldn't give her enough strength to stand on her own, but she could at least hold her head up and move her arms, and she might regain her voice and sight.

In the treatment room, I filled a treatment tub with the minty-smelling conducting gel and washed Karen off and fit her with breathing tube. These were normally tech duties, stuff I thought I would never be doing again. Looking down at this little twig of a woman on the table, it occurred to me that all I had to do was tie off her breathing tube, and that would be the end of her. I asked her the question that kept coming to my mind. "How do I know for sure that you didn't blow up Atlanta yourself? How do I know you aren't full of shit?"

My set was blank for a while before she answered.

> well... how could I prove it?
>
>

I tried to think of a way. Some kind of test. "I don't know," I said finally.

> u know much about statistical proxy distillation tracing?
>
>

"No."

> then it would be hard to prove it to u
>
>

"So how do I know it wasn't you?"

> u cant know.
>
>

"I need to know if I'm going to help you."

> then learn about SPDT
>
>

"I don't have time to learn about fucking SP fucking DT."

> then u cant know. ur just dealing with stuff thats too advanced
>
>

I walked away from the table and sat down in a nearby chair. I felt like I was cracking up. The urge to cry had come and passed every few minutes, and it came again. "I don't know what to do."

> i told u. we must get to upstate New York. there's a way to defeat Q.
>
>

"Maybe you are Q."

> listen before u put me in the gel, I want u to pull my jack battery. cut it off
>
>

"And that would prove you're not Q?"

> not really. i couldve scripted everything
>
>

"Oh."

> but it would mean i cant directly order nuclear strikes
>
>

"Oh, well, that's a relief," I said, rubbing my face and trying to blink away the fresh wave of tears. "What's in upstate New York that's so important?"

> there is a resource Q cant access. something she cannot defend against.
>
>

"What?"

> honestly, if u dont understand something simple like SPDT, u wont understand this.
>
>

"Fucking great," I said. We sat there in silence for a long moment. Finally, another message showed up.

> im not Q. i spent my life fighting Q. i fought Q instead of living a life. we still have a chance to win. we must win.
>
>

I sighed and stood up and walked over to her. "Well, then let's get started."

> good
>
>

I found the jack patch on the back of Karen's neck and squeezed at the tattooed points. Her battery capsule slowly slid out of her skin like a giant blackhead. I disconnected the wire. Now she was completely disconnected from infraspace. I picked up her body and gently lowered it into the conducting gel. It took a minute for her to sink to the bottom, for the gel slowly slide over her face like a closing curtain. I dialed up 90 minutes of muscle treatment and 30 minutes of eye treatment and started the tub up. I sat for a while, listening to the soft wobbling sounds of the gel shifting as Karen's muscles clenched and unclenched at a rapid-fire rate. This was the sort of spare moment where a person would stare at their set and look at game replays or something, but my set was a just a long list of red interrupts, telling me about how everybody was dead.

I realized that the hygiene bed's life alarm was still going off in some other room. Usually when I heard that sound, I went racing to find out what was going on. But I had just ignored it. Well, the person was probably dead before we got here. What were the odds that they had just gone into arrest when we walked in the door? And who gave a shit anyways when a 100 million people had also died today. Still... there was an instinctive part of me that wanted to run toward the sound, that wanted to help. I got up and walked down the hall. The ringing got louder. At the end of the hallway, there was a small room with 4 hygiene beds that had been brought in for in-hospital disconnection, a procedure usually reserved for really complex cases. The last bed was blinking red. I took a look at the readout, but it didn't show cardiac arrest. In fact, it was showing 260 bpm. It must have been malfunctioning. I looked at the patient chart. Zhenzhen Sobakin. 24 years old. Total connection duration: 47 minutes. It must have been runtime crash. Unlucky.

I pressed the seal button, and the bed lid opened up. When she came into view, I staggered back and shouted for help.

*Title: "A Man Arrived To A Duel With Only A Pen And A Piece Of Paper"*

###### 77th Post / Date 06 -05-2016 at 02:08 EDT

I sat Karen up in the electroconvulsive tub and wiped the warm gel from her face and detached the breathing tube. Her head rolled back, her face glistening in the glare of the LED. I could see the shape of the skull clearly through the wet skin. Slowly, she pulled her head upright, blinking the goo from her eye lashes. "Heh. Hi. Hello. Hello. Can you hear this?"

"Yeah, I can hear you," I said.

"Wow. OK. It worked. Good," she said. Her voice was completely flat and surprisingly deep for somebody so scrawny. "I am here," she said, baring her teeth in what might have been a smile.

"Can you see anything?" I asked.

She opened her eyes wider and moved them around. "Yes. Persistent shapes," she said, pronouncing the word 'persistent' like a child.

"Can you see how many fingers I'm holding up?"

"No."

"Try squinting."

"Oh, right. That changes things. Hmmm... Two?"

She was right, except she was looking at a completely different direction than my hand.

"Great," I said.

Slowly, her knobby knees emerged from the gel, and she grasped them with her hands. It was a good sign for somebody in her state. It also showed that she knew some of the standard tests for emergents. We went through a few more of the tests and found that the treatment had worked well. She might even be walking soon. I got her out of the tub and washed her off and put her into some scrubs. She managed to sit upright on the table without leaning on anything, her bony arms set stiffly at her sides.

"Can I ask you a question?" I asked.

"Sure," she said in her deep, childish monotone.

"What is Q?"

"You want the whole story?"

"Yeah."

She took a deep breath. "OK. So, approximately fifty thousand years ago..."

She told me the whole story of Q as she knew it, from the beginning in prehistory, when the "hyperspace code" was inserted into the human genome, and she went all the way to right now and the so-called plague of the flesh. Her description of the plague explained what happened to poor Zhenzhen in her hygiene bed. It also explained the red butterfly thing I found the other hygiene bed.

If you are "reading" this, I guess you have access to her story as well. Hopefully she wrote down the whole history of Q because I honestly didn't understand it all and couldn't do it justice. If I had heard it on any other day than the day Atlanta was destroyed, I wouldn't have believed any of it. As it was, I just took it all in in a calm detached way, as if I was just listening to another delusional. I guess you'll be reading her story before any of this even happens, so you'll be inclined to believe it even less.

So, at that point, I asked her how she knew so much about Q, like what its plans were and everything. She said Q had recently stopped hiding anything from her and the other Bred soldiers. It was fully confident in its ability to win against them in any scenario. It no longer felt the need for any secrecy. I asked her why it had tried to kill her, and she said that it hadn't. It was planning to destroy Atlanta anyways. She had arranged for the assassin herself, an improvisation to get her out of the city more quickly. I asked her if her ability to see all those extra dimensions allowed her to see into the future. She told me that she could only see extra dimensions in the feedrealm. It allowed her fight against Q more effectively because she can process information on a different level.

She explained, "When you look at a digital picture, you can process a huge matrix of color values all at once. If you tried to process the same picture by looking at a list of color codes for each point, like R:101, G:254, B:017, it would take forever and be incomprehensible. For certain problems, I have the same advantage over you that you have over a guy reading a list of color codes on a ticker. I can see many things all at once. But I can only see extra dimensions in the feedrealm. Here outside the realm, there seems to be only three dimensions plus one timeline. I can't see beyond that. But I can imagine beyond it."

"So you can't see the future?"

"No. I can only imagine the future. I can imagine a lot of futures."

"Then why did you hire an assassin for yourself? I mean, that just seems like a really risky move. Like, something that was unlikely to pan out."

"Oh? I couldn't imagine many scenarios where it wouldn't have worked."

"Really? What if I had just been like, 'Fuck this, I'm out of here.'"

"Oh, come now. Nobody would do that."

"Nobody would do that? Almost everybody would do that! He had a gun."

"Wrestling over firearms is quite common."

"Maybe in feed narratives, but not in real life."

"You see stories about that kind of thing all the time in the news."

We argued about this point for quite a while. It was like arguing with an intelligent child who has no clue about the real world. Her view of real life had been warped by seeing only the sensational parts of it that managed to leak into the feedrealm. She seemed completely unaware of that most basic and fundamental fact of human life: that most of it is boring, that most of it is just waiting around, that people go through large portions of their lives tired and sleepy and wanting to lie down. I tried to convince her of this, but in her short time in the real world, she had experienced a murder, a drone strike and nuclear holocaust, so I wasn't having much success until -- lo and behold -- she got tired and wanted to lie down.

I helped her onto a gurney, and we made plans to head toward Plattsburgh in upstate New York. She said that the key to defeating Q was somewhere near there. Of course, she was lying to me, but I didn't realize it at the time.

*Title: "How The Flesh Dances and How The Flesh Plays"*

###### 78th Post / Date 06 -0-6-2016 at 04:00 EDT

```
How The Flesh Dances And How The Flesh Plays

How the flesh toils and spins through its days

See the flesh happy and strapping and young

See the flesh sagging and dragging and glum
Sssssshhhhh....
Hear now the giggling

See shadows grow

Step down the hallway

Each door aglow

Watch now the ceiling

Sweet cradle rocks

Who made these puppets?

Who made this clock?
Ancient hand on the cradle

Withered lips form a song

Golden wheels spinning backward

Withered hand becomes young
The hands can spin

Spin then slow

The clock is wound afresh

But is the key

Turned this time

By fingers made of flesh?

```

*Title: "Jerking off until Mother opens the door"*

###### 79th Post / Date 06 -07--2016 at 0:00 EDT

I am 24, and it's a Friday night in early summer. The sun is settling down into a haze beyond the mountains, and the city's concrete is beginning to cool after a baking day. The signs for all the bars are on turning on. The windows of stolid office buildings become a wild collage of reflected neon. Yes, everybody wants to party tonight. Even the Central Insurance Bank is looking festive. Oh, you minx!

I've drunk six beers. I am right in the zone. Active. Playful. Charming. Oh so charming. I am actually charming myself right now with my internal monologue, reeling off clever little observations about the people who pass on the sidewalk. I can see a glowing doorway in my mind. All I have to do is walk through it.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Who's calling me now? Maybe it's my usual gang of friends. Or the Swedish friends I drank with until 6 A.M. last weekend. Or one of the dozens of girls who are saved in my phone with thoughtful pet names like "brownhair2" and "metinpark." But I'm not going to answer my phone. I don't want to make any plans. I am simply going to walk down this street, and something is going to happen. Because the door is open. The world awaits.

I stand by a food vendor and watch people pass. I smile, nod, make funny comments. Most people smile and pass right by. Others linger for a while. Two girls and guy start talking to me. They're tourists from out of town. What are they looking to do? A nice place or just somewhere cheap? Do they like saké? I know just the place. Sure, no problem.

And we're off. Soon we're sitting in a booth, and the saké is arriving at regular intervals, and I'm telling crazy stories and snapping off jokes, and I'm listening to them, and they're telling me about themselves and one of the girls keeps glancing at me when she thinks I'm not looking and

I am 30, and I am in a darkened apartment, hunched over the glow of my laptop screen, jacking off. I finish and go to the bathroom to wash up, and there is that moment, that same moment, where I have to look at my blotchy face in the mirror and say, "Well, not my proudest moment," in my head, the same joke I make to myself every time. When I'm done, I stand in the doorway of my bathroom and look at the tiny studio apartment: a desk, a laptop, a futon, a small window with the curtains closed against the summer glare, a crowd of empty bottles on the floor by the door. The stink of old sweat and beer.

I whimper. The door is closed. The door is closed forever. I am locked in this apartment, this little box, closed off from the world.

Now that the jerking off is done, the jitteriness starts to creep back in. Oh nightmare. I want to drink, but is only 3 PM. I have only been awake for half an hour. I should wait until at least 8 before drinking. At least 6. But this is torment. I need some now or I will have some kind of fucking seizure. Just two shots, that's it, and then no drinking until

I am 33, and I am sitting in the 24-hour club, listening to a man talk about a mouse that changed his life. He had been living out of his car for a month, and it was so full of a trash that a mouse started living there too. This was this problem that finally broke him, that finally showed him the absurdity of it all, that finally made him get sober: how do you set mouse traps in a car? It's a pretty good story, but I've heard it before.

Stolid Haircut walks into the meeting late again. I call him Stolid Haircut because I don't know his name, but he has a respectable Republican haircut: silver and gray and sculpted into broad curves that recall the body of a pre-gas crisis American sedan. He wears the uniform of a retiree: bright blue dad jeans with running shoes and white socks and a plaid shirt buttoned up to the next-to-top button.

Stolid Haircut walks with the wide, clumsy steps of a hesitant toddler. Years of alcoholism have damaged his cerebellum, resulting in an abnormal gait. This and his reddened, venous nose make his weakness for alcohol plain for anybody to see. At a glance you can know his most painful personal shame. His lips are permanently pursed into an embarrassed smile.

I watch him ease into the chair and go back to listening about the mouse and find myself looking at him again.

Oh, tragic haircut!

The haircut calls to me from some golden past. It is the haircut of a man who once was. In days gone by, it was thick and brown and belonged to a man who walked with a purposeful stride, a husband and father, the kind of guy who hoisted his son onto his shoulders to watch passing parades, who played softball and relaxed with a few beers after work, and a few whiskies after that, but always woke up bright and early the next day, who worked hard, who knew who he was, who knew right from wrong, who know how the world ought to be.

I stare at his soft, shining, embarrassed eyes and feel my own filling with tears. How it has all slipped away from him. The young son is grown. The job is done. The wife doesn't talk. Everything that was once strong and sure is now frail and shaky.

How many nightmares has this ordinary man seen? I saw so many in just ten years. And I am nowhere near the point of an abnormal gait. This man has seen unutterable things. How bewildered was he when it first came for him, the scuttling darkness? Did he think he was going mad? He comes from a generation where this sort thing is not discussed. How he must have suffered.

O haircut! haircut! haircut! O the bleeding drops of red.

I am staring at him openly. The rest of the meeting is not there anymore. A halo of light pours out around his face, and he becomes a vision. Doves and cherubim swirl around him, Escher staircases extend in every direction, mandalas expand and overlap and spin and

The door-- my god. For a moment, the door is open again.

*Title: "The Beginning Of A Story"*

###### 80th Post / Date 06 -09--2016 at 0:00 EDT

Right now, the car is headed silent down the highway. It's dark, and there is nobody driving. I snuggle up in my seat and listen to the hum of its parts. I have turned my set off. It shows nothing but reports of destruction and plagues. The world on fire. The world gone mad.

Most of the interstates have shut down. They want people to stay in one place. The car is moving along the back roads, switching from one lonely little highway to another. We are headed towards the answer, towards the key to defeating Q. I hope we get there fast.

Slowly, the sky pales, and the blue curves of the mountains emerge from the darkness beyond the guardrails. I heard once that the Appalachians used to be as high as the Himalayas. Looking at the sloping hills under the sky, I can sense the ancient shape of the world. A world that was here before us.

Man, I'm getting pretty philosophical.

In my mind, another shape appears. Massive. Continental. The slope of human decline. The awful descent of the human race into...

Christ. Let's just enjoy the pretty mountains.

Karen is lying in the back. She's doing another eye treatment with equipment we took from the hospital. Before we reach Plattsburgh, the car switches highways and heads west. The sun climbs higher. We are getting closer.

Eventually, the car turns onto an unpaved road. After few minutes, it slows to a stop. And here we are. I look around. It's a nice bit of country scenery -- grass and trees and gentle hills and blue sky and pretty much fuck all. There is nothing here. Or whatever is here, is hidden.

Karen is still doing the eye treatment in the darkness of the van's rear. The light from the goggles seeps out in little flashes, sketching the shape of her face. Finally, the goggles turn green, and she pulls them off, blinking and squinting.

I go and help her sit up. "Can you see a little better?" I ask.

She looks down at her hands, moving the fingers slowly in the dark. "Yeah."

"Persistent shapes?"

She raises her hand into a shaft of sunlight shining in from the front of the van. Her fingers catch the glow. "My hands," she says softly, her voice quavering with disbelief. It's the first strong emotion I've ever heard from her.

"Good. That's great," I say. "Well... we're here. What do we do now?"

She looks at me and smiles maniacally. "We go into the forest," she says. Her smile is unnatural and stiff, more of a grimace than a smile, but for a brief moment, as it first spreads across her face, she looks like a giddy little kid. "The key is there," she says.

"What is it? Some kind of secret underground base? Hidden laboratory?"

She makes a groaning sound that I barely recognize as laughter. "You play too many narratives. It's much simpler than that."

I unfold a wheelchair that we "borrowed" from the hospital and help her into it. When I open the back doors of the van, she winces against the bright sunlight, and again her face looks like a little kid's for a moment. I give her a pair of huge black wraparound sunglasses that we took eye treatment center.

The van lowers to the ground, and I roll the wheelchair out onto the dusty road. She makes sure I take a bag of supplies with us -- snacks and drinks and other stuff. The sun is warm on my skin, but the breeze is fresh and cool. It's a perfect day. You would think that everything is right in the world.

"So where to?" I ask.

She looks around, her head wobbling on her thin stalk of a neck, her eyes hidden by the massive glasses. "There was once a house here. Do you see it?"

I look around and spy a low, crumbled gray wall mostly hidden behind the high grass. "I think see an old foundation."

"That's it, she says. Her eyes are hidden, but there is something in her voice that wasn't there yesterday, a shivery excitement. It makes me excited too. I push the wheelchair down a weedy gravel driveway toward the foundation. There's nothing else left of the house. It must have been torn down and hauled off. Karen has me push her around it and go down a trail leading towards forest.

"What was that house?" I ask. "Anything important?"

"I used to live there."

I turn and give it another look, as if I would see some new detail in the crumbling concrete that I had missed.

"That was the old children's home?"

"Yep."

"Then where are we going?"

"We're almost there," she says. "It's close."

We follow the trail into the forest. The trees become thick and shadowy. The wheelchair has a little power assist, but it's still tough to push it over all the roots and rocks and that lie along the narrowing, twisting path.

"Oh, yes!" Karen whispers excitedly.

Up ahead, sunlight gleams through the branches of the crowding trees. A wave of excitement moves through me, and I push Karen faster. We come out into a clearing, a broad patch of wild grass that glows green and golden in the sunlight.

"Here," Karen says.

I stop the wheelchair and look around. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything here.

"So what's here?" I ask.

"I used to come here as a child... and play make-believe... before I was connected."

I take a walk around the clearing, looking for something. A hatch? A hole? An actual key lying in the grass? There is nothing.

Across the clearing, Karen is slowly pulling off her sunglasses. When her eyes appear, they startle me. They are wide and gleaming within utter fascination. I walk up to her. She is staring at something. Tears fill the rims of her eyes and spill over. What is she looking at? It seems to be something right in front of her, something I can't see.

I stand beside her and crouch so I can see what she is seeing. There is nothing there but a small cloud of gnats. "What are you looking at?" I ask.

She looks all around and takes a deep breath and shudders. "There's... more..." she whispers.

"More what?"

"They said the feeds were complete... but they were wrong."

I wait for her to say more, but she doesn't. "What do you mean?" I ask.

She looks at me and smiles, the most goofy, crazed smile I've ever seen, tears still flowing down her cheeks. "The designers of the feeds said that it provides a complete experience. Enough colors, enough frames, enough smell gradients, enough complexity to make it indistinguishable from reality... but they were wrong. Here! Look at them!" she says, raising her hand into the air.

"You mean... the gnats?"

"Yes."

The gnats are glowing specks dancing senselessly in the sunlight. I wonder if some pattern will emerge. Can Karen control them with their mind? Is that the secret? Are they forming shapes? But they just dance and dance, forming nothing, making no pattern that I can see. I feel silly for even thinking that they would. They're gnats.

I turn away. A flood of angry thoughts rushes through my mind. Gnats? Fucking gnats? She's a nut. She's lost it. Yeah, she's powerful and impressive in the feedrealm, but now she is in the real world, and she has completely lost her shit, and this whole trip has been a waste. "Is there anything here?" I ask. "What's the key? Seriously. Don't give me any of that bullshit like 'I can't explain' or 'You'll see.' Just tell me. What are we doing here. What is the plan?" I ask, almost shouting by the end.

The crazed look of joy fades from her face and is replaced by the look of a scolded child. She lets her head hang and wipes the tears from her face with her weak little hands.

I feel a bad. I kneel by her chair and say, "I'm sorry. Please, just tell me what your plan is. I need to know now."

Karen begins speaking softly without looking up. "Q has base control of every major system in the world. Every drone, every rover, every defense robot, all orbital assets, all nuclear weaponry. She has control over most human political systems. She has destroyed or contained every existing countermeasure, including me. There is no scenario in which we could ever reacquire control. Not with a thousand times our current resources. Not with a thousand years of computation time."

"So then what's the plan?"

"What we need is a way for Q to be destroyed by just one or a few motivated individuals. I believe there were points in the past when this could have happened. Maybe one of the Germans overseeing the early research program could have stopped it. Maybe it could have been stopped around 2020, when the portals were shut down, and interface research was temporarily abandoned. But it didn't happen. Currently, at this point, there is no way for it to happen. Q has control of far, far too many assets. The war is already lost. Irrevocably."

"Then what do we do?"

"We must hope that there are alternate timelines and that somebody in one of these timelines foresees what is happening to us right now -- that somebody foresees this very moment in time and takes steps to prevent it."

I stare at her. She looks into my eyes. I grope for words. "Is that... Wait... Alternate timelines? Is that the plan? We have to send a message back into the past?"

"In a sense."

"Then the person who receives this message will destroy Q in the past, and that will save us?"

Karen shakes her head slowly. "No. That clearly won't happen or everything would already be different. We are utterly doomed. We'll either be either incinerated in a nuclear strike or rounded up and incorporated into Q. There's no stopping that. The only hope to defeat Q is on some other timeline, if such a thing exists."

"There's no hope for us? At all? Then what are we doing here? Why are we in this fucking clearing?"

"Haven't you felt it?"

"Felt what?"

"The feeling that you're inside a narrative."

An eerie shiver comes over me. I look around at the clearing. "Like, I'm inside a feed?"

"No. Inside a narrative. A story in somebody's mind. Doesn't this all seem just like a story? Two people rushing off to save the world, to find some hidden key in the forest?"

"Yeah, it all seems pretty unbelievable."

"That's how I wanted it to feel. That's why we came out here. So that we can be inside a story. Now, hopefully, there is somebody out there in the past who will write the story."

"Write the story? What? So there's nothing here?"

"There's no magic key or secret underground base."

"Well this story sucks."

"Why?"

"It's a huge fucking let-down."

Karen makes a mild choking sound that might be a chuckle.

I slump down into the grass beside her wheel chair and hang my head. I'm out in the woods with a crazy person. She doesn't even make sense. She's spent too long in 5D. She's talking about alternate timelines. Finally, I ask her, "So we're just fucked, right?"

"If you look toward our future, if you look at the series of events which will happen to us, they are dark. They are very awful. We will suffer. We will die. But that would be true in any timeline. On the other hand, if you look at the entire story, not as a series of events, not from beginning to end, but as a single continuous, connected shape, where every event is occurring simultaneously... I think... my life... even my stupid little life, which I spent mostly inside that hygiene bed... could form a beautiful shape."

I snort. I'm tired of this cryptic bullshit.

Karen goes on. "Maybe that shape reaches back, back to some place where somebody can see it and change things."

I don't say anything. Karen reaches into our bag of supplies and pulls out one of the little paper notebooks she bought at the gas station.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"I'm going to write a poem. Do you want a notebook?"

"What for?"

"Maybe there's somebody out there who needs you to write a story."

"Who would read it? Isn't everybody going to die?"

"Who knows," she says and drops the other notebook into my lap. "Maybe somebody would be interested."

I toss the notebook off into the grass. Fucking pointless. I can barely write on paper anyways.

We sit in silence for a long time. When I look up, Karen is staring at that same little cloud of gnats, occasionally jotting stuff down. I find myself staring at them too. They look like nothing more than living specks of dust worked into a crazy, whirling frenzy. Is there any pattern in how they move? Would it matter if there was? I think about what Karen said about the shape of her life, what it would look like if everything happened simultaneously, if it could all be seen at once. I think about the shape of my own life. I stare at the gnats and imagine seeing every position of every gnat all at one time. What kind of shape would it make? Even if I could see it, would this shape have any meaning?

I pick up the notebook and begin to write.

*Title: "We All Have Skeletons"*

###### 81st Post / Date 06 -11--2016 at 4:23 EDT

Before writing this series, I wrote a novel. I worked on it for 6 years. The worst years of my life. As I sank deeper into alcoholism and became a pathetic trembling recluse, I held on to the novel as my one desperate hope. Maybe it would turn out well, maybe it would get published, maybe it would sell well, maybe my life would change, maybe I would escape my stinking little apartment. What dreams I had. What desperate little dreams.

As my life got worse, I told myself I was on a journey of self-discovery, that I was an artist going through a period of struggle before my great breakthrough. Every famous artist has some story of living in a tiny apartment and working a mind-numbing job and eating crap food before their first big success. Surely this was just that part of my story. How much richer would my success be after all this pathetic degradation!

After a night of writing, I would get drunk and imagine myself being interviewed by in front of an auditorium full of my fans, telling self-deprecating but touching anecdotes about my ragged days before I became I literary success. The audience full of bookishly pretty young women would titter and sigh as they related to my struggles and admired my unwavering determination. What fantasies I had!

There were other times when I knew that I was just comforting myself with delusions of grandeur, that I was trying to romanticize my lazy failure of a life by pretending to be a struggling artist on the verge of success. Really, I was just a lazy drunk on the verge of fuck all. I wasn't even some proud rebel drunk like Charles Bukowski. I hated myself. I didn't write enough or read enough or know enough or work hard enough to be a real writer. I had never read Anna Karenina or One Hundred Years of Solitude or anything by Henry James.

I was often bored when reading and bored when writing. Did I even like it? I had half-assed my way through school and work and relationships. I had half-assed everything I had ever done, and I was even half-assing something that was supposed to be important to me. I hadn't even finished one novel after six years.

And then there was the most damning evidence of all: my writing sucked.

Sometimes I felt like I was fraud, sometimes I felt like I was on the right path, sometimes I felt like both of these things were true at once, like I was on two different timelines. My view of the matter changed often. At night, I tended to regard myself as being on the very cusp of fame and fortune. The next morning, I tended to wake up feeling like a untalented dilettante. Meanwhile, this supposedly temporary period of struggle stretched on and on and on. I turned 30. Surely something would happen by 40. But what if it didn't? As I withdrew from friends and coworkers and became more of a recluse, I rationalized it as "concentrating on my writing." Except my busy schedule of drinking and hangovers didn't allow for much writing. The story of the struggling artist was showing itself to be a lie.

Then I got fired from my job and sent to rehab. After I stopped drinking, I used my newfound energy and spare time to finish the novel. I finished it in a few months. You can get a lot done when you're not entering the void every night. For someone like me, the completion a 6 year struggle is an occasion which simply begs to be accompanied by a drink, by many drinks. I had always planned to just go get drunk for an entire week after I finished my novel. Instead, I took a walk down to a nearby bar and stood outside of it for a while.

I didn't go in. In my head, my life seemed to be developing into a new story: a heroic turnaround in which I got sober and everything fell into place. Yes, surely this was how it would go. I sent letters to 30 literary agents with the hopes of getting the book published. None expressed any interest.

It hurt to be rejected. I had stopped drinking, but I still hadn't found a fulfilling job. I was able to talk to people and look cashiers in the eye again, but I was still a recluse. I had still invested a lot of desperate hopes into getting the novel published. I felt so foolish for investing so much hope into something that is just so unlikely, but I couldn't help myself. The lure of feeling some sense of purpose and accomplishment was just too much.

I wanted to be noticed. Honestly, I wanted to be rich and famous. Though they may have been disguised as "achieving artistic success" and "finding my purpose," perhaps my dreams were ultimately as crass and grasping as any Kardashian's.

I had given the literary agents 4 months to respond to me before accepting they were not interested. Soon after that deadline passed, I started writing this web series. As you may know, a few websites wrote articles about the series, and some very lovely people created a very wonderful subreddit about it, and this drew the attention of people in the publishing industry. They contacted me, and just like that, my long-held dream was again revived, and now it seemed more in reach than ever. I had been struggling to contact agents, and now they were contacting me! Oh, what a heady feeling. Again, it felt like everything was falling into place, like my life was shaping into a story with a happy ending.

Speaking of endings, I needed to come up with an ending for the series before I could finally take my rightful place as leading light of the literati (cough). A few people on the subreddit had expressed doubt that I could possibly deliver a satisfying ending, and I was inclined to agree with them. I had already noticed that the story was easier to write when I was opening narrative threads than when I was wrapping them up. What would the overall ending be?

It had to be about Mother. That was the center of the story. But what did I really know about Mother beyond a few vague memories? I had long puzzled over these memories. Back when I was drinking, I was convinced that something had happened to me one summer, something beyond my understanding, something monstrous. But after I got sober, I was encouraged to digest some hard truths about myself, and I decided that it was entirely possible that I had more or less made it all up. Not that I simply lied to myself, but more that I had latched on to some vague memory, perhaps a recurring nightmare, and built it up in my mind over the years, perhaps as an explanation for why I was so emotionally fucked up. It was easier to face life as a victim of some unknown, half-remembered evil. It gave me an excuse to crawl into the bottle.

I needed to provide a satisfying ending to the series and to my quest to get published. Being intertwined, both of these tasks rested on a hazy collection of sinister memories. Then again, couldn't I just make some shit up? Hadn't I been doing that all along?

The solution presented itself to me one night when I was talking with my roommate Shawn. He told me that back when he smoked crack, he used to break into abandoned buildings to see if there was stuff to steal. He said that once he broke into a warehouse downtown and found set of stairs that led to an underground room, which led to many more rooms that went deep underground. Over the course of a few weeks, he went deeper and deeper into the complex, taking various stuff, but always leaving quickly, because it was a spooky place. On the last night he snuck into the complex, he found a room where the walls were covered in human bone.

*Title: "A Double-Take"*

###### 82nd Post / Date 06 -12-2016 at 0:00 EDT

So there I was on the front porch with Shawn, both of us sitting in rickety old chairs, slapping away the mosquitoes, when he mentioned quietly that he had once seen a room where the walls were covered with human bone. Right away my heart started thumping in my chest.

He must have seen my reddit posts. This was something I had been worrying about, even dreading. My posts were none too flattering of him, and he was a very private person, very defensive of his boundaries. He would see it as an intrusion and a betrayal. I had taken great pains to obscure the details of his identity, giving him a new name and a different sort of Afrocentric religion. Nobody would recognize him from my posts. But some of the stuff in my writing had been had been taken verbatim from our conversations. If he saw them, he would surely recognize himself.

Shawn was not a guy I wanted to piss off. When he first came to the house, he told us that his main character defect was his temper, and he wasn't kidding. On more than one occasion I had watched anger build up inside of him until he ended up chewing somebody out. It was the sort of scene that left me tip-toeing back into my bedroom, giddily thankful I wasn't taking the brunt of his outrage. All those years as a recluse had left me with no appetite for confrontation.

Shawn had been sincerely working on his temper. He was the only black dude in the house, and he was worried about being seen as the angry black guy. He often said to me, "You get up in somebody's face and they'll be like, 'Say, fellas, let's work this thing out.' But if I cross the line, they'll be like, "Call the police! This n\*gga gone crazy!'" I assured him that this was not the case, while not being entirely sure that this wasn't the case.

As a result of his fears, he had become very indirect about how he expressed his anger. If he felt somebody was disrespecting him, he would give them the silent treatment for a while, then come down hard on them for something small, all the while being very careful to not raise his voice or make any threatening gestures, which somehow made him more intimidating. As much as he didn't want to play out the angry black guy stereotype, I didn't want to play out the meek, affronted white guy stereotype, but I was sometimes intimidated by him.

So now when he told me about the walls covered with bone, I figured he must have been feeling me out, seeing if I would come clean about what I had written. But it was such a strange way to do it. I didn't know what to say. I looked him in the eye, trying to make my face completely neutral. He gazed back at me, his face half in shadow, half colored by the yellow porch light, his expression dead serious. He went on, speaking softly: "Skulls... teeth... arms and hands... melted together... on the walls... up on the ceiling."

...............................

So there I was on the front porch with Shawn, both of us sitting in rickety old chairs, slapping away the mosquitoes, when he mentioned quietly that he had once seen a room where the walls were covered with human bone. Right away my heart started thumping in my chest.

He had seen in real life what I had only seen in my mind. He was about to tell me that the flesh interfaces and Mother and all the other nightmares were true. I had, on some level, known this was coming. It was the culmination of the strange feelings I had had all week.

It started when I was sitting in that AA meeting, looking at the sad face of the old man with the Stolid Haircut. I had entered a strange and sudden reverie, carried away by the sheer damn poignancy of this man's haircut and how it symbolized the sort of strong, upright man he had tried and failed to be. I saw him in a great shifting vision, different versions of him emerging and overlapping. Here he was a young boy learning how to use a comb. Here he was a young man, the wind ruffling his sturdy locks as he experienced that a rush of confidence that comes with drink. Here he was in front of the mirror, running the comb through his wet hair with a shaky hand, dropping it into the sink. Here he was with stitches just below the hairline after another accidental fall. Here he is finally face down at the bottom of his stairs, his hair ever so slightly mussed, just a few strands out of place... almost perfect.

The next day, my roommate Donnie (the ex-Marine) and I went out to the river to swim. It was a perfect sunny day, and there were a lot of people out swimming and floating along in inner tubes. As I lay back in the cool waters, feeling the warm forest air alive on my wet skin, I saw for a moment that vanished primeval world peopled by the forest children. These children lived along the river, not working or toiling, but simply taking what the river offered, living and dying by the good mother's generosity. Sure, they wouldn't know the benefits of writing or agriculture, and they would drop like flies to horrible diseases and predators, but in doing so they would accept their humble place in the universe, rather than striving to overcome it through science or religion. They would know themselves to be fragile things which lived for a brief moment and died, like glimmers on the river's water.

For the second time in as many days, I found myself with tears in my eyes over some trivial moment, and I was forced to turn away from Donnie as he related a story about Marine buddy who had been given a humorous nickname by the platoon due to his uncanny knack for finding and acquiring venereal disease.

In AA, they talk about not struggling or trying to manage everything, but rather letting God manage it. Not believing in an interventionist God, I had to interpret this as simply trying to "accept the things I cannot change." I saw a vision of my life where I was able to accept life's vicissitudes with humility and grace, and where life opened itself to me as a result. With it came a wave of nostalgia. The last time I had felt like this, I had been in college and taking a lot of acid.

How long had I shut myself away from life? In that goddamn apartment with that goddamn bottle! I had been unable to accept any discomfort or unhappiness, so I had avoided everything except liquor. I had tried to control my feelings, and as a result, I had found discomfort and unhappiness like I never imagined. But now I could accept life, embrace life, welcome all the awkwardness and frustration and pain and indignities. How many opportunities were right at my fingertips? I could talk to one of these girls wearing the smart bathing suits and be married in a few months! Or just find a friend. Or be hired as staff writer as some kind of pastry magazine. Anything was possible! I saw now the glowing door open before me! I saw all doors open, all doors open and aligned, one after another, and behind them all there was--

There was what? I couldn't say... The insight slipped away without revealing itself, but the fading reverie left a warm glow, and I dipped my head back into the cool water and looked up into the sky crowded with bright weightless clouds. I could see now that so many things were coming together in my life. I was getting sober. I was learning to talk to people. Even the dream of being a novelist -- the dream -- was coming true!

So now when Shawn told me about the walls covered with bone, it seemed like yet another thing falling into place. But this time it was something sinister, something so awful I thought it couldn't be real. Now it seemed that whatever force was bringing my dreams to life was also acting on my nightmares.

I looked Shawn in the eye, trying to make my face completely neutral. He gazed back at me, his face half in shadow, half colored by the yellow porch light, his expression dead serious. He went on, speaking softly: "Skulls... teeth... arms and hands... melted together... on the walls... up on the ceiling."

I asked him very carefully, "Is this something you read about on the internet?"

He shook his head and said, "No, man," and looked down into his lap.

I needed to find out exactly what was going on, even if it meant giving myself away. I asked him, "Have you been reading my reddit posts?"

He squinted at me and asked, "Reddit? What is that?"

So, it was real after all...

*Title: "Children, Welcome to The Correlation Game."*

###### 83rd Post / Date 06 --2016 at 0:00 EDT

A full scale interface portal below a highly populated urban center.

In the early days of flesh interface technology, this would have been considered utter madness. The uncontrolled incident zone would have resulted in mass segmentation and total chaos. And looking back on the experiment, madness was in fact the result. But for a brief time, it seemed like an idea worth exploring. It all started one day when a mid-level analyst was navigating a 3D map of the Honduras Contained Interface II and felt the urge to go to the bathroom. Just as she was getting up from her desk, she was struck by an overwhelming realization.

But before we get to that, you must understand some background information. First, building an interface below a populated city was now possible because we had learned how to control the size of incident zones. We could create interfaces with incident zones that only existed within the interface tunnels, instead of there being a large uncontrolled zone around the interface. This was achieved through a breakthrough involving signal cables.

For years, we thought that the interfaces had little appetite for anything but flesh. Machines and other objects were ignored. They were not incorporated into the interface superstructure and did not seem to undergo significant travel. But the Chinese figured out that the interfaces were willing to incorporate electromagnetic signal cables.

If a live, transmitting cable was sent into a phagus corridor, the cable was taken up by the cilia limbs and connected directly to the interface's nervous conduits. At this point, we could send and receive signals from the interface. You can imagine our excitement. We had a working example of seamless techno-organic integration. It would naturally become the basis for direct-sense feed technology.

In those early days, we had no idea what the interface did with the signals we sent to it, nor could we make much sense of the signals it sent to us. All we knew is that it loved signals, the more the better. The more cables we hooked up and the more information we sent and received, the smaller the segmentation zone would become. As computing and signal technology advanced, we were able to reduce the segmentation zone to area within the interface tunnels. Finally, we had a relatively safe and stable flesh interface.

Still, we had no reason to consider building an interface below a city until our mid-level analyst made her startling discovery. Before this discovery, we knew that the size of a flesh interface depended chiefly on one factor: how much flesh it was provided. But at a certain point, the interface would cease to grow, even if it was provided with ample "building material." We wanted to know why. Why had the Novaya Zemlya and Artigas portals grown so large, when other portals were offered more flesh but failed to grow? In addition, we wanted to know what factors shaped the configuration of the interface tunnels, the so-called ant farms.

At that point, we knew only a few basic facts: the tunnels would form either underground or underwater, but not in the atmosphere. The underwater tunnels were much larger than the underground tunnels, generating more segmentation and requiring more signal transfer to quell the segmentation. While the interface tunnels avoided the surface, they had little regard for the composition of the rock, sand or soil that they were tunneling through. They tunneled through everything at rate chiefly determined by how quickly we fed them flesh. It wasn't possible to observe the tunneling process, but it must have happened via segmentation because the dirt and rock which was removed simply disappeared. The tunnels were self supporting and would remain in place even if the surrounding earth shifted, unless they were wholly exposed to the open air, in which case they would putrefy.

But why did the tunnels take one configuration or another? What our mid-level analyst discovered as she traveled through the 3D digital recreation was that the route she was taking was strangely similar to the trip she took to the bathroom every day. It was an odd little route through a poorly designed research facility, which included a short flight of stairs and a switchback at the end of the hall. All of this was reflected in the ant tunnel.

Forgetting for a moment about her desire to use the bathroom, she took an emergency escape map off the wall and compared it to the ant tunnel she was studying. The layout of the Honduras research facility, which was just a few hundred meters from the interface entrance, was quite different from the layout of the interface tunnels, but there were certain similarities which went beyond coincidence.

The analyst's discovery spread quickly through the facility, and the analyst herself was given minor promotion along with a new office. It was discovered that the interface tunnels did not copy the architecture of the research building but rather the most frequently used paths and most frequently occupied rooms in the building. That is, it copied the layout of human activity within the building. But even this it did in a distorted, oblique way, repeatedly copying and multiplying certain sections of the layout, as if the building map was being viewed through a multi-faceted lens.

For the people working in facility, the discovery was nothing less than eerie. Shortly after the newly promoted analyst moved into her new office, a new section of tunnel was created within the interface to reflect this. No longer were the analysts detached observers. It was clear that on some level, they were being observed and copied for some inscrutable purpose.

A quick comparison of interfaces and nearby human-occupied research facilities revealed unmistakable parallels. Huge facilities such as Zemlya Novaya tended to produce huge interfaces. This even held true for undersea interfaces such as Artigas, where the nearest facility might be many kilometers away.

The correlation was stupefyingly obvious once we looked for it, and it set off a wave of crazed speculation. People started theorizing that the interfaces were affected by all sorts of things: the mood of the office, how much coffee we drank, the health of our potted plants. This period of wild speculation came to known as The Correlation Game, as almost anything was proposed as a possible correlation. Most of this speculation came to nothing. But there was one idea that gained traction: what if we built an interface in a highly populated area and gave it unlimited flesh material?

How big would it get?

*Title: "Do you believe the things I'm saying? Or do you think it's just the crack talking?"*

###### 84th Post / Date 06 -15-2016 at 04:29 EDT

There was this abandon warehouse that everybody knew about. I knew it had evil spirits when I first went into it, but the crack had me thinking nothing could touch me. Even the other crackheads didn't like to go in there, except the ones who had really fell off. Those ones you see standing around, just staring through the wall.

But I'm up in there like, "I got God's protection. I don't fear anything," but really it's just that crack talking. I start looking around, and I find some stairs in the back. At the bottom is a steel door. This thing is big. Solid. Deadbolts. Everything. Somebody already went at it with a sledge, but it ain't move at all. You think, there's crack heads in there every night, and they still ain't broke through that door. That's a solid door.

So where I was working at, I knew my boss had a spreader, like some jaws of life shit. So the next night, I took it, and I broke open that door. Inside was just a little room with block walls and another door. Same big-ass steel door. And there was a smell. That underground smell, but also like how when the spirits are unclean, they make a stank. That smell.

I broke open the next door. And it's a hallway with another door. I keep going through the place, breaking open doors. But it's mostly empty. Just some desks and computers too old to sell. I was like, shit. So I took the doors. Sold them for scrap. Heavy-ass doors.

The reason nobody got in them doors before is because a crackhead can't hold on to something like a hydraulic spreader. That thing was like 400 dollars. A crackhead will just sell the spreader. He ain't gonna fuck with those doors when he can just get his 400 dollars. I still had some discipline. I was smoking rocks, but I had some discipline, so I would put it back in the morning before my boss saw I took it. But that crack had me going. So one day I sold the spreader too.

My boss never figured out it was me who took that spreader. I was so slick. Then some things happened with me and my wife, and I stopped smoking for a while. Things were going alright. She acted like I was going to see my kids, but... nah.

I had forgot all about that old warehouse, but just as soon as I forgot, I looked in my boss' trailer, and he had another spreader. I was like, "Damn." I didn't even want to look at it. I had been clean for two months, but the crack was whispering. It got me again, and I was back down in that warehouse.

I was just breaking open doors, going room to room. There was hallways, stairs, more rooms. I keep going deeper. I found a room full of cages. A real big room like a pound. I was glad because it was a lot of metal. But in the last cage at the end...

Do you believe the things I'm saying?

I know you don't believe in God. I know you don't care about the Jews or the Gentiles. The Bible is real, but it happened a long time ago. People have forgot. That's why they carry on like they do. They don't know. And it's just when people forget, that's when the Lord comes again. And he will punish us for all the iniquities, the evils we do. The days to come will be full of terror. The Lord will chastise us like little children...

The smell was real strong in that room. That evil smell. I knew what I would find before I found it. There was some bones in the last cage. Little bones. Curled up in the corner, still with clothes on. I got out of there. I was gone. I wasn't never gonna come back... But, God, I came back and I chopped up those cages and took them all out. Just kicked them bones out on the floor.

I came back again the next day and broke into the next room, and there was more cages, all of them full. I was supposed to be back in my old house with my wife and kids, but I was down in that room with all those little skulls and hands. That's the insanity. It wasn't even worth that money, but I kept going back. There was always one more door, one more room, just a little more money. I ain't even think about where them bones came from. Who killed them? Who put them in cages? I didn't care.

Then I found the room with bones on the walls, and I was done.

That last night, I was way down in there, down underground. I opened a door, and inside there was just a cave. The other rooms had block walls, but this was like a mine. I shined my flashlight around, and up ahead I thought there was crystals on the walls or something. But it was bones. I mean people. Hands. Skulls. Ribs. All of it just put together. And it went on and on.

I said, God, this is the valley of the shadow of death. I knew I wasn't scared of those spirits because they were already inside me, telling me don't worry, telling me to keep going back down in there. I prayed to the Lord to deliver me, and I got scared right there. The spirits came out of me, and I got scared. I won't lie: I was crying, just shook up. I knew I wasn't alone in there. I could feel the evil one down in that tunnel. It was all power in the dark. The spirits of all those dead people were all formed together to form up into the body of the evil one, formed into a beast. It wanted me to bow to it, to bow to the idol. I didn't bow. I ran. I was gone.

That was my moment of testing. I didn't bow, but for a minute... For a little minute... I could feel all that power. And I smelt another smell, different from the other rooms. I remember. My daughter is more grown now, but when she was little, I'd feed her apple sauce. I be thinking about her when I smell it.

I smelt it then, coming out of the dark. And, God, I wanted to bow.

*Title: "If I could just be drunk until the end of time"*

###### 85th Post / Date 06-17-2016 at 03:52 EDT

Alcohol goes great with nostalgia and melancholy. It's what gives us misty-eyed barflies, forlorn poetry, midnight phone calls, the last page of *The Great Gatsby*, Sinatra ballads and 73% of all country music.

That was my favorite part of drinking: the wistful interlude a couple hours after the first flush of drunkenness, when you wander away from a boisterous party and look out into the darkened woods and see for a moment the fragile past floating ghostly before you, colored in sunset oranges, all the bygone things which have slipped away in the gentle flow of time. Your breath catches in the tightness of your throat, and your eyes fill with tears. Then somebody calls your name or you have to piss, and you wander back into the party.

I felt like I was at my finest in these moments. I felt poetic and sensitive and alive. Eventually, though, it all became an awful parody of itself. The gentle wistfulness devolved into me sitting in front of my laptop, drunk on a Wednesday night, watching sad Youtube videos, weeping and slurping down vodka and water. I would watch any sort of weepy video (soldier homecomings, kids with cancer, dogs being put down, etc.) just to get a good cry on, to trigger that dopamine release that came with the tears. It was nothing more than emotional masturbation. Just like with the alcohol itself, I had found something that gave me true pleasure, then used it over and over until my feelings had become rote and dead.

The same sort of thing happened with my memories of Mother. At first they came unbidden, stirring up a sense of wonder so powerful it brought tears to my eyes. But over the course of too many drunks and too many hangovers, I replayed the memories over and over from every angle. Eventually I couldn't be sure if certain parts came from the original or were formed by during later recollections. The whispering magic became a monotonous drone. The vaporous impressions dried and hardened into simple facts.

Mother was a woman sewn together from different things.

Mother would come in late at night with a bag that squirmed.

Inside the bag were children.

We would go down into the basement where she kept the cages.

We would do things to them together.

I thought the memories had no more power. I thought they were just abstractions at this point. Bad data. Who could explain them? And why bother?

Now I found myself walking down the street in the middle of the night, trying to burn off the eerie feeling that Shawn's story had put inside me. At the intersection, a stiff breeze zipped down the empty lanes, making the traffic lights sway. I walked by a bar with a patio and listened to the low rumble of confident male voices. A smell came off the bar -- cigarettes and hot wings and liquor sweat. It was the smell of action. The smell of good times. I could just walk in there, have a couple drinks and hold court. Tell a few jokes. Make a few friends.

The problem with going out sober is you have to make all these little decisions: where to go, where to sit, what to get. When you go out drunk you just make one decision: to keep drinking. Every other decision just falls into place. Life becomes easy. As easy as listening to a story.

It wasn't worth going in the bar. It would be closing time in an hour anyways. So I walked past it... on down the street... by myself...

God, if there was no closing time. No tomorrow morning. Just darkness and magic and mystery forever. If I could just be drunk until the end of time.

*Title: "Mara and The Womb"*

###### 86th Post / Date 06-17-2016 at 21:42 EDT

Mara is molting so we can't play. I'll have to wait until she's done.

I've moved out of the crowded sand burrow. I think six different broods live there now, and everybody crawls over each other and bickers and snips. Now I live in one of the sea caves. It's wet and lonely, but at least nobody snips at me, and it's a little easier to find food. When Mara is done molting, I want her to come here, and maybe we can live together.

The caves are made of ganna-black meltrock that has hardened into fluid shapes. The moons shine through dozens of porous holes in the roof, and the seaglitter throws shapes onto the rock ceiling. I like to sit back and let the shapes tell the ancient worldstory. This cave is nice. I will stay here.

I'm getting a tired of eating sea flowers, but I don't want to go through the trouble of buying livestock. The crowds at the temple are awful this time of year, everybody clamors and begs, and the priests are greedy and officious. They tell us the livestock is a generous blessing from the womb-sac of the Mother, but I think they just buy it from the Inland. At any rate, I don't want any part of it.

There is never much food around during the Ebbing, when the air turns cool and the worms travel away but the plumes have not come yet. This year it is even worse than usual. They say the ocean dies a little more each year. The water is becoming bitter. But since I live in this sea cave, I can get down into the cove before everybody else, so I'm pretty lucky with what I get to eat.

I wake up to the sound of rain on the ocean outside the cave. I look out to see which kind it will be. Light yellow-kadda-green, my favorite. I crawl out to a bluff and let the rain fall on my carapace. There is something sweet in the kadda-green rains that loosens up the whelks on my seams. I comb through my carapace with my forelimbs, snipping them off, letting them fall onto the rocks until whole front is clear and smooth. After that, I do my joints and my underside. Nowadays, with food scarce, it has become common to eat the whelks, but they taste like ammonia.

Just as I am done grooming and feeling very new and shiny, Mara comes climbing up the rock. Her shell is brand new and looks amazing. We dance and burrow and make happy little snips. I have missed her even more than I realized. She moves the colors on her carapace to show me how she feels. They are very vivid on her new bone. She shows pictures of her looking everywhere for me, searching through all the sea caves. I show her myself as I sat in the cave, lonely and waiting for her. She snips at my front legs, and I dance around for her. Sweet lovely Mara!

I show Mara my cave, and she likes it. She loves the sea mist and the way we can see the tetta-purple moons pass through the sky through the holes in the rock. I show us living here together and making it into a nice home. She shows me leaving the burrow, colored as a question. I show her that it was too crowded, and I was getting sick of all the others. She flicks her antenna at me, making slow, comforting movements. But I notice she hasn't answered about living in the cave. I feel my little plan is being washed away.

Mara doesn't stay with me in the cave, but she visits often. I make sure to always have some sea flowers for her when she comes over. Lately, they have been harder and harder to find. I get so hungry that it's hard not to eat all the flowers before I can give any to Mara. I give her the best flowers, but still they are small and colored an ugly shade of hanna-blue. Despite this, she always shows me how delicious they are.

Mara suggests we go to the temple to get some livestock to make a proper meal. I show her that I don't like the crowds. Mara has always loved the temple. She uses admiring colors to show the great gemstone mountain and the moons passing through the pylons and the great ziggurat where the livestock is brought out and sold. She shows the priests with their painted shells and red claws.

I insist that I don't like meat. I prefer sea flowers. She wiggles her hind-jaws at this. Nobody can prefer sea flowers! They taste like sand! I crawl back away from her a little. Hadn't my sea flowers always been delicious to her? Was that just a lie? She crawls closer to me. Her carapace takes on gentle yellows. She shows me that they were delicious because I had picked them. But I don't want her pity. I pull my legs in and lay still until she leaves.

I don't see Mara for a long while. The third moon makes its way to the high cusp, marking the end of the Ebbing. The plumes have still not come, and I'm often hungry. Finally, Mara shows up with a meat wrapped in temple cloth. I wonder if she's there to taunt me, but she offers it to me. She shows me that my shell has become thin and dull, and I am looking worse. She is right. I have not eaten enough in a while.

We go down inside my cave. Before she unwraps the meat, Mara lets me know that she has become a priestess at the temple. I turn blue with surprise. How had it happened so quickly? She had been studying for a while without telling me, since I never liked the priests. I feel sad about this. How many times had I complained about them in front of her while she was studying to become one? It was no wonder I didn't have many friends.

Mara unwraps her gift. The creature she has brought me is soft and pale pink. Mara likes the taste of these the best, but I don't think there is any difference between these and the brown ones. I break off one of the five little feelers on the end of its foreleg and nibble at it, but Mara snips at me and breaks off a hind leg and offers me the thick end. My shell turns yellow, and I take it. The pretty red juice runs all over my jaws as they pull the meat from the bone.

We eat in blankness for a while, then I ask Mara where the priests get the livestock from. It has always been a mystery, since none of these soft little creatures are ever found on the land or in the sea. I have wondered if they raise them inside the temple or if they bring them in from the Inland. Mara doesn't answer at first. She doesn't want to show me. I ask again. She shows me a quick, vague picture, the old story about the womb and egg, something the priests tell little children. I know she is hiding something, so I snip at her. Why does she hide things from me? We used to be so close. After a moment, a picture forms on her carapace, as clear and vivid as anything she has ever shown me. I ask what I am seeing. It is the womb. It is where they come from.

*Title: "To my Granddaughter"*

###### 87th Post / Date 06-18-2016 at 19:51 EDT

Dear Isellandria,

I hope your name is Isellandria. I will name my daughter Trellasandria, and I will tell her to name you Isellandria. These names are prettier more than my name. Ann. Too plain. I am your grandmother and even though you are still not born, I am writing to you in all 100% original English. Grandmother is teaching it to me. My Grandmother is your great-great-grandmother. I call her Ally Halmony yet that is not true English. Woops!

Grandmother is my best friend, and she gives me presents. When I meet you, I will give them to you, and we can be best friends the same. Can you keep secrets? Some of the presents are secret. I will keep this letter and your presents safe under my bed until you are here. I will give you the presents and a lot of hugs!

I am learning new English every day. Cloister. Do you know what that is? Grandmother use to live there. It is a special house for the mountain-born. Surprise! Ha Ha Ha. Grandmother was a mountain-born surely. She came out of the mountain's womb when she was a little girl. That's why me and mom are very healthy, and I hope you will be very healthy the same. I hope you have curly hair and green eyes, rather plain hair like me.

Grandmother said she hated to live in the cloister because the monks are mean. Grandmother does not like monks, yet that is secret. Don't show this letter to anybody. It is for just you. After she moved out of the cloister, she met grandfather. He was very nice yet not healthy, and he is passed on to the love of the Imp sun. On days when the Imp Sun rises before the big Monk Sun, I say some prayers to grandfather. Grandmother never says prayers to the Imp Sun. Rather she only prays inside.

I want to tell you about your presents. Grandmother carved them directly from green crystal. The biggest one is a kitty cat. That is an animal that lives on the far world. The next one is a rose. That is a vegetable that grows on the far world. It is supposed to be red yet this one is green and still very pretty. The littlest one is the secret one. Grandmother keeps it for herself, and she will not tell me what it is still. Yet one day she will give it to me.

I think she is still working to carve it. When she started to make the rose, it was just a block and she carved it and made it beautiful. When she started the little one, it was just a T shape, yet now she has carved a little man on the front of the T. I know she will finish it very beautiful for you.

OK, that's it!

See you NOT soon, Isellandria!

Ha Ha Ha!

Love,

Ann

*Title: "On the planet's surface, a great crystal tower"*

###### 88th Post / Date 06-19-2016 at 22:00 EDT

The remnant ember of a dying star

drifts along the galactic fringe,

companioned solely

by a tiny world.

On the planet's surface, a great crystal tower

lords over a vast and airless plain.

The cooling star's blue light

draws the tower's shadow across the land

and marks the passing of the ages.

Through the core of the tower

runs an artery of living flesh.

Branching paths of blood

are refracted within facets.

At the base of the spire

there is no door, no entryway

but at the top

a fleshy orifice

Once or twice an age

for purpose unknown

the tower's mouth expels a living human,

to fall down and down

through the airless space,

and land atop a scree

of other people.

A traveler passing on foot would be forgiven for wondering why so many other travelers

had approached the tower and flung themselves down at its base

to die.

Perhaps it was in prayer.

Or perhaps they were searching

for an entryway

for a door

which doesn't exist.

*Title: "CHODE OR CHOAD??? LETS SETTLE THE DEBATE"*

###### 89th Post / Date 06-26-2016

Posted. na na na FUCK REDDIT

I have decided to move out of the sober house. People usually stay here a couple months. I've stayed here over six months. Honestly, I'm finding it hard to live in the same house with Shawn. He's never been easy to live with, and lately we've been getting in arguments about little shit like chores. On top of that, I'm freaked out by his story about the room full of bone. I've come up with a few theories about why he would tell me that story -- and why he would insist it was real. None of these theories are terribly comforting.

I want to put it behind me. For a while, I had actually considered finding the warehouse that he mentioned. Maybe it would give me some answers. But I've decided: fuck that. I'm not going to some goddamn warehouse in crack city. I don't need an ending to my story that badly. I'll just do what I've been doing: make shit up.

Actually, I've been stuck for the past few days. I can't really come up with anything that seems fitting as an ending. I've been considering just leaving it unfinished. Maybe not all stories should have ending. Endings are lies.

I've realized that AA meetings are just a form of storytelling. That's what we do in meetings. We sit in a circle and tell each other stories. Oh, we pretend like it's all real life. But every time somebody shares, they make an attempt to "storify" their life, to make it into some tidy little parable. Sometimes the parables are profound and touching, and sometimes they're absurd or clichéd or just terrible.

A guy in meeting might tell a story about how he got into an argument with his boss, and he might end it with something like, "... and that's how I learned I need to stand up for himself." Except maybe arguing with his boss was a terrible idea. Maybe he's trying to portray stupidity as wisdom. Or maybe it really was wisdom. Either way, he's packaging the truth up as a story with a lesson at the end. And this covers up one of the essential facts of life: that it just keeps going along, not giving a shit about our attempts to explain it.

There are these moments in life when the goal is achieved and the story should end and the credits should roll. But instead, it just keeps going the fuck along. The guy gets the girl, and now they have to live with each other. She farts a lot, and he hogs the shower. Or the underdog teams wins the tournament, and now they have to get ready for the next season. 10 seasons later, they're all retired, sitting around and scratching their balls.

That's the first big problem the recovering alcoholic encounters. We make the inspiring and courageous decision to walk away from our whole way of life to try something new. The story could end there. But it doesn't. Instead, life stretches on, and we have to live day after day with the grinding boredom of sobriety.

So maybe the interface story should be like that. No tidy ending. Just "Here. Take or leave it." Except that's lame. That's a rip off. I'll just wait. Some kind of ending will come to me. But I'm not going to that warehouse, though. Fuck no. I'm not asking Shawn any more about it either. If I have to make up a shitty ending, that's fine. A lot of good books have shitty endings. At this point, I'm just a little burned out.

After I'm done, I'm going to put aside writing and work on my social life for a while. I'm going to try to change my number of friends from zero to a positive integer. I thought maybe I could find a group of friends in recovery, but it hasn't happened. I don't like recovery people. They're corny and boring. I've found a room to rent near downtown in an arty neighborhood. As a soon-to-be acclaimed writer (ha!), don't I belong among the thinkers and the artistes?

[*The end to this chapter doesn't feel believable. After everything that this character has said previously, how could he come to this decision so lightly? Sure, he's a self-deceiving alcoholic. Sure, people make crazy decisions on a whim all the time. This might be* realistic, *but it is not* believable. *A novel must have more logic than real life. The events in a novel must operate by a chain of cause and effect that the reader can follow. If you're going to have somebody completely contradict their previously expressed viewpoints, it has to be the result of some event happening in their life which causes them to change. The bigger the change in the character, the bigger the event must be. Before you post this, I would rewrite it, playing up the conflict with Shawn. Make it into a full-blown fight that forces the narrator to move out. Then have the narrator living alone, going to stir-crazy, which leads him to make the fateful choice.* -- K.]

I'm going to get in touch with some old friends, and I'm going to go out and meet people. I'll just try to get a small circle of friends started. I know how to meet friends. I've always known how. It's easy. I'm going to drink again.

*Title: "A Mother's Son"*

###### 90th Post / Date 06-27-2016

One time, my mom took me to a clothes store. She was wearing a blue dress and I was following her around. But then I looked up and it wasn't her. It was some other lady wearing a blue dress I had followed by mistake. I was scared so I ran away from the lady but then I couldn't find mom. A lady from the store found me crying and took me back to her. I was mad at her because I thought she switched into that lady on purpose to trick me. I was too little to know that's not possible.

Is it?

I wake up by myself and go downstairs for toast and jam but the kitchen is totally empty. I call "Mom! Mom!" but she doesn't answer. I can't find anybody. In the TV room there is a stranger sitting in the big chair. Uh-oh. I can only see the back of her head. Gray hair. I sneak away to my room.

Upstairs I check mom and dad's room and my sisters' room but they're all empty. Where did they all go? It's not fair that they all left without me. Anna and Brittany always go places and do things without me. But mom wouldn't do that. She likes to take me everywhere. We are best friends. So what happened? Maybe they said they were going somewhere and I didn't listen. Mom always tells me to listen better. Why don't I?

Wait a minute! Today is Sunday. Usually we go to church on Sunday. Mom and dad go to the grownup church and I go to Sunday school. They must be at church. Last week I told mom that I never ever want to go to church again. Hey! Maybe mom decided to leave me at home just like I told her to. This is great! No stupid Sunday school! All the play-time I want!

I run over to where my toys are piled up in the corner and get all the ones I want. I've been playing this great game with my trucks and cars called police vs. firemen. The policemen use their guns and the firemen use their hoses and they even have hoses that shoot fire.

I play for a long time and it's great but I'm getting more hungry. When will everybody be back? How long is church? It feels like forever when I'm there. It's so boring and the kids aren't nice to me. I remember that last week I cried in the car on the way over because I didn't want to go. Mom was mad. I was really crying like a baby and it was embarrassing.

I always cry too much. Anna and Brittany make fun of me for it because I cry more than them but they are girls. I try not to but I do it anyways.

I wonder about the stranger downstairs. It looked like an old gray-haired lady but I only saw her back. Is she a baby sitter? I decide to go downstairs and get some crackers from the pantry. Mom keeps some on a shelf for me. I go get the crackers and eat them until I'm full.

On my way back I pass by the TV room. That old lady is still sitting there. Her long gray hair is hanging down over the back of the chair. It's got leaves and little sticks stuck in it. This makes me want to giggle a little bit. What a messy lady! But then I start to get scared thinking about it. I sneak back upstairs.

Now it's sunset time and I'm hungry again and I'm a lot more scared. Mom and dad and everybody are still gone. What if they don't come back? What if mom was really mad at me for crying last time and now this is punishment?

Oh no. What if God is mad at me for not going? We're supposed to go to Sunday school to make God happy and I didn't go. I was really bad. What if this is a big punishment? God can make people disappear forever.

I get down on my knees and press my hands very tight together and whisper, "I'm sorry God for not going to Sunday school. I will go every time forever until I am dead. I am sorry. I am sorry. Please bring mom and dad and Anna and Brittany back. Thank you God. Amen."

I get up and run over to my window. I can see the front lawn and the street. It's all empty. I wait for dad's car to come down the street. Now they'll all come back... But nobody comes.

Downstairs, I hear noises. Like a dog growling but so loud. And something banging on the ceiling.

I go into my closet. I cry too much. I always cry too much.

Mother Horse Eyes Finale