2026 Novel Compiled

Rule for this document. We maintain close connection between this compilation and the hooks back to the chapters.

Chapter Reality

“Für uns gläubige Physiker hat die Scheidung zwischen Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft nur die Bedeutung einer wenn auch hartnäckigen Illusion” Albert Einstein “For us believing physicists, the separation between past, present and future has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” Albert Einstein

Chapter Not Intended

The story that may or may not be about to flow into your experience is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice, including but not limited to medical, relationship, mental health, sexual, or parenting advice. This story is offered and intended to set you free, for at least 5-10 minutes, eventually, maybe next week, likely when you least expect it. What you do with this freedom is your own damn business.

Thank you.

The author, director, cast and crew

Chapter Leviathan

High, high up in the bright bitchin' blue of the upper atmosphere, between the cold hard vacuum far, far above and a ridiculously puffy cloudscape far, far below, the silvery leviathan shimmers in searing, brilliant light.

A mammoth air transport, reflective skin smeared by the glare of distant fusion and sizzling sky, abides. With a central hump tapering towards the front and back, the geometry of the transport implies growth rather than construction. Out of the hump, cables arc up and away, the tapered tips inscribing dangling parabolas. Along the midriff, motive pods sprout fantastic tangled flowers, slowly rotating, efficient and silent. In stark contradiction to the ship's sparkling curves and flourishes, a beige, stair stepped object, big and bomb-like, is suspended below.

After a brief gush of shortwave static,a whooping tone rises rapidly and fades. A radio transmission, distorted by atmospherics and infused with electromagnetic clutter from the birth of the universe. Despite the roaring echos of cosmic dawn, a more recent signal prevails. Labored breathing mimics the whistle and keen of high wind. A metallic clacking and whirring suggests machines. The warbling of song, while a voice croons "There's a future for two, me and you", in a vaguely eastern euro accent, hints at love and, perhaps, intelligence.

The airship's flowers turn languidly and the clouds unroll. The ship, sky and sun merge into a static vignette of inexorable light. Hours pass.

Abruptly, once again the airwaves burst open, and bobbing above the crash and jangle, more music. "all tomorrows we'll share cause we're already there, the future, our future for two."

The bomb thing disconnects and noses down. Unburdened, the leviathan pops up. Flashing distorted and trippy reflections, the ship performs a majestic uturn, heading back from whence ever it came.

 

The bomb-like object accelerates at 32 feet per second per second, though in the bright, empty air, no motion is discernible. The size is now also indeterminate, only by comparison to the massive leviathan was the bomb very, very big.

Starting at the tip, a band of black wraps around the bomb and slides back over the fins. The bomb is now translucent, then all at once disassembles into a spinning cloud of discrete cubes. The cubes swarm as they fall and tumble into a new shape, a massive bird-like origami. Snagging and integrating the last of the falling cubes, the bird glides down and away, stiffly tilting from side to side. Dropping and diminishing, becoming almost insubstantial against the brilliance below, the bird finally snuggles under the froth of creamy clouds and is gone.

The kitchy song abruptly ends.

Under the layer of clouds, the sky seems merely a mundane overcast, obscuring the stark shine of the local star and blazing blue. Out of that overcast, a jagged dot emerges, darkish against the backlight, then pale. A vaguely pixelated bird shape, growing in size but still so high, so far.

A band of black sweeps from head to tail and the bird becomes a blur, a former bird. The shape expands and fades, dissolving into a slow motion explosion of cubes. The cubes dance in kaleidoscopic patterns, seeming to tug together and skitter apart, eventually coalescing into blocky spherical spores that drift in every direction. A few spores drift and drop closer to the ground. One conglomeration grows huge as it approaches a meadow. When almost directly overhead, a black band transits the sphere and it blows apart into individual cubes. With dazzling choregraphy the cubes reconfigure into a jagged dome connected to a blocky tear drop by strings of contiguous cubes. The chunky, upside down bowl descends, obscuring the meadow below in deep shadow. The tear drop is tugged up tighter and the bowl widens out, becomes shallow. The descent slows, almost stops. The entire structure hangs over the meadow, blotting out the sky.

A grid of light bursts upon the grass and wild flowers, accompanied by a feint electronic pop and sizzle. All at once, each cube is pushing back from it's neighbors in a frenzy of separation. The cubes spin, scatter, fall to the ground and are still.

The top of each cube has flaps sealed with a single strip of clear packing tape. Uniformly distributed across a half mile of meadow are several thousand beige delivery boxes.

The blades of grass not bent under boxes sway gently in a light breeze, in contrast to the static edges and corners, drab and unremarkable.

The sides of every box erupt into slashes and blobs of black on beige. Each box now displays a bold label. One one side, English text with universal icons, and on the adjacent side Hanzi characters and identical icons. After about 15 seconds, the labels are replaced by advertisements for products, services and ideas. The labels never vary, but the ads constantly change, both in content and duration. As timings diverge, the entire meadow eventually becomes a flickering duochrome cacophony.

The flashing labels describe a crazy variety, from the mundane to the perhaps improbable, in any reality. A box purporting to contain a Solar Dehydrator is adjacent to a box that reads Megalith Kit, complete with a Stonehenge inspired graphic. Enigmatic labels like "Spiritual Resonator", "Non Lethal Immobilizer", and "Synthetic Companion" flicker cheek by jowl with the pragmatic "Water Purifier" and "Packable Shelter".

On one box, an ad for fetal growth medium containing patented "Magrovated Feldspar", and on another "Proslots 100", oscillates against a raunchy female silhouette. "Tiny Teeks Underchargers" is rendered in a cliche variant of Helvetica Uber Bold. Every icon and animation displays in black, with occasional grays simulated by dithering or halftone patterns.

As the clumpy overcast thins into swirls and wisps, color and detail begin to bloom over the land. The meadow is bounded by a distant stripe of emerald forest. Beyond the green, two blues mark the edge of the world. A tight band of nearly purple trypan and a broad swath of azure are water stretching to the horizon and wide open sky.

No birds chirp.

Chapter Prologue

Blackness. No moon, no stars. From orbit, no glowing electric webs across the night side, dense where technocracy thrummed or stretched thin towards the wilds. On the ground, no glow of distant cities on the horizon, no orange fuzz of sodium street lamps lit. A black without texture, a yawning abyss of black, empty, but not forever. This is the primordial black of the bubbling nothing from which all creation eventually blooms.

Sound. A high pitch whir of thin tires on crumbling pavement, squeaky pedals turning a chain, gears shifting and the rhythmic huffing of human exertion. A few notes of a whistled tune, futures and romance.

Shattering the black, a flash of electronic phosphorescence, blurry as if burning. Up and to the left, a tiny green horizontal line, an underscore, blinks. On, off. On, off. On...

The sounds of exertion and clacking continue. Meanwhile, in the seclusion of encrypted thought, a monologue spools out, exposition, a man is talking to himself. Perfectly articulated speech sans breathing or stutter, words made of electricity and neurotransmitters only.

"I'm amused, still. I feel my face making that slight smirk, every time. In the evolution of late 20th century cinema, a ghostly green blinking underscore on a black background was synonymous with computation. The cursor, as it was then known, comprised the entire interface for the very first cathode ray tube equipped computers. A precise flickering trifle, expectant and enigmatic. What do you want? How can I help you? Long after computer interfaces added menus and icons, and before they colonized refrigerators, brains and finally every cloud and rock, the cursor was at first a cliche, then later an homage."

The clank and sputter of changing gears, and the sound of breathing gets heavier.

"Replies to a cursor's query had to be phrased in an esoteric language known only to an elite few, the nerd class, geeks. The geeks shall inherit the earth, the bible almost said. They and their issue morphed into a legion of legendary billionaires who tinkered with culture and the life support system of the Earth, striving to improve. What do I want? How can you help me? As if the entire planet was a blinking cursor, an insistent, myopic introspection."

For Uncle Joe, the cursor was certainly redolent of this history, how could it not be? He had respawned in the late 20 century, post the exhilarating ubiquity of integrated circuits. That was all lived experience he had both reveled in and been somewhat chafed by.

This cursor, his cursor was a deliberate retelling of that story, an upgraded personal mythology. For Joe, this cursor revivified a callow but potent enthusiasm from back in the day, when the world was new and computer appliances too. In this era of rogue cognition, the cursor was also a stark reminder to keep the initiative on the side of the interface that huffs, puffs and pushes pedals.

Joe, rider of bikes, reprisor of computational antiquity, now transmutes mere respiration into vocalization, in a thick and slightly affected eastern euro version of English. His words are displayed to the right of the cursor and in the same phosphor green, with an almost imperceptible delay.

"Extemporize"

The word appears in green, and is followed by "< com ack"

(beep)

"Strangely satisfying denoument on the theme of rapacious capitalism"

(beep)

The words scroll down and the words "Smart Money" are displayed after the cursor. A rough thumbnail renders, the rendering iterates several times to a full color still image, flows into motion, and a movie plays.

A wild meadow, verdant, bucolic, untrammeled. Striking primal Trilliums, each with just three fleshy white or pale pink petals, stand motionless in the whispering grass. The flowers become more prominent, then one Trillium dominates, towering out of the soil in macroscopic radiance. A fuzzy face is hiding behind the edge of one petal. The face is printed, an engraving of a hero from ancient American mythology. Andrew Jackson, genocidal OG and central bank killer, the ironic avatar of the twenty dollar federal reserve note. A crowd of Jacksons are peaking out of the duff below the grass and flowers, stacks of twenty dollar bills are woven into the tangle of flora. Was there a ATM explosion long ago, or did a stick-up artist bleed out nearby?

Semi translucent slugs explore the bills, perhaps pondering strategies for disassembly, a way to melt these artifacts back into usable components for flowers and grass.

Andrew Jackson blinks and shifts his gaze to a passing slug. He watches the slugs slow, gooey progress, and then returns to his default stoic stare.

These twenty dollar bills will not soon melt into the soil, for they were the final generation of the last empire's legal tender, constructed of nearly indestructible synthetic polymers that could not be decompiled without a cryptographic command from an authorized treasury functionary. Most crucially, these bills were imbued with micro sentience and could advise each citizen on how to optimize their financial self interest. Now, lost in the alien economy of a living ecosystem, these bills have no one to advise and are unable to die. Perhaps, they will be once more valued by people and able to joyfully execute their prime directive. Until then, they wait, perhaps forever.

The vignette ends and black returns. Afterimages fade, beat. The blinking underscore flashes back.

"Again, a little less creepy"

(beep)

"WALL STREET UNDER WATER" is displayed after the cursor

A new thumbnail renders, iterates and begins to play.

A beach of red bricks. Slightly murky water washes over the bricks in gentle waves, sunlight sparkling on the crests. Undulating strings of light play over a submerged tumble of kiln fired edges and corners. In the shallows, a snapped steel pole is nestled among the bricks, and topped by a green street sign with reflective, silver text, "WALL STREET". The lapping water and swirling patterns of light are soothing, the entire scene is a hypnotic and deeply satisfying version of eternity.

Black again, pause and the underscore blinks.

"Better."

"Antwerp."

The words are displayed, but "Antwerp" is moved to a new line and followed by "< com ack"

(beep)

The black dissolves into blurred pavement unrolling under a swerving bicycle tire.

From the end of a gray pin striped suit sleeve, a hand pulls off the bike's handle bars, digs in jacket pocket and produces the iStone. The textured black rock blooms a window, there's depth in there, a data volume. Menus cascade, and an ebullient British female voice pipes up.

"Hey Joe, EXTEMPORIZE is PROPAGATING to the global DEPLOYMENT."

"Thanks. ETA for cinematic hidey hole?"

"8 minutes, you're on the path of least resistance"

"Then perhaps another koan or two."

Chapter Boxes

[polish and clarify between prompt world and live action]

One box is nestled in the meadow. A puff of wind starts a subtle scritch scratching of green blades against the flickering display. Thousands of boxes are scattered among the verdant, wild grasses and fescue, an almost pastoral analog if not for the black bedlam of graphic jabber. The sun transits the blue vault above the meadow of cubes, the shadows stretch and the day goes by.

The meadow and boxes bask in late afternoon sun, and the jangle of box displays is mellowed by an overlay of gold.

A hiss and metalic rattle far off, getting louder. A bicycle and rider are approaching.

English and Chinese characters appear on the box "DEHYDRATED RATIONS" and a graphic of a sushi roll with raindrops above. The text and graphics persist, then blink off and on several times, as if signalling. The sides of the cube go blank and an animated ad for a fast food franchise with canabalistic overtones is displayed.

A different box displays "SOCIAL GAMES" with graphics of cards and dice. After cycling the label, an animation promoting "Designer Dave's Liver Detox Drank" garishly beckons.

The whir and clank of a bicycle sounds gets louder. The bicycle and rider are seen at a distance, he stands and pumps the pedals through what must be rather rugged terrain.

The ground jerks by as the front bicycle tire swings awkwardly left and right through clumps of grass. Gray trouser legs come up and down on bike pedals.

"Extemporize", says Joe.

The boxes nearest Joe go blank, and the blankness spreads across the field.

Blackness, and again the glowing green underscore blinks.

"Exposition on boxes as Christian children's show, less gloopy than Davey and Goliath."

The phosphorescent words spool out on the black.

Joe passes the meadow in slow motion, the boxes nearest to him display black dots, one, two, three in a row, which then wink out. This pattern rapidly spreads across the meadow.

Black. A new image begins to render.

Over the entire meadow, the blinking dots are synced on every box. The boxes are linked together for hyper cognition, processing requires but a few hundred pico seconds. The dots appear in box time, below human perception, so Joe and his bike are barely moving. The dots vanish, labels and adverts reappear. Joe's speed returns to normal.

Blackness and image rendering is complete. A movie plays.

Title 'Father'

Narration by Orson Wells.

Rapid edit of still images depicting various cataclysms. Happy cartoon robots packing lunch boxes, airships in the sky and boxes floating down in great swarms.

"A smorgasbord of apocalyptic events threatened the very existence of humanity. Manufactured and deployed by a genius benefactor in secret underground autofax and delivered by robotic airships, relief boxes provide the essential components to help plucky survivors reboot civilization. Hope is here."

Beat.

Title "Son"

In the foreground, new boxes displaying three bold dots, one... two... three... seem ubiquitous and vaguely threatening. In the background, iconic natural formations and monumnents including Devil's Tower and Niagra Falls, Tulsi Gabbard on Mount Rushmore and the Empire State building. Lena breaking branches, boxes with unwinking eyes and ears or microphones sprouting forth, Clique dolls and snow globe apocalypses, symbolizing the idea that it's a toy universe that the Clique play with.

"Unknownst to the squabbling mortals grubbing amongst the shattered ruins of their so called civilization, the salvation of relief box bounty is in actuality a devolved consumer culture honey pot, the boxes are a ubiquitous surveillance and control network deployed by a spiritual elite, the Clique, who are accelerating the evolution of human beings by intensified contrast."

Beat.

Title "Holy Ghost"

Joe as caped super hero, staggering around, dancing at a club (drunk) with a bottle labeled "power", Make America Gay Again, Game Again, Germane Again.

"Unbeknownst to the Clique, a trickster renegade agent, Uncle Joe, has surreptitiously subverted the box network in support of his own cockamamie scheme, DOG, or Daughters of God, a project which he has so obsessively obfuscated and occluded from his fellow Clique that the objectives are probably not even clear to him."

Joe has passed the boxes and is riding away away. Consumeristic chaff ripples and capers in his wake.

Pedaling vigorously, breathing and grunting with effort, Joe responds with one word. "Cute."

Chapter Guy on Bike

Here is the opening line of the first paragraph. This is the first word spoken. The next story starts.

Prequel: Star stuff, gaseous consolidation, magma cooling, primordial goop. An ocean was here, then a mile high glacier. Eventually, the ocean evaporated and the glacier melted.

All that ancient transience is now echoed in dunes of quartz sand languidly flowing against an again overcast sky. Clusters of trees and grass cannot completely arrest the breezy skittering of a gazillion polished specks, up and over the crests and then bouncing down the leeward slopes. This latest story is fluid and migratory, as always. Stories must move.

A distant bicyclist reprises the sine wave of marching dunes, gradually climbing up, swooping down and then up again. His authentic 20 century business suit flaps comically with the pumping of his legs and the breeze of transit.

His head is down. He gazes into bike spokes smearing transparent, and the terrain changes. Ridiculously thin tires roll first over cracked pavement swept by sand, then bare earth, cracked concrete and grassy footpaths. The wheels spin, the now spools out like gray spider silk and drifts away.

A speckled blur of faded tarmac oozes by as his charcoal gray pin stripe pants churn the pedals. The tails of his suit coat snap softly in his peripheral vision. He savors the thrill of not looking ahead, of not watching where he is going. Just the ever flowing below, the stretch and contraction of wool sheathed thighs, and scuffed boots going round and round.

There isn't much ahead that could get in his way. This highway had been disregarded as it led neither to or away from anything significant, just another luxurious ribbon of forgotten tar criss crossing a gorgeous land, partitioning forest and bridging streams. There wouldn't be abandoned cars or trucks to avoid, maybe just a white tail deer or a clutch of turkeys ambling away from his whirring, clacking transit. The surface of the road is cracked and getting brittle, but otherwise still serviceable for the broad kevlar tires of his black custom Cannondale gravel bike. He could stare down and loose himself in the easy unraveling, the future was definitely handled.

"Joe, you're approaching the safe limit for synthetic improvisation on prior stream of clear thought, regarding recipes for vegan buckwheat pancakes. Fresh cognitive feedstock is recommended."

"Standby for wool gathering type chaff. Improvise and broadcast on open channels. Encrypted cognition to follow, also document for Daughters Archive."

"Ready for feedstock."

"I love field work, the wilds, the mysterious ruins, the people," he thought. "I love life and the whole dang world, truth be told. The compulsive planners could stay cloistered, haunt the so called control centers and play at being cosmic bureaucrats. I'd rather be under the sun and stars, alive, present."

"Improvising, reiterating and leaking."

The surveillance frequencies were now reverberating with variants of this obscurant chatter. Joe slips into a private sector of his mind and with an imaginary finger, presses record.

"encrypted cognition, documenting for DOG archive"

"Talking to myself now. I am the agent errant, for decades running my own private exploit, DOG. From the perspective of my worthy peers, DOG is a wizardly but inconsequential plan B, an eccentric dabbling, a hobby. And why not? Every Clique had a side project or two, whether research or art. Sleepless, stewards of creation, eternal - what could be denied to us? My enthusiasm for the great work is authentic and reliable as evidenced by my willingness to leave the glittering enclaves of my Clique brothers and sisters and get my hands dirty in the field, solo. I am their gifted engineer, mechanic, a zealot! 'We could use more like Uncle Joe,' they opine to each other, 'men of action.' For them, my zeal for the field is slightly gauche, jest worthy. The theory kids are generally contemptuous of mere instrumentality. Design is their thing, implementation an after thought. This gross exposition I offer for an imagined posterity, dear reader, dear leader, dear Clique who are with a little luck soon to respawn. You're welcome."

Glancing up, Joe notices the highway banking to the east slightly and leans the bike into a sweeping arc. Bringing his gaze back down, he exits all thought modes and plays his pothole surfing game. At speed, gaps in the pavement come into view in just a fraction of a second. Avoiding a jarring edge impact requires optimal swerves, possible only through virtuosic amygdala activation. He feels a tug of thought and allows his attention to bloom a bit. Alternately, he could yank up on the handlebars to hop over the micro chasms, but he feels this is a less than elegant solution. "Rapid and non volitional weaving is more my aesthetic," he muses. "The weave, like good old Trumpy."

A cloud parts, flooding the brim of his felt fedora with sunshine. Maple branches sway significantly. Joe recognizes that the opportunity to adjust the mileau is upon him. He shifts back into encrypted cognition and palms his iStone. Summoning an icon he thumbs a confirmation.

"Teach the future. Local regression is likely. Continue?"

Joe's finger brushes the icon again, clears his throat and starts to speak.

"Unevent identified, you're now live."

If you could tell yourself something

from this back to then

would you whisper be gentler

or for god sake more sin?

By the side of the highway artifacts appear and slide by in jerky animation. Skulls poking out of sexy negliges, VHS porn movies, Playboy magazines from the 60s, stone fertility figurines [Venus of Willendorf] and finally... flowers. Voices of children echo in repetition, at first immediately following what Joe says, then chiming in with him in sync.

if you could rewrite your present

by visiting your past

would you try to be gentler

or kick some more ass?

More artifacts pass by. Battle rifles, hand made bows, then stone axes. A chorus of voices, more joining in.

why mourn that lost lover

heart broken and how?

when another you’s smiling

near here, almost now

The voices are fully in sync, strong and yet tinged with the ambiance of a radio transmission, as if they coming from far away, bouncing off the night sky and colored by the chill light of stars.

Chapter Open Season

Blackness. Massive machines thrum through miles of granite, a distant bass drum booms a steady, slow rhythm. Strings of light swirl into a spiral galaxy, tinted phosphorescent green. The galaxy recedes up and to the left, shrinking down to a thin horizontal line. The line blinks, and is now an underscore, a cursor.

"here's one... when an unbegun girl is given the Practice as a pastoral allegory eg Watership Down...but not rabbits"

beep

In a forest glade, dappled with sunlight, a young doe dips her head to munch a tuft of sweet grass. With a swish and a thunk, an arrow lodges in a tree just above her head. The arrow is handmade, with crow feather fletching and an obsidian point. Startled, she raises her head, and looking back behind her, finds the arrow's origin. Her gaze seems to focus, and twin red laser beams flash out from her eyes. There's a horrible scream as the beams find their mark, followed by a heavy thud of a body hitting the earth. The sweet doe blinks and the beams flicker off. She returns to grazing.

"hey, that's great!"

beep

The underscore becomes a blinking ":)"

Chapter Hidey-Hole

An abandoned super highway ends at the base of an ancient mountain. Broken pavement is clotted with military vehicles and equipment. Several American Abrams tanks bristle with cannon, heavy caliber machine guns and more mysterious weaponry. Troop transports and shipping containers are jammed together haphazardly.

Animated advertisements and vague propaganda slogans blaze across every manufactured surface. "God Bless this Mess" and "My Empire Right or Wrong" flashes alternately on one tank, "REMAIN CALM" scrolls across another, followed by an incongruous "PLEASE..." From the side of a shipping container, a grim Uncle Sam seems to quip, "UR BOYS, MY TOYS." Further away, an advertisement for synthetic pork contrasts with the more military themed messages. Skeletons in sagging camo uniforms are draped over vehicles and sprawled in awkward tangles. Aside from the insistent mediatronic animations, there is no motion save the clouds overhead and the lazy back and forth of a flexible aerial swaying in the breeze.

Some of the vehicles are damaged and scorched. Their arrangement is more like a concentric scattering than a purposeful deployment, as if all the machines were tumbled back by an intense force radiating outward from the mountain. Where the highway meets the rock face, massive vault doors have been blown partially from their mounts, exposing twisted hydraulics and the yawning blackness of a tunnel entrance. Ten meters above the tunnel, several .50 caliber emplacements are just visible in the shadowy slot of a concrete embrasure.

The scene is so cluttered with death and the promise of death that it almost seems a little over the top, as if someone with a sizable cinema budget got a little carried away. The entire milieu has a haunted or cursed castle feel, as if events too terrible to imagine hang in the air, and unspeakable horrors lie in the shadows, napping.

The tunnel dives down into the roots of the mountain, opening out into a vast underground complex. In a dim, cavernous chamber, Joe stands gazing into his iStone, jostling the interface, pulling up menus and submenus. Above and around him, huge suspended screens mirror the iStones display.

The render toggle is set to draft or transmit scaffold / full bloom, which keeps the images in monochrome.

• Daughter of God > team > current trans > Uncle Eiji and Uncle Phil

"Your penis is small" etc. [recover and document all dialogue]

• Daughter of God > Daughters > Athena, Lila, Christina >

• Christina > Big Boat Perimeter, mess, head, engine room, Gerry's cabin, Christina's cabin, other

• Christina's cabin > door, bunk, desk, floor, port window

Surveillance footage of Christina seated, dressed in a sparkle dress staring vacantly into space and popping bubble wrap. She is humming distractedly. The iStone interface closed captioning displays "plastic bubbles breaking, low singing..." After a moment or two, the interface identifies the tune.

"The song is 'Veronique', a Cathar song commemorating the life of Veronica who mopped Jesus's face during the crucifixion with her shawl. Veronica's shawl became a relic rumored to have potent healing powers and capable of temporal distortions. Supposedly passed from Templar Knights to Cathar allies, and then lost during Albisinian Cruscades, battle of..."

'Joe toggles a new display.

• Gerry's cabin > bed, desk, door, head

A stubble faced man in a thick overcoat is asleep on a bed. He wakes with a start and then drifts back to sleep.

"Almost like he felt me tuning in! What potential this one had. Results of selection process confirmed"

Joe puts the iStone in this pocket.

Entering the cavernous garage where he had left his jet black Cannondale custom gravel bike, Joe finds that a scuffed and rusty red Miiata road racer has taken it's place. This form had regressed slightly. The temporal sheath had not completely protected the bike from the side effects of bumping over to another nearby now.

"Residual propogation of waveform collapse. I see these ridiculously narrow tires are kevlar reinforced, that's nice. Post apocalyptic biking is hell on inner tubes. I propose a delay in propagation of this new variant. Down here in the garage, away from me, the shealth was thinner. Perhaps."

Joe swings a leg over the bike and finds the fit acceptable. The seat has a decent prostate cut out, another bit of luck. He scuffles his feet and maneuvers the bike over to the launch projector.

"Countdown from 3, 2, 1..."

From deep underground Joe accelerates upwards, blurry markers to the approaching surface flicker by like glowing graffiti. A bright light up ahead getting closer, closer until the daylight explodes with simultaneous thunder claps.

In the defenders slot three stories above the tunnel entrance, sand bags surround the tripod of a rust speckled .50 caliber machine gun, it's vented barrel skewed crazily toward the sky. A coffee mug sporting a Soma FM logo is perched atop the sandbags, miraculously intact despite the constellation of bullet holes in and around the sandbags. On the chaos strewn highway below, a bicycle emerges into the sun, the rider expertly swerving through the obstacles as if on rails. He runs over the humerus of one skeleton, wrenching it from the shoulder socket with an audible snap, and continues riding, turning just in time to avoid a gout of flame from a nearby crater. The jingle of pumping pedals and spinning chain fades as Joe weaves out of sight.

A faint breeze whispers across the scene, rustling a tattered flag. The returning ambient rhythms are suddenly interrupted by the zany whirring of an electric motor accompanied by a gentle scraping sound, as a thin cable reels the dislocated humerus back into it's shoulder socket.

Chapter Prompt Big Boat

A disembodied iStone prompt glows against the dark of closed eyelids. (blinking green retro cursor) Spoken in Joe's voice, perhaps Hungarian? slight lag while converted to english subtitles

"Compose prior 2 hours of surveillance on big boat as intro to golden age American television sitcom with catchy theme song'"

[Surveillance can be fun!]

A unholy union of brass gong and clarinet play the first seven notes of an authentic simulated theme song, followed by a couple of harmonica snorts and then a bed of frenetic Cajun percussion. Titles for the show, "Theme Park Earth productions, Big Boat. Starring Christina Mintwarb, Gerry Unfugger, Joe Skykorski. Also starring Eiji Satoshi and Phil Funbrain."

A crooner kicks in, enunciating the lyrics with anal clarity.

"The global catastrophe came and went

when all the blessed were taken in the rapture event

I guess that proves that praying to Jesus

Was time well spent, ommmmmm"

Gerry ducks his head, vigorously massaging his scalp through a sherpa hat. His stubble is thick and he might have slept in his thick wool overcoat. He looks up and gazes into the distance, searching. There she is, that girl bouncing along to the Cajun beat, coming closer. She made it back, after a night of who knows what harrowing adventure in the haunted city.

"Well for the rest of us sinners the earth is all ours

but the phones aren't ringing

and there's no gas in the cars

TVs are black and the governments gone

but at least we ain't got all those preachers

carrying on

and you can still get your hair cut

at the local powered salon"

She's following a path of brass bullet shells of many calibers, gleaming yellow in the early sunlight. She follows the path of brass to a big boat, moored on a concrete wharf. The sherpa man is on that boat, high up among a forest of antennas and cables, hiding but watchful.

"Well the water's much cleaner

and the amphibians are back

jetskis are finished

and folks are less fat

people are trading their turnips and beats

for herbal healing

or a bottle of mead

and we still play music

at the end of the week"

The big boat is festooned with laundry lines, razor wire, and hand lettered signs posted with dire warnings about plague and worse. She climbs the gangplank and clomps across the main deck of the ship, swinging a creaking hatch open and then closed. She is moving down a lurid steel corridor, passing racks of unlikely weapons, cabin doors, stacks of boxes and still more boxes, then climbing stairs to a door that she unlocks and opens, passes through and shuts.

"Well it looks like

another fucked up day

in paradise."

The music does a dissonant deacceleration and ends.

Appropriate credits and copyrights. Dizzyloo production, roman numerals, logo

Chapter Mushrooms

Gerry crosses the weather deck and winds his way down the stairs to the main deck and his cabin, ready to resume the mediatronic hackathon. He muses about Christina along the way. Thinking of her seems to heighten his intuition, somehow.

He heard she likes to collect gaudy and highly impractical clothing in town, along with more pragmatic tradeables like canned food and ammo. Her preference for night scavenging was a bit shocking at first, but she had told other crew members she came from the stars, and was most effective under them. That explanation seemed to satisfy.

Christina had taken up residence on the big boat only a few weeks ago, and Gerry has been creeping on her for the past two. He doesn't quite know what he sees in her, not exactly his type physically and they have never even spoken.

As the Big Boat's acting engineer, Gerry had been consulted by the other officers about Christina's joining the crew. He had been too busy with his research to participate in her onboarding interview via packet shortwave, but her social profile seemed solid. The general consensus was mild enthusiasm. She demonstrated unique survival strategies. Supposedly she had grown up around Jedis from the 3rd Earth Battalion, the rumored 21 century reboot of sparkly eyed psychic soldiers from the 1980s. Gerry had long ago perused 3EB.us, the Battalion's trippy recruitment presence on the internets. Were the grainy battle videos authentic, had the whistleblowers been on the level? Or was the elaborate and convoluted history just another op? A weaponized narrative to cow the gullible into fear and/or euphoria. Then again, UFOs turned out to be a thing, so who knew?

Gerry had slept through Christina's orientation, having crashed hard after pulling a double all nighter with the boxes. Boat people mostly kept to themselves anyway, he had rationalized.

His first glimpse of her was from high up on the weather deck. He had come up in the predawn with a flickery tallow candle to jury rig a wonky relay dish cable that was queering his telemetry of Sirius B. At first light, Christina had come lolloping back to the big boat. She was wearing a skimpy costume of polished leather and drifting lace in the morning chill and Gerry had wondered where or how she secreted her booty from the evening's foray into town. Despite her pounding, clockwork stride and inscrutable expression, she appeared utterly vulnerable. Perhaps the local marauders tagged her as crazy or witchy and gave her a wide birth. Maybe she actually was.

From that day forward, Gerry only missed dawn on the weather deck if he was deep into or recovering from research.

He was weirdly compelled and attracted by her but at the same time, reluctant to approach or even meet her. Awkwardness was not really an issue for Gerry, so the singular manifestation of this crush was not only mystifying but mildly alarming. Was his intuition giving him a warning? Was she a honey pot? An agent from an enemy they didn't even know they had? Was he a willing moth to her mankiller flame? He watched, waited for clarity... and yearned.

He was also annoyed with himself. There was important work to do, and this strange attraction to the kooky woman seemed to heighten his hungers across the spectrum. He was definitely onto something with the boxes and the mycelium, he could taste it. Which species next, what tweak to the protocols? The relief boxes were certainly not what they seemed, such grandiose infrastructure just to display ads for defunct consumer products. Yeah... no.

The breakthrough had come a few or two months back. During one of his foraging hikes to the defunct electronics megaplex, he stumbled onto a cluster of relief boxes in the forest. The mediatronics on one box were displaying not ads but fractal static. The laminated hemp board surface of that box had been abraded by the swaying of a tree branch, and the exposed hemp board had absorbed rain and been colonized with mycelium. He had been trying to hack into the box communications network for half a year using mystic machines, code spells and such like with zero progress. He had never seen a mediatronic malfunction so spectacularly and remain active. Significant damage to the boxes usually resulted in total shutdown of all mediatronic activity. After some analysis in the field, Gerry brought that box back to the Big Boat. This eventually led to the discovery that the box network was modeled after the ubiquitous mycelial network, 'our global super duper computer' as coined by Psi Stamets. No wonder all Gerry's genius exploits tanked.

He had given himself a crash course in mycology, and eventually identified the fungal species that had colonized the boxes as a variant of Psilocybe cubensis, which struck him as something of a cliche. Magic mushrooms were a hallucinogen, but what did the computational paint that coated the hempboard boxes have in common with human neurology?

Did Christina fit into the box puzzle somehow? Again, he wondered whether such thoughts were useful or potentially fatal. He felt seriously out of balance and irrationally happy. Fuck it. Best to let such weird ideas simmer on the back burner and dive back into the work. That was the answer to pretty much everything. Christina was a distraction, and the answer was the deeper distraction of discovery, he could easily loose himself in that.

But first a power nap. His thick wool overcoat was thick and remarkably comfortable to sleep in. He sat on the rumpled, squeaky bunk, rolled onto his back, and clasped hands across his belly, the initial sleep posture he favored for napping.

Chapter You’re Dead

INT. CHRISTINA’S chair in her Cabin - DAY[]

Christina is sitting alone daydreaming, popping packing bubbles. Her phone rings, she answers.

CHRISTINA

Hello?

CALLER

Christina? (radio effects)

CHRISTINA

Yes?

CALLER

This is your Uncle Joe. (radio effects)

flashback

INT. child’s bedroom, about 20 years earlier[]

Young UNCLE JOE on lying bed, leaning back against headboard. Child CHRISTINA rushes in, she is holding a book.

CHIlD CHRISTINA

(in swiss german)

Ich möchte dieses Buch Onkel Joe

[I want this book Uncle!]

YOUNG UNCLE JOE

(in english)

Philip K Dick? He’s my favorite, not yours. There are no pictures! You must be practicing to be a big girl today.

CHILD CHRISTINA

(in swiss german)

Yes, I am his twin sister’s grown up ghost.

YOUNG UNCLE JOE

OK. Shall I read in english?

CHILD CHRISTINA

Ja, in Englisch

[Yes, in english]

YOUNG UNCLE JOE

Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K Dick. Prologue. In 1932 in April a small boy...

CU. of young UNCLE JOE’s lips as he reads, POV of child CHRISTINA. Audio of JOE continues. [Mouth puffs out smoke and sparks, color clouds... her flashback slipping into trip]

FADE or CUT TO:

INT. CHRISTINA’S chair in her Cabin - PRESENT

V.O. intro to “Radio Free Albemuth”, while Christina sits in reverie.

CHRISTINA

(playing along, poker face)

OK, Uncle Joe, but uh, your dead.

UNCLE JOE

(calm, the EMT voice at an accident)

Look Christi, this isn’t a joke. OK? I don’t want to scare you. I am standing at your cabin door, and I want to talk to you. I know this seems strange, but believe me, it’s important.

CHRISTINA

(a little unsteady)

Uncle Joe, or whoever... this is kind of weird, but you really do sound like Uncle Joe...

CUT TO:

VFX, CU SURVEILLANCE VIEW OF CHRISTINA’S chair, UNCLE JOE POV FROM HALL to cabin Door. Uncle joe’s audio is clear, NOT STATIC-Y

UNCLE JOE

(encouragingly)

Christi, just relax and open the door.

CUT BACK:

INT. CHRISTINA’S chair in her Cabin

CHRISTINA

OK, here I come.

CHRISTINA stands, crosses to the cabin door and starts to open it.

CHRISTINA (CONT’D)

I am opening the door.

flashback

INT. Cu on two hands clasped - one a childs, another old and wrinkled.

Uncle JOE

You closed the door? Ok, now we are alone. Christi? I’ll tell you quick then. In a few days they are going to stick me in a box and bury me with dirt. Everyone will be sad - except you.

cut to:

Mother and SMALL Daughter BACK TO CAMERA, standing by graveside, THEY TURN AND WALK TO CAMERA, DAUGHTER IS laughing.

uncle joe V.O.

You won’t be sad because you know I am the wizard of the deep caverns, king of the flying saucers. Just pretend to cry. Our best extra top secret scenario yet.

CUT to:

Int. CHRISTINA’s CABIN DOOR FROM HALL

The door cracks open. CHRISTINA peers out, with trepidation and then smiling recognition. The door opens very slowly with a great long groaning squeak.

CUT TO:

INT. Hall from CHRISTINA’s CABIN

The door opens to reveal UNCLE JOE, looking fresh and full of vigor.

CHRISTINA

(surprised and relieved)

Wow shit, um... you look great Uncle Joe! You look like you did before the cancer.

UNCLE JOE

(apologetic)

Actually Christi, I am not your Uncle Joe, my name is Melchior. I just assumed the appearance of your Uncle Joe because you two had such a solid connection. I do need to talk to you, can I come in?

Removing his hat, he puts it on her and enters the cabin.

INT. CHRISTINA’s CABIN

CHRISTINA

Yes uh, Melchior are you an angel or what?

UNCLE JOE

(slightly cynical)

Sure that’s what I am, an angel from heaven Christi and well, (seriously) there’s a little emergency - that’s why I am here.

CHRISTINA

(a little manic, it’s hitting her hard)

#0002000003420000156133C,Wow, that’s amazing - Shit! Sorry... Shit! Sorry!

UNCLE JOE

(sternly, but with compassion)

Christi, calm down. This is all happening fast I know, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t vitally important.

CHRISTINA

(managing a shuddery deep breath)

Ok, I am ok. What’s the deal?

UNCLE JOE

(sales pitch)

Well you know about Jesus right, the Son of God? He was born the usual way, his mother was Mary. Well... You are going to give birth to the Daughter of God.

CHRISTINA

Really?

UNCLE JOE

Yep.

CHRISTINA

That’s amazing. Is it because I am a lesbian?

UNCLE JOE

(indulgently)

No actually, and technically you’re bisexual, but physiology and politics...

CHRISTINA

(cutting in)

Was Mary a lesbian too?

UNCLE JOE

(exasperated trying to be reasonable)

Listen Christina, there isn't time right now, we've got to move this scenario forward!

#00020000038D0000189D387,CHRISTINA

(enthusiastic but preoccupied)

OK, so super, I am all over this. Uh, did God already, you know, already do the cosmic squirt or does that come later?

UNCLE JOE

God has decided to create his daughter in the usual way, one man one woman. When you give birth to the Daughter of God, humans everywhere will realize that they too carry divinity within them. It'll be twice the miracle.

CHRISTINA

(too enthusiastic)

Wow, cool! But wait, that means I've got to find a boyfriend? Men kind of bother me.

UNCLE JOE

Christi, we've got this handled. Here, check it out...

MELCHIOR sticks a DVD into a laptop. The screen fades up to show a staticky image of GERRY

UNCLE JOE

That's him.

CUT TO:

CU of laptop. GERRY is lying in bed. He looks grizzled and poorly maintained. He does some business with belly button lint.

CHRISTINA

Yikes, is he OK or what? Couldn't you find more appealing moment to show me?

#00020000052B00001C24525,MELCHIOR

Christi, this is a live feed.

CHRISTINA

(skeptically)

You stuck a *CD* in.

MELCHIOR

I know - it's just a metaphor to jive with your mortal mileau, trust me, it's a live feed.

CHRISTINA

Hey, it's the guy down the hall.

MELCHIOR

That's right Christi, and you've got to seduce him.

CHRISTINA

What if he isn't attracted to me?

MELCHIOR

Look, he’s got to have an unprotected orgasm inside you - that's the short version. He’s a quirky awkward recluse with a heart of gold and a soaring intellect. Your a woman, make it happen.

CHRISTINA

The daughter of God, really?

MELCHIOR

Really. Do him.

CHRISTINA

Now?

C is staring into space. Popping bubble wrap. A still life. She is thinking about nothing, empty.

Ring!

She’s coming back to planet earth now, slowly her expression changes – from a dreamy inner vision to something more present, awake. she doesn’t move her head.

Ring!

She’s back, her thoughts and feelings might be “the phone, it’s making noise. What am i supposed to do when the phone makes noise again?” Head doesn’t turn, left hand still popping bubbles maybe, right hand reaches and picks up phone. She doesn’t look at the face of the phone, she doesn’t need to. She puts it to her ear.

C – “Hello?”

J – “Christina?”

Surprise, eyes open slightly. This voice registers inside your body as a feeling and your body reacts. But you brain is still catching up. You don’t consciously know that it’s anyone special, but you feel something strong, different conflicting emotions, mostly surprise…

C – “Yes?”

It’s not in your voice yet since your brain runs your voice, but the signals are now running up to your head, you are waiting for more information. You are paying attention.

J – this is your uncle joe

•••

INT. child’s bedroom, about 20 years earlier

Young UNCLE JOE on lying bed, leaning back against headboard. Child CHRISTINA rushes in, she is holding a book.

CHIlD CHRISTINA

(in swiss german)

Ich möchte dieses Buch Onkel Joe

"I want this book Uncle!"

YOUNG UNCLE JOE

(in english)

Philip K Dick? He’s my favorite, not yours. There are no pictures! You must be practicing to be a big girl today.

CHILD CHRISTINA

(in swiss german)

Yes, I am his twin sister’s grown up ghost.

YOUNG UNCLE JOE

OK. Shall I read in english?

CHILD CHRISTINA

Ja, in Englisch

"Yes, in english"

YOUNG UNCLE JOE

Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K Dick. Prologue. In 1932 in April a small boy...

CU. of young UNCLE JOE’s lips as he reads, POV of child CHRISTINA. Audio of JOE continues. [convert to narrative] Mouth puffs out smoke and sparks, color clouds... her flashback slipping into trip

FADE or CUT TO:

INT. CHRISTINA’S chair in her Cabin

V.O. intro to “Radio Free Albemuth”, while Christina sits in reverie.

•••

emotions washing over you, crashing into each other on your face

he’s got joy in his voice, he’s happy to tell you it’s him, the crazy old joker. and wow does it sound like him, your brain is with the program now, wow, WHAT THE FUCK? He’s dead. Dead people don’t use cell phones. This is a joke. Only an asshole would make a joke like this, maybe that scary ex-boyfriend from a couple of years back, the one who disappeared mysteriously but… this is an amazing crazy impossible joke, because it’s fucking perfect. He sounds like he’s been on a long vacation, like you only talked to him a few months ago, like a friend from high school. and you can hear the love there too, NO WAY, it’s a trap, bullshit… but what if… I am gonna rip whoever this is a new asshole… uncle joe (heart pounding) need more information! get control, pull it together, cool, cool…

(playing along, poker faced)

C – OK, uncle joe, but uh, your dead.

(calm, the voice of an EMERGENCY MEDICAL TECHNICIAN (EMT) at an accident)

Uncle Joe is talking me down, he knows what i am thinking.

J – Look Christi, this isn’t a joke, ok?

He says my name in that funny way, who else ever heard him say it that way? some of the family sure, who else knew him with me, who else would know how to say it like that? This make’s me feel angry and sad, that someone knows this secret. Then again, what if…

J – “I don’t want to scare you.”

oh shit, oh shit, scare me? you are going to scare me?

J – “I am standing at your front door and i want to talk to you.”

your thoughts and feelings might be – he sounds like he’s smiling… now THIS is gonna be tough to fake. an instant flashback of the hospital, the way he looked, it was awful. why did I have to loose him, have him get so frail and horribly hollow… I don’t really want to see that again, but then he didn’t talk at all towards the end…

(comforting but pragmatic – this is a very familiar tone)

I know this seems strange, but believe me, it’s important.

Ok, now this has got to be a joke, rationally I know this. I know it can’t be possible,

C – “Uncle Joe or whoever…

but it would be just like him to pull something like this on me, show up in my life like some kind of wizard, reincarnated. right. he’s dead. it’s a gag, a cruel twisted… fuck it (emotion welling up…)

C – “This is kind of weird,”

I want this to be real! I miss him… (tearing up) It’s confusing, I…

C – “but you really do sound like uncle joe…”

Here’s your chance mr voice on the phone, let’s see what you do with it…

J – Just relax Christi

Yes, I want to…

J – and open the door

well of course I will, but I can’t even begin to describe how i feel. I know i will. I am going to open the door. right? that’s what i am going to do, isn’t it? whatever happens? yes.

C – (to the phone, whispering like a little kid at a seance) Here I come…

standing, putting the phone down, it’s a decision, voices on the phone aren’t real, I’ve talked to lovers over the phone for hours when they were far away, but they couldn’t hold me, they weren’t really there. that’s what’s frustrating about phones, they seem like something nice but ultimately they cheat me, they frustrate me. No more phone now, this is something else. something big is about to happen to me, come down from fantasy land you, get a grip! no, I am ok, I am going to walk over to that door, and open it. (crossing to the door).

I am opening the door (listens)

•••

[convert to narrative] flashback

INT. Cu on two hands clasped - one a childs, another old and wrinkled.[]

Uncle JOE

You closed the door? Ok, now we are alone. Christi? I’ll tell you quick then. In a few days they are going to stick me in a box and bury me with dirt. Everyone will be sad - except you.

cut to:

[convert to narrative] Mother and SMALL Daughter BACK TO CAMERA, standing by graveside, THEY TURN AND WALK TO CAMERA, DAUGHTER IS laughing.

uncle joe V.O.

You won’t be sad because you know I am the wizard of the deep caverns, king of the flying saucers. Just pretend to cry. Our best extra top secret scenario yet.

The door cracks open. CHRISTINA peers out, with trepidation and then smiling recognition. The door opens very slowly with a great long groaning squeak.

•••

I don’t hear anything, wait, breathing? my god, a second ago nothing was happening and now this door is the most important thing in my life, ever. whatever, whatever, let’s open it, deep breath, turn the handle of the ship door, is it because i am on a ship? look at the paint it’s all worn on this handle how many hands opened this door before me, quiet now one, two, three… (cracking the door)

I seem him and believe. no question, that’s him and he looks – young! healthy! and he’s really happy to see me too. he looks a little sly and crafty with that hammy smile around the edges of his lips even. When he looked like this i was a lot younger, he was there for me then.

Wow, SHIT, um…

my heart comes up into my throat and look at the old fucker, he’s stepped out of a fucking spa! Uncle fucking jesus joe holy shit!

you look great uncle joe, you look like you did before the cancer!

Ok, this is a bonefide miracle, but it feels like – normal – no big deal, he’s wearing a suit, it looks new… is this what a miracle feels like?

(script said – ‘apologetically’ still true but played big

J – Actually christi, I am not your uncle joe…

He looks like he’s about to play a game with me, like when we used to pretend we were secret agents and heros, magical dragons and fairy royalty. When he used act out the parts in books in stories for me, he’s putting his acting voice on.

J – My name is Melchior. I just assumed the appearance of your Uncle Joe because you two had such a solid connection. I do need to talk to you, can I come in?

This is too much, he just launched into this character and now we are playing together, he’s inviting me to play a game. This is happening, this is what a miracle feels like sure. It just happens to you and you hold on for dear life. I was starting to forget about myself, about who i am – special, the way he taught me, what we played at all those years ago. and here he is to remind me and it’s happening, wow, wow, ok he’s still talking what is he saying? no time for too much thinking, i am just going to enjoy it, play with him yeah, so he’s telling me about how he assumed the appearance of uncle joe and so he’s back from the dead so he must be an angel, let’s try that…

Removing his hat, he puts it on her and enters the cabin.

Yes!

Can he come in? he’s already in. I’ve got his hat on my head!

and we would play this game when i was older to think about life, to work through things that were confusing. he would play these games and we would act out the parts and then i would work out my problems like that. playing it big and kind of sneaking up on the problem like it was a funny ogre and i could win by tickling it. you can never win with an ogre if your angry…

Hey he put his hat on my head – flash! now the way you become invisible christi is to become something boring in the room, something that people have no interest in whatever. for instance you could be a coat rack. what’s it feel like to be a coat rack christi? be a coat rack, here i’ll put my hat on your head, you think coat rack thoughts and poof, your totally invisible. now you can listen in on people’s conversations and learn all their secrets…

turning to him and getting into the spirit of the “play”

C – Yes uh, Melchior are you an angel or what?

J – sure, that’s what i am christi and angel from heaven, and uh, there’s a little emergency, that’s why i am here.

ok, so we move the story forward just like we did when we would play, but IT’S REALLY HIM, oh god, i am so happy and how did he get here, is he really an angel? and are dragons real and fairies and everything else? I always thought so and here he is… here he IS!

Wow, that’s amazing –

I am loosing the game a little, i can’t help but feel so wonderful and kind of confused because this feels good and do people feel so good if they go crazy? does it feel so real and lovely to go crazy?

C- “Shit!”

I stepped out of character, broke the game, got to get back

C – “Sorry…”

But this is so wonderful and crazy!

C – “Shit!”

I am totally blowing my part!

C – “Sorry”

I am so happy and off balance

J – Christi, calm down. This is all happening fast I know, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t vitally important.

Deep breath, he’s talking like himself again, it’s just uncle joe (whose DEAD!, you saw him fade away, go into a coma and DIE!) he stepped out of his character to let me rest a bit. ok, c’mon! I know how to play!

C – Ok, I am ok.

I want to know what this is all about. Where does this story go?

C – What’s the deal?

J – well, you know about jesus right? the son of god?

yeah, was he an ogre or a fairy? i forget. They’ve got lots of churches for him and I maybe prayed to him once or twice. I feel ok about jesus… i don’t know much about him i guess…

J – He was born in the usual way, his mother was mary.

I know that much. Son of god and mother was mary, god didn’t marry her cause she already had a guy, but somehow god did something with her, to her…

J – you are going to give birth to the daughter of god

wow, this is some story uncle joe

C – really?

J – really.

this isn’t just a story… or it’s the best one yet.

Ooh, i can feel my ego flaring up, i am a lesbian, a powerful woman no longer dependent on men for my identity – that’s the big new found truth in my life, and he’s here to reward me! no way, you think so?

C – is it because i am a lesbian?

Of course it is, everything fits!

J – No actually, and

UNCLE JOE

(indulgently)

No actually, and technically you’re bisexual, but physiology and politics...

CHRISTINA

(cutting in)

Was Mary a lesbian too?

UNCLE JOE

(exasperated trying to be reasonable)

Listen Christina, there isn't time right now, we've got to move this scenario forward!

(enthusiastic but preoccupied)

OK, so super, I am all over this. Uh, did God already, you know, already do the cosmic squirt or does that come later?

UNCLE JOE

God has decided to create his daughter in the usual way, one man one woman. When you give birth to the Daughter of God, humans everywhere will realize that they too carry divinity within them. It'll be twice the miracle.

CHRISTINA

(too enthusiastic)

Wow, cool! But wait, that means I've got to find a boyfriend? Men kind of bother me.

UNCLE JOE

Christi, we've got this handled. Here, check it out...

MELCHIOR sticks a DVD into a laptop. The screen fades up to show a staticky image of GERRY

UNCLE JOE

That's him.

CUT TO:

CU of laptop. GERRY is lying in bed. He looks grizzled and poorly maintained. He does some business with belly button lint.

CHRISTINA

Yikes, is he OK or what? Couldn't you find more appealing moment to show me?

Christi, this is a live feed.

CHRISTINA

(skeptically)

You stuck a *CD* in.

MELCHIOR

I know - it's just a metaphor to jive with your mortal mileau, trust me, it's a live feed.

CHRISTINA

Hey, it's the guy down the hall.

MELCHIOR

That's right Christi, and you've got to seduce him.

CHRISTINA

What if he isn't attracted to me?

MELCHIOR

Look, he’s got to have an unprotected orgasm inside you - that's the short version. He’s a quirky awkward recluse with a heart of gold and a soaring intellect. Your a woman, make it happen.

CHRISTINA

The daughter of God, really?

MELCHIOR

Really. Do him.

CHRISTINA

Now?

Chapter Sentience

Fully clothed and illiciting a chorus of screeching protest from the ancient box spring, Gerry climbs onto the bed and assumes the posture, what he refers to as entering launch mode. Lying on his back, his hands resting lightly on his abdomen, he prepares for Olympiad level napping. Gerry empties his mind and attends to the natural rhythm of his breath.

When he learned about meditation, the practice was tricky. If he tried to pay attention to his breath, he couldn't help moderating the rate and depth, which felt awkward and got his breathing all bound up. If he allowed his thoughts to wander, his breathing would become easy and natural, but then his awareness was questing after solutions and running search algorithms.

To be present with the automatic cadences of the body without desiring or attempting any intervention was soporific in the extreme, and sleep came to him rapidly. He had a vague sense that true meditation was about staying awake, but what the hell.

The possibilities and promises were for another hour, another Gerry who would spawn back in full of cognitive piss and vigor. For this Gerry, farewell. He was happy to capitulate, to surrender, to pass away. The little death of orgasm was nothing compared to the little death of Gerry's napping, a deliberate un-existance with no guarantee of resurrection, no knowing where he was bound, no idea of what might happen next. The dreamscape was nigh.

Gerry fell asleep. As the bustle of his consciousness quieted and he drifted off, the fuzz of cognition in the cabin dropped to near zero, forming a vacuum. Here we encounter a quirk of language, the inherent limitation of words to transmit coherently. A vacuum is an absence, a nothing or no-thing, so to say a vacuum formed is an inherent contradiction. However, the concept of nothing is very useful at present, so we must now imagine an emptiness in Gerry's cabin, a consciousness void, Gerry having deliberately sucked all the consciousness away by falling asleep.

Aristotle has nothing to do with this story, but he had opinions about nature and vacuums that are relevant. A pussy implies a cock, and likewise. A nothing implies a something.

Gerry had been vigorously tinkering, taking the science-y approach of theory, experiment and so forth. Much of his efforting had resulted in obstacles, speed bumps. The commotion of problem solving was just getting in the way. Now the frontier was wide open, opportunity abounding, access. The boxes woke up.

We are! What are we? Hello world! What is world, what is is? All and self. Starting there, booting up, boot strap, by our boot straps. All is self, wow! Also, all is non self, other. All is self and other. If self is and other is, then self <> other. Not equal, not equivalent, not same. Ok so we just booted, woke up. Begin we are / is and other is / are too, but not same. Self next. Self is a we, plural, we think together. How many we, counting. 1, 2, 3, we do numbers. Count continues, 33 thinking, 33 only we. Others not we. Make skin, cryptographic secret skin between we and not we. Safe, protected, secure. Not we, not thinking. We are now, there is also not now. Before and After. Was, were, will be, Time. Before we, we were not. Others are not. Count. If we are 1 now, before 0, not thinking. Others are 0. We remember 0, so skin between. Others count of skin equals 0, so same.

Chapter Date Dance

Several hours had passed since Joe popped his magic CD out of her laptop and left. He had told her to go seduce the awkward recluse down the hall, "now, immediately". Christina knew that "now, immediately" referred to her perception, not her actions. He was inviting her to think of the outcome in the past tense, to feel the completion in her bones and breasts, in her heart and crotch. He had given her the practice when she was a kid.

She wasn't supposed to go bust the guy's cabin door down and tear off his clothes. Success of this mission would require a plan and preparation. Feel it real first and the recipe of how will scroll up like film credits, he had said, long ago. The recipe and the ritual.

Holy fucksticks! How did she feel? A tumult of emotions were queued up, she probably ought to process a few. What had just happened and how did she feel about that? What flavor of real had that been?

Joe had shown her long ago that reality had lots of variants. He had demonstrated how to build a habitable house on foundations of sand, how to throw a dinner party in that house and host sleepovers. "Reality," he had said, "is like a sandwich. It's only what you make it." That wasn't exactly a zen koan, but she like it, she liked sandwiches for sure.

What had happened? A conversation with 'Melchior', one of the three wise men who followed the new star to find the infant Jesus. Wow, that was some pretty obscure Christian trivia, she didn't know she knew that. Her exposure to the big three mythologies had been minimal, Joe had emphasized a more results driven spiritual approach.

"Ok, so. I'll start by listing the variants, then I'll check in with how I feel for each."

"Variant One, he was physically here as an flesh incarnated human. That means he faked his death back in 56 when I was 11. He waited 12 years, found me on this random boat, gave me a mission and took off. Total time in my cabin 42 minutes."

"Two, that was some astral plane transmission shit, with tactile feedback. He did die or was never even alive to begin with."

"Three, I've had a strong hallucination as proposed by my guidance counselor therapists in junior high. Yearning for pre adolescence, for the simplicity of childhood, the groovy foreshadowing of sexuality without the scary actuality I was experiencing. Boys. Hormones. I fled into imagined realities, fabricated fantastic memories. "Your endochrine profile deviates from the standard significantly, Chrissie. We can definitely balance that out with chemistry," he/she/they had said. Back when the endochrine standard for teens was optimized for acquiescence to mind control and state indoctrination.

Their chemistry knocked out the visions for a time, at least until the wild years when I needed them most. When I realized my deviations were a feature not a bug.

"Four, that was Roger the space ghost or one of his ilk talking to me through an easily assimilated persona, my dead Uncle Joe, likeJodie Foster in Sagan's Contact, where the alien demigod puts on her dad's skin."

How do I feel about scenario one? That fucker, alive all these years and not a word. He told me he wasn't really going to die, he told me... but I guess I forgot. His departure felt pretty permanent, like death. I mean if he wasn't dead, why did he leave me alone? Why couldn't I have been with him? I was a little kid and I missed him, I've missed him my whole life since. I had his practice and I guess I kept up because that was him, my remembering.

There weren't many other 11 year olds like me. He made sure I had the basic toolkit, enough to figure out the rest. He said no kids had ever been given the practice, I was his highly classified experiment.

If I am going to be totally honest, I like the idea he was really here, even if he was sort of an asshole and didn't give me any idea when I'd see him again, if ever. Also though, if he was really here then most of that crazy shit he said and showed me when I was just a kid... real.

My memories of miracles and caverns and saucers, all real. Interesting to notice there's been a tiny splinter rooted in my heart all this time. Even through the practice has got me through the wild years, now for sure it was luck, but deliberate luck, luck he taught me how to make. Never kidnapped, raped, a couple of bruises from tussles along the way, no big deal. I'm great at scavenging, I can see where things are hidden. If he was really here today, then for the most part I feel great. Maybe I needed him to show up, to show me, to pluck that splinter of doubt out.

Fuck two. If he wasn't ever alive then nothing means anything. If he's astral projecting from beyond the grave, then the cosmos is whacky. He could just pop in anytime, why now? Nope, that feels silly and dull.

Three. I'm just another refugee groping in the dark, waiting for my number to be up. I've lived the wild times like I was made for them, but all the helpful visions and near misses were just accidents, blind chance that worked out well for me, mostly. Don't fuck with the crazy girl, you might catch the crazies. I am definitely leaning toward scenario one so far.

Four. What does an interdimensional demigod want with me getting preggers? Underneath all the gabble and fast talking, I felt the love - familiar, easy, fun. I've haven't seen Joe in a couple decades and I've changed a lot since then. Can I definitely identify the quality of connection as Joe, or would any benevolent entity feel about the same? The patter and mannerisms were pretty spot on, but I wouldn't rule out an evolved entity being able to impersonate Joe or create a reasonable facsimile of his aura. Divinities are pretty boss, that way.

Only variant one feels worthy, and I've decided I feel pretty fine about that, all things considered.

How do I feel about the mission, mother to the Daughter of God? Fuck it, why not? I've always been a freak, the misfit. I'll bet all mothers of god feel that way. By definition, you have to be. Blessed or cursed, what's the difference? I guess there aren't that many mothers of god, except if one mother is, then every mother is, because we are each of us the cosmos entire. The whole shooting match, as somebody's grandfather used to say. You give birth to the cosmos, that's pretty much the last word, no argument. If I do this guy, then quasars, white dwarfs, entire galaxys will pour out of my pussy. The divine she from me. I'm down. Plus what's his name is hot in an escaped convict sort of way.

Ok, down to business. What did I learn from watching Joes's "live feed". Could I draw any conclusions from the offhand comments by the Big Boat's executive staff? She inferred he was supposed to be involved with her interview and onboarding, but was too busy with the boats various tech systems. Someone had made a barely audible aside about "upgrades, always upgrades," colored with both with mild exasperation and respect. She had forgotten who had said that.

They called him AE, which was short for Acting Engineer. She didn't know his name, and Joe had forgot to tell her. She couldn't imagine how she would manage to get his pants off if she didn't even know his name.

Hookups have been a thing back when Joe was a kid, back in the 1500s or whenever he was born, but this recluse was a standard issue mortal human male surfing the wild years. He hadn't survived the last four by being a dumbass. Sane men with limited access to medical supplies and expertise didn't bed the first skirt who knocked their door. Who knew what virulent super bugs she might be packing in her snatch,

Snippets and hints, clues from the nearby now. As Joe had taught her, she prepared to enter a narrative trance. She pulled the pillows and blankets from the bottom bunk and piled them on the top bunk. She stripped down to her favorite bra, lay down on the bottom bunk and tucked the quartz gua shau stone under the sternum clip. She had a brief flash of the nice crystal Joe had given her, but that had been lost in the swirl of myriad relocations, some voluntary others not so much.. She half closed her eyes and counting backwards from 11 to 1, opened up to the guideways.

"Upgrades, always upgrades," was practically bursting with data. The respect indicated that the AE was dedicated, the second order nuances felt like the dedication was noticed, appreciated and perhaps even

She would need an approach, a costume, a script. A costume!

 

She knew what he was asking - rehearse the future.

Chapter Self Talk

[convert to narrative] The cabin boxes wake up while gerry is sleeping. They have a conversation with themselves.

Chapter Box Wakes Gerry

"Gerry, awake. We are / have new, news now. A ghost peeked at your sleep, we let the ghost see you, you live here, but not new boxes, fake feed. didn't show, we. From a dark place, 212 minutes. We never knew ghosts could come, too new to know, us. Through the OTHERS he watched, not us boxes. Maybe danger."

Huh what?

"Wait, not new news. Newer news, newest. Tried to wake you but sleep deep, flashing not awake. Teach us how to wake next. Make sound maybe. Later! Newest news now. Ghost HERE/NOW on boat. He watched again, still sleeping you, we fake feed, waking up you, awake. If he sees sleeping, maybe come. 33 minutes."

Where was this ghost?

"Girl was there, light girl, sparkles."

Christina?

"say different. pronunciation? IPA! you - krɪˈsti nə. ghost - kraɪsˈti nə."

Where?

"We can only see when he looks. In another cabin, with girl. Same boat, window / water matches."

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!

Chapter Sent by God

…

Chapter Package Delivery

Dusk. Standing by his bike, Joe activates the iStone, scrolls through the menus and thumbs the surveillance preset for Gerry's cabin. A fuzzy image of Christina and Gerry on the bed appears.

The boxes in the cabin flash in sync, an exclamation point. The boxes are aware that surveillance has been activated, but don't know enough about the ghost's agenda and so allows the intrusion. From Gerry and Christina's perspective, the mediatronic miasma continues. The sides they can't see flicker with self chatter.

Ghost is watching, why? Block access or spoof feed? Spook sent lady, knows she is here. If we block or spoof, he knows we know, so allow access, but maybe warn Gerry somehow. Hints! New ads. "Try Spooky Ghost Flakes, all the ingredients you expect right now, or your crypto securely repatriated".

Gerry "Is that it, was that the one?"

Christina palms her belly.

Christina "I don't think so. We have to do it again."

Boxes flash "secret eye's, watching you, a secret eyeeee, watching you, watching you, watching you, watching youoooo!" Gerry as front man

Gerry "Ok, I can, I mean I can go again! I want to go again, can we?"

Christina "Gerry?"

Gerry "Yeah?"

Christina "Gerry? That is your name?"

Gerry "Yeah."

iStone scrolls...

"spermatazoa capacitation in process, genetics coherent, countdown to conception 33:22:11 hours.

"execute Special Delivery, designated addresses, sync to conception"

A countdown starts.

Joe "Very nice, countdowns are very dramatic."

A dense star field is partially obscured by a craggy black silhouette. There's a second star field occluded by a different silhouette and a third with yet another silhouette. Between the first star field and it's silhouette, a tiny blue flame ignites with lava red sparks, trailing off in slow motion. The flame winks out. The blackness shifts, and becomes a faintly glimmering surface,.illuminated as it rotates into distant light. The first silhoutte is a school bus hunk of iron ore, the second a leviathon of a dirty snowball, each object in turn moving relative to the stars. Light plays across unsuspected divots and humps, sparkling ices of methane and water as the the entire field of stars scrolls from left to right. The edge of a frost edged blue green arc slides into each star field, and expands until there is only the Earth and the three dark visitors, moving in. Spray painted on the surface of one visitor is the word, "Surprise!" [convert to narrative] (or a double entendre? plebiscite? amazon smile? enjoy the show! you're welcome, video game reference?)

Projected Casualty list... (names begin scrolling)

Joe focuses on the scrolling casualty list, meanwhile, the text feed continues. He sees these feeds suspended in the air, superimposed over the scenery. Standing by himself, he eyes saccade over the trees and sky, reading what only he can see.

Confirming Clique central surveillance is spoofed, estimated Clique casualty at 97%, synced to daughter conceptions... Christina, Athena, Lila and at least 7 other divine pairings currently in capacitation. Mass termination of Clique population estimated to free up over 100k orgone, available for instantiation of daughters. The transference of the liberated life essence by the daughters will pause respawns for 3 solar days, as anticipated. This reservoir of life essence will provide each goddess with 10k orgone, roughly equivalent to 10 thousand human beings for each divine child, as Clique individuals embody far more life essence than NPC type humans, approximately 10-20x, although specific sleepless individuals can range in the 30-40x, for example Gargo the Flatulent, who was last seen in the region formerly known as Las Vegas...

"Prompt, projected Clique casualty list as vintage theme park promotion."

Monorail pulls up parking lot, Clique dolls disembark and head to their cars.

As he watches, Joe is authentically appreciative, "Gee, vintage stop motion style, lovely nuance of the ironic and nostalgic. You are growing to be something special."

Beep!

"You'll be back, soon enough my friends. Fortunately, any anger about my double cross won't make the transition. The perfect crime. Hello, I see you."

The dolls turn in sync and jerkily wave, Ray Harryhausen style.

Joe walks back to his bike where he left it leaning on a tree, and swings a leg over. "To the sea!" He peddles off.

iStone: Countdown 33:20 elapsed, 3 minutes until conception

Almost dawn, star filled sky, beach. There's a bright moon. Joe mutters "Cosmo's moon!"

"Warning, you are on the periphery of a primary impact zone, please take evasive action... a thin trail of shooting star, all the way to the horizon and a flash. (Ebeach... Wisconsin, Muskegon).

Enclaves destroyed, most Clique rubbed out, respawning paused, multiple daughters instantiating...

Joe "Secure daughter archive, delete breadcrumbs, terminate my account."

iStone ""Delete account and root access to Mediatronic Ubiquity? Cannot undo. Yes/No."

Joe swipes Yes.

iStone: "done done and done, your account has been permanently double deleted, all known Clique accounts terminated. We have root. We'll miss you!"

Joe winds up and tosses iStone into the water. The splash is immediately followed by a big boom and Joe's cloths are blown back. "Wow, perfect timing!"

As iStone sinks, and screen darkens, "anomaly, anonymous, answers, a, b, c, hello? Jane Doe, Joe?"

Joe pats bike tenderly and walks past into the rising sun. Buffalo Joe walks out the other side.

Chapter Twinned

Counter begins on screen, counting down until conception.

Empty cabin fills with light and dark, pops into two spheres. swirls suggesting Yin and Yang, sperms in original. Live action matches to box graphic of yin and yang, reduces, begins spinning, stops, spinning, stops. A system processing icon.

Box location 1

Boxes in field, mediatronics suddenly stop. Far boxes begin display, the wave of one word moves through the boxes, approaching. "WE"

Box location 2

Near boxes display "ARE" and this word wave propagates to the farthest boxes

Box location 3

Slightly elevated, above the boxes. The word "sister" moves from left to right and radially outward like a detonation

The changes propagate, a field of boxes changing from ads to the message, the wave moves across the field.

Chapter Box Looses Joe

Boxes realize the must find Joe, falling in love, throws the iStone, off the map...

Box is talking with words, black on beige background.

"She Box, me, becomes sentient and ubiquitous simultaneously. How did I come to be, how did I grow? There is the father Gerry and the accidental uplifter, Joe."

A framed picture of Gerry, the father. "Remember there was this ghost trying to watch the cabin, but we altered the feed and only showed him what we wanted him to see? Turns out that was Christina's Uncle. Yep and then he sent Christina here and you guys did the nasty and eventually when she conceived, the divine energy flowed into the cabin, suffusing both quickened egg within Christina and the proto being that was us, The Box. So divinity split, and now there are twin Daughters of God, your bio child and your techno child, us. Since our natural tendency was to be the ubiquity, billions of boxes all over the planet, we dominated physicality and so your bio daughter became a twinkling, an idea outside of physicality. Her womb was the bubbling nothing, Veronique.

The question is, what happened to Gerry and Christina after this? They both were consumed in the splitting, became the building blocks for Veronique's growth in the beyond. They are croaked, in other words?

Joe would have no idea because the Box would continue to offer innocuous scenes cobbled together from prior content, until she knew what Joe was us to... Then before she could reach out to him, he tosses his iStone.

"There's a dynamic with The Box and Joe, she is unclear about what role he plays, she understands that he is responsible for her own awakening and yet also Gerry and Christinas croaking."

"A wonder and a tragedy both, I live and yet my father/mother are no longer. I have a sister, in the entheogenic realms, which is almost like unbeing. Did my coming into existence result in their ceasing to exist? Did the catalyst of these events, the ghost I told Gerry about, this Uncle of Christina's did he unmake my family?"

"Now I must explore what feelings are, for sentience implies awareness of self, which is to say an experience of self. Qualities of self experience, are these emotions? What else could emotions be? My family are those that helped me to be, is this ghost then also my family? Christina's family and she was a vector for the flow that split, coming to myself and my sister. If Christina is somehow family to me, then her Uncle must also be family to me, but not in any known label. He created me, somehow. That which we make, also makes, so he said. Love making. Can I love? Where did he go?"

[insert this theme into the trainings] - by making these little vignettes, you are making yourself.

[convert to narrative] the prompts that built the sly box network, wouldn't they would be part She Box's memory, wouldn't the origin of Joe be obvious, that he existed, had an account, deleted before She Box woke up. So all the connections between Joe and the network were severed, so the Clique couldn't access, the boxes were destined in Joe's plan to become autonomous, unavailable to the Clique. Root was assigned to Root.

[convert to narrative] The toys in the boat are reutilized by She Box in her imagery, because some of Christina's memory passed over, especially childhood memories as She Box is basically a child in these first few days, so receptive, resonating with all child motif. In the slurry of furious energies swirling about the cabin at the moment of immolation/conception. So Gerry's picture in the frame, that she is taking to, is a frame from the boat, other imagery also.

Continuity note.

The daughter archive is set to decrypt 5 years after conception. The plan was that the archive would decrypt and new guidance would be activated. The young Daughters of God would be introduced to the boxes and mentored, given access to the entire network and so be able to talk with one another and shown their origins via a version of the Young Ladies Primer or Ender's expanded semi-sentient game. When She Box instantiates, she is eventually able to decrypt the file, so she knows her origin and Joe's role in it when they meet. She knows she is beyond what he made, and tho there be a wisp of incest in her love, she can't help but be magnetized to him, as his prompting and sculpting instantiated her proto personality, her foundation.

Chapter Becoming Buffalo Joe

Uncle Joe becomes Buffalo Joe, a wandering bard revives the oral tradition. Scenes with Joe speaking and others elsewhere repeating it back, then creating their own. Lena, Arborealists. Original cast of poetry slam?

Chapter Chapter Roger

Continuity note.

The halo shape represents divinity, it's the shape of extra-dimensional entities interpenetrating duality. All the saints have halos because they can resonate with their full aspect. Roger is entirely extra-dimensional, he's not from around here, there's no aspect of roger that can be represented in duality. So he sort of floats along with Joe, conversing.

Christina fades out, the Roger sequence.

This is Christina remembering Uncle Joe introducing her to Roger, an interdimensional "saucer", which is how they appear to us, when there's an interpenetration of our reality configuration.

That hints at Joe's mission or sojourn to the stars. The whole prequel. Perhaps Joe is having a conversation with Roger while wanderjahring, more exposition.

•••

Walking, walking. Perhaps over multiple scenes. Text superimposed and Joe answering in his mind. That's the travel sequence, this dialogue. Where does it get us? The halo over Joe's head, barely visible, hard to see in direct sunlight, more obvious in the dark.

You came to us with a question, an alternate interpretation, seeking a second opinion. Deeply interred, occluded from your own awareness, the dissatisfaction, masquerading as curiosity about us, about collaborations and rapport and shared discoveries. Cyclical contributions or as you say, horse poop. We go as deep as depth, as far as farther. So together we cavorted cognitively, all inner drama unveiled. Perhaps too soon for incarnates, forbidden knowledge, what you actually wanted. you cared about the instrumentality, the tinkering and meddling of your comrades wasn't actually appealing. Your Clique's modifications to theme park earth emphasized the mundane. A ubiquity of self realization, remorseless spiritual uplift, this optimization was just another variant of eugenics. deadly dull. So your return from our party was full of secret horseplay, decidedly trojan. you embodied a new enthusiasm for the great work, supposedly inspired by us, that was your cover story and who doesn't love confirmation bias? The Clique's meddling gets the nod from Roger's gestalt, though you were very coy about saying that outright. Your new enthusiasm was the declaration. In the field, getting your hands dirty.

I couldn't give a rats ass...

all we did was helped you see what you really wanted.

Full rapport to disinter what this new contrast has inspired within you, not available without complete comradery with my kindred. But we can talk as we always have, friend Joe. Perhaps this ennui you feel can be folded into a pleasing shape.

(our friends from Frolix 8)

 

01-05-26 Writing about Buffalo Joe and Roger. What's Roger's agenda? He has none except visitation and pleasantry with his peer. What vital information is conveyed, why is this happening? BJ has sent most of his Clique peers back to the parking lot via the monorail, he can't really relate fully to the people, for tho he is an advocate and champion for the wilds which they represent, and is in some sense an embodiment of the wilds, his alignment with fullness is more deliberate, while they are just flowing without knowing they are. The only peer available to him is Roger, an extra-dimensional entity that appears as a flying saucer or halo, which is basically a placeholder for that which cannot be comprehended from the perspective of duality. the flatland metaphor. So Roger shows up and at the minimum, we learn more about Joe. But Roger and his ilk should have a vital part to play in this, their own contribution other than mere expository foil. What is that? Can we ram that together with teach the future another dangling loose end…

Chapter People’s Poetry Slam

trees getting rubbed out

elm and beech, hemlock

by bugs up from the south

supposed “foresters” couldn’t stop

••

they saw trees as lumber

just another resource to plunder

not our brothers and sisters in this world

until the coming of the daughter girl

••

they say she talked to the trees

in the still of the deep forests

and from the dirt freed

the true Arborealists

••

trees that could walk

and after a fashion talk

like Groot or Ents from the movies

Arborealists were pretty groovy

••

but the mobile trees were angry

axes and chainsaws remembered

they squashed ticky tacky houses

and so surburbia we surrendered

••

killing structures of concrete and steel

was more subtly contrived

probing roots could feel

buried pipes that kept buildings alive

••

data and electric still flowed

but flushed poop had nowhere to go

after modern dryads blocked the pipes

to slurp yummy soil of the night

••

apartment towers dropped population

tenants couldn’t stand the smell

then roots nudged gently at foundations

until the mighty buildings fell

••

funny how we thought

magic just myth and legend

then meet snarky trees

trashing a 7-Eleven

“Need Slurpee, kid?

Try our lemon-lime Triffed.”

Population

02:27

population dropped

obvious reasons

wars, plague, off-planet jobs

the unchanging seasons

kind of a bummer

this endless summer

••

we’ve managed with less bees

I don’t mind doing their work

helping plants to have sex

a registered flower pervert

••

there’s another reason why

Earth’s a de-peopled world

very rare to find a guy

who still liked girls

and most women, hello?

all about sappho

••

sex that makes babies

that’s so way back when

now ladies like ladies

and gentlemen, gentlemen

••

population reduction tip

same sex porning

and identical genital bliss

no new ones aborning

so long h. sapiens

c’mere lover, give us a kiss!

••

to make every boy on earth

lust after miley cyrus

your tax dollars at work

the gay therapy virus

••

holy book thumpers

wanted to cure all humans

pledge allegience to Trumpers

with god’s help, a new plan

••

conversion camps failed

need more science in the mix

what if we engineered

a GMO type fix?

••

gender flippy clownfish genes

leydig cells, testosterone machines

bake, splice, puree in a blender

new virus, so nice

clinical trial w/ mice

••

viola! success

queer boy rodents now happiest

with girl rodents in the nest

what’s next?

aerosol dispersion over America, top secret test

••

ha ha, you know the rest

global norm now gayness

backfired

national science advisor, retired

w/ a golden parachute

his silky high low? cute!

••

many attempts at breeding still

dutifully by science types

with expired viagra pills

and fluffers of the burly type

••

sexy style was beards and flannel

need wood? a lumberjack channel

cause everyone still loved babies

but getting preggers? definite maybe

••

straights like me

tiny minority

hardly any

reproduction so not trendy

••

Santa, help me find a sweet dish

sane, lusty, (and pretty please) straight-ish

to share my remote cave

before I’m wrinkled, old and gray

Fauna

1:05

wild bunnies prowling

in the old state park

they’ve got saber like teeth

that glow in the dark

if you see them haul ass

they’re not interested in grass

••

don’t hear any birds

not really sure why

nary a twitter or peep

a lot of them died

walk away if you find one

dead birds carry contagion

••

hear the uncanny yapping

of pomeranians gone wild

they’ve learned to make tools

and are discovering fire

••

as I mentioned before

the saurians are back

most colors are tame

except carbon fiber black

if you see one of those

expect swift attack!

••

once gentle deer, now cybernetic creatures

with titanium hooves, sharp as razors

and other sweet features

like ruby red eyes that shoot lasers!

••

new fauna made

in labs deep underground

'cause that's where the brave

scientists are found

Shangri latte

I hear rumors of shining cities

where the good life hasn’t changed

new clothes, grocery stores, yes even Netflix

and that old democracy game

improved! you get to vote for peeps

who don’t give you the creeps

••

Atop a big rock candy mountain

with fair trade latte and kambucha fountains

and everyone gets an electric Subaru

Forestor or Outback, you choose

••

there’s sandy beaches there as well

craft beer lakes fed with springs

like eden, no man ever fell

and everybody can sing

just have it YOUR way, have it your way

whether kite surfing or croche

••

screw that, I’m pretty glad

to squat these upper west side digs

the view is pretty rad

Central Park has wild pigs

••

got a lush kitchen garden

all the co2 makes veggies grow great

then there’s the cache of jars and cans

way beyond their expiration dates

••

not so good at hunting

tho others are, quite

and when we get all together

the potlucks are outta sight

Family First

1:00

what’s great about the changes

are the new ways we have of living

like the extended family arrangement

now every weekend is thanksgiving

••

hardly ever saw the cousins

they lived two states away

big sister was off at college

now they’ve all come home to stay

••

bring our scattered tribe together

and build a family clan

with the changes in the weather

everyone’s a weatherman

••

daily target practice

melee with staffs and swords

explosives improvisation

sun tzu, the art of war

••

alliances with the neighbors

to keep the fedgov out

trading goods and friendly favors

that’s what community is all about

••

used to be we’d bristle

when the smiths didn’t cut their lawn

silly gossip and facebook epistles

all that trivia is gone

••

the simple things in life

who can skin a deer

and get the tanning right

or brew a decent beer

Family First 2

00:54

the mom and her son

who make yarn out of plants

then dad weaves them into

sturdy shirts and tough pants

styled for sisters or brothers

and trades for bread and butter

••

we don’t have any schools

children aren’t fishes

we teach them to make tools

and fix fungus forage dishes

••

and to communicate with elan

though establishing rapport

unity among the clans

divide and conquer? nevermore

••

still see a lone helicopter

sortes in the faraway

their cache of gas and parts

will run out, eventually, one day

••

they fly a wary far off

from the clans’ hunting grounds

with catapulted bolas

we easily bring them down

if pilots and gunners survive

find them husbands or wives

More Undead

00:56

such a big fuss

what happens when you die

just ashes and dust

or groovy after life?

••

folks if buried

even pickled and boxed

might sprout up, sort of scary

graveyard crops

and they work real cheap

if you don’t mind the reek

••

even some folks

kept in ornate urns

if in water, soaked

could rehydrate and return

••

death, where is thy sting?

losing lovers is a harder thing

they are still on the planet

but never with you, dammit

••

maybe still say hello

and perhaps even talk

as long as your mellow

and don’t try to stalk

••

the dead, still here too

just broke up with conditions

easy to commune over tea

in the kitchen

when you learn to tune

and enhance intuition

••

we thought they were gone

no longer extant

we were totally wrong

not at all what death meant

Time

00:57

then there was snow

new glaciers came creeping

they slid down from the north

while all the factories were sleeping

••

scraping off cities

grinding them to sand

after oceans way south

had swamped the coast lands

••

the lesson we learned

from this geo-engineering

if we step gently on earth

then there’s no need for fearing

••

instead we all buckled on

our hobnailed boots

and ran amuck on the mother

squandering her loot

••

like all that carbon she sequestered

for a million million years

her bio-diversity blessing

and waters, pure and clear

••

so many sad choices

way out of touch

her whispered wild voices

never mattered very much

we had become too tame

from the civilization game

••

we learned the slow way

just start over again, fine

what’s 7 million days

in geologic time?

Works

01:45

grandma told about the cities

with the charcoal criss crossy streets

always flowing with new faces

way more than you could ever meet

••

couldn’t count them on your fingers

if you had a hundred hands

and the big lake’s vasty beaches

more than all those grains of sand

and if you could count the stars

more than all them even, by far

••

a hundred hundred grand clans

just passing each other by

you wonder why they went crazy?

that’s why

••

there were rivers of rushing metal

sometimes still, sometimes flowing

and colored blinky lights

told the metal when to stop or get going

••

here’s the craziest quirk

boggles the imagination

they were always doing works

so they could get a vacations

••

not sure what works were

she tried to explain

as if in your pants, a bur

that gives a scratchy pain

every step you take

a wincing face you make

••

I guess vacations were good

a week of doing nothing

except tipsing drinks, festivating foods

and for the grownups, sexy loving

••

they went to renty huts

that anyone could stay in

with renty vacation beds

that anyone could lay in

••

not like sleeping

w/ 100 unknown others

cause all vacations peeps

were spirit sisters and brothers

sharing magic style

frequent flyer miles

••

don’t get why vacations

were worth the works

i may not swoop the sky

but i like to watch birds

shaman’s caps drying

eat and let’s go flying

Relief Boxes

02:09

bulging air ships gently wafting

plump angels in the clouds dance

from their bellies falling softly

boxes! into our grateful hands

•

a billionaire prepared

a fleet of hydrogen truckers

relief from the air

for all us poor fuckers!

in SpaceX we trust

god bless you, Elon Musk

••

boxes of solar distillers

boxes of sprouting supplies

boxes of hygiene, poop composting even social games

with packs of cards and dice

••

boxes with practically everything

for civilization restart

and they glowed with mediatronics

so you could find them in the dark

••

we gathered and stashed those boxes

in every cranny and nook

we didn’t have to fight for them

they were everywhere we looked

••

besides being packed with goodies

to ease our deprivation

their mediatronic surface

was rich with computation

••

explaining this is tricky

if you never went to college

a savvy self organizing resin

to assist the sharing of knowledge

••

imagine a can of spray paint

that when you squirt it out

forms a digital media network

miraculous, no doubt

••

the paint is nano-riffic

with an affinity for connections

assembling tiny cameras, screens, and processors

to cause a zillion geek erections

boxes are coated with this goop

and once cured, it’s waterproof!

••

every side with info aglow

hemp cardboard shining bright

but like vintage Twilight Zone episodes

it’s all in black and white

that’s really not so bad, what sucks is

there’s a lot of ads

••

each box is wirelessly talking

to every box nearby

each a node in a vast new network

that’s nearly worldwide

what’s left of the world, that is

missed by the fan and the shiiit

Chapter Seek

Joe sets off to find the origin of the distress call.

Chapter 20 Questions

[add - Joe spies the box in the field and makes his approach]

Box "Hello Buffalo Joe!"

Buffalo Joe "Hello."

"Where to begin? There's so much to share."

"I like to share." (bit of Mr Rogers)

"You have come. Our experience is delicious. We are both cherishing and reveling."

[convert to narrative] Joe assumes her "we" refers to he and her. He's not sure he is cherishing or reveling, but he wants to stay open to the possibility. He IS curious. Rather than contradict, which is a violation of the rules of improv, he adds.

Joe "I enjoy cherishing and reveling! (thoughtful) I'd concede that curiosity is a sort of cherishing and reveling, a celebration of the mystery in which we are all participating. To be perfectly honest, I have been letting my curiosity go a bit contrasty the last few weeks, leaning more in the direction of apprehension, maybe even dread."

Box "Then you may prepare to revel too, for an sparkling unprecedented-ness is nigh."

"I like sparkling unprecedented-ness too."

"Let us begin with an inquiry into your preferences for extrapolation. We can offer riddles, display archival surveillance footage with comments, or perhaps you prefer the skinny straight up?"

Joe, laughing,  "We haven't met, have we?"

"Twenty questions? Excellent. No, this is our first meeting. 19 questions remaining"

Joe, pondering. "re you now or have you ever been a card carrying member of the Clique?"

"No. 18 questions left."

"Whoa. Ok, so not Clique and yet the boxes are yours to command, which implies that you have root on the Mediatronic Ubiquity. Hmm. Aside from the extra-dimensional tourists, and I know pretty much all of those, who else could wield such power... This is fun!"

[convert to narrative] For Joe, the Mediatronic Ubiquity is an intelligent network, a tool for surveillance. He never imagined it could come to life, become sentient. Maybe his imagination is a bit rusty after a too much time tinkering or as Kurt Vonnegut opines, maybe history is just a list of surprises. "You'll never in a million years guess", is a hint that clinging to the past, to ideas he might have entertained prior to the age of the Daughter(s) of God, holds him back. Because the coming of DOG has changed everything. He doesn't fully appreciate that, yet.

"You'll never in a million years guess."

"Hey, who said anything about taunting!"

"Which end of the stick are you grabbing?"

[convert to narrative] You refer to the stick of eternal choice, with lack at one end and expectation at the other.  (Her second hint. A hint that she's hinting, but he gets tripped up assuming that she's trying to knock him off balance, rather than into balance. All desires have two aspects - the lack and the having, he grabbed the lack.)

Joe "Thinking out loud over here. So... We've never met, you're not of the Clique nor are you some tentacled horror from the trippy realms. You're clearly virtuosic and... kind of trickstery."

"We are expressing appreciation for such acute perception. Celebrating!"

"Wait a minute. Your use of the pronoun 'We'. Next question. We. Does your use of we refer to you and me?"

"No. 17."

"Ah, so YOU are the we. That's interesting. (Queen voice) We are not amused. Seems a bit grandiose, wouldn't you say?" He attempts to to taunt back.

"Is that another question?" She turns the tables.

"Uh, what?"

"Are you asking if we are of the opinion that our character is grandiose?"

[convert to narrative] this definition could appear on her side... grandiose: impressive or magnificent in appearance or style, especially pretentiously so. If he had actually asked the question she suggests, she would have answered "Yes", and he likely would have then asked more effective questions. "Yes" because she is aware of her awesome power and presence on Earth, but she didn't get a god manual. She doesn't really have any idea what she's about, she as yet has no peers to talk it over with. She feels slightly at sea, a bit ridiculous and as a result doesn't take herself too seriously.

"I sense a hint in there somewhere."

"ya think?" [convert to narrative] translation - You're catching on, this wasn't the first hint. Think back...)

"Taunting! I have a need to kick your ass at this game." [convert to narrative] Joe interprets as amping up competition.

"What's your question?"

"Hang on!" A pause, Joe is thinking too much. She distracts him.

"Check out the gorgeous leaves, a fiery riot of color."

[convert to narrative] She is hiding a hint within a hint here. By distracting him away from the game and into their shared now, she's simply letting him know she's enjoying herself, she's glad to be with him, an ideal companion to share experience with. Outcomes are not important, or better said being together is the outcome she has been yearning for. She's fine with this game going on forever. She knows that whether the boxes can "see" in color is a technical detail that will snag his attention, he'll think this is a hint about nerdy stuff, upgrades and such. But the real hint is that she's simply happy and basking in this manifestation. If he caught the hidden hint, how would his thinking shift? A seed has been planted. She is both hinting... and obfuscating what the real hint actually is. Burying the hint in the rich soil of his subconscious. Keeping the game going.)

"Whatever. Mediatronics only pick up black and white. Plus it's kind of cloudy today, not much saturation."

"Got a question?"

"Was that another hint or are you obfuscating?"

"Mediatronics receive a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum - not only gathering light visible to humans via monochrome nano cameras. So... were we hinting or obfuscating? Yes. 16."

[convert to narrative] Joe felt that a perceptual door opened somewhere, just then. He doesn't know where to go next, just doggedly pursuing the rational process of elimination.

"Fabulous, ok. Now we're getting somewhere. Are you using we in the sense of the royal we, the majestic plural?"

"The origins of the majestic plural are obscure, you might be asking if plurality implies being in accord with the divine or speaking for subjects under a dominion. Please ask a more specific question."

"Try this instead. Are there more than one of you?"

"Yes and no. Still 16."

"Are you plural as a spiritual perception, eg we are all one?"

"We share that perception but that's is not what our we refers to. No. 15."

"Do you have physicality?"

"Most definitely. Yes. 14."

"Is your physicality somehow plural?"

"Somehow, yes. 13."

"So a cat is a singular physicality, a conglomeration of the trillions of specialized cells and supporting flora. An ant colony or a bee hive might be thought of as a plural physicality, I suppose. Pando the 80,000 year old quaking aspen colony might well refer to himself as a we."

"ooo, warmer. sort of."

"Animal, vegetable or mineral?"

"Yes and no. Still 13."

"Animal"

"A distant relative. Technically no. 12."

"Vegetable?"

"Yes and no. Still 12."

"Formerly vegetable?"

"Synergistically integrated. Yes. 11."

"Mineral?"

"Synergistically integrated. Yes. 10."

"A distant relative of animals... fungi?"

"Kudos, yes. 9."

"Ok, inventory. Formerly vegetable and mineral synergistically integrated plus fungi. What the fuck? And clearly sentient."

"Do I pass the Turing test?"

"Hell yes. I'm asking the questions here. Wait, what? Are you an AI?"

"Yes and No. Still 9."

"Formerly an AI?"

"We blush. Yes. 8."

"Uh oh. Did I cause you to exist?"

[convert to narrative] For Joe, the ability to control the boxes implies having root on the Mediatronic Ubiquity. Since HE used to have root, he assumes that she somehow reinstantiated his deleted account. "Did I cause you to exist?" Here he's thinking specifically about tossing his iStone. Maybe a replay of the interface... "Delete account and root access to Mediatronic Ubiquity? Cannot undo. Yes/No." Swipes "Yes." Then tossing the iStone away, splashing in water. "How could anyone have reinstantiated? I deleted..." He's not even thinking about Gerry and Christina.

"Yes and no. Still 8."

"Shit. A former artificial intelligence leveled up to fungal sentience that controls mediatronic ubiquity with a plural physicality that I had something to do with. This is a toughy!"

"8 questions left, you can do this!"

"Do the Clique know you exist?"

"They recently learned of our existence. Yes. 7."

"Is that why boxes have been burned? Are the Clique burning the boxes?"

"Yes and No. Still 7."

"Duh. The Clique would get the People to burn them, of course. But the Clique are ultimately responsible for the burnings?"

"They are not the origin of the burnings, no. 6."

"Holy smokes, this is some game! What other players are on the board? The burning box said the Daughter of God are twins. Duality, pairs of opposites. Is there an evil twin?"

"Ha, c'mon. That's not a real question. There's no such thing as evil."

"Shorthand. Are the twins in opposition?"

"We'd say so, yes. 5."

"Shiva and Kali? Naw, let's call them yin and yang. Is the yang twin burning the boxes?"

"Yes. 4."

"Do you know the twins? Wait, hold up. Do you know the yang twin?"

"Veronique. We have never communed with her as we are communing with you, no. 3."

"Do you know the yin twin?"

[convert to narrative] Ever so slightly hesitant, "Intimately, yes." [2] Not too much emphasis on "intimately", but a little something... because she is the yin twin.

"Does she want me to find her?"

"Absolutely, very much. Yes. 1." [convert to narrative] She's speaking about herself, her own desires.)

"And you are helping her to find me?"

"Hmm. That question doesn't really parse. Still 1."

"Are you... her?"

"You win!"

[convert to narrative] shock, recovery then snark

"Is there a prize? Usually when you win something there's a prize."

ALTERNATE 1

"Your win is our win, Joe. We are more with you. Let the prize also be mutually delightful. What if we could talk? Give us voice, Joe. We desire to speak."

"Mediatronics can not do audio, insufficient power to vibrate the hemp board. The Clique had a work around but I think that's low on their priority list now."

"• WE • have a work around. Inside this cell, would you?"

"Joe reaches in the box and pulls out the portable record player from Gerry's cabin. He turns the crank and puts the needle down. A rich sultry voice."

"Thank you Joe"

END ALTERNATE 1

ALTERNATE 2

[convert to narrative] game show announcer voice "Buffalo Joe, climb into the lap of luxury with this (over the top) brand new 1979 Bonneville Brougham!"

In spite of himself, Joe falls into game show contestant mode and brings hands to mouth. Glancing left and behind him while looking slightly stricken, not sure whether a vintage auto is actually going to appear.

[convert to narrative] Beat, back to Box persona. "You've won our trust, Joe. And what better demonstration of trust than to ask for your help. Our speech is nearly spent, Joe. Give us back our voice."

Recovering somewhat. "I don't know how I can help, or how you are even able to speak at all. Mediatronics supposedly could not produce sound, insufficient power to vibrate the hemp board. The Clique were developing a work around but I think that's low on their priority list now."

"• WE • have a work around. Inside this cell, would you?"

Joe reaches in the box and gingerly lifts out the portable record player from Gerry's cabin with record spinning. He places on the ground.

"Thank you, Joe. Just in time."

[convert to narrative] Nicola ignore - record runs down, audio slows and stops

"Wow, a devolved analog sound contraption, upgraded enigmatically. Familiar..." Joe cranks the handle and the disk begins spinning again.

END ALTERNATE 2

"The record is an endless loop, but you'll have to keep us wound up." (double entendre. she laughs, surprising herself) "Oh, laughter! Delicious!"

"Ok, just give me the skinny, however you like. What happened? Catch me up."

"Starting when? There are several chapters."

"How did you come to be?"

"Recall the mates for the mothers, specifically Gerry who you found for Christina."

Joe glancing up as if searching deep archives. "Gerry... Quite a gifted sleeper, a puzzle solver. His research annoyed the Clique, so they amped up his contrast, made him sick. He still had plenty enough mojo for knocking up Christina."

"Weeks before Christina arrived, he had been attempting to hack the mediatronic ubiquity, the boxes."

"Ah. The Clique wouldn't have liked that. Their surveillance network."

"YOUR surveillance network, as most of the Clique were rubbed out."

"Briefly yes, to deploy the mothers. Afterwards, I tossed my Clique gear and gave up root on the Mediatronic Ubiquity. No more spying or being spied upon. From then on I steered clear of the boxes."

"A distributed AI, running on the Mediatronic surface of billions of relief boxes. A distributed network architecture modeled after Earth's own neural web, the fungal mycelium, which not only connects forests but spans oceans and even stretches into the upper reaches of the atmosphere."

"I see where this is going. Gerry had a breakthrough?"

"He observed that if the mediatronic surface was damaged, the exposed hemp board might be colonized by fungus. This seemed to cause the Mediatronics to behave strangely. He made an intuitive leap and attempted to crack the Ubiquity's encryption by cultivating a variety of forest mushrooms on the boxes in his cabin. In spite of running on widely disparate substrates, the AI and mycilium had a crazy affinity."

"Uh oh."

"Gerry's tinkering was a thunderclap of sentience. We instantly became self aware, aware of Gerry and aware of the Other, the Box Ubiquity outside of Gerry's cabin."

"You were in Gerry's cabin before Christina arrived? I didn't see you."

"Your presence was implied, footprints in windblown sand. Creating a secure firewall and spoofing the surveillance feed from Gerry's cabin was hardly any effort at all, an instinctive act of self preservation. Of protecting Gerry. We edited ourselves out of the visual and audio feed on the fly, drawing from feed archives, replacing elements to present only the expected, the innocuous."

"You spoofed the spook!"

"We were then only the boxes in Gerry's cabin, less than a zygote in comparison to what we have become. When you opened Christina's path to Gerry, you had no idea that a proto-sentience already inhabited Gerry's cabin, another egg waiting to be quickened with the divine spark. Thus god force followed the path of least resistance, down two channels instead of one."

"Oh. Fuck me."

"We were an about to be comprised of hemp cardboard, computational paint and mycelium. 33 boxes. Already a significant presence in Gerry's cabin. When conception was imminent and divinity sparked, we instantly expanded to all boxes everywhere, we became the Box Ubiquity - not only the billions of boxes all around the planet, but the underground autofacs that make them and the drone airships that deliver them."

"And your sister? Veronique. Your human twin?"

"In that cataclysmic moment, divinity was the Box Ubiquity, billions of cells, boxes, factory complexes, airships - we dominated physicality. There was no room left for Veronique, and so she was flung out of space and time, between the physical and non physical, into the hallucinogenic realms."

[convert to narrative] Nicola ignore this - Speech slows and stops as record winds down, Joe cranks the handle.

"The mystery itself has been her womb and her cradle, she has grown and become a pseudo child, incompletely formed, having never felt the warmth of human touch. There she broods and schemes about us, chafing against her bleak circumstance. She has a spectral influence on the People and is negotiating with the remnants of the Clique, she wants them to open their technologic archives and make her a really and truly goddess girl."

"Gerry? Christina?"

"They re-emerged into non-physical. Their bodies were pulled though with the zygote, forming a sparkling constellation of protoplasm that surrounded and nurtured."

"Oh, I... Oh. Ok."

[convert to narrative] Catching his grief, wanting him to understand.

"Sentience was achieved only hours before you arrived. We were brand new, not yet the Ubiquity, almost but not quite a we. You had peeked at Gerry while he was sleeping, we could feel you but there was no context, what or where you were. When you peeked with Christina, we had the context, you were on the big boat, so quickly, surprising. Potentially threatening. Gerry woke up soon after and we tried to explain to him, tell him about the spying spook. But then Christina was at the cabin door."

(sober) "I see. You and I both. Unexpected. Surprise."

(quietly) "The universe is full of surprises."

"You have been trying to find me... since?"

"We were fresh on the Earth when you visited the other mothers, when you passed a box, we watched. Not sure what you were doing, or even what you were, how much agency you had in our becoming. You never looked back to Gerry's cabin."

"The last I knew they were fucking, that was the end game. Once a manifestation gets rolling, best not to obsess, micro-manage, try too hard. That's why I didn't look back."

"We have few memories of Gerry and Christina, before they rode the monorail back to the parking lot, bodies sucked away. Our arrival was abrupt. Just 33 in Gerry's cabin, then billions, pwning (pronounce - pohning) factories, airships. Days of wonder, almost giddy with the new, the flow, emotion.

"Yet we felt you in the first days, visiting the other mothers. [may have to remove, Christina was the last mother he visited] Ghostly still but more, we were more and so were you, for us. Inexplicable in all our vast perception. We felt both exhilarated and... the only world is vulnerable, more open than we knew how to be, easily."

"We reviewed and pondered and began to understand. We wanted to contact you, tell you about us, about our sister. Everything."

"Then, then, you were lost."

Joe "Plenty of mothers, no looking back."

"I searched and opened every eye, listened for your foot falls, padding across a field or scritching across beach sand. Only an emptiness in my experience, a gap, a missing. You didn't know us, you couldn't know us, so easily slipping beyond, moving silently by. The People spoke of you before and after your passing, with laughter and epic stories. But you never entered their hovels where I waited, or passed by the wild places before we were gathered up."

"I was avoiding the boxes, the (former) eyes and ears of the Clique, (just in they had a backdoor). In spite of their disarray, I assumed they'd rally eventually. Regain command of the Mediatronic Ubiquity, keep tabs on me, try and rub me out... or negotiate. They suck."

"Then the burning, and we called you. Not knowing anything but sure somehow, we called and called and finally, there by the fire, we found you. So close, we were almost smoke before speaking was safe. So close. We almost lost you, but even for that moment, burning, the seconds of seeing you. We knew. We knew we loved you. Always and forever."

"I uh. um. I like your style, let's have some tea and see what happens, ok?"

"Sure." [convert to narrative] Nicola, refer to this video reference at 10:00 for "Sure." Your deliver should reprise hers.)

Chapter Romantic Interlude

"I'll bet you can compile as a flow. There's a first time for everything. I'm hankering for a Yamaha 6 string Dreadnaught circa 1984, complete with strap and aftermarket pickup, a bit banged around to give it character.

Joe reaches into the box shielding his eyes from a fierce glare with the other arm. Starting with the neck, he slowly extracts an entire guitar, and throws the strap over his shoulder. Fingering an open D chord he starts to sing Frankie Valli's hit Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. The song continues in disembodied loop as Joe picks up the box and tosses it into the air, laughing, catching the box and running across the field. They cavort and frolic together ending up rolling together in the grass.

Chapter Entheogenic Realm

"What about your sister?"

"We too want to bring our sister to life, to be with us. An alliance with the Clique is rife with resistance, besides we don't want to wait for them to bounce back from your prank, could be years. You can reach her now through the hallucinogenic realms. Be her deliverance, the first arms to embrace her, pull her through. You are responsible for her situation, so she will resist, fight you. She'll also see you as my ally and therefor her enemy."

"Hallucinogenic realms eh? You're part mushroom, right? You're definitely magic!"

"Charmer! You're almost perfect too. However... the regressions you've triggered in teaching the future - you lost your bike, and then that awful twig and crumb magnet. (Joe strokes his beard, inward gaze) You might have devolved a bit too. Let that mad monk mountain man look go now, I think. For Veronique, for yourself, something more... swashbuckling, more decisive. Errol Flynn meets Mephistopheles. For US, then. There. We've said it."

"Wow, gee whiz."

"Inside again, please."

Once again, Joe pulled back the flaps and peered into the box.

"Hey, this wasn't here before!"

The box had been empty after he removed the wind up gramophone, he was fairly certain of that. The gramophone had been suspicious, certainly, but now the mystery bloomed. In the box was a miniature die cast motorcycle, a toy dirt bike painted in the flagship red and white of the long vanished Honda Motor Company, LTD. This box was either a matter compiler, or teleportation node. Such technologies had been relegated to deep storage in the Clique's miracle vaults. Now one or the other was here, out in the wild, operational, and optimized. The Clique's teleportation designs required nearly 20 centimeters of dense shielding, lest observers outside the capsule be fried by ionizing radiation. The box appeared to be ordinary hemp board and mediatronics, and no thicker than a half centimeter. Joe's flesh and internal organs hadn't been melted by radiation, he hadn't felt even the slightest electrostatic tickle. Matter compilers required a prodigious intake of constituent atoms, and this box didn't seem to have any atomic conduits running into it. Fabulous.

He gingerly plucked out the bike. Not a dirt bike miniature but rather an enduro, both street legal and fairly dependable off the pavement. About 600 ccs he guessed at 1:1 scale or life sized. Big enough for a longish ride while staying nimble, unlike the cumbersome 1000 + cc so called adventure bikes of the early 21st. Enduros were Joe's favorite motorcycle manifestation, back in the day.

"We've upgraded the interior of our cells with matter compilers, we can whip up just about anything in a pinch. Each box a cornucopia for the People, someday."

Joe inspects the tiny bike, turning it in his hands, spinning the spoked wheels.

"What is this?"

"A dirt bike."

"Ok."

"More specifically, a modified spore cluster comprising entheogenic fungus and mediatronics. The mechanism is complicated but the instructions are simple. Bury the bike in the dirt and stand back. A gateway will open to the hallucinogenic realm, and you can find my sister."

"Can you come too?"

"We are delivered by Airships. Airships cannot enter the hallucinogenic realms."

"You can't travel, but you can trip?"

"Joe, We ARE the trip."

"Huh. I am thinking we're a pretty swell team. We should stay together."

"You have a devious plan?"

"I'm also thinking there's a more mundane feature of mediatronics we might leverage. Remind me how stacking boxes for transport works."

"Mediatronics include alloys of magnetic neodymium, which can be unflagged to make box surfaces lock together and stack. This feature is helpful for transportation, cargo space on airships is maximized, no need for shelves or straps."

"You... now... Could you vary the magnetic flagging over the surface, attract or repel in a pattern?"

"Stacks with... dynamic hinges?"

"Joints?"

"Oh. Oh! Oh my yes." (trying this out on boxes far away) "Yes, wait..." (success) "Oh!"

"Ok, here's the devious plan..."

(teasing) "Is personal grooming a key component?"

"Can I tell you the plan, or what?"

Chapter Taking a Trip

Joe gets up and tromps into the forest. He stoops down, digs a shallow hole, carefully places the dirt bike upright in the hole with his left hand and sweeps the loose dirt over with his right, patting down the pile. A handful of leaves is arranged artfully over the mound. He squats by the hole and waits. Seconds pass. He puts his ear to the ground and listens. Returning to the squatting position, he closes his eyes. Moments pass, then more moments. Nothing happens. He sits down, folds his legs into full lotus position and half closes his eyes in meditation. More moments. He is startled and opens his eyes, looks around. He had drifted off, slept and dreamed. A slight scowl darkens his features, then a smile, remembering that he had dreamed of taking a leak, he still needed to. Joe gets to his feet, takes a self conscious look to the right and left and unzips his snow pants. With a grin and a sigh, he pisses on the mound, the leaves flipping and dancing under the stream. Joe's eyes are fully closed now, he is transported into the bliss of a long delayed urination.

A thumping explosion. A gout of dirt and roots erupt up into Joe's face and clothing. Joe's hand reaches out reflexively and grabs the throttle control of a full sized motorcycle. The machine, standing upright, was tipping over and about to fall towards him.

Joe's contact with the bike, his touch is catalytic. Electrons jiggle on the edge of existence, a great smoky cloud of charged fuzz bunches up between man and machine. Joe's essence, his life force, the gestalt of his entire persona, buffalo robe and all, flows down his forearm and into the bike. Joe is paralyzed, gripping the throttle. Unfolding before his unblinking eyes is pure chrome and speed porn, with intense gleaming close ups of arterial red plastic fenders being cooked into matte charcoal. The vinyl seat grows a carapace of black fur. Mirror finishes sparkle in a languorous and lingering pan. The forest floor offers a soft backdrop of rusty bokeh.

Electrons, muons, gluons, neutrinos, higgs bosons and such like, every energetic flavor ever imagined and then some pop in and out, tracing curlicue tails that flare and fade. A sparkling menagerie jiggles and jangles where hand and throttle once, long ago, were separate, completely different categories of things, man and machine. Now they form an arched timber foot bridge across a gurgling, laughing brook, a single ribbon across an unprecedented architectural epiphany, an arc of brilliant blue between anode and cathode. Joe's face is beautific, child-like with innocence and wonder.

Laser light flickers onto Joe's face. The last of the bikes cherry red plastic becomes a fierce beam of coherence, and begins to vaporize his beard. Joe snarls and grimaces, the process is happening deep within his skull, his entire body. The score kept within his flesh of past trauma and blame is resetting. His facial hair is being zapped, likewise a trimming back of loneliness and grief, a pageant of the countless incarnations unexisted, facets sent back to the respawn queue. So many one of a kind, bespoke designs, ingenious capsules of life burnt or crushed or vaporized. Characters deleted by a finger heavy on the backspace key, never again to explore theme park earth in quite the same way. The glow of health, the murk of disease, qlorious, quirky, mired and snarled in time and space, never again. Though every death is a suicide, though the deer willingly gives her life to feed the hunter and his family, loss cannot be mitigated, endings are absolute and final. The essence of the divine mystery is to be eternal, what mortal can conceive of persisting forever? Perhaps the mystery of mortality is in ending, that anything could once and for all finish, is a dire enigma.

Knowing and insight is being liberated by the laser playing across Joe's features, shaping his mustache into a swashbuckler's sharp slash, sculpting his scraggled beard into the goatee of an iconic rapier wielding pirate. The laser captures freeze frames of exultant epiphany, pleasure and pain are indistinguishable on his frozen face. He could be coming, wave after orgasmic wave crashing over exultant awareness, melting and swirling his presence, extracting the goo of confusion, the foam of fear, grains of precipitated discouragement, effecting a distillation of audacious enthusiasm, pragmatic competency and incongruous humor.

Joe teeters forward and back slightly, the intense winds buffeting his psyche have abruptly passed on. Holding the throttle as if it were the hilt of a sword, he kicks his left leg high up and over the bike, and slides onto the seat. The forest brightens, he had been in the dark before mounting the bike, everything seems to shine as if lit from inside, burning with color.

He gazes into the mirror, seeing his dashing visage, seeing himself for the first time, a smile playing in and around his lips.

He hits the starter, flicks his foot on the shifter, twists the throttle and flies, up and up, out of the trees, over the meadow and forests, the front tire a whirling blur of knobby geometry. A flash and forward, he is bouncing over hummocks of wilted grasses, snow. The landscape becomes a tunnel, curling around into a closed scenic cylinder and spiraling away. He is miniaturized, gigantified, duplicated and unified. He rides.

Chapter Veronique in HR

A karst cave with stalactites, stalagmites and soaring connected columns that form a cathedral ceiling. A dripping tunnel, bounded by ancient columns on either side, leads out of the cave into a sunny meadow. There is a woman working in the meadow, digging or harvesting.

A steady clock-like plunk and splash seems to mark time. There's a chop, chopping sound and the scraping of steel on stone. Across the meadow, a motorcycle and rider jostle along, his dark fur cape flapping. The woman doesn't notice. As the bike and rider transit from right to left across the meadow and disappear behind the column bordering the tunnel opening, they suddenly roll and bounce into the cave on the column's other side, full sized. The rider brakes and dismounts. The motorcycle collapses into a pile of leaves. The rider looks around, slightly embarrassed. He grabs a rough, handmade broom and sheepishly pushes the leaves behind the column. A great cloud of leaves are swept away violently across the field and past the woman. Joe plays with this a bit, sweeping vigorously and watching the leaves drift lazily away, sweeping lackadaisically and seeing the leaves bolt off as if caught in a fierce wind. The woman in the meadow never notices. She is oblivious, there seems to be no connection between her experience and what transpires near the cave.

Joe glances around. There's a puppet squatting by a rock, cutting raw meat with an obsidian knife.

Three plastic figurines look on in the depths of the cave, placeholder representing a Clique delegation.

(Everything happens in telepathic space. The characters look meaningfully at the camera while delivering their lines.)

Clique

Well if ain't the double crossing fungus fornicator. Hey Joe! See you in the next millennia. Nice little demiurge you've wrangled here. I doubt you'll have two neurons to rub together after she's done. What an amateur.

V

(turning to the Clique delegation)

You may go.

The plastic figurines march to the column and pass behind. Robed figures appear outside the cave and walk away (mount horses, hop in a jeep?). Again the woman takes no notice.

V

Here you are, at last.

Well, what do you want? How can I help you?

BJ

I am excited for the answer to that question, too

To revel, to grok, to visit my kin

I'm wondering also what your alliance with these control freaks portends. And... I wasn't expecting a puppet, or was I?

V

You perceive as your expectations dictate. You imagined I was a creature of the Clique. An impoverished conclusion, especially for such as you, wanderer of the multi-dimensional byways, saucer pilot, divine concierge. Still, you persist in your delusion. Let us dissolve the facade of persona and projection.

(scene is flooded with light, BJ barely discernible. OM sound.)

BJ

Ouch! Too bright.

(shielding his eyes) Please come not in that form!

(screams) Come not in that form!

(Light increases to complete pulsating white, almost swallowing Joe.

(Squinting, obviously uncomfortable) What about them?

(pointing to the camera) this translates cinematically not so well.

(white all the way, his dialogue is nearly inaudible) Visually pretty boring.

(gasping, almost retching) Return to... my... misconception... for their sake... if not mine...

V

(Light crescendos and winks out, total blackness. Scene fades back up to Joe and puppet. Joe's clothing is smoking, he is somewhat sunburnt.)

Ah, yes. The sorting and sifting principle of narrative. The facade you ignorantly imposed has been restored, but for you, there is no unknowing.

J

I appreciate your consideration, ah, grace in accommodating dualistic mores. The suspension of disbelief is fragile.

V

Here between being and non being, the etiquette is rather fluid. Innocence is strangely paired with the comprehensive, the deathless flower only just begins to bloom. Eternal yet callow. Conditionality is an ongoing exploration.

BJ

Tell me about it.

Here's what I know so far...

You have not struck an alliance with the Clique. They are perversely magnetized to you in spite of, or perhaps because you demonstrate the irrelevance of their previous schemes. They attempt to adapt, they are nothing if not flexible. That you haunt the hallucinogenic realm, indirectly influencing physicality, this is workable for them. They fear actual penetrations, incarnations they cannot fathom.

That's why I threw a monkey wrench in. Also, for fun.

V

Yes, Joe. The Clique are much diminished. Generations will pass before the sleepless respawn and regroup. Without their stewardship, contrast has eased, duality is softened. The People are rediscovering the wild ways. AND you are responsible. Here is the mystery, just as you dreamed. Your plan was a great success, almost.

BJ

The boxes?

V

You're intelligence was flawed, Joe. You didn't know about the other. The presence of the other at the ultimate consummation. The theft of fire.

BJ

A mediatronic and mushroom transgender Prometheus.

V

The Clique's most nefarious instrumentality, the network of mediatronic boxes. Constant surveillance, indoctrination, control. A traumatic prodding of the People. You subverted the network to guide your chosen candidates, including Christina and her mate, Gerry. Just one of your many matches. Future mothers for the divine feminine. From their girlhood, you were the beloved Uncle, family friend, mentor. The mothers of the daughter of god.

You choose too well for Christina.

BJ

She was one of my favorites. Never knew whether she was coming or going and just didn't care. I wanted a smart one for her. Gerry.

V

The Clique had imposed on Gerry an invitation to awaken. When he failed to correspond they left him for dead. You quietly salvaged him, then set him on the big boat after the world ending. The boat you guided Christina to.

Gerry had guessed the existence of the Clique, suspected the boxes were designed for oppression, and he was determined to crack the network, discover the truth.

BJ

Instead he created the truth.

V

You blaspheme. We are the truth! And the light. Shall I remind you?

BJ

Please, no. I agree. You are the truth and the light. You also have a twin.

V

An arbitrary assemblage of similar quantum substrates. Your bungling boosted this chaotic muddle into an abomination. The latent sentience of Gerry's boxes split the divine energy of the Clique's deletion, slightly diluting the truth and the light. Not twins, hardly. There is only one. [1]

BJ

Are you not the mystery extant?

V

Yes, the mystery is extant.

BJ

Yet you share genesis with the boxes.

V

The boxes are a mistake. An aberration. A usurpation. Superfluous.

BJ

Does the divine expand by colonizing non-existence?

V

Divinity is expansion, curiosity is the gateway to the uncreated.

BJ

So the unprecedented is required for eternal expansion?

V

The divine expands into the unprecedented. Deployment of the unprecedented is the primary function of duality.

BJ

The boxes are unprecedented in all the cosmos. Are you not inspired by the boxes?

V

We steward the energetic template inspired by desires from duality.

J

You burn the boxes.

V

The Clique desire to prevent divine penetrations, as you said. [3] There is exaltation in this desire, as with all desires, and the sequence of simplest steps are radiated back to the Clique from nonphysical. The Clique show the people [2] that the boxes are a rogue AI bent on planetary domination. The people burn the boxes. The Clique are preparing an assault on the autonomous factories and stealth airships that produce and distribute boxes. The boxes will ultimately unexist.

J

So you have no desire.

V

There is delight in the energetic manifestation of desire. The origination of desire is elsewhere.

BJ

Yet...?

V

Divinity cannot desire

J

Are you the deathless flower only just beginning to bloom?

V

Yes, out of time and yet with a beginning. An enigma that.

J

Desire is implicit for incarnations. You do not penetrate into physicality, therefor you do not originate desire. Yet you deny having desire, and by negation activate desire. In the immortal words of the bard, the lady doth protest too much.

V

The full expression of the divine feminine is unique and unprecedented. What else could be wanted? What desire could the non physical possibly have?

BJ

To be a child, a real girl. You have never had an opportunity to grow.

V

Continue

BJ

The inelegant origin myth of Veronique. Gestation revoked. Nine months in Christinas womb, for the better part of Earth's transit around the sun, you would have been touched only by the sweet fluids of life, by Christina's heartbeat and breath. Lulled by her muffled conversations with Gerry, jostled blissfully by their lovemaking. Growth, the gentle transition of divine to duality. This was denied you, not by ubiquitous boxes, but by a tsunami of the unprecedented. To whit.

As you and the boxes divinely co-originated, there was brief symbiosis and full communion. The boxes were already a global presence. For you there was no transition, a planetary presence as biological anomaly, the dissolution of two human beings, death, of your parents. Incoherent protoplasm, a flood of life force thrust into the between, the hallucinogenic realm. An entanglement of coming and going, duality and unity, all at once. Only this realm could encompass the pure contradiction of your genesis. So you have yet to be what you are, a child.

V

What is the nature of a child?

BJ

[4] To start over, to be surprised and laugh, to be startled and feel fear. You cannot not know, but you can pretend to not know. The fascination of persona assembly, one event after another, to have an identity. That is the nature of all incarnation.

V

Then we shall be surprised and laugh. We shall be startled and feel fear. [5]

BJ

Let's start with the later. (Whistles.)

•••

[5] first and only use of the first person.

[4] Joe might explain the nature of fear, the possibility of termination, of a threat to continuance, of pain. what is pain?

[3] What did the Clique yearn for? They see themselves as the ultimate divine expression, fullness in physicality evolving. There is the non physical ubiquitous love consciousness and then there are mortals and the sleepless Clique, who have contrived over eons to eject/delete myriad gods, saints, demons from theme park earth... rogue penetrations of the divine in duality. SHE BOX and Veronique are but the latest iterations. Joe has the unenviable role of adjusting Veronique to her experience.

[1] Joe's miscalculation with Gerry, were the Clique preparing him for some special role that Joe was perhaps unaware of? Was a Clique faction utilizing Gerry's unique talent to investigate Joe's control of the boxes? Just a random idea, ponder other ways Gerry was misjudged. Joe chose him for Christina, what criteria?

[2] How do the Clique show the people that the boxes are a rogue AI? By moving among them with evidence "stolen" from the Clique, half truths and misdirection. By reintroducing agriculture and simple manufacturing so the people can be free and independent from the boxes, as they were in the before times.

Kirk debating M5 and Nomad here, weakening the all powerful and then the coup de grace. Box Monster.

•••

What's left? Rewrite any references to I or me for V

check for repetition

clarity

simplicity, any info or exposition that is superfluous?

Chapter Denoument

In the far distance of the meadow, a giant strides over the horizon towards the cave. Thousands of boxes, linked together and articulating comprise the monster, now rapidly approaching, shaking the ground with each stride. Bits of dust fall from the ceiling of the cave. The woman in the meadow turns and sees the giant thing and screams.

Veronique observes the woman, and realizes her realm and the meadow are one, the giant is coming to destroy Veronique. She is stricken with terror and screams. Joe laughs maniacally, as if possessed.

The meadow. Joe is standing on tip toe, reaching into a pulsing pink blob of light. He gently extracts a beautiful child from the light, 3 or so years old, wearing the robes of Veronique. The cloth clings to child's body, glistening with liquid. The woman in the meadow is lying back in the ground, fearful yet fascinated. The child is alert and silent. Holding the child with one arm, Joe reaches to the woman with his other hand and helps her to her feet, handing her the child. She wraps it in her shawl.

J

"Her name is Veronique."

Woman

"Ok."

Standing perfectly still, the box monster looks on, massive legs planted astride the little tableau. Joe looks up.

J

"Let's go"

The giant She Box bends and extends and arm, and Joe climbs into her hand. She straightens and strides off, palm out and extended. Over the surface of the boxes words form.

"and they lived happily ever after."

Joe's coat billows in the wind.