The New Scum Present:

Copyright 2010 By The New Scum Productions

Most, if not all, rights reserved.

Http://www.TheNewScum.ORG
Http://www.ZachElmblad.COM

Kalamazoo, Michigan

These words shall not be made available in a public forum

without written consent of the copyright holder, except in short
excerpts for professional critique. Share, and share alike, but profit
not.

~1~
 Screw Plagiarism,
and FUCK censorship.

A Puzzle of Squares.

Squares 0 – 5

0
Preordination

1
Life

2
Death

3
Gaia

4
Logos

5
Nightmares

~2~
 square zero. preordination

Fate. Do you believe in it?

What is fate? A map? A framework? An absolute?

Some think our only fate is to die.

What if the only thing you could do with your life was end
it? Not because of some misguided and pathetic illusion that
nobody cared about you, or because of the emotional ebb and flow
of being alive. Not because you wanted to, necessarily, but
because you had to. Some things are far beyond our control, it
seems. Only a fool rules out the outlying possibilities.

~3~
 It isn't so often that we sit by ourselves and honestly –
truthfully – re-think the choices and labors of our lives. We may
remember, we may choose to forget. We are the sum of our past
and present, and we are those forging the future – our future. Not
just ours in the first person possessive, but in the manifestation of
the cumulative whole all in the same. Just as surely as we will rot
to dust, so will our names be spoken long after we're dead. We are
the progeny of destiny, as much as we are the ink that marks his
book. We are not merely flesh and blood, but minds beyond the
body. Carriers of a message, and bearers of history's standard.

Free will?

Sure. We have it. Your mind is your own. Nobody can

take it away from you. Manipulate it, though? Shape it's narrow
view? Provide it goals, and feed to it persuasion? Lay traps, force
conjecture, distract and beguile. These are our weaknesses. The
weakness of those depending on the will of others to complete
their own. We are forever tied together in this life, all those we
have lived, and all those we will live. We, in essence, are forever.
New iterations of the same past.

Most wouldn't take offense to that.

He did. He will, he wants to.

~4~
 But he doesn't know how to make it stop.

Yet.

The wheels of the cosmos turned, the great giant clockwork

of the ages. To those wise to the ways of the universe, time is only
a context. Reality only a pinpoint on a map of endlessly iterating
chance occurrences. That's how they built it from nothing, after
all. Out of nothing came the chance for something, and out of that
chance for something came the chance for anything. That was the
truth of the matter. You could call them gods, but they would
laugh at you. Even your concept of god is a diluted pinprick of
intuition compared to their light.

Steadfastly maintaining our cute little Earthbound musings

and squabblings with one another existing as tiny ants of
insignificance and misplaced aggression. The real movers and
shakers, the real people behind the shrouds, the grand architects,
and the clock-makers; they know the time. They have seen the
beginning and ending of countless existences you couldn't even
fathom. The rise and fall of galaxies, the shifting of star clusters,
the very breath of life itself across all reaches of time and space.
They silently watch, maintaining the clockwork as it marches it's
solemn stride.

~5~
 Does one walk a path of preordination, or a path of
illumination? Are we learning, or simply uncovering? Where
does destiny fit in the mechanics of the universe? If all that is,
was, and will be was planned out in some fabulous spark; what
would be the point of living inside the bubble? What would be the
point of even having existed at all? To prove what? To what end?
From what premise? What would the world look like from outside
that sphere of influence, outside that fragile construct of
momentary cohesion?

He felt that urge, that pull He wanted to know what the big
picture was, but not what the 'big picture' was to his narrow-
minded college professors and mentally cataleptic peers. He didn't
know if he was different, or if he just felt different. That's what
they told him he was. They told him he was disturbed. Grossly
cynical. Prone to nihilistic delusions.

Delusional. That's what they called him.

To him, it was the essence of his being to consider

everything they held true as a delusion. He felt like his mind was
trapped inside a useless container, a constrictive vessel that would
not allow himself a level of comfort he desired. The human body
isn't equipped to feel clockwork of that magnitude. He couldn't
think it, he only felt it.

~6~
 It caused him pain, now. Suffering. He was not among
friends. In reality, in the context of those around him, he was a
miscreant. A delinquent. A rebel type, a dangerously free-thinking
deviant. A sociopathic monster. A person who dared to say that
they were, indeed, right about things which you were wrong about.
A person to be kept far, far away from normal folks.

Humans feel threatened by the preponderances of time.

They are not meant to think on those levels. Earth is a paradigm, a
fill-in-the-blank form. Our existence, a checklist on the cosmic
clipboard. A proving ground for an engineer of the very fabric of
existence.

He knew that he knew it, but it felt like he was

remembering something he had forgotten long ago, or maybe like
he was learning about something he was barely able to perceive.
Perhaps someone or something was trying to tell him some
important information, some missing piece of a puzzle he was
putting together in his mind.

If one thing was true, it was that he had plenty of time to

think. Time was one thing he had an awful lot of.

~7~
 square one. life

He was a man. His name isn't really that important, hell he

could have been anybody. Not even who he was is either
interesting, nor important. He was just another of many that got
randomly selected to be a guinea pig in some sort of bizarre
experiment called life that he could have never dreamed up, or
properly explained afterwards. But it did happen to him. He
would be certain of that soon enough.

He stepped out the door onto the front porch. He nearly

slipped on the accumulated ice, reacting quickly to regain his
footing. He gently bit his lip as he gazed off somewhere toward
the horizon. He wasn't looking at anything in particular, just
looking.

In his mind, he played through images of grabbing the

~8~
maintenance man's head, a hand on each side, and forcefully
thrusting his knee into the lazy bastard's face. That'd remind him
to put the salt down, wouldn't it? He could feel knee give way to
nose, which in turn gave way to bone. He didn't just see it, he felt
it. Like it was actually happening. He could even feel the warmth
of blood soaking through his jeans as he bashed away, loving every
second. He could feel a new tooth loosen and give way with every
thrust of his kneecap. He made no sound as he dropped the man's
head, which smacked loudly against the wooden deck rails. He
watched as a pool of blood formed around the man's head, slowly
passing the blue collar of his stupid work shirt, forming eddies as it
flowed past his matted and greasy mop of hair.

He shook his head and coughed, realizing he was now

standing in the front yard of the halfway house. He thought, again,
but more lucidly and self-aware than he had the time before. It
was two different extremes of self-awareness. The first, merely
temporal and imaginary, the second existential and mental. Full
mental awareness of his own body and actions- in reality, not in a
daydream..

“How long have I stood here? Just looking off into space, man?
Fuck!”

He said it aloud, even though no one was within earshot

with the exception of the birds in the leafless trees. The birds

~9~
whistled the tune of the day as his boots made time crunching
through the fresh snow on the sidewalks. It was a two-block walk
to the bus stop, a fifteen minute ride across town to the burger
place he worked at. It was in this small amount of time every day
that he truly lived. Sure he might have been alive the whole time,
but as far as he was concerned, this was the only bit of real
freedom he had anymore. His freedom had always been his life,
and having his freedom limited had made his life seem smaller and
more insignificant than his pride had let him feel before “the
incident.”

That's what he called it. When he talked to all the

therapists, it was understood that he would simply refer to the last
three years of his life as a cumulative “incident.” He had stopped
talking to his parents long before any of it happened. This incident
had left him without a home, a dollar, or a friend to his name.
Sure there still might have been people who called him friend to
his face, but they couldn't accept him into their homes after what
he'd done. Friends and loves lost, drywall fist holes and boots
through doors. It wasn't even a memory to him. He honestly
couldn't remember most of it, just an alcohol and drug induced blur
of three years. And that one memory he couldn't lose. The worst
one. The feeling of knowing everything that happened, but not
knowing how, when, or why. It had all come to him at once as a
big ocean of memory snapshots as he curled closer to the fire he
had apparently made just minutes before. He was bleeding from

~10~
the neck.

He tried to help the therapists. He told them stories, but all

of them were just made up from pieces that he recollected. He told
them about the people he lived and worked with, the people he
drank with, the names and faces, and the endless parties. He
remembered things as brief whisps of memory, like he was
grabbing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in his mind, but there were no
connections. No pieces cut with a curve to fit together. The pieces
were just squares, he had no idea how they fit together. He would
imagine things, looking down and to the right, with the furthest of
far-away stares as he remembered “things” ten to twelve at a time.
Flashes of memory, some as mundane as the sound of his foot
smashing a door; some much more vivid and sensual, lasting from
seconds to minutes in length.

He knew he had done some pretty bad things, and as he

remembered them he wept. It was a double punishment to his
conscience. Not only did he have to re-live the painful memories
of his past, he had to be punished for them without fully knowing
what it was he was being punished for. His charges were
malicious destruction of property, aggravated assault, attempted
suicide, and breaking an entering. There were court-room
appearances, pleas made and bargained, institutionalization and
more drugs. Different drugs than he used to take, but drugs none-
the-less. Drugs that did the same damn thing the last ones had

~11~
done to him. It made it seem like nothing he did was real. Like he
had broken the gap between reality and imagination. Anything
could happen, and he could never remember if it had actually
happened, or if he was just imagining it. Such strange things,
memories. So real, yet so not real.

“Drugs,” he thought out loud, again.

“Drugs will be the death of me.”

He looked at his hands as he walked, as he tended to do.

The crunch of his boots served a natural rhythm to the chirping
birds and the sound of the bus as it rolled up and those loud brakes
overtook everything like a screaming electric guitar. He hacked
again as he took his last swallow of free, but cold, winter air before
entering the atmosphere of bus air. He scraped the gob of cigarette
tar and mucus from his teeth with his tongue, and spat into his
hand, wiping it on the front of his jeans. It was Friday. He was
allowed a home visitation for good behavior, and he had chosen
this Sunday.

~12~
 He hated his mom, but it was the only way he could get out
of his halfway house other than work. They wouldn't let him leave
except to go to work, and he had one of those things on his ankle
so they knew where he was all the time. He didn't know who
“they” were, because it was always a different one. Some guy, in a
suit, a lab-coat, a uniform, or even just normal clothes- some guy,
telling him what to do. If he didn't do it, he was berated and,
sometimes, even abused. He did what they said now, anyone who
told him what to do. “They” told him what to do.

He got one day a month, if “they” judged his behavior to be

satisfactory. One day where it was OK for him to leave the house
without getting tracked down by dogs and men with guns and
badges. That was his freedom. The twenty minutes of travel time

~13~
from home to work and work to home, and his one “home
visitation” a month. He called it home, but it wasn't really his
home. Neither the halfway house, or his parent's. He hadn't really
had a home for years. It was just sleeping on couches for nearly a
decade. His “home visit” was to his parent's house, a house he
hadn't lived in since he was sixteen. What he did know, though,
was where the drugs were in that home.

His mom was a pill-popper. One of those old, angry, fat

ladies who just keep eating pills. More every day, from
psychological misdiagnoses, and from psychosomatic “pains.” It
was pill, burger, pill, burger, pill, vodka for that lady. He hated
everything about her. Her voice, the subtle choices of bitch
language, the fat rolls leaking from her shirt, the sweat stains, but
worst of all the smell. It was a pungent, musty smell. One that he
could never forget, like a gym sock soaked in vinegar and thrown
into an open latrine. That smell permeated the house, and he had
smelled it since childhood. He spent his time outside, back then,
far away from the smell and that horrible woman.

“Fuck.” He swallowed, and clenched a fist as he looked out the bus

window, just off to the right.

“I fucking hate her.”

He didn't remember himself being so violent, so prone to

~14~
anger in his imagination. Maybe this was the new drugs. They let
his violent side out. That's probably what the therapists would say,
but they didn't really know him. He didn't really even know
himself anymore. Just that ocean of square memories without
connection. Memories as real to him as the seat he sat on in the
bus, as real to him as the burgers he had flipped for eight hours a
day, five days a week. The fast food places were the only people
that would hire him anymore, the only people that didn't check
references. All it would have taken was one phone call to any of
his previous employers to guarantee he wouldn't get the job.

He rode the bus home, and walked past his boot tracks from
earlier. He imagined seeing himself as he walked back, giving
himself a high-five as he passed. He walked up the stairs, and
looked down at the ice, still unsalted. He didn't break into violent
reverie this time, he just instinctively grabbed for the bucket of salt
near the door. He scooped a cupful, and scattered it in front of the
door. It looked like tiny marbles thrown on a sheet of smoky glass.
He watched as they rolled and came to a stop. He watched longer
as they melted tiny holes into the glass, slowly shrinking in size.
For the brief moment in time between when the hole was made and
the marble of salt completely disappeared, that quick instant, he
thought, that was when the marble had finally made a home for
itself, only to be dissolved away. A springtime smudge, scrubbed
away with a deck-brush on the first sunny afternoon of May. It
was the first time he had thought cohesively about what he was

~15~
going to do.

“I'll break into that medicine cabinet when she's eating.” he

whispered at the salt disappearing into it's newfound home.

“I'll find the best sounding stuff I can, I'll eat it all, and I'll
die”

He said it, and as he said it, he thought about what that meant.

Death. He had thought about it a lot. Before the incident,

he had been in and out of Philosophy classrooms where the
concept of death was dealt with like one was writing a fact sheet
on a tourist attraction. Finality, the end of life. That's what he
knew it as. He didn't want to reset, he didn't want to shut down.
He wanted to jam a chemical screwdriver into his motherboard and
end it. He didn't want it to be messy, like with a gun. He had
already tried cutting his throat, that was one of his memory
squares, but that obviously hadn't worked. He woke up again.
That was the first time he woke up after the incident. When the sea
of memory squares had come into his mind to float there and
torment him. He didn't want anything to do with it anymore. He
found himself, at times, wishing that his crimes against humanity
had rendered him terrifying enough to warrant a death sentence.
He was a petty criminal. One deemed safe to slowly release back
into a “society” which wanted no part of his presence.

~16~
 He shook himself out of it again, and walked in the door
and up the stairs, boots clunking up the stairs marking the time to a
different rhythm than that of the birds and the crunch of the snow,
but a sad, solitary thud of a boot on a stair. He unlocked the door
to his “private residence.”

“More like private hell,” he chortled to himself.

“That's what this is. My own private hell.”

He didn't believe in god, nothing of the sort. The

Philosophy had beaten that out of him. “They” wanted him to
believe in god. They even tried rationalizing with his philosophies.
Even if it isn't real, and it's just a metaphor, it's a good metaphor,
isn't it? A good way to live, through the teachings of Jesus and all
that. He thought this Jesus guy was kind of a pussy, turning his
cheek and crying in gardens and stuff like that. A big “boo-hoo”
story full of needless torture, guilt, and inhumanity. His mom had
never brought him to church, he didn't even know what religion
was until his friends at school had talked about going to church on
the playground.

Hell, to him, was a symbol. A symbol of what someone

feared, hated, and loathed- a symbol of oppression, servility, and
malcontent. A symbol which rendered itself nicely into his reality.

~17~
This horrible place they called a halfway house. It was prison, let
there be no mistake. He was allowed out only for work and his
one day, dependent on behavior. His behavior wasn't good,
generally, as he had never quite gotten used to his freedom being
taken away from him. They kept telling him he'd get it back, that
they'd “restore his civil rights,” but he knew it was a bunch of
bureaucratic garbage. He'd always be on some list, somewhere, at
the Airport, the DMV, the car rental place, from something his
potential employers called a “background check.” He knew it was
over, he wasn't free anymore. And that's why he wanted to end it.

“I just want it to end.”

That's what he said when he went to sleep Friday night.

He woke up, Eight in the morning on a Saturday, for his

“day off.” Which, at the halfway house, meant his day of chores.
His list that week was daunting: Morning inspection of his private
residence, coffee in the dining room, calisthenics, breakfast in the
dining room, three hours of laundry duty, lunch in the dining room,
four hours of “cleaning” which meant anything from urinal
scrubbing to dusting the cobwebs from the storage room, dinner in
the dining room, and two hours of “social time,” yet again in the
dining room, which was the worst of all for him. He loathed his
fellow criminals. They were a savage lot of petty thieves, con
artists, and shifty-eyed borderline sociopaths. It wasn't that he
couldn't associate with those type of people, he was all of those

~18~
things. But they were stupid, and he smart. Something he couldn't
help. He had always said that the only good thing his mother did
was keep books around. Despite her large list of irritating
idiosyncrasies, she had been an avid reader of the type that like to
own their books, and she had developed quite a large library by the
time he had reached early adolescence, and he would walk to the
park and read for hours to escape the smell. By consequence, he
was verbose and literate, which marginalized him from his
mongoloid compatriots.

He fought through his Saturday like a Homeric warrior,

gaining kleos through vanquishing his enemies. He slept soundly,
but before he fell asleep, he broke his day's silence with the same
words he had ended the day before, and the last hundred days or so
before it.

“I just want it to end.”

The pills he took from his mother's well-stocked medicine

cabinet were a mixed handful, mostly painkillers of varying
strengths and lists of side-effects. He read every bottle, matching
it up with his repository of drug knowledge gained throughout the
years. He recognized one in particular, Oxycontin, because he had
an allergic reaction to it when he tried it for “recreational
purposes” a few years back. One of his memory squares was a
snapshot of an apartment bathroom where he had convulsed,

~19~
naked, in the bathtub for the better part of an hour. He had nearly
died. If he took enough, he figured, this would surely do him in-
especially with the help of the rest of it and a few swallows of the
Jack Daniel's he had poured into his empty thermos while his mom
was taking a shit. They never checked his thermos, he noticed,
because every day it was filled with coffee. They had no reason to
suspect otherwise. He knew better than to bring a bottle in, they'd
check his backpack for sure, but they always knew he only drank
coffee from that thermos. That's how he got the pills in, too,
wrapped up in what seemed like a thousand layers of plastic wrap
he had taken from the deli sandwiches his mom had bought them
for dinner.

They never checked the thermos.

It wasn't a hard decision to come to, death. As far as he

was concerned, it was just going to end. It's what he had imagined,
what he was certain was going to happen. He'd die in his sleep,
they'd find him in the morning when he didn't come down for
coffee, and he'd rot in the ground, somewhere, wherever they put
him. Life ends, and you're dead. No more drama, no more
bullshit. Game over. It was easy, he figured. He'd fall into a
somniferous daze and never snap out of it. It'd all just end- no
pain, no sadness, no burdens, no regrets. No memories. It seemed
so funny that he had fought so long to stay alive, doing what it
takes- working, making money, spending money, doing drugs, just

~20~
getting through the days. He never really wanted to do anything
with his life, he almost seemed angry that he was alive to begin
with- he had no purpose, no agenda, no reason. Nothing drove
him, not love or anguish , not profit or loss, not good or ill. He just
ate his food, did his drugs, read his books, and lived like it was a
chore to be alive.

It was the tiny, insignificant, capsules in his hand that made

him laugh. A loud, hearty laugh that reverberated through his
private residence. It seemed so funny that these tiny things were
his ticket out of here. He was so big, and they so small. Surely it
was funny to him, if not morbidly funny, that after all the endless
toil and sacrifice of life, with all the memories, it would all be over
a few short hours after he swallowed these innocent looking pills.

He thought about the marbles of salt on the porch, how the

pills would make little homes for themselves in his gut, sinking
into acid-soaked piles of chewed up burgers and fries. Making a
little home for themselves inside him, for that brief moment in time
while a pill was busy being a pill and not a silent dissolved
assassin. He shook himself out of the daydream, and arranged the
pills in a row, left to right, from smallest to largest. He looked at
them for a while, and he mused to himself about which pills would
find homes in which piece of his stomach's real estate. He
imagined them buying and selling plots of land to each other,
maybe inventing new ways to shield themselves from the

~21~
inevitable digestion, like little people living in a world they didn't
know was toxic to their very being.

He thought they might become altruistic and sacrifice

themselves to re-patch the thinning coatings of their loved ones
with their own coatings. He decided to wait, just another day. He
hid the pills in the spine of the only book he was allowed to have
in his private residence, a brown vinyl-bound Gideon bible.

“Nice guys, the Gideons, giving out books and what not,” he had
always thought.

He wished it was something a bit more to his liking, like

the Iliad, or maybe some Vonnegut, but at least he was allowed to
have a book – even if it was the Bible. He only read Revelation,
but he read it over and over again, every day. He thought that was
the best part, and it reminded him of one of his memory squares,
which was the peak of a mushroom trip he had during the incident.
From being opened and closed so many times, the vinyl on spine
had escaped the cheap adhesive, providing a nice little pill-sized
space when the book was opened and left on the desk. It was like a
little tent for the pills to camp out in before they made their final
move into their burger town to live and die as what had now
become anthropomorphic pill-people in his daydream.

He wasn't having second thoughts, it was just good to know

~22~
that he was finally in control of his mortality. He felt free again,
and he wanted to feel that feeling of freedom that he hadn't felt for
so long. He called in to work sick for the next morning. He knew
it wouldn't matter anyway. What would they do? Fire him? He'd
be dead the next morning, sure as the spring thaw. He called his
ex-girlfriend, the one that gave him herpes, and made a date.

He ran away from the halfway house that night. He didn't

go far, just far enough to make his date at the coffee shop down the
street. He told her he was going to do it. It was an expression of
his freedom. She told him she thought it was a stupid idea to run
away again, but she promised to meet him anyway. She was the
only one he could talk to lucidly, because she wasn't a “they.” She
had a name, Becky, and he knew that name. He used to say it to
himself sometimes just because it was the only name he could
remember other than his mother's. She had a face, too, a face that
could have belonged to a thousand girls. An oval face, with
perfectly proportioned eyes, nose, and mouth. Her ears were a
little small, but no one ever saw it because she kept her brown hair
brushed straight down the sides of her face, framing the perfection
and concealing the imperfection. He never looked her in the eyes,
it was one of those weird qualities that fit him into the “shifty-eyed
criminal” archetype. She had been weird about it at first, but
eventually accepted it for the simple quirk it was. That's the thing
he liked best about her. She didn't care about stupid shit. He was
already resigned to his death long before he met her, she was the

~23~
lady that worked the check-in desk at the halfway house.

At least, before he “mysteriously” contracted the same

sexually transmitted disease she had, which confirmed “their”
suspicion of fraternizing aroused by the fact that the two had been
spending a great deal of time together around the house. She was
the only one that could ever rouse a conversation out of him. They
had only had sex once, the first time he ran away from the halfway
house. She had been a promiscuous one, which he had always
figured was why she had herpes. She wasn't a spiteful person, she
was a good person, and she wouldn't have sex with anyone who
didn't have herpes.

She loved him, at least what she knew of him, and that was

~24~
enough. He didn't care about herpes, just another scar on his
already scarred body. He was going to die soon, he wanted it, he
just hadn't quite figured out how he was going to do it yet, and he
couldn't mention it to the therapists, they'd put him on lock-down
for sure. It had happened once already. He had to completely
convince them he wasn't suicidal anymore and he very much
wanted to live, and twenty days passed before they would let him
sleep in a private residence again. On lock-down, you had to sleep
in a well-lit room full of bunk beds and built of windows. It was
on the third floor where the security guards, physician, and
therapists were. “Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week,
fifty two weeks a year- to take care of you, to watch you, and to
help you regain your civil rights.” That's what they used to say to
him. He thought it was funny. They didn't like it when he
laughed, they said it was recalcitrant. He knew what that word
meant, but he pretended he didn't, and he laughed at it like all the
mongoloids would laugh at him for using a big word. It amused
and entertained him to invent himself for the therapists. They had
huge files on him and everything- all lies, intricate and perfect.

The first time he ran away from the halfway house was to
fuck her. He had saved up for a hotel room, and that's where they
found him- she was long gone by the time the cops came to drag
him back. One time was enough, and it was less than a month
before his first outbreak, and the house physician recognized it
immediately. She was the only known carrier in the house, and it

~25~
was easy to put the pieces of that puzzle together. She lost her job,
he lost his only friend in the world with a face and a name- his
only friend in reality, although he had swathe of friends in his
memories.

There were many familiar faces in his memory squares, and

many familiar names, he just couldn't quite match them up to his
own satisfaction- or “their's.” He knew they'd find him, they
always did. It was that stupid thing on his ankle- he could never
remember what it was called. Some stupid, euphemistic name, like
“GPSBuddy 2” He didn't like to look at it, so he didn't. He knew
he only had a short time to say what he needed to say before he
would be apprehended and dragged back “home.”

“Did you bring me what I asked you for?”

“Yeah,” she said, as she slid a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a set
of earbud headphones across the table, towards his cup of coffee.

“I'm doing it.” he said, staring into the coffee, stirring the drink
slowly. Clockwise, first, then counter-clockwise, to watch the
waves ripple and crack.

“Doing What?”

“It”

~26~
“Oh. It. The big it. The end.”

“Yeah. It.”

She started to watch the same ripples he watched, as if she

could possibly see what he saw in those ripples. They had
intellectualized suicide to a moot point. She knew there was no
convincing him not to, she had tried, and it was impossible. She
knew what he'd say next.

“The only thing that makes me feel alive is the certainty that I have
the ultimate power over my own life,” he said, sullenly, as if on
cue. She could have said the words right along with him, and she
almost did.

She feigned contemplation, neither of them breaking their

locked gaze on the coffee ripples, but both of them instinctively
soaking up the world of their peripheral vision.

“You know my stance on that, and you know I understand yours,”

she said, following a prolonged and heavy, but barely-audible sigh.

“That's why I asked you to come here.”

“I had a feeling, it'd been a few weeks since you last called me”

~27~
“I had to convince them I was improving”

“Naturally”

“I love you.”

“No you don't. You love what you wish we could be.”

“I know, but for me, that's all love is.” He gave her the rare
glimpse into the eyes he seldom gave to anyone.

“You and your Philosophy.” She smiled.

She smiled, because this is what their conversations were

always like. That's what she liked most about him, but she never
mentioned it to him. He had a way with words which made her
feel as if she were in close personal contact with a character in a
brilliant artist's masterpiece. She could look past his scars and see
him as he was, before the incident, as a potentiality that took a
wrong turn in a decisive divergence along the road more traveled.
Not a road of contemplative stoic virtue, but a road of earthly
pleasure, and violent reverie. It was his world. She knew it, and
she accepted it. She knew that was what he wanted from her, an
intellectual love. He would have found it disconcerting and
emotionally fruitless for her to be physically in love with him.

~28~
“Philosophy doesn't matter when you're six feet under ground”

“That's an epitaph for you.”

“Give me a pine box with no marker”

“I,” she paused dramatically, not because she was melodramatic,

but because she wanted to give him what she knew he wanted,
some sort of closure fantasy to his fantasy of a life written down on
the countless legal pads in his file. She had seen that file, and
knew the words for the lies they were.

“I love you, too”

For a second, she thought he'd cry. She fancied he would.

She wanted to, deep down, be the one who finally talked him out
of this stupid suicidal sacrificing himself to himself like a god
thing, but she knew it only played further into his intellectual
martyrdom. He didn't cry, he got up suddenly and moved to an
adjacent table.

“They're coming, you'd better go.”

She went to the bathroom and cried silently to herself, and

she was proud she had the strength to have lasted that long. She

~29~
listened to the sounds of him, the polymorphic artist's ideal, being
carried off by very real, very reality-entrenched men with guns and
badges. It was muffled by the door, but she could imagine him
submitting, but still being dragged off like a recalcitrant miscreant.
He had no rights, he was working to restore them.

“His act of defiance in running away was a demonstration. We feel

that this time it was an act of an acceptance. He didn't go far, he
knew we would come for him. It was an act of boundary testing.
A result of partially restored civil rights on his home visitation.”
That's what the therapists said. He had kept a straight face for the
whole thing, except for that moment they said “home.”

“I have no home,” he wanted to say.

“I want it to end,” he wanted to say.

“I don't know what you're all talking about, I just went to get a cup
of coffee,” is what he said.

In reality.

He acted dumb, and he laughed when they said

“demonstration,” because he always laughed at the “big words.”
That's what he called any word they said with more than three
syllables. They didn't even know he knew what the word

~30~
“syllable” meant. He knew it, and he had planned it that way. He
didn't even graduate from college, and these men had spent half
their lives in college to toil on his behalf. He figured he would
invent a challenging case for them, one with twists and turns, half
based on reality, and half based on fiction. What they didn't know
is that he couldn't really tell the two apart anymore. They asked
him questions, and he timely responded with prudent lies as they
scribbled on legal pads. He was allowed to return to his private
residence.

As he unlocked the door, his eyes went immediately to the

open bible on his desk, which lay undisturbed right as he had left
it. His thermos was still placed on the nightstand, right where he
left it, between the lamp and the alarm clock. Right as he left
them. He sat on the bed and took one last look at the room around
him. His “private residence.” He hated the euphemisms.

“I just want it to be over.”

He let the words roll out of his mouth like a puff of smoke,
to no one, as always. He had become accustomed to intelligent
debate with himself.

“Soon, it'll all be over.”

He took the pills out, one by one, the little pill-people. He

~31~
re-arranged them on the desk, in front and parallel to the bible,
opened to the first chapter of the book of revelation. Left to right,
smallest to largest. He glanced over to the thermos, but decided
not to pick it up quite yet. He had one last thing to do.

“Who's a man that doesn't have any last words?”

He jammed his hand into one of the drawers of the desk

and produced his journal and pen. He was encouraged by “them”
to keep a journal which, of course, they read daily. He ripped a
page out of it, and set it back into the drawer. He looked down at
it, and he spat on it. Underneath the spit, the ink in the letters of
his name started to bleed together, an image he relished as a
symbolic erasure of his existence. He liked symbols.

“Soon, it'll all be over” he said aloud.

He wrote his last words on the piece of paper torn from his
journal. He thought of his conversation with Becky earlier that
day, and he started to write:

Philosophy doesn't matter when you're six feet under ground.

I have lived a life. It was my life. It wasn't a good life, or a

bad one, just a life. It wasn't a life they would have approved of,
and it isn't a life they know about. It was my life, but I can't

~32~
remember a fucking thing about it.

He wrote the words as clearly and deliberately as he could,

as if he were carving them into a solid chunk of marble. He didn't
write them so much as he etched them onto the page. It was slow
and laborious, and he took great care to space the words
esthetically on the page. It was then that he began to cry. He
didn't couldn't figure out why. He, after all, had resigned himself
to death long ago. He was disgusted by people that hadn't. Death
is the end of life. He knew it, and he didn't know why people were
so distressed by this simple fact, which he had no logical or
existential trouble swallowing. Tears rolled down past his nose,
through the faint and crooked lines of skin that led to the corner of
his mouth. He tasted them, the salty excretions he knew to be
commonly caused by emotion. He thought about it. What death
would be like. The end. How would it end?

He thought about stories he remembered as tiny squares in

an ocean of puzzle-piece memories, stories of the old gods
intertwined in the ancient philosophies. The old books, the ones he
liked. The books that blended myth and history, fact and fiction.
The books that failed to separate memories of daydreams and
memories of reality. Books like the book of revelation. Like the
Iliad. He thought of Charon, the the ferryman of Hades. He
thought of Ahmut, the devourer of souls. He thought of
reincarnation, of heaven and hell. He thought of where he might

~33~
fall in the fold of the ancient religions, were they to be true. He
thought of the mediocrity of purgatory, the harps of heaven, the
fires of hell, or the cold. He thought of the excruciating balancing
of his heart to a feather, or perhaps of drinking mead with Odin in
Valhalla. He found the thought of death was now entertaining him
to some degree that he never thought it would. He brushed his
religio-philisophical ponderings aside, stood up, and grabbed for
the thermos on the nightstand, opened it, but set it back down
again. He laughed to himself, finding it amusing that he kept
thinking of things he wanted to do before he died.

He ventured downstairs, to the dining room, for a bottle of

water. There was a constant supply of bottled water kept in a
cooler downstairs. He had never seen anybody fill it, but it was
always full. He took one, and awkwardly noticed the distinctive
sound of cubes of ice falling to fill the vacancy left by his having
removed the bottle. It echoed through the empty dining room, and
he remembered the two other things he wanted to do before he
died.

He walked down the hallway to the library. That's what

they called it, but it was only self-help books, spare copies of the
same Gideon bible he had in his private residence, and the thing he
was looking for: the only computer in the house with internet
access. It wasn't a part of the halfway house computer network,
and it was used as a supplemental fund. People in the house paid

~34~
for internet time, but there were no speakers, and blocks of time
cost residents fifty bucks for half an hour. It was an unsupervised
half hour, though, because there was a lock on the only door to the
library, and there had been too many complaints of the poor young
interns un-like Becky (she didn't mind when he did it) that had to
watch residents jerk off to images of women doing things they had
never dreamed of having done to them.

He had one half hour credit to cash in, and he had been able
to smuggle the cigarettes and headphones in his coat pocket during
the apprehension at the coffee shop and subsequent interrogation.
He had a good last jerk to some Anime-style pictures of emaciated
gothic lesbians with wide eyes and tentacles coming out of their
vaginas. The girls each had a cigarette in one hand, and a gladius
hispaniensis in the other. There were cigarette burns and tiny cuts
all over their bodies, and the tentacles coming from their vaginas
caressed the breasts of the other, and of themselves. To most
people, it would have been hideous. To him, it was the funniest
thing he had ever seen. He wasn't looking at the picture to jerk off,
he did so wishing he had taken the time to fuck Becky one last
time instead of having to walk up the stairs with his spent ejaculate
staining the front of his jeans like the tar coughs he ground into
them daily. He liked to tell the therapists about tentacle porn. It
made them squirm. Some of them touched the crucifixes around
their necks like it would keep them safe from him. The patient.
The resident. The sociopath.

~35~
 As his time alone in the library came to a close, he thought
of what he wanted the last song he ever heard to be. He had heard
so many songs he liked, he was a big fan of music. All kinds, and
it was a very hard decision. He decided to go with “Wish You
Were Here,” by Pink Floyd. He found it quickly, just a few
keystrokes away. He took the earbuds from his pocket, and
inserted the tiny little metal part into the hole in the back of the
computer. He chuckled as he accidentally rubbed his arm against
the drying semen on his pant-leg.

“Heh, Gross. You're disgusting!”

No time for laughter, listening to the last song of your life.

He listened carefully, and intently as if it was the first time he had

~36~
heard this song he had surely heard a thousand times. It ended,
and he checked out of the library. He didn't say a word as the
disgusted lady at the desk, who was not Becky, stared blatantly at
the milky stain on his pants. He laughed; like a maniac looking her
dead in the eye, scaring her, so that she would not follow or
interrogate him. He had these people eating out of his hand with
psychological manipulation they never thought possible for human
beings to exhibit on other human beings. He walked up to his
private residence, clunk-clunk clunk-clunk, listening to the sounds
of his boots echoing up the staircase.

He closed the door behind him, and realized he had

foolishly left his suicidal implements in plain view, arranged like a
regimented dose. The room smelled like Jack Daniel's from his
open thermos. Foolish, but he hadn't been found out. They usually
didn't bother checking in on him after dinner, they would know if
he the house. They always did. They were being predictable
today, to his eternal gratitude. He sat on the bed, and thought for
the first and last time, that he might not go through with it. He
nearly slapped himself at the thought.

“My life blows, I hate it, and I want to die,” He said.

“I just want it to end.”

He slapped his knees as he stood up, grabbed the thermos

and took a small mouthful of Jack Daniel's. It seemed to bite his

~37~
tongue, the alcohol, his long lost love back to see him off. He kept
it in his mouth for a while, tasting it painfully, and he swallowed it.
The biggest pills were the Oxycontins, and he set aside one, with a
single finger, as he sat at the desk. He closed the bible, and put it
back into his drawer, on top of the journal, the spit-ink blur now
dried to a faded mess. He centered his last words on the desk, with
the pen elegantly set just on the bottom right corner like he'd set it
down after writing it. He unceremoniously gathered his pills into a
fist full of pill-people, and swallowed them with a large gulp of
water, off to sink into the pit of his stomach to make their homes
and live their little pill-lives before delivering a cumulatively fatal
dose to his unconscious brain and bloodstream.

He took his house key from his pocket and smashed the pill
he had set aside, and carved it out into one long line of powder on
the edge of his desk. He opened the desk drawer, opened the
Gideon bible one last time to the book of revelation, tore out the
first page, folded it in half, and rolled it into a tube. He inserted
one end of the tube into his nose, took a deep breath and leaned
toward the line of powder. He hesitated long enough to remember
the pack of cigarettes Becky had given him, and he took it out of
his pocket. He grabbed the cellophane tag, and with a flick of his
wrist and a snap of his fingers, the package was opened like he had
done a thousand times before. He removed the foil, and took out a
cigarette. Djarum Blacks, his favorite. He ran it under his nose
and inhaled deeply the smell of cloves, setting the pack on top of

~38~
the bible, and closed the drawer. He lit the cigarette, puffing quick
and short to make the glowing tip a smoldering cherry. Residents
were not allowed to smoke in private residences, but he figured no
one would protest this one time, especially if he were dead.

After a few puffs, and another swig of Jack, he put the tube
to his nose and insufflated the entire line from start to finish in one
single breath. He paused to recollect how he knew to do so, and
remembered another brief square of memory- snorting a
tremendous pile of cocaine in the back of a strip club with one of
his friends, who's face was clear, but name was not.

He swallowed the last of the whiskey, holding the thermos

upside-down and above his mouth, savoring every last drop. He
looked, one last time, at his last words. He felt content with them.
He took off his clothes, folded them neatly, set them on the floor at
the foot of the bed, and threw the cigarette butt out the window.
He laid there, silently, on his back. He began to feel what he could
have only described as “numb,” if there were anyone around to
hear him say it. They would just write it on a legal pad and chatter
amongst themselves about the new revelation. He stopped
thinking about “them.” He stopped thinking about himself, and he
stopped thinking about everything as he spoke his true last words,
the words no one would ever hear or read”

“It's all finally going to end”.

~39~
 As he closed his eyes, he felt as if he were falling in to a
warm, comfortable place that seemed to beckon him further and
further on as he seemingly sank lower and lower into his mattress.
Lower and lower yet, the sinking feeling hit rock bottom as his
heart ceased to beat, he breathed his last breath- a long, wheeze, of
a last breath- with a tiny puff of clove cigarette smoke that
billowed out of his lips like a rising spirit, and dissipated quickly
into the darkness of his private residence. As the smoke
disappeared, all was quiet, there was no sound. Not the sound of
rustling blankets, the sound of breathing, or the faintest touch on
the ears of any microbial dust mite of any heartbeat in the room,
and he was dead.

It didn't end.

He woke up, as if waking from the soundest sleep of what he could

now call, in past-tense, his life.

~40~
 square two. death

He wouldn't have called it waking up as readily as he would

have called it remembering. It was as if he had entered his first
moment of true existential clarity. He remembered what existential
meant. He remembered words, language, he remembered that he
was a person. A
mind. His first moment of retrospect outside the fourth dimension.
It happened quickly, lucidly, and without the grogginess of waking
up. His eyes opened abruptly, and the moderately-lit room had no
features that shocked him or drew his attention. Easy, logical lines
of chairs along three of the walls, with a space every few for a
coffee table with a smattering of magazines he somehow knew he
wouldn't be interested in looking at. Like a doctor's office without
the kid's toys, hand-print wall-paint, and ugly multi-colored floor.
It looked more like a probation office lobby. Like a rehab center.

~41~
 He was alert, but he didn't exactly know what that meant
yet. He remembered things, some things. He remembered that he
was alive, once, but he thought of it in the past tense. He could see
it all in his mind, nothing conclusive or cohesive, but memories
ranging from early childhood to his death. Mundane things, like
the alphabet. He could surely remember that. He said it out loud,
remembering how to speak as he said it, his words echoing down
the empty lobby and back at him like he was talking to himself in
the third person.

“a...A...b...B...c...C... and so on.” He remembered the whole thing.

He looked around at his surroundings, now slightly

confused, at the pale beige chairs and the cheap-looking coffee
tables. He remembered a hundred doctor's offices, the rehab
lobbies, the airport terminals, all the things you'd see in those
places seemed to be around him. He always wondered where
people buy that kind of crap. No one would ever put it in their
house, unless it had a lobby. “Lobby Furniture,” it must say in
some catalog you can only get if you're “in the loop.” The floor
was linoleum that looked like it came from the fifties. He
remembered what linoleum was, what “the fifties” meant. There
was no one else in the room with him, not a breath or a stirred bit
of air except from his lungs and his movements. Art hung from the
walls, unrecognizable modern impressionist flowery crap, but it

~42~
certainly wouldn't offend anyone. It was there because it was
supposed to be there. People put crappy art on the walls because
any art that's good, someone else doesn't like. So if you put
something stupid, like a stuffed bear and three blocks, three colors,
three letters – A, B, C – maybe a wooden top with a -green-
spindle. That would be the “crazy artist” bit. Grandmothers could
hem and haw about why he chose to use green, and not one of the
colors of the blocks. It was vapid, useless art, merely a way for
some schmuck to pay his way either out of art school, or into a bar
while he yearned over the art he really wanted to make. He
remembered what art was. That it wasn't just there for nothing, it
had an intended purpose of being looked at, of being admired-
even if mundane. Who applies for a listing in “Lobby Furniture
Digest,” right?

He remembered how there were public places like that all

over in his life, where things were just there because they were
supposed to be there. Places where you were not supposed to be
comfortable, just adequately contained, pleased enough to settle
your patience while you wait. It was a place where you never quite
knew how long you'd been waiting. Had a minute passed? A
second? There were no clocks on the wall, he didn't know what
time it was. How could he know how long he had been waiting?
How he had gotten there? He remembered the last thing he did-

~43~
He died.
His life had been lived and ended.
So that's what this was.
This was... the afterlife.
It hadn't ended.

Cut into the only wall not surrounded by chairs, the wall
across the room from him, there was a closed receptionist's
window. The kind with the bullet-proof glass and the hole with a
metal grille. Like a gas station on the bad side of town. There was
a small opening in the bottom, presumably to pass forms back and
forth, but the window was covered from the other side by a thick,
black curtain. No light seemed to be present on the other side.

~44~
Next to the closed window was a large, black, heavy looking door
which he could have sworn he heard steps coming from the other
side of.

A tone rang out as if coming out of nowhere. He saw no

speakers, but recognized the mid-range crackle of a PA speaker
coming to life. He remembered what a PA was. One of those
noises you're trained to point out as a small child, but forget about
until you hear it again- in some antiseptic and authoritarian place.
A meekly frigid female voice leaked out of the PA. It was a
friendly, official-sounding voice. She didn't sound familiar as if he
knew who she was, she sounded familiar in that she sounded
exactly like a woman announcing through a PA should sound.
Like it was an archetypal PA voice, one that wasn't heard so much
as imagined.

“Welcome to intake, the Doctor will see you now”

The door swung open, revealing a man who stood with a

hunched wisdom. It was an old man, one who looked like each
wrinkle on his face accompanied a story which never ended. He
thought for a moment that he recognized the man. The man held a
clipboard loosely to his chest with the crook of his left arm, a cup
of coffee in his left hand. The man then gestured, noncommittally,
with his right hand. As he gestured, he grinned, which moved a
long cigarette in a holder from the front of his mouth to the corner.

~45~
“You are dead.” he said, suddenly, with a voice that was neither
caring nor interested.
“Does that surprise you?”

“No, I think that I had kind of planned it that way”

“So you did, and so you are. How much do you remember?”

“Bits and pieces, mostly just stupid things like someone I think
was my mother telling me to remember to wash behind my ears.
Picking up a 96-count box of crayons, and having to settle for the
48 because we “couldn't afford it”

“Naturally. It's the big memories that you have to go back to, that's
the deal here.”

“What is this, purgatory?”

“Watch it- that kind of crazy talk will get ya whispered about.”

“Where are we?”

“The dark center of the universe. Doesn't that sound cool?”

“It doesn't end?”

~46~
“Nope.”

“Why?”

“Why not? We don't bother asking questions like 'why' around

here anymore,” the man said.

“Ok, but here... is a, “here,” right?

“You will listen, and you will listen carefully. Walk with me”

“Why should I follow you?”

“Well, you can follow me, or you can sit in this lobby for eternity.
Your choice.”

“So now I have choices? I can't even remember my name.”

“You have many choices, and your name is Lux.”

“That's not my name”

“If you can't remember your name, how do you know it isn't Lux?”

“I just know”

~47~
“Your name, here, is Lux.” He held up a file.

A name is a good thing to have when you can't remember

anything important. Lux got up. He stood up from the chair,
standing on the feet of a dead man. It was like he was watching a
movie of himself, from himself, and he was controlling the
movements- but at the same time, he knew what he was going to
do when he did it. It was still pretty weird. Oddly reminiscent of
some wild hallucinogen. Obviously he never died and went to
hell, or whatever this was, tripping balls on acid; but he had
thought about what might happen after you die a great deal. He
was not pained to walk, it was effortless. He walked confidently
towards the man. About ten feet from the door, he stopped dead in
his tracks and gazed at the man.

“You, you're- no fuckin' waaay!”

“Kind of. I'm Chronos.”

“Like that video game?”

“That was Crono. More like a catchy Greek or Latin name with
little or no inherent meaning to you or whatever it is you are or do.
Take yours for example. Lux. Light. It's just how we decided to
name ourselves a long time ago, that's all. It came into fashion

~48~
sometime around the Earth time-context of the Victorian Ages.
Every time someone dies for the first time, they have to come here,
wait in the damn lobby, and I come get them. That's my job. It's
what I do. While I'm here, at least. Now come on, God DAMN IT
man, you're wasting my time!”

“You look -just- like Hunter S. Thompson” He felt stupid, as he

said it, because he hadn't had the faintest clue who that was, just
that he looked just like him.

“I look like what you wanted to see when you died.”

“Yeah, I did always say you'd be the first one I'd see when I went
to...”

“To hell, yes I know. That's what everybody says about him. And
no, that is not what this is. Christianity was bullshit, you knew it
when you were alive.”

“So, am I still a person?”

“No, not really. You're more than a person, you're a fully

actualized existence. You are a- well, I know it sounds bad- but
think of yourself as a traveler. You're trying to get to point B.”

“Where's point B? I'm so confused”

~49~
“Look, don't ask any more questions, OK? You're gonna have to
hear a whole big speech and all that nonsense from Phalanx, and I
just don't want to get into it.”

“I had kind of hoped it would all just end”

“What, you thought you could just quit? Ha, doesn't work that
way. Existence is kind of an endless thing, man, you'll see- Earth
is just a training ground of sorts, it's like school. You can't readily
drop out of that school, except by committing the greatest taboo-
suicide. You still die, all the same, but you missed out on a lot
more fun. No matter, this existence won't bother you a bit.“

He was trying to put it all together. Who he was, and what

it meant to keep existing after life, without all the Earthly religious
garbage. Gods this, gods that, he had no idea who he had to
please, who “they” were around here – the people who told you
what to do. He knew that he was kind of pissed off, though- the
fact that it really all was just a big test. He was trying to figure out
why it made him so angry.

He followed Chronos, who looked less and and less like

Hunter S. Thompson as they walked down the hall. He
remembered who Hunter S. Thompson was. He remembered
reading “Fear and Loathing” for the first time. He remembered all

~50~
the good times watching the movie, quoting it, re-enacting it,
living it. All at once, it just popped into his mind from seemingly
nowhere. Chronos turned to look at him, and the recognizable face
of the good Doctor dissolved to a different face entirely. Without
pronounced features, just a “face.” They came to the end of the
hallway, and stopped at a door, heavy and black, like the one he
had entered from the lobby. It had a silver tag on it, which read

“Preliminary Intake Briefing Room – Gaia, Galaxy Sol, Planet

Earth, Time-Context: American English, Michigan, United States,
Post 9-11 – Pre 2012”

He thought about how official sounding that was. Like the

rooms in a halfway house he lived in one time. He remembered a
word- euphemism. Two words, private residence. Three words, I
hate euphemisms.

“Well, have fun.” Chronos, said, as he nonchalantly opened the

door.

“Lux, what's up, dude?” Said a man that looked eerily similar to
Chronos, just a face, no distinct features or memorable
characteristics.

“How do you know my name?” He said it, but he still wasn't

comfortable calling himself that.

~51~
“Lux is what the name on your file is. It means light, didn't
Chronos tell you?”

“Yeah, so that's not my name?”

“No, man, you can pick whatever name you want once you leave
here. You don't really need one now. You did have a name, once,
on Earth. I don't know what it was, I just know you probably had
one- actually a few.”

“So you don't really know me, and neither did Chronos?”

“No, man, look, there's a lot you don't understand- I get it. Let's
just sit down and be on with it, then, shall we?”

“On with what?” He yelled.

He didn't know why he yelled, but he did it. He

remembered what yelling was and what it meant. He figured it
wasn't necessary to yell, so he sat down in a chair- a comfortable,
black leather chair that seemed to swallow him up whole. It was
the best damn chair he ever sat in. He looked around the room,
and found it to be remarkably reminiscent of a house- any house
you'd stumble into on a drunken night in your college years. Band
posters, soiled carpet, beer cans.

~52~
“On with the preliminaries, dude, just relax. You're freaking out.”

“Why are you talking like a hippie?”

“Look, like I said, there's a lot you don't understand. I'm only
trying to help you. These are common expressions and
surroundings from your cultural vernacular and Earth time context.
It's in the file. Me and Chronos are familiar with the time, so we
volunteer for duty at the center of the universe for intakes from that
time context. The center of the universe is just the most general
location in the plot, the (0,0,0.) It's where everyone ends up when
they enter the fifth dimension. We make it look like a place you'd
be comfortable in, and we give you a recognizable face to see
when you get here so that it isn't that overwhelming. It's kind of
altruistic, I know, real touchy-feely and bleeding-hearted. When
you've got an eternal existence in any time at any place, it isn't
really that difficult to volunteer some “time,” as it were.”

“Ok, whoa, those aren't euphemisms.”

“I'll be straight up with you if you need me to be, man, but if you
don't mind... I have a bit of a speech that we prepared for you.
There might be some euphemisms, but it's just to keep it flowy and
nice.”

~53~
“A speech? For me, for Lux?”

“Yeah for anyone. Lux. The intake. I could refer to you as intake
0619-048624011-12ba if you'd rather I did that”

“Ok, Lux works”

“Hence the Greek and Latin names. Keeps things simple. Now
listen. You are dead -”

“I know that, Chronos told me”

“This is the speech, man, don't interrupt me!”

“Oh, Ok, Sorry.”

“You are dead. You once were alive, on a place called Earth. You
are no longer there. You are in the fifth dimension of existence.
Earth is what you might call an incubator. It breeds new life,
which goes on to exist, through reincarnation, to learn the
intricacies of the three spatial dimensions. Humans, the final
version of life on Earth, know time. Time is the fourth dimension
of existence. It is relative to a fixed place in the cosmos. Beings in
the fifth dimension do not exist as they did on Earth. You are not a
captive here. You cannot leave, but it's not because we're holding
you back. No one is holding you back, you can go wherever you

~54~
want after you leave here, but we advise that you follow along with
your guide for a short time. [uh, that's me] Life does not end, it
keeps going. Humans have a unique glimpse of the upper
dimensions. It's that sense of time which bends, which perplexes
the minds of humans. They invented a multitude of coping
mechanisms.

On Earth, there are many religions. These religions are

made by people on Earth. They are not made by the cosmos, or the
universe. The universe is, as your physicists said, quite a very
large place indeed. You will have a home. It will be an entire solar
system. This was provided for us by the creator of the universe.
He is not a benevolent or vengeful master, he is only the creator.
You will never meet him. “He” isn't even a “he,” nor a “she.”
Sexual reproduction is a human trait.

He is a more advanced being than us, than you, Existing in

dimensions far beyond our comprehension. Much like you now
exist, far beyond the comprehension of Earthlings. Much like you
existed on Earth, far beyond the comprehension of animals. They
knew you were there, they could feel your existence. Some could
see you, touch you, smell you, hear you, taste you. They could not
comprehend you, They just existed within your presence, barely
aware of it if they were even aware of it at all. So do we exist,
here, in the Fifth Dimension, discovering the meaning of existence,
not the meaning of time.

~55~
 When our existence in this dimension is through, all deeds
accomplished, we will progress again, on to the next dimension,
Dimension is our name for it. We don't comprehend it, we exist
within it. Your life existed as a series of events, from beginning to
end. Now you must explore the choices you made. Through
examining the different paths, you will gain the wisdom needed.
You will remember many things. The sums of your dreams, your
thoughts, your actions, your choices, your would be's, and your
could have beens. Your friends, they too died and will die.
Friendship is also a human trait. There is no time in the fifth
dimension, and no conflict, no allying, no adversaries, no need for
such nonsense. We have all the space we need, in our infinitely
expanding universe. We know of each other, we help each other
along the path. It isn't difficult to lend a hand every now and
again- especially if you're able. The fifth dimension is a transitory
realm, more of a state of consciousness than a spatial place, a place
of endless possibility and constant change. You will exist in your
physical, four dimensional home in a galaxy of your choosing, and
you will use at least one of your planets on which to breed new
life. You do not know how, yet, but you will. The life you breed
will help you understand, help you to grow and nurture, help you
to achieve existence beyond, on to whatever is next, we don't know
what it is.

You will die, again, some time. But now, as you know,

~56~
death is not as final as you once thought it was. Death is like a
sonic boom, severing your ties to the lower dimensions, freeing
you to exist further in life. You may try to kill yourself here, but it
will not work. You do not exist in time, you exist as a sum of your
experiences, which you must piece together frame by frame.
Square by square. Complete the puzzle. That is your task. That is
your point of existence. To grow your mind, to sharpen your
intellect. To pursue new heights, new sensations and
understandings. New plateaus of mental clarity. That we may
follow along this path is our blessing. Our life is our freedom, and
our freedom our life. You will grow in your understanding of life,
of the nature of existence. First by examining the entirety of your
existence on Earth, then by creating your own version of Earth.
Things you think you could have done better, you do them. Things
you want to change about it, you change. You are like a god to
your life-bearing planet. You will create life that will one day
follow your footsteps into a fifth dimensional existence. That is
how you will spend your existence in the fifth dimension.”

“Is that it?”

“Yup.”

~57~
 As he said it, that final 'yup,' the room around them
disappeared. He found himself floating, suspended in what
seemed like nothing, but it was certainly something. He had no
body. No body like he had back on Earth, anyway. He felt whole,
and he felt solid, but he had no form. He was shapeless, like a
camera with spherical vision. He could see in all directions, and it
seemed like those directions went on endlessly like the rays of the
sun. He could see no end to his vision, just a spatial arrangement
of stars, some close, some the faintest imaginary specks of light.

“Welcome back to the fourth dimension,” a voice said. He heard

it, but it didn't come from anywhere. He just heard it. He
recognized it as the voice of Phalanx.

~58~
“Is this... space?”

“Yes, it's a super-existence inside the three-dimensional realm

created by the creator.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means, you can go anywhere, do anything, whatever. You

are a theoretical point in the three dimensions. The Cartesian Plot.
You can go to any planet, any star. Once you're existentially
centered there, however, you are bound by the time-context of that
solar system's fifth-dimensional being. Sol, the place where Earth
is, is run by a chick named Gaia. She's cool, but still kind of new
at the game. In fact, you're the first person to pop out in to the
fifth. At least, out of her creation anyway.”

“Gaia?”

“Yeah, Gaia. Look, man, we don't have time for this- we have to
get somewhere, fast, before you totally freak out.”

“What?”

“Ha, did you hear me? I said time. It's a funny thing, time. You
see, there is what we call 'the big time.'”

~59~
“...Big time?”

“Yeah, existential time. It doesn't quite work like time on Earth.

Earth time is temporal, based on what's called a 'life.' It begins and
ends, based on an individual 'lifespan.' Life is just a measurement,
really, an easy way to separate existences. Like I said earlier, you
are a sum of your experiences in the fourth dimension, but you
have to go back there to figure out what it all means. You're no
doubt a jumbled mess of memories from all sorts of different
existences. That's why you don't have a name. You have a
thousand names, a hundred thousand names. You've been alive an
infinite amount of times, you just didn't know it. We measure
existential time as a single wavelength of the frequency the cosmos
reverberates at. You got me?”

“Not quite. The thousand names bit reminds me of reincarnation,

like the Buddhists believed. Like you keep getting chances to do
what you're supposed to and then you move up a rung, I just don't
get the whole reverberating cosmos thing”

“Right, well, the universe vibrates. It's technically infinite,

because it expands to accommodate the need for new galaxies, but
the whole thing kind of pulses like a bubble suspended in water.
The frequency at which it vibrates is the only constant we really
have. It's the yardstick by which we can measure existences in the
four-dimensional realms.”

~60~
“I have no idea why, but that seems reasonable to me.”

“I'm going to take you back to Earth for a bit, so you can check out
your first death. It's an easy introduction to understanding what's
going on. I'll just manifest myself as a bead of light, follow me,
and we'll be there shortly. Just try not to think too much, OK? It's
easy to let your mind wander when you're between spaces.
Imagine yourself following my light, and you'll be following the
light- it really is that simple. Try it.”

The instant Phalanx's voice said “bead of light,” there was a

small light in front of him. It reminded him of a candlelight, seen
from afar, on the darkest of nights. He had to realize what “front”
was, at first, but it was really just the direction in which he was
traveling. It was hard to see Phalanx with the backdrop of the
billion candlelights of stars, but there was something different
about this particular candlelight. It seemed to have a presence, an
essence. Maybe that's what they had meant when they wrote that
letter to Lux. It felt strange to refer to his only existence after
death not only in the third person, but as a euphemism for intake #
0619-048624011-12ba. His name was a number he couldn't even
remember in the afterlife. As soon as they started moving, the
bead of light took off at what seemed a supernatural speed to him.
He learned how to move, it was easy. There was no resistance, he
wasn't even a “thing,” as much as he was a point of reference on a

~61~
Cartesian plot. He was a point in the universe, and then he was
another point, and another, and another. Speed and velocity had no
relevance. He had not mass, only consciousness manifested to a
single point in space. He could see the Earth as they closed
in on the Sol Galaxy. He recognized it right away. He had seen so
many pictures of it from space on TV that he could have spotted it
anywhere. It was hard to imagine he had once lived and died
there. There it was, just floating like a marble, forever falling
through the nothing of space marked out by an imaginary Cartesian
plot. The light that was Phalanx came to rest somewhere between
the Sun and the orbital path of Mercury. It's hard to imagine a spot
of nothing in such a wide space, but the utter perception of it all is
what really made him uncomfortable. Not the vast distances, those
seemed irrelevant and immaterial now. He felt like he could just
be there – anywhere – in an instant, so long as he knew where the
“there” was. He existed beyond time, beyond space. It was still
hard to get used to. So infinitely overwhelming in complexity and
depth. He felt like he could see it all.

The thing he noticed, almost all of a sudden, was that there

was no sound. He heard Phalanx's voice along the way, but it was
like an echo in what he would have at one time called his brain.
Thoughts and memories and information were flooding into his
mind at such a rapid pace. Seeing in all directions at all depths at
all times made him feel woozy and debased. Thinking about
feeling woozy made him remember he had no body to feel woozy

~62~
in. It was a latent effect of his consciousness passing through a
greater depth of sensation. He wasn't thinking broadly enough,
even though he was beginning to realize that his mind had the
capacity for it. Infinite capacity, it seemed. Like he could know
the entirety of knowledge in the universe. He didn't have the
knowledge yet, but he knew he could know it, it was possible. He
thought about infinity. It seemed like a more tangible concept to
him. When time is irrelevant, infinity seems so much easier to
grasp. It's your field of reference that differs, infinity is just kind
of there, looming in the distance- all ways back, forward, up,
down, left, right, and everywhere in between. Even what couldn't
have been is in there somewhere too.

Time.

That was the thing that pushed him over the edge. As he
thought about the concept of time inside infinity, he started to see
it. Planets seemed to be a thick ring of orbit rather than a sphere
floating in a sea of tranquility. They exploded as they were
created. The stars blurred in and out of existence, fading,
brightening, forming almost a fog as far as his mind's eye could
see- which was quite far. He saw the big bang, and the original
galaxies- the ones the creator made first. He saw everything at
once, as it was created, to how it was now. It was a staggering
sensation, one that he was having a really hard time coming to
grips with.

~63~
“Lux? Luuuuux? Oh shit, you're bugging out, aren't you? Just try
to relax.”

He tried to answer, but as he heard Phalanx's voice, it came

as a thundering of every word Phalanx had said since they met, all
at once. He felt as if his thoughts were going to boil over with
input, and it overwhelmed his mind. His whole essence, his whole
consciousness, his whole being ached. It hurt in a way he couldn't
understand, but he could definitely feel it. A hurt that went so
deep, he felt as if he would go completely insane. Like he was
about to go into a bad, bad, trip on some horribly powerful
hallucinogenic drug. He had no way to sort it all out, no way to
separate what he was at that instant with what he, and everything,
was- ever.

In that instant, he felt completely comfortable. Like an

existential blanket had been put over his mind. Over his very
being. He was contained, for an instant, but comfortably so. He
felt calm, like he was being cradled as an infant. He saw a crack of
light, then another, then three more as he saw a hand open up from
around him and place him, ever so gently, on the surface of the
sun. He felt like his old self again, but in perfect health. He
looked at his hands. It centered him. That's what he always
looked at. He found he could walk, strangely, on the surface of the
sun. He looked beneath him and saw what seemed like an endless

~64~
depth of fire, explosions, fumes, and vapors. Somewhere, there
was an edge, and he was walking on it. Dancing on the faintest
wisps of fire tongues.

“Welcome back to three dimensions, I had to carry you here”

“It was all so immense, I still can't quite shake the feeling”

“Chalk it up, man, you're going to have to go back out there

eventually. By the end of this little exercise, you'll be able to put it
all into context. Remember that it is infinite, but you are not.
That's the key to putting it all into perspective. Even though you
can perceive infinite time and space now, you are not that infinite
time and space. You exist within it as a single point, a single
existence, a singularity.”

“A singularity. Ok, that's a good thing to remember. Perspective is

the big thing here, isn't it?”

“Well not here, here. Only because we are in the physical space of
the star “Sol,” in the Earth time-context of Abiogenesis- the
moment in which life began.”

“Like, when humans came around?”

“No, it takes a long fucking time to get to Humans, man, that's the

~65~
last step. Remember this stuff, you're going to need to learn it.”

“So what's Abiogenesis?”

“It's when the Earth finally became chemically viable for life.
After everything settled down, and after Gaia finally came here
and made it her universe. She learned how to articulate the
balance of elements and atmospheres- systems and... well, she'll
tell it best.”

“If we exist in infinite time, how is it she finally “came” here?”

“Good! Good fucking question! You are taking this in stride,

man!”

“I was a thinker in times past, you might say.”

“Most of you bastards aren't. I blame television. Crafty, but

ultimately a waste of time.”

“Whatever, man, Aqua Teen was the best thing that ever came out
of that box.”

He remembered Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a cartoon he

used to watch on TV. He remembered what a cartoon was, what a
TV was. Artists, computers, satellite and cable broadcasting. He

~66~
remembered the words “Non Sequitur.” He remembered the Latin
language, like where his name came from. A dead language, the
language of Ancient Rome. He thought of all the gods of the
Roman Pantheon, the Greek gods, the Egyptian gods, and all the
countless searches on Earth for what happens after death. He
wished he could go back and tell them all. Just tell them to wait it
out, enjoy their simple lives on simple Earth. Not worrying about
time-contexts and intake numbers. Not worrying about what
galaxy they had to pick out of an infinitely large set of galaxies.

“So what about infinite time?”

“Yeah, remember the bit about the big time?”

“Yeah, the rhythm of the universe.”

“Right, good way to put it. The song that never ends.”

“It doesn't end? Ever?”

“It started, right? When the universe was created. It was set in
motion, in what is likely an entire field of universes, a multi-verse.
It has a beginning, but no end. It's just “Time.” The greatest
measurement of time, sure, but time none-the-less. It's just a bit
different than Earth time.”

~67~
“So what about seeing in different dimensions of time?”

“You felt at home in the spatial dimensions, you'll feel at home in

the dimensions of time as soon as you start moving about through
them. You can only be in one context at any given time anyway, so
once you get into a galaxy, it's a bit easier to cope with the
immensity of it all.”

“Ok, so time is relative to where I am, I get that. Is that why we

have form again?”

“Precisely. You can only have material form in a context of time.

If you tried to manifest yourself into your Earth body while you
were between time-contexts, like way out in the middle of nowhere
of space, you'd exist as an infant, a child, a toddler, a pre-teen, and
so on. You'd be a giant mass of existence not able to move
anywhere.”

“And dependent on Oxygen, too, right?”

“Yeah, but dying isn't really the same thing as it was to you
anymore, now is it?”

“Not really, I guess, no- not at all.”

“Then I think it's about time we met with Gaia.”

~68~
“The creator?”

“Of Earth, yeah. We're definitely not cool enough to meet the
creator of the universe.”

“I got that impression”

“I'm sure he's off doing something else entirely, off to bigger and
better things, or maybe nothing at all- we don't really know. He
created this place, and as soon as the first person entered the sixth
dimension, godhood, his job was done and he peaced right the fuck
out. The thing was built to be self-sustaining.”

“Right on, man, I have a feeling this whole afterlife thing isn't
going to be so bad at all.”

“Well... You be the judge of that. Let's go see your Mama, Mother
Earth, Gaia. She's really cool.”

With that, the tongues of flame separated, and they

descended towards the heart of the sun. Sol, a star like a million
others, many now apparently owned by dead people like Lux. He
was growing fond of the name. It wasn't so bad, Lux, it sounded
pretty cool. It was a strange honor, it seemed, to be meeting the
creator of Earth. God, in a sense, although he never did believe in

~69~
god- and his existence right now didn't seem like what the bible, or
any other book for that matter, had said it would be like. He
figured it wasn't so bad. Existing outside the confines of what
“they” told him to do was a new kind of freedom for him. A
freedom he felt he could get used to. Sure, there was that great
creator of the universe, and everybody just seemed to acknowledge
him without apprehension, fear, or anxiety. Lux figured it didn't
make much of a difference if the creator was around or not, seeing
as how there were millions of billions of small-time creators
bustling all over the universe getting busy planting the seeds of life
on their planets. Who would have time to worry about the creator
of the universe when you had the whole universe to explore, and it
just kept getting bigger without end?

They continued down through the hole in the sun, to the

core. To the cold, dense, strangely homely-looking, dark, tiny,
metallic core. There was a building there, that seemed impossibly
existent. It stood like a temple, a dark-grey metallic temple,
shimmering in the light of the sun- a different kind of shimmering
than the shimmering on Earth. A complete shimmering, with an
infinite amount of light sources all bouncing off the mirrored
temple at once.

On the steps of the temple stood a beautiful woman, with

brown hair that framed her perfectly proportioned, oval face. She
held her hand like a sheet over her eyes, as she gazed at the two

~70~
men approaching. She took a step back, suddenly, as if she had
seen a ghost.

As Lux approached the temple, he too took a step back,

suddenly. He knew that face, it pained him. It was a face he
recognized somewhere in an ocean of memories in the back of his
mind. He needed to put a name to that face, he needed to know
what that woman's name was-

And then it came to him.

“Becky?!”

~71~
 square three. gaia

Memories of the woman came rushing into his head like

water to a sink from a broken faucet. Wild jaunts of reckless
abandon, fucking in a hotel room until the cops came to get him,
and she escaped through the between-room door just before they
got there. He remembered it. It was like one of the puzzle pieces
in his mind found a connection – a face found the name, and the
combination brought forth a flood of new information. New
thoughts, new memories, new connections for his mental puzzle
pieces.

“Is it really you?”

~72~
“Ah, you remember. I chose to use that aspect of me as my Fifth
Dimensional Avatar, yes.”

“Avatar?”

“Yeah, it's a funny word, I know. It's what I chose to look like
when you came here. When you came to me, Gaia, creator of life
on Earth. It's the face I wanted to have.”

Her voice didn't sound like he remembered it sounding. It

was more reverberating, fuller, like she was speaking to his whole
mind, not just his ears.

“Why?”

“To remind me of us, of you, of myself.”

“When did you die?”

“I've died a hundred thousand times, like you have, Lux”

“Do you know my real name?”

“Your name as a human?”

~73~
“Yes, my name as a human- I want to know it.”

“Your name isn't important, beside the fact that you've had many,
why would you care about it right now?”

“I knew you as Becky. The only girl that ever loved me. The only
girl I ever loved. Not the first girl I thought I loved, but the only
girl I ever really loved.”

“You loved me because you are me.”

“That is really, really weird sounding.”

He backed off a little, startled at the statement. It made his

life seem even more confusing. Even more complex than he had
remembered it being. What was this about him being her? What
could that mean? He shot a look at Phalanx, who had for the first
time produced an expression on his otherwise dull and indistinct
face. It was an expression of confusion.

“I'm at a loss,” Phalanx said, shrugging his shoulders with a

genuinely bemused look on his face. He turned to Gaia, and said,
“You know him, Gaia?”

“I don't just merely know him, he's my apotheosis!”

~74~
“Oh, that explains the creepy metal sun-temple with no decoration.
I knew you would be on the sun for the abiogenesis, but I didn't
expect to see a temple in this time-context. Usually it's at the end
of life- not at the beginning.” Phalanx grinned and looked at Lux.
“You're a bit more special than I thought, Lux, and it appears I
need to educate Gaia on how to correctly fill out – and complete-
an intake file.”

“Sorry, Phalanx, I forgot to add that bit.”

“Apotheosis?!” Said Lux.

“Don't go and get freaked out again, now, you little fucker. You've
been taking things in stride after our first run-in with godhead”
Snapped Phalanx.

“Cool it, boys.”

She walked down the stairs. She wore a flowing white

dress that seemed to shimmer like it was made of a thousand,
thousand diamonds. It billowed behind her like some Greek
statue, falling gracefully from step to step as she descended. Lux
couldn't believe the day he was having.

He thought about days. “What's the next measure down

from the big time?” he thought. Was it a day he was having, or the

~75~
beginning of a long string of events that would continue on and on
for what really was a potential of forever? How long is forever?
When you exist in the fifth dimension, apparently, there is only one
time- the big time. So what does that mean for him, there, in that
time-context? He started thinking about time again, he felt the two
of them watch him, knowing they knew he was thinking intently,
and that he knew they knew he knew they knew it and so on.
Reverberations, echoes of knowledge spinning through his mind.
That was the kind of thing that went through his head, there, and
he thought for a moment that he might break down like he had
floating in the Cartesian Plot of space. He took a breath.

“I am not that infinity.” He said it aloud.

“Whew, I was worried for a second, man,” said Phalanx.

“I have total confidence in my Apotheosis.”

“Wow. A real-live Apotheosis. No wonder he couldn't remember

anything, huh? I did kind of think it was a little weird. He
reminded me of you.”

“He did say you were cool,” added Lux, innocently. “And you are.
You always were.”

“That'll be enough of that, Lux Apotheosis, the physical coupling

~76~
was limited to the physical realm. Any act of sex would be
absurdly pointless in our current existential state. No pleasure, no
procreative end, no meaning, just movements of imagined bodies
in imagined ecstasy.” She said the words bluntly, as if she were
wielding a weapon. “In order to fully actualize my existence in the
Fifth Dimension, I had to live an entire fully-developed life in my
own creation. You were my prized Apotheosis, my heir, my first. I
love you, but not out of a passion or fleeting desire, but as I would
love an image of myself. As I would love a reflection of me that is
not me. My love for you is Narcissistic, as was your earthly love
for me. You just didn't know it save for some twitch in your Pineal
Gland. You have known me in a thousand, thousand lifetimes. I
have followed your every moment, your every step up the chain
that eventually led to your Apotheosis, your awakening, your Fifth
Dimensional existence, and my actualization. Being my
Apotheosis, I made a temple at the heart of the sun, for us. For our
existential awakening. For our godhood.”

“Whoa.”

He didn't know what to say, so he said “Whoa.” It's all that

came out. It appeared adequate.

“You were there because I made it so, but I did not invent you.
You came to being from your own volition. I watched as
chemicals on my planet, Earth, mixed and melded and cascaded

~77~
through time. They folded and combined and disintegrated and
recombined into new formulas, new chances, new possibilities. I
watched in amazement as enzymes, amino acids, and complex
proteins developed naturally, just as I had learned they would.
Then, it came to this moment.”

She gestured, out towards space, at a distant speck he

assumed to be Earth. He thought about how much was happening,
so fast, what it all meant, how he was supposed to take the fact that
his girlfriend was his creator, hence his Mother. That's how he saw
it.

“Are you my Mother, then?” He just kind of let it out, pretty much
on accident. “Cuz that brings in a whole new crisis of a mindfuck
right there.”

“No, I am not your mother. I am a reflection of you, you are a

reflection of me. You are not a motherfucker, Lux. I know you
must think that's funny, but it isn't. I know you.”

“See, that's creepy, Beck”

“I am Gaia, giver of life on Earth, and master of Sol!” She became

indignant.

“Whoa, sorry, I just feel really comfortable around you. You're the

~78~
only semblance of comfort I've seen since that boring lobby. I
don't mean to offend. I'm new to all of this, I don't have a clue
what's going on, where I am, really, what I'm supposed to be doing,
hell, I don't even know If any of this is real, I mean, I might just
fucking wake up in a hospital bed or something, christ, what the
fuck is going on, really? Someone please tell me!”

Lux was getting angry again. Angry, upset, confused,

bewildered, he didn't really know which feeling it was that he was
having. He was sure he was having it, though, there was no getting
around that. He was feeling it.

“I was told my first Apotheosis would be rough, I would have been

better prepared if you had told me. You should have put it on the
intake file! It's a whole different speech!”

Phalanx pointed a finger at Gaia. His face began to

convalesce into one with features. He looked like Ichabod Crane.
His body, which had been dressed in pale greys, was now adorned
with a shimmering tuxedo, black as the night sky. His hair was
long, parted at the left side. It flowed behind him like a shadow as
he turned to point his accusing finger. He seemed, almost, playful.

“What the fuck is an Apotheosis?” Lux interjected.

“An Apotheosis is the first of the fourth dimensional beings to

~79~
reach a Fifth Dimensional Existence. Remember how we traveled
from the zero point here? Plotting a course on the Cartesian Plot,
making our way to Sol, before you freaked out because I didn't
know you'd have no memories and I had to fucking carry you in
my hand like a baby?”

Phalanx whirled around and pointed the accusing finger at

Lux.

“ENOUGH”

The voice seemed to echo from the far reaches of the

galaxy. Gaia was speaking through infinite time, the sound of her
voice echoing throughout the existence of her solar system,
throughout all times and spaces- even those that were only
imagined. A demonstration of her power in her own domain. The
two men stood to attention.

“Lux, I'm sorry. Phalanx and I have been friends and neighbors
since before the Earth was done cooling off from formation. His
system is Centauri, in Andromeda. His Apotheosis has been gone
to select a galaxy for quite some time. I'm sorry to have ignored
my duties as your guide here. We shall continue.”

She motioned, gracefully, with her hand as she turned

around and walked slowly up the stairs of the Temple of the Sun.

~80~
Lux followed, almost blindly. He was still used to people telling
him what to do, so he just did as he was told. He didn't think much
about it. Phalanx kicked at the ground a bit, shook his head, and
followed a few steps behind Lux.

Lux took a moment to survey his surroundings. He was

amazed at the aesthetic beauty and completeness of the temple. It
was made of the metal of the core of the heart of the sun at the
center of the Sol Galaxy, what he would have known on Earth as
the Milky Way Galaxy, which is what they called it. Back then.
Back then, he thinks. Like it's a concept he's fully grasped. The
Domain of Gaia. It's where he had become a thing. An existence.
It's when he became him. He was learning, and it was all quite
new, but he knew he had done a great deal of learning back on
Earth. He looked, out into the unfathomable distance. Out past the
wisps of flame stretching far into the sky from where he was
standing. He looked into the inky distance, he tried with all his
might to see the Earth. He couldn't make it out. Figured it must be
on the other side of him, or something, maybe even too small to
actually see with his eyes. It was then that he realized, quite by
accident, that he didn't really have eyes anymore. He thought
about the Earth. He saw it floating there, like he was standing on
the moon, like he had seen in the NASA pictures. NASA. The
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He wondered
what they might give to be able to talk to him for just five minutes.

~81~
 He got to the top of the stairs, nineteen in all. He wondered
if there was a significance to the number. He was cut short in
thinking by the contents of the temple. It was one room, open on
all sides and surrounded by columns. It stretched a good quarter
mile down, narrowing in the distance like a perfectly done
perspective drawing. The shimmering of a thousand, thousand
tongues of fire sparkled off of the columns and on to a giant pool
of water, filled with a thousand, thousand tiny squares. Images,
some of which Lux recognized immediately as pieces of his
memory. It was his ocean of square puzzle pieces, like he had
envisioned. But it was there, right there, right in front of him.
Like he could dive right into it. He almost did, just seeing all those
memories flicker and fade in and out of one another, shattering and
combining. He wanted to hold them, to touch them, to re-live his
past. They were rearranging and fragmenting as he watched them.
When he seemed to focus on one, he would view it as an instant in
time. Not as a picture, but as a visceral snapshot of the memory. It
was like he, for a moment, was re-living his own past. It was
much more than a memory, it was like unlocking a piece of his
own mind.

“This is the entirety of your existence. This is what the temple is

for. First for the Apotheosis, then for all the intakes. The pool is
just the pool. You populate your own memories inside it. As you
progress through your understanding of your own existence, the
tiny squares will merge to form larger pieces, which will form the

~82~
greater, complete “picture” of your existence, from beginning to
Apotheosis. I will show you the first step on your journey, your
first real death.”

She condensed into a candlelight, the same kind of

candlelight Phalanx had turned into at the center of the Universe.
A sparkling, waving light that seemed not just to exist in the the
world, but to have existed forever. It hovered there, with it's
existence manifested in both time and space, just hovering there,
without source nor place just dancing in the foreground as if it had
always been there. With that, the light dove into the pool. Lux
watched as it sank down. An image appeared above the pool,
which leaped out to surround them in three dimensions. It
overtook Lux, Phalanx, Gaia, and the Temple. Lux was now
standing at the edge of the collection pool of a geyser. He almost
felt the twinge of sulfurous fumes touching his nostrils, even
though the nostrils were just a physical manifestation of his own
consciousness. He thought it must be Earth, but he didn't
recognize it as such. It looked, vaguely, like a picture from
Yellowstone National Park. The candlelight flitted back into his
peripheral vision, and as he turned to greet it, the flame expanded
into Gaia's image. She wore the same dress of a thousand,
thousand diamonds. It almost seemed to float above the cratered
and bubbling Earth. She looked less and less like he remembered
Becky having looked.

~83~
 “This is the climax of a rising action of Abiogenesis. The
beginning of life on Earth. Look close, into the pool. She bent
down, and gestured towards the water's edge. Look, very closely.
Use the mind's eye.” As she said the words, they seemed to flow
through him; throughout existence. Throughout his mind.
Throughout his whole entirety. He knew the words in that instance
as if they were carved in the stones of his very being. He looked,
closer and closer still, like his vision was a zoom lens on a digital
camera of the mind. He zoomed further and further until he could
see little tiny cells floating in the geyser soup. He almost felt as if
he were them. He was surrounded by them. Encapsulated by a
cell-wall, thinking only in the vibrations of a cellular entity, alone
and silent in function, form, and perception. Yet, there he was, as
if he had existed forever, with the knowledge that he had learned

~84~
throughout thousands of lifetimes spent on the very planet he was
floating in the soup of. They were vibrating about, half floating
and half moving. One of the cells stopped moving.

“You are witnessing Apoptosis, programmed cell death. It

was the precursor to mitosis. Before organisms could propogate
asexually- let alone sexually- they first had to learn to die. To
learn existence and its terms in its environment. This is your
apoptosis. You, Lux Apotheosis. You as a whole you, the
cumulative experience of your existence on Earth as a
consciousness. Your programmed cell death. This is the very
moment, the very second. You are that cell that has ceased to
exist. That is YOU, it is not the only you, but it is the first you as a
thinking, changing, thing. You are even still in this moment living
a sequence that began here. Right here, at this juncture. This cycle
of life continues ad-nausem from this moment in time until the
inevitable and imminent destruction of this very planet. All these
monocellular organisms you see here are what will potentially be
life on Earth, until the end of time itself. They re-iterate and re-
populate in variable and proportional manifestations throughout
existence until the end, the last moment in four-dimensional time.
The moment where everything has ended, all deeds accomplished.
The moment where the solar system is engulfed by the exploding
sun and the whole thing goes up in a self-contained singularity-
inferno that takes a thousand, thousand years, but exists as if a
breath of a moment of time in the fifth-dimensional existence. A

~85~
dew-drop on the leaf of the tree of time. I watched the whole thing
happen from the start, as you can now do inside this temple.
Retrieving your own memories will unlock the truths you must
know. Some of them, you even know now, but when you have
assembled your memory as a cohesive whole, you will be equipped
with the necessary intellectual tools to go and create life in your
own galaxy. You will be compelled to do so, by your own desire to
further your existential journey to the next port of call.

When that cell died, your consciousness simply sought out

another empty vessel. Every time something dies, something else
is born ready for a consciousness to enter it. Like a hermit crab. It
couldn't go outside of Earth, but it could have gone anywhere else.
Yours decided to stay right here and move into that one.”

It was obvious which one it was, it looked slightly different than

the others. In a sea of cells with the same make-up, it was simple
to see the clear difference. It looked like the redhead In a group of
goth kids. The different one. Slightly larger, with more intricately
laid-out innards.

“It was a fluke, an accident. That is what abiogenesis is. A

mistake. An anomaly. In this case, it's the anomaly that gets the
whole thing going. Life. This is the moment life on Earth crossed
from a potentiality to an existential reality. This is your
consciousness. The first one. You are the cell that forgot how to

~86~
die, and learned how to divide itself from itself, creating an exact
copy of itself that is not itself. Watch as it leads its life, sucking
nutrients from the world around it, processing them, and
expunging them back out into its environment as processed waste-
waste which would become the media for a new genetic mutation
of replicating cells. It lives its existence in one dimension. It
exists only as itself in reference to its neighbors. It does not know
other cells exist and it doesn't even know, in fact, that it exists. It is
existence on the basic level. The single point in time and existence
where the two concepts of life and not-life are a blurred line.
Abiogenesis. Genesis through chemicals. This is the state at
which all galaxies exist upon creation- they are like petri dishes
with agar applied, ready and willing hosts of future life. All the
consciousnesses that will live and die on this Earth are there from
creation. All we do when we visit our galaxy is reach in and get
the whole thing started. We get the thing started and we watch.
We watch as inactive participants, we watch without the burden of
time. At the same moment I witnessed the beginning of life on my
planet, I watched the end of life on my planet. I knew it would
happen, but I did it anyway because that is what we do. I had to
start it and stop it to understand what it was- to know myself. My
full potential. All questions possible are asked and answered by
the inhabitants of your creation. It's rather sobering to see it all
happen.

~87~
 I needed to do nothing when I came to this galaxy but make
that one small change. I reached inside that cell your potential
consciousness entered. I took out the bit of developing RNA that
told it to stop existing. I halted apoptosis. I replaced it with a code
I programmed for it's eventual split, and when it did split, I entered
that split cell to become the second cell to end in mitosis. I wanted
to watch my first transitory consciousness coalesce from the
beginning to the end, and I have. I watched you grow and progress
from a single cell to a human, through several iterations of
existence, many recurring phases, and through eventual apotheosis.
I never intervened unless asked, but I watched and learned through
your actions, as you will do so now. “

He found himself back in the temple. He looked around

him, at the glimmering metallic columns with ornate capitals and
the way the restless waters of the pool full of his own memories
seemed to glitter with the internal light of a thousand, thousand
screens showing memories and thoughts and actions from his
existence throughout life. It wasn't just his life as he could
recollect it, but a much more expansive and invasive existence as a
self in a thousand, thousand iterations. Endless, the temple pool
seemed. Endlessly deep, speckled with glittering reveries.

“Wherever you go from here is going to come out of your own will
and volition. You have to look at them all, and you have what is
essentially an eternity to do it. Each memory will put together a

~88~
piece of a coherent puzzle in your mind that will encompass your
entire existence on Earth from that moment in a pool of liquid
scum where I reached inside a cell and created a potentiality for
life. You were the first iteration of that potentiality, and you are
Lux Apotheosis. You are the exemplar for an entirety of an
unfathomable existence. The first, the Jesus Christ, the prodigal
son, the flesh made god, the artificer of the waning light of the
morning star, the image of human existence, the Brahmin, the
Boddhisattva, the mythos, the logos, the alpha, and omega- your
actualization brings forth the actualization of the entire existential
population of the entire planet. You are not better than those
existences, you are the first. Dive in, actualize your existence.
Become an example to those who will journey to this temple after
you. Move on and become what you will be. Leave behind
presuppositions, premonitions, pejoratives, and preconceptions.
Make your own decisions on what this all means, and become a
progenitor of life in another galaxy, another solar system. I have
completed my task, and will submit my consciousness to higher
realms. You may see me again, you may not. Stranger things have
happened.”

With that, she was gone, and so Lux was left with Phalanx.
He looked at the pool, and from the pool he slowly moved his gaze
upwards towards the distant end of the temple. He stared at it in
staunch contemplative thought. He imagined the single point
perspective of human binocular vision represented in the

~89~
renaissance depictions of ancient temples and mythologies. He
thought of the almost comical nature of his entire existence
drowning in an endlessly deep pool. A puzzle of squares. He
thought, on still, about how ironic it was that all he wanted to do
was get some rest.

“Sleeping is a human trait.” He said it aloud.

His concentration on his surroundings was broken by

Phalanx bursting into laughter. It was the deep laughter of a
contented person, a satisfied and sure person. It was directed at
Lux.

“You,” he gasped between bellowing hysterics, “are going to be

just fine.”

“And you're so sure of this?”

“It's our connections with our past that unites us as a planet, and
denotes us as an individual. You'll see, really, with your own eyes
exactly what that means. I can't teach you any more than I already
have, I'll be going now. Just remember to head back to the center
of the Cartesian Plot if you need to seek counsel. I'm registered
there, they'll know how to contact me. Just ask for Phalanx.”

With that, Phalanx was gone and Lux was left alone in the

~90~
temple. His temple. He dove right into that pool. His dive was
perfectly executed, and he felt comfortable in the pool- as if he was
becoming the water itself. He realized it wasn't water, it was
something else, some sort of medium, a sort of gaseous vapor that
supported his three-dimensional frame of a body like a trestle. He
could breathe, move around quickly and effortlessly, and see
without obstruction. He remembered how Gaia and Phalanx had
manifested into points of light and he figured he should be able to
do it, too. He concentrated on the feeling of being a point on the
Cartesian Plot. He felt his body give way to nothingness. It didn't
hurt, it was like retracting the landing gear of his consciousness.
He felt his mind encapsulate and envelope the physical body he
was occupying, and he looked down at his hand. The hands were
not there, just an endless sea of puzzle squares. He saw himself in
all perspectives. He saw as if he was a self, looking out of a set of
eyes. He saw himself as if he was looking at himself, seeing a
small light, as if the flame of a candle-less candlelight. He saw
himself as if he was an omniscient narrator, not dictating his
actions but merely perceiving them from a distance. He felt all of
this at once, and it was no longer overwhelming to him. He was
not infinity. In fact, in this temple, he was very finite. Viscerally
finite. He was floating in a pool of himself. Floating in the
experiential conglomerate that was his own existences.

He made off towards a medium-sized square, as if at

random. What he saw in the square was a looping snapshot of

~91~
time, of a person he recognized as himself, dressed in a brightly
colored late-1970's polyester leisure suit. He was staring down a
long line of cocaine in the back of a room that seemed to be the
changing room of a strip-club. A row of seats sat along a row of
individual counters with individual mirrors. At each counter was a
pile of multicolored makeups, aerosol cans of deodorant body and
hair sprays, multiple sets of stiletto-heeled shoes and boots,
pictures of boyfriends and industry-looking fat guys, and pictures
of the same girl in different poses and costumes. Presumably,
these were pictures of each girl that called that particular seat her
own. As he watched the events unfold inside the square, he felt
himself entering that memory. He was becoming that man in a
leisure suit. Visions of the pool around him faded slowly into a
room ripe with stench of cigarettes, hairspray, sweat, and pussy.

“To the cornucopia of life!” A voice said.

Lux looked up from the line of cocaine to see a black man

built like a refrigerator, wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie.
He looked like a security guard- a bouncer. It must be. Lux had a
small glass in his hand, and the smell of whiskey suddenly hit his
nose as he shook the glass. He watched the ice cubes disturb the
brownish liquid as he touched it to the glass of the man sitting
across from him.

“Cheers,” Lux said as he tipped the glass against his lips and felt

~92~
the cold liquid run over his lips, down his tongue, and into his
throat. As it traveled down his esophagus, he felt the cold
sensation turn to a burning one that seemed to coat his entire
stomach in flames- even if only for a second. He exhaled a breath
acrid with the stench of whisky and cigarettes. He tasted it on his
tongue. He was still Lux, but he couldn't control what was
happening. He was merely an observer, although he could sense
the body and its surroundings like they were his own. He realized,
then, that they were his own. This was a square of memory. This
was a puzzle piece. He watched from the eyes of the man in the
leisure suit as the black man shoved a cut-up straw into his nose
and snorted the whole line of white powder in one quick motion.

“Oooooooooh shiiiiiiiiit,” said the man as he plugged his opposing

nostril with his left hand and snorted a staccato snort, putting every
last grain of powder right where it needed to be. He swallowed
hard and put down the straw as he sank into his chair, closing his
eyes and deeply exhaling. He leaned his head back against the
headrest of the chair, and opened his eyes to just a crack. He
moved his jaw, slowly, back and forth while he tightly shut his
eyes and opened them wide. He did this a few times and focused
his gaze into Lux's eyes and said, “Mike, you have got some
wicked fucking blow.”

“I know it.” Lux felt himself smile as he reached for his own straw
and bent down to take his bump. “Hell of a night we're having”

~93~
“Fuckin' eh, man. The dollars are rollin' in, the bitches ain't
fighting, the whiskey's cold, and the coke's on the table. What
more could we want or need?”

“A fat fucking joint is what we need,” said Mike, who was Lux-
but not really Lux, only just a part of what Lux was for the last few
thousand years. A dewdrop on a leaf of the tree of time.

“A fat fucking joint is all it ever takes for you, nigga,” said the
man, as he reached into his lapel pocket and pulled out a finger-
sized joint. He handed it to Mike, who took it quickly yet
graciously and set it to his lips. He lit a match and pointed the end
of the joint into the flame.

“Today is a good day,” he said, exhaling the marijuana smoke and

snuffling the last flakes of powder from his nostril to the back of
his throat. He took another sip of whiskey and lit a cigarette,
passing the joint back across the table.

“That it is, that it is,” said the black man over his glass of whiskey
before he tipped it back quickly enough to splash his mouth with
the stuff. He coughed slightly, pounding a fist to his chest with the
arm that wasn't extended across the table to take the joint from
Lux, or Mike, or whoever he was.

~94~
 He found himself back in the temple, in the staging area he
had stood in before with Phalanx and Becky, or Gaia, or whoever
the hell she was. He was surprised at how malleable identity could
be in this place. He had the power to be whatever shape and form
he wanted to be. It was an incredible sense of power he felt
standing there at the edge of a pool full of his own memories. He
stared down into the nearly endless depths. He thought about his
times in his life just before he died- times spent aimlessly
wandering around the strip clubs with a whiskey on the rocks in
one hand, money in the other, and a cigarette hanging out the
corner of his mouth. Saying awful things to women like “you have
nothing I want,” and “show your meat bags to someone else.” He
kind of felt bad about it, only for an instant, when he realized that
those sentiments are a product of the atmosphere of the place; not
his actual thought processes.

“I'm going back there, that one's pretty interesting,” he thought.

He dove back into the pool, seeking out squares containing

Leisure Suit Mike, the coke-snorting strip club guy that he wasn't
even a bit surprised was him. He must have retained a great deal
from that prior existence, but it was no big surprise that Leisure
Suit Mike was certainly not the Apotheosis of Earth. Lux smiled
realizing that he was in fact his own, personal, Jesus. Just like that
eighties song. He didn't bother focusing on the squares in order to
enter them, he merely collected them as if they were trading cards.

~95~
Any time he saw Mike in a square, he grabbed at it and held it like
it was an autonomous television screen, only showing memories
that he alone possessed in his mind. He collected those squares
and brought them to an empty patch of the pool near the staging
area. The lobby of the temple, if that's what you'd want to call it.
The temple was only one great room with a pool, nothing more and
no ornament- no statuary, no embellishments beyond the ornate
capitals. He noticed key features in Mike's face that showed Lux
where in Mike's time-line the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Although his puzzle was a puzzle of squares, the minor features of
the scene detailed where the piece fit in the puzzle. What he had
first assumed was an unintelligible sea of memory squares needing
placement was in actuality a piece of a puzzle he already knew the
picture of. It started with him as a cell in a scum-bog, and ended
as a human in a bed in a halfway house. The rest of the puzzle was
merely an afterthought. He knew the beginning and end, the rest
was just a game. He thought that the temple seemed bland without
statuary, and he decided that he would erect a statue of each of his
favorite iterations. It would give the visitors to the temple
something to remind them of apotheosis, and inevitably of their
own existences. Staring at the blank expanse of the temple seemed
blank and austere; begging for what he, laughing to himself, called
a “human's touch.”

He didn't swim through the pool so much as he floated

through it, he no longer desired the use of a three-dimensional

~96~
body. He jettisoned it entirely, preferring to remain as a point on
the Cartesian Plot, a singularity of metaphysically five dimensional
existence within the context of a fourth-dimensional time frame. It
may have confused him in a base-sense, but it was not difficult for
him to feel it. The feeling came naturally to him. Him, existing in
eternity as a point in space and time.

The squares with Mike in them seemed to tell a story of a

man, from birth to death, that Lux couldn't help but sympathize
with. It seemed that Mike had been to hell and back, a human
existence wrought with an ecumenical distribution of agony and
ecstasy.

***

Lux chose the most interesting-looking square, and felt

himself becoming Mike again. He was remembering a memory, a
lost memory, but that memory was a most viscerally real memory.
Peripheral vision, full senses, and utter awareness- but no control.
He was Mike as much as he was Lux, neither were the name he
was looking for, but both worked quite adequately. The scene was
set in a smoky apartment, seemingly in New York. He thought it
might be New York because he looked out the window and saw
nothing but sky and the occasional sky rise building blocking his
view of the horizon. He wore the same brightly-colored leisure
suit, and sat staring at a typewriter.

~97~
 He looked around the room. Wood paneling, cigarette
smoke hanging in the air, beige curtains still and monolithic. The
room was dark save for the desk lamp. On the left of the
typewriter, a half-full bottle of Wild Turkey and an empty glass
with the last humps of hours old ice cubes dancing in a watered-
down whiskey puddle. On the right of the typewriter, a nearly full
ashtray and a ripped open carton of camels. In his hands he held a
large silver platter with a king-size mountain of cocaine. Just
beyond the typewriter was what he remembered as a kilogram bag
of cocaine, and a large bag of marijuana. The weed looked good,
probably home-grown by a patient and experienced cultivator. It
could have been as much as half a pound, but he figured there was
probably no need to measure it if you possessed it in such
quantities. He was proud of his former self, drugging like a
champion. He noticed joints jutting up shorter than the cigarette
butts in his ashtray.

In the typewriter was an article for a major metropolitan

newspaper. He was reading it, between gulps of whiskey, joint and
cigarette puffs, and the periodical jamming of a straw in his nose to
take a fully-bored pull out of the pile. As he took snorts from the
pile, it seemed as if it wouldn't ever run out. Lux thought about
how much money a pile of cocaine like that might have cost him in
his last iteration.

~98~
 Mike revised the article as he read.

“Drugs to the recurrent drug user, the consummate drug user, the
initiated psychonaut; are not merely an escape, but an existential
necessity.”

He crossed out the word “necessity, and wrote “surrogate”

in pencil above it.

“A modus-operandae, much more than a simple-minded escape.

Psychotropes, hallucinogens, are the truest drugs in the sense we
wish to use them. Stimulants and sedatives are a futile recreation

~99~
for the true psychonaut”

Cocaine was not a constant in his life, he came to it

apprehensively and with great respect. This time was special. He
was writing what would potentially be the greatest article of his
entire life. Mike was a journalist in that rare sense, the sense that
when he wrote things down it was bigger than himself. He wrote
objectively, but not without the subtle nuances of language that
provide you with a clear picture of what you should feel about the
words you're reading.

“Before and since the beginnings of mankind, chemistry has

played a fundamental role in the existence of life on Earth”

Lux thought “Yeah, man, you have no idea how much of an

effect chemicals had in existence.”

“Some are more powerful – far more powerful – than others.

These chemicals need to be feared, revered, and respected; not cast
aside as “addictive” or “menacing,” as they so often are. They are
only chemicals like any other substance and should be treated
carefully. Some people, inevitably and indubitably, will ruin their
lives in psychosomatic addiction. We must not, we cannot, use
these weak-minded individuals as the great yardstick of
measurement for the casual drug user. Drugs are a tool, not a
replacement.”

~100~
 Lux agreed with most of it.

“Make no mistake about it, friends, chemicals can and will

envelope and consume your life with their potency. When you
consume a drug, you fundamentally change the chemistry of your
brain and body. The fundamental core of existence and perception-
who and what you are. You change yourself in so many ways with
unassumingly small amounts of inert and innocent-looking plant
matter, powder, liquid, or smoke. Chemicals and chemistry have
always been a fundamental aspect of life on Earth, only man-made
social laws prescribe the in- and out-put of chemical availability.
These laws mandate the perceived vision of a drug-user as a
disgusting filth-monger wandering alleyways to rob those more
fortunate and less addled in order to attain that sought-after “fix.”
This image of the psychonaut could not be further from the truth.
An experienced drug user may surprise you if he were to reveal his
identity. It could be anyone, a doctor or lawyer, even your parents
could be drug users and you'd never know it. Drug laws prohibit
cultural acceptance, and deter the proper and clinical use of the
substances. This causes the blow-back function of demonizing
chemical drugs. The black market production of drugs is focused
on profit to product ratio, not preserving the purity of the chemical.
This “cutting” makes a weak product, commonly with non-
psychoactive chemical additives. These morality-based drug laws
have caused drug users to apply to themselves a scarlet letter- A,

~101~
for addict. The only recourse for these people is to “rehabilitate”
themselves, creating more profits and success stories for morality-
driven politicos. “

Mike typed those last few words with a pronounced motion

of the hands, as if he were punishing the typewriter as he wrote it.
Punishing the thing in effigy for the fact that he had to write those
words. He thought about what this article might do for him. It was
about to be submitted to a very prestigious, very bourgeoisie,
metropolitan news magazine. It would, unknowingly to him, be
his finest and best article. It would be the article that made him
famous.

***

Lux found himself back in the Temple. He decided he

wanted to have a chair to sit in. To rest. He felt existentially
weakened by traveling back and forth in time and space. He
looked off, down and to the right, and he thought about how nice it
would be to have a chair right there- just near the edge of the pool.
As he imagined it, it was there. Almost magically, his thoughts
became concrete reality. He thought about the power of this. He
could not only manifest matter to contain his consciousness, but he
could manifest matter around him to bend to his will. He decided
to try it out on the first piece of statuary for his reflecting pool.
This was about him, Lux Apotheosis. His story, his existence. He

~102~
decided he wanted a large statue of the first cell to split.

He thought about where It might go. He looked up, for the

first time, to see that the temple had a second floor- smaller than
the first. He imagined a staircase spiraling up to the second floor.
A double-helix. Like the RNA that Gaia had altered in him to
become the first cell not to die. He walked up that staircase
knowing full well he didn't have to operate a body to get there. He
could have just manifested himself as a pinprick on space-time, but
he felt like if he was going to enjoy his new staircase, he needed to
climb it like a man.

The second floor was empty space, save for a portico cut
through the ceiling and floor that illuminated the reflecting pool
below him. He could see tongues of flame flit and flicker,
reflecting off the pool. He thought that this empty space would
make for a wonderful place for his statuary. He set off making the
first. He placed, with his mind, a great mass in front of the
staircase opening. He, with his mind, scraped off layer and layer
until it began to take the shape of a cell. He changed his mind, and
made it a cell dividing into two. The first act of mitosis on the
Planet Earth. It was a testament to Abiogenesis, a testament to
himself, and a testament to Gaia.

For the first time, Lux realized that he was utterly alone in
the universe. He contemplated the endless solitude of being the

~103~
only physical being on the sun other than itself. He wasn't even a
physical being anymore, really. He walked down the stairs again,
looking at the pool as he descended down the other side of the
helix. He sat in his chair, and he looked out onto the still waters of
the temple pool. As he looked out from that chair, he thought
about how long it might take to get through all of this. How long it
might be before he was free to leave again, free to roam from
galaxy to galaxy. Free to find his own place in the universe, and
free to come to a fuller understanding of what was going on around
him in all times and spaces. He desperately wanted to leave, then,
and explore. He thought about constellations he saw as a child in a
hundred human forms, about Orion the Hunter and the Big Dipper.
As he sat in that chair, he rested his arms on the armrest, and he
leaned back. He imagined himself a matching ottoman, which
materialized underneath his outstretched legs. He closed the eyes
of his physical body, and he fell into a peaceful and dreamless
sleep.

~104~
 s quare four. logos

Lux sat on the steps of the temple of the sun. He sat there,
and he thought. He thought great, cosmic, time-spanning thoughts.
He thought not about trivial things such as sports scores, check
stubs, and lottery numbers. Lux thought deep thoughts about the
meaning of life, and about the way of all things; he thought about
the creator. He looked out in front of him, far off in to the distant
solar system rotating around him in the kaleidoscope of all the
dimensions of time. He saw Mercury, buzzing quickly along its
course; Venus a milky blur. The gas Giants and the asteroid belt
faded into an elliptical path resembling an impressionist painting.
He looked for an especially long time at Earth, the planet he knew

~105~
best. On that planet, he thought, there have lived a thousand
thousand souls wandering around in utter ignorance of what would
happen to them when they were finally to escape. He thought of it
almost as a prison, but yet as a sort of farm; growing intellectual
entities for admission into the cosmic hierarchy. More rules, he
thought; rules, regulations, tests, and achievements. Life on Earth
wasn't entirely too different from life outside Earth. In fact, it was
becoming more and more rational; more and more comprehensible
by the minute.

He sat on those steps, and he thought about his life. What

did it mean; what did it really mean? All of this? Just another shit-
stain on the blanket of eternity. So Earth was just a farm for pre-
fifth dimensional life forms. That seemed rather bland to him,
almost mechanical. Like he'd come out of a factory or something.
That couldn't be the whole story. Sure, there were the intricacies of
life itself, the beauty of the spring cherry blossoms and all of that
nonsense. Falling in and out of love, financial boom and bust,
moments of brilliant insight and utter disgust. There was a balance
to it all. From this cosmic perspective, it all just seemed so
mundane to him. What was the point? Life on Earth had always
been summed up by the question, “what's next?” and it didn't seem
to him as if life outside Earth was going to be any different.
What's next, apotheosis? What do you do now? How, exactly,
does one occupy oneself in eternity?

~106~
 He had so many options. There was, of course, a
swimming pool the size of a temple behind him that held an
assemblage of his entire existence on that planet he saw orbiting in
the distance like a marble. He imagined picking up one of the
rocks around him and being able to throw it at said planet, like a
game of cosmic marbles. Why not? Gaia was gone, off to bigger
and better things. He didn't matter to her anymore, so who cares
about the damn temple and all the memories and all of it. He
punched the step he was sitting on, only to remember that his
iteration felt pain. The sensation stirred a new batch of memories
from deep within the recesses of his mind. It was pain that defined
humanity. Constant, never-ending, existential pain. The pain of
existence. Being alive and aware in a universe that was far beyond
even the furthest limits of his comprehension. Working for
nothing, for the sake of some other person. All of a sudden, after
his go at life on Earth, there he was in the middle of it all. Both
literally and figuratively, stuck in the middle of space, time,
existence, life, beginnings, endings, possibilities, and singularities.
The “world,” as he knew it, had appeared vast and full of
opportunity- at least that's the feeling he remembered about the
place. A globe of infinite expanse that suddenly seemed so finite
as he watched it travel like the insignificant dot on the black that it
really was. He remembered her words, Becky's words, “You were
there because I made it so, but I did not invent you.” What did she
mean by that? He was used to the fact that she was a traveler
inside the body he knew as Becky, but what did that imply about

~107~
himself? Was he, too, just a silent observer inside the bodies he
knew as shattered memories floating about in the pool behind him?
What were the implications of that? What was he, now, as he sat
on the steps of a temple erected by Gaia, giver of life on Earth and
master of Sol. That's where he was, walking like a miracle on the
core of the Sun. As he remembered, from a class in one of those
memory squares, the Sun didn't have a core. It was mostly
Hydrogen, with the majority of the remainder being Helium.
There was no cold metal core to walk on, there was no heart of the
sun. Was this place a figment of his imagination? Becky had said
that his own thoughts materialized in the pool, but did his own
thoughts materialize the whole damn place? The sun, the universe,
the cartesian plot, Phalanx, Becky, and the whole lot of it- was it
all just some dream? Some kind of wicked hallucination as he lay
in the death throws of his chemical suicide?

Wait. Chemical suicide? He thought about it, intensely

focused on recalling the train of thought that had led him to that
conclusion: “was that how I died?”

“Am I just really fucked up on drugs right now?” He said it aloud,

to no one, to the rocks in the distance, to the Earth itself- a marble-
dot on the endless expanse of time.

“No. You're dead, it's not a joke; you're not on drugs.”

~108~
 He looked at the bottom of the steps, only to see Phalanx,
his intake guide.

“I thought you left,” said Lux as Phalanx climbed the stairs toward
him.

“I felt kind of bad about not knowing you were an Apotheosis, and
I figured you could use a friend right now.”

“A friend? Is that what I need?”

“I bet you're wondering what the point of all of this is right about
now, aren't you?”

Lux looked at the ground.

“Yeah, I guess I was”

“No surprise to me, that's why I'm here.” Phalanx stood over Lux.
He almost seemed imposing.

Lux stood up. A friend. That was what he needed. The

universe seemed lonely back on Earth, but sitting here on the
temple steps staring off into the vastness of space with sight
beyond limit was indeed quite lonely. He had only just realized it.

~109~
“It's good to have friends,” said Lux, almost accidentally.

“It certainly is, especially when you're the Apotheosis.”

“So, I guess my biggest question is: What exactly differentiates

me from the other souls on Earth as an Apotheosis.”

“Essentially, nothing. But there is a special duty you hold to them

as the first to escape.”

“So I've escaped then?”

“In a way, yes. You can look at your awakening into the fifth
dimension as a form of escape. It's more of a blossoming, but in
the parlance of your times; it's a fucking escape.”

“Like going home?”

“That's another way of looking at it, I suppose, but it's more like
becoming who you really are. You're goal is to become you- as a
whole. The point of re-hashing all your memories is for you to
gain the perspective of looking at things on a time-line. Looking at
things from a fifth-dimensional point of view. You can see every
beginning, every end, and every in-between of everything that ever
was- ever. You've gained essential omniscience in the realms of
space and time; but that omniscience is regulated by strict rules.

~110~
Those rules were set out by the creator, and they cannot be altered.
They are the steadfast laws of our universe, and as far as I know, of
the multi-verse.”

“Ok, I think we're getting ahead of ourselves here.” Lux was

getting confused again.

“I know it's confusing, man, but please just bear with me. I'm
trying to teach you something here. I came back because I felt
guilty. The Apotheosis speech is so much more in-depth, and since
Gaia didn't put it on your intake form; I had no idea. Usually, we
bring the intakes to their solar system and there's a temple like the
one we're standing in front of- but the temple is complete with a
record of the key transitory forms. How much exploring have you
done since I left?”

“I checked out a sequence of squares from an iteration in the mid-

seventies. Strippers, Money, Typewriters and cocaine. Great
weed, good times.”

“That was a good period-” Phalanx interrupted.

“It was.” Lux cut him off in turn, “I was a guy named Mike. He
was a journalist, but one of the rare ones that could walk the walk
while they talked the talk. He railed lines of blow in the back of
strip clubs, and smoked the finest grass money could buy. I'm glad

~111~
he was me. He was like...”

“Hunter S. Thompson, like your intake. Fair enough. That's a

good start, close to your final death, is that one or two iterations
from your transcendental iteration?”

“Transcendental iteration?”

“Yeah, that's the one you had right before you ended up here. It's
the life you lived that finished whatever protocols Gaia had set up
for you to trigger after your soul neared Apotheosis.”

“Ok, so what exactly is Apotheosis. I mean, I get it- to deify, to

make god from flesh- but does that really mean I'm a god?”

“In a sense, yes. I mean, what were the gods to the mortals on
Earth? You guys classified yourselves as mortals, and they as
gods, am I wrong?”

“Yeah, I guess. We were mortals, gods were immortals. The gods,

the undying manifestations of our assumptions of perfection.”

“Precisely. Souls are the singular essence of an evolutionary

sequence that takes place on Earth through reincarnation. It's one
of the many ways you can gestate your planet in order to create an
actualized existence.”

~112~
“So what's the point of me playing along, then?” Lux was
beginning to “get it.”

“It's not about playing along, really, there isn't really a choice.
When you were bound by existence on Earth, could you see time
in dimensions? Could you simultaneously watch a beginning and
an ending? Could you subjugate your consciousness to a pinprick
on the Cartesian plot? It's the same here. We're bound by the sight
of a fifth-dimensional existence. You can stay here for all eternity,
or you can try and progress. Some people have no interest in
progression. They're contented solely by meeting other people on
other galaxies and having a good old time in the infinite expanse of
fifth-dimensional space.”

“So I could sit on these steps and be done with the whole thing?
Can I kill myself?”

“Sit on the steps for eternity, I guess so. It'd be really boring, but
you could do that if you wanted. As far as killing yourself, no.
There isn't really anything to kill. You aren't stuck in a biological
mass right now, you aren't even made of any stuff. What you see
and feel as your body is something you made up without even
knowing that you did. You have to bind yourself to the limits of
space when you're in a galaxy. You have to exist in context. If you
killed your contextual self, here, on the Sun, your consciousness

~113~
would just revert itself back to it's Cartesian form.”

“Why can't it just end? What is this continual pile of horse shit I
have to climb through?”

“Don't get down on your own existence, man. We're just pawns of
the universe. Plankton in the great sea of nothing. That ocean is
eternal, and so are we. Why make it stop?”

“I want there to be an ending.”

“Of what use is an absolute ending here? There's all kinds of

endings. Interpersonal relationships from meeting to make up to
break up, galaxies beginning and ending all around us, and the
constant reformation of matter.”

“Things should be finite, set in stone, realistic.”

“Fuckin' Lux, what is reality? I'm not talking about stuff, or

thoughts, or tangible things. Reality is temporally subjective.
Don't you realize that endings are closely followed by new
beginnings? Haven't you picked up on that yet? You ended your
life on Earth by your own hand after philosophizing the fuck out of
it. What happened? Here you are, you have no control in the
matter at all.”

~114~
 Lux kicked the step and stared off into the horizon,
regressing.

“Alright, that's it, lets get out of here for a while. It's been too long
since I spent some time on Gaia's planet; probably a few hundred
Earth years I'd imagine. You could probably used some different
scenery, anyway, am I right?”

“But what about my 'solemn duty' and all that? What about
'figuring out what the meaning of life is'?”

“I appreciate, yet loathe, your sarcasm while referring to the

discovery of new things. Ever onward, man, the quest for the
higher plateau. Why is it you look with such disdain upon new
things? I don't understand how you could be so apathetic with an
entire universe to explore.”

Lux begrudgingly followed suit as Phalanx condensed

himself into a Cartesian point. The feeling of condensing your
body to a singularity in an instant would seem to some as difficult,
maybe even painful. It was becoming second nature to him by
now. Lux's body was a hologram, a doll. It was an assemblage of
biological matter from spare atoms happily buzzing along
throughout eternal quantum passivity. Like Lux, existing as a
microcosm of biological systems, designed through a thousand
thousand years to achieve one thing: a separation between the

~115~
physical, organic, body and the consciousness it contained within
it- Lux, the existence as opposed to Lux, the man. That's what was
designed to happen. It wasn't designed by some almighty creator,
really, even though it essence it was. The creator of the universe
wasn't the only creator of universes, not the greatest nor the worst,
he was just the creator of the one Lux was present inside. The
creator didn't create Lux, Lux created Lux. The creator created the
parameters of existence. He took a bubble of cosmic dust,
crammed it all into a singularity, shouted some fundamental rules
of physics at it, and blew it up. After that, it was every molecule
for itself, then every mote of dust in turn, until you got some
organic bodies with consciousness on some rock somewhere, and
they learn the secrets and create more life, and in turn again, the
universe spits out a sixth dimensional being and it's fulfilled it's
purpose and it perpetuates it's own existence right out of existence
throughout immeasurable times and spaces. Things were starting
to get overwhelming again.

“Yeah, let's go.”

“Follow me,” said Phalanx

They ended up in, of all places, a church on Earth. Could

have been any church. It was a Catholic Cathedral somewhere in a
pleasant suburb. Clean lines and stoically contemplative
architecture, comfortable pews and climate control. It didn't seem

~116~
like a place of worship as much as it seemed a giant sized version
of a cheap studio apartment complex. There were people there,
milling around. Mostly families with young children laughing,
picking their noses and flipping through the hymnals.

Phalanx, and Lux in turn, materialized into physical bodies

in the shadows just outside the building. Phalanx made a motion
for Lux to follow, and they silently opened the doors and took a
seat in the back to watch the Mass. It was the gospel reading. The
priest's voice was calm and direct, in a way that was pleasant to
Lux's ears. The last time he was on Earth, he thought, he would
rather have burnt down a church as opposed to sit in one. That was
then, this was now, and he really didn't mind it after all. It was
quiet when the priest spoke, save for the occasional baby noise and
fart, and the priest's voice just seemed to captivate him. Like the
man had some sort of sight beyond the superficial; like Lux could
relate to him, if only through his voice. Like he had to listen.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and
the word was god. The same was in the beginning with god. All
things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made
that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended
it not. There was a man sent from god, whose name was John.
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all
men through him might believe. He was not that light, but was

~117~
sent to bear witness of that light. That was the true light, which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the
world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him
not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as
many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons
of god, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born,
not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but
of god. And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. John
one, verses one through fourteen. The gospel of our lord.”

As the masses made strange gestures with their hands, and

chanted back with indifference before sitting back down, Lux felt a
twinge of irony rush through his mind as he reflected on the words
he had heard. He glanced at Phalanx, who stared back and silently
grinned.

“We'll be staying for the homily as well,” he said from behind his
Cheshire-cat grin.

“Homily?”

“Pay attention, man, don't get impatient. I know this religion is

bullshit, but it's not like everything they had to say was without
meaning. It helped mankind cope with the world around them for
thousands of years. Chill out; don't hate on the priest- he may be
misguided, but his intellect and understanding of people is on

~118~
point.”

“And the word was made flesh. Speaking, of course, of Jesus our
lord. Straying from the obvious, we can take John's words as a
peek into a further awareness of the kingdom of heaven laid out for
us to dwell in for eternity. In the house of our lord, words are the
dictum of divine arbitration. Words are all we have from the lord,
our god. Words are what he communicates to us, what we are left
to interpret and understand. These words are not simple ideas or
concepts, but vastly incalculable insights into the realms of god.
As the word made flesh, Jesus Christ represents the a visceral
iteration of the lord our god. He is the word of god made flesh, an
apotheosis. The truest version of humanity, the only begotten son
of the father, light from light, true god from true god. God, who
made his word flesh in his own image. This word was given to us
in the scriptures, and we live inside that word. Words of god not
only made flesh, but made of rock and dust, of atoms and sub-
atomic forces. Those forces are also the word of god, for the word
of god is what holds our universe together. As humans, as physical
manifestations of the word of god, we are to live in the example of
Jesus. That is the true reason for life, the true reason to live a life
in the example of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for our sins.
The path to heaven is the path first trod by Jesus Christ, word made
flesh. This, you will see, is the profundity of the word of god. The
word of god is infinite and unerring, from the minute details of sub
atomic particles to the vastness of space. As we grow to further

~119~
understand the mystery of the physical world around us, we are
walking in a physical manifestation of the word of god. In heaven,
we will exist in the true extent of the glory of the word of god.
May your journeys always leave you with more understanding, as
all on this Earth is temporary in terms of the world of the word of
our lord.”

Phalanx grabbed Lux's arm, and they got up to leave. Lux

took one last look at the people sitting in the rows of pews.
Obviously the priest had a firm grip on perspective, but he just had
to throw in all that Jesus and God stuff to make it digestible. Lux
could see the importance of what Phalanx had shown him, but he
could also see the fundamental errors in the hierarchy. Jesus wasn't
real, he was a literary representation of an amalgam of ideals seen
by a hundred different people decades apart in some exemplary
person they made into their messianic effigy. His sacrifice was
that he was destroyed by the very people he was metaphorically
sent to save. Living and dying and resurrecting and
transubstantiating, and all that. All just a symbol for an existential
and communal understanding of the metaphysical realm. They
didn't know the realm wasn't metaphysical, they just knew they
couldn't experience it in their physical bodies. Humans always
knew something much bigger than themselves was going on
around them, they just had no perception of what it was.

“That's the ultimate lesson these people are missing, it's all just a

~120~
fucking metaphor, just a good story that you're supposed to find
further meaning in. It's no answer, it's just a way to pacify those
with existential anguish” Lux thought aloud. He was getting angry
again. “They're so limited in their grasp on the scope of the
situation they're in, the people would rather kill the greatest
iteration of themselves than listen to what he had to say.
Disgusting, really. Doesn't matter if it actually happened, or if it
didn't”

“That's where the obfuscating concept of 'faith' comes in, man.

Imagine you're standing on a cliff's edge, with your only chance of
escaping a heated pursuit being to jump into the water below.
You've never been there, you've never swam those waters, and you
have no idea if you'll dive to safety or crack your cranium on the
jagged rocks below: do you jump, or do you fight your attackers to
the end?”

“Are you nuts? Jumping off a cliff? I'll always stand up and fight
my own battles- I'm not a coward.”

“Ye of little faith would fight to the death.”

“Exactly right. What's the point in putting all your eggs in one
basket? Hoping for a saving grace when you could stand up for
yourself and still win.”

~121~
“That's the difference. Rather than defer to the unknown
possibility of life after death, you chose to fight. That's why you're
the Apotheosis. You were trying to find a way out, and you found
it. You stood up and fought, but you did it for the right reasons-
you were being held captive, man, and you would have stayed a
captive for a long time if you hadn't ended it. Normally I wouldn't
admonish suicidal tendencies, but in your case it was the final
piece of the puzzle. You took active control of your mortality, and
it was your faith in that mortality that led you to kill yourself. Your
misstep was the fact that you blindly jumped into the water, hoping
you'd crush your skull on the rocks, but the ocean was warm“

“And full of squares representing the life I tried so hard to escape.”

“And you did escape, Lux, don't you see it?”

“I may have escaped Earth, but I did not escape life. It's easier to
look at it all from a third person point of view, though. I haven't
checked out any squares from my transcendental iteration, but
from what I can remember- and from what you and Becky said; it
sucked pretty hard.”

“It's good to see you're beginning to understand.”

“Let's get out of here. I hate churches.”

~122~
 He followed phalanx out on to the sun-lit sidewalks in front
of the church. As they walked down the steps, he took in the
surroundings. It was a crisp spring day, birds chirping and the sun
shining and all of that. He thought about how he had just been
inside the sun, starting out at the planet he was now occupying.
The marble he thought he could throw a rock at.

“Lets take a walk, man. I know a place.” Said Phalanx. It seemed

like Phalanx could almost sense the anxious wanderings of Lux's
mind.

Lux followed Phalanx to a foot-trail headed across a

meadow into the woods. As they walked along the path, Lux took
special note of all the different plants and animals he saw. The
colors, the shapes, the smells, the feel of his feet crunching the

~123~
crushed limestone trail. It was nice to be back on Earth. He had
felt so abandoned and constrained in that half-way house, at intake,
and in the temple. It was nice to breathe the spring air again. Even
though he wasn't alive, in the Earthly sense of the term, he was still
alive in the truest sense of the term. Even though his body was just
a container for him, he realized that it had always been that way, he
just didn't have the capacity to understand what that really meant
until now. He was trapped inside himself. They approached a
bend in the trail just before the tree line, and Phalanx sat down in a
patch of grass under a shady tree. Lux sat down near him, and
gazed down the tree line into the horizon. He noticed the way the
horizon almost pulses and radiates in the spring afternoon sun. It
seemed like he could see forever, but then he thought about what
forever means to a person in a body on Earth in comparison to
what forever is to a fifth-dimensional consciousness.

“I forgot how much I like to sit and look at this place. Gaia's world
turned out so aesthetically beautiful. The colors, the trees, the
grass, the way the atmosphere bends the light to make a blue sky;
it's all so fucking beautiful! My planet was austere, rocky, even
utilitarian. This place has a woman's touch. It's comforting.”

“You sound like you've been munching on acid tabs, Phalanx.”

“Life on a planet isn't much other than a hallucination, man. You

see things from a fixed point of view, it's all about perspective.

~124~
Look around you, man, you're living inside a time-context right
now. The surroundings are stationary. Imagine if you could have
seen in the fifth-dimensional point of view before you died. You
don't even have to imagine it if you don't want to, really. Become
it. Don't forget you have that option now. Look at this dandelion.
Imagine a tiny insect crawling along the leaves. The tiniest little
bug, insignificant as a mote of dust. Now put your consciousness
inside that tiny insect as it climbs over the leaves. You see a
dandelion, now, but it's a whole world to that insect. The colors
aren't yellow, they're shades of cellular yellows, greens, blues, and
hues. There's mountains; peaks and valleys for that insect. That
dandelion would be absurdly huge for that insect, but he still just
walks along the leaves. Is he looking for food? Is he admiring the
beauty of the dandelion's contours? Is he traveling far from home?
Does he have a home? Where might he go from here?”

“Acid trip.”

~125~
“Fine. An acid trip, whatever. Remember how powerful
chemicals can be? You saw abiogenesis, you were there in more
ways than one. Both observer and participant- scientist and
subject. And now you're experiencing the entire universe as both
an observer and participant. There is no separation of those two
extremes when you aren't stuck in the fourth dimension viewing
time as a straight line from a point in it.”

“Fine. I get it, though. Like that preacher was saying back in the
church. The word of god is the laws of the universe. Their version
of god isn't quite what reality is, but it's pretty damn close. Jesus is
a metaphor, the word of god is the rule of the universe, and the
creator created it for us to live in. In the case of Earth, Gaia was
god in the Judeo-Christian sense. She put it all in motion. When
she got here it was nothing but rocks, water, and volcanoes.
Potential. She pissed in the water or whatever and abiogenesis
happened. So who's the creator of life- the Creator, or Gaia?”

“There is no real creator of life. Gaia didn't create life, she

arbitrated it. Same with the creator of our universe. Life is what
happens over a long period of time and development. Life on
Earth began a journey at abiogenesis that continues ever onward
until all the souls transcend and the planet outgrows it's usefulness
as an incubator. Life as a concept began a hell of a long time ago-
before me, before you, before Gaia, and before our universe was
created as we know it. Life is a trans-universal concept. A concept

~126~
that spans all universes, all spaces, all times, all dimensions, and
all existences. It's a fundamental part of nature, the nature of all
things. These trees and rocks are as alive as us, this dandelion, and
even as alive as our imaginary bug. It's imaginary because there's
a possibility of imagining it; and that's also the reality of it. You
can't imagine a bug that can't be imagined. It could be any bug,
but it has to be a bug. Spider, aphid, caterpillar, butterfly, all alive,
all bugs, real or imagined. In a world of infinite beginnings and
endings, and a world where matter can take any shape, there are
endless variations of what you can get when you create life on
another planet. That's why you do it, that's why you keep living.
It's to keep understanding the way all of this space dust can iterate
into so many different things. Stars, mountains, rocks, trees,
dandelions, bugs, people, nuclear reactors, oceans, galaxies, the
atmosphere; at a basic level, it's all the same stuff. How can that
not be fascinating? Why wouldn't you want to spend an essential
eternity figuring out what different kinds of things can happen in
the universe? Why, for fuck's sake, would you want to kill
yourself? LUX, IT'S FUCKING AMAZING TO BE ALIVE!”

“That's a good point, man. I have to admit it”

“So you wanted to know your name, huh? Your transcendental

iteration's name?”

“Yeah. That was the point, at first, I guess.”

~127~
“Anthony James Cahill III”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck.”

They sat there for silent hours under that tree, Phalanx in a
silent and contemplative state, and Lux on the cusp of
understanding a way of looking at things that better suited him
than he thought could ever be possible. It was funny, in a way, that
he could have always imagined it. Just like Phalanx said. It was
definitely possible to imagine the Earth as a piece of a much larger
puzzle, and that made it real. And now, here he was, in the midst
of matter, time, and space; a comprehensive consciousness, a
pinprick of existence on the Cartesian plot tucked inside the meat
folds of a human circa 2001. Years didn't even matter once you
left Earth anyway, and at any point Lux could flip his
consciousness over to view Earth in the fourth dimension. It still
made him sick in how overwhelming it was to experience, but he
gave it another shot. Slowly, he looked out at the field and saw
himself blurring out from where he was; into every move he took
from the trail head to where he was now. He saw the birds and the
animals and the motions of their wings and feet blurring into fog.

~128~
He saw every animal that had crossed that path that day, every bird
that had been in the sky since birds knew how to fly. He saw he
and Phalanx leaving, walking off into the forest. As he looked at
the forest, he saw the trees as new sprouts, saplings, and
gargantuan old-growths. He removed his consciousness from his
body and brought his perspective slowly outward from the tree.

He floated up into the clouds and saw civilizations founded

and crumbling, he saw the constant whirling of the Earth around
the sun. Light and shade, day and night, spring, summer, autumn,
and winter. He saw the volcanoes, and abiogenesis, even the end
of the world; all there at the same time, but any time he looked at
anything closely, it became a still image of time that he could
digest. Although he could see the beginning and ending of Earth,
he could focus in on the instant in time that he and Phalanx were
sitting under that tree in a park. At the same time he could see
himself there in that park, he could see the mountains of Tibet, he
could see the insect on the dandelion, he could see Mike blowing
coke in the back of a strip club, and he could see his transcendent
iteration sitting on the edge of his bed in a dimly lit room.

He collapsed his consciousness back into the folds of time,

and re-occupied his body. He looked at Phalanx.

“Why create a universe?” he said, bluntly and abruptly. Phalanx

grinned.

~129~
“Why build a house?”

“Fair enough.”

“Look, man, I can see you're finally getting used to all of this. It's
gotta be a bit of a shock.”

“I wish there was a way to help other people expand their

consciousness to the point where they can escape Earth. No one
should have to be imprisoned on this planet, despite it's beauty. No
one should have to stay here when there's a whole universe to
explore.”

“Now you're thinking. That's what your job is as the apotheosis.

You're the word made flesh, the Jesus Christ of the whole damn
thing. You're the first one. Remember, you and Gaia were the
second generation of the first cell to undergo mitosis. Light from
light, true god from true god. You were surrounded by the light,
yet not that light. Just like you are surrounded by infinity, but you
are not that infinity. You are only a part of it. That's why I brought
you to church, man, religion is a way for humans to cope with a
complex understanding of the world around them. Those words in
the bible have a deep meaning for most humans. They can grasp
the sense of the fact that we're all made out of the same stuff, but
they need a master, a god, to tell them what to do. They don't have

~130~
faith in themselves, they have faith in something else. They need
something to latch on to that's tangible, so they can go along living
and dieing in a world they can only slightly grasp and never
fundamentally understand. The real world of soaring triumph and
troughs of defeat. It doesn't work for everyone, but it works for a
lot of them. You can't help them directly, they won't listen to you.
What you can do is prepare your temple so they can have some
semblance of purpose on their path through fifth dimensional
existence. You can't change the way the world works, Lux, you
can only change what they come out to. It's up to you to make
their transition as easy as possible. You are the guiding light at the
end of the tunnel, the light of the Earth.”

“I guess that's a bit of a relief, Phalanx, thank you.” Lux laid back
down on the grass, staring up at the clouds in the sky. He
remembered being a hundred children staring up at that same damn
sky, the same damn clouds. They still looked just as beautiful as
he had remembered them being every single time he looked at
them. Damn clouds. He took a long piece of grass and stuck it
between his teeth. He took a deep, full, breath of the spring air and
exhaled deeply, watching the grass wave back and forth in front of
his face.

“You know, man, when I transcended from my galaxy...” Phalanx

laid in the shade, not far from Lux, under the same tree they had
sat for what seemed, now, like days.

~131~
“You're from Andromeda, right, Phalanx?” He took the grass out
of his mouth to speak.

“Indeed, yes, good old Alpha Centauri. It was a nice place, my

planet. We called it Kleon, but it's since passed. I've been around
a long time, man, I took the time to study a minimum of nineteen
different planet's existences in order to volunteer full time at the
intake. I wanted to help people out, you know, and learning about
so many different places was a great time.”

“It does sound like an admirable profession.” Lux stuck the grass
back in his teeth after he spoke, like it was a cigarette, and focused
his gaze back on the clouds.

“It is, I think. I must admit, though, that I'm kind of excited my
first apotheosis is from Earth, that was my favorite planet to study.
You had the best music, and the best languages.”

“Rammstein uber alles,” said Lux. He leaned over on his elbow

and stared Phalanx right in the eyes.

“Good times with the industrial headbanger shit, man, but I was
thinking more along the lines of the evolution of instruments, and
the relationship between music and the progression of technology.
I'm a big fan of subtractive synthesis. You managed to

~132~
electronically manipulate generated tone waves to replicate sounds
in nature. No other beings on any other planet ever made
electronic music. It's so amazing.”

“Techno?”

“Ha, yeah, I guess.”

“Let's go back to the sun, dude, being on Earth is starting to bum

me out.”
“Fair enough.” Phalanx sat up, brushed himself off, and
condensed into a Cartesian point.

***

So now that he was beginning to understand what to do

with himself, he was beginning to hatch a plan. He wanted to
know some things about his death. Someone had once said, he
recalled, “To write a good story, you have to start at the end. You
have to know how it ends in order to tell the story correctly.” The
end of the story, in this case, was the beginning. He had died.
Other than that, he didn't really remember that much. He decided
that he would investigate his final death before apotheosis, the
transcendent iteration, and he would try to remember his name.

“Mind if I head back to intake for a while, man? I've got some

~133~
paperwork to catch up on.”

“No, not really, I think I'd like to be alone for a while anyhow. I
appreciate the help, Phalanx- now go help out those intakes. You
do a great job. I'll head your way if I need your help. You're my
first friend in this new world of mine; and it's good to have one.”

“Likewise.” Wth that, Phalanx was off. His condensed flame on

the Cartesian plot shot off towards the center point.

Lux turned and walked back into the temple. His temple.
He looked around him, again familiarizing himsef with the massive
columns that seemed to shimmer from the tongues of a thousand
flames. He walked up the spiral staircase to the room he had put
his abiogenesis statue in. He made another statue there, one of
clouds separating to reveal a ray of light- the light of the
apotheosis. Lux. He stared at it for a while, wondering what other
statues he might place there, and he realized he was beginning to
get tired again.
He chose the far right corner of the room, and put a bed
there. Nothing huge, nothing ornate. Just a plain old bed, with
plain old white sheets, and plain old pillows. Utilitarian. This was
a temporary place- temporary for him, and temporary for all who
would visit after him. There was no reason to make it a home, it
wasn't a home. It was a temple, and it served a specific function.
He wanted any furnishings in the temple to echo that temporary

~134~
feeling. He laid down in the bed, and stared at the ceiling of the
temple, finding himself unable to fall asleep as quickly as he had in
the chair downstairs.

“It's our connections with our past that unites us as a planet, and
denotes us as an individual”

He thought about what that meant. Gaia had said that to

him. Becky. Whoever. That chick. His other half, light from
light, and all that shit. Whatever. He wanted a purpose.
Something to do. Sure he had this temple to fill out, but that
wasn't enough for him. Move on to the next step, then? What
would that bring? Another few millenia of tortuous nitpicking over
his freshly-minted life-bearing planet in some far off star's system?
What was the point? Just farming souls, like all the other
lingerers-on surfing it out without a purpose like Phalanx's. He
didn't know if he had the stomach for it. It's quite a burden, if you
think about it, being a god. With that, Lux fell fast asleep.

~135~
 square five. nightmares

June 26, 1999. The real summer of love.

Battered speakers belched radio songs about nookie and

freaks on leashes. Anthony Cahill drives into the heart of the
sunrise. He stomps on the accelerator of a rust-bucket Honda from
before you were born, stressing the engine just as close to the edge
as he thinks he can take it before it explodes. He drives with the
window open because the air conditioning stopped working three
owners ago, a hundred thousand miles ago. He is only a blur of
offensive bumper stickers as he screams past semis, mini-vans,
construction workers, and mile markers- nearing a hundred of them
an hour. He tries to throw an empty beer bottle at the “Welcome to

~136~
Ohio” sign, but he misses, tossing it haphazardly into the ditch.
They should have never given him a driver's license. Who's idea
was that, anyway? Their loss.

He's got a wallet-full of twenty dollar bills the lady at the

bank gave him in trade for his paycheck from the burger shack. He
intends to spend them. He can feel the awkward thickness between
him and his bucket seat. They're on vacation. Headed to Cedar
Point for the day. Sunburn, roller coasters, and a half gallon of gin
thoughtfully concealed in water bottles. His friend, Ray, is rolling
an inaugural blunt in the passenger seat, flicking seeds at the hole
where the glove compartment used to be. Anthony slows the car to
sixty-five. One law at a time. Christ, he's not even supposed to
leave the state. He looks in the rear-view mirror and sees her face.
He adjusts the mirror for a quick glance down her body, from
spaghetti-strapped shoulder to mini-skirt hips. She chose the
clothes she wore very carefully, and he could tell. The folds of the
fabric seemed to enjoy the body underneath- it almost seemed like
some grand seamstress had produced the clothing specifically for
her.

He liked the way she dressed. To him, she was a goddess.

She was curled up in a little chick-ball, taking up a small corner of
the faded leather backseat. The car was dirty, he never washed it,
so the speckles of bird shit on the windshield cast shadows all over
the car like a reverse disco ball. She was sleeping. She looked like

~137~
a cat when she slept. Ray's girl was curled up on the other side,
her best friend since high school. That's how he'd met Ray,
actually. He took a drink of coffee, and set it back down in the cup
holder.

“Needs more Jager.”

“What?” Ray turned around sleepily, with the unlit blunt hanging
from a corner of his mouth.

“My coffee. It needs more Jager.”

“Oh. Shit. Hold on a second.”

Ray lit the blunt, blowing back through it as he did,

shooting a little flame-thrower at Anthony.

“Fucker! You burnt my arm-hair! Jager!”

“Hit this,” Ray said, handing the blunt over to Anthony as he

reached into the backpack between his feet for the fifth of Jager.
He poured a shot or so into the coffee cup and took a pull for
himself, glancing for cop cars on the side of the road. After seeing
the coast was clear, he turned his head toward the backseat and
held up the bottle.

~138~
“Hey bitches, want some Ja-”

“They're asleep, dude!” Anthony barked, as he put the blunt in

front of Ray's face.

“Oh well. More for me.”

“More for you my ass! Give me that shit” creaked a squeaky voice
from the back seat.

“See, now you've woken the sleeping beauty.” said Anthony.

“Stop looking at me in the mirror, Ant, you're creeping me out!”

she said with a sheepish grin.

“Sorry, babe, just love your fuckin' face.”

“Well, it is pretty.”

“Ya don't have to tell me that.”

The rust bucket pulled into the first rest stop on the turnpike
after Westgate. The sun was up in full by then, a bright yellow
bucket of light poured out onto the flat and treeless expanse of
Northern Ohio. The skies were clear and the lot gulls were
belligerently squawking as they dove for misplaced french fries in

~139~
the parking lot. The air smelled clean, even though they were right
next to a highway. Ray got out first, pulling his seat forward for
the girls to get out.

“I gotta pee, I gotta pee, I gotta pee!”

She was jumping up and down, with her hands folded in

front of her as if trying to hold back a failing dam. Her long brown
hair floated up as she came down, hitting her shoulders seconds
after she landed each jump.

“So go piss, Rachel, damn!”

“I'm waiting for Tam!”

She paced and jumped around the asphalt as Tam backed

herself slowly out of the car, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She was
similarly dressed- denim mini-skirt and spaghetti-straps. Her shirt,
a pastel teal, Rachel's a classic black.

“I'm coming, I'm coming, Jee-sus. It's way too fucking early.”

“That's cuz you're a vampire, Tam,” Ray said as he stretched.

“Fuck you, Ray. Come on, Rachel - Let's pee!”

~140~
 They skipped off, arm in arm, to the bathroom to do
whatever chicks insist on doing together in the bathroom. Ray and
Anthony finished off the blunt in a shady back corner of the
parking lot, and each took another pull from the Jager bottle.

“So. You ready for this, Ant?”

“Going to prison isn't exactly something you get ready for, it's
something you accept.”

“Do the crime, do the time, right?”

“More like take the fall, be on the other end of the pointed finger,
and get fucked when rats squeal”

“That's one way of looking at it. I wasn't there, man.”

“It doesn't matter. We're here on one last vacation before

sentencing, and I don't really want to think about it right now to
tell you the truth. Let's just take a piss and get back on the road.”

“Fair enough, dude. I'm just shooting the shit, you know.”

“I know, Ray. It's no big deal. I won't go away for that long; my
lawyer is one sadistic motherfucker”

~141~
“I wish I could afford a lawyer like that”

“Afford. Shit, I'm blackmailing that gold-watched slime ball.

Who do you think I was selling the coke to?”

“Nice. Pictures?”

“And video. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

“You scare me, Ant.”

Ray went to meet up with the girls, and Anthony pissed in a

sewer drain on the far side of the car. It had been a few months
since he got busted. They got busted. He and his roommates had
purchased two bricks of blow and six paper grocery bags of home-
grown hydroponic Northern Lights, which was proudly displayed
on the kitchen table to be divided up and sold to their fiendish
friends and fiend friends of friends. This, of course, was before the
damn cops knocked on the door with a warrant while he was home
alone.

It was in the past, now. After a series of “What do you

mean a giant pile of cocaine, officer, it wasn't there when I left for
work,” and “He was there when you found it, it must be his.” He
took the fall, got ratted out by his so-called friends, and was
looking down a stiff set of charges laid out in front of a judge with

~142~
a stick up his ass and a point to prove. Things, overall, were not
looking good. Sure his lawyer was a good one, but this judge was
a well known draconian in terms of drug sentencing. They say the
Judge's kid got raped back in the early nineties by a heroin-addict
with AIDS. She blew her brains out in the garage on her sixteenth
birthday, and he was the one that found her there. He's been
imposing maximum sentences for drug and rape cases ever since.
That's enough to take the blinders off of justice for even the most
stoic of judges. It's a world of villains and psychopaths, the
nightmare of judicial dreamers the Earth over.

A sad story, no doubt, and it gives you a funny feeling in

your throat when you hear about stuff like that. It's easy to see
how such horrible circumstances could blind your eye to the
intricacies of the word “criminal.” Anthony had never even done
heroin. He was test-proven HIV negative. He never raped
anybody, either. His girlfriend was hot, and really liked to fuck.
Rape was the furthest thing from his mind. He was just trying to
get money to pay rent. He didn't even snort the coke he sold, and
wished he didn't smoke the weed he sold. You don't do your own
supply, man. No money in that. No money in it either way,
because now it was Exhibit C. A big pile of what could have been
turned into money now occupying space in an evidence locker.
Tragedy. They said he was a criminal. A scumbag. They said he
was dangerous. His only fault was getting burned by playing with
fire. He was ready for that. “Be Prepared.” He remembered that

~143~
from Boy Scouts. Give the people what they want, get shit on.
Better luck next time. He wanted to say he would learn from his
mistakes, but he wasn't even willing to call them mistakes yet.
They found it really easy to tell him he was making mistakes, and
he wished they kept their opinions to themselves.

“You stupid fuck. You're thinking about it again, aren't you?

Aren't you?” She punched him in the shoulder.

How long had he been standing there? Five minutes? Ten?

Twenty?

“Yeah, I'm sorry.”

“You promised me you'd stop thinking about it just for today, Ant.”

“I know, babe. I'm sorry. Let's hit the road, huh?”

He pulled out on to the highway, merged, and stomped on

the accelerator again. Topping ninety, he looked in the rear-view
only to ease off on the speed and coast back down to the limit.
He'd hate to see that pretty body all cut up with glass on the side of
the road after his drunk ass flipped the rust bucket. His rationality
had a tendency to beat out his thrill-seeking side. He wanted to be
close to the edge, but never over it. Especially not at the expense
of people he actually cared about.

~144~
“Eat this and soak up that Jager, Ant, you're driving.” Rachel said
as she handed Anthony an Egg McMuffin she had bought him at
the rest stop.

“Thanks, kid. I could have bought shit for us, though, I'm rich
today!”

“I know. But you were out in the parking lot sulking and I knew
you'd forget to eat, get way too drunk, and pass out in the sun as
soon as we got there.”

“I'd at least find a picnic table in the shade first.”

“Fuck you, you'd pass out on a bench after puking in a garbage can
and get a shitty sunburn. You know it.”

“She got you, dude,” Ray chimed in.

He was right. It was sad how well she knew him. Twenty
years old, head about her like a sage. Straight-A student, eyes
bright as the fucking sun. She was naturally beautiful, with a full
future ahead of her, and he felt like he was holding her back. He
was twenty four, twice the college dropout, and master of grill
operation. He never loved her like she loved him. He never said
“Rachel, do you want to be my girlfriend?” She just spent all of

~145~
her spare time with him. She wouldn't have it any other way. He
just figured he'd enjoy it while it lasted, and had a good idea she
felt the same. They enjoyed their time together. They were two
souls meant to wander. Children in the span of time, adults in their
own minds.

“We're here.”

“Already?” The two girls said in unison.

“I've got the tickets, let's smoke another blunt and get the Gin.”
Ray pulled the seat forward and the girls got out.

“Good plan,” Tam said as she stretched her arms above her head,
pulling her shirt above her low-rise mini-skirt and showing off her
midriff tattoo.

“Tam, you little sexpot, you've got a tramp stamp on your mons!
When'd you get that?!” Rachel pointed with her right hand, and
covered her mouth sarcastically with her left.

“Ray likes it” She stuck out her tongue.

“Fuck yeah I do.” Ray said, as he lit up the blunt and passed it to
her.

~146~
 After the blunt, they each grabbed a water bottle filled with
gin and Sprite from the trunk and headed off to the park. Anthony
and Rachel walked hand in hand while Ray and Tam lagged behind
trying to figure out which could grope each other in a more gasp-
provoking way. Poor Ohio never saw them coming.

***

A freight train carves across the liquid night of the

American Midwest. A crescent moon dimly lights the landscape,
trees casting fading shadows like fingers reaching into the fog of
darkness. The cargo moves as a flat black serpent along the tracks.
Save for the patchworks of graffiti, the cars are uniform and
similarly-laden with cargo - save the final car shattering the
darkness with a dim glow coming from the cabin furthest to the

~147~
back.

A man sits on an overly stuffed leather couch, smoking a

very large and pungent smelling cigar. He's dressed in a
monochrome black three-piece suit. Elderly, but not too old.
Fashionable, but not extravagant. Distinct, but not gaudy. His face
says military, his relaxed posture says civilian. He looks like a
man that will get things done. He's been to places you haven't
heard of, he's got stamps in his passport in languages you've never
seen. His suit is immaculately clean, well pressed, and expertly fit.
The train car is exquisite. Lines of polished wood grain dance
along the trim, the single desk a mammoth construct of rare wood,
green marble, and gold inlay. He speaks quietly, but loud enough
to hear him clearly. Quickly, but with a thoughtful tone. Sternly,
yet as compassionate as a drunk grandfather. When he speaks, you
listen.

“I've got a lot to tell you. You'd better listen up, and remember
what I say.”

He added an obvious emphasis on that last bit through

violent inflection. The rhythmic churning of train wheels on tracks
only added to the drama being played out in this fantasy of a
mobile office. Some hunter's lodge on wheels. Some abomination
of luxury and impudence.

~148~
“You've got a job to do, and there's a lot of people depending on
you. Don't listen to all the garbage they're gonna feed you about
temples to yourself and the great altruistic 'intake' at the zero point
convergence. It's crap. There's a lot more going on behind the
scenes that they don't tell you about. Things you could never
imagine, but will come face to face with soon enough. You'll know
in time. I'm coming for you. Don't worry, you'll know when I
arrive.”

He poured an astonishingly large helping of whiskey into a

square glass with no ice, and took a hearty sip without a change on
his face.

“But first, ah yes, there is the one problem we have, isn't there?”

He took a long, slow, drag from the cigar and watched as

the smoke floated through the air.

“You're going to have to die.”

He stabbed the cigar violently into the ashtray. It stuck

straight up, smoldering and breathing out its last streaks of blue
smoke. From behind the tobacco tendrils, the man crossed his left
leg over his right knee and folded his hands neatly in his lap.

“I'm coming for you, Lux. Prepare yourself.”

~149~
 ***

Anthony woke up on a park bench at Cedar Point, just like

Rachel said he would.

“Bad dream?” She rubbed her hand on his arm.

“I don't know, really, there was this train-”

“You're just hearing the roller coasters, come on- let's get some
food!” Rachel interrupted him.

He didn't argue, he just let it go. It was only a dream. They

ate bland theme park burgers, sitting at a shady park bench as
Anthony tried to sober up. It was still early in the afternoon.

“How long was I out?”

“I'd say about forty minutes or so, not that long”

“Damn.” He shook his head.

“Don't worry about it, you just passed out- it happens to the best of
us!”

~150~
“You're right, let's hit up the Magnum again.”

They caught back up with Ray on the north side of the park.

“Feeling better? What'd she say again? Puke in a garbage can and
pass out?”

“Fuck you, man, I just hit it a little hard, that's all.”

“I know, I know. How ya feeling now?”

“Like I could punch the Pope in the face.”

“Great! Let's ride the Magnum again and then go smoke another
blunt.”

He rubbed his shoulders, realizing they were already burnt

and he wasn't going to be leaving any time soon. He bought some
over-priced sunscreen at a gift shop, but knew it was already a lost
cause. They walked out to the car to smoke another blunt.
Anthony sat on the hood, looking across the parking lot at the
horizon. He thought about Rachel, he thought about prison, he
thought about the judge, and he thought about the long drive home
after their day at the park. But most of all, he was thinking about
the dream he had while passed out on that park bench.

~151~
 What was that all about? He had to die? Now? When?
Why? They don't execute people for selling drugs. What kind of
stock can you put in a dream? He'd had crazy dreams before, but
none so vivid and realistic. He felt like that man was actually
talking to him. He didn't know who Lux was, but this guy seemed
like he knew what was going on. Rachel grabbed his hand,
bringing him back into reality.

“Stop thinking about it. Just keep on living while you can, Ant.
You know I'll love you forever, right?”

He smiled. Everything was alright as long as she was by

his side.

“Until the end of time, kid.”

They laughed together in the Ohio Sun, and they headed

back into the park. She was right, what's the point in worrying
about dreams? Hell, she didn't even know what he was thinking
about it, but she still knew just what to say. He knew he'd miss her
more than anything else when he was in prison, and he was
beginning to harbor feelings of regret. That didn't sit well with
him. That would make him a hypocrite, and a bad one at that.
He'd always told everyone he knew to live life without regrets, and
it was time to practice his preaching.

~152~
 ***

Lux swam up from the reflecting pool in his temple on the

Sun, sitting on the stone edge with his legs dangling in the warm
water. He was now used to the fact that the depths of the pool
contained the shattered memories of his cumulative experience on
Earth, one planet out of thousands across the universe. Ever since
Phalanx had left for intake, Lux had been busily collecting
shattered memories from his past life as Anthony James Cahill, his
transcendental iteration- as he was now expected to refer to it. He
wondered where Becky came in. Rachel seemed nice, and he
wondered what had become of her. He was beginning to
remember referring to what happened after that Summer as “The
Incident.” Nothing happened outwardly that day, but it was the
last good memory in a three year stretch of dreadful ones. The
peak of a wave that just seemed to crash further and further down.
When he thought about his past, he didn't think in terms of
chronology. It was periods of “alright,” “bad,” and “horrible.” No
wonder the guy did himself in. Lux felt less and less of a
connection with who he was seeing in the memory squares.

The last few years of Anthony's life were a shotgun blast of

bad luck. Every once in a while, there was the saving grace of a

~153~
good day. A day where the psychological weight of his burdens
were lightened, even just for a second. Cedar point was a good
day. He got real drunk again, and fucked Rachel in the back seat
while Ray drove home. No accidents, no car failures, and no cops.
They made it back without issue. No one got busted that day, and
he didn't get any extra punishment for leaving the state while under
bond.

His incident wasn't a monumental disaster as much as it

was a culmination of small disasters timed in the worst way
possible. The student loan debt from his fuck-off college days was
heavy enough before the medical bills piled up. With no degree,
no health insurance, and a rust-shell of a car; a rented room in a
house on the side of town you'd never go to was all he had in the
world. A stained mattress on the floor and a second hand player
for his scratched CDs. He was slaving it down at the burger shack,
trying and failing to make ends meet. A prison cell would soon be
his home, and as if that wasn't bad enough; Rachel broke up with
him the first time she came to visit him. His parents never wanted
anything to do with him in the first place, and she was the only
person alive he thought might actually come and see him. It was a
shame she only came to break it off, but he couldn't blame her.
Hot young thing, he'd be damned if she wasted her time waiting for
him to get out of prison. So much for love until the end of time.
His mind would not rest. He was ready to get back out into the
world, to get his 'second chance' his fellow inmates all talked

~154~
about. The strangest pieces of that puzzle, by far, were Anthony's
nightmares.

***

“You don't believe me, do you? You think this is all some
sort of dream, some sort of invented fantasy, some sort of elaborate
illusion. What is life, Lux Apotheosis? You're involved in
something you can't possibly understand, and you don't even know
the half of it yet.”

Same man, same train, same cigars, same square whiskey

glass.

“Like it or not, I'm coming for you. We're going to find a

way to stop the machine. Gaia won't help you, Phalanx can't help
you, and you can rest right assured that Saturn won't have anything
to do with you at all. You're the last Apotheosis, and you don't
even know what that means yet. The time will come where I stand
in your temple and tell you exactly what that means. You'd better
be fucking ready, and Gaia better have done her fucking job.
We've only got one chance at this, and it has to work or we're all
doomed.”

He took another long pull off of his cigar.

~155~
 “You're gonna know when it's time. In fact, you're
probably watching this right now for the second time. I'll be
seeing you really soon. Don't work too hard, Lux, the hard work
starts when I arrive at your temple.”

***

Anthony sat straight up in bed. You could call it a bed if

you wanted to, but it was a only a thin mattress on a sheet of steel
awkwardly jutting out from a concrete wall. Straight ahead was
the pastel-blue painted steel door with a tiny window and a waist-
height opening closed off from the outside. He looked to his right
and saw the stainless steel sink and toilet, and remembered that he
was safe. Probably more safe than he cared to be.

The nightmares started with considerable frequency

happening the very first night he slept on that wisp of a mattress in
a lonely prison cell. At first, he chalked it up to his discomfort
with being confined. It wasn't always the man, and it wasn't
always the train, but the message was the same. You're going to
die, then I'm coming for you. So creepy. It wasn't necessarily a
nightmare, even. Sure, he would die eventually. That's part of the
human condition. What was the meaning of this, though? What
could this dream be communicating to him?

He tried not to let the dreams get to him. Dreams were

~156~
only dreams, anyway. He was locked up. He was getting along as
well as he could. He did what he was told when he was told, and
he did his time quietly and respectfully. Was it too much to ask for
a restful sleep that didn't involve scary men in black with doom
and gloom theories?

It had been a year since Rachel visited to break up with

him. He wasn't really that surprised, but his lack of surprise didn't
make up for his overabundance of regret. He thought about
making money the conventional, legal way. He could have flipped
more burgers, or mopped up more puke, or something. Maybe he
would have eventually finished college, and got a job his mom
could tell her friends about if she still talked to him. It's easy to let
your mind wander to regret when you've got nothing but yourself
and a mattress to talk to. His term wasn't that long, only two years,
and the fears about the judge had been greatly exaggerated.
Rumors perpetuated by those on the receiving end of punishments
they felt were excessive. Intense cynicism began to rise in
Anthony's mind, and he dove into books rather than lashing out
against guards and fellow inmates. The prison had a well stocked
library, and he took advantage of that.

He kept a journal the first few days, but soon quit it. He
was no writer, just a thinker. A “doer of things.” If he sat around,
it was to read, not to write. Mostly, the vacant scrawling had
generally consisted of complaints about the food, rough caricatures

~157~
of the female guards, and lists of what he wanted to do when he
got out. He was scheduled for release in two weeks. He started up
the journal again, only to count down the days.

***

Lux didn't know what to think about his past anymore.

What did this dream mean? Why was there a man speaking to
him, outside space and time, through a dream of his Earthly past
life? What was the message supposed to mean? He was dead,
now, but he wish he could go back and tell Anthony not to do
himself in; just to take a few more simple years trudging it out at
the burger shack down on terra firma. Things were much simpler
back then. Sure, work sucked, and he kind of fucked himself over
a bit getting caught for drug trafficking; but he still had his mind

~158~
and his thoughts and sovereignty over himself. He felt so isolated
and exposed in this new world he found himself in. He had built a
few statues like the ones he had before, but the tasks were
meaningless and the art less and less fun to create. He sat in the
atrium, looking at his statues, and realized that he didn't mind
being stuck on a rock in time that much. He wished he could go
back, but he knew there was no way. Once you check out, it's over
– or so he thought. Little did he know, living on Earth was just
training grounds for something so much larger in scope, and so
much more complicated in temporality.

He wondered if, just maybe, there was an end to this game.

A master's goal, a final culmination. A source to the light at the
end of the tunnel. If he couldn't end his life, he saw it fit to
conquer it completely. He wanted to be master of himself, he
wanted his freedom and his self-sovereignty back. He was
becoming determined to educate himself to that end and, if
necessary, to fight for it. That's the way to spend eternity, he
thought, finding out a way to master the universe. To experience
it's every benefit and shortfall, to perceive the greatest limits of
perception, to understand completely the laws of the world around
him. He would set to task finding a way, any way, to stop living.
He would find a way to stop the machine, even if it meant finding
the great clock of the multiverse, tearing away its pendulum,
ripping off the hands, and snapping every cog in half – one by
miserable one.

~159~
“You look troubled, Lux.”

A voice came from nowhere.

“What? Who's there?!” Said Lux, wheeling around in

astonishment. The voice did not belong to Phalanx, and Gaia had
transcended. Still, the voice sounded familiar.

“You know who I am. I've come for you. Don't be afraid, Lux
Apotheosis. There is no enmity between us. Dare I say, you are
quite a valuable asset to my colleagues and myself. Would you
mind manifesting me a seat? We have a bit to discuss.”

“If you're who I think you are, I'm not entirely sure I want to talk
to you. What brings you to my temple?”

“Don't be afraid, Lux. We are friends. I want to help you. There's

more going on around you than you may understand; and I don't
have the patience to wait for you to figure it out. I've been
watching you for a while, Lux Apotheosis. Remember that we see
all time and know all space in this universe. I have studied your
case-file, and found a most troubling question arise in the way
Gaia had filled out your intake form.”

“So you are the man from Anthony's dreams.”

~160~
“Yes.”

“How did you do that?”

“I can explain, but I would rather show you.”

“Does this have something to do with Gaia?”

“That's one of the many things that we're trying to figure out.
Listen, I know you're a little in over your head. Judging from your
transcendental incarnation, you've got a brain for philosophy. Let
me level with you, and pose a question: To what end must the
universe strive; a spiral toward atrophy, or an infinite expansion?”

“I'm not sure. As a matter of fact, I've been struggling with that
same quandary.”

“What's your gut instinct?”

“If you had talked to me as Anthony Cahill, in the proper time-

context, I would certainly prefer that it spiral toward atrophy.
Honestly, now, I'm not so sure that's how I feel.”

“Let me ask you another question.”

~161~
“Shoot. I've got nothing but time.”

“A perfect way to put it, Lux. To rephrase, I pose this question:

Considering time as the fourth dimension, and a dimension of
relative temporality at that, do you think time stretches to infinite
past and present, or finite creation and demolition?”

“Isn't that a question of divinity?”

“What is the nature of god to those on Earth?”

“Omniscience and infallible judgment.”

“Exactly. What do we possess as fifth-dimensional

transcendents?”

“I wouldn't call our perception omniscience, and I certainly

wouldn't equate my existence with that of Earth's most popular god
from my transcendental time-context.”

“So would you call yourself a god?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

~162~
“Because the concept of god was created by beings with a linear
perception of time.”

“So do you think time is linear, or not?”

“I don't know.”

“We want to find the answer.”

“How do you propose that? Who's we”

“We are a group of individuals seeking to discover the mechanics

of time in our present context. We propose the declassification and
publication of certain crucial pieces of information at the Intake,
which is also the Central Management Authority.”

“Management Authority?”

“Yes, Management Authority. The primary focus of the CMA is to

orchestrate the creation and demolition of galaxies based on the
balancing equation set by the Creator.”

“I thought that was the prerogative of the Apotheosis.”

“Nearly. The Apotheosis eases the transition of intakes by creating

statuary of the nineteen transcendental iterations; which

~163~
correspond to the nineteen transitory phases of the planet in
question, the twentieth always being dimensional transcendence.
There is a finite number of souls on each life-bearing planet, the
number of which is determined by the CMA. On top of that, the
CMA translates the galactic time-context with the universal time-
context. The algorithms for the creation of souls, and the
translation of time-context is protected information, and we aim to
change that to further our agenda.”

“So, what's the agenda?”

“Well, let's get on with it. Why don't you condense, and follow
me. I have a few friends I want you to meet.”

“Well, I have all the time in the world.”

“I like your sense of humor, Lux. I hope we can become mutually-

valuable associates.”

~164~
to be continued in square six. Revelations.

~165~