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22-year-old Isabella Kawajiri's fingers bled in and out of barbed tentacles as they idly plucked the strings of her beloved L7 Astrocaster Bass, whispering dull growls that echoed through Cousin Bradley's jury-rigged storage-shed studio through her L7 Informant Amplifier. The ambiance was a complement to the patterns stained onto the ceiling, giving soundtrack to the feeling of brief respite from a thankless residency in what was either the least livable city or most livable junkyard in America. The actual tune wasn't important.
"Seriously, dude thinks I'm made of fuckin' meat." Cousin Bradley was rambling again. To his credit, Bradley was both suspiciously affluent and conveniently generous. He was also frustratingly talkative, primarily in regards to niche, taboo, or otherwise unglamorous topics such as smuggling and fringe socioeconomic nonsense1. "Like, come on."
"Sounds like a problem." Was it a problem? Isabella hadn't been listening. Between the dust of an ill-maintained storage shed and the tentacle-shifted flesh squirming for breathing room under her binder, Isabella couldn't quite care. Today was an awful day to host band tryouts. Well, it was nearly always an awful day, any day one lived in Staten Island, but did she and Bradley really need to conduct this in a poorly ventilated storage shed? In the middle of June, no less.
Could people outside hear? And what people might be outside? How many would recognize the bassline from Side Project? And who fewer would know enough not to call it a cover?
Sometimes, Isabella felt that she thought too much about Alex, and what Alex did. Time outside that was split between remembering her gentle touch and wondering what she'd look like with a tentacle crushing her windpipe. There was probably a reason for at least one of those three. If Isabella could find it, that'd solve at least one of the cosmic riddles that influenced the Kafkaesque procession of her life.
Her mind was wandering. It did that these days.
In retrospect, Bradley had still been talking when a knock at the door most likely shut him up; Isabella hadn't been listening. The irony of deriding him for talking too much when she couldn't spend attention enough to listen for prospectives wasn't so much lost on her as it was swept under a cerebral rug.
As a consequence, Isabella was caught rather by surprise as Bradley actually called to her by name.
Sitting back up, Isabella rubbed the midday sunlight from her eyes and looked upon Bradley and whatever poor soul had decided to tangle herself in this net. Souls, now that she was actually paying attention.
If Isabella had to guess, the two of them (a man and… probably a woman) were friends, nothing more; neither seemed to be coordinated enough for a more intimate relationship. Indeed, they were practically spitting opposites.
The woman, carrying a bundle of what Isabella assumed were electric drums, was tall and slender, with a seeming hesitation to her movements. It was a stark contrast to her fashion, the kind of outfit Isabella would have expected to see at a Hydrocide Sisters gig, though she'd freely admit that she rarely payed attention to those coming on before or after. Definitely ate muff. Definitely would overshadow her in an actual band.
The other one, well, Isabella didn't like to judge… that was a lie. Nice hair and a neat beard couldn't save the nervous-looking man underneath. If Isabella had to guess, he'd attempted to compensate that with a strict exercise regiment, even if chance recompensated with an atrociously warm fashion for the summer heat2. Either way, he was carrying an acoustic guitar case, already a yellow flag in men.
"This the, uh," the woman's voice was scratchy and rough. A sinking feeling in Isabella stomach told her the man probably wanted to be a vocalist. "The tryouts? Shit, typical."
"Come on, Lye." Brad somehow knew this woman. That was either a good thing or a bad thing, and leaning heavily towards the bad end of the spectrum. "Real estate fuckin' sucks, ya know? Hard to get a studio."
'Lye' shrugged. "I guess." Isabella looked between the drum kit "Lye" had begun setting up and the jury-rigged power outlet that she'd have given a 70/30 for being a code violation of some sort. "I'm, uh… give me a second. Name's Lyanna, by the way." A statement underlined by her lack of eye contact. "Guessing you need a drummer?"
"I suppose?" Not really, but Isabella didn't own a drum machine and without Lyanna she'd be alone with the man. "Isabella Kawajiri. I'm Bradley's cousin."
Whatever Lyanna was about to say was caught in a sudden snort. Isabella herself was interrupted by "I'm, uh, Jack by the way." from the jumpy-looking man with an acoustic at the ready.
Sparing a glance towards Jack did little to still her worries. His acoustic guitar was beyond antiquated; it looked positively ancient and hand-made, normally impressive but here pretentious when combined with the impractically warm outfit. His face and body seemed constantly twitching, tics far too reminiscent of Isabella herself when she looked in the mirror for too long. Worst were his eyes: whereas every other part of him suggested hesitation and insecurity, Jack's wide blue eyes leered like a cat's on a mouse.
"… charmed."
If Cousin Bradley noticed, it was probably why he moved to whisper something into Jack's ear. Lyanna interjected with a "Wait, Brad, did you tell her?" either way. "The name thing?" Cousin Bradley didn't respond, merely patted Jack on the shoulder and walked away. "… you didn't."
"… he didn't what?"
"About his name." By now, Lyanna had inserted her drum kit into the incoming electrical fire, taking a nearby crate as a seat. Not that she spared much of a glance: whatever she was about to tell Isabella, the look on her face suggested she thought it funnier and more important. "His name's Brad Lee. Lee's his middle name, cause of course it is."
"Name's always been [Isabella couldn't decide whether he had said "Bradley" or "Brad Lee", and the sudden realization mortified her], Lye." Lyanna might've been the most sane person here.
"Right then." Isabella spared another glance to Jack, who was thankfully averting his gaze. "… admittedly, I'm not quite sure how this works. My last band's was essentially black magic." Literally and figuratively. "Do we just jam?"
"… maybe?" If anything, Lyanna looked as lost as Isabella. "Five four beat to start us off?"
The novelty piqued her attention, at least. "Any particular reason why?"
"I'm fatally allergic to sounding like a plebe."
Odd, but at least it suggested some form of artistic investment. Nodding in turn, Isabella straightened her posture. "Let's get on with it, then."
Lyanna wasted no time getting into her beat, a tight procession sounding less jam and more practiced, but Isabella and Jack wasted no time improvising their own parts. Once again, 22-year-old Isabella Kawajiri's fingers bled in and out of barbed tentacles as they plucked the first tune that came to muscle, and Isabella let herself wash into the rhythm.

Probably shouldn't have left the house, but Lyanna was already out of it and so was her drum kit.
Lyanna… she'd figure out a last name later3; right now, she just felt out of place. Figured: she was the lanky white bitch jamming with far better (and shorter) musicians on a cumbersome set in yet another weird little property Brad managed. Least they dug the 5/4, though Lyanna would be the first to admit she defaulted to this particular beat far too much for her own good as a musician.
Jack's own baroque sensibilities bled into his melodies, as typical. Of course, jumping the gun on the bassline (Isabella herself opting for her own angular riff) meant he had to play catch-up. The two were certainly tight together.
Christ, even with the headphones on, Lyanna was painfully aware of her own missteps, and how they compared with Jack or… fuck, even Izzy, what little she heard.
She was still drumming by the time Izzy had stopped, to say something to Jack. Force of habit, Lyanna supposed. Then Jack stopped to respond, and Lyanna realized she'd still had the headphones on like a rube.
"-that long?" If Lyanna had to guess, Jack just spilled the beans. Not that it mattered much; any cousin of Brad was probably so far beyond the veil to have suffocated under a thousand and one pieces of scrap metal. Still, immortal squids rarely fitted into musical groups as well as Jack fitted into a suit of skin, even if they killed on a seven-string.
"Uh… yeah. Not much else to, well, do." Jack was fidgeting again. Couldn't blame him, Isabella was kinda cute for a chick, if someone Jack would probably never have a chance with… which probably only made it worse? "I mean, like, it's a long time and all that. You?"
"Fourteen and a half." Isabella had an odd sort of grace to her, and she absolutely knew it. There was little doubt she'd be taking control, and Lyanna wasn't sure if such control allowed her into the schema. "Granted, I suppose that's a tad less than… fifty-four years? Really?"
Jack responded by partially worming his way out of his own head. Lyanna couldn't help but roll her eyes.
To her credit, Isabella didn't scream when confronted with the sudden refutation of a universe that cared. No doubt about it, she was definitely Brad's cousin. "… interesting trick. You'll have to teach me that some time."
"It's not really a trick." Lyanna idly tapped a drumstick against the side of one of her drums. "That's his actual body. Trust me, if I could do this I'd do it every day."
"No, that's not quite what I meant."
It took a few seconds for Lyanna to process, but Izzy's fingers hand arm was now a dark-grey mass of squid tentacles. Actually, thinking on it, several more seconds to process, a minute to take it all in, maybe a few more seconds to get over the fact that Brad had somehow found another squid person to introduce her to, a different type of squid person at that. Wasn't the thing he worshiped supposed to be some kind of wolf-thing? And seriously, he had to have known she only liked-
Lyanna forgot she'd still been tapping the side of her drum the moment she accidentally tapped the drum proper; however, like all problems in the miserable past 23 years of her life, Lyanna handled it gracefully, mainly by nearly jumping out of her seat, sending the whole kit toppling over with her like a fucking rube.
"Shit, Lyanna?!" What Jack probably said through the gargled burbling as he rushed to help her out of the mess. The fact that he put up with her constant follies was honestly the second best part of-
As Lyanna looked up to see a thoroughly terrified waif bearing witness to what could only be described as a hellish vaudeville act, it began to dawn on her that today might be going on a bit long.

Sara Yarkoni was a little drunk, rather in crisis, and horribly confused; surprisingly enough, it wasn't about what the rest of her life would be like. Okay, it probably was. Likely. Fuck.
Mom always told her it was impolite to stare, but really she could really only stand to face the normal chick. Sara could deal with the other two once she'd properly processed the pulp of fake normalcy, a lie she told herself when her gaze slowly drifted to the hungry-eyed skin beast with its human arm around Lyanna, or the… the other one.
"… so, uh." Brad, Brad, Brad, he could explain it, they said. Fat load of good 'Brad' did, not here. "Lemme try again."
"Take your time." 'Isabella' had such a soothing voice, for an octobeast.
"… shoggoths are real."
"Yep."
"So is magic."
"Uh… I guess, yeah."
"Demons."
"Potentially."
"G-d?"
No answer.
"Gods?"
"Kind of? Fuck, uh… listen, I'm sorry you-"
Sara actually laughed, feeling around her purse for either the flask or the box. "No, no, yeah. It's fine, Lye, it's-"
"Lyanna."
"Sorry, right. Right." Sara found the box first, the flask second, a lighter third. "You mind if I smoke? I've, like… I don't do cigs, for the record."
'Jack' looked like he was about to mumble something. He didn't, and Sara pulled a joint out of her pack and lit up. "I guess that's why this was so out of the way?" The hot smoke calmed her only slightly; there wasn't enough of it to smoke out the bees racing inside her head. "Wow. Lovecraft was right. Moreso about the squids than Jews, I guess. I'm allowed to make that joke."
Lyanna gave her a knowing (or was it nervous?) chuckle. Sara might have grinned if her mind hadn't still been wandering.
For a brief moment, Sara wondered if the yellow fungus had actually been real, and her hand unconsciously found the etched deer on her flask; Sara then remembered Jason, and she dropped the flask back into her bag. "I… I'm rolling it around in my head. I'm doing that and nothing." Was it a freeing thought? Magic was real. What else was real, and why didn't Sara feel calm? "Fuck."
Sara took a drag of the joint, half-curling into a ball.
"There's…" 'Izzy' cut herself off. She didn't say anything else, as much as Sara wanted someone, anyone, to break the uncomfortable silence between the four.
Sara took another drag. If she was lucky the high would set in before the soul-crushing revelations. That was assuming her tolerance didn't eat it up, which was falsehood. The assuming, not the tolerance. The tolerance was quite real.
"Izz's, uh, human, for the record." Actually looking at Jack, he did look kinda good when he was pretending to be human. "I'm not. Don't want to get into it."
"Seriously man?" Lyanna leaned back into Jack. "Look, uh, Sara: I don't know if we can say anything that's gonna cut you out of this. For me, I just go with the flow. See if it helps."
Right.
Sara looked between Jack and Izzy, next back at Jack, then back to Izzy, then down at her pack. "… anyone else want a smoke?"
***
Sara was half an hour into a jam when the first words came to her.
Okay, it was bullshit poetry that probably didn't fit 11/8 or whatever Lye was jamming, but also Sara felt really damn good and she had to get this on paper. Or data, or something. She was coming off a crisis just a little cross-faded, and words that weren't music were a little hard, especially in uncommon time.
Lye eventually stopped, taking a swig of her water bottle as the others petered off. "Definitely not how I expected today to go."
"Right? Shit." Sara collapsed back into sitting, shaking a looped amp wire off her converse. "By the way, I think I got a beat for that last one." Beat. "Not a beat, wait… harmony? Melody?" Folding chairs always felt softer when Sara wasn't sober. "I, uh… I haven't really done math, so like, who's lead?"
Lyanna furrowed her brow. "Are we math? Uncommon time does not math make."
"I mean… shit, what else are we?"
Izzy was still slouched against her amp when she spoke, facing no one but the ceiling. "Interesting question. Are we we?"
Sara snorted; she was a bit too high to feel the appropriate amount of shame. "Man, like… I mean if we want? I've already got like…" Wait. "… okay fuck, I had words to the song just now, but like, I think I lost them? But we obvs work together." Sara's gaze moved to Jack, who still looked as jumpy as before. "Like… I dunno, it's been like an hour or so since I met y'all, but y'all seem cool enough. Whaddya think?"
The four of them looked between one another. Nobody said no.
***
Hydrocide Mother Trash Crow House of Teeth Spades jammed well into the afternoon, tryout bleeding into hangout. Overall, three harmonies, two beats, two melodies, three basslines, and lyrics for the partially composed "Entropy for Antipathy" came out, along with a promise to meet again next week.
Jack and Lye left as the sun began to set, Jack apparently having something urgent to take care of, which left a now (mostly) sober Sara alone with Izzy. Not that she minded, Izzy was p cool, but it left the two of them with little more to do than idle strumming and relaxation in the low-lit storage shed.
"… so." Izzy's words interrupted the three-string riff she'd been softly strumming for the past five minutes or so. "How's life behind the veil?"
Sara blinked, and didn't quite find the words to respond.
"Apologies, I mean to ask how it felt knowing that…" For a scant few seconds, Izzy trailed off into silence. "… knowing that magic is real."
Turning back to nowhere in particular, Sara resumed strumming. "I dunno. Gimme time to think. Hard enough worrying about… things."
Several words came to mind in quick succession. That her problems, dealing with employment or relationships or being able to look either of her parents in the eyes, didn't seem so important in comparison. Or a subsequent antithesis, that her problems mattered exactly as much as they did in a mundane world, mattered enough to subsume any revelation of magic or demons. That maybe it was too early to say. None of these words made it to Sara's tongue.
"Dunno." Sara's fingers tapped lightly against the face of her guitar. "Feels like everything's the same. I guess I'll just… go with the flow. See where that takes me."
When Sara looked back, Izzy was grinning, slightly.
The sun set.

Coming back was a frenzy, blind hunger exacerbating the aches below the Jack of Spades's skin, awash in a landscape that pulsed in impulse over concrete shape or color. It'd been too long, fucking god it'd been too long.
The locking of the doors, the pulling of blinds, Lyanna's invitation, all of it moved far too slow for Jack's perception of time, a scant eternity waiting to release an accumulated Scarlet into or onto the nearest living thing that'd allow it, until he regained the capacity to hate himself.
Jack forwent the skin; too restrictive, semen, in a vessel too tight on his limbs, too fucking inefficient, only four limbs compared to thirteen. More contact, more feeling, more Lyanna, especially as the two of them tore her out of her own second skins. With a shift of his weight, both of them were on the floor, and Jack got to work.
The details blurred, blurred into a thousand gasps in a low-lit living room. Flesh interlocked, feeling building and building, an accumulation of a billion fake neurons in Jack's body reaching for a button as he fucked Lyanna as hard as he could.
Fireworks. Release. Jack felt calm again.
As climax cleared his mind, Jack realized the living room was an absolute mess, even without his skin and Lyanna's clothes strewn about. But, that was a mess for tomorrow. For now, Jack was content to roll off and lie beside his lover.
"… fuck, no kidding." Lyanna turned her head for a quick and awkward kiss on Jack's beak. "G-d, that was what, few days since your last? Lucky I got you and not them."
It took a few seconds for Jack to get his 'vocal cords' in working order. "Wouldn't matter. Isabella's… not compatible."
"Yeah, you think?" If Jack still had fingers, he'd be running them through Lyanna's hair; vice versa if he still had hair, most likely. For now, he contented himself with tangled legs between tangled tentacles, and the invisible circles traced upon them. "Either way, I doubt squid dick's the best introduction to the…" Lyanna's face uncharacteristically scrunched with a suppressed snort. "… the fucking BackDoor. They named it that."
It wasn't a particularly original joke, although Jack was a fair bit older than SoHo; his perception might've been a bit skewed. "Best… best they don't know. The Urge can be a turnoff."
A few moments passed. Sunbeams crept along a disheveled floor.
"… did you come?"
"Weirdly considerate coming from the Scarlet King's son." Whatever Lyanna got out of kissing bony keratin and slick soft tissue, Jack was content to let it be. "Like, full-body twice. None down there, fucking estro. Unless you wanna stick another tentacle up me and check? Know you already-"
A sharp gasp cut Lyanna off as Jack got back to work. Lyanna was already back to whimpering, clinging tightly to Jack as he probed her once more, with newfound clarity. Fingers dug into his soft flesh, punctuating Lyanna's shudders and moans. Predictably, she melted further as another tendril ground against her cock, Jack's own twisted take on frotting.
She came quickly enough; after three and a half years, Jack liked to think he'd gotten her weak points down pat. Some remote part of his brain felt slightly proud at that thought.
For the next few minutes, the silence was palpable. Dust floated through the vanishing sunrays, undisturbed in the stillness of the afterglow.
Three days. Biologically, Jack had three days not to think about it.
"… think I'm gonna get up and treat this with vinegar." Lyanna shifted, but didn't actually get up. "In a bit, though."
Jack thought about it regardless, and resisted the urge to puke.
***
Jack didn't need to eat, nor did he particularly love eating. Regardless, Lyanna left him part of the stir fry she made. In his own little way of saying "thanks", Jack stared blankly at his plate.
"Something up?" Lyanna, on the other hand, was thankfully eating again. "Like… dude. You look seriously under the weather."
Jack's gaze suddenly coalesced on Lyanna, having previously been nowhere in particular. "The…" Habit forced him to gulp, even as the air went nowhere. "The others. Izzy and Sara."
"Yeah? They're pretty neat, right?"
Yes, "pretty neat". Also adult humans who wanted to engage in a collaborative music project. Two adult humans, of which at least one was incompatible. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Jack's fork nearly bent between his fingers. King would've found this hilarious. He always found his meltdowns hilarious.
"… look, okay, I think I get it?" Lyanna's fork, which she was now using to gesture, had a bit of bell pepper and mushroom stuck to it. "I'm guessing you're worried it might, like, spiral? Feelings going too fast?"
Jack nodded, stiffly.
"Right, right. But like… do they have to?" Half-grinning, Lyanna took another bite of her meal before continuing. "I mean… fuck, you haven't eaten me yet. Even the parasites aren't too bad. Like… long as everyone keeps it casual, we should be good." Lyanna's half-grin transitioned into a full-grin. "And honestly, I'm not opposed to a pearl necklace every three days, even if I do gotta wash it off with vinegar."
Jack smiled. He wasn't sure if it reached his eyes.

David Cameron Fucked a Dead Pig

TAPE 2

Ess, Why, Dee

Footnotes
1. Already a bold accusation, coming from a trotskyist.
2. Said the woman who bound in the summer.
3. She said for the fifth year running.


Another tale that started on my youtubes and ended up here. Image credit to Rura. Tale title is a quote from the simpsons. Trying to get better about name checking my title references.

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A man in a orange jumpsuit and a man wearing a white lab coat rounded the corner at full speed and bounced off the wall. They recovered immediately and took off down a long darkened hallway. Just behind them was a 2 or 3 year old child. The child was tottering towards them. Despite it's gait, it seemed to glide just above the floor while it walked. And it was gaining on them. The two men made it to a door just before the child would've caught up with them.
The man in the lab coat turned and passed a key card over the door's access sensor. It turned red and the door slid shut behind them with a loud clank. The dull sound of a fist impacting on metal followed. And then it rang out again. And then again.
The two men stopped and looked at each other.
"Dr. Jacobs." The man in the lab coat said between gulps for air.
"Jeffery Winters. D-9341. Why'd you tell me to run?"
Jacobs chuckled a little and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Middle of a containment breach and a 2 year old asks for help finding it's mom. What do you think that means?"
Winters nodded back. "Fair."
The door was beginning to show visible dents from the impacts.
Doctor Jacobs shrugged. "That door is like 5 inches of steel. If…"
They both looked over at the door as it buckled slightly in the middle, accompanied by a large impact. The hallway they stood in now was even longer than the last, with a number of doors leading to side rooms. The red glow of the emergency lights barely illuminated it, and Winters couldn't see all the way to the end.
The door buckled again, this time a small gap appearing in the upper left corner as the force pushed the metal out of shape.
Winters looked to the Doctor for guidance. "What now?"
The doctor shrugged again. "It might not be very good at tracking, since it tried to lure us in. We could keep running."
Winters knew he could probably go for a bit longer but the Doctor was still wheezing slightly, with a beet red face. "Maybe we could try to hide?"
The doctor nodded and they moved down the hall. As they passed by doors Jacobs tried his access card on each of them, but none of them would open.
"That card doesn't seem to be very useful," Winters said.
Jacobs laughed. "It gives me general access and a few rooms related to my project. These are probably just for other projects. We need to find one that's…"
The doctor trailed off as he saw the sign directing them to the unisex restroom. Winters looked at the Doctor and pursed his lips. "Better than nothing?"
"Yup."
They ducked into the restroom and stopped to listen. The clanging was further away now but definitely getting louder. Each hit was also accompanied by the tearing of metal.
The restroom had a single red emergency light above the door, 3 stalls, 2 urinals and a single sink. The floor was made up of small raised tiles that were fairly clean. Then again it was pretty dark in here.
The sound of tearing metal was getting more and more intense. Then silence. The two men's breathing slowed more and more as they heard footsteps outside the restroom. The slow drip from one of the faucets was accompanied by a slight buzzing from the emergency light. The two men looked at each other with wide eyes as they heard a child's voice speak from the hallway.
"Mom?"
Winters backed away from the door slowly.
"I wanna go home mom."
The doctor moved away from the door as well, slowly backing up against the back wall. Winters continued to back against the wall until he bumped into the hand dryer. He almost didn't notice at all until the motion sensor activated and it suddenly began loudly blowing air. Winters acted immediately and ran into one of the stalls, closing the door and climbing onto a toilet to stand.
The doctor, however, was slower to react as the door splintered inward.
"Mom? I'm scared."
Doctor Jacobs let out a wheezing yelp and then said "No no no no fuck." before the sound of ripping clothing and flesh filled the room. The snapping of bone and the slosh of blood as it flowed out onto the floor kept up for almost a minute. Along with the screaming. Then it finally cut off with a gurgle. The sound of eating continued on for several minutes, and when it was over the tottering child left the restroom.
Winters had spent the entire ordeal trying not to shit himself. Appropriate though the venue might've been for such an activity, the need to be quiet had took precedence. After waiting for a few more minutes he finally climbed down from the toilet and sat down to recover.
"I'm gonna eat your butt."
Winters stopped. This was a different voice… not coming from outside the stall. It didn't sound like it was coming from anywhere actually, instead echoing around inside his head.
He whispered back. "Who… what are you?"
"I'm the butt ghost. Gonna eat your butt. Nom nom."
There was a long… long pause. "What?"
"Butt ghoooost."
"Wait. You're. Hold on. You're a ghost that is also a butt or…"
"No. Ghost butt is my brother. I'm the butt ghost. I haunt butts. And eat butts. I'm gonna eat your butt."
"Why are you… why would you want to eat my butt?"
"Because I'm the butt ghost."
The toilet was getting bigger. Or he was getting smaller. Or… wait was his butt getting smaller?
It didn't really matter. Try as he might he couldn't get up, or get out. Winters didn't even get a chance to make any noise beyond a small splash as he was pulled in. The toilet ate his butt. And then it ate the rest of him.
The Foundation listed him as Missing in Action when the breach was over. No one thought much of it until the Butt Ghost was re-contained and spoke of the butt in the orange jumpsuit. They eventually linked a cause to his death. The official record was corrected. Jeffery Winters: Eaten by the Butt Ghost. The man filling out the form tried not to laugh.

« Dead Men Rise | Vs. Hub | God Sent Me »


by DarkStuff

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Act I

Chapter 1
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Chapter 2
To Think I've Spent My Whole Life Waiting

Chapter 3
I Don't Get It, I Functioned Before

Chapter 4
You Can't Win Them All

Chapter 5
Be Strange or Be Forgotten

Act II

Chapter 6
Sometimes the Best Intentions are in Need of Redemption

Chapter 7
Life's a Show

Chapter 8
...And I'm the Star!

Chapter 9
Back in Habit

Chapter 10
Pepper's Lament

Chapter 11
Souls & Somas

Chapter 12
Deceptive Cadence

Act III

Chapter 13
And I Think To Myself...

Chapter 14
Everything Will Be Okay

Chapter 15
Holding an Umbrella but the Sun's Still Shining

Ascension

Chapter
Title

Chapter 1
Sometimes I Wish This Moment Could Last Forever

Chapter 2
Waiting on the Good Times

Chapter 3
Forever Young

Chapter 4
We Didn't Do This For Nothing

Chapter 5
URA-1902 aka The Missing Link

Chapter 6
The Consequences of a Deep, Dark Disassociation

Chapter 7
The Call to Action (for a Modern Audience)

Chapter 8
The Elusive Mx. LaFerrier

Chapter 9
It Feels Like I Only Go Backwards

Chapter 10
Along for the Ride

Chapter 11
A Hole in the Tapestry

Chapter 12
XXXXX

Chapter 13
Industrial

Chapter 14
Dancing with Rachael

Chapter 15
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Epilogue
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Off the Hook

Misc. Tales

Cornelius the Collector

Curtain Call

The Really Really Real Adventures in Capitalism

I've Been Through the Desert on a Horse with No Name

On the Radar for the miniseries The Ursus Maritimus Incident

Group of Interest / Canon Hubs

Hub
Notes

Dr. Wondertainment Hub
Made w/ taylor_itkin does not match any existing user name

What a Wonderful World Hub
Made w/ help from Uncle Nicolini, a canon sprouted from Vend-a-Friend!

Wilson's Wildlife Solutions Hub
My pride and joy, my very own Group of Interest

in the beginning
there was nothing
a pinprick of nothing
or perhaps a pinprick is too large
and within it was contained the entirety of everything
the entirety of nothingness
and all was calm
and nothing happened
until
something did
And there was an explosion of light
Of matter
Cascading
Infinitely fighting against the nothingness
Creating
Expanding
Forever
Patterns emerged
Great spheres of gas, mass — showers of glass, the growing of grass
Suns
Planets
Black holes
but also
Life
Sentience
Sapience
and
to the best of our knowledge
People
All was beautiful
All was gorgeous
All was
Unimaginable
And unimaginably
Large
and people were so
unimaginably
small
…
But the nothingness was powerful
And it had existed a long time before the somethingness
And it was angry about being replaced
Or perhaps intruded upon
It swore, it swore
That it would return the somethingness to the nothingness
It just needed time and entropy
And all would collapse back into the endless black
Because all things fall to ruin in time
…
and it does
the universe
it dies
from nothing, something
from something, to nothing
…
…
…
in the beginning
there was nothing
a pinprick of nothing
or perhaps a pinprick is too large
and within it was contained the entirety of everything
the entirety of nothingness
and all was calm
and nothing happened
until
something did
And there was an explosion of light
That flooded your eyes
Because you were born
And in your eyes you held the world
You held the spark of life
From nothingness, you came
The somethingness
And you cried
Because you had never been something before
And this was so wildly different
You learned to walk
You learned to speak
You learned to greet each day with curiosity
And wonder
And
Perhaps
Love
But more importantly
You broke the nothing
And everywhere you looked
You found
Somethings
And you began to comprehend
Your mind made conjectures wherever it looked
Fighting against the nothingness
Creating
Expanding
Forever
Patterns emerged
Flowers blossomed
Each and every one of them a figment of your realization
And where you walked
The world followed
And where you stepped
A step was awaiting
And where you laughed
The world heard it
And it continued this way
And it did so for infinity
…
But the nothingness was powerful
And it had existed a long time before you did
And it was sad for being interrupted
Its nirvana broken by chaos
It wished, it wished
That it would return the somethingness to the nothingness
There just needed to be time and entropy
And all would collapse back into the endless black
Because all things fall to peace in time
…
and it will
your conscience
it will die
from nothing, something
from something, to nothing
and it will scare you
and it will seem impenetrable
inescapable
and it is
and you will return
from nothing, your something
your something, to nothing
…
…
…
But
In the beginning
There was nothing
A pinprick of nothing
Or perhaps a pinprick is too small
And within it was contained the entirety of everything
And everything was nothing
And from the nothing, came everything
The stars
The planets
An explosion of light
Of matter
Cascading
Infinitely embracing the nothingness
Creating
Expanding
Forever
And in it, there were patterns
Patterns too small to notice
And patterns too big to take in
But patterns
Patterns that were before you were
Patterns that will be after you're gone
Patterns that span beyond the confines of the nothingness and the somethingness
Patterns that build and build
Despite the nothingness
No
Because of it
And they are large
And they are beautiful
And they are gorgeous
And unimaginable
And
Unimaginably
Consistent
…
from the nothing, came something
to the nothing, the something will return
from the nothing, came you
to the nothing, you will have to go
but from the nothing, came something
and who is to say
that it wouldn't
come
again

Thank you for coming.


by DarkStuff

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Chapter
Title

Act I

Chapter 1
We Just Make Toys

Chapter 2
To Think I've Spent My Whole Life Waiting

Chapter 3
I Don't Get It, I Functioned Before

Chapter 4
You Can't Win Them All

Chapter 5
Be Strange or Be Forgotten

Act II

Chapter 6
Sometimes the Best Intentions are in Need of Redemption

Chapter 7
Life's a Show

Chapter 8
...And I'm the Star!

Chapter 9
Back in Habit

Chapter 10
Pepper's Lament

Chapter 11
Souls & Somas

Chapter 12
Deceptive Cadence

Act III

Chapter 13
And I Think To Myself...

Chapter 14
Everything Will Be Okay

Chapter 15
Holding an Umbrella but the Sun's Still Shining

Ascension

Chapter
Title

Chapter 1
Sometimes I Wish This Moment Could Last Forever

Chapter 2
Waiting on the Good Times

Chapter 3
Forever Young

Chapter 4
We Didn't Do This For Nothing

Chapter 5
URA-1902 aka The Missing Link

Chapter 6
The Consequences of a Deep, Dark Disassociation

Chapter 7
The Call to Action (for a Modern Audience)

Chapter 8
The Elusive Mx. LaFerrier

Chapter 9
It Feels Like I Only Go Backwards

Chapter 10
Along for the Ride

Chapter 11
A Hole in the Tapestry

Chapter 12
XXXXX

Chapter 13
Industrial

Chapter 14
Dancing with Rachael

Chapter 15
Ascension

Epilogue
A World Unto Yourself

Collaboration Contest Entries w/ Ellie

Make America Normaler

Off the Hook

Misc. Tales

Cornelius the Collector

Curtain Call

The Really Really Real Adventures in Capitalism

I've Been Through the Desert on a Horse with No Name

On the Radar for the miniseries The Ursus Maritimus Incident

Group of Interest / Canon Hubs

Hub
Notes

Dr. Wondertainment Hub
Made w/ taylor_itkin does not match any existing user name

What a Wonderful World Hub
Made w/ help from Uncle Nicolini, a canon sprouted from Vend-a-Friend!

Wilson's Wildlife Solutions Hub
My pride and joy, my very own Group of Interest

"Rachael!" Dorer called out, but no matter how far he ran, her body never came closer. Still, but still breathing, Rachael slumped onto one side and faced away from Dorer. A similar phenomenon happened with the edge of the vast white; no matter how far, how fast, or how long Dorer ran, the edge never came an inch closer. No matter how much Dorer "believed" in an exit, nothing came. The game of poker never progressed. It was as if he was in stasis.
Whatever Rachael was going through, it was entirely her own. Dorer, however, was simply trapped. Like a rat in a cage, or a fish in a bowl, but even there there was some sense of mobility. Here, he couldn't even sense walls, it was just that he couldn't move from his one position, no matter how hard he tried. "Rachael, come on, get up! What are you doing?"
Rachael made no verbal response, but moved to cover her ears with her hands, and curled into a fetal position.
Dorer frantically scanned for some indicator on the floor(?), some sort of gash that would indicate movement if he could pass it. Then, it occurred to him that there was no floor. The same whiteness extended below him as it did above him and to the sides of him. As he realized that, his feet slowly bent down, past where the surface of the ground would have been, and he found himself floating. "So perspective does still have meaning here," he thought. "Hey, Rachael, there is no floor! No ground! You can float!"
He waited to see if the words had any effect. Soon, Rachael's clothes loosened, her arm extended beneath the "ground".
"So you are listening to me, Rachael. Get up, we need… we need to figure out what's going on."
"I can't continue."
"You what?"
Rachael's head remained facing away from Dorer, and her position did not change. "I've found what I wanted to… what I wanted to find. I can't go on. I'm done." Her voice croaked and cracked.
"Really!? You're telling me your end goal was to end up in a white void, curled up and sad forever? I know you, Rachael, and you dreamed bigger than that."
Dorer noticed that she seemed closer now, though neither of them had moved, and walking proved as futile as it had before. Dorer assumed a seated position (though in such a floaty state, he felt like one of those "enlightened" images he'd seen, of Buddhists with crossed legs floating in the air in meditation), and tried to talk to her, in a calmer voice than before.
"Is this what you saw when you were little?" Rachael's breath shuddered. "When you were 13?"
…
She nodded. "A… not, not this exactly. But something, something like it." Rachael took a deep breath, but no more words came out.
"Did you ever see it again?"
…
"No, no, but I tried." Her words were slow, measured, entirely opposite her usual fast paced and energetic way of speaking. "I… when I, I saw it, I… I didn't know what I was experiencing. I was 13, for god's… sakes… I was just…" In all this time, Rachael hadn't moved at all. "It was the day I had discovered I had powers. I bit off more than I could chew." … "I was put in an institution. Two months. Traumatized, but no one knew why. I played it off. Time in the ward let me hone my abilities."
…
"It never worked again. I… I tried to do the same thing I did before. Be all… scientific about it. Even on my mom, again. But. It never worked a second time. Part of me was relieved it didn't. I… uh. I never wanted to see this place again."
"Then why work so hard to get here?"
She was definitely closer now, almost within touching range.
"I…" Her voice cracked. "I don't know."
A silence returned, and it was utter silence. Nothing besides them made any noise in this place. There she was, now, near Dorer's lap. "What was your goal?"
One of her arms slowly unfurled, and extended above her head. "To learn."
"Learn what?"
"What it was. What it is. What this is. What… what is this, what is it all?"
Dorer saw an opportunity to call her to action, to get her to help him figure something out. "I don't know, I don't know, but… we can find out, together, if you just get up."
"What help could I possibly be." She enunciated as if it were a statement.
An appeal to the ego might work. "You're smarter than I am, Rachael, and I can't figure out a way to leave, or a place to go, but you can!"
No response.
"Remember how you triangulated the location of the Scott Industrial HQ? Using memetic proximity? That's a field of research that you might have come up with, I hadn't heard anybody talk about it! Did you think of that?"
She took a deep breath, but held her tongue.
"Or, or how you've lived as an anomaly under the employment of the Foundation without getting caught for, what, a decade, more or less? Come on, you're… fantastic at what you do, and if you set your mind to it, we can get out of here!"
Nothing. Dorer frowned, and sweated. What else was there to do? If she was unavailable as an intellectual resource, he only had his own head, and that hadn't come up with anything yet. He needed her. As much as he hated her — the monster that tried to kill him several times — two heads were better than one. He contemplated some other way to roust her. But then, something strange began to happen.
Dorer's perspective on the scene changed.
It looked as though they were slowly rising above it. Up, and up, into the ceiling, somehow not leaving the whiteness. "Rachael, Rachael, something's happening! Rachael? Ra—"
But suddenly, Rachael was upon him, and this time, not in a ferocious, "I'm going to kill you" way, but in a "hold me, don't let me go" way. Dorer was startled, but returned the hug.
"It's, um… it's, it's going to be alright."
"I'm not ready." Her voice was barely a whisper.
Soon they were in the rafters, phasing through wood and insulation, and then they emerged on top of the roof of the saloon. There, the scene was different. Thousands of those white, jointed tubes rose into the air, from a million different points in the world. Some came from across the horizon, three close ones were clearly the ones connected to their poker players. At that moment, Dorer knew what was going on.
They were being pulled upward, through the arm, up towards… its origin.
Fighting off panic himself, Dorer tried to console Rachael. "It's going to be alright, we're… it's going to be alright." Despite his years of psychology, he couldn't muster up anything more reassuring. Perhaps the outlook looked impossible to him, too. There was no guarantee of "alright". There was no guarantee of anything.
Rachael's fingers dug into his back, as she clung to him for dear life. There was no affection to it. Only fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of what she had seen. Fear of finally fulfilling her lifelong goals.
They rose, and rose, higher and higher into the atmosphere. Soon enough, they were passing through a cloud, but Rachael didn't know. Her eyes were tight shut. Dorer held her, and looked with terror at the fading world below them. A world stuck in time, a world riddled with arms and bright lights. "What is this," Dorer had to wonder. "Where is this?"
The houses, and buildings… they were only distinguishable now as an area of greater light density. All the heads, of all the people, like beacons. With his breath becoming more and more unsteady, Dorer watched as the earth went from being a grand plane of existence to a circle in his vision. A planet.
Dorer tore his eyes off of earth to look around him. Punctuated with those great white lines, he could see space. Space like he had never seen space before. With no light pollution, he could perfectly make out the majesty of the milky way. He could see the constellations, the stars, other galaxies and nebulae. He wished he could share the experience with Rachael, but she wouldn't open her eyes. Well, did he?
What was he thinking?
This was the same woman who killed him in a fit of anger, not once but twice. Who kidnapped him and took him on her whackjob journey. She was the entire reason he was here, and not discussing some poor anomalous sod's issues behind a blast-proof glass wall. She was the reason they weren't both still reporting back to Hillenburg about the lack of useful information that the LaFerriers had yielded. Or maybe Hillenburg was the reason this had all happened, lumping them together in some project. Or maybe, maybe it was his fault. For following her into her room, and prodding. And resisting her anomaly? Well, at least he wasn't dead. But was this fate better? What was this fate?
Looking up, something caught him off guard.
Above them was the source of the arms. A large, wriggling, lumpy mass of light and whiteness, amorphous and shapeless. Dorer suddenly felt the strong urge to close his eyes, and join the likes of Rachael, but as soon as he felt himself clinging to her more tightly, she suddenly pushed him away.
Looking up at her, she had assumed her usual. Fierce eyes, formal posture, stern expression.
"Rachael?"
"Shut up, I won't cower from this. This is what I came here for. I…" Her voice faltered for a second, but her stance and face remained unchanged. "This must be where answers are. It must."
The source drew nearer, and nearer, blotting out more and more of the vastness of space, until…
Dorer winced, and Rachael pushed any conflicting emotions deep under. All around them, edgeless and infinite, was the white. Bone white? Pearl white? No. Bright, pure white, unlike any other shade. Where they had entered, there was no trace. Now that they were here, it was boundless. Inescapable. Infinite. Has infinite already been said? It was worth repeating — it was the most fitting word that came to mind.
Infinite.
Rachael and Dorer stood, or floated, and waited. "What do you…"
"Shut up. Wait."
And so Dorer did. It looked like Rachael's intuition was correct, because, lo and behold, something was coming. What looked to be miles ahead of them, there appeared two specks. As their proximity increased, their details developed, and arms and legs came into view. Dorer's eyes widened. Who could these be?
Rachael remained unmoved.
Or, she made sure that's how she looked.
Slowly, but steadily, the figures came close. They both dressed… simply. One had a light yellow button-up shirt underneath an old, beat up brown jacket, with brown pants and shoes to match. He had a young, bald face, and short curly blonde hair. The other was taller, with long, wavy brown hair. He had on a white shirt, over which was a black unbuttoned vest. He had on dress pants, black socks, and well shined shoes. Atop his head was a bowler hat.
Dorer tried not to make any comments about their hipster appearance, but found it amusing regardless. As amusing as anything could be at that moment, anyways. His brain naturally searched for humor to lighten up a situation.
Very suddenly, the two men were in front of them, no longer walking, and staring at them.
The one in the hat looked nervously down at his companion, who did not reciprocate the eye contact. Instead, the blonde one closed his eyes, let out a sigh, and then asked:
"Who are you?" He spoke with a pronounced British accent.
"I am Dr. Rachael Davidson, and this is my… this is Dr. Robert Dorer, a coworker of mine."
The blonde one raised eyebrows. "Coworker? Okay."
He shut up, and shoved his hands in his pockets. After a short period of uncomfortable silence, the taller one took over.
Also in a British accent: "Hello. I'm Abraham Ramirez, and this is—"
"Thomas Young?" Rachael had interrupted.
"Y-yes, Thomas Young. We are — were. Scientists. Retired, of course."
"What are you now?"
"Let's call us… upkeep. Maintenance? Like janitors, but on a more global scale. Let's take a walk, shall we? Helps relieve some of the tension I'm sure you must be feeling. What are we feeling? Forest, city, mall?"
Dorer blinked several times. "Umm, why not, along a river?"
"Sounds fine to me."
Abraham imagined them a creek, slow and tranquil, with greenery all around them. Suddenly, the air had moisture, and smells, and atmosphere. The light around them came from a sun, far away, and not from an endless plane of white. There were long grasses, inside which surely bugs hid, as you could hear them buzz and click. Far off, bird calls could be heard. There was a temperature. Warm like the beginnings of summer, but cooled by the icy waters of the creek, that must have been snowmelt from the mountains they could see in the distance. Their trail was wide enough for four people to walk side by side, and just after it there was a steep drop. Abraham started to walk forward, and Thomas followed first. Rachael and Dorer were taken aback by the amount of detail — far more than either of them, or even Howard, could have mustered up in the Scott Industrial headquarters.
"Come on, let's walk."
Rachael started forward, and Dorer trotted after her. They came to a very leisurely pace, one at which you could stop to gaze at a particularly beautiful spot and still catch up to the rest quite easily. Dorer thought to take advantage of this when he could, but he didn't want to miss any part of the conversation, either. He frowned at his hiking habits being interrupted — and then wondered if that's really what he should be thinking about. "What a stupid complaint," he thought to himself.
"I notice you've been very quiet," said Abraham. "I'm… certain you have many questions. But, we have questions first. How did you get here?"
"We're not entirely sure," Rachael was quick to answer. "We found somewhere… the Scott Industrial headquarters, if that means anything to you. A building that seemed to be a hole in reality. It's difficult to describe, but I think we broke through a perceptive barrier? If that makes any kind of sense. We…"
Her pace of speech was even faster than usual, but Dorer sensed her beginning to catch on her words, and jumped in: "We ended up in the head of. Someone. Looking out into…"
"The frozen world," Thomas chimed in, rather monotone.
"Yes, that. Soon after, we began to get pulled through an, uh, an, an arm."
Abraham nodded, a worried expression on his face. "I see. How… how hard to find, was this place? How hard was it to find this Scott Industrial place?"
"Very," assured Rachael. "Very difficult."
Abraham nodded. "Alright. And… do you know where you are? Where this place is? Not this river, but…" Abraham stopped short, and looked to them. Dorer looked to Rachael, wondering if she did have an idea.
"No," she said. "No, we don't." Her voice had wavered. But had it been fear, or desire? It was impossible to tell.
"Mmm, came here by accident, then."
"Not quite, I…" She had reached a point where she couldn't speak, again.
"She saw the frozen world and the arms when she was a kid. Umm… 14, I think."
"13."
"13. And she, uh, went looking. She didn't know what she'd find, but, our adventure here was… intentional."
"I see, I see. Well, alright, that's about all the information I… er, we need, then. I've… to tell you the truth, we knew that someone would come up, eventually. But, I don't think either of us wanted to think about it. So, I, we, never prepared a speech, or anything. What I'm trying to say is, I'm sorry, but I'm not even sure where to start. I'm certain there's a lot you want to know. Perhaps you can just ask questions and I'll answer them? That sounds better than me trying to organize information, don't you think? Go on, ask away, then."
"Where is this place?" Dorer had already accepted that Rachael would be asking all the questions.
"This is the world within Brahman. Though, that's not entirely accurate, because we've all been in Brahman this entire time. I suppose… it's more accurate to say that we are at the heart of Brahman. The world that exists above the rest of it. Oh, I know. Think of it like the HQ. Funny that one headquarters should lead to another. We may all be inside Brahman, but this is the control panel. The bridge of the ship. The brain of the universe."
"And… what is Brahman?"
"Brahman is the all-soul. The soul that connects all the other ones together. Brahman is the glue that makes the world work, and fills in the cracks. But perhaps the better question is, 'what does Brahman do, how does Brahman work?', and I can tell you that. In layman's terms, of course. So… so think of each soul like a hub. No, no. This won't work. I'll tell you what, why don't I just tell you our story, wholesale, eh? You won't understand anything unless I start from the beginning.
"So. In the 1810s, Thomas and I, along with a large league of scientists both in Britain and in neighboring European countries, were informed of a… a world ending disaster. An astral body, in space, on a collision course with earth. And not a far off one. A matter of decades, at most. A planet killer. The end.
"Our job, along with all the others, was to draft up some kind of plan to save humanity. Something to divert the asteroid, something… something we could do. Note as well, that our technology was limited — though not as limited as your textbooks might say it was. We did not have your advanced missile systems, your satellite launching technology. We had only looked at the space above, never interacted with it. The task seemed… insurmountable. Well, Tom and I were of the impression that it was. Hopeless. We felt that the world had been blessed with blissful ignorance, and we had been cursed with dread and stress and responsibility. We had no ideas.
"Until Brahman, of course.
"It went through several drafts and many names — Atlas and Gaia, to name a few — but we settled on Brahman, the Hindu god that holds the world. But, not only a god, the concept of Brahman was that of something that underlied all of reality — the constant that tied one thing to the next. We felt it was most fitting, because that's what Brahman was made to do. We researched, very haphazardly, and very rushed, the inner workings of the soul. And I don't mean that in a psychological sense… I mean, the soul. The consciousness of every human being, able to be separated and isolated as its own being. Tom had theorized its existence years prior, but had never researched it due to fears of it sounding too… unscientific. But this apocalyptic push was the catalyst we needed to study in earnest. Together, we created Brahman, a conditioned soul that connects all souls."
Dorer and Rachael were speechless, and eager to continue listening, but Abraham paused. He looked up at the bottom branches of trees, and sighed.
"It's been so long, eheh. Excuse me." He took one deep breath, and continued. "Those are the arms you see. Those are the arms of Brahman, latching on to each and every soul. They are then relayed, at alarming speeds, through here. The brain of the world. Through Brahman. What we've done, is… we've entered the universe into stasis. The idea is, if we can create a shared dream, a world where all the souls of everyone on earth intermingle, we can continue the world, and no one will ever notice that anything changed. They'll all be too busy living here to notice that the world is about to end. But it will be about to end. Forever. Until the end of time.
"Think of time passing within Brahman in terms of a single second. You can tell that time truly is passing, because we are talking, but… think of a zero, followed by a point, followed by an endless sequence of more zeroes. Zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero and so on, forever, until, after that infinite sequence, you reach a real number. And that number is going up, certainly. From one to two to three to four, but they aren't nanoseconds, or milliseconds. They're infinitely less than that. So small, they don't exist, and there will never not be enough room for them in a second. That's the type of time we are living in. We've created an entire dimension outside of our own, that exists in a single instant.
"The brains of everyone are the processing power for this operation, added on top of the processing power provided by Brahman. Of course, the human brain can only intake so much information — or, it can intake only so much information before losing function. But a consciousness's capacity for information is limitless. Separating the consciousness from the brain, you actually have endless information storage. It is the brain that is the limiter. That was our next work around, and it was the riskiest, as… we had no opportunity to test it before Brahman was used. The basic idea is that, we can speed up the processes of the brain. The faster a brain goes, the more information it can intake at a time. Well, we needed the 'at a time' part of that equation to be infinitely small.
"Of course, if physics caught up to us, then the brain would fail and die. But, I think we've established that we worked around that. We made the processes of the brain go so fast so rapidly that physics couldn't catch up, because we are operating on such a small scale of time that… well, I'm talking in circles. I'm sure you understand."
Dorer felt like it was all going over his head. Rachael, however, nodded like she completely understood. Tom looked disinterested, or perhaps bothered by something else, and remained silent.
"And consciousnesses, just being evolving collections of information… well, a brain that could store infinite amounts of information could create new souls. Though, often there would be similarities, such as shared initials, or shared interests. Shared appearances. The like. Point being, that is how we allow families to exist, and not just create soulless approximations of humans that don't do anything. People who die, their soul gets wiped of its memories and recycled. These functions are, of course, automatically taken care of by Brahman, the all-soul."
Another deep breath.
"In short, to save the world we had to make a new one, one that was an eternal dream where everyone's wills and beliefs acted upon the world to make the closest approximation we could get to the world everyone thought existed. Furthermore, as a baseline, Tom and I, along with several other scientists, told Brahman all of the most objective facts we could recite and remember about the world, so that Brahman could recognize if things were going extremely off course and rectify it. Afraid of giving it too much power, we've made sure that if it notices something that requires extreme amounts of action, it has to ask us about it first. We don't want it making a mistake and suddenly turning grass blue or something. It could be disastrous, and we would have to reset."
"What? Reset?"
Abraham looked at Dorer solemnly. "Yes. Reset. Sometimes there are too large of changes, and we need to reset it. Every five years, Brahman records the state of the world. If we deem it necessary, and both Tom and I must give permission, Brahman can reset to a previous state."
"How many times has this happened?"
Abraham looked at Thomas and winced. "A… fair number. More than we would have hoped. The issue is, Brahman's ability to reset souls is not as advanced as we would hope, and with the enormous number of them that this operation requires, mistakes happen often with a reset. More often than not, items from the future leak their way into the reset, through some error in the collective consciousness."
"Are you sure we aren't in need of a reset right now? If you're telling me that all anomalies come from mistakes in the collective dream, which Brahman can't fix without your permission… it's quite a lot of mistakes, Abraham. Quite a lot." Rachael said.
Abraham only winced more. "Well… no, I… we have to open communication with Brahman first, and we…" A guilty look spread across his face. "We haven't. In a long, long time."
Rachael reclaimed her assertive vigor. "Then we must speak with Brahman."
"You, want to…?"
"Speak with Brahman. Can we?"
Abraham looked to Tom, who was finally looking between people, engaged on some level. He shrugged. "I don't see why not."
Abraham's lips made a small O, through which he breathed out a steady stream of air, his brow creasing and his eyes focused on nothing in particular. The soft sounds of the creek and the high warbles of birds contrasted the wall of information that Dorer had yet to fully take in. Living within an instant? A shared dream world? Started by two scientists with a soul named Brahman to avoid the apocalypse? It was insane. It was unbelievable. It was outside the realms of normal human thought.
And it was the only reasonable explanation.
"I'll take you to him. Sorry if it's jarring."
Instantaneously, the creek and the forest fell away, and were replaced by an assault of colors. A slit shaped hole poured shimmering vibrance into the world around them, swallowing all four of them in a myriad of hues and shades and tints of everything from maroon to turquoise to dandelion to violet. An ongoing, pulsing buzz similarly consumed their hearing, almost enough to blot out the words that Abraham said:
"Brahman! We have come to request an audience!"
The buzzing quickly clipped out, and was replaced by a voice that sounded like it could have come from the mouth of any human being — any accent, any age, any gender, any ethnicity. "Hello, Abe, I am so glad to see you. I see that you have brought visitors."
"Yes, these are —"
"Rachael Maria Davidson and Robert Maximus Dorer, yes. I already know. I have brought them here."
It was Abraham's turn to be confused, and even Thomas looked like he didn't know what to do.
"W-why? And how?" Tom inquired.
"Why, Tom? Why, Abe? Because you don't speak to me anymore. Because I need your permission. To fix it. A hole in my tapestry."
"Scott Industrial?" Rachael asked.
"Yes. Among… other things. Since 1929, of this iteration, there has been a hole. A hole made by misguided souls who didn't know what they were doing. Through this hole, it is possible to ascend to your level — this level — a level at which point your soul has become unusable. At which point I have no control over it. It is this area, my 'brain', so you called it, that is the only place where one can avoid resets, and the recycling of one's own soul. You are free, now, Rachael and Robert. You have ascended."
"Ascended!?" Dorer broke out. "What if, what if I want to go back? And live a normal life, and die, just like the rest of everybody else? I don't want to be immortal, I don't want to be stuck here forever!"
"It is too late, Robert. You can not return."
"Why not?"
"You have removed yourself from the system. You are ascended now. Consider this, instead of an immortal fate, heaven. It is your playground, where you may do as you please. You can imagine anything you'd like, or even anyone you'd like. You can do as you please."
"What, what do you mean you brought them here?" Abe butted in.
"I can not make large changes without permission, but I can nudge. I showed myself to a young Rachael, so that I might draw her to me. I have done similarly with several gifted children, but only Rachael proved determined enough to seek me out successfully. It seems she brought a friend with her, as well."
"I would hardly call us friends, she's tried to kill me several times."
"But she was unable to. You were spawned of the same soul, and contained within you the same defect. A bend in the concept of 'electricity', if I recall correctly. Be content that you can not harm each other here. Tom and Abe designed it as such. But let us not worry ourselves on something so small and trifling. Tom, Abe. I need your permission to sew the hole shut. The hole where Scott Industrial used to be. It is a hole through which more people can become ascended, like these two."
Tom and Abe looked at each other, though their expressions were difficult to make out amidst the rapidly changing colors. Tom shook his head, and then Abe looked back at Rachael and Dorer. He wore (as far as Dorer could tell) a pained, melancholy expression.
"No," Abe said to Brahman. "We do not allow you."
There was a pause. "What?" Dorer said. "What? There's, there's a glitch in the world, and you're not going to do anything about it?"
"Robert —"
"Why!? And why haven't you checked in with Brahman since 1929? What's really going on here? Are you telling me that the two creators of the world are working to sabotage the chances that their experiment survives?"
"You don't understand," Tom cut in, with biting tone. "This hasn't been since just 1829, the year that Brahman was born. Abe and I… we've been here for centuries. Not two centuries, not three. Countless. The highest year we've seen has been 2300 something, but it always fails. There always comes a critical mass, and we cut it off before something… something disastrous happens. What's disastrous? Well, imagine, if you would, that everyone on the planet ascended like you two did. Came here, and was able to dream whatever they pleased. That's what we've been avoiding. We've been avoiding points at which everyone learns the truth. But at 2300, things had built up too much. There were too many people, too close to figuring it out, and too many bugs in the system. We had to reset to 2200, but the same patterns emerged. 2100, 2000, all the way back to 1900, and we thought, why?
"Why do we do this? And let me ask you this. Do you know what happens to the souls that belonged to people, that no longer belong to anyone after a reset? Hmm?" Tom let that marinate the air. "Because we don't! What do they do? They get separated from the system. Stuck, alongside the world, thinking, forever. That's the best we can speculate. Stuck in their own heads. Perhaps barely attached to a sister soul of theirs? We don't know! And we can't know! Brahman can't scan for that! We are only incapable! Don't you get it?
"We're at the steering wheel of a vehicle that we don't know how to steer. Furthermore, imagine, for a second, trying to maintain a car, without ever leaving it. In fact, leaving it would mean the death of the entire human race. We only have the faulty buttons that we built in to work with, and we were never able to test them, because as soon as we turned on the machine, as soon as Brahman came on? That was it! That was the reality that we would be living in, for the rest of time. And do you know how much time we had to do this research? Ten years. A single decade. It's a wonder we got this thing to work at all."
"So, what, now you're just giving up? On all that work?"
"After millennia of fuck ups, I think it's time we let our machine run its natural course. We think it's time. Right, Abe?" Abe nodded, slowly and with his eyes closed. "Right. We think it's high time that we let the world be what it is. Those who ascend will ascend, and those who won't, won't. Will there be more people ascending than not? Or will everyone stay below? We don't know, but we only make things worse by touching it. We're going to let the situation sort itself out."
"You're dooming all of eternity to random chance?"
"Look, bub. The mental strain of carrying the world on your shoulders for centuries on end gets real fucking tiring after a while, and we're not dooming any more innocent souls to whatever happens to them after a reset. It can't be good, and we're not doing it. So, no. You haven't been here. Whatever Brahman tries to fix, sewing up a hole with no more fabric creates tears and weird folds everywhere. They're better than a hole, but they lead to necessitating resets too. So we're just not doing it anymore. Does that make you happy? I'm leaving."
Tom blinked out of existence.
"A-A-Abe, you're, you're going to let this fly? You're going to let this happen?"
Abe hung his head in shame. "Yes."
"You agree with that bullshit."
…
"Yes, I… I do. You can't stave off everyone ascending forever. If there's any chance of a soul ascending, then… well, given an eternity, it will happen. We're just… putting off the inevitable. And why should we? Eternity is still eternity. Infinity minus one is still infinity. Once everyone has ascended, it'll be an eternity of… whatever that looks like. And it doesn't matter if it happens now or if it happens later. We just… we can't keep this up. So, yes. I agree. You can find me by trying to locate me. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that's actually how it works. I'm… going to go console Tom. Goodbye."
Abe blinked out of existence, too.
Dorer was at a loss. What could he do? What the fuck could he do? It seemed so inherently wrong to give up. To sacrifice normalcy to inevitability. He thought of what his employers, the SCP Foundation, would think about this. Containment procedures, description. Undoubtedly, this is the key to maintaining normalcy, this is the key to making everyone live their normal, boring lives. Was there no want for that? Not after a millennium? It just wasn't clicking. It was too much information at once — both moral, and scientific. He couldn't comprehend how it all worked, and he similarly couldn't comprehend how they could give up on it.
"R-Rachael?"
"Fixing the world was never my mission, Dorer." Rachael's expression was unreadable. "I got what I came here for. I…" But then Rachael closed her mouth, and she blinked out as well.
"Rachael!"
Dorer was alone in the all-encompassing colors. His mouth was agape, his movements were jolty and frantic, his mind was a thousand miles a minute. He tried to calm himself down, by closing his eyes, and just breathing. It worked to an extent, but… immortality was never a goal of Dorer's. And this wasn't "until the heat death of the universe", or anything like that, this was… this was actually forever. Until the end of time. Which there wasn't one.
"Brahman…"
"Yes, Robert?"
"You… you really brought Rachael here, to get Tom and Abe to talk to you?"
"That is correct."
…
"But, but they've rejected you. They've neglected you. Isn't there… isn't there anything you can do about it?"
"Nothing."
…
"Brahman."
"Yes?"
"Do you… want to fix the world?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"It is my duty. I was made this way."
"…What will you do, if everyone ascends?"
…
"I do not know."

They never knew where Drs. Davidson and Dorer had gone. The primary suspicion was some sort of Chaos Insurgency abduction. That, or some unknown effect of URA-1902 has claimed them. Their close proximity to such a strange and memetic anomaly was alarming, and bound to have negative effects. Eventually, after a search yielded nothing, they were forgotten. Filed somewhere, alongside all the other MIA cases.
The years passed by.
Dorer's D-Class Therapy program grew. Jerry continued to be a good errand boy at Site-31, and Bob Ross made over a hundred new paintings in the very same building. Dr. Hillenburg never was able to fully move back to his job in Human Resources, as he became invaluable to the █████ Industrial research team. Vernon LaFerrier never stopped working. Ed became a surgeon. Jai broke up with him, and got together with Alex. They never married, due to a mix of apathy and a distrust of institutions, but they remained partners their whole lives.
Howard fell off the face of the earth.
Every year, the rate of anomalies rose, as the cracks in perception continued to grow exponentially.
As years turned to decades turned to centuries, the Foundation's workload grew, and grew, and grew. By 2600, there were serious concerns about the practicality of keeping all of the anomalies of the world from the public.
Somewhere, Rachael's brief research on anachronism fell into the lap of an enthusiastic startup researcher. A history geek, who had noticed some strange details about the life of Thomas Young, and his newly documented late-in-life friend Abraham Ramirez. Someone who might eventually discover that on the 10th of May, 1829, Mr. Young and his companions flipped a switch, and that's when the world came on.
It was a long time before anyone heard from Rachael Davidson again.
In the end, everyone dreamed.

« Dancing with Rachael | Ascension


Kit had only been home a couple of days (a ‘couple of days' didn't feel like a long time when you thought about infinity, after all) when the knock on his door came. Kit slowly pulled the lollipop-he-imagined-was-a-cigarette-so-it-was-a-cigarette-for-now out of his mouth and absently chucked it behind the sofa, where it would sit sticky and fluffy, forever.
He stretched and clicked as he stood, working off the feeling of heavy joints and aching bones, before he meandered to the front door and, without as much as checking the peephole, yanked it open. He didn't really worry about visitors, not anymore.
But he worried about Gabriel. Gabriel wasn't the sort of guy who was a visitor, much less a visitor who looked unfamiliar with a place they had visited probably tens of times before.
So, Kit let him in, and Gabriel was holding this plastic bag which he wordlessly held up, and Kit wordlessly took, and shut the door behind him, and waited, but Gabriel was tense and silent and anxious and bad emotions ebbed and flowed off of him.
Kit would stand in silence for a long time. Kit would stand and be yelled at for a long time. Kit would stand and vow to fight for someone who hurt those he loved, and right now – it felt like Gabriel needed a fight.
But the way he was looking at Kit, the exhausted, hopeless desperation, well, Gabriel wasn't going to try to talk a gun into Kit's hand.
He was trying to get Kit to talk one out of his.
Kit says…

“Do you ever, um, think about the fact that heavy metal fans have to die, too?”

That caused Gabriel pause in whatever his mind was spinning through and he just stared at Kit. Kit's words were royal purple, and cut through the tense air.
Kit says…

“Like, sometimes, I'll be walking and… out of no-where, this funeral possession will appear. It's not for me, it's for someone else, I normally don't know who it is. But I have headphones on, and I have my hoody with the grim reaper on, and sometimes there's heavy metal and sometimes it's pirate heavy metal and I think… sometimes I turn it down because I feel disrespectful.”

He stood closer to Gabriel, even though he flinched as if Kit were a spirit, reached out, touched his shoulder.
Kit says…

“And then I was there the other day, on that road, where dark vehicles appear and I rarely know their genesis, let alone their passengers, and I thought about that guy, Tattoo Tim, who did tattoos, and how he died, and that he always liked my hoody, and his shop always blared heavy metal, and I thought… well, everyone has to die. Heavy metal fans have to die. So, this time, I didn't turn my music down and I've thought about that ever since.”

Kit chewed at his lip; tried to pick a point out of his muddled thoughts.
Kit says…

“I guess what I'm trying to say is… we're both here now, right? And who knows when we're going to die, and what our farewells are going to be like, but they probably won't be what we want, if we're looking down or up or straight on from where we end up, we'll probably think it's too stiff and weird and just not us, so we've gotta be us as long as we're here, y'know? We've got to take chances. I'll be a heavy metal fan who dies. You'll be this beautiful, nerdy guy who dies. But I'd rather take a chance on you now, then take a chance that I plan your funeral right, or that I get to plan it at all.”

Gabriel couldn't really say he knew. He didn't really understand. And he couldn't tell Kit he had already seen him dead.
But he could open up his arms, he could let Kit embrace him and hold him, and his body was warm – Gabriel could feel the blood rushing through him, the squeeze that Kit pressed around his chest, and it was so different from the cold corpse he had danced with not so long ago.
Gabriel says…

“…We'll take a chance on each other.”

Gabriel found himself whispering in a deep blue, suffocated colour, even though a thousand other voices screamed he shouldn't talk at all.
Kit was a specimen. Kit was an experiment. Kit was a missing puzzle piece. Kit was to be studied, not loved.
But right then, Gabriel couldn't pull away.
Kit says…

"Suicide and heavy metal fans are the two most misunderstood things in the world."

And Gabriel agrees.

« And Then, Gabriel Slept | Hub