Prologue

Lorraine Plaza – Midnight.

The rain pattered onto her hair. She knew the feel of the cold vertical slot of the zat gun barrel pressed against her forehead would be one of her last thoughts. Soon, the hot knife of the zat bolt would cut her brain in half and that would be it. But she was prepared. She didn’t get to be a leader in the Alliance by being unrealistic. She knew this ending was a valid possibility. All was lost.

And yet . . .

. . . glancing at her husband, knelt beside her in the mud, she could see him looking up at something. He smiled.

He was gazing at the face of the officer who was pressing the gun to her head.

She looked too, into the cold grey eyes like two surf polished rocks on a bleak windy beach. Something in those eyes. He was trying to keep them level and angry, but there was something else there. Resignation.

The thing he was most angry about was he knew they saw it.

Oh my gods. They were afraid of losing The War.

They were losing.

So, there it was, killing her and her husband was a desperate act. They hoped that personally executing the leaders of the Alliance would cut the head off the beast.

But they weren’t really the leaders. They were only human. And now they were dead.

She’d do it again. For their daughter, for One Mind, for Sol III . . . for love.

A hot flash and lightning boom, the light fading to a violet darkness and rest. In the distance further away each second a burst of nervous laughter.

The darkness folded in on itself again and again, spreading out to infinity until it was nothing and more than nothing. A serene flat nothingness and a so very absolute silence.

Her consciousness, that thing she fought so hard for was still there, but it was changed. It had taken another form, such a form that describing it was impossible with ordinary words. Only one ordinary word came close, but even that lacked enough dimensions.

Peace.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know if this story is going to be comprehensible to anyone but me. It’s complicated, a story that traverses multiple universes and multiple timelines, but I promise in the end you will see there are common threads running through it.

It may be the only common thread running through any of it is my perception, my viewpoint, my ideas. That’s a distinct possibility. It could also be that my viewpoint is totally subjective and wide of the mark. You’ll have to take a risk, like I did. But if at any point you feel you are lost and don’t know where the path is leading, don’t worry. I’ve been there before you and I’m just as clueless and shaky on the truth as you are, for reasons that will become obvious over time.

Who am I? I’ll let you figure that out, but don’t sweat it, it’s really not that important.

You’ll see why.

It’s customary at times like this, when relating the events of a story, to start with “It all began . . .” This is not that kind of story.

In real life the clockwork parts of any story never truly begin in one place or with one thing, there’s no sharply defined beginning. This is what makes true stories so hard to tell.

Nobody ever said “once upon a time there were a handful of random people who didn’t know each other and never met, and their actions never really came together neatly and tidily, but somehow it all made sense at the time.” That’s reality. It’s messy. What you want of course with a story is for all the events in it to mean something, and come together in an exquisite and unique way to bring about an impossibly tidy and satisfying conclusion.

No.

Only made up stories have structure. They have pace, they have arcs, they have meaningful interactions between people and those meetings change them and move the story forwards.

This is not that kind of story.

Well, sometimes it is. It depends who you ask.

All stories are true, even if they are not real . . . but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, let me try to focus; I don’t want to tell this story by describing what it is not.

Let me see if I can make a meaningful start.

Something wonderful and strange is about to happen and the person it’s about to strangely happen to has no idea it’s coming towards them. The person was clueless about the train tracks they were standing on and the whistle and rushing air of the locomotive charging towards them. Don’t worry. It’s not a real train, it’s a metaphor for destiny. Perhaps that’s too strong a word for it. Life. They were unaware of their life. That’s at least a realistic beginning.

Dirk P. Kinder was not his real name. It was the name he was known by. Dirk was a writer. He still is a writer, but we are talking about him as he was then at this specific moment in his world.

I want you to picture him. He is almost universally described as having a kind face. Although in his mid forties, or perhaps even early fifties, hard to tell, he was lucky to still have most of his hair, although his forehead in truth was getting higher. His hair was thick and dark brown, cut neatly at the neck, as he detested ponytails, and swept smoothly over the crown of his head. He occasionally pushed this sweep of hair over his head with thumb and little finger while concentrating on something. His beard was dark and neatly trimmed, but not often. He despised men who were too well groomed. Either side of the impressive, sculptural nose were two dark, glossy brown eyes like bitter chocolate candies, under straight but unmanicured brows. Fine lines at the corners of the eyes lent a cheekiness to his gaze, which smiled at you even when he wasn’t.

He sat at his desk, a Slate computer on the top, his hands in his lap, his eyes closed and covered by an eye mask. He could hear the giant Nemesis butterflies thrumming about in the garden, but coming from a hidden speaker in the room was a repetitive hypnotic beat.

The tall terrace windows were open with fresh, sweet air wafting through from a grassy valley beyond, a little too picture postcard perfect and beautiful.

The wooden frames of the windows were untreated but clean. A woven rustic rug covered a red tile floor. On the walls of the study were family portraits and photos of Dirk when he was young and handsome. He thought they were his better years that were behind him. He was often told that was untrue. Although it was quiet in the room and he wasn’t moving, he was working.

His writing process was a ritual. He liked to keep it sacred. That’s an odd word to use, but perhaps an appropriate one. Not sacred then, but protected, preserved. The ritual was a large part of that protection.

The first part was the desire for an idea. If you wanted an idea you’d have to sit and wait for it. Not in a passive way. It’s not like waiting for a land bus when you’re not sure if they’re running today. No, it’s more like waiting for a baby to be born. You sowed the seed, so to speak, and the baby grows and is born on automatic pilot. It’s a usually inevitable and predictable process.

Obviously following this analogy, also sometimes babies aren’t born. Medical matters intervene. Through luck or chance or genetics, the process is . . . interrupted. Sometimes instead of birth you get death. It’s sad and sorry and unfortunate, but it happens.

It’s precisely the same with ideas. You sow the seed, then you sit in quiet non judgemental patience until at that point in time, which is acceptable to the idea, when gestation is finished and it is born.

Why the lack of “judgement”? Well, when a baby is still inside its mother, you don’t know who it is, what it wants to be. Your first thought is that you hope the child is healthy, viable, able to grow and become a person. But the destiny is unknown, who it is, who it wants to be, is undefined. You don’t prejudge that, you patiently wait and see.

So it is with ideas. If you pass judgement on an idea before it’s born (what kind of idea it is, what its purpose is, what other ideas it might hang out with, where its ultimate destination lies etc.), you are trying to steer its birth. You are not allowing it to be what it is. Instead you are trying to brute force it into a mould.

This is not good for the development of babies and it’s most definitely not good for the development of ideas.

So the first part of Dirk P. Kinder’s ritual was a form of meditation.

Over the years he developed a lot of techniques for perfect meditation. He did a lot of courses, read lots of books, and watched trillions of videos on The Feed. He tried many ways to do it. All it really boiled down to in the end was closing your eyes for an hour and not falling asleep.

His takeaway from studying all the different disciplines was that no single discipline worked for everyone; Transcendental Meditation, Yogic, Buddhist, Technophagic, Elemental, Quantum, all of these things were varying shades of the same colour.

For Dirk P. Kinder what worked was a quiet, comfortable space, an eye shade for complete darkness, and a repetitive sound, preferably binaural beats. He found the sound tuned his brain out really quickly and the lack of light gave his brain the mistaken idea that it was night-time. Using this method he could even do just 20 minutes and have a meaningful experience.

He loved the pulse of the beats. The gentle frequency was instantly relaxing to him, but perhaps this was because he had trained his mind to respond to that particular stimulus.

In this environment of peace and low level brainwaves, he found his mind to be at its most facile, the most productive and creative. It’d taken a little bit of practice to get to this point, but now he was here, ideas could be sown and harvested at will.

The second part of the ritual was sticking ideas together. Once you have an idea, you must sit and wait for another idea that goes with the first. This is where the magic happens. Another round of non judgemental idea holding, and this time he would turn the first idea over in his mind and meditate on it.

It’s like looking at a single Lego brick or jigsaw puzzle piece. It has almost infinite potential but, he reasoned, you must not force it together with just any other random piece. You must let it find its own friends and join with them willingly and authentically. That’s the most common bit people get wrong.

It’s like the baby analogy again. Cells divide and organise themselves according to a plan, the DNA. They multiply and divide and proliferate in ever increasing numbers according to a built in design. But with ideas there is no map, no DNA, no design or at least no explicit one. They know where they belong. You need to let them find it.

So he sits and turns the ideas over in his mind until he gets another idea and it fits with the first. The little nubblies on the top of the Lego go into the little holes underneath the other and they fit together in a pleasing way.

Snap!

Repeat until you have enough ideas so that they have enough weight.

It had been a protracted and soggy winter, but finally Spring sunshine was glinting off the glass dew drops hanging by threads in the windows. Outside he could see the tortoise in his little house was emerging, stretching his neck.

On the desk his Slate was resting on its little wooden wedge, which lifted the glass surface to a perfect typing angle. As thoughts occurred to him, he tapped them in.

His teacup, beside the Slate, had a picture of a biplane on it and the tea in it was Asian. He added milk to the tea even though he knew most purists would take it without. “I take it with milk”, he’d say to himself every time he made it. Another ritual.

He learned a long time ago that doing things the “best” way was an unhealthy obsession which could easily take over a person’s actual taste. How would you ever know what your true taste is unless you abandon all the “right” ways and find your own way? Well you just wouldn’t. You’d be pleasing someone else and never yourself.

Pleasing yourself is very important, he thought. It’s a kind of mindfulness exercise.

Mindfulness was a much misused term in all the airy-fairy, wool-hatted, alt-lifestyle fringes on The Feed. It was a term misapplied to any and every activity, but in his experience it only applied to one. Your own consciousness.

It’s quite scary how dangerous it is to forget to mind your state of consciousness. Everyone thinks everyone is aware, “they just are”, but in fact few people had an authentic grip on their own consciousness. In this age and era, with the omnipotent Feed shining out day and night through every Slate, Desky and AI, it was easy to lose yourself. You forgot you were a unique and complex individual consciousness, and slowly over time became a passive consumer and conduit for the whims of The Feed.

Dirk knew all about the perils of indiscriminate sucking on the Feed. So many people he once knew and liked were now lost to it, lost to him now too. Sometimes you have to make painful choices. Cut off the lost souls to protect your own mind. Cut the rope to prevent them pulling you off the mountain. He was okay with that.

As the level and quality of your input arises, the level and quality of your output reduces. The more ideas you ingest from others, the more distracting content you consume, the less you create and produce. You have no room in your brain for ideas to form and to flourish. The ideas you do have, such as they are, are just pale imitations of the trash from The Feed. No original thought, just plastic, fun-house mirror reflections. The only way to be free is to cut yourself free.

Obviously the Feed has its uses. No Man is an island. You can’t live in a shack in the woods forever, appalling as that sometimes may seem. You just have to consume it wisely. Live in the woods but maintain the road back to town in case you need milk.

Wise consumption is a transferable skill. Alcohol is like that, cigarettes too.

With that thought Dirk drew and lit a cigarette from a box on the table. He blew the smoke into the air in the room where it hung over the table like a cloud. The tobacco was Ottoman, sweet and delicious. He allowed himself two a day, if he wanted them. This was the first. Wise consumption.

When he used to be a full time smoker, he would smoke indiscriminately. If was bored or stressed, which was often, he would light a cigarette. Many times he drew a cigarette from the packet only to find he couldn’t light it, because he already had a lit cigarette in his other hand.

So he evolved his new rituals after discovering his addiction to The Feed. To create, you must destroy.

You must ruthlessly cut off sources of input which contribute nothing positive to your consciousness.

Protect your output.

There is a phase in the first part of the ritual, regarding input. When feeling an idea hovering out of sight, you must immerse yourself in objects, sounds, sights, places and smells which stimulate the kinds of thoughts you find which bring the idea closer.

A desire for an idea comes as an unformed feeling, an image in the mind that you can’t quite see, but you know that it means something. All creative thought begins this way, he thought. Whether you’re writing a novel, painting a picture, carving a sculpture, or inventing a new entertaining gadget to distract others from their own consciousness, the idea starts with an unformed thought. It’s an orphan, a mutant thought form that doesn’t fit with any of the complete, better worked out thoughts and ideas in the mind.

Sitting with an object or song or anything that makes the thought brighter and clearer and not dimmer and more quiet was all he needed. Once he learned the ritual, he repeated it, over and over, and it bore fruit. Much fruit.

He put out the cigarette and picked up the lighter. Its steel surface was buffed to a high shine, but it was pitted with tiny holes and lines so small that you could only see them when the sunlight glanced across it. It looked like spider webs in the grass.

He put the lighter on top of the box of cigarettes and returned his hands to hover over the keyboard on the screen of the Slate. In the distance through his window, he could see an airship and faintly hear the whine of its engines as it banked gently into a turn. He got a lot of those blue and white painted ships over the house as there were a few airports nearby.

He watched it turn lazily past the nearby Tesla Tower, which tirelessly radiated the carriers for The Feed and wireless power for his Slate and Desky, his heating, oven and his lights. The tower was quiet at this distance, but he remembered the sound. They made a gentle crackling hum that you felt more than you heard. They were so high frequency that you could touch the emitters with a naked hand without fear of harm, but once done you would not do it again. It was not an entirely pleasant sensation.

Outages were rare, but they did happen. He took comfort from the fact of the bank of accumulator cells in the wall of the garage where he parked his land car. No interruption of the entirely free provision of The Feed. “The Feed must flow” was the slogan on all the Visor adverts.

Even in daylight there was a faint purple glow around the top of the Tesla Tower. The tall tower was made of straight beams, which due to the cross over construction looked curved from a distance, flaring out towards the ground and the head. The emitter was a huge doughnut of tiny gold spheres.

Dirk made himself a coffee with the Beantec globe and poured it reverently into the small chunky white cup. The coffee was Icelandic, produced in one of the hundreds of glass factories that dotted the dark volcanic landscape. The coffee was smoky with a hint of grass.

He switched on a large round audio speaker, went back to his Slate and chose a music selection to be played through it. A little metal jazz to lift his energy. Johnny and the Straights came on and he paused to listen to them. The track was called “Hell to my Leather”. It was an Oldie back from the days of The War, back “when men and women fought, side by side, on some damn fool idealistic crusade” according to the lyrics. Dirk didn’t remember The War too clearly, but was old enough to recall the song very fondly.

The song featured Billy Jesus on vocals, long since gone, but remembered by all as the voice of his generation. When the song ended, he sat back down in front of his Slate, the dark glass waiting to be activated by his fingerprints anywhere on the surface. He touched it and a soft bong sounded from somewhere inside.

He was writing fluently at the moment. The words were tumbling out of him, fully formed. This was the main benefit of thinking a lot before you write. If you think enough, the rest is just typing. You hold the mood, keep it in the cinema inside your mind and just type what you see.

That’s another part of the ritual. Flexing that muscle, the invisible hand that keeps a thought in your mind until it comes alive and becomes its own thing. Balancing an idea in front of your mind, holding it just so, so that you’re barely touching it yet keeping it right there, holding it.

You’re not holding it back. You’re just stopping it from flying free. You’re making it believe it wants to stay.

The book he was writing was his fifth. His third was a success while he was writing his fourth, which although wonderful really disturbed his ritual. Fame does that to an art, makes it mean something it shouldn’t. It did not turn out so good, but that didn’t seem to matter. Everyone liked book three so much they accepted book four much more warmly and with much more widely open arms than they should have. They then read or reread books one and two and re-evaluated them and judged them to be masterpieces, and he took the fame and the money even though he knew that to be totally untrue.

Then all people could talk about was book five. That was four years ago. It’s not that he had writer’s block. He didn’t believe in writer’s block. Not starting work on the fifth book was a conscious decision. The ritual was everything and the ritual was ruined by all this fame-and-fortune-and-expectations nonsense. He knew he needed to take some time and think about what he wanted to do. Number five needed to be authentic. It needed to be real.

He needed it to be good.

Finally now it was in progress. Finally he had a story he wanted to tell and things he wanted to say. It felt real. Finally he was free of interruptions to his ritual.

At first the tapping noise was inaudible to him. He was hearing it but his brain was not processing it and telling him about it. Then he heard it and realised retrospectively how long it had been going on for before it registered. He scrambled up and went to find out where it was coming from.

When he opened the front door, a woman was standing there. Shoulder length dark hair, brown almond eyes and quite short, wearing a waxed cotton jacket with a rather heavy looking brown leather bag, the strap cutting diagonally across her chest. She wore a mask over her nose and mouth, not a medical mask but a rather fashionable fabric print. He couldn’t figure out why she would be masked. There was no pollution here.

Her expression was hard to read, but from her eyes it looked like the face of someone about to deliver bad news. She also looked like she was afraid he might attack her. Her right hand gripped the bag strap where it crossed her chest and her fingers were clenching and working the leather as she spoke. Her voice was clear and hypnotically beautiful in some way, full of emotion. Her appearance and expression made it very hard for him to speak, but his look of surprise and confusion was very eloquent.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said, “I know this is going to sound insane, but I think I might be from an alternate universe. You have no reason to trust me, but can I please come inside. I just need to get my bearings and figure out what to do. Can you help me please.”

He didn’t speak for an uncomfortably long amount of time. Most questions you answer at the threshold of your home have a list of obvious and carefully rehearsed responses.

“No thanks. Not Today. I gave at the office. Let me stop you there,” etc.

None of these seemed appropriate. For a further few moments he opened and closed his mouth. Then in a burst of recklessness, he heard himself saying, “Oh, of course, sorry. Come in”.

They sat in silence for quite a long time. She was looking at another airship passing by, clearly fascinated. Then she looked at the Tesla tower as if she didn’t know what she was looking at. Then she spent a bit of time looking at the Visor in the corner with a quizzical eyebrow raised. She pointed.

“Is that a TV?” She said

“A what? What’s a TV?” he was genuinely puzzled by the term.

“Television. It looks a bit like a TV.” She pulled her mask away from her face as she spoke in case he was having difficulty understanding her.

“Oh, I don’t know what that means. That’s a Visor. It shows performances and news events.”

“Why isn’t it plugged into anything?” She pointed at the wall.

He was confused. What was she talking about? “What would it be plugged into?”

“The wall, for power.” Her eyes smiled a little.

“Again, not sure what you mean, but it has its own power. It’s powered by the Feed?”

She paused and put her hands back in her lap. She twirled one of the rings on her finger.

He coughed a little and she flinched. “I’m sorry,” he said slowly, “would it be possible to take off your mask? There’s no pollution here.”

She blanched a little. “It’s not for pollution, it’s for the virus.”

“What virus?”

“The children of covid. The Raven. The pandemics.”

“I don’t know what that means either. There hasn’t been a pandemic for over a century. You’re safe here. You can take off your mask. I’m not sick.”

Her eyes were wide. She thought for a second and gingerly removed the mask as if it was physically difficult. Underneath it she revealed an adorable button nose, and when she spoke her mouth was mobile and had large, slightly skewed but very white teeth.

“I don’t know what’s happening. Everything is different. One minute I’m at home leaving the house to go to shop. The next I’m in a field by one of those towers and purple energy is crackling around it. I see airships, butterflies the size of dinner plates and now you’ve never heard of the viruses. Where am I?” Her lip trembled.

He tried to be calming, “Ok let’s not worry about how and why for now. Let’s concentrate on what I can actually do for you. Let’s . . . let’s start with your name. My name is Dirk. What’s yours?”

“My name is. It’s. Oh. It’s. I mean . . .”

Her mind was completely blank.