Netizens of the Deep> by Schwann


Greetings O mindspring overloaders and greeters of the dawn, transhumanic fad creators in the blue beam of fractal reality. Allow me to introduce myself as we travel inwards alone but together, until our quest is revealed - or our day is done.

(I wrote): 'The creaking door through which our universe will shortly be vacuumed is waiting to be opened. Humanity needs the organic keyword to survive.

More low-level stuff bubbles up in my head. My fingers stiffen over the orange keyboard, but thankfully no more words come. Rubbing my tired eyes, I realize that I can't take much more. Terror clutches me for an instant but I manage to shrug it off with a large yawn. It's only 3.17 AM, give or take a time zone. No biggie. What's another all-nighter?

I don't go out much. My studio is like 'down periscope', sometimes claustrophobic. It gets me to rearrange highly stacked printouts from under week old coffee cups. Checking through the valuable trash gets me hopeful of finding that letter from an old girlfriend whose address I'd lost some years back. Instead, I'm pleased to find a thinny I'd once lost under an April 1980 Heavy Metal magazine. Dodging an overdue session of self-hypnosis, I light the dried spliff. It was a good crop.

The mind fog is something you never remember. It's too early for meditation, but not too late to consider a number of questions that have been around long before mystech warriors began trying to understand reality. Things like: Who am I? What the fuck am I supposed to be doing? These simple questions are still proving to be a bigger task than any one can handle, and of course anything bequeathed to us by the previous world order need careful scrutiny, so it's not surprising that things still don't make sense.

White noise and meaningless sentences flow through my overheated imagination. The organic key slips further away. One more hit and the walls close in, but the little voice in my head that's recently been saying; "something really important is gonna happen - soon", isn't done yet.

No problem; I can handle this. It's a fantasy thing and I'm a science fiction writer, but what does 'soon' mean? Now's the time the time is now!

Nowsthetimethetimeisnowisnowistimenowistimenownownow....

Using years of experience at dismantling harmful beliefs, I delete the runaway thought using mind control and it doesn't matter what time it is because perception kicks in and awareness scrolls as I unfocus into cyber-shamanism. Combat drugs taken. Blood superoxygenated. Turbo spleen activated. Pain editor engaged. Speedware initialised. Cranial armour secure. A.P. up. Azmazz online.

Closing my eyes, I try to think about something besides what I'm thinking about. Consciousness shifts me up and data streams like a plasma flow, while my long-gone parents are whispering; "Warning! Warning! Reality starvation in progress!!", in my middle ear.

Yeh, Yeh. I skip the warning. I've heard it before but it's mandatory to listen at least once in your life. This is advice my kids could benefit from. Isn't life sweet?

Swivelling the chair away from the screen, I tip the ash and consider the cold, dark world past the glass. It keeps me hopeful that, somewhere among the millions inhabiting cyberspace, there's a secret of Earth shattering importance.

"Soon!" whispers the joker. "Soon - something will happen which'll make everyone pay attention".

It's now 4.00AM. I'm tired enough to attack the surrounding paper and get a quarter way through squashing some of the more useless printouts into the dysfunctional wastepaper basket before giving up. Stacking the survivors in a neat pile of disorder on top of some yellowed faxes pertaining to an old car insurance claim, I kick back and survey a job almost done.

Sometimes when it's late things feel real and you can share knowledge with yourself and it isn't so bad. Mind control. I try deleting the brain slam but a last surviving thought breaks like a wave of embalming fluid and floods me with anticipation;

"something wonderful is soon going to happen".

Fortunately I'm not someone who wonders why stray thoughts from old sci-fi movies are often important.

They just are.

 

Schwann