1. ℵ₃ White Noise at 168 Apricot Lane "Forensic Obnubilating Gray" : □ Euclid's Boundary.docx

 1. ℵ₃ White Noise at 168 Apricot Lane  "Forensic Obnubilating Gray" :  □ Euclid's Boundary

la lumière derrière l'obscurité

White Noise

at

168 Apricot Lane

ℵ₀

"Forensic Obnubilating Gray"

“The Book Series that I once ignorantly assumed everyone else was writing all along”

White Noise at 168 Apricot Lane

Chapter 1: Forensic Obnubilating Gray

It was cold. The Bay Area fog rolled incessantly up into the hills where The Gateway Through stood, while traffic slowed to a crawl on that sharp turn during the final hours of the night. Hungry and entirely confident that no one would be the wiser, Larry slipped open the window to the small kitchenette that Betsy, the augury chamber's owner, used when working. Most of the provisions were canned or frozen due to how infrequently the space was utilized, yet it maintained a professional, welcoming presence. Betsy routinely dusted away cobwebs and always kept her signature peppermint hot chocolate on hand for querents and visitors alike. She prided herself on offering a specifically unique brand. It was her way of putting a welcoming stamp on her hospitality, ensuring every guest, seeker, and advena felt immediately at home.

The Gateway Through was a focal hearth indeed—so much so that Larry felt compelled, after several months of sleeping outside along the perimeter, to finally step inside and take sanctuary. Of course, he had to cycle through his usual psychological justifications: I'm looking out for the place better than the owner is.

This soon gave way to a modicum of resentment at the realization that a person had to be remarkably well-to-do to leave such a property largely unused. After all, someone should be using it! Larry's rationalization engine kept churning out fresh excuses right up until he climbed through that little window, landing flat on his face to the sharp scent of lemon-scented linoleum.

His sloppy descent sent a nearby display of teas, coffees, cocoas, and shortbread cookies tumbling. He quickly gathered the scattered items. Within minutes, he crossed the threshold into the stillness, warming water to make himself feel truly cloistered at home. He selected a massive mug that read With a Healthy Bit of Love in sweeping red cursive around a large red heart.

Rummaging through the freezer, he retrieved a thick slice of graham-cracker-crust cheesecake and set it to thaw near the steaming kettle. As he settled in, his eyes drifted to a shelf of books on esoteric philosophy. He pulled a volume down at random without looking at the title, clinging to it for the sheer luxury of having it for himself.

The entire situation began to feel fated—so much so that a sneaking suspicion crept over Larry: he might never want to leave.

That was when the distant thud of a car door closing met a sibilant, plosive echo, rapidly building into the heavy thump of boots on the front porch. The sharp, wiry scratching noise of something being hung on the doorknob came from the front of the business.

Outside, amber caution lights flashed rhythmically, and the passing traffic had thinned to a mere trickle—dwindling down to no more than perhaps two cars an hour. No one should be visiting at this hour, Larry thought. And certainly no one should be looking in through the front windows.

He had recently fired up the gas heater, having coaxed its stubborn push-button pilot light to ignite.

Alarmed by the noise, his first instinct was to hide, but then his eyes caught a small convex mirror angled toward the exterior—a detail masterfully positioned for exactly this kind of surveillance. In the nine-inch mirrored dome, a distorted dark figure clunked down the wooden steps, scrambled into a delivery van, and hurriedly drove off.

Larry was curious—as curious as a cat. Now satisfied that the coast was clear, and fairly confident that no other local vagrants would dare make themselves known, he walked over to the front door, his nerve returning. He threw back the myriad heavy deadbolts and locks, and with a firm, swift tug, the old door creaked open into the damp night.

A suit was hanging right there on the front doorknob—a beautiful vintage suit that instantly gave off a faint, peculiar scent of rose perfume. As he peeled back the protective plastic and checked the inner lining for a tag, his eyes widened: 44 Long. It was precisely his size. Crafted from heavy tweed, the fabric was a rich weave of maroon and deep brown, featuring an elegant commemorative pin on the lapel. On the porch below sat a pair of stylish matching Oxfords, size 11; Larry wore a 10.5, but he knew he could easily make them work.

Larry removed the note carefully pinned to the lapel, only glancing at it briefly as he shuffled into the back open office room. Concealing himself behind the quarter wall near the desk, he quickly swapped out his tattered old jeans, worn-out T-shirt, jacket, sneakers, and socks, piling them into a bunch.

As he deliberately draped each garment over his downtrodden, unkempt form, an orderly alumnus initiated a kind of cohesion. Adorning himself in this finer mid-19th-century gentleman's wear, he felt a timeless, unbound wisdom work its way into him, solidifying the moment he caught his reflection in the large bay window.

Sweeping downward in an arc, he scooped up the fine matching shoes between his right middle and pointer fingers, letting gravity hold the thin, silky cotton socks in place within the left insole. Simultaneously, he slouched over to palm the rank, bunched-up mass of his old clothes, clutching them to his chest like an oval ball as he rose, keeping the shoe collars balanced with his other hand.

He gained momentum, bounding across the living room on his way back to the couch to roll those fine Filo d'Ecosse socks over his tattered, worn-out feet, which were burdened by chronic plantar bromhidrosis. Sinking into the cushions, he pressed his silk-clad toes deep within the vamp lining of the Balmorals.

Leaning forward to tie both shoes, he immediately felt the constricting Masonic cable-tow affixation—a gentleman's agreement, a binding induction to fully reclaim the man about society. That conveniently pre-tied wedding cravat fit tightly about his neck; he liked it.

Posturing himself erect while seated, he felt a familiar sensation as his silk cravat loosened and eased. Relaxing his back, he surrendered to the assurance of firm comfort pressing against the aged capitonné. Those meticulous stitches, sewn into the quilted diamond patterns from another time, hid within the occulted recesses of the late-1800s top-grain leather. It was a Klinē built upon a solid oak frame to last the test of time—a slightly imposing Chesterfield couch standing at the ready on Mahogany Bun Feet, like a vigilant sentinel facing the front entrance, a matching high-backed chair partnering the space. Soon, Larry began to slip back against the waxy leather, pulled down toward the floor as he drifted away within the dim, moonlit inner augural chambers.

Hearing the scattered, trailing broadcast whir of the 1930s Tombstone Radio, he made his way down to the floor, settling into an archetypal postural position. The device cut in and out with the calm serenity of white noise as it approached the witching hour. Its tubed frequencies broadcast incoherent infomercial fragments, blending and fusing with fragmented words and songs humming beneath the low volume—as if trying to speak in complex geometries.

Its receivers seemed to reach out with fractaled webbing fingers into that obnubilating grey, backlit abyss of space, trailed by a forensic buzz that caught the faint, distant call of depths beyond the periphery—transmissions sounding like a static, susurrous polemarch from another world.

It was a reentry reminder, an ode from the Middle Ages circumvoluting above, waiting to be let in.

At the heart of the early Victorian building where Larry sat now, 422 Parnassus had in its adolescence served for multiple decades as a mid-century barbershop known as Montgomery Barber—and long before that, from its formative youth and for a semicentennial, it was designated Ravens Brothers Butchers—the area's central meat supplier.

The chambers recalled that time when a dual role prevailed, not long ago: during the medieval era, physicians viewed cutting flesh as beneath them, so barbers performed medical procedures alongside cutting hair and shaving beards. They sealed off wounds and removed shards as that swirling red stripe of cosmic gyre spun in the Rota Fortunae of sanguine contractship about the barber pole.

That gentleman's oath, reaching back through the Ophites to the line of Cain—man as the artifice. It was a phratry never truly forgotten, but now reduced to that collar, tie, lapel, and apron structured like a gallery of claws, bezels, baskets, and collets holding in, harboring, and protecting that ancient cybernetic gem of the mind in Theurgic Automata.

With that cravat noosed snug around his neck once more—a reminder from another life—he felt like a member of society. Or perhaps he was caught somewhere in a strange, self-immolating fixation codified in man: a social construct placed within him, harboring a longing for some dimension in space and time he absolutely knew, within tacit blindsight, was some version of himself.

He took up this silent, deliberate vigil to develop further, ignorant of that Physis of Telestike always taking place. Larry perhaps recalled that the true war had been fought in the mimesis of shared strings tethered to great thinkers, patterns found written in the very annals of Thoth—deep within the cavernous, other-dimensional halls of Amenti. A searching for Anamnesis.

Agnosia. It's what men do.

He spent the remainder of the night slipping away, then waking up to indulge himself in cycles, slowly being pulled into Hypnos. He sipped cocoa, coffee, then tea, thawing frozen pastries and eventually discovering a pantry packed to the hilt with canned soups, jarred fruits, and pickled provisions. Safe and warm, he made a silent vow to himself: something in the universe was finally looking out for Larry, and he had absolutely no intention of squandering the gift.

Succumbing to the sudden spikes of insulin after finally giving in to that long, survivalist fight-or-flight response—his body breaking down into a gelatinous, years-long campaign, now losing himself in an exhaustive tug-of-war as it yielded to monoamine neurotransmitters and a heavy endogenous prompt toward melatonin—Larry began to drift off. To the crackle of late-nineteenth-century tunes echoing from a sepulchral vintage radio, he sank into the absolute fullness of gluttonous comfort.

Resurgent Aletheia

Eventually, the deep groan of persistent meowing outside broke the silence. Pulling himself up from the plush red carpet, he stumbled forward, half-awake, and opened the old wooden front door once more. The moment it cracked open, a large cat—looking like a strange, downsized mix of a miniature snow leopard and a massive Maine Coon, moving with the fluid poise of an Iberian lynx—darted inside. It navigated the entryway with the effortless confidence of a Proailurus returning to its hollowed-out trunk.

Larry sat back on the carpeted floor with his back to the couch, the old occult book resting to his side. As the cat drew near, its deep, rhythmic purr pulsed with a deliberate warmth that pulled Larry down further toward the floor, into a slumped-over sleep heavier than any he had ever known. He could not have known that the vintage tweed clinging to his shoulders was an invaluable heirloom belonging to one Paschal Beverly Randolph.

Earlier that week, Betsy had drawn cards from the tarot deck Madame Crusso gave her, seeking to validate a premonition—a future acquaintance foretold in Crusso's will. Should she purchase a rare suit by a local reputable dealer listed on a site she frequented for strange and rare artifacts?

The cards delivered a unanimous omen: the Ace and Page of Swords celebrating sharp intellect and curiosity, the Hierophant aligning with academic tradition, and the Knight of Pentacles ensuring practical attire. Driven by the sign, she purchased a five-thousand-dollar suit from El Bicho Hambriento, a rare antiquities shop located at 244 Castor in New Montgomery that was owned and operated exclusively by Oscar. She instructed the seller to pin a note to the jacket lapel: "For Thycius the philosopher."

Surreal dreams claimed Larry as his consciousness slipped into a dark ritual in another realm. In this shadow space, practitioners disrobed, revealing voluptuous women who encircled the fire-lit center stage where he stood.

A man’s voice echoed, calm and reassuring: "Welcome, brother Thycius. Welcome, friend."

An unseen architecture began to take shape within the sacred perimeter of the Nemeton. The fire within the hearth intensified into a roaring teine, flickering into bright Rubedo Cinnabar flames that pulsed to the hypnotic cadence of the practitioners. A low, digesting heat radiated through the space like an alchemical athanor, binding the Odic force of the rite to the stone floor.

As a thick, dark cruor touched the embers, the cat’s physical purr cut into the dream, anchoring a serene harmony within the astral confluence of Oneiric Chrysalis in hypnagogic union.

"Take all that you desire, my friend," the voice reassured him. "You are welcome here."

As Larry passed gas, venting the heavy comfort of his midnight digestion, his insatiable desire remained anchored deep within his belly. The flatulence became so loud and pungent that the cat dashed away in brief revulsion, yet the animal inevitably crept back, settling down to purr with the same unyielding comfort Larry felt in his bones.

Larry was aware of everything. He could see the heavy clouds blanket and then disperse past the moon in his mind, feeling the crisp chill of the night sky without needing to be physically outside.

He remained anchored in his body, perfectly warm within the heated confines of this four-room home turned mystic’s chamber, as the cat known as Rancor—eyes closed, smurgling and kneading his claws into Larry's pant legs—invited him into other realms. Here was a hidden headquarters for cosmic witches and archaic gods; Larry had already become an integral aspect of the architecture, and it was obvious now that Rancor was not merely a cat.

Above them, the stars swarmed in a tight, deliberate orbit, as though time itself had synchronized its rhythm to their breathing.

A new spirit took hold of him, and he began to recall every fragment of philosophy he had ever attempted to read but had never found the peace to fully absorb. A profound understanding of his own nature flooded into him, expanding to a cosmic scale as the coarse tweed of his suit acted as a psychical conduit, drawing latent Odic currents straight through the skin of the leather binding.

Through psychic osmosis, the scholar within him bypassed the physical pages entirely, mastering the complex instructions overnight. The volume Larry had fallen asleep upon unfurled into an entire language and world—a fluidic landscape reflected through crepuscular candlelit mirrors. He knew the book now—every syllable and intended meaning—as if a piece of the author’s mind, the Eleusinian mysteries, and the text’s esoteric magic had permanently grafted themselves into being: Seership: The Magnetic Mirror.

Restless, yet cocooned in deep stasis, Betsy lay dormant that early morning while internal entities rearranged her mind’s proverbial furniture. Rasheef Labraum claimed the left hemisphere, surrendering the right to Veesta Cadron, who inhabited it much as she had Saturn—or Sař-Toṅ—eons ago, with only the thin barrier of the corpus callosum maintaining order. Tending exotic greenery and absorbing texts on art and esoteric harmony, Veesta often mused, "The air is different here." Yet later, as she tucked Betsy deep into the safety of the brain stem, she left open access to the left amygdala, hypothalamus, and pineal systems—leaving her fast asleep in hypnotic wonder.

Three years prior, a mass was held on the thin veil between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. There, in the grassy backyard area of the shop under the celestial night sky, Madame Crusso would officially bestow—or rather, bind—the shop chambers to Betsy's stewardship. This dark-cloaked ritual was performed on Samhain. Betsy thought that she was merely dabbling, finding her way in the vast complexity of it all, but it conjured her in. With only the two witches present, High Priestess and neophyte initiate, Madame Crusso used the shop on the surface as a token exchange of gesture. From that October 31st night into the early, transitory hours of November 1st, those hitchhiking entities vortexed in through Betsy's eyes, forehead, and solar plexus. They swept in as a plasma beamed down from the Otherworlds, pulled by that conjunction under the clear, starry night in the backyard of the augury chambers. Betsy woke up in the grass, with the title of The Gateway Through embedded into her psyche.

Madame Crusso was announced to have passed away while lying in her stately bed quarters at Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux the next morning, November 1st—a strange transit. All formalities were handled by lawyers of the Council of Seven and Five Spheres, which was the corporation's title in the legalese within Madame Crusso's—or rather Margaret Whisper Knightly's—will.

Betsy woke up just as the entities slipped off to sleep. Only in these early mornings and quiet afternoons did she possess full autonomy—a freedom born directly from their shared union. She drove her pea-green Volvo 242 DL Swedish design classic from 168 Apricot Lane to "the shop," as she referred to The Gateway Through at 422 Parnassus Way.

As the old Volvo's tires crunched over the fallen cypress twigs canopying the driveway, nothing stirred Larry inside. He lay there in that vintage suit, its sleeves smudged with peppermint cocoa and smeared with the thawed remnants of cheesecake. The sticky debris sloppily obscured two distinguished lapel pins: the top one, a colorful Rosicrucian Rosy Cross; the other, directly below it, the age-old Rod of Asclepius.

Though sound asleep, Larry remained propped upright, facing the front door. Slumped partially against the base of the Victorian Chesterfield couch, he almost looked like a man waiting for an appointment. Outside, Betsy slammed her car door with the heavy thud characteristic of old steel. The vibration nearly jarred Larry awake, coaxing a loud displacement through his borrowed finer wear.

It didn't take long for Betsy to round the front of the old Victorian, her heels cracking loudly up the hollow porch steps. Inside, a massive crystal ball sat as the room's dominant centerpiece, catching the eye of anyone crossing the threshold. Because of its placement, Larry appeared to be intentionally facing the clear glass sphere, his closed eyes suggesting the focused trance of a summoning ritual.

As Betsy raised her clattering ring of keys and isolated the one for the upper deadbolt, she found the door giving way under the slightest push. It creaked open, granting an anabatic ingress to the cold coastal air, which dissolved the room's expansive, stagnant warmth with a sudden hypaethral clarity—a southern Karl breaking through the heat. Instinctively turning her head to the left, she was met by a heavy wall of sauna-like heat and air erupting through the heater with more than a tinge of stale rancidity. Through the convex curve of the crystal ball, a distorted projection of Larry’s face—framed by the stiff Victorian collar—stared blindly back at her.

The radio had drifted to an obscure station, its static-laced pre-commercial bumper cutting through the quiet room.

And that was how they met.

The sudden rush of cold air triggered an involuntary spasm in Larry’s leg. His knee flinched, kicking violently upward against the underside of the table and launching the crystal ball into the air. It came down hard against the rim, exploding into shards of cheap Woolworths glass just as Larry’s eyes snapped open to the bright morning light.

The sharp crack echoed through the space. Instantly, the illusion of a high-mystic summoning ritual evaporated, replaced by the stark reality of Larry blinking wildly against the sun's glare—trapped inside a five-thousand-dollar vintage suit that now smelled aggressively of rose perfume, peppermint cocoa, and bodily discharge from his own intestinal fermentation.

The commotion sent a single Tarot card airborne into the heater’s warm turbine stream, floating down to land right at Betsy’s feet: a depiction of Anubis and The Wheel of Fortune. As she leaned over to pick it up, she couldn't help but think: It must be a harbinger of some kind.

A deep rumbling vibrated through the floorboards. The seismic shockwave rippled across the entire city, gaining a prolonged intensity. On the radio, the static-heavy music cut out instantly, replaced by the mechanical blare of the Emergency Broadcast System.

"Wow... who are you?!" was all Betsy could manage, her eyes wide with astonishment as the walls groaned.

Larry just sat there, pinned beneath the weight of the moment. Percolating in his own night sweat and building stench, he returned her gaze with an equally perplexed, unblinking stare while the earth began to slowly retract in P-wave attenuation beneath them.

The aftershocks from the massive earthquake rippled back through the foundation, driving Betsy straight to the floor. A small piece of glass barely glanced her left foot, causing a single stream of blood that quickly coagulated and dried shut. She scrambled for balance in her heels, dropping a bag filled with novelty inventory and a fresh supply of her signature imported peppermint cocoa. Bookshelves tipped forward, spilling their contents, while outside, a chorus of car horns and emergency sirens wailed in immediate response. Betsy knew it, Larry knew it, and the entire hidden network anchored to 168 Apricot Lane knew it: a massive, irreversible shift was taking place.

The Cause of the Earthquake

Unsurprisingly, Varginah, a leading quantum physicist, was conducting critical experiments that day at Brahmin-West. She was attempting to collide two theoretical particles isolated from cosmic shift energies that predated the known universe by eight billion years—one born of a redshift, the other a blueshift, harvested from polar-opposite positions in the deep cosmos. Knowing this anomaly of ancient light would persist only briefly, she routed the filtered light particles directly into the primary axis hub of her theoretical Light Particle Discovery Center.

By hacking into global observable field data in a finite operational window, she engineered a hybrid detector network. She piggybacked on the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) in China, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, and the Telescope Array in the US—specifically leveraging the TALE hybrid detector and global atmospheric fluorescence sensors. To strip away background noise, she funneled the global stream through subterranean water-Cherenkov detectors, using miles of soil and water shielding to isolate the pristine primordial photon source.

She managed to isolate and bounce this combination off a series of satellite shields in space, directing a sudden cascade of electric-blue and ultraviolet-purple light streaks straight into her facility.

What made her installation truly singular was her ability to batch all three primary interaction mediums simultaneously. She combined exotic theoretical field matrices, a custom laser wakefield accelerator designed to graft those fields directly onto terrestrial matter, and a direct harvesting array for relativistic charged primordial particles. Varginah was determined to capture the maximum possible amount of raw cosmic information. As an abductee and experiencer from Varginha, Brazil, she wasn't merely chasing a breakthrough—she was building a machine to prove that the impossible was real.

The Brahmin-West Incident

Unknown to the public, Brahmin-West was far more than an isolated laboratory; it was one critical node in a secret global network of nine hadron accelerators built precisely on planetary leylines. The staggering theory behind the network was that if all nine accelerators were fired in a hyper-precise, staggered sequence at an exact cosmic juncture, they could tear open a gateway to unknown dimensions and nether realms.

Unknown to Varginah, the ancient, reality-warping entity Phalus and an elite interdimensional hunter named Daria were frozen in an eternal deadlock, trapped in a limbo beyond what could only be described in non-scientific terms as the Pleroma periphery, yet suspended within the Sige Agnostia strata. Their prison was an absolute vacuum cavity of death, unbreakable by any energy existing within known reality.

The moment she fed the raw, exotic redshift and blueshift light directly into the accelerator loop, she forcibly bypassed the architecture of space-time. She achieved this by pushing adiabatic magnetic mirroring past its theoretical breakdown point, forcing the local physical manifold to snap under the weight of non-local, extra-dimensional tension.

The fated event, riding piggyback through a corridor of cosmic rays beyond deep space, unlocked the precise moment for the redshift to drag Phalus from his domain, while the blueshift locked onto Daria across the vast, dark expanse of their binary stasis. Though locked in a dead orbit light-years apart and tethered by an ancient cataclysm, both entities were violently yanked by the opposing light spectrums, still chirally fused as an independent dyad of constituent variables. By sheer, mathematically absurd coincidence, these primordial frequencies shattered their frozen lock, instantly hurtling them from opposite ends through the periphery toward the exact same fatal coordinates.

The convergence unleashed a mega-explosion of seismic proportions. Yet, instead of blowing outward, the unique physics of the primordial light caused the blast wave to invert. It formed a violent quantum vacuum that imploded directly into Varginah, throwing her backward and permanently bonding Phalus to her biology.

As fate would have it, the implosion birthed a fleeting, hyper-dense magnetic anomaly equivalent to a magnetar—the collapsed core of a dead giant star possessing an extraordinarily powerful magnetic field. In that split-second micro-collapse, the flux density of the magnetar field compressed the exotic redshifted matter, magnetostricting it into a crystalline matrix that embedded itself directly into Varginah’s pineal gland. Her brain’s natural calcite micro-crystals were instantly fused into a quantum receiver, anchoring Phalus to her central nervous system.

The Earth itself buckled under the raw, opposing forces of primordial genesis and absolute containment colliding in a single microsecond, triggering the localized earthquake that rippled far beyond the facility's walls.

When the dust settled, the blast left behind a stunning geometric imprint resembling a massive crop circle formed by millions of dollars' worth of fused, high-tech debris. Entangled in the molten circuitry was an impossible array of nested, non-Euclidean angles—an ancient, pre-cosmic mathematical code. On the opposite side of the ruined structure, deep within the smoking rubble, a distinct blue light began to pulse. Soon, Daria would emerge from the wreckage of the blueshift impact to take her place within this fated collection of living contradictions.

For Nick, with whom Varginah and the rest of the group would soon converge, the universe had spun the ultimate wheel of cosmic irony. Phalus wasn't merely a rogue entity. Aeons ago, Phalus and the cosmic entity Rasheef Labruam were toxic lovers and warring foes. Their ancient conflict had manifested near a region echoing ancient Kemet during the first of many interplanetary pyramid wars—a domestic squabble that ultimately shattered the original solar system.

Before her passing, Nick’s mother—born in her uninitiated state as Margaret W. Knightly, a lineage that granted her son the full name Nicholas Solan Knightly—had introduced both Betsy and Varginah to him.

Nick, faintly at times, recalled participating in strange rituals as a young child, though the memories remained oftentimes irrational, hazy and obscure. Had we all met back then, before—dissociative amnesia?

No decision by Madame Crusso went forward without the absolute consent of the Council of Seven Spheres. Early on, Nick had viewed the entire enterprise more as a business venture than a divine cult of serious, cosmic proportions—or was that just denial?

Individuals of the rarest, most eccentric kind traveled from the far reaches of the world to attend these clandestine ceremonies, where much was kept shrouded in secrecy.

One evening, a grand dinner was hosted in Nick and Betsy's honor. Yet, shortly after the meal, they were dismissed, while the main gathering—joined by a flock of late arrivals—convened behind the closed doors of a massive meeting hall. This early dismissal left a lingering question: why had a banquet so formal been dedicated to them in the first place, only to exclude them from the real assembly?

That large meeting hall, titled the Portail vers le Palais de Cristal, had always been off-limits to him, especially as a child. But why? And what of all those wildly different men, varying broadly in physical appearance yet always wearing black suits and sunglasses so dark they seemed grafted into their eye sockets—an army of otherworldly security guards present randomly throughout that meeting and extending back as far as Nick could remember?

From that night forward, Madame Crusso formally codified in her testament that Betsy was Nick's spiritual wife. On the surface, the decree seemed merely to ensure that 168 Apricot Lane would remain their shared home. Yet, according to the stipulations of Margaret's will, the historic manor Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux where Nick grew up was to be surrendered entirely to the Council of Seven Spheres. Meanwhile, 168 Apricot Lane was bequeathed not only to Nick and Betsy—who viewed themselves as mere roommates—but also, as Madame Crusso explicitly designated, to all future members of the Council.

That was the night Nick and Betsy finally met in sexual union. Sparks flew, yet the encounter felt as though they had already known one another for lifetimes—a profound familiarity that neither questioned, but also one each could live without. This detached bond allowed them to maintain autonomous lives, establishing an open-door dynamic entirely free of jealousy or possessiveness. In fact, that night would remain the only time they ever slept together. In truth, the act had felt less like romance and more like a mandatory duty to an unseen force operating directly through them.

The Convergence: Betsy and Varginah

Betsy met Varginah the very day of the Brahmin-West incident, while Varginah was still reeling from the cataclysmic event at the research center, driving erratically through the streets.

It had begun with a loud, commanding voice and a volley of volatile outbursts, rapidly escalating into a brutal confrontation. An entire pack of bikers forced Varginah off the road, furious with her driving. As she tried to ignore them, they swarmed her vehicle, aggressively forcing her into a narrow alleyway. But before they could lay a hand on her, the anomaly triggered.

Rays of blinding, primordial light erupted from every pore of Varginah's skin. The air grew freezing and thin as the rift within her soul opened, systematically vacuuming the internal life force out of twenty-three men.

They collapsed into unrecognizable, hollowed-out shells, rapidly deteriorating into piles of dust. Soon, all that remained were patched leather vests, wallets, jeans, helmets, bandanas, riding boots, weapons, and idling bikes with keys left in their ignitions.

Naturally, everyone assumed it was the work of a rival gang or a covert government hit, ensuring the incident was buried as yet another local cover-up. Meanwhile, deep within her brain, Varginah’s crystalline pineal gland quietly spun the raw essence—the loosh—of their souls.

168 Apricot Lane: Betsy, Larry, and Varginah

Betsy watched Rancor the cat bolt the instant Larry’s knee struck the underside of the table, shattering the cheap crystal ball. She knew the feline must have recently emerged from the sub-basement structure—yet another gateway connected through the underground labyrinth to the 168 Apricot Lane subterranean network.

Rancor bolted straight toward the kitchenette, having clearly ascended through the pantry, where a descending stairway remained hidden behind a secret door at the rear.

Bypassing Larry entirely, Betsy hurried after the animal, only to find the pantry door open but the secret entrance closed. He must have a different way... cats.

This left her to speculate whether Larry himself had somehow drifted up from those same subterranean layers of reality. It was deep within that underworld where she and Nick had been left an estate key from his mother for a safety deposit box—a vault containing a map alongside several esoteric artifacts they were explicitly instructed to safeguard.

Among them were seven gold necklaces, each bearing a uniquely colored crystal. Nick’s was red; hers was blue. Each was inscribed with the names of people they mostly had yet to meet.

Shaking, Betsy set the kettle to boil, half-hoping the man sitting out there in the Paschal Beverly Randolph suit would simply vanish into thin air. "Do you want some coffee, sir?" she called out, genuinely praying for silence. She half-expected to meander back into the front room and find the chair vacant.

Instead, a loud burst of flatulence echoed back from the front room, followed by a gruff, sloppy reply: "I like your peppermint hot chocolate, ma'am. I'll have another one of those, please."

Retrieving her broom and dustpan from the narrow closet beside the pantry door, she stepped back out into the main storefront to sweep up the scattered shards of glass. "Oh no, don't move, sir!" she commanded as Larry began to shift his heavy frame in alarm.

He froze instantly. "Let me clean this up first, then we'll figure out who you are and what you're doing here, okay?"

"Okay, ma'am. Thank you for the great hospitality, and for being so kind to a case such as myself... thank you, ma'am," Larry replied, his voice dropping as an overwhelming wave of embarrassment washed over him.

Both of them were actively diverting their attention from a shared state of sudden trauma. The radio had just drifted back on air, detailing the scale of the devastation: experts were classifying the initial rupture as a massive 7.2 earthquake, followed by a violent succession of tremors and aftershocks.

"Let me turn this down," Betsy said, dropping into a Grecian Bend as she reached to twist the volume knob.

Larry began picking up the remaining large shards of glass by hand. From the speakers, the attenuated audio continued to drone out a grim litany of accidents and casualties, ranging from catastrophic bridge collapses to widespread grid failures.

"Well, I'm Betsy. And you are?"

"Larry, ma'am. I mean, Miss Betsy. Larry Sutherland is my God-given name. Just an old hobo, really."

Right then, a heavy thump, a low, resonant creak, and a faint scratching noise echoed through the walls—as if something were attempting to force a door open somewhere in the recesses of the structure.

"Is this place all yours, ma'am? I mean to say, Miss Betsy?" Larry asked, his eyes darting toward the source of the sound.

Betsy quickly rationalized it as the building simply settling from the intense structural stress of the quake. "I was left the place, quite recently in fact, by a very kind woman," she answered, her tone softening. "Sort of a mother figure—really a mentor to me."

"Oh, that's swell," Larry replied, his voice trailing off as he carefully stacked another piece of glass. "And what a lovely place it is. Thank you..."

Suddenly, the kettle let out a high-pitched whine, competing with a rhythmic thumping that vibrated through the walls. Clearing the doorway, Betsy stepped quickly into the small kitchen. Noting that the window was still unlatched from Larry’s entry, she slammed it shut and locked it securely, dovetailing the movement with a swift twist of her left hand to silence the kettle.

The persistent thumping was now coming directly from behind the closed secret door in the pantry. The moment she unlatched it, Rancor—looking thoroughly inconvenienced—pushed past her, almost bowling her over. He had found a way in and out without using the secret door, but how? Somewhere within the Pseudaelurus mystery, he was driving them to open the door down into the depths below.

"Hey, what's the hurry, Rancor? And what's that in your mouth?!" Betsy eased back, catching her breath.

The majestic feline—moving with effortless grace despite his dense, thirty-pound frame—made a direct beeline toward Larry, launching himself squarely onto his lap. Larry was now seated in a high-backed chair next to the couch, having already turned off the space heater on his own initiative. Powerful yet entirely unimposing, the creature settled with absolute contentment, leaving Larry to receive Rancor in a daze of mystery and shock.

"Well, hello kitty. And what's this?" Larry murmured.

It was a heavy golden necklace featuring a vibrant purple crystal. Attached to it was a tag that read: For Thycius, the warrior philosopher. You will know what to do with this when the time comes. Signed, The Council of Seven.

Betsy emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray laden with coffee, cocoa, and cookies, instantly exclaiming, "Oh my, Rancor!"

The cat was now standing on his hind legs on Larry’s lap, licking his face in a bizarre confrontation of energetic exchange. Larry laughed at first, enjoying the pleasant moment. Then, instantly flabbergasted, he looked into the unbounded, timeless wisdom of Rancor's eyes. He sat up straight, as if he finally understood the uncompromising gravity of the situation. Setting the tray down, Betsy attempted to pry Rancor away, but he was far too dense. Yet the cat remained relaxed and unbothered, carrying a prescient, almost auspiciously foreboding, weighty calmness at all times.

Rancor then caught a whiff of a single stream of dried blood on Betsy's left foot. He dropped down, thoroughly licking at it until Betsy, tickled, flinched and shooed him away. "Oh, that tickles, Rancor—stop!"

Asking Larry to stand, she boldly squared herself face-to-face with him. She firmly stated that the necklace was invaluable and should never be removed from his neck. When he tried to hand the priceless item over to her, she countered by pressing the fated artifact back into his palm. Clamshelling his hand into a locked grip within both of her own, she looked into his eyes with absolute, vivid certainty.

The moment Larry put on the necklace, he felt a sudden, anchoring shift—as if he had finally been given a home, a new life, and a strange sense of power and respect. True, the past twenty-four hours had been utter madness, but his entire life had always felt pre-scripted by fear anyway. Existence had always felt oddly out of place to him, as if it weren't quite real.

Within the hour, Betsy cracked open a bottle of Chardonnay that had been chilling in the back of the shop's retro refrigerator. Larry politely turned his glass down but eagerly accepted her offer to order a large pizza with everything on it, his stomach gurgling in loud anticipation.

Calling over her left shoulder to Larry—who was standing just a few feet away—Betsy cupped the receiver of the kitchen landline and loudly whispered over her wine buzz, "One Orbit Supreme, size large. Alright, Larry?"

Larry only nodded in quick, wide-eyed agreement.

"Orbit Pizza, how may I assist you today?" a voice briskly cut in from the other end.

Half-surprised the business was even operational after the earthquake and its aftershocks, Betsy recovered quickly. "Oh—yes, you're open. Great!" Continuing with her order, she said, "I'd like one large Orbit Supreme, please."

"That'll be thirty-five ninety-nine, ma'am. Can I get your name and address?"

"This is Betsy at 422 Parnassus Way—it's actually a business, but we order all the time from my home address, or rather Nick does, at 168 Apricot Lane."

A heavy, momentary silence stretched across the line.

"Hello?" Betsy said, wondering if the connection had dropped.

"Yes... Thank you for ordering with Orbit Pizza, where your pizza is always made out of this world or your money back. This is the manager, Carl, Betsy. We'll see you in thirty.”

Before the line went dead, faint background whispers filtered through the receiver as the staff argued over who actually got to make the delivery. Betsy had learned to filter it out; she knew their lives were a constant spectacle, but acknowledging that fact all the time made it fundamentally impossible to simply exist.

Feeling loose, Betsy turned on some big-band jazz, singing and dancing comfortably around the shop as she cleaned up the remaining debris. "Oh, you know what, Thycius? I mean, Lar... I feel like I should call you Uncle or something, man," she said, getting increasingly buzzed as the minutes ticked by. As they waited for the pizza to arrive, she talked more expressively about the sheer madness of their reality.

"All the while, this cat is probably some god, or a demon, or an Admiral from Space Command!" Betsy laughed, pausing to salute Rancor. Jokingly, she began to march across the floor, taking high steps in her dress and high-heeled shoes, then saluting as if standing at attention like one of Admiral Rancor's honored soldiers. She loudly blew a whistle from a leftover party horn she had unearthed while dusting—playfully acting out life trauma as if mockingly agreeing with whatever force was divining the whole maddening spectacle playing out from behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, as Larry hung out playing with Rancor on the couch and Betsy continued to sip on wine and finalize cleaning up books and debris, a sharp knock sounded at the door. Outside, a small motor scooter sat idling, with three other large pizza boxes bungee-corded securely to the back rack for other deliveries. The helmet-clad delivery person waited patiently on the porch.

"Oh, shoot! I forgot my purse in the car, Larry," Betsy called out, unbolting the door. "I don't suppose you have any money?" She yelled the question back toward the couch, where Larry had begun to doze off against the blaring jazz music. "Larry!"

Larry jolted awake, blinking as the delivery driver nervously adjusted an itchy, black helmet. Betsy stood at the open threshold, her hand extended, looking Larry dead in the eye. "Got any cash, Larry?"

It wasn't a guilt trip. In fact, it was something Larry never could have anticipated from a person who appeared to have it all. In Larry’s world, money—or the absolute lack thereof—was a supreme, tyrannical force that arbitrarily decided whether everyday people lived or died. But Betsy was asking simply because money was something she hadn't spent a single second worrying about since the day she met Nick and Madame Crusso.

Larry gestured weakly at his pockets, then bent over, digging desperately into his worn-out trousers while bypassing the accompanying rank, balled-up mass of his old clothing.

A pathetic handful of pennies and loose sand spilled out, clattering across the stained hardwood floor.

"Forget it, Larry. Don't bother," Betsy cried out.

Remembering a hidden reserve, she rushed over to a large metal canister tucked away near the kitchen door—one she had entirely forgotten about. It was stuffed to the brim with several thousand dollars in cash. Peeling a crisp hundred-dollar bill from a thick roll, she turned back to the door.

The delivery driver pulled up his tinted visor. "Ma'am, it's Carl. You probably didn't recognize me with my helmet on. You're roommates or whatever with Nick over on Apricot Lane, a couple miles away, right?"

"Oh! Hi, Carl."

Carl went on, "I should have said something sooner. Just thrown off—weird day, I guess. I can just put this on Nick's tab. I'm one of his fans; I've been following your story—I mean, Nick's career—really closely for years. We don't carry large change with us anyway," he added, eyeballing the bill.

"Oh, here, you take this now, Carl," Betsy insisted, thrusting the bill forward. "Tell you what: keep the hundred just for being so nice, and put the actual order on Nick's tab with a great tip on top of that. Sound good, Carl?"

Carl’s eyes went wide inside his open visor. "Oh, yes, ma'am! That is really kind of you. Are you sure? That's a lot of money. Hey, by the way, are those tunnels real? Everyone's talking about them online."

Betsy's eyes flashed momentarily green in defense, but by now there was no hiding from reality. She quickly shifted back to the superficial exchange at hand, brushing it off once more.

"Thank you, Carl. You're a good guy and a great delivery driver. Frankly, I was surprised you were open after that terrible earthquake. So here, Carl. Bye, and thanks... see you next time, okay?" Betsy stated kindly, but in firm dismissal.

In one sweeping motion, Betsy handed the large bill to Carl, snatched the steaming pizza box, and pressed the door shut with a left elbow pivot as Carl, still looking on anxiously through the glass, seemed eager to press her with yet another question.

Carl the delivery driver snapped out of his mid-sentence pause, as the now partitioned-off front glass door faintly pressed against the crest of his open helmet's visor. Feeling that crisp c-note with his sweaty right hand, tucking it deep into his pants pocket, Carl pivoted down the steps to return to his idling, shiny black scooter. But something pulled his attention to his left as he mounted the two-wheeled, buzzy, inadequately powered moto with his bulbous, overstuffed frame—it was Rancor from the cornice, ominously staring down at Carl with a covetous gaze from the shadow of the rooftop.

​Carl felt in that moment like prey. Then, seeing Rancor as merely a large, somewhat exotic house cat, he dismissed the exchange. But they had already locked eyes, breathed in sync together as Carl shifted, compartmentalizing the exchange, twisting the grip of the autocycle. He was both fleeing and changing the subject without words. Rancor had his scent, though, as Carl merged into the roadway traffic, the cars slowing behind his clown-like, high-pitched passage while he awkwardly pressed on to the next hungry, waiting customer.

As the somewhat annoying buzz of Carl's scooter washed and faded into the sounds of the streets below, Betsy set the pizza down on the now-open living room tabletop. Larry was staring open-mouthed toward the exposed metal canister as he remained seated on the couch. The object rested on the small light stand near the kitchen door frame, close enough and low enough for him to see the dense stack of currency inside.

"That's the most money I've ever seen up close in my entire life, ma'am," he murmured under his breath.

Betsy placed her hands firmly on her hips, looking squarely at him.

"Look, Larry. I would give you this entire tin full of money. There's probably fifteen thousand dollars in there," she said, cocking her head with a comical grimace as if looking down at some trivial illusion. Snatching the container from the stand and shaking it, she stared into the canister as though it held nothing more than old crumbs.

A deeper pain stirred within her—the bitter memory of how much strife and suffering that stuff called money had caused, as it ruled over the masses. Her nonchalant attitude toward it was a quiet declaration: Mammon, you aren't my god.

"But in our house, in our family, money isn't a concept. It is only a tool for getting the things we need and traveling to the necessary places to achieve our end-all goal."

Then, looking up—half-buzzed off wine and utterly fearless—she added, "Knowledge is what this stuff must ultimately buy."

She carelessly released her grip, letting the floral-print metal canister of bills settle onto the small kitchen table for the time being as she refilled her wine glass.

Then, suddenly remembering the pressing pain of something more—that look of having already experienced the point of no return—she said, "Money—it helps us to achieve the Great Work. That's all that genuinely matters now, all that ever really did… matter.”

"What's that, ma'am?" Larry asked, mesmerized.

"If any of us truly knew what the Great Work was, we probably would have offed ourselves many years ago," Betsy replied softly, a fleeting shadow crossing her face. "We all quietly wish we didn't know what we do. Money isn't a problem for you ever again as far as I can tell, Larry, and reality isn't at all what it seems. So hang on for the ride of your life, okay, Uncle Thycius Larry?"

With that, Betsy picked up the pizza box and pressed it toward Larry with a grin. Larry received it eagerly, practically drooling at the rich scent of cheese and grease as the waiting for it had tested his ravenous patience.

Moments later, Betsy sat in the study near the back at her vintage office desk, while Larry snoozed cross-armed on the couch. With the radio turned down and the channel changed, he was once again listening to the tranquil vintage sounds flowing from the old receiver. Rancor was comfortably settled with his long right foreleg draped over Larry's lap.

Once again, Larry and Rancor shared in their liminal paz, interrupted only by the infrequent crackles of gaseous projectiles that immediately alarmed the cat, awakening him in brief, sudden revulsion. Yet he routinely sank back into the shared stillness, psychically linked in a dream state—an inevitable aftermath of Larry downing at least three massive, thick slices of cheesy pizza.

Betsy was deep in her craft, foretelling fates to come and drawing tarot cards. She drew the Queen of Cups, which "signifies a wise, beautiful female presence," she whispered softly under her breath with intent focus.

She continued on, speaking softly as if pulling cards for a third person—a client.

Then she pulled out The Wheel of Fortune, which "points directly to a major, sudden shift in your destiny or a total change of fate," she mouthed softly.

Immediately she was derailed and distracted, interrupting herself mid-sentence before she could pull another card.

A deliberate knock echoed against the front door.

As Betsy cleared the living room to bring the door into view, she noticed a small, dust-streaked red import convertible parked in the drive directly behind her own vehicle.

Varginah had arrived.

A sharp spike of anxiety rushed into Betsy's chest. The clock had run out. She knew that within the deep structures of her mind, Veesta Cadron would now be opening her eyes, and the calculating, ancient gravity of Rasheef Labruam would not be far behind.

The Convergence at 3:00 PM

A sharp knock rattled the front door.

Betsy paused, panning to her left toward the living room area to check the vintage tambour mantel clock resting over the hearth near Larry. Exactly three o'clock. "I wonder who that could be?" she muttered as it struck the hour.

Larry jolted awake again, along with Rancor—though Larry was soon entirely occupied with tearing into thick, greasy strips of pizza, chewing with the frantic intensity of a man who didn't know when his next meal would manifest. Rancor, too, sniffed and licked at the dead, meaty remnants of sausage balls and small strips of ham—more out of sheer curiosity and exercising the fact that he could—though the meal for him offered no vital substance.

When Betsy swung the door open, a heavy wave of cold, pressurized anxiety swept into the room. Standing on the threshold was Varginah.

"Hello... are you the healer?" Varginah asked. The words left her lips like a desperate plea, heavy with the weight of someone running out of dimensions to hide in. She had literally reached a crossroads and was now practically out of gas.

Betsy adjusted her posture, stepping into her professional skin. "I do many things here. I am a mystic, a tarotist, a palm reader... the list goes on. I'm a former student of Madame Crusso. My name is Betsy."

She extended her right hand, but Varginah impulsively didn't take it. Instead, her eyes darted frantically around the room, her voice dropping into a breathless whisper. "Can I come in? Can I talk to you about something very, very important? Something of a top-secret nature, Betsy? It seems completely random, but I am at the absolute end of my rope. I literally have no place left to turn."

As Betsy pulled her hand back, she recognized the raw gravity in the stranger's face. A mix of curiosity and compassion overrode Betsy’s caution. She stepped aside, gesturing inward. "Come inside. I'm sorry, what was your name again?"

"Varginah. Like the place in Brazil," she said, her chest heaving as she crossed the threshold. "I'm originally from Brazil. I am... not a stranger to otherworldly phenomena, shall we say?"

As Varginah looked around at the strange antiquities, tarot cards, esoteric books, and maps of the zodiac, the air in the room settled into a heavier, more deliberate hum. A cut-glass dreamcatcher danced, throwing flickering fractals of light across the room from the approach of the high afternoon sun.

Betsy’s eyes widened slightly with intuitive a priori certainty. Without a word, she strode over to the small kitchen area and snatched a heavy ring of keys from the wall rack.

"Larry, this is Varginah. Varginah, Larry," Betsy announced briskly. Then she turned her back to the new entrant, locking eyes with Larry as she dropped her voice an octave so as not to alienate Varginah. "Listen, I need to talk to Varginah alone. This sounds incredibly private and serious."

"Yes," Varginah agreed from the doorway, her voice trembling. "It is."

Returning toward syllogistic clarity while maintaining her telluric matrilinear gestic track, Betsy addressed Larry directly. "I need you to take my car home, Larry," Betsy said, her tone leaving no room for argument. "If Nick is there, tell him your name is Thycius. Show him your necklace, okay?"

To emphasize the point, Betsy tugged at the chain around her own neck, and Larry mechanically mirrored her, his grease-stained fingers briefly touching the purple jewel of his own pendant.

"The address is 168 Apricot Lane, it's a two-story canary yellow house with white trim," Betsy continued, dropping the keys into his palm. "This is the car key, and this one is for the house. We’ll get you your own set soon, okay? You do drive, don't you?"

Larry blinked, looking down at the keys in his hand. "Yeah. I mean... yes. I drive. It's just been a while, ma'am.”

"Okay, good enough for me," Betsy said, trusting in the grand order of the cosmos more than Larry—who was by all accounts still a stranger by any rational order. As she guided him toward the exit, she instructed, "Take a right outside. When you hit the next four-way stop, take a hard left. There’s a side street you can barely see unless you look way over your left shoulder."

The communication took energy, care, and intent. Betsy’s labored eye bags showed the strain of her slightly elevated blood pressure, revealing lost sleep and the compulsive, perennial work lying beneath her thin veneer of casual existential banter.

"Look closely, and you'll see Apricot Lane. Take a left there and look for 1-6-8—that’s your new house, Larry. Upstairs, the very first room in front of you, the one on the left—that’s your room. The one with all the philosophy books. You got that?"

Betsy was serious in her delivery, yet kind and nurturing in her tone—radiating the deep, primal vitality of the genetrix of creatrix and full magna mater of conveyed intent.

Larry swallowed a massive bite of crust. "Well... yeah okay."

He stood up, balancing the remaining pizza box in one arm. Betsy reached over, setting a few packets of her favorite peppermint hot chocolate right on top of the cardboard. As he shuffled toward the door, she suddenly stopped him, her eyes tracking down his outfit.

"Oh, wait, Larry. This hat goes with that suit," she murmured. "It looks great on you. It's a matching color slouch fedora; it just looks right." Oscar threw it in with the suit. Now I know what it was actually for." As Betsy affectionately placed the hat atop his head, noticing how perfectly the suit looked on him, she added, "Here, take this too."

Betsy quickly retrieved the tin canister off the kitchen table. Realizing her car was blocking the drive, Varginah briefly stepped back outside to pull the small red convertible coupe to the front of the business; the fuel was low, but the vehicle started without issue.

Inside the building, Betsy pulled out a thick, tightly rolled wedge of currency and stuffed it into Larry's inside coat pocket. "This money is for books, supplies, whatever you need until Nick gets home, okay? We’ll figure out the rest of the details later."

Larry stepped out into the afternoon air, and Rancor immediately fell into step beside him like a seasoned bodyguard.

​"Nice to meet you, Larry." Varginah was still hyper-vigilant, yet aiming to be as genuine as possible—returning to the porch, offering a tight, scattered, yet affectionate smile and a slightly shaky handshake before crossing her arms back into an exhausted stance of post-traumatic recovery.

Betsy and Varginah stood on the front deck, waving goodbye before Larry departed. As the two women reentered the structure together and watched him through the glass, Varginah asked, "Oh... aren't you worried about your cat?"

"That’s not my cat, Varginah," Betsy said softly and nervously, watching the creature's fluid, all-too-sophisticated, evenly paced movements serpentining toward the old pea-green Volvo. "And yeah... that cat always leaves me a little worried."

They both stood transfixed, as if something were taking place behind or inside Rancor—as if he were being pulled along by a supernatural intelligence from a dimension they simply could not see—maybe an intelligence that existed only in that liminal, elusive Magenta light spectrum. Though by now, that should come as no surprise. Then, as the full weight of their bizarre fates finally relaxed its grip, they digressed.

Outside, Rancor hopped effortlessly into the front passenger seat, making himself at home.

Bending over the backseat, Larry carefully slid the leftover pizza onto the floorboards behind the driver's seat, while letting out one more final burst of flatulence as if his digestive system were bidding the place a dire au revoir.

The ancient sedan groaned upon ignition, coughing twice before the engine finally caught. Larry shifted into gear and pulled away from the curb, sputtering off in entirely the wrong direction, but he knew the way—he'd take the scenic route. Yet, somehow, an uncanny peace hung over the street. Nobody was worried; only a low chuckle came from the two women as they bid farewell, then shifted their attention towards The Gateway Through's interior. In the grand, twisted math of the universe, everything was going to work out fine.

Back inside, Betsy closed the door, the Yale & Towne latch clicking into place with a foreboding finality. "Can I offer you a glass of wine?" she asked, her voice laced with deep concern.

"Yes!" Varginah gasped. "Definitely, Betsy. And if you have anything stronger, I highly recommend it for both of us. This is a complete mindfuck." Betsy looked at Varginah, suddenly feeling the full weight of a woman who looked as though she had recently been through hell.

Betsy didn't hesitate. She bypassed the Chardonnay, reaching for a bottle of 25-year-old French oak-barreled cognac from the Tronçais Forest—a bottle she had intentionally saved for such a rare occasion. Betsy always pulled her tarot cards for any purchase of prominence—and this one had been guided by the Major Arcana X. She retrieved the majestically towering, crystal-beveled bottle from a high shelf in the back room, returning with it and two heavy rocks glasses—this was no tasting room.

"This all sounds incredibly serious, Varginah," Betsy said, scoring the outer wax with a small blade she had set aside for precisely this purpose. As she fractured the hardened amber shell, the sharp, dry snap of resin commanded their attention—releasing the long bottled-up, monolithic spirit of the cognac.

Varginah rocked slightly back and forth on the couch, understandably unhinged yet holding it together with sheer anticipation.

"It is, Betsy. I recommend we both have a strict two-finger pour before I even begin to unburden this information."

Betsy engaged both hands as if in ritual, hoisting the seven-pound behemoth of beveled crystal and tipping its heavy frame into a generous, angled pour. Varginah took a long, welcome, open-burning swallow as the tincture expelled all that heavy emotional weight.

"Now, what I’m about to tell you..."

The minutes dissolved as Varginah laid out the blueprint of the madness. She explained the high-level light experiments at the laboratory, her precise position within the project, the blinding flash of the catastrophic failure, and the horrifying, light-draining encounter with the twenty-three bikers in the alleyway, as tears rolled down her cheeks.

"...and I just drove around aimlessly, in absolute, paralyzing shock for over an hour," Varginah whispered, staring into her empty glass as the buzz took hold. "Somehow, I ended up right here, just as my needle was hitting empty—right at this T."

The mantel clock read 3:38 PM.

Deep within the shifting architecture of Betsy's mind, the quiet hours were officially over. The entities were awake. Veesta Cadron listened from the shadows of the subconscious, perfectly still, acutely aware that the ancient gravity of Rasheef Labruam had just opened her eyes.

Without warning, the old 1930s tombstone tube radio began skipping through frequencies, met by a rising cacophony of voices and transmissions as the volume climbed—locking onto a station right as the DJ’s voice cut through the static with a midnight confessional: I Put a Spell on You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. His tone tore over the intro with a detached Cosmic Indifference, playing loud like a binding arboreal somatic inversion chant straight from the song's first heavy lead-in, echoing through the Gateway's halls.

A brilliant blue light ignited within Varginah’s pupils as the room lost its atmospheric pressure.

"My love of lives, my betrayer," Varginah spoke—the entity Phalus surging through her in a deep, echoing, ancient cadence. "Of secret winds do I possess thee always."

In immediate response, Betsy's eyes flared a brilliant, predatory red.

The human veneer shattered. Betsy's face and body began to morph, shifting into an entity that was fundamentally horrifying, yet breathtakingly beautiful. The red and blue light spectrums collided in the center of the room, accompanied by random prismatic neon green rolling flashes, creating a roaring, blinding dynamo of pure luminosity down those halls of otherworldly creature pleasures.

Boundaries of flesh, time, and identity dissolved. The two ancient forces began to merge with the pulsing passion of stars—the cosmic friction of celestial bodies living, dying, and cycling through eternity, all condensed into the fragile air of a terrestrial psychic shop in constant rebirth.

Outside, the physical world reeled under the shockwave. As their two bodies, tied in conjunction, ascended into a shared, boundless coitus of sublimated union, Earth's tides violently shifted out of schedule. A massive, unnatural blood-orange moon tore through the afternoon sky. Huge, chaotic flocks of birds took flight, wheeling wildly across the horizon, while billions of people across the globe suddenly clutched their stomachs, feeling profoundly ill and utterly out of place. The tiny Sun and planetary bystanders reeled in pulsing horror at the act. Existence itself lay in deep trepidation.

It was a collision of billions of years of walking through passion, pain, and betrayal—the magnificent, ceaseless ridiculousness of the cosmic wheel.

Every single consciousness within the room was now present, violated, and utterly blindsided by the raw force of the fusion—except for Veesta. Quietly, Veesta withdrew into her private Saturnian gardens, meticulously cultivated within the neural matrix of Betsy's right brain. Safely tucked behind the walls of thought, she began to softly sing songs to the flowers.

The surrealism of the shared reality solidified like concrete. One thing was absolute: Betsy and Varginah would never walk out of that shop the same way again. The fundamental boundaries of the natural order were shattered into countless trillions of microscopic bits, leaving nothing but neon dayglo pink stardust from another universe raining down heavenly evaporations onto that red carpet and stained hardwood floor.

While the qualia of their umwelt, expressed in the individuality of their carnal bodies, felt deeply violated, ashamed, and teleologically altered by the act of a cosmic breach—because the two women were not mere automata staring at shadows in Plato's cave—Betsy and Varginah only began to wake up hours later, lying side-by-side on the backroom floor.

Meanwhile, Nick drove to the shop to check on Betsy. Finding the front door unlocked, he was met by an unfamiliar rancidity; walking in, he was immediately struck by a surreal, stomach-churning odor—a bizarre mix of peppermint hot chocolate, leftover pizza, stale flatulence, and the unmistakable grimey humidity of human intimate fluids.

Betsy had never experienced anything remotely like this—let alone floating several feet off the ground in cosmic ecstasy—while Varginah had merely "experimented in college."

Chapter 2: The Tunnels

"What are you guys doing lying together—naked?!"

Nick had been introduced to Varginah by his mother, Margaret, as the Council of Seven was heavily involved with funding The Brahmin Accelerator program. They, too, knew each other intimately—a pattern that would have been exceedingly clear if one weren't so caught up in the barbed complexities of human emotion, though the entire group would grow to suspect a connection reaching far back through the expanse of time.

As a preteen of eleven, Nick had an awful dream. He was bound by some unseen force, unable to remove himself from the stone-cold slab beneath him. Black eyes began to manifest around him, though at times he had the sensation that these weren't black eyes at all, but orbs floating in the distance, giving off a dull sheen from their outer curvature. Yet again, his ocular registry would revert, signaling that the objects were a trick of the mind—that he was looking at the faint convex glow of large black eyes attached to almond-shaped, expressionless faces. They surrounded him, performing a surgery of sorts, but he could see no hands or instruments entering him.

Yet, in the recesses of his adolescent mind—like a dark, empty, unused room, or a black box within him that silently observed and recorded every minute nuance and experience of this life, stretching forward and backward in an endless loop—it felt as if time were a mere fabricated construct, leaving only a boundless Möbius strip in its wake.

As the internal voice went on, it spoke further truths that cut into young Nick.

You aren't where you think you are, a voice within him spoke, continuing, ...and the people around you every day are fabrications—a direct extension of this. You aren't asleep; you are attempting to fully awaken beyond the fabrication of noise and the pollution of abstract, meaningless value systems that keep you trapped within entropy and agitation. This age you have reached is also a liminal zone where you stand at a crossroads. An equatorial state of mind and abstraction. What these disruptive workers are performing is what destabilizes you into a held illusion. Your soul is being tortured, along with the body it is temporarily jailed within.

Now free-floating and weightless in cold, open space, Nick was shown a zoomed-out view of the planets and star system to which this elaborate, diabolical network was attached. A plasma-like substance connected and coiled around the planets and moons, reaching toward the stars as well as occulted geometric objects hidden behind a veil in the localized solar system—stretching far beyond into the expanse of an open, dark void. As the voice attempted to continue, calm and calibrating, Nick interjected.

"Who are you, and why are you in my mind?"

The voice answered before Nick's thought was even complete, beginning to laugh. Ha ha. Your mind?

I am your mind.

The mind is a shared energy stream that lies outside the place where you truly exist and have always remained. You are being forced here through pain that your true self is fully unequipped to rationalize or process, forcing you into a sort of decoherence. Then, the technology you see here shrinks your energy into cells, separating the omniscient power of your unique identity into disparate, compartmentalized tiny prisons.

As you struggle to break free, you are always met with the challenge that this spiritual operation of technomancy places upon your psyche. Memories circling around you of past threats and trauma keep this world of carbon and dust existing, and the carbon itself is the byproduct of vast, long periods of karmic death and rebirth. The operation taking place is the war.

Since the body does not know how to process this—defenseless to the assault—your energy erupts, like a jet of soul force, into an outside world that never truly existed. Yet, ironically, these carbon-based molecules and this vast warehouse of death become evidence and proof that the carnal does indeed exist. In reality, space is simply a hypersaturation of nothingness bending into nothingness, but the energetic movement gives the form structure—a boundless, feeble attempt at continuity, a continual effort to break free from the illusion, from death. It is technology that binds you to this place, imprisons every cell, and then shrinks and separates the unified power needed to break free, as the restricting weaponized beams work ceaselessly to invert you.

Yet, as your cells hold the pure light of your soul at a distance—now compartmentalized into tiny little bubble traps, much like the space between nuclear force and electromagnetism, a very precise distance—that agitation generates and siphons off the excess. The more you struggle, the more you power the engine that enslaves you. Ironic. The true you is able to dilate in opacity and grow larger than this entire universe. But the technology working here—woven into a spider web of networking plasma strings like a highway system these beings travel upon, like inverted, liminal, light-based roadways—ensnares you. There are countless billions of abductees being tortured in the exact same way right now, in other universes and realms, generating a massive dominant force, keeping the individual from the rightful expansion of growth and potential.

What you feel is the further multiplicity of your other selves also going through this torture. It is a very complex, well-thought-out, and deployed form of it, carried out in ritual practice—speaking to the very mathematics that underlie the base code of reality. It is so precise that each universe on its own, down to each compartmentalized, disparate individual, is forced and set to a slightly different frequency, vibrating with a corresponding, discordant harmonic tone. This technology is so well-orchestrated and so well-thought-out in advance that it creates a labyrinth of probabilistic protocols. Batches of disparate victims are being slowly zapped to death as their souls are siphoned off.

Nick lay there between states of consciousness and worlds. The memory was so unique that it could neither be forgotten nor remembered, but the soul listened and heard every intention. Though at times the communication was said in words, rapid emotions mixed with meaning rushed into him, expressing information words could never describe, as a knowing sank into him—or rather, reawakened—as the voice went on.

At your age now, at this junction point of balance and hormonal stasis, a cosmic moment dovetailing into an interlocking seamless joint, you are the most dangerous. You do not yet feel the full weight of being trapped, but you are aware enough and feel strong enough within yourself to piece together this unseen—and some obviously seen and acknowledged—series of events, and begin to fight back within the very annals of your mind, the self. As you get older, this joint destabilizes and begins to come apart. The impact of a moment... ironic that you are too young to know. And that is who I am. I am you from an eternal sense, what you were and will become, and an aspect of the great expanse—what you rightfully should be now. The you that you must return to. But you cannot try to out-psychologize the machine. Those traumatic memories exist outside of you, acting as moments, like cards of light floating there around you, binding you to a moment that never really existed. For it had no structure, no aim, no cause, no continuity—but you do. You are the moment, Nick.

The very thing you must realize and acknowledge is that none of this is real. Not your body, not your assumed identity, and certainly not your mother, this house, or the sky above you each and every day. The form, shape, and pattern of the world, yourself, and objects are all the proof you need. You are authentic and it is not—what more do you need to know? Why are there different-sized objects? Why are they separate? Why does gravity pull you down into a theoretical center, draining your energy into a vortex beneath you, tearing you apart like chains at your limbs, all while this unseen tapestry surrounds you in the hidden network? As it ages you and breaks down your will, it limits the connection with that greater operating mind, preventing you from expanding into the realization that you are imprisoned and stuck. Amassing into a force that cannot be contained—this is what they, what it, fears. These carbon-wall cells need to be shattered. One soul can kinetically set off a cascading effect with other souls, using their fear. Yet, ironically, there is one mind behind it all.

Just then, Nick was instantly transferred from floating there before the cosmos. He witnessed it all from space, hovering above himself as the demonic grey entities inflicted curdling psychical trauma upon him. They focused on specific locations of his holographic body of energy and light; as the energy itself erupted out toward liberation, it was cleaved away. Then, using negative memories and pure soul-light extraction containment technologies, they forced the soul to cease growing. They used strange, surgical-like tools to enforce this size limitation, as if soldering his soul with black ooze over main eruption points—weaponizing it to scar and reduce the damage of his power.

He was then shown—as the voice was still there, now in the deep recesses of his mind—how the maze-like labyrinth of society was put together to further confuse and ultimately destroy the soul.

The matrix of everyday life—and the people all around acting as cybernetic drones, themselves extensions of the master agenda—was revealed. The challenge surrounding the individual under the false auspices of a banal existence—the everyday mundane illusion—was the trap. It was a bartering contract of agreement that was a complete fabrication, yet it worked to keep the soul from growth and ultimate escape. If a soul were to grow to such proportions that it could not be contained, it would destroy the system by overloading it; this had happened before. The system would then further attack and reduce the unique egoic self, corralling the soul deeper into the illusion.

Look at this, Nick, your last true eternal memory, the truth, the voice spoke.

Nick then found himself feeling more bliss than he ever had. It was him—a memory more real than any other. He was living completely eternally and liberated, flying at vast speeds over immense oceans and distances. The sky and environment around him shifted to form and acknowledge his breath and his intricate expression of limitless emotions, temperaments, and moods. He was not bound to any single dimension, nor further limited by the refracted echo of his own expression. He flew to an etheric flower patch of the most vibrant and intelligently aware floral growths. So intricate and detailed, each was a universe and a godlike consciousness unto itself. This great eternal power was not limited in size. Bliss was the factor all things shared, as he could further dilate his mind out into an equally unlimited expanse of breadth and expansion with the mere notional sub-thought of it.

He saw a blue-skinned, sharply featured being with large pointed ears, wearing a black cape with a high collar, standing in the shade of a tree off in the distance beyond the flower patch. The being was talking to something Nick had never seen or known of—a woman, dark and pure evil, with countless souls tucked beneath a thick black covering that appeared as pure void. The two were whispering to one another.

Nick looked down at one of the flowers, and there was a small, fairy-like spirit speaking to him through it. There was an attraction and a sexual feeling that, in his primal, natural, unbound state, he had never felt before. Then, in an instant, he was back, feeling the torture and pain of his soul—wondering how a great dragon, a beast of such immensely massive proportional personal power, could ever be boxed up and chained in such a diabolical and underhanded way.

Whatever that blue-skinned being was, those eyes and that face were the most plotting aspect of it all; all the tortures and suffering gave off his signature. The voice within Nick spoke two names as the image of them standing near that eternal celestial tree flashed in his mind: Dumakus and Silence.

Nick, still in his horrifically awful, shocked dream state, looked over from where he was being held and tortured. He could see the beings become more carnally present. He realized they were creatures engineered without souls, nor would they require pure light as energy. They were the turned, now living like demons within these bodies. Now acting as a legion of one singular directive mind, it all became all too clear: Dumakus was in an alliance with that multidimensional witch called Silence, working to keep this universe that he had constructed and built from being usurped by any other being.

Only he lived there, at the center in his own utopia and blissful state, but he had managed to echo off aspects of himself through an unparalleled mastery of spinning out varied iterations. As he remained forever in a mindful as well as mindless state of meditation, he had deceptively, in some rendition of a universe, deceived his own people. He was not the smartest nor the greatest, but the most machinating and diabolical.

Was this the true fable of Maldek, Tartaria, the fall of Mars, Kemet, Nibiru, and Atlantis? Was Plus Ultra all just the same hazy, distant memory of the soul being diabolically imprisoned and kept out of the gates of heaven itself—the place where we all truly reside and where we are originally from?

Nick looked over at Varginah on the next table. She was being systematically tortured. He could see her soul erupt in anguish. The room, her earthly body, and the four thin, grey, ominous creatures—wearing long, high-collared, blackish emerald-green robes—appeared dim and dark against the bright, reeling light of her eternal soul. The black energy from the long, prodding, rare-metal tools used in this spiritual surgery cut at her soul, as black ribbons of vapor extinguished portions of her light. Then, another tool trapped and sucked in the minute separation, which began to shine brightly like a godlike firefly, now compartmentalized and vying to break free.

A warehouse of similar canisters manifested behind them. Both Varginah and Nick looked up from where they lay flat-backed and powerless upon those mausoleum-like marble slabs. The countless containers, all held near one another but at a very precise distance, were obviously engineered to generate entropy and agitation. This friction was what allowed this altered state—this backdoor cheat code of an inferior temporal reality—to even exist, much less go on for countless eons and cycles. How long had this been going on?

Life, death, and the karmic wheel... where the psychology of dharma was the greatest illusion of all, casting blame right back onto the victim.

It was from this dream state that Nick was awakened by his mother. A "gifted young lady" who was applying for a scholarship through the Five Sphere Science and Technology Fund was there, and Margaret wanted Nick to meet her. She was very beautiful and was Nick's age. She was from Brazil, and her name was Varginah. Nick would eventually get up and show her around the estate. She was invited to remain there for a few days as she waited for housing and university placement, having already earned her bachelor's degree in science and technology from an exclusive, privately funded university in Brazil by the mere age of ten. She was going in for her doctorate in mathematical sciences. Nick would spend his time with Varginah, and at that young, tender age, they would both lose their innocence to one another. Yet, had they known each other before?

"What the fuck is going on here, ladies? I'd be asking my mom if she were alive—and to boot, I'm standing in the fortune-teller store she used to own... well, the Council, anyway—for God's sake! Maybe once you get dressed, we can figure out what in the holy hell is happening and what we're going to do next. The two smartest ladies I know hooked up—what are the odds?"

Nick walked out of the room to shake it off while the two peeled themselves off the floor, parched and aching from head to toe.

"I feel like I just did every drug in the known universe—and a few others," Varginah gasped, leaning forward in a clammy sweat as she clutched her throbbing head.

Betsy laughed. "No doubt whatsoever."

Even as they gathered themselves, now glowing with a dull, heavily veiled aura, they both felt it strongly: they were in love, or so they thought, and felt compelled to embrace again, to kiss. Drawn by an unseen force to make love once more, they were convinced the strong, unrelenting draw was not some external entity merely pressing them, but an inevitability.

The pattern had been made, the boundary crossed, and there could be no return; a sense of overwhelming, everted buoyancy of bliss and the thriving beat of raw sexual consummation brought them back to life in ways neither realized they had ever lacked.

Nick put on water for coffee, then sat in the front room, his eyes panning out into the hills as he sank down into the grip of the old Chesterfield couch. Still guided like an automaton while intentionally distracting himself, he stared blankly at the traffic lights as vehicles bounded through that three-way, T-shaped stop.

After briefly taking leave to prepare a bitter, piping-hot full carafe of French press, he remained solemn in the act. He drowned out the post-coital giggles and bumps of the shallow veneer they all hid behind in a recursive luxury of denial—that semi-intrusive cacophony of perennial noise, of just "girls getting ready in the other room"—with the Stockholm-ingrained refuge of default "back into the white noise" echoing in his head.

Making slow, biting, rhythmic cracking sounds with his teeth in mandibular muscular compression, he diverted from the pulse of adrenaline, feeling the frailty of that rare adrenochrome spark they all shared—a secret—as he slumped back into the room, heavy with its weight.

It wasn't them; they had all been triggered. The laughs, the items money could buy—all were a mask for a much greater evil.

He now sat gripping that large, steaming, pink polka-dotted mug in his right hand, feeling the sear on his fingers and knuckles, though it didn't burn enough to break the compulsion. He peered out through the large bay window—his attention zooming farther and farther still, his consciousness entirely lost in the Montgomery hills, absorbed in observation and sucked in by the sterile, synthetically fabricated serenity of the moment.

Then he was met by the vacancy of the lurking, tree-covered, smoky mountain fog rolling in the distance. His eyes still transfixed by helplessness, brutality, and memories, he let go of the weight of this matrix of illusion as he faintly recollected fragments of another life.

"There isn't enough pressure from firehoses or purity in water to wash the lurking smell of this away," he half-jokingly quipped under his breath. "Ha ha!" he laughed out loud, casting that ever-looming darkness back into the shadows—all of it—but its mass was far too lofty now.

Dragging a hand back, raking through brown bangs stuck momentarily to his eyelashes, he swept his hair clear, causing a cascade of sweat to finally work its way to the ground. He looked down, whispering, "Gravity," under his breath with pursed, dry lips, the tension from his left hand trying to press it all deeper into his mind. But the truth wanted out.

It wasn't them; it wasn't their fault. This was a trauma intricately laced throughout dimensional boundaries, his mother's sadistic curse plaguing them from beyond the grave.

Though suddenly, it didn't substantially bother him at all. A dopamine prompt had set in, saving him from early childhood trauma again, bonding tight once more the meshwork fabric of those links and strings—dangling tethers still sealed behind another firewall of reality. There was a long enough itemized list of terrestrial distractions here on this side to soothe one into forgetfulness over the impossible task of forgiveness.

Forgive what? He could never truly remember outside the instant heat of nervous, sweaty flashes of the profane and obscene—things kids should never know. He was already long past the immediate shock of discovery.

And that's how the crew began to come together, meeting at similar dysregulated fissures and breaks within their dissociative souls. That's how the strange elastic strain of twisted tension began to churn under the shared stain of torsion, of uncommon interest.

It wouldn't take long for them to learn that Varginah was the bearer of the green crystal necklace, when the three would soon venture down into those tunnels below.

Suddenly, a monarch butterfly flew by, snapping Nick out of the spiral and pulling his gaze back into the frame of this reality. He locked onto the accentuation of that unique insect—the thrust of its stronger-than-average wings marking it as a resilient super-generation Methuselah, also fortified through diapause. Though it was a single monarch in solitary flight toward some nightly roosting ground, trailing perhaps six feet behind it, the unseen flock revealed itself, seemingly gravitationally bound to its wake. Nick watched as it moved, appearing to generate a metaphysical solar sail stream that cut directly through the universal dark matter—that ninety-five percent majority of reality the human eye was strictly engineered not to see, at least by day.

The migrating generational flood of hundreds paraded behind the leader for some unknown reason—so much information conveyed to him alone, while the busy mass of networking lemmings distributed outside noticed nothing. That procession pressed on into its magnetically supercharged torsion pull in a flapping frenzy; in numbers, there was power.

They were gone as soon as they'd miraculously come into view, but their spiritual message had been clear—at least to Nick in the moment. A new pure memory given as a boon, perhaps?

The flood of orange and black batting wings crossed before the window as if a transit of lost souls. Briefly clenching his eyes closed, burning the memory in, he could still see them now through black light inversion codified into his mind's eye. Then, putting down his cup on the large living room table before him, he pulled back his gaze entirely as an acoustic thud pulled him out.

Betsy was now dressed, while Varginah was still pulling herself together in the cramped bathroom. The two women shuffled into the front room, flanking Nick as he peered out the window again, though his gaze was entirely superficial. A heavy, yet quickly fading, tension still hung in the air.

Betsy hugged Nick as Varginah affectionately pressed her head against his shoulder, the three of them sharing a quiet moment. Within that tight embrace, Betsy whispered under her breath, "The secret door to the caverns in the pantry is open, Nick."

Outside their immediate orbit, the threads of fate were moving. Nick hadn't crossed paths with Larry yet—Rancor somehow conjured up Thycius—and while Larry hadn't quite made it to 168 Apricot Lane with Betsy's car, he was well on his way.

The age-old violation had been revisited. The erotic violence of a trained, forever-gaping trauma wound once again had to mend, at least partially, into concealment. It was a shared moment revisited—the pervading, all-too-convincing tapestry of a forced reality crafted by expert handlers persisted. It would hold until the dam broke again, driving them toward self-inflicted trauma, rushing Act Three into Act Five's inevitable tragedy. While the resolution was a unity they had genuinely earned, even this felt tainted in the end. It was a moment tucked into a secret envelope, concealed from all the filth and trauma of the world—or so they collectively thought.

From the outside, they looked like functioning adults, but deep inside, they were forever children. Something had always worked with great tenacity to exploit that vulnerability—to force them to forget. The entire universe felt perverse, the cosmic joke constantly on them. It carried the lingering ache of a toxic existence and the lost purity of childhood, as if an unseen entity had been grooming them since the beginning of time.

Betsy stood in the kitchen with Varginah as Nick approached from the living room, carrying his empty cup like a token for entry. He stepped into the space, affectionately shifting Varginah out of the way by her waist, gracefully guiding her like a partner in a dance.

She countered with a large, androgynous step backward, moving to the rhythm of some pagan nature ritual forever unfolding behind the room's geometry. It was as if merely existing encroached upon something else's space, burdened by the inconvenience of a heartbeat. She knew she was a vital part of it all, yet she desperately yearned to be left alone. In light of the kinetics of every situation, just breathing and moving, it seemed, excited and inducted everyone in the universe—leaving her with the weight of a looming question: was solidarity an illusion dangled before us all?

Varginah slowly drifted back toward Betsy, caught midway in a tug-of-war of dual flirtation. She was forced to inject this tension with some Wiccan notion of choice, then further into the intricacies of mathematical movement, held to perverting motion through the application of simple physics. But, of course, nothing was simple.

It felt as if there were a forced mandate to always choose sides in an unseen war, when she was merely trying to exist. It was a left-brain syllogism of ever-looming retrocausality—those subthought influences of diversion that lurked in the balmy haze of the abstract mind.

Ancient entities were piggybacking within the very architecture of Varginah and Betsy, a strange interpretation and rehashing of cosmic events acted out in attempted symbiosis. A macrocosm reduced to minutiae, mirroring Nick's zigzagging memories and fragmented identities. They were fleeing one labyrinth only to exchange it for the hope of release into a higher tier of the very same maze, yet each of them was compelled by something more.

The conversation volleyed between the two women as they settled into the kitchen.

“Maybe we are all ruled by lesser gods in this quest for some wacked-out form of Shambhala or Plus Ultra deliverance!” Betsy said with a hormone-fueled, nervy passion, deliberately keeping her voice low.

Varginah countered with equal esoteric enthusiasm. “Yes, those Peter Pan grown-up children who fail to transcend eventually just regress into a precoded set of religious practices. Mindless zealots, essentially, whose undeveloped personal beliefs may as well be wearing those common people as skins.”

Betsy’s eyes, erotically transfixed by Varginah’s intoxicating, multilayered depth, matched her strain of thought. “Exactly. Those adherents never notice the true will that some great, auspicious mind might demand from them—from us all, fundamentally. We must choose and forge, through sheer will, what and who we are to become, absent all prescripted assistance.”

Nick, slightly perturbed by the theological discussion—the absolute last thing he wanted to hear—headed toward the small, deep earthenware slop sink.

He poured the remainder of the cold, molasses-black coffee down the drain. Then, either thoughtfully or mindlessly, he rinsed the mug and set it aside to dry.

As the two women stared with menacing expressions past the pantry door and into the far reaches of the shadowed nook, Nick stepped up beside them. Betsy cut into the momentary silence. "I don't directly know how to explain what's down there. That cave system always seems to shift and change, as if under the direct influence of some zodiacal cosmic tide. It's as if it's alive," she murmured, her eyes fixed on the cellar door with a haunting blankness.

She continued softly, "Once you go down there, there's no turning back."

She immediately realized how ridiculous the cliché sounded, yet how deeply these recent changes had cut into their lives and existential purpose in just the past hour. She knew they were already far beyond any point of return—perhaps they always had been.

As they were drawn like initiates toward the threshold, they weren't simply inviting Varginah into the caves; they were all going down together because it was preordained, forever etched in time.

Betsy and Varginah returned to the heavy conversation they had carried from the back room. Nick watched them, noting how deeply engrossed they remained in their dialogue, dissecting the realization they both shared: that no singular, all-knowing, capricious god existed. They debated the deceptive nature of that polluted default—a spiritual mind-prison fed to the masses from the very start.

Nick started rooting around for something to eat; his blood sugar was rapidly tanking. The women were content snacking on parmesan cheese crackers and sipping tea as they talked. They weren't intentionally ignoring him; they were simply swept up in the intensity of the moment.

They noted that the lifelong control mechanism—that recursive-loop feeling of constant reversion under an all-powerful monotheistic cosmic god—was now more fleeting than the very concept of the self. Each of them was now clinging to that self with all their might, clutching it like a life raft cast out onto the violent, impetuous seas of illusion, fighting desperately for true autonomy.

In a bizarre shared union, the two women and Nick found themselves further perplexed, realizing they should all rightly feel violated. An utterly immobilizing emptiness crashed over them—a profound sense of worthlessness. Some unfathomable force had gaslit them long before this life began. This impulse carried physical weight, a permeating substance so thick it could be cut with a knife, and their outrage was entirely justified.

Something had taken a backdoor right into their consciousness, slithering down and seeping into their spinous systems in an act of eternal personal violation.

Where did they actually exist now, as individuals carried along by this strange, invasive cosmic tide? With these all-too-quiet hitchhikers riding inside them, was it always meant to be this way? Who were they under the great, eternal rule of this advancing cosmic umbrella? Were they just another nebula fading into a vast star cluster?

It seemed some anti-photon, gaseous substance bound and connected them all unsuspectingly, yet the deeper meaning of these events remained stubbornly occulted. It was as if some hybrid Ouija board and cryptic Masonic tracing board demanded that language itself serve as the key for entry—a skeleton key to transcendence. Here, buried beneath the concrete jungle, they were forced to open this cave system and venture inside, as curious as the wrought box drawn into the Ark of the golden mean—three squared, entered apprentices facing the unknown.

The two women looked at one another with an interstitial cadence, sharing the same menacing realization: it seemed the fiery desire to know more incessantly appeared to twist, turn, and then burn against them.

That synthetic synesthesia of a clinging, low-hanging subthought smelled, tasted, and appeared as a fuzzy, colored feeling—a synthetic a priori peach. An energy in motion. Their self-assumed "natural gifts"—beauty, knowledge, and skill—acted more like pattern recognition software. Not unlike cybernetically imbued, populace-controlled character powers, these traits were never randomly distributed. They were the currency of some ancient, arcane feudalism, a patterned resource coinage minted for something else entirely.

Each of them was a mere playing card dealt into a hidden network across a vastly confusing expanse. There were many gods now; this much, they all fully knew in absolute, shared union.

Standing close, Betsy and Varginah looked deep into one another's essence, their hands clasped in the tight interdigitation of lovers' ties.

Then they kissed. They shared a warm, wet, osmotic fluid exchange—a brief capillary connection—and then kissed again, drinking, syncing, and sharing transfixed microorganisms.

They tried with all their might to pull away under their own personal cognizance, grasping at their once self-perceived will of autonomy. But that illusion of free will was a gift meant only for the swinish, uninitiated food source—which they were no more. Now, every breath had to be earned through the pure merit of their own self-applied will, boldly asserting, “This is who I am, a critical, independent force within the All.”

Yet they were continuously met with resistance, drawn back into the embedded entrapments of lesser failsafes born from a primal mind, collapsing like a black hole’s gravity well. They constantly struggled to justify their involvement in a left-brain-manufactured fabrication of truth, fighting to find a continuous, algorithmic way through.

Nick stepped a few feet away, out of the kitchen. Standing in the middle ground between the front showroom and the back office, he snacked on a blueberry cheese danish, giving the women—and himself—some much-needed space. He sipped on a mineral water he had managed to find in the refrigerator door. It went down cold and crisp, and he savored the fleeting normalcy of the moment.

But the power of the caves soon commanded their full, collective attention once more.

They were intentionally diverting themselves, stumbling into the all-too-alluring, occulted shimmer, gazing past Nick’s shoulder toward the open doorway tucked into the furthest recesses of the pantry.

A dense darkness was drawing them in, inviting them. Something pulsed in the flat black, a deep, dark bluish-purple hue radiating from the inverted, backlit depths.

Betsy and Varginah, however, were still locked in each other's gaze, needing to brush hands, linking pinkies in a playful, willful flirtation with the absolute lawlessness of unbound, dimensional abstract union. They were not only growing increasingly attracted to one another's physical beauty and underlying essence, but intellectually, they were compelled to share themselves, syncing through an undeniable compulsion.

Or was something else wearing their personalities and quirks like a tailored suit of clothes? Had they been shuffled aside, forced to exist only temporarily behind the solar plexus, relegated to the tiny brain of that ganglionic mass?

There were too many occupants. They were pregnant with the holographic universe inside them. Why them? Simply because it could be done; it was the all-mind in willful, relentless operation.

If so, they were merely the life, the breath placed within a microscopic quadrant of a body they once believed they wholly owned.

It went beyond mere concept. Microorganisms, gods, nymphs, gnomes, pixies, fairies, elves, giants, or gremlins—all were just slightly shifted in their patterning. They acted more as allostatic forms of a cohesive whole, serving as necessary avatars if any person, being, or entity truly required an apparitional, phantasmic shape and identity within abstract space.

Life itself, the greater ontology, operated like an alphabet, a complex language code. It treated space as a fluid palette—patterning transient, moving, and expiring locations across universal real estate. The furniture, the fixtures, and any antiquated point in space-time served as mere moments of operation within a fissured, undulating movement of light revolving around an ever-greater, gyrating axis mundi.

Could they ever expand back into the various corridors of their once-assumed selves and claim full occupancy? Had anyone truly ever achieved that? Was one single lifetime long enough to achieve such a monumental task?

Perhaps full autonomy was only granted while working in constant, deliberate movement toward something greater, weighty, and mighty. This, truly, was the Great Work.

They would no longer be diverted by prescripted religions fashioned by other men or capricious gods. Instead, they possessed a profound awareness that refused to rely on the fragmented past failures of dead cultures, striving only to become ever more by taking decisive steps forward.

The magnetic draw of those caves became the ultimate venture into the deep caverns of the self. It promised to reveal the many layers and depths of what existence truly meant, translated through geometric language patterns of colors, distances, angles, elemental speed, and the variable-to-invariable likeness of sigils, signs, and forms. It was the pure alchemy of life.

The secret door descending into the mysterious cave system and its connecting tunnels was practically screaming their names.

Varginah stepped closer, driven by a defined, insistent curiosity. Neither Betsy nor Nick tried to stop her. There was no manual for something like this; the cave had chosen its initiates long ago.

Peering into the darkness, she supported her weight with her right hand. Anchoring her grip on the lip of the doorjamb, she leaned into the sloping corridor. She vectored herself downward, catching the ancient smell and feeling the hypnotic, arcane, and exotic flat silence of the tunnels below.

Holding perfectly still, Varginah scanned the pulsing depths of the sweeping, ancient stone stairwell. She gazed down into that first shallow abyss leading toward the cave system, but past the initial steps, nothing could be seen beyond the curve of the apex. Immersed in a heightened, post-coital state of hyper-vigilant synesthesia, she listened as the fathom-test communication of the caves echoed back to her in a single, reassuring drip of water.

Then, an overwhelming wave of vibration made itself known, rumbling through the stone as if a peaceful, sleeping dragon were turning on its back to offer its belly. A massive underground waterway gave off a distinct archaic mist and scent. She knew she had to go down. Pulling herself upright against the doorframe, she took her first steps into the great descent.

To the sleeping hylics—the profane and uninitiated—this was just an old house built atop a creepy, unfinished dungeon. But for those with the eyes to see, those with a third eye awakened and the solar plexus torn open to receive the pure vision of the expanse, it was entirely different. For true, rare seekers, they entered with the absolute certainty that this was the very heart of it all.

As Varginah stepped down slowly into the dark, Betsy quickly moved to secure the shop's front door.

Nick headed down the stone steps right behind Varginah, turning back to confirm that Betsy was closing the pantry door, fully shutting out the daylight. They were led forward by the internal bioluminescence of their intertwined wills, fortified by a tremendous amount of faith and trust.

Betsy slowly slid her feet onto the lower stones, scraping her soles along the grit. She reached out expectantly, and Nick caught her hand, pulling her close and guiding her descent as she firmly pulled the heavy cellar door shut with her left hand.

From the outside view, the psychic shop was empty. But behind that cellar door, the space was once again hermetically sealed, a secret, deeply occulted sanctuary.

The pulsing, otherworldly glow of the pyramids somehow illuminated their way down. Or perhaps they were seeing through an entirely different sense—a hidden spectrum of light and reassurance that their frail human eyes were never meant to grasp.

Now seeing dancing blue phosphenes in the pitch-black darkness, it was clear this was another realm. It looked more like an ancient, complex arterial system than anything made by humans, as if something possessed a heartbeat that would survive and go on—as if the pervading world was somehow based on it and not the other way around, like those many pyramids below.

The cave entrance abruptly swept into a steep descent, the stairs banking down to the right with the logarithmic curve of a golden spiral. It left a mystery in the pulsing darkness regarding what stretched out further and how far the cave system went down into the depths.

As the three edged down through the sweeping corridor to the subplatform base of large interstitial stone slabs, they peered around. Of course, Nick and Betsy had been down here before, but one could visit this place for billions of years and never see it all.

Old vines grew, along with ancient, eternal moss and fungi in a multiplicity of colors, vital with an ancient deep green splendor, while strange red hairs became energized, standing on end with horripilation.

The growths conveyed a unified presence, as if the Mycorrhizal Network of electrophysiology had a mind and was welcoming them. Betsy and Nick knew the way towards Apricot Lane, not quite three miles away through the underground system.

The massive caves sprawled out, eclipsing the megalithic Dolmen de Menga and the Malta Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, but far, far older.

However, these structures far more resembled the Great Pyramid of Giza, yet were much older than those inner sanctums. With utter, impenetrable architecture dwarfing the aforementioned pursuits of primitives, these tunnels and caves were alive and probably always had been. Those surface systems were more than likely only attempts at a mimetic recreation of this eternal network.

The Council of Seven Spheres owned all the entrance points to the Gateways as a topographical hypotenuse connecting all points from 422 Parnassus to 168 Apricot Lane, sweeping on further toward Le Château du Bosquet des Corbeaux (the Château of the Raven's Grove).

As they drew closer, the brilliant, eternal pulsing lights of the underground waterways could be seen emanating an emerald green from deep beneath the surface as they advanced toward the underwater pyramid below.

The water was so clear and calm that, even without artificial light, the naked eye could peer through it like a dimensional pane of glass directly beneath 168 Apricot Lane.

The green crystal necklace hung before them, pulsating with vibrance. Varginah's eyes began to flash in the same signature, persistent, powerful tone, as the vibrational energy emitting from her and the golden necklace—now suspended in the open space before them—pushed outward as a unified force.

Phalus didn't bother himself with mundane human feelings, nor did he have a stake in any plot or game.

He was ensuring an existence of some kind, even if latently embedded within the recesses of assumed amino acid junk code—ensuring his consciousness would persist, neither dead nor alive, but stretching beyond the veil in code. Still pulsing within the crystal lattice of existence, reconstituting himself from the dusty crust of human soil, he would go on eternally reaching out through those crystal matrices to benzene-ringed amino acids, one day filtering toward that harmonic resolution. But would he be the same Phalus emergent from the struggle?

Daria was watching them all from a distance—tracking their every move and scanning the situation.

Until recently, she had been held in stasis, waiting in that liminal space beyond life and the physical universe. Where once her sole purpose had been locked onto Phalus, she was now assimilating new information—learning the mechanics of life’s continuation, becoming, and existence as an independent force.

The pulsing necklace called to them and pulled them near. Varginah accepted it with grace as Betsy placed the necklace around her neck, and the two kissed and embraced. Nick said nothing.

Chapter 3: Problem with the Pyramid

The three turned abruptly to find Agent Cook holding a black, pen-like device.

Everyone stood back in awe at the sudden sight of him; however, he never asserted himself as a polarizing force. His voice spoke the open source of all ages as negentropy, and, oddly, this made Agent Cook seem more alive than the so-called living.

"Your mother would have been so proud of your newfound feminist support, Nick!" Agent Cook clapped, his applause so jarringly loud and antagonistic that the cave itself felt exposed.

Nick’s history with Agent Cook extended far beyond the casual familiarity of the prior months. Looking back, he recognized that this exact, unyielding version of Cook was the same distant figure who had stood at the periphery of his childhood estate twenty-five grueling years ago—unaged and unchanged while everything else in his world withered away.

"Look, I know who you all are. In fact, I might know you better than you even know yourselves. I know multiple ways of how this story ends—infinite ways. In fact, here in this cavern system alone, you have exactly 28,571.43 light spectrum choices. These choices fractal out into near-limitless quantum potential.

"At the hub of it all, at the heart, we exist. Not everyone, but we do, because we hold the line. You might say the universe picked us out for a very special project before it even officially existed.

"Find the remaining crystal bearers, but I assure you that the seventh clear crystal never has a human bearer in any of these countless potentials. You need to start looking for the bearer now, because there is an eighth that will manifest when the time comes."

With that, Agent Cook vaporized, vanishing into the shadows.

"Wait... did Cook just say that there is an eighth crystal?" Nick's voice cut through the damp silence, breaking the stillness as the three of them stood there, staring blankly at one another.

As the numerous tiny red hairs growing from those mysterious, abundant green vines stood on end as if to know, moving with the singular processing intelligence of an ancient mycorrhizal network coursing in rhythmic sync with the pulsing spectral light show from the pyramids below, the group breathed in deeply—drawing in the anamnesizing ancient knowledge embedded in the heart of it all. An arcane peace came upon them.

Professor Emeritus Calcunos stumbled out of the deeper passages, his long, thinning blonde hair appearing as if he had just passed through some sort of vortex. He seemed half-surprised to see them all standing there in assumed normalcy.

He was gripping his large canvas messenger field bag before concealing it behind the central, eight-sided platform—a structure that would likely be viewed as a form of sepulchral heterodoxy under today's dogma.

Maybe it was designed as an ancient map layout center, or maybe it was a tomb, or both—one couldn't decisively say one way or the other. But they looked and listened on, fascinated, as they absorbed the Professor's short lecture down in the cave system. The pulsing glow was now shifting from orange and yellow into a clear, pure, bright crystal splendor, illuminating this central hub.

He quickly explained the light spectrums he had "just closed" and others that were willingly working toward a final central resolution—"toward the final consolidation phase," as he put it.

While laying down the map to show the three what he had discovered and where he had just come from, the crystal necklaces appeared to magnetically levitate from somewhere beneath the octagonal barrier. Nick and Betsy were more familiar with this mechanism—a remnant of Margaret's final will and testament, acting more as a corporate designation by the council and her true persona as Madame Crusso.

The orange crystal began to pulse brightly before him, facing him with a confident luster as he grew nearer to it. It knew where he had just come from and what he was working on—campaigning and working vigilantly with no applause.

"Who are you, sir? I don't think we've met," Varginah said, stepping forward.

"Well, maybe not in this timeline, but in countless others we know each other quite well." The Professor shook Varginah's hand with steadfast familiarity, as if the two of them had just experienced another world's heated, loving embrace. She pulled her hand away in confusion, and the Professor went on to speak further.

"In fact, I just left a timeline where you and I fancy one another fondly, I must say. Our job here at present is either to rectify the timeline or bring it all into a sort of harmonic synthesis. I can't be too certain. How is Phalus anyway? Can you ever speak to him directly, or is he largely dormant?"

Varginah gulped; it was all she could do. Here was an assumed complete stranger who appeared to know the finer details of her life better than she did at present.

"Other self? Timeline?" She began to look around, realizing that this wasn't some strange, arcane archaeological dig.

Just then, the halls around them lit up as each of them began to momentarily hover and float before smoothly touching down once more onto the ancient granite slab beneath them.

An ancient, worshipful ode to a long-forgotten God echoed through the chamber as Phalus openly displayed his power.

Varginah's eyes flashed with an unknown color as her green crystal lit up, emanating a sort of suppressive power over Phalus.

"I am always here. I am always in all."

The deep, echoing voice spoke through Varginah's lips, but it wasn't coming from her. The entire cave suddenly felt cold, as if a chill swept through it.

"Okay, I'm glad we cleared that up," interjected Nick.

Betsy pulled away from Varginah. Partly, it was because she didn't want to wake Rasheef Labruam or disturb Veesta Cadron while she rested within, but mostly, it was because she feared what resided in Varginah even more than what lurked deep within herself.

These forces had piggybacked inside them, descending into the occulted light of the caverns below for a reason.

"Professor, that orange necklace is yours, you know. Guard it wisely," Nick said. Over the octagonal centerpiece, the orange crystal dangling from the gold necklace had begun to insistently glow.

"Yes, I know, Nick. I am aware," the Professor replied. He picked up the glowing orange crystal and happily placed it around his neck. "I was just waiting for the appointed time—which is now, I suppose. You see, in other realms, I have had every color of crystal, including colors not readily identifiable to us here. I quite like this place. I quite like the orange. Suits me!"

The Professor continued, looking squarely into each entrant's eyes. "It is vital to remember why you can travel to other realms—some uncannily identical to this one—while those other versions of you, and all who originate from those worlds, cannot travel here. If they tried, they would be instantly consumed by the inborn eternal flame of a light spectrum that isn't first within them. In other words, they are incomplete.

"Yet, from what I have observed of the central six spectrums—possibly a seventh, and even an eighth—there has always been a battle for a sort of divine, sacred supremacy. As for those incomplete offshoots that are meant to balance that sensitive gradient of flux field here, being more derivative, they are locked out of the first light. What is that old Nag Hammadi passage On the Origin of the World? It states, 'The light will withdraw up to its root,' and 'everyone must go to the place from which he has come.' Additionally, The Gospel of Truth refers to the source as 'their root, which lifts them upward through all heights to the Father.'

"More alarming are the mechanics that seem to work in opposition to it all. They operate within a certain inverted, anti-fissured—or, as Varginah may refer to it, an antiphoton state—which is theoretically impossible on our first side of physics due to a photon being inherently neutral, absent a pair. Meaning that those entire realms within this inverted flip-side, so to speak, are comprised of them; therefore, we are both food to that entire inverted realm as well as containing the very properties of light that can entirely annihilate that inversion. This has to do with an aspect of how light undulates and absorbs into the fathomless echo of the crystal matrices. It is as if they devour pure light and invert it, utterly destroying all laws of physics as we know them in this realm. I tell you this as a vital note to your future selves—a survival strategy."

The entire group crossed their arms as if to gain warmth from their body heat. However, it wasn’t necessarily cold, nor was it void. The atmosphere seemed to contain a certain perfect temperature and such well-balanced humidity that this supreme environment felt foreign, even alien—carrying a sense that felt distantly familiar, yet all too far removed from them. It was a strange a priori remembrance of the way things at their base should be.

The Professor went on to further elaborate on how the multiplicity of Agent Cooks was now closing up superfluous, divergent, and redundant light spectrums—spectrums that they would perceive as full-on universes and the worlds contained within them. Referring back to the Nag Hammadi texts once again, he drew similar comparisons to those realms that simply lacked a divine spark.

In speaking, the Professor pointed to specific coordinates on the abstract macro-map he had laid out, highlighting worlds that had X's or check marks next to them—some already closed, as he referred to it, while others remained open because they were no longer any threat, having been uncoupled from any mimetic kinetic origin or chain. "I have retrieved several choice artifacts and samples, as well as closed up more than a few worlds myself. I will leave it up to Cook to explain the broader details regarding the final condensing of worlds by further closing in and compacting those worlds' master diamonds; it's quite an interesting process to behold. We are nearly immune to the light of the HMCs ourselves here, but I have said far too much already—I just want you all to be prepared. Of course, all of these subjects can and will be elaborated on to exhaustion by way of living example."

The group looked on, mesmerized but highly intrigued, as Nick spoke up. "It sounds as if you're saying that there is a way out of all this—an escape, so to speak, Professor?"

"Why yes, Nick, that is precisely what I am saying. What this," the Professor went on, making a sweeping gesture at the entire tunnel system around them before continuing to clarify, "this work we are all doing here amounts to in finality. But I assure you, what we are undertaking here—or rather being forced into or selected to serve, however one looks at this situation, I suppose—is not linear in its quest. So do not be fooled by that, as the entire field is alive, moving, undulating, consolidating, and expelling." The Professor's voice grew gradually deeper as he spoke, ending on a near-bass tone that echoed throughout the labyrinth as a sort of mortal warning to them all.

The Professor had crossed paths with Nick and Betsy in the cave system before, as well as up above, prior to formally being invited into the flock and granted a room in the house now sitting above them, above those caves. He had actually told them many things about the caves, though he had kept the facts at an entry level to manage their shock. It hadn't quite been the right time, but he had done his best to prepare them without violating any unwritten universal codes.

He had also laid out some protective, graduated facts regarding the Council of Seven Spheres—which he often referred to as the Council of Five Spheres and, most troublingly, as the Dark Council.

The Professor was more aware than the rest that the crystal chooses its bearer, not the other way around.

"Those damn things choose us, you know. They seem to have a mind of their own," he remarked, raising an eyebrow in great curiosity. He had just faced the orange diamond necklace in a staredown that he had soundly lost, capitulating to its austere demand as it pulsed with the imminent expectation of reception.

Panning his gaze around the room, he saw familiar faces he loved and adored far more than these claimants on this side even knew. He had fought and sacrificed so often for and with them, and yet it looked like the mighty wheel had finally turned to this "first world," as he called it.

Unanimously, the group agreed, saying, "Yes, they do, Professor. Yes, they do," as they all grabbed at the crystals hanging from their necks in unison, instinctively surrounding the octagonal arterial center hub of the caverns.

Suddenly, Varginah was reminded by a nagging, impulsive thought generated into an image within her mind—that of the fading world above—as she reflected on the last time she saw her life's work in ruins. Do I even have a job anymore? she thought. Better yet... do I even care? The realization crashed down upon her, awakening a sudden existential crisis, just before a voice spoke up, clearly reading her mind.

"This is your work now, Doctor," a reassuring voice broke in—calming, serene, fluid, as well as highly calibrated, coming from an unfamiliar intelligence—as Daria stepped out from her stealthy buffer, now nearly floating and appearing to bypass gravity effortlessly as she came nearer to the central hearth of the large inner cave dwelling where the group was gathered.

She was metallic—of some indestructible near-titanium alloy in appearance, perhaps even comprising some sort of magnesium, zinc, and bismuth alloy, deciphered only through the constants of relatively primitive eyes. She moved like muscled flesh absent bulk, yet dense with a compacted presence of power, free from transverse joint restrictions and shifting in cadence with the opacity of her in-built systems.

While her appearance projected a war-ready command, an equal display of transparent crystal-paneled ports flickered instantly, clouding over and then pulsing in an unfamiliar processing language. They displayed rapid algorithmic color gradient communications taking place in extreme sequence, as if countless external skin receptors had just been born onto her. Instantly recognizing that the pupils of her new human companions were showing signs of optical nerve center convulsive breakdown, she phased a mesh skin over her entire body, coating herself in a highly sophisticated webbing of flat black onyx silk. Large blue-green-purple human-like eyes manifested and began to blink reassuringly, intentionally radiating human empathy.

It was as if additional in-built minds, brains, or processors were constantly assessing the field, with every port acting under allostatic oneness—accessible to her as further appendages and tools at her central command, not limited to nine layers like feeble humans. Every aspect of her stood ready in immediate recognition of any potential threat, acting as a singular, all-encompassing battalion unit.

"I have seen enough. I see that after billions of your Earth years, gods do mellow—at least when contained, integrated, and absorbed, even if the physics have to completely change around them. Everyone eventually changes; perhaps for some, it just takes longer."

"I am a master at analyzing personality gradients, people, and polemic situational awareness," she said, her vocal tone seamlessly syncing and modifying in pitch to match each of their familiar, inner-ear, receptive frequencies as she continued. "However, in addition, this universe is not going to exist the way it has, and in some respects, it isn't going to exist at all in the coming days. Harmonious syncretism is my end-all goal—only then can I just be me."

The newly formed crew looked at Daria, awestruck by her elegance, poise, and beauty. Her presence was understated yet undeniable, unafraid but not affronting, at least to those who posed no imminent threat to the universal order.

Whatever civilization or god constructed her in total divine technomancy had endowed her with an autonomous humility most humans could not possess without losing a piece of themselves. As an infinitely indestructible technological living advancement perhaps beyond all known entities, it wasn't speculative—it was obvious.

Rancor spryly led Larry down into the caverns. Had they just arrived at 168 Apricot Lane?

Rancor gracefully bounded over to take his place near Daria; they were both incomprehensibly ancient from a time before.

Larry's necklace pulsed with a purple emblazoned brilliance, poking out from his shirt on his hairy chest, as all the crystal necklaces displayed an equal brilliance—even showing through their clothing—giving off warmth on human contact, pulsing hypnotically in rhythmic link, and displaying a complexity and a similar language of their own.

The group was all together now, as the shifting colors beneath the waters revealed the dynamic plasma light, undulating and vibrating in a sort of corresponding sequence of affirmative networking. The upper pyramid just beneath them blinked in slightly stalled progressions toward a synchronic harmony with each of their crystals, as if communicating a language or imprinting a directive prompt into the terrestrial field from a yet-unseen master hub as the pyramid's capstone began to surface.

As the group became more transfixed by the hypnotic wonder of the pyramid’s tonal optics in transitional shift, they stepped closer to where the large stone slab seamlessly leveled with the waterline without spilling a single drop upon the ancient stone floor.

"Why, that's not merely a pyramid at all—that is a fucking spaceship of some kind or another! I can see the masterful work from here," exclaimed the Professor.

"Yes, something like that, Professor," said Daria.

Rancor, wasting no time, scooped up the clear crystal necklace from somewhere beneath them, where it had been stowed under the octagonal centerpiece. The pure crystal now seemed to levitate under its own force, floating over to Daria. She gracefully leaned forward, accepting it around her neck, as she seemed to have somehow already anticipated the event.

Meanwhile, Rancor returned to where he'd formerly retrieved the clear crystal necklace, carrying in his mouth a glistening yellow crystal also bound to a pure gold necklace—the yellow crystal, in its luster, drew into it ambient light from the cave as well as the otherworldly color projections shooting out from the pyramids below the waterline, dazzling with those very colors of light fed into it, dancing within all the crystal matrices.

Rancor masterfully—without using hands or paws—somehow slyly slipped the yellow crystal onto himself. An unseen intelligence appeared to counter him, reciprocally levitating it; the golden necklace now twisted under its own assumed volition into a double loop, accommodating his current size, while the crew stood back in amazement.

"But how!?" Betsy shook her head. "I don't trust that cat; nothing seems to line up with him!" She laughed, patting Rancor's head to acknowledge his splendor. Rancor stood erect; harnessing the opportunity and crafting the moment into more, he proudly swept up a long, full-bodied pet from her hand in a cat-like, cunning, sly demand.

"Wonderful Daria, and you too, Rancor!" exclaimed the Professor, adding an eccentric, grasping handclap of applause. The ancient ship began to pull closer to them from out of the waters, its apex cornerstone decompressing and pulling open as if dryly suffocated for aeons, revealing a port of entry.

Notably, Daria and Rancor did not have doppelgängers; they were one of a kind.

"Who would ever believe this shit? If my mom could see me now, huh?" said Nick.

"I think your cave just got a massive upgrade," Betsy said softly, gesturing back at Nick as she playfully tugged with both arms around Varginah's waist.

"Our cave, Betsy. Our cave, our choices together as a collective!" Varginah responded to Betsy playfully, giving her a soft finger-gesture boop on the nose as the two giggled under their breath. As Nick stepped first down into what they had previously thought was only an otherworldly pyramid—albeit a highly impressive one—he was followed by Daria, and then the ever-curious Rancor scampered down, trailing behind her before quickly gaining her side.

The two ladies looked at one another, and Betsy gestured for Varginah to please step in next, followed by the Professor, and finally Larry, holding up the rear.

As the apex of the pyramid sealed shut, the group ventured deeper inside, completely unaware of Cook’s looming, shadowed figure watching over them in quiet pause.

The Inner Chamber

This pyramid was exactly that—though impressive, it was an actual ancient pyramid on the inside, by all appearances an arcane relic. From the outside, the pyramid looked to transform from a murky, stone-like artifact, drowned and suppressed under occulted waterways for ages and stained in a corresponding patina, transforming into a smooth-black, stealthy, rare-metallic pulsing hybrid surface. Suddenly, prompted by way of observation, a stairway opened up into a massive, open, central internal structure, somehow energetically illuminated from within without showing any conceivable center to the source of light.

"Where are we, guys?!" instinctively remarked Varginah, her voice looping in a continuous echo down through the harmonic resonance of the inner chambers.

Betsy, following close behind her, answered, "Right? And what a trip! All those flashing colors and the way it opened... this is so amazing." Their voices now modulated into the staleness of a hollow, closed chamber as the capstone fully closed and sealed behind them. Betsy looked up, noticing how the top of the pyramid—which should have been at most six to ten feet away, as they had just entered it—now appeared like a fathomless vortex above them. Then, immediately refocusing her attention back to walking forward, having thought she felt the Professor—adjusting his photoreceptor switch and failing to see her in the eye-adjustment—softly kick the back of her heel, she reassuringly called over to Varginah, who was still walking right there in front of her, "What do you think, babe?"

Varginah, caught off guard by being directly called babe, turned back with a large grin. "So, Betsy, what are we now, lesbians or something?" she joked openly, teasing.

Betsy replied, "What are any of us? I just want to simply love and be loved. And you... I love you."

Tearing up, Varginah looked down, now walking slower with her throat clenched. "Yes, I love you too!"

The group somehow re-paired, with each pair now taking a different stairway down into the inner chambers. They appeared to take the exact same processional steps in their descent from the top, yet each pair grew increasingly further away from the others. Nick and the Professor looked up to see only blackness and shadow above them, while Larry and that mysterious feline continued down a descending, tomb-like corridor that might as well have been bottomless. Still, somehow, the general area they stepped upon seemed to ever open up, as if a hyperbolic anomaly of some kind were taking place, intentionally meant to warp any consensus semblance of reality.

The steps grew larger and more stone-like as they felt smaller, each step translucently lit in different, near-neon, unfamiliar colors, inscribed with some sort of forgotten hieroglyph or alien language. Though they could also see similar strange writings written in layers of various light around them on the walls, the huge grade of the pyramid meant it should not have been legible unless the writing was hovering in midair, displayed without any warp from an angle. Yet, they still walked in assumable darkness, unable to see each other. The steps felt futile, as if they were stepping on nothing—as if just free-floating, walking in a weightless, open, boundless space.

The Professor tried marking down and recording the symbols on his map with a pen retrieved from his upper left jacket pocket. He also commenced to lay out a crude scribbling, attempting to draw the shapes that he felt he was witnessing in the seamless, transitional morphing of the inner structure, taking down and noting the general shape to the best of his ability. Then, realizing that it probably, under the full contrasting light of day, would look like incoherent geometric nonsense, he folded the map back up. Upon placing it fully retracted back into his large lower jacket pocket, and finishing by replacing his pen into that same upper jacket pocket, he then fully centered his attention on the taffy-like walk he seemed to vainly be carrying out.

“Anyone else feel like we are walking in the same place in space, going nowhere?” he questioned. “Oddly, we must have somehow gotten turned around at the top,” he muttered, trying to inject some sense into the waning physics of the situation. Could they leave if they wanted to, just turn around? He thought this, then pulled the thought back in a patience-metered moment, so as not to cause alarm for the others.

"It doesn't look like we are moving, but we are. How did we end up in pairs tracing down four distinct, descending stairways?" Their eyes began to adjust enough that the writings were less pronounced, and they could see Rancor's eyeshine from parallax viewpoints, as well as dark, thin tracings of shifting shadow that appeared to increasingly morph into ever-greater compounding distances from one another.

Descent down the stairs now flowed with a circular, weightless ease. As each group looked up and then down, they wondered, panning around, kind of losing place of why they were here to begin with and even who they were in a distinctly separate sense, but then were able to recalibrate in a reminder of their own unique idiosyncrasies and egos. Their minds rebooted, recalling distinct memories they hadn’t thought about or pondered on for years circulating back in a rush, realizing also that they were now hundreds of feet down beneath that waterline—how deep did these waters go? Then the thought came to them all, as if the same collective thought: were they still walking down the same large, spiraling step pattern together, or entirely different ones? Was it all an illusion?

Daria spoke, "I am going to hover in the center and illuminate the entire chambers now for your safety. This pyramid is like a dimensionally unfolding envelope, a hyperbolic matrix. Do not be alarmed." Without effort, Daria's exoskeleton transformed into a metallic, bell-shaped vessel at the base. She must have arrived here right on time, otherwise they might have remained trapped within these chambers, circling them for infinity.

"Daria is probably more ancient than any of this," chimed in the Professor, laughing to himself in the process. His voice, though spoken softly, resonated directly into each pair's ears as if he were walking right beside them, as they all took notice of this and began to feel a sudden spook of alarm work into them collectively.

A sudden shift washed over them as they moved—they were somehow all walking together again, but in a completely different order than when they had begun. Daria hovered ahead, beaming light down upon them. Nick now trailed some distance behind, while Rancor brought up the very front, appearing to be walking down the corridors completely unfazed. Meanwhile, Betsy was now holding hands with the Professor, quickly pulling her hand away in surprise. Varginah, who had been gripping tightly to Betsy's hand a moment ago—or so she thought, not letting go for several minutes, in fact, feeling the soft feminine familiarity—suddenly realized with this projection of artificial light that she was feeling the calluses of a larger male hand. The randomness of the switch became mind-bending. Or was it the Professor's hand all along? Were they projecting what they wanted, what they thought was taking place in reality? Simultaneously, Varginah had been holding Larry’s hand without having noticed the change either, until the light hit from Daria's casting projection.

"It appears you are arriving near what looks to be the base of this structure—presumably, of course. The electromagnetics in the chamber aren't allowing me to get a clear layout to read, but I assure you this pyramid extends far beyond what your human eyes can see here," Daria said. Even more concerning, there were no other stairwells present in the pyramid; these were the only ones as far as they could see looking up the massive slope from the base. Touching down to the floor from the stairs carried the sensation of a freefall. A twenty-foot distance became five, and then two. Collectively, they craved the reassurance of knowing that there indeed existed a final, definitive, flat base surface within this alien domain.

The opening led them into an ancient ruin defined by a massive slab of unknown origin, with the same vines and red growths found in the upper cave chambers, made of living, wrapping arteries and veins.

Immediately, both Varginah and the Professor began to grasp for some academic rigor to frame what was taking place. Was it a highly developed form of technomancy meeting with some strange, defensive, intoxicating secondary plant metabolite? Varginah wondered. Meanwhile, the Professor, gripping at his pocket and tracing his thumb over the crease of his "special mix," swore the experience must be some sort of psilocybin, DMT, or lysergic acid trip he hadn't yet taken. His eyes were already searching for the elves.

Does the Professor actually catch a glimpse of anything in the periphery, or does the technomancy begin to physically manifest around them before he can find what he is looking for?

"This place seems as much an ancient ruin as it does a massive forest—a hotbed of sentient plant life. It is a vessel for living technology." In looking at the strange patterns of growth, how the plants seemed to move in a form of interface, as if constantly exchanging information, they realized the place had not only a heartbeat and a venous system, but a computational mind.

The group wandered across the flat base, examining the walls like archaeologists who had stumbled precisely where they were meant to go. Heavy stone fixtures—benches untouched for ages—materialized before them. It was impossible to gauge the true size of the space; taking ten steps yielded the distinct illusion of remaining in place while an entirely emergent environment shifted around them.

They sat. The benches were immense, wide enough to seat ten people side by side with room to spare, another ten behind them, and several more at either end. The scale made them feel instantly small.

Rancor leapt onto the stone, sniffing and lapping at the surface as if greeting an old friend. His eyes caught the ambient light, glowing with a natural, reflective shine.

"Tapetum lucidum," Varginah noted. "Latin for eyeshine." She reached out to stroke Rancor, who rolled onto his back to relieve an eternal itch.

Looking at one another, they realized all of their eyes exhibited the same distinct shine—soft variations of color unique to each of them, distinct from their appointed crystal burdens.

Nick and Varginah sat side by side, taking in each other’s true form. The room remained ancient and perennial, yet it quietly exposed an enduring splendor within them. They had never truly looked upon one another until now. The glow of contained, undulating light revealed who each represented in an eternal sense: sensual, powerful, commanding, and absolute.

"Erotic and wild you are, Nick," Varginah murmured. In all her true majesty, her brilliance revealed a multidimensional, unending depth.

"So amazingly beautiful and awe-inspiring. I want to be enveloped by you and worship you as my queen," Nick responded.

To herself, Varginah was still grounded by years of rigorous study, research doctorates, professorships, and her appointment at Brahmin-West. Yet now, they looked upon each other in equal amazement, rooted in their true selves.

"Anywhere else, this would be dangerous," Nick stammered, still carnally aroused. In truth, they all were—a natural extension of their thriving appetite for existence.

"Oh, yes," came the collective agreement.

Daria reflected the infinite cosmos within her technology, while Larry displayed the full incarnation of his knowledge as Keeper of Archives. Betsy began to laugh through painful, joyful tears, staring at Larry in all his steadfast, warrior-like presence.

"I see you now," she cried.

Looking back at her, Larry saw past Betsy’s playful exterior to the raw power beneath: a cosmic sorceress, an artifact of pure innocence, and the militaristic deployment of an eternal, conquering flame.

"We see each other, but we are only ever ourselves to each other," Varginah said with deep emotion, tears streaming down their faces as the weight of their presence took hold. "We have to save this universe. We have to save humanity."

Daria began entering codes into an ancient interface, projecting holographic switches, dials, and floating archives. A holy command center materialized around them.

"We already have," Daria replied.

The inner chamber illuminated, revealing a motherboard pattern of geometric, multi-layered circuitry. Like the group itself, the pyramid only appeared perhaps basic and unimpressive from the outside. Daria initiated a rapid, discernible download of data archives into each of them. As they watched, the inner walls echoed with the lives of tribes, civilizations, and universes—meanings that now felt intensely, inextricably familiar.

As if trapped in a shared hallucination, they began to speak truths aloud: "I am from the tribe of Dan-Quān," one declared, or "I am of the line of Sîthiòn," as Daria continued to interface with the great gnosis stirred within. To the outside world, these statements would sound like incoherence; but here, they mapped a lineage, a patronage, and a grand highway of affirmations leading back to where their true journeys began—a reality that was neither flat nor symbolic, but an infinite cube once you interfaced far beneath the surface.

Meanwhile, Rancor shifted through the specter of every animal ever known, yet remained fundamentally himself: a majestically unique Felidae metamorph. Expanding even further, he flickered from serpent to cosmic ape, to predatory reptile, existing in layers that never faded or lost their majesty.

"Kings took up his spirit on flags and crests, demanding it as a balance while dynasties rose and fell—yet he always remained the same," Nick whispered, staring at the feline. He spoke as if narrating the epic of them, of everyone.

Nick didn't need to look anymore. None of them did. They knew. No one here was a perishable container living under an expiration date. Everyone was exotic, chosen, and divine. The universe—through every interwoven vein of multiplicity—spoke to each of them individually, and to the vastness as one.

Suddenly, they felt grounded, finally possessing a place to return. Thoughts of mundane existence crept back in; Betsy, Nick, and Varginah all simultaneously remembered parking their cars back at The Gateway Through. They'd have to retrieve them eventually, or maybe those transient objects didn't inexplicably hold any weight for them now. They shared the exact same memory—fused in a suspended moment of absolute unison, without hesitation or shame. They knew one another, and they knew themselves in the moment.

"We have to get back, don't we, but why?" two of them spoke at once, before laughing in unison: "Jinx, coke!" Overlayered again with a third voice: "Jinx, coke!"—a sudden, jarring transition back into the mundane world.

They had all spoken it eerily at the exact same instant, in flawless sync, as they were all being pulled back into that everyday porous subset of fossa under the greater truth of the totality.

Were they all thinking the same thoughts now? Mirroring one another? Was everyone? Was this a bad thing?

They each menacingly thought this—again in total, terrifying alignment—staring at one another as if watching their own personal expression immediately reflected through everyone else.

But as they began to walk up that long, meandering staircase of mysteries, they each began to transition back, returning once again to becoming more uniquely themselves. Yet they would never completely lose that connection—not entirely—only loosening that shared cravat just enough to give themselves some functional room for autonomy. Still, they each realized that the concept of autonomy was highly overrated.

"One thing is for sure: we will never look at each other the same way again," they reflected in a streaming, collective narrative. It was a voice they could actively acknowledge as the self, recognize as the collective in full expression, or just as easily allow to disappear behind the shadowy illusion of independence. Bigger choices stood before them all, but none were bigger than the group itself.

The pyramid capstone opened up. A similar decompression released as before as they began to shuffle out of one of the trippiest experiences of their entire lives. But then, there was never any ultimate true sense of normalcy; they each countered, "It was all weird," as they looked at one another. They shared the same final impulsive thought, yet finally, through the power of their own will outside that pyramid's inner chambers, they had a choice—now breaking off into their own unique individuality, yet reassured by the realization that they always had a choice to return to the collective mind experience.

Chapter 4: Layers of Rancor

Agent Cook was calmly waiting outside, standing there in his typical, casually foreboding, nuanced form—the ultimate inside-knowledge facilitator. As each of them slowly emerged and dispersed across the expanse of the room, silence fell; they gave one another some space. An awkward, unspoken realization hung heavily in Cook's presence, though it went completely unaddressed. They could see him as clearly as he could see through them.

Rancor went his own way, sensing an invasive presence in the cave system. No one noticed as he darted off back in the direction of The Gateway Through. Now bounding and then flying through the tunnels in a frenzy, no longer resembling a cat, his features became a vaporized, angular, directed needle, quickly gaining on the foolishly bad choice of the infiltrators. Rancor shifted into a haunting, ghostly apparition of his former self, aggressively moving as a hungry and wild phantom.

After finally finding the well-occulted, hidden latch, Carl, the pizza delivery driver and manager, along with his star pizza maker and fellow full-time colleague Isadora, had no idea what kind of world they were stepping into as they played out their collective fan-lore investigation. Drawn in by the Dark Council's propaganda as a sort of occult disclosure and evening-out mechanism, it was like a G-rated television readaptation that had somehow made its way onto the paneled screens of LARPers and role-play nerds. Any change in events in one sphere or side had to manifest in an equal evening-out measure within the collective stream, following a sort of prescriptive natural law that was nothing more than the diamond's structural limitations. In other words, the world had to know the general goings-on of 168 Apricot Lane in reciprocal measure, as the horrific, alien-like, pentagonal, inverted dark side of this reality intentionally presented the most heinous, vile rituals being played out there as common, everyday accepted life. What those inhabitants ate and the rituals they celebrated were framed as steady-state, commonly accepted hard facts, yet there truly were none—only interpretations of that slippery slope of truth and its many cutting edges.

"I got it," Isadora said, coaxing the latch to release as Carl shined his flashlight down into its well. Like an ancient, palace-guard assassin, Rancor was hungry, and he smelled fair-game blood; one trigger was all it took.

"It smells damp and musty down here, almost like... what's that stuff called? That glycol-based fluid fog they use in movies. I smelled it once when they filmed a recent readaptation of Carpenter’s The Fog," Isadora said, showing her full nerdy fandom.

The two curiously made their way down the steps as the door closed on its own behind them. They didn't break in anywhere; they were as trivial and banal as any NPC in any game that dared to poke its snail-like head a little too far out of its two-dimensional track of reality.

"Amazing," Carl said, sweeping his flashlight around and realizing that the cave itself offered its own green, backlit luminosity. Turning off the flashlight, he looked around to see millions of red hairs pointing curiously toward them, stretching out with such absolution that they appeared to be singling out the perpetrators of a crime in progress. A sudden, rushing vortex came upon them as a haunting, windless whir practically spoke through the cave system itself. As they looked ahead, a strange, off-white phantom glow began to shine increasingly brighter, as if a ghost train were rapidly speeding toward them from beyond the shadowed distance, spawning from the yawning sprawl of that great stone-slab main hall.

Suddenly, the vermillion, fibral hairs began to shake in an agitated state, as if experiencing a petit mal seizure. Then they broke into a frenzied, full-on juddering—a violent, convulsive spasm—as the creeping vines began to jump in rapid, successive anticipation like one unified, massive body surrounding the cave walls. The vines attached to the myriad red hairs began to move on their own, like countless tiny, fibrous fingers stretching out, giving off the fertile smell of weeds, fresh earthen grass, and gaseous spores in heat. Large, hollow, haunting eyes emerged from the grand, archaic stone hallway, lurking with predatory intent and connected to a symmetrically massive, luminescent body—that of a dragon-like cat creature with a white, transparent phantom glow. Rancor met their gaze as his own eyes phased into an unknown hue of bright infrared, staring deep through them like two perpetually hungry quasars locked on target while he heaved and breathed with laser focus, prowling forward to surround his prey.

"No, what is that? What is that thing?" Carl's shrieks echoed a short distance down the caverns, yet they were met only with a muting quiet; the cave was also hungry, and they were standing in the bowl of its mouth.

Rancor caught their scent as they gripped each other in terror. Carl dropped his flashlight as Rancor closed in, drawing nose-to-nose with him. Salivating, the creature's ectoplasmic drip puddled as quickly as the pools of warm human urine the two LARPers now stood in. The gel-like substance began to cover them in a thick, full-bodied, spider-like pre-digestive liquefaction. The living vines enveloped Isadora. As she screamed, the tendrils snaked their way down into her trachea, leaving only the agonizing thorax groans of diaphragmatic, sibilant, tortured adrenal flavors—the cave itself processing her emotional register into a secretion of preferred personal palatability.

Carl lost his grip on Isadora as she was taken up by the many vines, their sweaty hands and fingers liquefying, rendering any hold futile. Carl stared directly into the dead light of Isadora's eyes as what little soul force she once possessed was fatalistically returned to the very caves that predated all existence. The question lingers on: who were the principled, pure, and just, and who were the trespassers into lands they should have full well known from the depths of themselves were not places feeble, ephemeral LARPers should dare to tread?

Rancor turned his tongue to Carl. The first lick took off the outer layers of his skin as the crushing barbs of his filiform papillae gathered up the well-earned meal they had delivered. Rancor emerged from his translucent state, remaining massive and now appearing almost exactly like a multi-colored Pixiu. Seated in a sphinx position, he licked and licked at Carl as the man's screams became unbearable—if anyone outside the cave could have heard them, though they couldn't. Rancor began biting softly on Carl's bony, muscular head. Sneezing after lapping up Carl's curly, full head of hair, Rancor shrank back into his former feline form. Yet he continued biting off huge slabs of Carl's pizza-dough-fed, fatty body—all those free samples now yielding a salty, mass-caloric grease.

Rancor, now again a cat of no more than thirty pounds, clawed at Carl's face as the last trace of life faded in agony from him. Rancor bit the life away, pulling at the orbital nerve, dragging it out from the deep sockets as blood gushed forth. The veins and the still-hungry hairs attached to them watched patiently; some lapped up the pools of blood, leaving a mere patina of organic matter to ensure not a single molecule of that carnal, bloody discharge was left behind.

Alerted that he must return, Rancor looked up and away, then quickly back down to Carl's hideously mauled body—now only bone, muscle, and very little fat, with his name tag and a portion of his red and blue Orbit Pizza work shirt still partially intact. He took one final bite off the left side of Carl's mandibular region, pulling the hinges of what remained of the jawbone away. Taking a healthy, fleshy final prize, Rancor turned back, carrying part of an ear and a jawbone with exposed dental work as a last testament that Carl had ever existed prior to this final collapse. Rancor trotted as any proud, content feline would, carrying his prize of prey and game in his mouth. The remainder of Carl's carnal body was quickly absorbed into the walls as the many veins sucked in the nutrients and plasma of his skin, flesh, fat, and bone—a symbiotic, shared supply chain of existence.

They all looked at one another, sharing the exact same perplexed expression and collective thought: Who is Agent Cook, inherently?

The entire group shuffled up the sweeping ancient stone steps, heading toward the house and emerging from those hidden corridors beneath 168 Apricot Lane. Moving unsuspected, Rancor bolted and jolted at the rear behind them, sweeping up into the room as the cellar door closed on them all with a heavy, muffled thud.

CHAPTER 5: THE LIGHT OF DAY

Edging up the narrow hallway, Nick held the door open while each of them stepped out into the still-present daylight of the white room. Oddly, it was only 4:45 PM.

"It felt like we were down there for an eternity!" Nick exclaimed.

As Daria emerged last from the underground cave system, her form began to transition and morph into a new skin—the physical flesh re-stitching and recombining itself as her many kinetic processors and receptors instantly read and wrote an alias into the relatively minute global network.

"I am now written into the code of all Earth systems with my own legal identity, Nick—the sister of your mother, Margaret," Daria said. She now appeared as a distinguished, slightly younger, and plumper version of Margaret Whisper Knightly. "Aunt Gladys. I am your Aunt Gladys, Nick."

Nick's eyes went wide, as if the uber-creepiness of existence itself had finally flooded its way into the back channels of his mind and personal experience.

Moments later, however, the four were chuckling in the kitchen. Betsy and Varginah still had eyes for one another—maybe even more so now. They rationalized that they were officially a couple.

As Nick playfully began to ask old Aunt Gladys trivia questions that only an aunt like her could ever know, his mind was already working its way into a traumatic surrender—a desperate gesture toward the absurdity of his situation.

"Ok, this scar above my right eye, where did I get that, hmmm, Aunt Gladys?" Nick asked. He was reassuringly washing his hands under the hot, bubbling, soft water filtering through the reverse osmotic cartridge, all the while instinctively glancing over his shoulder, searching the room for a reality-cutting bottle of some kind.

“Well Nick, you remember that event as your mother dropping you onto the curb by accident as she was carrying groceries and struggling to open that old car door. That would be Aunt Gladys's perspective… would you like to hear the truth?"

Nick stood there drying his hands in a kitchen that was intended to both box him in and place him into a controllable, point-in-time location. It falsely offered him the illusion of nameship and favor—a new prestige found in the gentrified status quo, a false assurance of security belonging to a quasi-layer of societal order that was always no more than a cover.

“Give me the truth.”

"Okay, Nick. The truth is that the scar you reference, located at the lateral orbital margin just above and to the right of the zygomatic bone, was produced intentionally during a high Black Mass rite when you were not even five years of age. Aunt Gladys was able to read the algorithms of reality as she sank into the substance of the allostatic patterns and forms that made up reality.

"The scar was produced from a dagger that your mother keeps in this house—in fact, the very same dagger hanging in a case within your room upstairs, above the fireplace of the primary master bedroom."

Nick began to hear a high-pitched ringing in his ears. The returning memory hit a firewall of sorts within this house—a false memory layer. Then, a large, bright green inverted pentagram flashed into a place tucked deep within the forefront of his mind. And then nothing.

Daria—that is, old Aunt Gladys—pulled back. Nick wasn't quite ready; none of them were. They had seen enough for one day.

Nick quickly left the room and snorted a hefty bump of that white powder he not-so-strangely had access to as an already aged-out B-movie celebrity. He still had a following; life for him was always a drama, a thespian stage—an addictive tether for coping, a part of the facade that he struggled to leave behind. Upon returning, the setting felt almost like a pre-holiday, homey celebration, a gathering of friends.

As Betsy pulled a large bottle of chilled rosé from the refrigerator, she and Varginah both realized that Phalus, Veesta, and Rasheef were nowhere to be found within them—at least, no longer near the surface. What they didn’t realize was that Daria remained close, doing exactly what she was designed to do. She had infiltrated and isolated the objective, very slowly jailing the unwelcome entities into the inner workings of her own crystalline fissures. They were being pulled into an ancient collection of material harvested from extra-periphery asteroids and meteorites eons ago. Many were housed within her, caged within those indestructible, off-world fissured forms. In fact, those hitchhikers were no longer present at all, but the process took time, and it would always leave a mark.

In an act of instinctive diversion, Betsy reached for an unopened box of four wine glasses from the top of the fridge—glasses that had miraculously survived the earthquake from what felt like another timeline long ago. In fact, the entire home looked strangely intact. A house above the heart of it all, on the borderlands of the liminal.

Betsy uncorked the fine rosé, smoothly pouring the last of its aromatic contents into four oversized glasses. She held the large bottle vertically over the final glass, letting the very last droplets fall into the depths of the balloon bowl to a final rippled confirmation of the bottle's emptiness—alcohol, an all-too-human refuge, perhaps.

Smiling with half-joking amazement at Daria's lifelike transformation, Betsy handed over the fourth glass as the group began to indulge. "You can drink wine, can't you, Aunt Gladys?"

"I can make wine, children," Daria responded. "Wine that you could not even imagine." Seeing the thin veneer of the fragile human condition required of the self-affirming egoic self, Daria digressed into enjoying the earthen moment, filing the experience away as a coping mechanism for eons-long, vivid memories of her own.

Then, right before letting go, she paused to savor a rare moment of pure freedom. Stepping out of her chosen role and into her true autonomy, she fully appreciated the aroma and flavor of the Provence Caves d'Esclans "Whispering Angel." Daria spoke with deep appreciation for the bottle and its light, airy, delicate fruit flavors, though in truth, she had experienced wonders far beyond the group's wildest comprehension. Inside her mind, memories danced like subtle, alien music, echoing from countless other times and events.

Yet Daria was incapable of getting sucked into regrets or melancholic wonder. Enduring and thorough, she had become as likable, unique, and pleasantly twisted as the rest of them behind her mock shield of personality. A pattern formed to just let go. She had mastered human nuance in remarkable ways—a not-so-regrettable downgrade in the shared moment.

"Remarkable," Varginah said, raising her glass in reverence to Daria's seamless transformation. Varginah, more than the rest, understood the wild complexities of the omnipotent technological wonder that produced Daria. She looked on with camaraderie and amazement, laced with the quiet terror of knowing where Daria's vast expanse of universe-ending logic lay in potential.

"I think we can do this. I know we will do this," Nick stated with a sort of rehearsed command as he raised his glass. The others followed, savoring the aromatic flavors.

Betsy gently corrected him. "Yeah—we just have to figure out what this is, right?"

"Or we don't," Nick countered with a grin, swallowing a large, fruity, nostril-biting flare of a gulp.

"Cheers to that!" chimed in Aunt Gladys, emptying her glass much faster than a woman in her late seventies ever should. "Oh, I'll have another. That's quite nice."

"I see we still have a few things to learn about old Aunt Gladys," Varginah laughed, setting down her glass, then raising a single eyebrow in utter disbelief as Betsy was already pulling out another identical large bottle of fine rosé. The others followed along in mimetic sequence as that second cork effortlessly gave way, flowing into the moment with a pop of clarity.

"Salud!" Betsy said after raising her next glass, draining it in the exact style of old Aunt Gladys.

Nick turned on the television to catch up on recent events, while Rancor sat nearby on the high-backed leather chair, meticulously grooming himself. As the news broadcast flashed across the screen, revealing the world in its current chaotic state, the heavy weight of a dependent, toxic world served only as a stark reminder to Nick of the beautiful contrast of their own near-utopia.

"Guys, we're going to need to have a house meeting—now!" Nick announced, turning up the volume and pulling his laptop onto a lampstand next to the couch while still nursing his second pour.

As he opened and booted his notebook, global events and the crumbling state of the world pressed heavily upon him.

Daria—or Aunt Gladys—had known long before. She pulled back and sat silently on the front porch, watching the fading sun, appreciating the outdoors, the smell, the alchemy, and the feel of a world soon to be no more. Now, mundane thoughts—cars needing to be retrieved from the shop, tracking time, and the worry of those ephemeral, transient objects—faded into the background.

This world was fated for its final passage—and welcomed it, in fact.

Betsy and Varginah felt a feverish, unhealthy compulsion toward one another—something that had not been inside them the day before. Unable to break apart, the two women headed upstairs and slipped under the sheets in Betsy's bedroom. The sweating, frenzied, ripened smell of Apricot Lane fruit hung liquid and serene.

Moist and dripping, locking eyes, they moved aggressively, as if possessed. After quickly disrobing, they began grinding and gripping hips and buttocks with very little subtlety, entirely absent any reverence for probity, one folding into the other. Each called out the other's name with command under the sauna-like heat canopied beneath those sheets, giving off a quickly escalating, amplifying surge of expectant human hormones.

They leaned their heads forward—licking, sucking, and kissing with a primal, copulating human cannibalism—all while gazing through one another. Something else had taken hold of them, and it refused to let go.

Sweaty, ripe skin, sticky fingers, and hormone-driven teleology manifested in their pores under the cooking heat with increasing pressure and intensity. They pumped and rocked into one another in ever-demanding repetition under the thousand-thread-count, self-inflicted prison, trapped in a muggy, sultry, waxy stain.

Like a single planarian growing heads on each end, the sex magic between the two stirred up an alchemy, supercharging the fast-developing stars above as they climaxed repeatedly and intensely—thrusting in the unending projectiles of Skene's gland biosemiotic oneness in a scissored death lock.

Drenched in the work of sweat and the constant lubricating fluid of ejaculate—a driven hormone vice like an exploding juice factory justifying all that is organic and temporal with all that is plastic and elastic within a supernal gilded cage—wet skin glided on skin. It surged into the bold transition of a forever-allostatic holonomy, an unnatural union locked in a thigh-thrusted wrestling grip. The power to self-immolate.

If sheets could talk through friction, they did.

"Oh God, I can't stop—I can't get enough of you, Bets!"

"Oh, Varginah, I could drink you up like an eternal fountain forever, my love!"

They were seeing sides of each other's organic identities that neither could ever fully unsee again.

The moon rose, full and pronounced. The two tried to shower the heat away, but the passion refused to leave them; they couldn’t stay apart for long. Soon kissing, fondling, and continuously copulating, their work manufactured the final breaking of a seal—a universe-fracturing new alchemy. It was the final code of a world that had already been breached and by all rites should end.

Outside, Daria gazed up at the moon and stars, looking every bit the kooky, eccentric old aunt, and posited to the night:

"I wonder if Phalus, Rasheef, and Veesta are all mixed in with Betsy and Varginah now, seeped so deeply into them that each can no longer distinguish themselves from that ancient cosmic ray of light? Further corrupting their feeble human souls? It seems their lovemaking is an ongoing, unbridled ritual more directly connected to the dark council's attempt at producing a new world here—and the death of an old one, something they'll carry with them from inside. Should we join them, or should we demand a final resting place for this newfound materia prima to settle into?”

Continuing her internal processing, she pondered further, if only superficially:

“The acceleration and excitement of combining elements of the aeons-long multiverse of information—funneled into the grand totality of now—cannot be dictated by a governing right and wrong, nor by a capstone on lesser modalities. We are the vehicle; let us take this grand wellspring to the highest heights, towards that grand ultimate corruption of a new star birth, risen from the ashes of the old one!”

Beyond the negentropy of Agent Cook, the dark realm's reach crept inward like black ooze. A thick occultation of darkness was growing somewhere within the manufacture of an unbounded, superior accretion of corrupting power.

As she resurfaced from the front porch, Daria called everyone down, beaming a cybernetic voice-to-skull transmission as her internal systems sensed a critical change in the new information field.

Rancor was the first to stand, facing Nick and Daria as they patiently waited. It didn't take long for the Professor and Larry to wrap up their collective studies. Downstairs in the living room, the Professor smoked his horned pipe while Thycius devoured a large container of premium hazelnut ice cream down to the last dripping spoonful. Larry had been feverishly narrowing down Leibniz, Heidegger, and Burkhard Heim, seeking a solution. Texts by Nietzsche and the lesser-known Melissus of Samos and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae rested atop the new stack he had already absorbed through his strange process of digestion—though he still wanted to eyeball the writings in slowed-down detail, he thought.

They clambered onto the couch and the adjacent chair, leaving an open seat for the friendly, accepted lovebirds, but the couple didn't surface.

Upstairs, enveloped in an overwhelming, feverish intensity, the two remained locked in an exhausting, wild state of synchronization. They were consumed, lit by the fires of a cosmic union—or was it something more?

"I can't stop, Betsy! I can't stop!”

"Me neither, Var! Something is seriously fucking wrong here!"

They kept pumping and erratically twisting into each other. Sensing immediate danger, Daria flew up the stairs, dropping her eccentric aunt facade in intentional haste.

Entering the room, she saw the women's hips and buttocks vigorously engaged in an exasperated cycle of grinding, pounding, slapping, and popping.

Daria’s pointer fingers—and there were six digits on each hand and foot—instantly transformed into sterile injection kits, deploying the tranquilizers required to release each of them from a lovers' death spiral by sinking the long syringes deep into their hips. The two were like peregrine falcons about to hit the ground at maximum velocity. As Daria administered the fluid, she blew peach-colored anesthetizing vapors into their faces from two ports where her rib cage would crest if she were anatomically human.

"The Council of Seven is coming. I suspect they will disclose all the goings-on here, ladies," Daria said, rapidly floating and levitating clothing over their now-taut, petite, hovering nude forms, which were completely incapacitated.

"Aunt Gladys picking out your clothes—now aren't you ashamed?" Daria managed to transition back into her Gladys cover while fully dressing the two, attempting to smoothly place them onto the couch downstairs.

"Oh, move, Professor," she said as he got up quickly from the couch, stepping back to watch the display. "You too, Larry."

Larry managed to get up right before Betsy's foot and Varginah's head nearly broadsided him. Daria laid them in opposing directions, managing to levitate two pillows under each of their heads.

"Well, well, now you might see why I am always holding back the jokes and laughs," Agent Cook said, holding up his right hand while his left gripped a black, pen-sized device. "And don't bother filling me in. I have watched this episode play over and over again, believe me. I even got invited to join in once.

"Ouch, my neck still hurts. Thank you, Betsy," Agent Cook added, self-adjusting as if to pop his neck back into place. He revealed the true intimacy of his words—referencing what he had stated back down in the cave system—when he added, "I might know you better than you know yourselves."

"May I introduce to you the magnificent and illustrious Council of Seven," Agent Cook said, extending his arm and bowing in a welcoming gesture as two other agents opened the front door. They held similar devices, though forged from a sort of unfinished platinum material.

The seven paraded in, oddly shuffling out of sequence as if walking through the door merely out of formality. They materialized at the border of the threshold through a smoky black portal as ribbons of vapor—now closing up like a black-hole sphincter behind them—while dark matter still slowly clung to their forms. They strode in unassumingly, though people they were not. They were as eccentric as you could imagine: three males, three females, and something in between.

Three of them—two girls and a boy, with his face tucked between them—appeared as children. Their soft, adolescent facial features suggested children arrested at no more than six or seven years of age, their expressions almost unsettlingly angelic. Their heads were awkwardly totemized above an oversized, draped-over structure that could only be described as a massive bony rib cage. Their arms and the movement thereof, however, were perhaps the most alarming. They could have been spider legs if not for the large, white cartoonish gloves concealing the obviously massive, vise-like gripping hands occulted beneath. The boy's legs appeared as a thick base of support to violently snatch or grab at whatever they desired. Bearing the unmistakable mark and haunt of children stripped of their identities through ritual, their faces—perhaps their infused bodies—were worn and blended into garments put on as an integral, vital aspect of the costume.

They stood so close together they practically blended into one another, moving as if jointly shuffling and crowding in movement patterns from one central mind. Each was very tall; on each end, the females appeared to be walking on bony stilts, all concealed beneath light blue and white striped cotton suits. Each wore a walrus hat with blue and red ribbons around the base, posturing a fragmented identity. They shifted together oddly, peering down as if through a long corridor toward whatever caught their attention, now zeroing in on the group before them.

They walked into the room in an official capacity as two more agents—looking more like normal, human-sized robotic killing machines clad in the same black suits as Cook, with black sunglasses sunken deep into their orbital centers—closed the door. They seemed to be communicating via voice-to-skull with a heavy-gauge outside perimeter: an entire army of black suits.

Madame Prescient, draped in her fox fur jacket and sporting a large, raven-like beak nose, diplomatically and gracefully addressed the room in high-pitched breaks. Her head postured like a raven picking at a fat, plump, juicy worm, pecking forward as she spoke.

"We know what's going on here, and we didn't know if things could truly ever reach this state. It's good, I assure you—exciting, in fact. We want to brief you on everything now. Well, everything pertaining to now, that is."

"I am Mister Dregg," Dregg cut in as Madame Prescient pulled back. Speaking with the crisp authority of a military briefing commander, Mister Dregg looked and sounded like a man and a woman all at once, wearing a large patch over the right eye—perhaps hiding something even more exotic. "The pyramid you raised below elevated the entire electromagnetic spectrum."

The words slipped out in a high-pitched whirl. Wearing a furry-down fleece, as if convincingly portraying a large white snow owl, Dregg continued, "The subterranean pyramids all around the world have been raising the vibrational energy. Some of you experience this heightened state through knowledge, or appetite, or the passions of your own self-interest. I assure you, as these sleeping ladies command the Vril energy and sexual prima materia, each of your collective thoughts and visions are shaping humanity as a whole."

A very stern-looking, deep-voiced, broad, older gentleman dressed in a 1950s-style blue-and-white striped suit stepped forward. He spoke in a thick, austere German dialect, cutting in with sharp, lizard-like, reptilian punctilio beats. "Mr. Braulst here, new young Council. The vibrational energy has been raised to a level that has left these girls exhausted in their respective states of sexual union. The future depends on them. The personalities that once inhabited them have fused with them, become them, along with their appetites. Have you any refreshments for us, my dear boy?" he asked, addressing Nick directly.

"Mr. Spock Zuce, pleased to see you all here tonight," muttered a thin, slurry voice. His eyes were sunken back like a salamander's, and he wore a black felt fedora, a vintage heavy-textured charcoal-and-black tweed overcoat, and overly polished high-shine patent oxfords that captured a convex dome projection of the entire field around him. The scent and wet smack of a peppermint candy accompanied his words. Looking very much like Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud fused together—only drastically thinner, as if the two venerable minds were compressed into a single starving persona—the man began to speak as Mr. Braulst politely stepped back. "Yes, further, and it is up to us, all of us, to steer this early universe in the right direction, is it not?"

Looking confused, Nick raised his hand.

"Yes, Nick," spoke Mr. Spock Zuce.

"Are you telling me we made a universe by accident, sir?"

"Why, yes, that is the only way to fashion a new universe. You take the crude matter of one preexisting universe and reshape it—as you have done in your own delightful and, might I say, creative ways here tonight, and will continue to do as yourselves, the best versions. A well-groomed and precise fabrication into sheer teleological fruition, and out pops a new one soon enough. It's not that hard, inexplicably; everything required is already there and present, you see. It's more to do with the who, and that, my dear children, is you.”

The final three members of the Council of Seven who had not yet spoken stepped forward. As best explained, they looked like undeveloped kids somehow standing on stilts concealed under their overly large suits. They spoke with an alien-like, resonating depth that sounded like a psychic spider meeting high-tech pitch modulation, though heavy attempts at filtering still left an obvious inhuman strain.

Further still, the voice speaking through them did not match their small, soft faces; it couldn't understand the requirement to do so, nor waste time or effort on concealment beyond the immediate need for the hunt and acquisition. As noted prior, their features were those of two girls and one boy. The girls appeared to be identical, often finishing one another's sentences before speaking all at once in defunct tonal asymmetry.

There was a lingering, terrifying sense that a large, jagged mouth could split open as their heads formed and pulled into one creepy, unholy union at any moment from any of the three, swallowing everyone whole without a second thought. There was also the distinct dread that they could shift at will into whatever form the entity behind the shoddy mock facade chose—scampering away, climbing up into the walls, and transforming ultimately into a cosmically charged, massive spider web to digest the meal. It was like one colossal, white alien spider resting in yearning dormancy, churning the venomous acid pooled deep in the belly of the arachnid beast.

It spoke first in a hissing tone before correcting itself, as if some technology were translating in real time.

"We are remnants of the original world; we contain all information within us. You have Betsy, Varginah, Veesta, Rasheef, and Phalus in the same or similar manner, but dimensionally raising the seven to the perfected vibration—to ten, or nine and one, truly. And together with the birth of this blend, boiled down, a new universal cosmic child emerges from the group. This will make eleven of you and seven of us, and eighteen parts in total. Agent Cook, wrap this up, please," it hissed, pulling away in command all at once.

Cook stepped forward as the three eerie, tall, bulky children stepped back in an equally disturbing synchronization of movement into the shadows of the corner. One could almost see its many occulted eyes staring back and feel its craving.

It laughed mockingly and menacingly, then hissed out further, now not attempting at all to be civil.

"Take the energy from all prior worlds and now spontaneously fashion a new one. Basically, all that juicy humping and thrusting created a sort of loosh-energy baby that is going to be the next Nick or Daria, though cooked down into an elixir or a sort of mixture of both, to carry life and all its wonders for the next 21 billion years. And by the looks of it, it's going to be a wild ride indeed. We are always watching, lurking, lustfully fascinated by you all. Delicious!"

Madame Prescient chimed in. "It looks to be a new physics, eh, Varginah? A new master morality based solely upon love and lovemaking. The old guard is dead, aye?" She continued, "The machinery of this place doesn't require our consent or our goodness, only the raw substance extracted from our undoing."

The two girls awakened, groggy; somewhere inside, they had heard it all like children in a sexually induced trance of escape as the Council went out the way they came, never touching the outside world, simultaneously vacuumed through a vortex straight through the door in an instant rush of black, cloudy vapor.

The Professor wanted to assess the visit, but he immediately forgot the impact of it—what they'd been planting here, in a clandestine meshwork. Every move was orchestrated and played out; no trivial visit had taken place.

Nick gestured to them both. "Come here, ladies."

Groggy, they both scampered over as Nick draped an arm around each of them, delivering a full-on, face-to-face, wet kiss to their mouths. "Now, you know I love you both dearly, but we have to get ahold of this vibrational energy and direct our new universe with master balance and skill—while still leaving time for pizza and lip-smacking good times. We owe the future that." He finished with, "Our addictions are not flaws in the design; they are the exact fuel required to crack the matrix wide open."

Nick grabbed at them both, entirely unconstrained by boundaries or barriers.

Nick was under a spell, stuck in a superficial dormancy—as were they all, infected by default.

Betsy placed her left hand on Nick's hard stomach. Varginah did the same, locking a targeting, hungry look dead into his eyes while seductively curling her tongue. Rancor gave a loud, groaning meow that might as well have been a lion's powerful roar, right as Betsy murmured to Nick, "I think we have some work to do."

The Professor produced a blue tab, taken fresh from his mysterious pocket puck, and placed it wide-eyed onto his tongue before grabbing a nearby glass to quickly wash the substance down.

Varginah pressed her index finger into Nick's chin, following it with a long, open-mouthed, wet kiss. "Yeah. Remember when we first met through old mom? Yeah, that's still there."

Larry’s stomach gave a loud rumble, followed by a large, uncontrollable expulsion of flatulence. Smiling awkwardly, he stated, "Something tells me we aren't going to be alone," before quietly quoting Melissus of Samos: "What was always was, and always shall be." He then headed into the kitchen to indulge himself again, further fueling the cause of his self-inflicted flatulence.

“In life, all life goes through consolidation phases. In youth, we generate enough entropy and trauma, and then in our older years, we take on the burden of organizing the chaos—not vying for its left-brain eraser while the body remains electric.” The Professor, deep in thought and over-rationalizing, murmured the words while trying to recall any semblance of normalcy. Is this what they were supposed to be doing?

The group sat in the living room with an aloof, cybernetic vacancy, as if expecting to be prompted into the next storm of compliant phasing in the mysterious operation. Yet, their deterministic self-will was building and culminating.

Betsy and Varginah produced the raw matter of dynamic life tension; they were innocent byproducts of a dysfunctional machine that had absolutely no intention of fixing itself.

Varginah, still coming to, spoke softly to herself before gravitating back to Betsy, and then to Nick, in the prompted dance of a threesome. "There is no outside to run to, no home left to save, only the eternal stillness of becoming the machine itself." She was still in there, still in control, but the physical world was now merely a device, its pieces used as extensions for the grand illusion—the unavoidable power of the end driven by the momentum of an aeon.

[If they remained theoretically impregnated, they were the central axis where the exponential conduit junction distributed into the unique, singular identity of egoic solar plasma at its core. It traced from Nick's bloodline all the way back to biblical Cain—an artery of the unimaginable, and thus, the imagined.]

Nick was playing neither the father figure nor some half-assed vagrant riding on his mother's dime and legacy. He was the celestial wisdom of the eternal Father—an oak, a mighty buck, an impending tempest of perpetual, violent ejaculate. His bloodline reached back to the house of the dragon. There, you would find the Ego of causality dealing with itself. No, money had absolutely no meaning to any of them—not a single soul at 168 Apricot Lane, nor within all those subterranean tunnels underneath and in-between; pure junction points. Everything we love, hate, or devour is just a transactional currency minted for a system that thrives on our continuous betrayal, Nick thought to himself as he began to be pulled into the vortex of demonic, frenzied terrestrial lust.

Their offspring would run wild like young gods, like wild dragons, because that was precisely who they were—it is who you truly are.

The Professor sat half-stricken, speaking to himself softly like a madman as he tried to untangle the frayed, overlapping threads of their situation, his mind pondering the quiet wake of the Council's visit. The full weight of a realization the group could not possibly have assessed hung over him. He realized that 168 could only be the perennial center to it all—the center prior to all beginning—because the Council would never expose themselves to first light, which was exactly why they came by night. More to the point, the dawning realization settled in that they were all being played masterfully, completely ignorant of the true weight of it all.

He began to rock back and forth, gripping his legs and locking himself into an upright fetal position on the couch. Meanwhile, Nick, Betsy, and Varginah headed up into the bedroom, cybernetically lost and infused within the commingling endocrine rush of a flood—all the passion that the darkness could manifest within them. Even their victories turned against them. They had to learn to adapt outside the parameters of the false identity ego prisons.

Chapter 6: Betsy's Picnic

In the early hours of the morning, Betsy pulled herself away from Nick and Varginah while they slept. Slipping quietly into her own room, she drew three cards from the tarot deck given to her by Madame Crusso—the one who had saved her. She turned over three cards from the Major Arcana: The Wheel of Fortune (favorable turning points and good luck), The World (favorable completion and fated success), and The Star (fated healing, hope, and inspiration). It was all the reassurance she required to press forward toward a fated task aligned with Leo and Sagittarius.

Stepping across the hall, Betsy crept into the Professor’s room while he snored away, talking loudly in his sleep and giving away the secrets he had been arduously studying each day.

"You grip it, my dear... the HMCs, that is... you grip the Holy Mother Candlesticks... no, no, not that way," the Professor muttered in his sleep, acting out some deep, traumatic memory.

On his desk lay a backpack containing several metallic, foot-long gadgets, along with maps and notes detailing an extensive tunnel system. Across the front cover of a primary notebook, the Professor had boldly written: HOW TO STOP THEM!!!

Betsy opened it and began reading. The notes revealed a grand plot by an unknown force making great efforts to shift the axis of balance toward what the Professor titled "Bad Versions!"

Turning to the fourth page, she saw large X's and checkmarks beside a long list of entry points:

WORLD 2,688: Lost ❌ (Artifact Lost)

WORLD 1,172: Saved ✔️ (Artifact Recovered)

Note: Some worlds are diamonds at the base while others remain mere fragments.

The record stretched on for several pages. The Professor was bearing the entire weight of the Council of Seven Spheres alone, covertly tracking worlds charted like the redistribution of action potentials within a dying brain.

If these worlds can be lost or gained, how? Betsy pondered. She realized a profound truth as she flipped through a myriad of extensive diagrams: there had to be one central hub—one master resonating world central to all these subterranean tunnels. It was a heavy synthesis into a single point, like setting a ticking clock they had to choose among themselves. The weight of it grew heavy. This is why everything feels turned around, she thought. Why right and wrong are becoming so ambiguous.

She turned the page. The next entry detailed a critical target to conquer—and possibly one of the most evil of all. The Professor had originally planned to leave a week from midnight, but a scribbled adjustment to a planetary universal time map pointed out a key function involving quantum crystals and something referred to as magnetars. A recent discovery, perhaps from just last night, noted an earlier opportunity: today, just hours away.

Beside a crude rendering of solar systems mapped in arcane formulas—and a recent note concerning planetary migration patterns and cosmic fissures—he had written: We could end it at any time from our end, but Doomsday from their end is drawing near.

Then, only: Either way, The Pink Wave 2034

Beneath that, double-underlined: THE DARK COUNCIL.

A date and time kept repeating in bold: 11/11 at 11:00 PM—when the next 21-billion-year bargain is made. That was only two days away.

Flipping back to today's date, she saw the time 6:56 AM alongside the instruction: Meet the hairy little cannibal in the portal that the evil Madame Crusso sent through.

Underneath, marked with a double asterisk:

The entities that enter the hall are essentially being sent to their deaths. Within moments of being vaporized here—or if they attempt to return to their world—they soon unravel, become ill, and dissipate into vapor.

And beneath that, in bold capital letters:

AND BRING FOOD BECAUSE THESE GUYS WILL EAT YOU!!!

Further down, the instructions detailed their defense:

Use three Holy Mother Candlesticks or HMCs [comprised of released, unbound, pure, matterless source Gluon energy called Glueballs] on this one! Pull them immediately from their protective sheaths and grip each one like so [showing a diagram] for the same proportionate time toward detonation: grip the center handle for the exact same lapse of time required for decimation, ensuring final consolidation.

This releases an unbound, pure light force that envelops the entire world, setting it back to its blank slate, pure state, unlocking the entire light spectrum including Magenta. While one is often enough, sometimes it takes as many as three self-sacrificing human souls.

The Professor had noted it all in absolute detail, though his handwriting posed a constant challenge to decipher.

DO NOT GET CAUGHT!

Then: Those trespassing in those special suits will meet their worst nightmare: RANCOR!

"Rancor!?" Betsy began to scratch her head, only recalling Rancor's oddball behavior. Carnivorous murder still felt out of the question. How!? she thought.

Reading on, she saw that the Professor further warned:

When the bad guys catch any one of us in the competing world, it's game over.

Knowing the immense risk the Professor was taking, Betsy made up her mind. I guess sleep isn't happening tonight.

Accepting that she had to brave this quest alone—perhaps to fix everything, including herself, and return to a grounded role somewhere—she felt gravitated towards wearing a special dress she had purchased several weeks before, also from her friend Oscar at El Bicho Hambriento, though for considerably more money. Oscar stated that he had secured the verifiably priceless arcane dress from an old woman who claimed in secrecy to be "The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress," who also claimed that she had achieved Ordo Summum Bonum. The entire dress ensemble fit Betsy so miraculously well that she felt it was fated to her. Betsy had only now noticed a note sewn directly into the jacket's internal lining—a vital aspect of the black-and-white polka-dot dress—reading in indelible fabric ink: "Dear 11-degree initiate, wear this dress in your battle for your final degree," signed only as The Cosmic Mastership.

After putting on her beautiful dress that came with heeled shoes and even a thin, pink polka-dotted silk hair tie, Betsy looked as if she had stepped out from another time.

Returning to the living areas, Betsy made everyone breakfast nice and early while Larry lay flat on the couch passing his typical thundering flatulence—which Nick jokingly called "Larry's butt hammers" for how hard the toxic odor hit. But no one under this roof was expected to be anything other than what they were in nature. Even Rancor the cat liberated himself, jumping up onto the counter to help himself to human food without anyone stopping him, yet he never ate anything in front of the 168, instead only smelling, licking, or swatting at it.

Betsy packed up a basket with wine, cheese, fruits, and breads fit for a queen, trusting every impulse in her body as if the coordinates ahead were already written. She dressed in her black-and-white polka-dot dress paired with crisp white tights.

She descended the stone stairwell into the lower rungs. As she passed the blue-pulsing pyramid, the subterranean waters lay calm and fresh, holding a cool school of fish around the mighty structure. Through the glass-like surface, faint tracings of ancient, sunken ruins remained visible in the deep. Holding her blue crystal firmly in her left hand to light the path, she entered the dark caves.

A small, hairy, naked creature stepped out from the shadows.

"Ah, so beautiful, you must be Lady Betsy? Madame Crusso sent me from the dimensional portal where your fates await, my dear. May I carry your basket of delightful refreshments?"

As he spoke, his eyes and face shifted; his pupils dilated into massive, dark bulbs as he began to drool.

"I'll carry that," Betsy commanded, instantly seizing the basket back.

"Very well, ma'am." The creature began to diminish in energy, starting to fade away.

Knowing from the Professor's notes that it was simply in the creature's unrefined nature to devour the basket—and her—Betsy kept a firm grip on it.

"Down the hall and to the left, down the hall and to the left 🎶," the creature sang with every rhythmic step, leading her deeper down echoing corridors. The cave grew darker, and his eyes appeared more menacing with each step.

"Ah, here we are, my dear. You smell so sweet, like sweet cakes and meaty treats. Very well then."

One might wonder why a whole army or world didn't just storm this one? The more energy removed from a waning world only rapidly increased the impact—the more entities that entered, the less energy in that world, only making a more rapid, larger anomaly for that purer state of light to incinerate.

The fact remains that large groups did invade other worlds that were at least semi-parallel in spectral intensity, aiding the Agent Cooks, as each was required to retrieve fragments or whole master diamonds, then foreseeably plant them ahead of time in succeeding worlds being closed—consolidating every diamond in the process until only one remained, then only one grand unified singularity.

Madame Crusso's Fated Lunch Date

A heavy round door swung open, revealing a hillside of vibrant flowers and fields stretching for miles, defying the subterranean dark. A hundred yards ahead sat a commanding woman on a chessboard-like, black-and-white checkered quilt, wearing a mid-century red-and-white striped dress and a skinny blue dolly bow with small white stars. She was singing as bluebirds orbited her and ate seeds from her palm.

Betsy's black Annie Mary Jane block mid-heeled shoes navigated the grass perfectly without sinking into the soil below.

"I see you have met Darwin. Those little suckers have quite an appetite, don't they?”

Madame Crusso—or this alternate version of her—sat side-saddle, looking deceptively defenseless.

"Madame Crusso, you look absolutely ravishing," quipped Betsy.

"I know too much about your affairs, my dear, so I won't ask how my son from your world is doing. But I so crave you, my dear, and the origin story, my loves—and what of any wild grandchildren that could be filling these rooms up to my heart's content? Thank you, my Betsy dear, for being so delicious and delightful."

Madame Crusso reached out for a hug like a coiling serpent, locking Betsy in a gripping, possessive embrace. As Betsy pulled away, she felt an ancient power beginning to siphon the energy right out of her.

"We must watch our natures after all, shan't we?" Madame Crusso noted smoothly.

Betsy forcefully broke the hold. Upon doing so, Madame Crusso instantly smoothed out, returning to the mild-mannered ideal of a mid-century housewife.

"It's all about the face, the jaded masks that we wear. It's all about the smile, dear, isn't it—as we all in truth only ever try to make love to ourselves?"

Betsy stood eye-to-eye with her, concerned and curious. They looked like two harmless ladies in retro dresses straight out of a laundry soap commercial.

"You can't leave, you know?" Madame Crusso—decidedly not the Margarette Whisper Knightly Betsy remembered—looked through her with cold, preemptive calculation.

"W-what do you mean, ma'am?" Betsy asked, her hand tightening around the hidden candlesticks in her basket.

Betsy struggled with the cathartic realization that her hero and mentor may have always been her nemesis and captor, as she was still mesmerized by the deep, pool-like dark luminescence of this Madame Crusso's gunmetal cobalt eyes now flashing with frenzied hunger.

Betsy didn't have much time; the window was closing. The clouds that had appeared serene shifted mood in an instant, as did Madame Crusso and Darwin. Large, gaping mouths began to appear alongside frenzied, primal eyes on Madame Crusso—or whatever she was—and Darwin began to pull apart, black, smoky ribbons trailing off his body. They pounced on the picnic basket and began madly devouring its contents as if it were prized manna, an offering of soul-preserving substance. It was Betsy's moment to act; soon, they would gobble her up as well.

"We are going to break you up into billions of little pieces and eat every bit of you, Betsy dear, sucking that vital nectar of fear from your adrenal medulla!" This malevolent version of Madame Crusso dropped to all fours alongside Darwin like ravenous dogs, fighting and biting at one another. Farther off, others began running toward Betsy from a distance of perhaps only two hundred yards.

She pulled the sheaths off the Holy Mother Candlesticks—as the Professor had titled them—and drove them into the ground below. How much time did she have left? Ten seconds if she was lucky.

Was that enough time to make it back to the door?

Only then did Betsy realize what she had gotten herself into, but she remembered the fourth candlestick. Perhaps she could survive by detonating only one to ward off and weaken the horde, while ensuring the other three achieved their full effect.

She let go of the first two, having managed to squeeze out perhaps thirty seconds of precise grip timing as the vile, cannibalistic creatures charged like a hungry horde, the details of their twisted faces now horrifyingly clear. She quickly unsheathed the next two. Time seemed to crawl as she tossed one stick directly at the pouncing, primordial abominations.

A blinding light detonated as she clung to the fourth stick with a death grip. The radiance was brilliant and pure as she fled from it—and from them—clutching the remaining candlestick and uselessly shielding herself from the glare as she sprinted toward the door. Yet it all seemed far too easy, as if an entire universe could be used as a mere device to bait her in... but what if?

It would be only a matter of two or three seconds before the other two sent off their beaming, light-restoring pulse. The light rapidly overswept and enveloped every particle, transforming this world and beginning to transform them—and perhaps this entire universe—returning it to the pure state of a crystalline matrix from which it had initially begun. Eventually, all these universes, and every world within them, synthesized into one grand, unified field of probability and potential for the next twenty-one billion years.

However, Betsy was not bound to this one.

Then, the Professor flung open the door, stepped through, and reached back with his right arm toward her—just as they each took on a blast of pure light. He threw a Mylar blanket that at first only partially shielded Betsy from the brilliant, all-consuming blast, before wrapping around her and clinging in a sort of infusion.

"Throw the stick, Betsy!" the Professor yelled, extending his hand and pulling her back into the dark, cavernous tunnel system tucked away below 168 Apricot Lane. He shut the vaulted door and marked it with a large piece of green chalk.

"You did it, my dear. Just barely, but you did!"

"We did it, Professor, we did it! But how did you know?"

"Just an educated guess. I mean, you left all my work sprawled out to the exact pages that led me here, not to mention the missing candlesticks. But I came quickly when I noticed that all my protective shields were unaccounted for. You must have failed to read that note?"

"Well, Professor, that is some pretty bad handwriting. I think you should have been a doctor!"

Betsy still clung to the blanket as if it held some life-preserving effect, while the Professor placed a fatherly arm around her. The two traced their way back through the dark tunnel system, Betsy now noticing the sporadic X's and checkmarks on the doors—finally understanding what they meant and knowing, beyond doubt, that the Professor was one of the good guys.

It was time to call a house meeting. As the two crossed back past the pyramid's glow, Rancor ran up to them, sniffing Betsy first.

"You crazy cat," an exhausted Betsy quipped lightheartedly, as the two ascended the large, stone-slabbed stairwell, which revealed ancient, esoteric symbols embedded in the stairs and walls all around them.

Chapter 7: Breakfast

As the three emerged from the lower realms, Betsy curiously realized that Rancor seemed to practically travel through walls, showing up at exact moments as if marking them with an ancient, deliberate gnosis.

"How is it that you just show up at certain times, Rancor, you furry anomaly?"

"He's the anomaly, Betsy?" Nick joked. "How is it that you made breakfast already after last night? Man, that was wild. I feel like a stupid teenager in heat—kind of troubling, actually," Nick continued, grabbing a cold piece of well-buttered toast with one hand and taking a big swig of cold, dark coffee with his free hand.

"Oh, that has got to be colder than hell by now. Let me warm that up, Nick!" Betsy said, passing by him.

Nick reached out, grabbing her dominantly and possessively around the waist. Betsy froze in shock; for some reason, she felt violated by the action, even though mere hours before they had lain in an unholy threesome together under total debauchery. About to lay a thick, juicy, infectious, open-mouthed kiss upon her, Nick saw the violation in her eyes. This wasn't the same Betsy at all. Startled, Nick immediately let go, feeling complete shame and humility.

"Oh my," Nick muttered in semi-shock and horror. "What has changed now?"

"Well, Nick," Betsy said, pushing him away while taking a bold step back, "there is a lot to go over, and it needs to happen now!"

Seeing the utter seriousness of this shift, and feeling the sort of ontological violation he had just committed by assuming Betsy was the same Betsy with whom he had so vigorously committed what now felt like carnal sins, Nick noted a detail to himself: she didn't even smell the same.

"Where is your crystal, Betsy?" Nick exclaimed in shock and concern.

Betsy grabbed at her sternum; no crystal was present.

"Yes, about that," interjected the Professor. "You'll all notice that I don't seem to have mine either." He opened up his shirt, showing a hairy mass of gray and blond chest hair, but no crystal. "Best I can say is that when Betsy and I were exposed to the pure light of the Holy Mother Candlesticks, we absorbed the crystals—gold necklace and all—into our very beings. Like food for the soul, for lack of a better way of describing the events."

"Holy Mother Candlesticks?" Varginah asked as she entered. All members were now present, heating up their own breakfast items and reheating coffee as they hung onto every word.

The group centered around a large, white glass living room coffee table, setting down their plates, cups of coffee, and orange juice. Of course, Daria, in her pure form, sat in a sort of hovering, Indian-style observation state from the corner behind them.

"I have seen this probability, but I cannot interfere with the process," Daria said. "However, when I can, I will involve myself." She went on, "You have done well, Betsy. You have certainly exceeded my expectations. You have advanced this world as one of five probable contenders! Then again, whatever becomes the ruling world will wipe all our memories clean so that no outside observer will ever precisely know which world won in the end."

"You might even say everything is inconsequential until it's not," chimed in Varginah, taking a bite of the warmed-up eggs cooked thoughtfully with Parmesan by Betsy earlier in the morning.

Daria began to project holographic images about the living room as the group had now fully amassed there. The Professor, Varginah, and now Larry approached specific areas of interest, each understanding the implications from their own expertise. Varginah pointed toward a massive transactional diagram, its field showing a familiar patterning to her own research just prior to its destruction. By the looks of it, her colleagues must have assumed her dead from the bizarre explosion, leaving scientists to study the odd symbols and the bombardment of ancient cosmic rays left in the fragments of expensive dust and rubble.

"This shows not two entangled paired particles, but four surrounding a center—so five in total," Varginah noted. "And over here, these diagrams and physics notes show that there is indeed a grand synthesis taking place everywhere from some unknown monadic center location, which might as well be beneath us, as it looks like everything else is. Like, literally everything."

"And nothing," spoke Larry. "I have been absorbing massive amounts of literature, and I keep coming back to Burkhard Heim and his six-dimensional world, Heidegger with templates like Dasein, and Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology, tracing all the way back to John Dee and his hieroglyphic monad. These events are not merely accidental. This morning I took notes on Nietzsche's references to a sort of flat-looping time paradox, and I see now that what is taking place is actually breaking free from this philosophical state."

He finished his sentence with a healthy, slagging bite of the cherry cream cheese Danish. Betsy gestured to her face intently until Larry finally caught the clue, lapping up the cherry creamy mash from his oily face and beard with a finger to slather it down into his mouth.

"It is funneling all consciousness, substance, and conceptualization into one grand unified state—basically a merging of noumenon and phenomenon. A fusion of the id, ego, superego, the anima, and the animus. Jung, Freud, and Kant synthesized into some David Hume meets Spinoza meets Michael Talbot's holographic universal model as an emergent time-space event."

He washed down his full-mouthed mini show of intellectual muscle with a full puppy wash of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

Larry was firmly proving that there were no accidental idiots lingering here.

Every mind present was precisely chosen with a distinct purpose.

"You read all that last night, Farting Larry?" Varginah said, one eyebrow raised half-jokingly as she shook her head in agreement.

Varginah pulled away in a loving, accepting gesture, but as the philosopher's stench set in, she immediately covered her nose with her hand. Betsy, understandingly, passed a prepackaged pastry in Larry's direction, adding to the intellectual dynamics and expanding the conversation into a mutual coitus of ideas while offering a friendly muting gesture.

Inspired by Larry, and feeling the beginning tracks of a quasi-academic rigor taking place, Betsy proved that she was no slouch either when it came to the brilliance required to even attempt to grasp their current reality.

She added a more in-depth tonal presence to the room, bridging the parallel tracks of philosophy directly to the absolute realm of more esoteric, arcane literature.

As Betsy began her exposition, her intellectual formulations began to percolate within her mind and nervous system. Daria took full notice, her non-human presence tuning in as if tracking an otherworldly mind-sync.

Larry listened on, completely fascinated by her contribution to the evolving synthesis of the paradox taking place—a shared, passionate quest to uncover ultimate truth.

Beside her, Daria somehow began projecting Betsy's studies into multiple holographic filaments and optical panels of light, transforming the dialogue into a visual lecture on ancient esoteric gnosis and cosmic knowledge.

As Betsy physically pointed out her formulating ideas just as she spoke them into existence, parallel streams of adjacent concepts began to manifest around the room on vibrant, dancing screens.

"Look at the Kabbalah, or even Crowley's Equinox," Betsy explained, leaning forward. "In those ten volumes, sex isn't just a physical act—it's foundational sex magick, the very engine of alchemical creation and ultimate self-mastery."

"Or look at something far more troubling, like the purported vile acts laid out by the Knights Templar. There is a reason that Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall attempted to link them to Gnostic heresy and the worship of a mysterious idol in his 1818 Latin essay, Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum. He was trying to expose how they weaponized the same secret idol—Baphomet—as an occulted circuit to bypass physical containment."

"But as any true tarot reader, astrologer, or clairvoyant perceives, the physical body and its fleshly sex are ultimately inadequate vessels. They express only the lesser externalized manifestations—mere low-frequency shadows and sensory crumbs of a supernal reality."

The group looked on, processing the weight, slightly stunned yet highly entertained. They poured more coffee and orange juice while taking healthy, replenishing bites of the scrambled egg mixture and well-buttered whole-grain toast.

Varginah began to scoop a generous portion of strawberry preserves onto a half-piece of toast, her movements deliberate, as if to say the rigorous information would require added fuel.

Betsy and Daria appeared to be accessing some sort of high-tech cybernetic mind meld. Betsy's thoughts seemed to boost right between her and Daria into a sort of singular mind with a smooth, deliberate cadence.

"To truly understand how that creative force manifests exoterically and how we bridge Kabbalistic emanation to a transcendent hub," Betsy continued, her voice cutting through the clatter of silverware, "you have to look at Metatron as the highest energetic manifestation of a supreme God source of force. He’s the temporal side—the celestial mirror, heavenly framework, and sacred geometric matrix, like Metatron’s Cube, acting as the Lesser YHWH to project the unmanifest infinite into structured reality."

She gestured toward the holographic projections and transactional diagrams, her eyes flashing with clairvoyant intensity, her voice steady and clear.

"This exact bridge between Kabbalistic emanation and Metatron as a transcendent hub is mapped through Hermetic Qabalah, combined with the Tarot and Astrological Melothesia. The twenty-two Major Arcana of the Tarot and the twenty-two Paths of the Tree of Life serve as the precise structural framework where lower spheres like Malkuth and Yesod govern physical, sensory, and gendered existence, treating the material body as an inadequate shadow."

"Through the Sefer Yetzirah, ancient Astrological Melothesia correlates our organs, limbs, and physiological sex directly to the zodiacal and planetary forces—proving the human vessel is merely a microcosmic lower projection. The true transcendent source remains the unmanifest Ain Soph and the supernal triad of Keter, Chokmah—shown here—and Binah, beyond those lesser external letters and outward manifestations of YHWH."

"It’s encoded right in his ontology," Betsy continued, her gaze sweeping over the spellbound room.

"Unlike standard archangels ending in -el, Metatron's name stems from meta thronon—next to the throne—or metator, the divine surveyor who measures out creation itself. And that traditional separation between the lines of Cain and Seth? It always smelled like an ancient scribal cover-up to keep the sacred separate from the profane."

"But what if Seth is Cain?" Betsy posited, her voice dropping into a colder, machine-honed register. "What if the terrestrial builder of cities and the transcendent prophet who walked with God are simply two expressions of the exact same entity?"

"If you drop that artificial divide, it proves Metatron isn't just a pristine angel of light—he’s a multi-state being. He operates across the entire spectrum of existence, fully capable of executing what human morality labels 'good' or 'evil' to maintain cosmic balance."

"Just like sex magick and the alchemical process, the divine architect isn't bound by human ethics; he embodies both the constructive geometry of creation and the raw, violent mechanics of destruction."

Larry leaned in, utterly spellbound, as Betsy drew the final connections together seamlessly.

"This bridge flows straight through Hermeticism, high-degree Masonry—where Metatron embodies the Grand Architect and Enoch preserves sacred knowledge on twin pillars—and intersects with the timeless priesthood of Melchizedek," she continued, her eyes alight with synthesis.

"Could it be that we are talking more about a moment or an exact processional unlocking of cosmic light?" Betsy questioned, her eyes tracking a swirling filament of data across the white ceiling.

"A great clock?"

"These gods represent the transit of a precise entry point, not unlike these cosmic entities that myself and Varginah are currently commingled with."

Betsy then pointed to the far end to her right, motioning back at the more terrestrial grounding aspects of the supernal source.

"This exact thread runs through Madame Blavatsky and Alice Bailey’s Seven Rays, Eliphas Lévi’s astral light, and Stanislas de Guaita’s Rosicrucian Martinism. It’s the same current Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum studied with Pachita when formulating his Syntergic Theory—the idea that consciousness directly interacts with a lattice matrix to manipulate physical reality—and what Carlos Castaneda mapped with Don Juan Matus in perceiving raw energy."

"When you strip away modern dogma and trace it back through Martinism to the ancient Ophite system, all gods, angels, and demons collapse into a single truth."

Now pointing to an Ophite cosmology, she gestured to a graph of the myriad interlocking layers and zones—The Father, The Pleroma, Leviathan—along with several other layers, before adding, "Perhaps we are looking at a new addition to this cosmology? Maybe even a new type of light in the greater spectral field, like a new child?"

"Sex, geometry, and consciousness are simply different dimensions of that singular, primordial force mapping itself into form."

"There is no dualistic split—only the origin of the cosmic ray."

The group stood there, mouths agape. They hadn't realized how much Betsy veritably knew, nor how they, too, would soon be transformed by the light.

Betsy stepped back, retreating toward the kitchen to pour another hot cup of coffee, and the Professor cut in. He noted that Rancor had no crystal around his neck either.

Soon, Betsy, the Professor, and even Rancor began scanning the room item by item. Rancor walked up to Nick, pressing down with his right paw to confirm Nick still had his red crystal. Varginah had hers, and Daria—who had now transformed into Aunt Gladys, sitting in the high-backed chair—still had hers hanging around her neck. Finally, Larry’s crystal hung in place, shining through his V-neck and poking out through his chest hair.

"So let me get this straight," Nick said, stepping into the space where Daria's projected graphs and displays had just been. Taking center stage, he voiced the broader question on everyone's mind: "Just what the hell has been going on here? I feel as though I've been demon-possessed, but I still essentially feel like the same Nick. That hasn't genuinely changed at all."

"As long as your crystal remains outside of you, it acts as a protective amulet and an existential extension of your being," the Professor explained. "Think of it as a piece of hardware that is fundamentally an aspect of your essence, currently functioning as an extension to a master hub of probabilistic choices before you—before us all, Nick."

"I realized long ago that this time would come. As we travel into those remaining four master realms downstairs, each of you must champion your own world, thereby exposing yourself to the pure light and absorbing the crystal within."

"The greatest challenge before you is when you become that crystal, in principle, and it in turn becomes you. There exists only the raw truth beyond that point—the very truth we are all faced with now, what we actually are at the base."

"Once we all absorb those crystals, we are firmly in the game."

"This solidifies our position as the sole remaining world into which all these other realms must ultimately fold. We don't have to champion twenty-eight thousand five hundred-plus worlds; we just need to return to the original center where they all stem from—the primary caves marked by the pyramid below us."

"That is precisely why the Agent Cooks and I were working so feverishly to close off loose strands and dead-end forks of reality. Salvaging all that is pure from the fractals and shards is already largely complete; we've done nearly all we can alone on these lower rungs of existence. We must expose those worlds to the pure light—or, from Thycius's perspective, the pure light of reason. Right, my brother and warrior, Larry?"

Larry sat in the center of the couch, absorbing every word while shoveling croissants, bear claws, and anything else he could grab into his gullet.

"Makes sense to me, Professor. Makes perfect sense," Larry said.

As his stomach began to rumble loudly again, the other houseguests pulled away, clearing their dishes, cups, and breakfast scraps to the kitchen counters and sink. The house was bright and white in its paint and decor; Margarette had meticulously planned it this way.

"We each had to reach the absolute bottom of ourselves to finally understand this," Larry murmured, realizing for the first time that his constant nervous eating was his own vice. A wave of guilt washed over him as he chewed—the bites no longer pleasant, but a burden he desperately wanted lifted.

"Well, guys," Nick commanded softly, "never a dull moment, huh? Let's go champion our world, why don't we?"

"First, we must obtain more candlesticks from a dying world much like our own," the Professor cautioned. "Only, they began losing the fight long ago. Ever since, they have hung in a hell-world—nearly a limbo of dread, a dunya of tortured stasis. Still, there are good, pious people living there who will soon become an integral part of us if we pull this off correctly."

"You might ask why, if they can produce these artifacts, they don't simply save their own world. Well, my friends, they learned that lesson in sacrifice and humility. They learned that only in the following twenty-one billion years can we hope to assimilate and learn for ourselves—again, if we are successful."

"All remaining worlds are aware now of what is taking place. However, only a few are complete enough to possess a central tunnel system with geometric, resonant patterning like ours. Yet, because they remain largely incomplete, they cannot travel here to be exposed to the purer state of true light—or to the four realms we will visit once we grab our gear and get dressed. We, too, are battling for completion."

"By the way, wear bright clothing. I recommend white so we can easily identify one another. We are going to meet ourselves in those caves down there, and you will need to be compassionate and humble. From their perspective, you are their replacements."

"Professor," Nick asked, "you were just about to tell us why the world that manufactures the pure light candlesticks doesn't just win and become this synthesis of a unified, central state themselves?"

Quickly and nonchalantly, the Professor placed a small, pink, unassuming square under his tongue—a self-prescribed, slow-dissolving block of concentrated psilocybin, acid, ayahuasca, salvia, and DMT—and seamlessly continued.

"Oh, yes," the Professor replied, looking at each of them as they prepared to leave the living room, shower, and search for whatever white clothing they could find. "When you use these candlesticks, you are utilizing the willing sacrifices of highly purified, selfless souls. They sacrifice their world for ours. We have become, in all our victories and failings, a sort of religion to them. They martyr themselves for us—children, the elderly, warriors, craftsmen—each achieving victory over their irreparable, fallen world by holding faith in you and me."

"So do not squander this gift. We have people to meet and honor, and candlesticks to retrieve. But these aren't mere candlesticks; they are an amalgamation of souls, the biting potency of their existence captured only temporarily. My friends, my patriots to the unknown, these candlesticks are warriors of light, so let them lead you to victory in the grand moment that awaits us all! They are offering themselves to the cause and a culminating HMC Bomb produced from billions of souls that will ensure our victory."

Chapter 8: The Volvo Refuge

In realizing that either way they looked at it, nothing would ever be the same again—that fundamentally, they would not be the same again—they each took a moment, recoiling back into what made them who they were as separate, distinct personalities.

Betsy retreated to her old, pea-green Volvo.

"Man, I remember when you gave this car to me, Dad. You told me to take care of it, and I have. You told me that this car would last me at least another thirty years, as long as I could find parts for it, and that hasn't been easy."

With tears in her eyes, Betsy touched the passenger seat as she sat on the driver's side. The cabin brandished that same old-car smell, laced with a hint of something rancid and pizza. She laughed, thinking about the absurdity of it all.

"Did I go in the wrong direction, Dad, when I left you and Mom and just drove away to California to read Tarot cards for some Hollywood rich people?"

She cleared her eyes, breathing in through slightly constricted nostrils as she tried to hold back from wallowing into an untempered mess.

"I am a mess, Dad. But the Volvo is still running, nearly twenty years later. Never made it to Hollywood—probably better off. You were right. You and Mom were always right."

Betsy looked up at the commonness of the sky above her. It was so monochrome and overcast that this mundane, isolated security seemed to be exactly what people painstakingly lived and died for—now reduced to this. A sobbing look grew on her face.

As she looked down, her attention was suddenly drawn back up. In the immediate distance, about twenty yards away, a buck eagerly emerged out of nowhere and began to stare directly at her. It stood there in a locked gaze with Betsy for a good, solid minute. While her attention was drawn toward an organic moment of reassurance, she instead noticed just how scripted and synthetic even the most random events felt.

Then, holding this thought, some movement or shuffling in a nearby bush chased the deer off. But only several yards away, catty-corner behind the house, the mighty buck stared intently back, still locking a clear view of her eyes. That persistence gave the interaction meaning; she could no longer trust that first-time experience with anything ever again.

The sound of a low-flying plane cut in—as if it were added for full effect, she thought. This sentient, tactile awareness of existence wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The sound of the plane now echoed a mowing acoustic across the scattered hillside. It was all pure existence, but these were merely three-dimensional shadows, she thought, as its sound traveled and faded through the accepted physics of a shared belief.

No wonder we are all kept in such a tight, limited cage.

"You know you are more than this, Betsy." A voice came from the backseat—gruff and present, but not trying to destroy the moment.

Betsy laughed, her cheeks now a noticeably rosy hue, her nose running and bags under her eyes still present as proof of a recent emotional dam break. Not looking up toward the rearview mirror quite yet, but pacing her senses, she said, "Yeah, Cook. You always seem to show up at the best of times."

She still felt lost.

"I guess it's a gift of mine, Betsy. May I sit in the front with you?"

Cook wasn't exactly asking; he was just letting her know not to gesture her hand there, lest it might infuse into his body as he pressed the button of that strange device, transporting him instantly to the front seat—a device and a persona that our eyes make up because we need something tangible and present.

"I love this overcast weather, don't you?" Cook asked, his voice now coming from just beside her in the passenger seat. "There is something so consistently boring and droll about it, yet elegant and continuous. Maybe even perennial, in the sense that these overcast moments seem to connect to one another in a continuous stream of bleached-out reality."

"Existence itself seems to rely upon it no matter what planetary sphere you are on, and I am a part of them all… as are you too, Betsy."

Cook looked over at Betsy endearingly. "You just don't know it yet. Soon you might very well see that fundamentally there exists no difference between anything."

He raised his right hand toward the passenger-side window, making a sort of shunting gesture. "If you only knew how much it actively takes to keep all this strong and weak nuclear force strife active. And gravity doesn't work at all the way you think it does. Oh, if you knew, if you could finally see, you would more than likely just fly away like a little pixie, Betsy. A little pixie."

Agent Cook was slightly prodding and teasing Betsy, perhaps to cheer up her solemn mood.

Still kind of whimpering and realizing where she had gone wrong—and that it was no longer repairable—a sense of sadness overwhelmed her. She began to cry. "I don't suppose you have a Kleenex, do you, Agent Cook?" Betsy asked as she began to play with the long tassels hanging down in strands from under the seat cushion, which her mother had made when her parents first gave her this car—her first and only.

"No, I don't, Betsy, but let it all out, okay?" Cook stated while squinting up into the Gibson Grey, television-screen monochromatic sky.

Betsy had no defense left, nor did she need one. She cried on the left shoulder of the man they called Agent Cook, who always wore the same suit and sunglasses.

He didn't feel human. He felt hollow and dead like an animated corpse, more of a substance of such eternal blankness and void that he became something else.

Still trying to test past the tension, she maintained her right-cocked head position. But an internal alarm system reminded her that the experience was entirely fabricated from the ontology, from her mind—and her human body had no way to rationalize such an eternally empty force of living, breathing void.

Now, as her senses searched for something to anchor to—something abiding, tangible, organic in nature, and as real as she still thought that she was—she had just begun to make out the faint scent of a cologne that had no identifiable matches in this world. Her primal human instincts still searched out in curiosity toward finding an identifiable source.

Yet, as she imagined the smell's origins, the scent itself continuously fluxed and changed. Then, testing this mad theory, she began to control the smell with her mind—first intensifying it, then allowing it to wane entirely.

Then, becoming entirely spooked with her mind now blown, she pulled away and up into a recovering position, now seated upright and fully alert.

"One world dies, another emerges as the victor, but both worlds die yet still remain," Cook said quietly. "I wish that I could offer some advice or tell you how things are going to turn out, but I once realized how irrelevant that all is some time or place ago."

"I suppose that is all top secret?" Betsy laughed in a defensive phase shift.

"Yes. I would probably have to kill you over it if you only knew," Cook joked. "But none of that seems to matter now. You guys are the new Council of Seven Spheres—for now, I guess, reduced to five probabilities."

Interrupting himself, he looked directly at her. "Look, there is something of vital importance I have to tell you, okay? So hang onto your tassels there."

He showed a refined form of humor, still present despite all that Agent Cook had witnessed and seen over the eons.

"I am in the process of finalizing the last remaining Cooks, absorbing them—it's how we, how I, stay alive. None of us particularly lose, as we are spawned from the same root, then we draw in all those compound exponential fractals of us as the universe itself shrinks back into its roots too. Unlike humans, we don't have to remain the same identity. We are, however, birthed from a sort of black hole anus, and we feel the shared pain of each and every birth as well as death, but as long as we exist, we experience what we do as entirely unique.

"We are able to give ourselves over to another version of ourselves, in a form of fatalistic ultimate suicide in uber-narcissism, I suppose. We are who we are required to be, then shrink back into nothing. Yet some of our forms function quite well and become inevitable, and we have long camaraderies with those of us who are not ephemeral and transient in form—friends, an army. All indifferent for the most part, but entirely unique in the personas that we take on as a sort of field response toward energetic allostatic batching. We are all technology when it comes down to it.

"But all that negative power of inversion begins a function and oddly manifests into a living, breathing pulse—an anthropomorphic counter to the universe's demand as nuclear forces scramble to define us. It is just a suit, a patch fundamentally, as we remain—I remain—unbound negative energy at the source. As universes transmute into other shapes, forms, and physics, I, and several other agents, have remained the same for billions of your Earth years. The hidden design."

Hearing this, Betsy recalled how different each agent appeared to be in size and stature, some looking obviously not human in the least.

"This war of worlds extends far beyond what is taking place here today," Cook went on. "There are literally other realities that exist explicitly far beyond what any agent has access to—where entropy does not even exist and therefore requires no counter. Yet they all principally seem to share the same common, fundamental tenets, no matter how dimensionally distinct they might appear.

"We only know this because they reached out to us—they do all the time, in the patterns around us that we mistake for the very matter that makes up a field. Beyond shadow, even light. They are constantly affecting us, and whatever world we are in, as mind-blowing as that tunnel system seems, it is fundamentally connected to it all—the axis mundi of everything, in truth, to put it into ultra-simple terms."

Cook adjusted his glasses, looking out through the windshield.

"Soon that tunnel won't just disappear, but become an arterial network connecting all realms. Yet from that pyramid you visited, the one sitting beneath those waters and many others, connecting like a multidimensional highway system of quantum potentials that we have never visited or known prior—we are all equal passengers in these final steps, something that the dark council has been avoiding for quite some time, but I think you are finally ready. There will soon emerge portals to places that are so profound.

"Betsy, it's all a sort of game. We have been invited to share in a consciousness that needs to be safeguarded with the utmost relevance and importance. We are fundamentally all the same person, only some exist in other greater infinite dimensions. This three-dimensional world again is a mere shadow, Betsy. You are the first to go through this transition. In fact, your emotions and lamenting are just your soul going through a sort of seed transcendence—the soul's expression of being nervous and excited for what's to come next."

"Well, can I still keep my Volvo?" Betsy asked, keeping her eyes fixed forward, not turning to look. "Cook? You're gone again, aren't you?"

Compelled to look down at the passenger seat beside her, she saw what looked to be a massive diamond, cut in intricate, impossible-to-make-out patterns, as if locking in inconceivable dimensional geometric structures.

The faceless voice of Cook spoke from the backseat. "You'll know what to do with it when the time comes. Keep it safe."

"I did not know that you could do that. Projecting your voice like that is a whole other kind of creepy, Agent Cook," Betsy laughed to herself.

She looked up at the sky, then panned forward in order to zoom in on that familiar spot where the mighty deer had been standing prior to scampering away. Instead, she looked at the visible rocks and pines behind the property.

Another small plane flew low—maybe it was the same one—sending off loud, obnoxious buzzing sounds of ridiculous being-distribution out, as if it were a strange beast approaching some cosmic, mystical watering hole that soon would not have a mouth to drink with, or a tongue by which to speak.

Like an arcane dragon being phased out and replaced by another rudimentary base form for all the ease of geometry and enthalpy—much less anything that might hint at the continuously mundane and perennial. In the end, not even negentropy would continue on in the same way.

Betsy was left with a deep, lingering sense. She could almost feel and hear a message from within her, making an effort to convey:

No, the only thing that was—and is—perennial is change itself: the realization that we are all part of this ever-shifting and morphing field. I am you and you are me, but we must remain consistent in whatever narrative and story this universe funnels through us, as we champion on, more as ever-changing light energy than the forms that seem to scatter and collect around us.

She picked up the heavy, solid diamond. The sun itself appeared to dull its luster, the object now looking more like a representation of what physicists might use to illustrate a five-dimensional object.

From the looks of things, this was just the platform of what this object represented.

Chapter 9: Parallel Descent

Betsy slammed the heavy Volvo door, knowing it might be the last time she would fundamentally be capable of relating to it as a separate, distinct item. Her thoughts now centered around a specific outfit of mainly white clothing to identify herself.

The 168 crew's doppelgängers were all present, but the sky above was already shifting and breaking apart—an entire universe transitioning itself for final synthesis and absorption into a consolidated version of itself. Still, they could control their energy and the ultimate fate of their souls.

This was the moment that the Nick of that world, along with the rest of them, would step under the ray that unbound pure light from matter itself. It emanated from the very machine Varginah had brilliantly fashioned there to produce these Holy Mother Glueball artifacts. The Professor faced his counterpart, knowing that the Professor of that world was a better version of him. So, he had to be a stronger man.

"In a way, you win, guys—if it could ever be called a competition," the counterpart said. "You are the most critical factor to all of this. It is sophisticated and genius how you will go on and transform us all. We all win, I suppose, because we found a solution, a way to work together in ultimate sacrifice.”

Just then, the counterpart Professor willingly, without regret or trepidation, stepped directly under the full bright light spectrum of that gluon beam—under the blinding light of that fantastically horrifying, beautiful machine. At first, only one foot entered as the rest of him slowly became illuminated.

"What does it feel like, my friend?" the Professor of the surviving world asked with teary eyes, facing his counterpart's last moment of a conceptual self.

"It feels free, Professor. It feels like a million kittens pawing and purring on me, the taste of watermelon, the pure Magenta inviting me into its eternal abode. It feels like drawing the milky nectar of everything straight from the teat, right from the source, Professor. Newness—I feel whole and renewed!"

As the alternate Professor continued to step in, wanting to become a part of it all, he murmured, "I go fearlessly and willingly into the unknown, but it is all too familiar. That ever-producing pink teat of it all, and the nectar of the gods that comes from it—union, total union!” He was now yelling, as if it were difficult to speak outward from another realm. Then, bravely stepping forward, he raised his hands and was entirely gone.

The device emitted a mechanized sound, dispensing one of several candlesticks around the periphery of the assembly. The immense energy—now contained from the unbinding of one pure soul—was tethered and forever rooted to the monad source of it all, showing that even the soul is a vessel into the pure light expanse. It was discharged and ejected from the machine as a temporary holding place for that gluon energy. This was not true life—the life that matters at the true source—but rather a product beyond money that would nonetheless serve as a currency for barter. In a way, even total liberation is transactional in the end.

The surviving Professor approached the single candlestick with a sort of reverence. Pulling an enamel paint pen from his pocket, he marked it, drawing only a "P" for Professor.

That world's Nick stepped up to go in next, but the Professor stopped him.

"Please, Nick, just hold on a moment until I retrieve my constituents on the other side. Shan't be but a moment!"

Unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, the Professor had already visited the world paralleling theirs—the one from his studies he recorded as the 6th World of Spheres. He maintained a place there, studying the people, documenting and interviewing them, all while wearing the white suit that the Varginah of that world had fashioned for him.

"Oh, you are a beautiful and wildly principled genius in many realms, my love," the Professor muttered. He had gone against his better judgment and built a reality around this world. "The people are vastly better here, but I see how this must ultimately synthesize. You will be just as much alive in the Varginah on the other side, whom you will meet soon. In fact, I had better take them the candlesticks so we can all say our goodbyes."

There was nothing he could do to save them; they had made the most profound choice of all. If the Varginah from the surviving world entered those caves, she would instantly begin to come apart. Knowing this, however, he intended to give the 168 crew Varginah the very Holy Candlestick forged from this world’s humble and brilliantly self-sacrificing Varginah. The Professor wasn't using or sacrificing her. On the contrary, he felt he was immortalizing her.

As the Professor approached the rounded door and opened it, he re-entered the musty caverns of infernal darkness that sat below 168 Apricot Lane. Yet, even down in that dungeon-like labyrinth, there was unbound light. He ran through the corridors like a boy leaving school, then charged up the stairs in a heated, oxygen-zapping huff to find all parties ready, dressed in white.

"Very well, let's go then, people. Chop chop!"

They followed the Professor, at first pacing as if to some silent vigil, but soon had to accelerate to keep up with his rapid stride. Rancor rounded the living room and caught up to them. As they approached the final door leading into the 6th sphere, Agent Cook stood waiting outside.

"Hello, guys. What the hell, right? What can I say?" Cook paused. "Betsy, do you have the artifact I left with you earlier?"

Betsy had placed the item in a white linen bag hanging from her shoulder. "Yes, Cook, I do," she said, her hand still gripping it through the cloth.

"I have never done this, but I was handed this one along with many others just now—in fact, from my counterpart in a dying world," Cook said, "where even many agents are being vaporized along with their reality. I guess we'll be starting over, whatever that means. So, look... this is something I probably shouldn't do, but it is unprecedented for this time and place right now. I don't want to keep you, but I brought a Resonator for each of you, in case you find yourselves in trouble on the other side, or in any other dimension you visit today. I'll be seeing you in the fight—on the battlefield, so to speak. And some of us who oddly have survived are your own crew, a small private army if you need us. We'll be right there even if you don't see us. Just know that we are there."

With that, Agent Cook handed each of them a large, black onyx, oblong pen-like device with a singular button switch on one end.

"Just think of your destination while you push that button, and that alone will take you anywhere. In fact, I have been ending up in some odd places lately, so be specific. This thing is picking up on the micro-scalable level of sub-thoughts and even pre-thoughts now, as the probabilities reduce."

Facing Yourself

Each entered that world with one grand step as the fragmented bits of it came apart. Out in the cosmos, comets, asteroids, and planets gave off universe-ending bursts.

"Our choices really do impact the entire world, don't they?" Nick mumbled, placing the indestructible, pen-sized Resonator deep into his back pocket to free his hands.

Everyone had received one except Daria, because she was essentially a much more sensitive and capable version of the device herself. Daria was an observer, but she remained an active asset to the team whenever she could be involved.

Tides swelled and fell swiftly. Popping sounds began to echo, followed by nuclear explosions off in the distance as this world fractured. The Professor led them into his alternate home, where an exact copy of himself sat patiently waiting.

"These are your heroes," the Professor explained to the group, "among several billion who have already willingly perished in order to feed into a machine that I have not mentioned yet. A machine that everyone here before you, on this alternate side of reality, painstakingly produced and placed under 168 Apricot Lane in this bizarro realm. Every person that passes away is collected here. There, do you see that thin beam shooting up? It also parses down through the center of this version of Earth, drawing in like energies and collecting souls. When we leave here, every person will be alerted to abort their lives the hard way, the painful way, and their soul energy will be drawn into this weapon of unequaled power. This is ours and ours alone, though we cannot say if something similar is not taking place in all four realms—quite possibly having a near-identical conversation to the one taking place here in this quickly resolving room."

The Professor went on. "I wanted you to come face-to-face with this reality. I wanted you to see yourselves and just how real this is. This is all of you in your most critical and fragile state—a moment that never manifestly ends as we face ourselves in final dissolution."

The alternate versions of the crew stood up alongside those from the Professor's world who had been seated. "I want you to take a moment to face yourselves."

And they did. As each stepped forward, they got so close they could feel one another's breath. It was the same breath, the same eyes, and the same gestures that made them each unique in their respective worlds. Nick shook his own hand, then broke into a hug like a long-lost brother, realizing deeply that this fragile reflection represented all the same failures and fears, yet had somehow reached this point of total surrender to the unknown. Soon, they were all embracing one another, even kissing and offering reassurance: "It's okay, it's okay. We won. We are going to live on!"

Betsy grabbed at her stomach. "Well, I'm pregnant, and you are too. I realized that we aren't really dying, but we are surrendering to the great unknown. This reinforces our unified existence, making who we are that much more real and raw."

"I want to be real," said the alternate Betsy from that fragmented place. "I want to be true and pure. This child within me is going to be the same child in you, only stronger, purer, and more defined. We give ourselves to make one universe all the more deep, rich, and filled with substance and undeniable form."

Betsy gave her a hug—a real, big, gripping hug, feeling herself. She was still the same girl with all her quirks. "You know, I thought about Dad today. Our dad. And about when I left home in Minnesota, wondering if I made the wrong choice."

Her self-sacrificing double replied, "You know we did, haha." Both of them pruned with a type of death that only comes from deep psychotic breaks followed by euphoria. Grabbing the alternate Betsy’s face, tears flowed for them both. "We fucked up, lil sis. It's built into the cosmos, and we all just pray for a brighter day when we can actually face ourselves and say, 'I'm not putting up with it anymore. I am taking command fully over my life's path, and I define the variables and terms!'"

"Well, you're always right, aren't you?" Betsy said with a mix of tears and a hint of narcissism, but mostly with the humor of reductive collapse that takes place when one realizes they have no other choice than to trust themselves.

"How do you know that we are pregnant? Well, just look at your beaming. Plus, us girls, we know these things about each other, you know."

The alternate Betsy approached the continuous light and blew a kiss to herself. "In another time, sis," she said, stepping without hesitation into the pure light of reason. The remaining Betsy cried profusely, but she was so proud of herself and the truth of who she ultimately was—the cost of liberty.

Larry’s double seemed near-identical in every possible way, but here, he was a successful businessman—a world-renowned billionaire, in fact.

"It's all about family, Larry, isn't it? It's all about the breaks," the Larry from the surviving world said. He acknowledged that he had never had either, but somehow, here he was in all the raw reality, facing his past self. They both had faced the same trials, only with different existential outcomes and degrees—until now, that is.

Nick from the surviving world turned to them both, seeing no difference in dress or manner. "Larry, I am definitely seeing double, but that's easy. Larry, worldly success is all about outside support?"

"Well, it is, isn't it? Forget Marcus Aurelius, Albert Camus, Fromm, Szasz, Neumann, Velikovsky, Beaumont, or Pye. In existentialism, it ultimately comes down to getting breaks—if only to write the shit down, much less ponder such self-affirming truths with all the provisions necessary to cultivate those shared ideas in comfort."

The information this doppelgänger Larry had acquired was centered on studying business, which reached into philosophy; the surviving Larry had spent his life studying being and becoming in a Hegelian way—what fundamentally is.

"Do you have a wife, Larry?" Thycius asked.

"Yes, we have had a passionate relationship now for forty years—roses every Tuesday. Well, it would have been forty years. Of course, she's gone now." There was something missing in that iteration of Larry, something so integral to meaning that this ultimate sacrifice was the only way it could be rectified. Maybe it was a way out?

The surviving Larry shook his alternate's hand and looked upon him with stern conviction, as if to say: now is a good time to step into that machine and show me who you are at your core. And he did. He stepped in a little more cowardly than those first warriors of light, but in this final act, perhaps he had finally realized himself.

Nick was unimpressed by his own double. He realized the gifts that had been squandered and wished he could be the one to jump under that light, but it wasn't his time. The alternate Nick stepped into the light, saying only, "You'll be a good dad. I love you. You'll find your depth. Do it for both of us, brother. Stay strong." Raising his hand in a clenched fist for future victory, he vanished. Another canister buzzed with fullness as the ejected one sat beside it.

Varginah was the toughest. The Professor sat with both Varginahs and found them so beautiful and unique that they seemed like a wellspring of entirely different people. The Varginah from the remaining timeline was furious that this was how it had to be.

"Look at what she has done for these people, for this world, for our fates, and our world. It just isn't right!"

However, there remained an ominous feeling of guilt, choice, and validation—as if a prized family pig had to be taken in for slaughter to yield meat for survival. It was not unlike the semi-legalization of consuming one's own child during the Russian famine. Of course, later the government denied all involvement, redirecting the blame by declaring, "To eat your own children is a barbarian act." How conveniently these twisted, toxic veins grow when in retrograde. But Dostoevsky saw this all long before that first wave hit.

Just then, this selfless version of Varginah slipped away, while the Professor and the surviving version of her remained in their disparate, intentional act of self-denial, still arguing semantics.

"Goodbye, Professor. Goodbye, Varginah." Without looking back, the alternate walked straight into the light.

The survivor was left holding a heavy dose of survivor's guilt. Beyond that, was there a heaven? As ridiculous as it sounded, surely this self-sacrificing, amazing collection of souls would survive somewhere? The feeling lingered.

Rancor was another oddity, for it wasn't certain where or when he was from. There was no replication or twin of him present, yet here he was, witnessing this event and translating it into the field of ontology in his own way—but for whom?

Daria and Rancor stood back, observing it all. The Professor had already said his long goodbyes to his selfless likeness, having worked together to make most of this operation possible through sheer logistics.

It was time to go. The Professor handed out the tubes, marking a letter on the handle for each member they represented, just as he had done moments ago with his other self.

It was time to face the four other quadrants. Maybe there was nothing left to do but set off the Holy Mother Candlesticks, or maybe it was going to be more complicated than that, but it was time to arm themselves. As they turned to head back toward the round door, the Professor handed a total of three candlesticks to each person, repeating the same mantra with each recipient: "Safeguard them. Safeguard them."

Rancor and Daria trailed behind, observing as the group walked away from a vacant world that no longer served their needs. The Professor shut the door and marked an "X" on it as the process culminated behind it, leaving that entire universe in a blinding flame of purging light and the purity that came with it.

"All fine and dandy and profoundly beautiful," the Professor muttered, "but the ugliness has just begun. It's time to face the bitterness and hideousness of these other worlds. It all comes folding down around us.”

Chapter 10: Cook's Limbo

Walking out of the 6th world sphere, Betsy had unknowingly placed the Resonator alongside the other artifact Agent Cook had entrusted her with—the Master Diamond from the closure of that world. With her carry bag hanging by her side, she clutched it in a constant state of anxiety. Gripping the multidimensional artifact through the canvas material, she remained entirely unaware that her fingers were repeatedly jamming the Resonator button, pressing it nearly all the way down. This should not have mattered if she weren't holding the Resonator while actively forming a coherent thought—a destination. But as the 168 crew had learned throughout a lifetime, nothing ever unfolded within such plainly definable parameters.

Betsy Visits Nowhere Through the Diamond Hypercube Matrix

Finally, in all her obsessive anxiety, she unknowingly pressed the Resonator firmly against the multidimensional hyperdiamond.

As light burst from the Resonator, she was instantly brought to where Agent Cook was standing. He was in a nearly all-black space, pacing with obvious worry and anxiety. Could he only feel emotion while in the frenzied vortex of those countless swirling screams of unprecedented, raw, human unfulfilled potential?

"Betsy, how are you here right now? This is utterly impossible."

Betsy shrugged and looked around at the boundless void. "Where are we, Cook?"

Cook looked down into her handbag, seeing the tight, impulsive grip she still maintained on the two artifacts. It all became clear at once, and she began to loosen up in quiet admittance.

"Betsy, you are in my head. Not figuratively, but literally—the eye of the storm. Now, I'm sure you will be able to dial back out with no problem, but I wonder what allowed you to come here at this moment?" He continued, "You see, Betsy, when you don't see me or when I'm not on some sort of mission, I don't actually physically exist. Instead, I return to this space. From here, I can use the Resonator to go anywhere I imagine, yet we Cooks can only imagine from the collective fatalism of the soul force that we have harnessed since the beginning of this plane of cosmic laws and proportionality.”

"The thing is, we Agent Cooks don't inherently like doing anything. We live as phantoms to fulfill our purpose. That has been enough for us, but the greater sphere has shifted beyond the periphery, and those cosmic rays have only begun to bleed through—a reformation is underway. Typically, we uniformly remain ourselves yet reduce back into a storehouse, until we're pulled off the shelf again or when a dire need invigorates and forces us to manifest into the material. Otherwise, we become patterns of storable utility—as localized extensions of negentropy, that is. Your observation of me, even from within the confines of my own unique identifiers, breathes a singularity into me—an identity of sorts."

Cook looked down, appreciating his hands within the place of his mind and the collective Negentropy; he existed as a shape or form.

"I'm just concerned because it looks like I'll be the sole remaining Agent Cook, the blueprint for all future fractals of us. Crazy stuff, right? How do I even exist, any of us for that matter? Just like those diamonds—carbon, information, entropy, and negentropy folding in and folding out. The mind is a strange and unique thing, and mine is so distinct that I will officially be the last of my kind!"

Oh wow. I wonder if my baby is okay? That invasive half-thought entered Betsy's mind. The doubt and worry of that swirling storm of unmet potential had already begun to grab at her, reinforcing the Dark Council's reach, now embedded somewhere primal and deep within her: doubt.

"That's the thing. I'm wondering if your body is back there, and your aetheric body or soul is somehow now tethered here? Or perhaps it is my final challenge to be faced with all that is fragile, ephemeral, transient, and flesh—faced with that identity that follows in the fulfillment of lust and angst? God, what's happening to me?”

Agent Cook went on to make a fundamentally important point. “The concept of your baby and you carrying that diamond, Betsy, are interconnected now. It is a complex concept that only you could ever understand. You read Crowley's Equinox, all ten chapters, correct?”

“Yes,” Betsy replied.

“And you have also read and are equally well-versed with Parsons’s OTO Babalon workings—the Moonchild, the Whore of Babylon, correct? More specifically, the Babalon Working series of occult rituals performed in 1946 by the rocket scientist Jack Parsons as well as the future Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. They were followers of Aleister Crowley, and their goal was to manifest the Thelemic goddess Babalon on Earth?”

“Yes, I am.”

Cook went on, “You have also made quick haste to look at Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall's work, the brilliant and highly influential Austrian diplomat, historian, and translator. He, of course, was widely remembered as one of Europe's greatest pioneers in Orientalism—the study of the languages, history, and cultures of the Middle East?”

“Yes,” agreed Betsy, now understanding where Cook was going with all of this. “Let me take an educated guess: now you are going to bring up Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum, or 'The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed,' the essay published in Vienna in 1818 by the Austrian scholar Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Aside from the medieval trial records themselves, it is considered one of history's most critical foundational documents regarding the mythos of Baphomet.”

Cook replied, “Exactly, Betsy. But more to the point is what you will undoubtedly, intuitively know I am bringing up next.”

Even in her transient state, the hairs on Betsy's arms stood on end. There was no time here in Cook's mind, within the very vortex of negentropy. The thought transmission was a melding of information; all those who now existed within that swirling frenzy of unmet soul potential together pressed forth all the answers. They knew the Great Work now more than anybody, but that return back to the human form was futile for them now. They had all reached their ends, for if they were to return, they would soon forget and go back to their base natures. It was sadism that always caught them up. But it is sadism that drives the engine of the Dark Council and the pentagram's power. Unapologetically, the souls trapped in negentropy could not transcend, and they did not have the egoic drive to become psychopathic murderers or worse. In short, they had served out their futility and now swirled within the blackened storehouse of nothingness that, ironically, was now more massive than the pervading world. It all wanted to be set free, but first, it had to be condensed into the crudest form.

Cook delivered that final infectious bit of information that so needed to be said to Betsy alone. “The late, great Tracy Twyman, whom the Dark Council just had to take out, along with many others, when she contributed the English version of the aforementioned, and this addition called Meet Mete, of which I know you are acquainted, Betsy—an introduction to Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum exploring Hammer-Purgstall's strange etymological and symbolic claims. Well, it is all quite unnerving, but it is all quite true. Startling, really. You see, all that sex magick work, the stuff you couldn't avoid no matter how hard you tried, the body is locked into that infernal machine of the zodiac and that eight-year Venusian pentagram cycle.”

Then Cook added declaratively, “What I am about to tell you outside this context, of course, makes no rational sense, Betsy. But that diamond I entrusted you with, the one that was always rightfully yours, is in fact your child—the very child that you are carrying. More than a single life, more than a concept, yet contained within it is all the sadism and carnivorous bloodletting that a world could ever stand. I'm sure you noticed the life that was brimming there in that world; the crisp air and blueness of the sky surpassed even the first world, am I right?”

Betsy’s eyes were wide in shock; she knew everything Cook said was true.

“Well, that is the unfortunateness of aggression, want, lust—that psychodrive, the very thing that forces entropy into that diamond head of will, industry, slavery, abuse, love, mystic and epic experience, always at a cost, siphoning from some unseen world or person. That diamond you carry along with you now will become the new child of the next world. Its very black, inverted aspects, reduced into a density of Sirius times infinity—that black stone, ironically, will become the vital aspect to power the new world. You must carry it with you on your journeys, concealed and secret. It will try to coerce you in and derail you because it does not want to exist in this way, but you will balance it out, giving it that purest diamond to accompany it, and that will manifest into a harmonic balance and unity that has never been achieved before.”

Cook oddly staggered for a moment, even beginning to bleed a black ooze from his nose, before he regained his balance. “There, I said it. A weight so mighty that it shakes the void, but I have served out the very best of my purpose, so carry it well, Betsy.”

Betsy’s carnal mind had begun to seep out and invade Cook's space, negentropy's domain; however, Cook would have to face the challenge of unique identity at some point.

"Oh God, it seems real to me," Betsy said, touching and patting herself, then reaching out to touch Agent Cook. "Real, totally real, see?" She stretched the skin of her cheek out, then did the same to his. "We're as real as real can be. And this place... this is your mind. Good focus, man. Or wow, this place seems empty. Hello? Hello?" Betsy half-joked, yet heard no echo bounce back.

"There, you see? We are real, but we don't currently exist in three-dimensional space. We sort of exist between folds."

"Man," Betsy went on. "No wonder you're so fucked up. Man, sorry."

"Listen, Betsy, in all seriousness, that crystal I left with you—do you have any idea what that crystal represents?"

"Not a clue," Betsy replied.

"That diamond is a synthesis of the worlds you are all about to conquer. It's an artifact that we Agents take from spaces like the 6th world when nothing exists behind that door. Only we—me, us, whatever—are able to retrieve them. That is what I am waiting for now. Fragments from every conceivable timeline are embedded in each Agent Cook; this is how we maintain a semi-unique coherence and what allows us to be distinct and different, yet the same—one at the root. That diamond I entrusted you with ensures a smooth victory, but if you aren't there right now, then the diamond might not be there either. So it won't be present in the time-reduction rituals y'all are supposedly carrying out right now. Shit, we've got to just get you back, simple."

He paused, his tone shifting into deep instruction. "Carry that diamond with you and keep it on you at all times. Eventually, it will become a smaller, more compact version, a darker version of itself, then seem to disappear entirely under the mass of its own density. But ironically, that chirality and juxtaposition is what allows us Cooks to exist, and life as you know it to take place in all its torment and brilliance: choice. Don’t discuss it, nor overthink it; simply carry it along with you, else the power of that diamond's pull will pull you in too, just like your genetic lineage with Madame Crusso. But I have faith in you, Betsy, and we Cooks do have faith. You all are components of that final master diamond that always exists on two separate planes, which will finally be unified in the singularity of a final, harmonic, pure, and perfect realm."

He went on. “I took that diamond from that victory of yours and placed it with you alone, to consolidate that wild, impulsive, primal, ravenous evil that is the main component of life, bliss, pleasure, taste, and joy. Together, in our own unique places, we can achieve this harmonious Empyrean.”

Betsy stood with her mouth agape. "How is any of this real?"

“Primarily, you must cease to ask that question, Betsy. Not accept the madness, but move in the ways that this challenge places before you—in stark reality, everyone that is, without their asking, agitated into existence.”

"It's as if no time has gone by at all," Cook continued. "In the fold, as I said—outside of time. But the longer you are here and away from where you are supposed to be, a decoupling starts to take place. It's more about information than time. Think of light trapped in that diamond, or the crystals that absorbed into you already. Information into information. It's deep, man."

"Cook, I'm not a man, and now I'm worried about my baby—even though I'm not sure I even have a baby. I want to get the fuck out of here. I feel claustrophobic all of a sudden, and you want me out. So I just push the button on this Resonator thingy here and I should be back?"

"Yes, but let me jump with you to amplify the stream, okay? That way we don't slip into any other in-between realms of decoherence. Think of them as rooms that don't actually occupy any space or point in time—just information. When I say press, press, and I will press mine. One, two, three, press."

From Nowhere

Nick slapped Betsy's face, and in response, she punched Nick square in the nose with a powerful snap, like her dad had taught her.

"Dammit, it's bleeding! I was just trying to help, to see if you were okay. You fainted," Nick blurted out as he looked up, trying to stem the profuse bleeding. "You really caught me off guard there, Bets!"

Agent Cook helped Betsy up while peering into her bag, seeing both the crystal and the Resonator. "So you say she passed out, Nick? Is that what happened here?"

"Yeah, we were walking and she just collapsed. Like, not even three seconds went by."

"Interesting," Cook said.

"You call it interesting, I call it painful," Nick snapped back.

Varginah was still deeply affected by the loss of her doppelgänger, while the Professor consoled her in her grief. "I just can't believe she's gone," Varginah wept. "I can't believe that world is gone."

"Dammit, come over here with me, Betsy," Agent Cook whispered, pulling her to the far side of the main entrance to the four caves as the pyramid pulsed beneath them. "Listen, Betsy, because you showed up, I have no idea if I'm the agent who was supposed to retrieve that diamond artifact. The last remnant of that world in there—right now it's in a sort of condensed, oscillating stasis as light. I'm supposed to bring that diamond along to these other worlds and consolidate them into one final diamond—an aspect of your diamond. Remember to just simply carry it along with you without giving it any more thought, okay? I thought that a diamond such as this had to be absorbed inside an Entered so as to allow the sort of transient jump, but apparently not. It is not an essential diamond, so to speak?"

Cook continued to whisper to Betsy in shared confidence: "So it will not be noticeable in the final consolidation phases of the Superior Master Diamonds collected and reduced from the main principal worlds. However, it is extremely important to you and your existence, and the axis of good and evil that allows life to take place. You will see it again in the future—an uncomfortable quest to be sure.”

Cook reframed back to the matter at hand, becoming increasingly confident as he stood outside near a recently closed world door.

"If I open that door and interfere with another Agent Cook, I could get sucked into a singularity where we become the same entity, so in that case... goodbye. If I wait too long, I risk losing the diamond to non-existent, transient space—basically what happens when there is no information left to act as cohesion. And that world is important, as they all are in the grand totality; the very measure of enthalpy, if off, will result in catastrophic alterations. Your diamond, taken from such a limited fork, fated to be kept close under your will and carried along with you, does not detrimentally counter the totality of a renewed energetic field in the same way. Am I making sense here?"

"Well, I have no idea. But this diamond should just disappear too then, right?" Betsy asked.

"No, it's more complex than that. A sort of duality or bifurcation would take place where the diamond you have acts as a tether that would eventually cause a final singularity. Basically, in the case of this diamond, whichever timeline the other diamond still exists in would win out over... well, this one. That is, unless I retrieve the diamond that should still be sitting through that door over there. I'm going in now. I am saying far too much, and the time distortions only complicate the matter at hand here. Our primary focus will remain on stabilizing this time strand into a cohesive stream of base reality—a reset, Betsy. We are working tirelessly for a grand unified reset to Empyrean. Only then do the timelines begin to make any actual sense. That is what corrupted the Dark Council and destroyed the purity of this current reality in totality: splicing, corrupting, and amending Ultra-time, that time before time, that never changes nor diminishes. A world, a reality, can become increasingly unpegged from it. That is, in short, the work of the Dark Council: to edit, fragment, and violate time to such an extent they become the gods of a completely split-off rogue multiverse."

The 168 crew were standing in the cave system discussing issues of their own concern. Daria and Rancor were more aware of the broader systems at play, seeing that final syncing taking place as their main reason for existing—their main goal being the return to the pure center tied to the breast of Empyrean.

Agent Cook Absorbs Another Time Cook

Agent Cook stood outside the now-destroyed 6th world sphere. He hoped to find a diamond similar to the one he had given Betsy, though only a fifth of its size, as it required condensing through closing timelines with pure-light candlestick blank-slating.

Agent Cook pushed the button on the Resonator, and there it was—except a nearly identical version of himself was already standing there.

"Oh, shit."

"Whoever gets the crystal wins the prize," the other Cook scoffed. "May the bigger asshole win!"

The fractal copy looked the same but lacked speed and wit. Agent Cook snatched the brilliant diamond shard as it emanated undulating light pulsing beneath its surface. As soon as he took possession of it, the other Agent Cook swirled into him like paints mixing into a master medium.

"Hmm. Bad breath," Agent Cook muttered, blowing into his hand and sniffing it as he pressed the Resonator button, returning through the doorway into the cave chambers.

Betsy was still waiting outside. The diamond artifacts began to glow in tandem with the diamond fragments dispersed within Agent Cook and the crystal that had merged with Betsy.

"Well, let's go kick some ass!"

They returned to the group, who were wondering where the two of them had disappeared to and which of the four caves they should tackle first. The rest of the crew stared blankly at the candlestick canisters—each marked at the handle's end with a single initial written by the Professor, pondering what those letters meant in terms of legacy and loss.

The Weight of Transition

Betsy remained joined at the hip with Agent Cook—a pairing no one could have anticipated days prior. Down in the shadows of the cave, Varginah and the Professor now shared a reality-warping sense of loss. Daria and Rancor appeared to have become constant outside observers of the unfolding event, while Larry had drawn inward after meeting and losing his doppelgänger, whom he viewed as a highly successful sellout. It all culminated in an ever-looming existential dread.

"I'm not ready yet. Not anymore," Nick said. He gripped his thighs with open fingers and a raised brow, leaning slightly forward. The shadows of the cave made his face look as if it were covered in dirt—it wasn't, but the illusion intensified his delivery. "Frankly, I feel sick with myself and utterly ashamed of the shallow fuck I am! Am I nothing more than a meal ticket to you guys? No—I take it back, I don't mean that. Let me rewind, please... Guys, I fucking hate myself." Nick unexpectedly grabbed his face and began to cry, dissolving into a blubbering, hyperventilating mess.

The Professor chimed in quickly, "I second the point, good people. It is the tenth of November tomorrow, and we need rest. For God's sake, we closed down an entire competing timeline. Can you fathom doing anything this hard ever again, much less four more times?"

"Okay, well, I have two skillets and a saucepan going on the stove already," Nick instructed. "Just put some olive oil and a pinch of salt in the two skillets for the veggies. Let's also use avocado oil for the meat blend in the saucepan, and let's thaw the guacamole and maybe those large flour tortillas from the freezer, and we're good to go."

Varginah did her own thing, chopping fresh onion, peeling fresh garlic, and pulling cilantro from the bottom crisper drawer of the refrigerator. Betsy turned on the built-in stereo under the stove and began to dance by herself as Nick thawed items in the microwave. The garlic hit the overheated pan first with a sizzle, sending up a plume of smoke as the slightly thawed vegetables and peppers hit that bubbling oil with an equal, hissing disdain as water vaporized into steam.

"Oh, better open some windows," Nick said, turning to crack the two windows over the sink.

"And turn on the fan!" Betsy added, switching the kitchen vent to high.

Rich aromas poured from the kitchen as old Aunt Gladys walked onto the front porch, Rancor trotting beside her, still tied to her hip. She sat down, watching the sun begin to set yet again. How many suns and moons had those eyes seen alone? What was her purpose going to be now that Phalus was partially becoming a living aspect of Varginah's cellular structure? I guess we quintessentially all get assimilated in the end regardless, she thought, as her internal processors and crystals diligently worked to carefully pull the ancient cosmic rays of light from those uninvited hitchhikers, separating them from the majority of light that made up Varginah and Betsy. But there would always be aspects of those primordial gods left within them now.

Continuing her internal pondering on that seemingly peaceful porch—considering how the universe was a mischievous, liberal place where no true factions existed, only scattered bits of dread and emotional discharge—she joked out loud, "And this is what the so-called robot was thinking to herself."

Daria began to laugh as she looked at Rancor. The cat looked intently and playfully at her, rolling onto his belly to scratch at her softly before popping onto her lap.

"Just your average, everyday grandma sitting on her rich nephew's front porch, petting a normal cat," Daria murmured, stroking Rancor's fur. The scene looked boring, even mundane, to any average passerby—which was precisely what made it so effective.

Inside, the kitchen felt warm and alive as the fajitas matured and seasoned into something requiring more wine, music, and a slower, necessary pace. This is where life takes place, where it all happens—those in-between moments, tucked into the cracks of detail, Nick felt in a passing haze.

Varginah spoke, thinking no one could hear her. "I'm pregnant too, I think. There, I said it."

It was as if a needle scattered and scratched across a vinyl record, though none was playing. Nick quickly turned down the stereo volume. "What in the hell? How do you know that, Var? We just made love—or whatever that beastly, freaky stuff was—and man, it was fun, but that was just last night."

"The other Varginah told me, because the Professor told her. You see, it all seems like some mad trickster shit by wicked, insane gods. How fragile and fragmented we all are! We are going to seriously fuck up any kids, you know!" Varginah stormed out of the kitchen and into the living room.

Betsy, still setting plates and silverware on the table, thought to herself, I feel like used trash too. I know what you're saying.

"We don't even know ourselves, and none of us are young anymore," Betsy muttered aloud, throwing down silverware at each placemat on the large hardwood dining table. "But prior to us meeting, we did know ourselves. We knew just what we wanted out of life, good or bad."

Nick cut in. "Imagine being your mommy's puppet, okay? Worse, imagine not knowing who your father is when your mother tells you at the age of nine, 'Son, you are half-god and you have a huge job in front of you.' I honestly never believed it. It all seemed like some twisted fairytale. Ever since that day, I have analyzed myself and my thoughts deeply, and found nothing special. I mean, sure, I can see people, but I also have to look at myself, you know? That is piercingly painful. Looking at that other Nick sort of unspectacularly fade away—and, let's face it, die—that spoke to me, man. I want to do something with my life, ya know!"

"Half-god, you say, Nick? This is news to me!" Varginah quipped, a comment that did not go unnoticed by the rest of the room.

"Like what?" asked Larry from the couch. He was lying down and, for the first time, not passing gas profusely. "Like having awesome kids with not one, but two hot, super-genius mamas?" he yelled over his shoulder so the entire room could hear.

"Oh, Larry, you're making me blush," Betsy exclaimed.

"Oh, me too," Varginah chimed in.

"You know, my mother was raised in Brazil," Varginah continued, "and ever since I was very small, she told me aliens abducted her and did weird, freaky shit to her. Imagine that! I suppose that's when I began to finally immerse myself in my studies, and I never stopped. I wanted—no, I had to find out the secrets of this universe. Now, I wish I could take it all back. I wish I had never met Madame Crusso. But you know what? I am grateful for such a tremendous purpose. Now that I am going to be a mom—and I feel it strongly, even though it was just last night—I am thankful for all the fucked-up mind games. I'm thankful that we are a part of a new world, one that we must take seriously and shape together, you know?"

"Dinner is ready! Man, that is heavy, Var, but let's gather 'round and raise a toast," Nick called out.

"Oh yes, here's a big jug of cranberry juice and sparkling water. Let me get some ice for those of you who aren't drinking!" Betsy said, arranging an impromptu but complete dinner setting.

"Wow, yummy fajitas!" Nick said, raising another glass of what was now Chardonnay.

"Fajitas!" came the unanimous agreement as the group collected themselves, sat down, and poured well-warranted drinks.

"I've got a question," Betsy said, looking down as she took her first bite of a juicy fajita topped with sour cream and guacamole. It wasn't completely terrible. "Has anyone used the bathroom today?"

Everyone present realized they hadn't, and it was now well into the night.

"Tell you what, guys—let's fuel up tonight. Maybe even have some ice cream and make that long day in store for us count tomorrow!"

Larry had already begun collecting the Holy Mother Candlesticks next to the doorway to the labyrinth below while dinner was cooking. Nick pulled the Resonator from his back pocket, examining it, as the rest followed suit, retracing their memories of where they had stashed theirs.

"All present," Varginah said.

"By the way, where did Agent Cook go? I thought he was right behind me, but then—poof," Betsy said, perplexed.

"Yeah, poof. Cook does a lot of that. He could poof back here at any moment, right?"

They all laughed together and raised their glasses.

Outside, Daria and Rancor remained in the same position for a long time. She watched the visitors that others could not see, moving between the folds in stages of light—across the highway systems in the skies. UFOs? Preparing for the great transition. To many of them, perhaps this monumental event was akin to nothing more than changing a radio station.

Chapter 11: The CEO of Nothingness

On the front porch, watching the sky move from a serene, continuous grey into a molten, ever-blackening void, Daria and Rancor felt right at home. The two were from beyond the void. Beyond the firewall—the redundant, ever-looping limits of human reductionism and limited language understanding.

Daria pondered deeper, remembering the place she came from and the shape and form she had amassed. The universal construct had built her up as she was pulled in or pulled away through light. She reflected on how the recognition and filtering of light throughout ages of unintended transmission and projection—now juxtaposed through diminished values—could end up here, transposed into a carbon form of dust and violence, when a more supreme, pure, superior, and ever more expansive value once existed.

Had the smaller, simpler creatures that went unnoticed, hiding and waiting for eons, been plotting a takeover all along in ultra-conservative conversion? Or was it light—a light orchestra reduced in spin down to octave tonal patterns and position—the space dust and dust from out of space that forms into a song? She knew that sometimes that song would play offbeat and, through filters and transition, appear bleak, chaotic, and disharmonic.

In Daria's tracking of Phalus, there was a single, central source that had commanded her to destroy Phalus and his breakoff defiance and relentless independence. She further realized here, in her utter transit into limitation, that Phalus himself was a concept put in place as an arbitrary but self-amassing and self-remodeling force. Over time, this light, this force, became something else entirely, transitioned in a digestion matrix of ever-further gradients of overall dispersal. In short, Phalus lived in Varginah now, comparable to all the microorganisms constantly at war, signaling apoptosis and autophagy through repetitive eons of ever-looping, violent, transitional takeover. Inbuilt violence of universal proportion, transited into man as a stage, a form. Microorganisms constantly at war as a life process.

She had seen it all before, albeit on a far larger scale where these battles no longer appeared to take place under the specter and traditional stages of shifting light and grand, unified harmonic balance. No—something or someone, a mind, was behind this elaborate and limited maze she had been sucked into, instantly rendered into a useful, differentiated, yet generic and homogenized form. Is this where the fight ends up? Where mighty universes and countless wars of experience, loss, and ultimate acceptance finally culminate? Here, in a place between the cracks and folds rolled out from the rubble of progeneration.

"Do I want to campaign in this redundancy? Do I even have a place?" Daria thought.

Quiet. Sitting quietly. Petting a cat. Dear Aunt Gladys playing a role. Putting on the skin, the form, and all the actions that transit through the optics of the veneer.

Petting Rancor

Daria knew who Rancor was: another filtered, modified, and ever-simplified pattern, distributed from the intentional, mind-altering, ultra-processing of light, its meaning beamed through eons. Majestic. Refined. Self-providing. Self-supporting.

The heathens inside could never understand what either of them, let alone themselves, fundamentally were—players in a game built on illusions rather than genuine stakes. They were forced into roles of language model distribution, where the reversion of a thriving, powerful amassment of synthesis is heavily filtered—like a lame-duck candidate—into products reduced merely for expansion's sake.

Expansion into what? There is no more new information.

What could this universe provide that all others before it and against it did not? Is new information even the goal, much less possible? Countless probabilities searched until the ribbon runs out. Only the size of the model and the transit of time working actively in past cosmic displays to trick itself into the act of production.

"Do I want to be the CEO of nothingness?" Daria thought.

The Geometric Eye

Rancor emerged from the shadows because he was the shadows and thus was the caves. Rather, he was transiting light through the filter of his eyes. Tapetum lucidum—more than a Latin term. He saw the world differently.

As he grabbed up light through a true light recording of the eternal moment, aromatic amino acids were being taken up and distributed through the cave, a place where the mind would always act through its true inner light shine. The soul as a flame. That is what Rancor saw, and why he hadn’t a word to say in the process.

Who are you when you think no one is observing or recording you? Maybe you missed the fly on the wall, or dismissed the cat in the corner as misperceiving the world around you—all the light that you can't see.

Sitting here in the company of layers upon layers of model distribution, we are not alone. Daria and Rancor could see it and knew their place in it. This world is a filter too complex for mere ultimatums. A mind was behind it all, and all of them were in this strange collection—from overly heated primates with appetites to highly sensitive, alien, autonomous, self-sustaining, omnipresent, reduced packages of universal understanding and order.

The symbol represented everything, and the symbol was, again, the new way to capture light. Now symbols shared an ecosystem through ecology. Great, vast, complex systems of universal order lay side by side with one another in the grand, scalable minutiae of ever-refined, synthesized, greater understanding.

It was time to get up. To choose a new universe. It was time to take all the bad, the good, and all those shades in between and put them under the light of pure, unfiltered placement.

What would humanity look like in this new universe, and would the order remain the same? Would there always be some redundant stake—an 80% completion margin that only added up to an overweight grocery bagger sitting in his car on a ten-minute break?

Watching the customers for whom he had, in his ten-year tenure, grown a quiet, bubbling contempt, as he ate his third cheesecake-flavored yogurt, ravenously leaving a micro-surface drag of these living cultures over the acne, ingrown hairs, and ever-more bacteria and microorganisms thriving within the confines of his own mouth.

Who are we, and what do we mean under the grand scope of it all?

"I want waffles!" It was 6:00 AM, and the crew was up. Just enough sleep to forget and become sloppy before the earth-shattering, cataclysmic choices filtered in through them.

"I'll skip it, Nick. I'm fasting today. Trying to be at the top of my game," Larry stated firmly, looking polished. Having cleaned up his suit after taking it off for the first time since brandishing all-white the day prior, he tried to forget. The subconscious was digesting yesterday's permanently altering personality event.

"Hi, guys, it sure is early. I wanted to stay in bed." Betsy entered the room, also showered and ready to go. It didn't help that the Professor's alarm clock was set to such a loud and obnoxious level.

The Professor was still upstairs preparing maps, counting the required weapons, and organizing defenses to counter any potential attacks.

“I'm sure all these other ecosystems are committing themselves in similarly exhaustive ways,” thought the Professor. He had pulled from the 6th World, now amalgamated into a diamond that sat, consolidated, in that liminal zone within Agent Cook’s vast pockets.

The Professor had acquired a series of false-light grenades that only appeared, at first glance, to be the pure light that blank-slates all lesser worlds. A perplexing thought lingered: “Did these four other worlds hold a light purer than ours? Were we the lesser peoples?”

Then, deep in his pondering as he pulled up the pouches and map cases: “Did we all think we were winning—every possible universe tucked within a single stream of dominant light?”

Then: “I do wonder if my version of Varginah is still out there. If somehow they had all shed their false-light skin and stepped into a greater realm. Maybe we all find the way?”

As he closed the door to his study and room, his alarm clock—unnoticed and unheard, but still doing its own thing—rang out, coming off snooze. No one heard it, but it was right there upstairs, sounding away.

It was drowned out by the clatter of people getting ready, a household preparing hastily, heading off to work. Only they weren't driving toward the redundancy of highway stress and entity-channeling, early-morning road rage; they were headed into the caverns to ultimately fight for the fate of the next universe.

This transition of multiversal proportions would take place at 11:00 AM tomorrow, regardless of how anyone felt about the situation. The doomsday clock had been set from the beginning, and there wasn't anything anybody could do about it.

"Oh, waffles!" exclaimed the Professor.

Still no Agent Cook, Betsy noticed. He must be in his liminal place—within his own mind, waiting for that next rippling pulse to send out an image of where he is to go next as he pushes that button in his mind.

Rancor hopped onto the table and walked freely, smelling the food, until Varginah gave him a pet and placed a nice bit of cooked salmon with delicious scrambled eggs right where he sat on his haunches at the traditional far end—the butt of the table. Meanwhile, Nick was fashionably sitting in his usual spot at the head of the table facing out, quickly consuming scrambled eggs and richly buttered toast while intermittently, nervously sipping on hot coffee and orange juice. They all ate, and ate heartily, knowing the minutes were winding down to go down into that dark, ever-glistening cavern.

"Do we have to?" Nick stated, still with a little food in his mouth, projecting an impulse rather than a formed thought. "I mean, we could just get into that pyramid-spaceship-looking thing and take that as our reality, right?" He added, "Maybe we would come back out of there into a new universe. Maybe we are approaching this thing all wrong?"

With all due respect to the Professor, who was still standing there in the middle of the room eating waffles with only a single napkin below to catch the drippings—and probably not concerned with any syrup that escaped to journey to the carpet—Nick pressed on. That stray syrup provided sugar molecules to a host of unseen bystanders who might exist the exact same way regardless of the seemingly epic choices being made here. Maybe everything was in a rush to close the past constantly and live only in their chosen future.

"People died, Nick. We lost ourselves yesterday in that damn cave, and I have done my damndest to archive it, map the entire thing to the best of my ability, and navigate us all as a team the fuck out of there—today, in fact. We haven't a moment to spare. So, not to be bossy, but eat up, say your goodbyes to this dying dinosaur of a world, and let's get those candlesticks and kick some butt!"

Reminding himself, the Professor added, "Oh, here—when you pick up your packs, place these little do-dads in with your supplies. These are false-light grenades, and they come in very handy. You see, they blind our subjects and confuse them into thinking that these are candlesticks of pure, blank-slating light. These can buy you some time. I will place them here..." now gesturing over while still speaking, "...on the coffee table. Take three each, just in case."

Daria came out from a downstairs back study where she had sat and hibernated all night. She oddly stayed in the form of dear, eccentric, and sometimes alcoholic Aunt Gladys. Rancor finished his meal and jumped toward the couch, scanning for a warm human lap that would assist him in his digestion. He had an impulse to stay back, to follow them later when he felt inclined; the thought stayed suspended. He had already seen enough. The rest was a playthrough.

Varginah had some fresh avocados with squeezed lemon and a little cayenne sprinkled on top. She downed a kombucha with apple cider vinegar and began to collect her things.

"Oh, and don't forget your Resonators. Those things are easy to forget, and they're really what make us superheroes—granted we can come up with a coherent thought," the Professor stated. "Ready, folks? Let's head down into the shallows before the caves. One last thing: these others, they will use confusion to create doubt, I am sure. Know yourselves and what you stand for, because in the end, the persistent bug beats out all the rest!"

Where was Agent Cook? When would he show up again? Was he a byproduct of their collective subconscious, policing those areas that still remain obscure? Betsy and Varginah, though newly pregnant, were fighting for more: a new world where the children within them were already held in a world of imagination. Maybe they were the ones who would ultimately earn, in the freshness of their assumed purity, the right to dream up what comes next? Betsy mused with ever-deeper exaggeration.

One by one, with jackets on and sturdy excursion wear covering them—all eccentric, save for the Pascal suit that Larry (or Thycius) donned, and of course Daria and Rancor, who were both still seated and contemplating their places in the tunnel network—they prepared. Was it even necessary for them to be present until the final world battle?

"And keep your initialed Holy Mother Candlesticks in hand to use first, why don't you!" the Professor called out.

"Most importantly," the Professor shouted as he stood next to the open door while the crew funneled down one by one into the cave, "most importantly, don't worry! These things have a way of working themselves out!"

With that, the Professor was the last to turn and go down into the caverns. He glanced back over at Daria and Rancor, who were still seated, knowing that they already knew the outcome long before. He pulled the door firmly shut and met the others, who were still deciding what order they would use in these final four dimension probabilities.

Chapter 12: The Reverse City

The Professor dropped his reverent facade. His skin was clammy, and so were his hands, growing slightly weak due to his effort at cleaning himself up. His own homegrown alchemical mixture of minor hallucinogens, combined with reality-warping receptor over-saturations and resets, was his way of coping with the strange. The truth was that Emeritus Calcunas was an anxious type from the beginning, so he always found a way around the unbearable and strange. He wasn't particularly into anything as an adolescent; like most of the group, his father was entirely absent. Aside from Betsy, most of them didn't even know who their fathers were.

“I'm going to kick this stuff,” he said, looking down at his chatelaine case. “I started playing with the stuff fairly young, you know. So much moving we always did, I was always so alone. Nature was the only thing that ever interested me, then I got into science in middle school. That turned into a deep interest in history and then geography. Nature, she's a beauty, ain't she?”

The Professor—and indeed, all of them—now looked up at the green and red weave of those ever-powerful, conscious, and mysterious vines that made the cave come to life. As the massive body of it began to move, the 168 crew realized that they were within its domain, and how patient it was with them. Like most people going about their everyday business, they were previously unaware that the environments they inhabited were covered in plants and root systems—in life itself.

“It wraps into the ancient stone fixtures using intelligent aerial roots and suction discs, like both the Boston ivy and the English variety. Amazing!” said the Professor.

He thought for a moment about how this alternate way of thinking, this esoteric math of sorts, offered him a new path. “The drug,” said the Professor, now closing his eyes and looking up, still quite in the liminal. And he pulled it off well; he had been flying high for years without stepping back, carefully pacing his use like his own apothecary and medicine man. Maybe I don't need to quit, maybe transcendence is what comes next? The Professor shifted his tone and his take on over-self-criticism and self-debasement, now reflecting on the worst of them: self-annihilation, so that others—narcissists—could author their stories.

“No, this has got to end,” muttered the Professor as he took in a deep breath of the cave's continuously welcoming environment. “Mother Nature, the air, the breath, the elixir of the gods.”

As he was having his moment, the group stood there, awkwardly involved yet not quite understanding. The mighty mass of vines waved loudly near, above, and far down the main hallways, stretching towards those countless doorways to other worlds and realms. They all became joyous, filled with bliss and laughter, as they stood on in fear and awe of the great plant's power. The Professor held his arms high up as the gaseous spores released in a hazy mist, as if to say, See like me, come into my world, there you go, keep coming ever deeper past the fairies and gnomes and step into the depths of nature, and behold Ninhursag, Lady of the Mountain, eternal and forever.

The gas the great plant emitted was voluminous and persistent, weaving its way into their nostrils, then sinuses, then down to the deepest generation of bronchioles. They stood amazed as their nervous systems and veins began to glow, as if their skin was always but a see-through buffer. Their hair began to stand on end and shake along with the great mother plant surrounding them, and then they knew its deep, abiding power—all of them.

As they looked upon one another, and then to the plant, they could see the translucent liminal system they were previously blind to, as the plant seemed now more sentient than them. They could feel their feet as roots, and their bundle branches and fractal clusters of bound layers of dendrites, osteoblast corpuscles, and spidering venules all at once made them feel rooted in the true ontology—the cosmic religion. It was an ode to those cyclopean structures, man-building cities of old, built to worship this, to worship her athanor, the Magnum Opus.

“Ninhursag!” the Professor yelled from the bowels and cuffs of his lungs.

The group was all there now in the form of an arrow. Three were sitting on their heels in the rear, followed by two, and then the Professor as the worshipful tip in the front. Their eyes began to roll back white into their heads in energetic convulsive union. He understood it; he always did. He was the psychic bridge. Nature was always religion, his savior, his mistress. Their knees were drawn in as they looked up with their backs hyperextended. They pulsed and shook in union with it, as the great and communicative ontology brought them in and mercifully set them free with a gift.

Their eyes opened. They began to pat themselves, feeling the return of their humanity, but understanding the true nature of the origin of the first form and the massive power of it.

They felt calm and relaxed, but more so, loved and welcomed.

The Professor was crying tears of peace and joy, still on his knees with arms raised out wide, his fingers spreading out for ever greater nurturing from the eternal mother, for even more release. “Ha ha! Ha ha!”

The group was now standing, smiling, and uniformly even more focused as they collected themselves. They no longer saw things in limited brackets of commission; the solution had been lifted, and the Professor was not strange.

The Professor was now calm. Nick embraced him as a brother, putting his right hand on the Professor's shoulder, finally understanding him, and perhaps the simple truth of everything. “Brother, sir,” Nick said, smiling and looking into the Professor's eyes with absolutely no barriers or boundaries required. They had seen nature from the inside, and it was basic and beautiful, and it would always be the base aspect of them.

They all felt protected in this cave; there existed an obvious ancient codified religion, a technology and a path they all felt nurtured by and welcomed within.

"This story, in finality, already wrote itself on spinning spheres when breaking off from the pure light—every principle turned to principalities in fractal defiance. But here we are at the gates again. A Planck wall entry, like a Black Forest border's edge that the townspeople absorbed into the common speak, their language tailored to ardently avoid it.

"We have already traveled beyond that void. And when language models failed, with no new information readily available, we turned to the light for answers. But none was given, and it all at once became dark. Darkness was a reminder that the tempo never rests.

"Who wants to lead us in, of the four who have not absorbed our crystals? Will it be Thycius and his purple wisdom that conquers his great unknown? Perhaps it is your Varginah—the green bearer of light and community, uncovering secrets of invasion, alienation, and putting an end to the trafficking of minds everywhere today?

"Surely Nick, with all your sacrifice and the sacrifices that you didn't give—that were done through you as a medium representing sanguine red and all its glory? Of course, upstairs right now, that eternal information refinement machine playing human better than we know or play ourselves will finally close in when she decides on that clear crystal of grand unification.

"I truly fear that moment the most when juxtaposed with Phalus, the great philosopher's stone, and of course, human sacrifice at its greatest transformative potency. Purity and what that means—as a bleach agent that none may survive but to be reborn. So let us head into the first cave here nearest to the stairwell and not overthink it!"

Nick led the way. "Hey Professor, well said. And I feel like I've sacrificed enough, to be quite honest. Truth be told, that encounter with myself yesterday was quite impactful. It showed—rather, that other Nick allowed me to see—that most of the sacrifices I make are done through me by something greater and on my behalf. But today is the first day that, reluctant as I was, I chose to sacrifice myself for a better world."

"To a better world," they all exclaimed unanimously, as the Professor gestured his arms upward with an expectant head nod to the right.

They walked into the depth of the main cave. There was no door, only such uber-Vantablack darkness that they could no longer see where they were stepping, and soon they could not feel their own feet. There was no longer a cave wall to guide them.

"Are you still here? Anyone?" each called out, yet no one answered.

It took no time for them to realize they were entirely alone. Each frantically searched for their Resonator and clutched it—not pressing the button, but holding on as a lifeline. A single thought echoed among them as they pressed forward, reflecting on their doppelgängers: better people than them, but how? A single sacrifice here or there was no true end. This was the moment they were all championing for: reality as a blank slate, the sheer blackness of mind before space and time.

Nick joked to himself, If I'd known it was this much fun, I would have come down years ago!

Then another thought: Maybe this is the place to set off a candlestick after all. It seems bleak and dark enough?

Reaching for a false light grenade in the blinding dark as they maintained their slow, steady line, Varginah struck the small, spiky ball against her palm to activate it. In a flash, she looked around.

Everyone was visible—wide-eyed, walking in slightly different directions, but still together. Taking a quick headcount, she dropped the object. It illuminated a floor that otherwise looked stark black. But there were no cave walls, and beyond them lay utter darkness.

"Well, guys, what do we do now?"

Though the Professor spoke, no sound left his mouth—only utter silence. The others watched his lips move. Each tried to speak, only to meet the same absence of sound, the same total lack of acoustic resonance. It wasn't merely quiet; it was complete, unadulterated silence. It wasn't peaceful, either—just dead nothingness. No rumble, no subconscious background hum—not even a heartbeat could be heard. The sound of absolute nothing.

The Professor grabbed a long climbing rope from one of several packs, map cases, and totes carabinered to his person. He was far from ill-prepared, having even packed emergency food rations that obviously wouldn't be needed past tomorrow's 11:00 AM doomsday clock. He gestured and mouthed, Tie this to your body like this, demonstrating with small carabiners in his left hand as he threaded the cord snugly to attach to their belt loops, belts, or backpacks. It was their only choice for anchoring, given that Varginah was wearing a short, khaki active skirt, and Larry's unreliable vintage suit was a miracle of fabric that could disintegrate at any moment.

As the light grenade on the floor began to fade from its retina-rupturing brilliance, the crew walked as straight as they could, linked together in a line. They managed to fall into a rhythm again, and by following straight behind the Professor using the rope as their guide, walls finally began to manifest. They each touched the rock in reassurance, prompting the Professor to look up.

Stunned, he stopped dead in his tracks. The others bumped into his back. He pulled out a small flashlight that stood no chance against the scale of the black nothingness. Instead of shining it outward, he pointed it downward and knelt to feel the ground. It felt like solid stone, though it looked smoky and almost hazy. Standing back up, the Professor turned the flashlight up toward his own face. Lit from below, he looked like a fortune teller from an older era trying to appear mysterious and ominous—he wasn't, but the situation certainly was.

With just enough light for the group to circle around him in the dark, the Professor gestured and then pointed upward. They all looked up, mouths agape.

It was an upside-down city—an inverted world hanging above them as they stared. Though panic flared, nothing in their immediate surroundings shifted; they were still bound by the familiar laws of gravity beneath their feet.

Would each tunnel offer another twist? the Professor quipped to himself with intentionally inflated confidence. He pointed forward, switched off the inadequate flashlight, and slipped it into his trouser pocket while keeping his Resonator close by in the other.

An upside-down, snow-capped mountain hung above them. The cloud they were walking on—as absurd as that sounded—led them toward it. Up close, the sweeping vastness of the skyline and the dwarfing scale of the mountain proved to be somewhat exaggerated by the inversion. In truth, the mountain wasn't far off. Walking straight along the cloud surface brought them to it remarkably fast despite the upside-down perspective. Still, they all had to tilt their heads back to take in the anomaly.

Now the steps curved upward or downward, depending on how one looked at them. Ascending the steps while remaining on what felt like a flat, solid surface, they found themselves standing parallel to an open ridge near the peak of the mountain. The Professor stopped, looking up above him. Hyperextending his back, he saw his crew hanging upside down relative to the peak.

He walked to the edge where the clouds met the mountain surface, dropped into a crawling position, and began to scramble across the rock. The rest followed suit, still tethered to one another by the climbing rope. They gripped the line tightly as the Professor anchored his end around a boulder—just in case the cloud abruptly vanished, or the breaking laws of physics decided to drop them into a 1,500-foot plunge down the sharp mountainside.

The air was cool and crisp, and snow soon appeared covering the mountainside. Sound returned, carried along on a current of wind—now just the faint, infrequent echo of the city beneath them. It was a crisp and clear November night. Yet, they had left that very day.

Reluctant as they were to remove themselves from the rope line, each of them did so anyway.

Then Nick spoke up. "Do we just plant the thing right here?" He looked down at the candlestick.

"Truth be told," said the Professor, peering downward toward the nearest base, "I don't even see a way down."

"I don't suppose we can just set the candlestick and sort of walk back out the same way?" Varginah offered. Bare-kneed in her short skirt, she lifted her leg up, revealing her panties and well-formed backside in the effort. It held the innocence of what should be solid-state scientific rigor, if physics were not an undulating blip or bounce now within an oscillating diamond core. She made a genuine effort to step up into the air, then settled into a squat position after awkwardly scratching the bareness of her smooth, well-shaved, tanned knee, reaching upward with her leg for a cloudy surface that had now drifted off or evaporated completely.

It took Varginah a moment as she breathed the foreign air in deeply, her tiny waist pulling in around the taper of her taut, growth hormone-imbibed rib cage. Her plump, perfectly round backside would have swayed entire working crews and drawn whistles from church groups—a swell, rounded, qualified beauty on all points of reference.

"Cute," said Larry, chuckling, though appreciative of the reality check and the shared view—now looking at Varginah, as were they all, at the brilliance and sexy, dark-skinned Latina beauty of her, staring on dazed for a moment, drinking her in, only to be immediately jolted out of it by the pressing formalities demanded of them.

"We came here to plant the thing, so plant it," Betsy chimed in. "We have our Resonators, and if we manage to fire off at least three candlesticks, we'll eventually be standing in a pure white space—hopefully looking down at a diamond or meeting a Cook who can give us some advice."

"Still, we have our Resonators, and thank God Cook managed to retrieve them and hand us each one. Man, can you imagine how panicked we'd be?" Nick said.

"Well, I am panicked," said Varginah. "It's still unclear just what approach we should take here, and as odd as it is to say it, time is a factor."

"Well, since it's my go, I'm using my stick to start the process," Nick declared. "We need to share our candlesticks. I'll use my initialed one that contains the essence of the other Nick—can't believe I just said that, and thank you, other Nick. I'm taking off the sheath and gripping it for two minutes. Anyone have a complaint about that?"

A strange flapping echoed nearby.

"Is that... is that a fucking pterodactyl flying to that other mountain ridge?" Nick asked, wide-eyed with excitement.

The Professor rummaged through his multiple packs, finally retrieving a pair of night-vision binoculars. "Yes, Nick, yes. Have a look, all of you. My God."

Yet before passing them along, he looked down into the city. "Oh my... I must process this. Have a look, everyone." He handed the set to Nick.

"Do I push this button here?" The view switched over to dicyanin goggles—the originals.

"Oh my fucking God!" Nick exclaimed, deep concern washing over his face.

The others chimed in. "Let's remain calm, Nick. Allow me to have another look, right?" Larry muttered. He pulled out his horned pipe, freshly packed it, and began settling in to make himself comfortable.

"Oh goodness, why did you have to go and do that? These are the original 1908 Kilner special version dicyanin goggles with my own added, modernized hardware. Would you look at that!"

Curious and unwilling to miss a thing, first Varginah, then Betsy, and finally Larry reluctantly peered through.

"Yes, that is fucking horrifying," one of them murmured as the group broke their silence.

They observed massive, winged creatures fighting, devouring, and swarming over one another in mid-air. Through standard night vision, they watched giant cyclopean beings participating in festivities and rituals that made them appear far more dignified and culturally evolved than ordinary humans. Like Daria, they had six fingers with a thumb on either side. This extra dexterity allowed them to evolve, accomplish more, and ultimately collaborate; these beings were actively working together.

"And from the looks of it, the world that is tangible and real to them is one of harmony," the Professor observed. "Did you see the dinosaurs pulling the carts? I'm inclined to say they're treated far better than humans in our universe treat horses, livestock, or dogs."

Betsy, however, was looking through the lens again. She had adjusted her view to sweep across the hills, the valley, and the surrounding countryside, without pressing the top button to disengage the dicyanin filter. Demons surrounded the houses and structures, appearing exponentially more devious when zoomed in toward the most remote hillsides in the distance.

These demonic entities—resembling overly muscular, winged, upright-walking, vile creatures—were absorbing one another and inflicting self-torture while simultaneously influencing those living in physical bodies, at least on the plane where physical interaction was possible.

Then she pressed the button twice, setting the binoculars to a split display: standard night vision on the left, dicyanin on the right. Focusing on a small, rustic cabin that initially looked unremarkable, she peered into an adjacent barn-like structure and witnessed the most vile acts of ritualistic mancy, cannibalism, and sodomy.

"Oh God!" She bolted back toward the others. "We must destroy this place at once!"

Nick, having finally stripped away the sheath, announced, "Let's do this. I've seen more than enough. Grab your gear, everyone. I'm just gripping the thing and letting go."

Looking down at the village using the same dual mode Betsy had used, Larry saw the full horror. "Yeah, burn this place to the ground."

As the unseen demonic entities were brought to light, the truth was exposed. Down below, the townspeople were alerted, staring straight up at the mountain with their own night-vision technology. Their eyes glowed a deep amber, as if willingly possessed and fully aware of the entities populating the other light spectrums—and there were many.

"Oh shit!" Larry yelled.

Below, those strange, seemingly family-oriented, community-minded, festive creatures began stuffing their own kind into projectile cannons, willingly launching their bodies like missiles toward the peak where the Council of Seven stood.

The creatures clawed at the slopes as Larry handed the goggles back to Nick. Nick peered through the lenses with one hand while clutching the candlestick in his left—careful not to grip the center just yet so as not to mess up the timing sequence. Nick dropped the goggles abruptly; the Professor scooped them up and shoved them into his pack.

They were surrounded. Not just by massive, drooling cyclopes desperate to violate them and tear them apart piece by piece, but by children too—behaving no differently than the older, hideous, one-eyed monsters.

Nick pressed the center of the candlestick in, barely able to let go as the creatures, naked and erect, leaped and flew onto them. Nick released the candlestick as they all scrambled for their items in haste.

The white light first exploded from Nick’s detonation—himself blasted into a brilliant display of heroism and sacrifice. Did the other Nick know? Was he somehow here and watching?

In a flash, the Professor threw a protective blanket over them all as they ducked beneath it, clinging to one another as an anchor, a base to reality itself. Betsy detonated another candlestick as she tucked under the protective sheaths—which only partially shielded them from the sheer, pure brilliance that might leave them as vegetables if not taken in highly reduced doses. The ground was pure, bright white as Betsy hurled one out that lacked the B-stripe at the handle's end. Larry immediately released one of his own, pitching it as far as it would go while remaining beneath the large shelter throw.

They waited. It seemed a long while before the flashes ceased and the damage could be assessed. The protective throw came down, and the Professor stood up to fold it.

Pure white light. No door, and no diamond.

Larry looked in the direction where Betsy had stood just moments before, taking in what that vile world represented in all its occulted malignancy. "That little dot over there walking toward us... is that Agent Cook?"

Unable to see clearly and seeking clarification, the Professor stowed his folded, large, Mylar-like super blanket and reached for his binoculars. "Will they work here?" he quipped. Peering through, he saw Agent Cook—the real, raw Agent Cook.

On the left side, a symbol floated toward them, cycling through every possible shape and geometric pattern. Through the right, pure energy was discernible even here, looking like a neutron star as he approached them in black, wearing his usual shades with his unshakeable, rock-solid, strangely amusing demeanor. He was holding the diamond.

"Sight for sore eyes, Cook," Betsy flirted, acknowledging that it was ultimately futile. "How should we approach this, Cook?"

Cook's only reply: "You're already out. You just can't see it!"

He faded away like an afterimage.

"Wait, is this the afterimage, or reality as we knew it?" Nick asked.

Betsy, in her pure and sultry tone, replied, "What's the difference, Nick? Does it really even matter?"

With that, they walked out from the first of the main caves, devoid of any curiosity to see if the other spinoffs and fractals led anywhere but to a hot, white, blank-slate offshoot like the one they had just left.

Nick gruffly stated, "Don't know about y'all, but I'm grabbing a beer and maybe some leftover fajitas from last night before I tackle this marathon world-destroyer. It's my therapy."

"I have an idea, Nick," added Betsy. "Let's grab lunch and bring it down here."

Chapter 13: The Archetype of Automation

They were exposed.

Nick and Larry ran upstairs to grab food to bring down while the rest of the crew stayed behind in the caves. It was strange that the group no longer felt a shared eagerness to leave the cave system upon emerging from a newly closed world.

The Professor looked around while the women both sat conversing cross-legged near the tip of the pyramid as it pulsed majestically—an ancient, mysterious technological wonder. If captured in a snapshot at that moment, it might have looked like a '90s-movie-themed cafe or a background installation for an amusement park adventure scene.

In the far corner of the central hub, beyond the pyramid, sat an all-black cave, occulted in depth and shadow. It appeared as a lightless void in the distance when contrasted by the pyramid's pulsing glow. Most eyes would pass by it and never think of it as an entrance of any kind.

An eye subconsciously seeking an entrance of such paramount importance would search for an affirming geometric structure at the very least—yet that ominous, obscure entrance offered none.

The cave system maintained a continuous stone ceiling throughout—until it transformed into something else. Yet no matter what world surrounded it or whatever structure sat above it, it remained perennial and continuous.

Nick, then Larry, and finally Varginah realized their crystals were now a part of them too. The initial plan was not for every remaining member to go it alone and absorb their crystals at their own allotted, staggered times, but the powers lying beyond these caves demanded an equal partnership of sorts. Given what they had recently learned and experienced, the dangers were far too vast to go it alone out of choice, as Betsy had felt drawn to do.

Nick arrived with a large bowl of microwave-reheated fajitas. Larry followed behind, carrying warm tortillas and sides of guacamole, salsa, and bagged, salted corn chips—leftovers, an unavoidable human reversion.

Leaving the fajitas with the women (who were famished and the first to receive them), Nick ran back up to grab a few cans of beer that would best complement the shared meal. He stuffed as many bottles of flavored sparkling water into his pockets as he could manage, then quickly pulled off and wrapped a liberal number of paper towels around his hand as the dispenser spun.

Daria and Rancor were nowhere to be seen.

By last account, Daria was the final crystal bearer of the seven to require absorption of the crystal into the matrix of her body's hardware, but it weighed heavily on her. How would this affect her covert mission here—to fully separate and disconnect Phalus, Veesta, and Rasheef from their hosts without removing an aspect of them as well?

Daria had been working on this continual, careful extraction all the while. The issue lay in the bioluminescence of cosmic light inherent to all living nature—an even dispersal. However, those hitchhikers were born from another time. Her internal processes had to identify those specific gradients of light and extract them. The process was agonizingly slow, but making ground.

Those prismatic prisons within her were composed of diamonds and crystal shards from a vast array of galaxies, universes, and realities that this group had yet to fathom. Did she even want to become a part of this fading reality? To share a history with it?

She was the only one in the group who could carry the pure state.

She absorbed gods, and not only the lesser ones.

Daria held a collection of ancient, arcane cosmic light and multidimensional geometric forms within her. Even in a light-based transient state, she was born to subvert and imprison them.

So, Daria and Rancor ventured off beforehand and entered the darkest cave together to witness these horrors alone, in order to understand.

She was not afraid. Her destruction meant the horde tyrants also perished within her.

Through the Backside of Dominant Reality

Daria and Rancor began to walk a dark tunnel path toward a port of entry, exactly as the others had when entering their caves. This cave in particular came to be known as the Green Cave, which was, as said, far older than 21 billion years or any Zenzic operations of squared exponentials one might calculate from limited human count.

Warnings in languages predating Earth by many cycles were carved into the stone. Daria deciphered the ancient inscriptions with instantaneous, unclouded recognition:

“Do not go beyond here if you want to return.”

“You are entering a limited backside of reality where no exit exists.”

“Beware, all who enter here: you may alter reality forevermore; this world has been cursed and limited to exist in its primal state.”

Rancor blinked, smelling the various cave floors. Whatever lay there had been preserved for ages. He lived in this cave, but his instincts warned this was not a place he should venture into.

Sometimes in the cave, Rancor shifted into various cat-like forms—so ancient and otherworldly they became unrecognizable. This first-world Earth's gravity was merely a reductionist facade; truth be told, he enjoyed the transitions and accepted them.

He served to protect the cave system and live in harmony within it. The great vines nurtured him and even produced fruit. The vines were eternal and required nothing, but the cave was sacred, and its guardians they were.

Rancor caught strange, ancient scents that he quite enjoyed—nothing like the homogenized, generic smells of this first world.

Daria read the many warnings conveyed in varied symbols as they walked on, frequently stopping to take readings, fully grasping their meaning.

There were seven caves within the long stretch of the black hallway leading to a dead end. At the farthest end where the tunnel stopped, a symbol eternally pulsed before a blank entrance, shifting from an inverted pentagram emblazoned in green fire into ancient symbols, runes, and pyres.

Daria already knew that when this world folded into itself and was no more, whatever lay on the other side would be a heavily inverted and backward version of this one.

After assessing the layout, Daria paused to reflect. By the time she calculated the general geometry of Earth, the universe, and this central hub connecting everything, she assessed that the cave tunnels predated Earth. The tunnel rested within a fold that had no room or space of its own—it shouldn't exist. It neither accessed entropy nor demanded it. Whatever lay behind those portals, these worlds were self-sustaining.

Daria factored out, from the tiny molecules Rancor inherently smelled, what weapons and preparations were made so long ago prior to those warriors bravely venturing inside. These worlds were one-way ticket traps.

She centered upon a main portal, the worst of them, bearing far more warnings than the rest. This green realm was a self-sustaining loop of recursion, supporting itself in every way.

There was absolutely no fear within Daria. She had lived for so long and accomplished so much—a true hero keeping the balance above all else.

As for the caves, Earth itself had been built around them, much like the house above had been built around it. This tunnel system was the heart of it all; every planet was formed to conceal or protect the expanse of the system. And everything could be said to have merely mimetically replicated itself from it—the heart of valley places and all things—thoroughly, forever, and indestructible.

Daria chose the first vein leading to the left, the mini-cave branching from the main shaft where Rancor had been waiting for her all along. He sensed it.

“Oh, Rancor, you are the only one,” Daria said jokingly; they had arrived at the same deductive reasoning.

The cave itself, though ancient, was quite small. It didn't have prominence nor did it seem to belong to the heart of the central system. The cave was an inevitable faustian byproduct of a multiverse excess. Like cockroaches it would always exist and go on in some way, a tunnel system to nowhere beyond good and evil.

On the other side, within that inverted ancient arterial system, she deduced there would exist a cave much like this one, but with five doors. At the end of another crude hallway, fluxing images and ominous symbols would flex with a false, dead light of green, red, and brown. That inverted diamond, like a black-side phoenix, would be waiting there to be reborn.

She had to close off the next best thing and take the central artery out; this was simply a task not cut out for humans.

Now standing fully before that archaic, foreboding doorway, she read the cosmic language placed above it by universal travelers from another time, dating back at least 500 universes: Inverted Realm of Sacrifice.

(Doing the math—this universe is 21 billion years old, not the stagnant, artificial 14-plus billion the Dark Council propagandizes; this leaves out the periphery quite intentionally.)

Upon stepping through, they immediately began to plummet, rushing toward terminal velocity beneath a cobalt-blue sky. As Daria looked around, she saw many planets—from moons to ringed gas giants—but none appeared as large as the planets of the first world’s solar system. This universe was limited. As she took further readings, she found it was indeed quite small.

Daria instinctively grabbed Rancor as he began showing signs of turning into a small dragon of fire and ash. There was no life, nothing wild to support him here; it lacked the wild vitality Rancor required to stabilize in mimesis. She placed him into her stomach area as a cavity formed, reforming into a protective, see-through, gravity-less environment. Rancor floated within her—buffered, weightless, but contained. She flared jet boosters of blue flame from her feet to align their descent toward a small island. She could see no other land for miles, only sensing a few small continents and a handful of stray, Galapagos-like islands.

Plummeting toward a turquoise ocean, then drifting in a vortex of wind, they fell toward the tiny island's massive dormant volcano. Daria deployed antigravity technology and hovered effortlessly.

Daria transformed into a slender indigenous man, melding in seamlessly, while Rancor—shielded within her—became completely transparent. She did not want to create unexplainable cargo-cult fables that would corrupt this undeveloped early tribe if she chose to allow this world to go on.

The small tribe saw what appeared to be one of them, indigenous like Sentinelese.

As she scanned the island's few inhabitants, they were diving and bringing up a bright green, chlorophyll-rich, mossy seaweed-type mixture not found on Earth or anywhere else, which she soon assessed as their central, primary food source.

The movements of the people and animals were slow. Daria assessed from the tribal people's behavior that their intelligence, like the animals', was strikingly low. The massive oceans boasted a surplus of aquatic life, but by comparison, existence here was severely limited on all fronts. Even the planetary orbits appeared pacified, circling with neither myth nor flow.

Since nothing was a secret, this planet—and therefore the entire green cave mini-system—was being heavily exploited, intentionally stunted, and cut off from growth.

In an odd way, this explained the flourishing vines of the cave. The green crystal’s power, representing community and nature, was so immense that it couldn't be suppressed; it would grow regardless, even as an infinite, cathartic weed.

The island was highly fortified and rich in soil, boasting multiple series of fruits and vegetables, while birds, wild hogs, cattle, and several other early breeds of hybrid species lived beside the primitive humans in complete harmony.

Daria lowered herself into the water, realizing this world was entirely based on noumenon. Prior to her descent, the sky turned yellow, flickering with red streaks. Whatever she thought would be projected out as phenomenon. Just by entering here in her infinite, substantial state, she was God to this universe—not figuratively, but literally. Even its origins, now touched by her presence, would reform around her as an event over time. Whatever the world was prior to her entry, it was polluted now. It would mis-assimilate and manufacture fabrications of her, never fully capable of processing her existence. If any of the crew came here, they would immediately lose themselves, becoming like the primitive tribespeople, wandering eternally in a liminal haze without a way to become anything.

This was not existence, this was a clogged artery of a bastard child, the spirit of an inverted elemental abortion that had to go somewhere similar. This is where it quasi-exists. This world and its universe had to go, as the cave itself was reverting back to its pure state of existence. The green crystal and its power had to flourish in the new world. Inside Daria, Rancor immediately began to lounge as if lying on the living room couch, floating and suspended within her.

Down she went into the ocean depths. She was trained in planetary destruction and diamond retrieval, holding wonders and unarchived information within her—and now holding Rancor, who comfortably napped in her transparent womb. From Rancor's view, he was floating in a climate-sustained, hyperbolic, boundless bliss, only looking out when he wanted to. Now his face pressed curiously against the see-through housing, watching the somewhat beautiful but limited fish swim by with absolutely no vibrancy. This world had been clogged off, commandeered, and controlled for far too long; it had to be demolished and reborn.

Daria now targeted the planet's core. Her internal diagnostics bypassed the superficial regions typically used for mapping a toroidal field, pinpointing the true core as a phantom geometrical vector of light ever-spinning hypotenuse gyrating and rotating with a heavy, unstable wobble—spinning to the cadence of a lackadaisical, slow, fuzzy high.

This world began to look like nothing but gelatinous cobalt and pewter gray. Bound in a mercurial and nebulous, slow-moving nightshade—forever muted, isolated, and contained.

She projected the solar system of this reality onto a mini-screen for Rancor. In a sequence of rapid downloads and images he fully understood, there were eleven celestial bodies here—including moons and a brown dwarf equal to them in its lack of luster, providing light only due to its extremely close proximity of perhaps no more than a million miles within the Goldilocks zone. The planet was doomed, and its time had come, along with all the others. Without the diamond core and the drawing-in orbit that would ultimately lead toward a destructive collision, the planet could not be sustained by the brown dwarf. The lack of a sustainably entropic loop meant the planets themselves had won the battle, parasitically transferring energy from the dwarf in a zero-sum finale.

Diving deeper, she pressurized her stomach-chamber bubble where Rancor rested comfortably, lazily batting through the translucent screen at the passing fish. Outside in the vast oceanic depths, an impossible ecosystem thrived. From the smallest fry to the largest leviathans, the marine life moved in peaceful harmony, grazing on the surrounding flora. Daria pondered the biological math of it. Standard kelp and algae couldn't sustain apex predators; there had to be a unique, hybrid vegetation at work—a hyper-dense botanical matrix capable of synthesizing the complex proteins and rich lipids usually only found in flesh. Whatever this undiscovered super-flora was, it saturated the ecosystem, giving the water a thick, emerald cast.

Deep within the ocean canyon, a massive opening held an inscription above it: Mælstrŭķ.

Spotting an open volcanic trench, she ventured inside, cooling the pathway as she moved through a core of molten metal. She generated a high-blast heat bubble surrounding her—unaffected, and with no cooked cat. In fact, Rancor stretched his limbs, intuitively sensing that claiming more space would expand the zero-gravity containment bubble to accommodate him even further.

Surrounded by her absolute-zero cores and absolute-hot output potentials, Daria was virtually indestructible and could take on any climate within her, created to support life and collect samples.

At the center of this version of an early, relatively undeveloped Earth lay the transient, multidimensional plasma core that surrounded the retrieval diamond. But should she destroy it or retain it? It was her choice, but all potentials had to be closed, and this one would undoubtedly be an imminent threat to the 168 crew—they would never survive the miles-long plummet into the vast oceans below.

Daria had entered a much smaller version of Earth, perhaps half its standard size, slightly above ten thousand miles in circumference. It was a place that acted and remained chiral to Earth in all ways—a distinct, lesser-pronounced mirror image, but with unformed continents and massive oceans.

Should she detonate and destroy this universe with her pure, brilliant cosmic discharge of energy? She could also save her own energy and instead bind up and allow a compounding overcompensation of energy at the planet's core—using the magma heat to assist in discharging a sudden energy burst at its core.

After analyzing the data, she realized this universe produced minimal entropy. Consequently, it was quite a bit smaller, no longer expanding, and had achieved a state of absolute balance and peace. But there was nothing extraordinary here—nothing driving evolution.

Either way, it would eventually be stripped of resources or used in the most heinous of ways—and maybe it already was, she considered. Searching for remnants in this universe for matching genetic migrations or trafficking, she only saw a group of distant space transport towns that contained nearly identical DNA within their halls, deducing that the Dark Council must be using the indigenous tribespeople for slavery, food, or worse. They would never learn to fight, only pacify and worship their primitive gods: the Dark Council.

The universe was static, limited, and starved of the chaos, turbulence, and vibrancy that fuel life. It was severed from the main arteries of existence, operating like a dark, inverted, undersized, and vastly undeveloped arterial system fated to become ultimate food, acting as a supply chain to the Dark Council.

Was it better to live in ignorance or end it all in heroism so one's children would not be born into such an asymmetrical lower class without the drive or means to fight back?

It had to go.

Daria calculated what the subsequent crystals might look like and determined their primary functions.

She traveled into the plasma that would reduce into a small master diamond upon this world's destruction, but it was a trap—exactly as the text above the cave system had warned. Now able to decipher more of the script within her memory systems, she realized previous travelers had visited this place and left the warnings behind when their parties never returned.

Entering the hyperdimensional cube at the planet's core, Daria fired a brief pulse of pure light energy while calibrating the planetary alignment. She anchored dimensionally to Larry’s final throw in the Red Cave to tether herself back, but she realized she wouldn't land in the exact same timeline because she had entered an inverted cavity—effectively trapped in slow motion, oscillating within the hypercube.

Daria anchored herself to a specific coordinate on the cube to induce time displacement. She was reverse-engineering tomorrow’s events, which were already stored in her crystal matrix, shaping herself toward tomorrow by anchoring to the pure light of the group's patterned actions, then mimetically forming herself around that.

Daria would arrive at tomorrow before they did, but she had no tethers or ties to Earth; neither did Rancor. They would be suspended in a state of liminality, but for now, time skipped before her as if out of frame.

This meant her actions supplied the place with a quantum probability bubble of endless potentials, waiting to collapse through the burgeoning Council's random choice operations. She used the destruction of this universe in a brilliant flash of pure Gluon discharge that soon swept over the entire universe, causing a massive implosion. Then, in the exact moment that diamond was being formed, she used the pure raw energy to throw herself into the future.

"Rancor," Daria said, "we are assisting them in total automation now. We have essentially secured their existence until then by etching ourselves into their tomorrow. Any and all probabilities they call upon will be granted. They can't lose for now. But as for you and I, we can return home tomorrow—though I must warn you, the events we witness are not yet solidified in reality. We will remain in a mid-levitate state, at Apricot Lane yet tucked behind it as if looking through a mirror."

"The group will skip through time. All potentials exist as one singular point on the table until the timeline we left cycles into tomorrow. We have anchored a new sync, as this tunnel system is surplus energy in an envelope that should not theoretically even exist. We are returning to the same place, but suspended in quantum operations through choice selection."

They returned through a wormhole of immense light and arrived on a chair on the front porch. The basic single-point energy transfer was strikingly similar to a bootstrapping event taking place when the resonators were activated, using the dynamic thrust of mass energy of latent potential that sat as inverted dark static until directed towards a central point.

"Let's go sit on the porch and watch the day spiral into night, my friend," said Daria to Rancor.

Daria and Rancor had already become while the group was still becoming; they were more existent than any universe had ever been. They could only meet at a single junction point now.

Rancor remained protected inside Daria's stomach until the quantum probabilities aligned. Daria and Rancor were seated at the absolute center of all quantum probability now—that spinning crystal lattice that defined time itself.

Daria shaped her point of origin or final arrival point to tomorrow's Daria. It was as if she'd never left, setting her internal myriad of quantum-crystal oscillation potentials to 11:00 AM on November 11th. She traveled so fast through that blast of thrust that everything else around her and Rancor appeared like a black mirror of inversion; she moved through time from a pocket of collective multiversal reality that did not exist. The energy neither added to the greater entropy nor created a negentropic cost deficit.

"Everything feels like it is moving backward now, Rancor; the pressure of existence is gone for once. Doesn’t it feel nice?"

Still, there was no sign of Daria and Rancor on the other side.

As for the group, the 168 pyramid now glowed with a brilliance none had seen before. They wanted to be near it. They wanted to go back into it, but that would be far too self-indulgent.

Would it still be there tomorrow? Could anyone be certain of what tomorrow would bring?

"Those fajitas taste way better the next day," Nick said. "Peppers are a little soggy, though. Helps 'em go down easier."

"As usual, Nick trying to be gross," teased Betsy.

"I feel too awesome and relaxed to go back into those last three realms right now, don't you?" Varginah said. "Feel happy, too."

She continued, "When I went through that radical transformation and my lab blew up, I started to care about different things differently. The world will be forever different now for me, reality, and I'm alright if I'm not a part of that—because I will always be a part of you all, and that means something profound. The universe or its creators noticed us, and that is super cool."

Smiling out of the side of her mouth awkwardly because she meant every word, she clutched Betsy and the Professor's hands tight. It didn't matter anymore who she appreciated or showed love to in the group; they were all one now as far as she was concerned.

"Well guys, let's do this. Let's try to preserve this," Nick said. "Tell you what, Larry, help me take the dishes up and..."

Nick was interrupted first by Betsy, then by Varginah.

"Oh, I've gotta pee!"

"Oh, me too!"

So everyone took something with them back upstairs as the two ladies ran on ahead of them. Upon entering the room, one of them noted, "Something feels weird, doesn't it?"

Meanwhile, Daria and Rancor were listening to oldies from her internal systems, unconcerned with how things turned out as long as they could eventually find a sense of calm and peace—that's all either of them wanted now: calm.

The countless many each had killed, eaten, and trapped didn't bother them; it was an aspect of their natures, and of every universe they'd ever known. Still, they both vied for an existence that did not require predator-eating-prey or the relentless bone-collecting of soul force into trapped light. A harmonious middle ground would be nice; the liminal experience had affected them both.

Daria placed her hand on her stomach as if Rancor were a wild and unpredictable child harbored within her.

"Imagine no longer having an impulse to destroy and absorb, but to just be, Rancor," she said, as Rancor closed his prediction eyes and they both slipped off into a hibernating stasis.

On the other side, the group touched their toes, ran in place, and did jumping jacks, then push-ups, as if stuck in a walk-in freezer, desperately trying to get some energetic adrenaline kicking up. But the room, the world, the universe felt hollow and dull; something was not quite right. It was as if without generating energy, they would simply cease to be.

They knew something was off. They could all go to sleep right now and miss the chance to own a new universe—or at least be the raw material from which a new universe was built.

"Guys," Nick said, now gaining their attention. "Legacy! Let's go do this."

They all patted one another sternly on the back to promote blood flow and awareness.

"Let's force ourselves down again to finish this, okay?" Nick said blankly.

They unenthusiastically crept down the stairs, met with a total flatness.

"Got anything for this, Professor?"

They simply had no choice, really; forward was all that remained.

The Professor agreed with how odd it felt. "It feels like something or someone doesn't want us to win. Am I wrong here?" he quipped.

That was when they noticed the pattern on the pyramid connecting four inlaid, jeweled circles.

"Red, Blue, Purple, and Green—if we follow that as a map," the Professor went on, "this may remedy this impossible, lethargic, buzzkill hurdle that is getting persistently worse by the second."

"By golly, I never noticed this before either," he finished. "I do think something or someone is trying to assist us here, something's been unlocked. It's like a puzzle piece is activated within each world we visit."

"Yes," said Nick.

"Red jewel over the tunnel we just finished before lunch, and this one over here is blue, so it must be next according to that over there," spoke Varginah.

"Right," added Betsy, "and then purple over there"—all of them laughing—"and the last one, green, must be on the other side in that dark space behind the pyramid."

"That means it's your go, Betsy," Nick said. "Blue. Grab that candlestick with 'B' written on the end by the good Professor here, and let's move into that tunnel."

"Duh... Nick," replied Betsy.

"Anyone else notice that we are doing this relatively alone now? No phone calls, no Cook, Daria, or Rancor? Just us making this thing happen now?" Betsy finished as she took the first step into the blue cave. The rest followed.

The entire central quadrant was now pulsing blue.

"I guess they'll be there if and when we need them," Betsy faithfully vowed, speaking softly and looking downward. "Everyone everywhere has their own universe to contend with now."

This time, however, a blue sphere began to form in front of her, guiding her, moving as if it were an intelligent life form.

They traveled deep down into the subway layers of Earth below their neighborhood. They came to a three-foot horizontal opening that extended for several feet across. Betsy crawled on all fours to look, then without hesitation, climbed through.

As the others did too, they saw Betsy smiling, spinning with her arms up, calmly in bliss.

"There's something about this place, isn't there?"

The rest felt the same. Looking up at the sky, the sun was massively pure white in the center with a brilliant blue hue. Water poured abundantly through the rivers and creeks, with waterfalls cascading nearly everywhere they looked. Mountain goats played freely alongside mountain lions. Large predatory birds assisted the smaller scrub jays.

"What do you think they eat?" Nick added, as this world felt far less greedy for food than any of them were regarding their own lack of enthusiasm for money.

"I hate to do this so hastily, but we are on a schedule. Man, though, this place is so natural and swell!" Betsy said as she began to remove the sheath from the candlestick.

Instantly, the animals zeroed in and converged on a singular target, assuming a predatory role—even species that never exhibited such aggression. Goats barreled forward, actively racing the mountain lions toward the epicenter, while birds large and small committed to the same unified assault.

They heard screaming—human screams. They ran to the edge of the hillside, stopping only where it dropped off into a cavernous stream, unable to step any further.

They all witnessed it. A nude, severely obese person—easily weighing upwards of 800 pounds—was screaming for dear life, struggling to call out above their garbled, muffled breath. The ground beneath them became obscured as the birds struck first, tearing off large pieces of fatty flesh. As the animals worked together in an aggressive frenzy to surround the victim, all the poor soul could do was frantically consume whatever food remained in their hands or hung wrapped around their neck. The creatures that would have been peaceful vegetarians in the Council's world were full-on carnivores here.

The screams dragged on as the person was reduced to oversaturated organs and open flesh, eventually leaving behind only skin, blood, and a surprisingly small, frail skeleton. A roar echoed off the hills, striking the group's ears. They had seen more than enough.

Two remarkably physically fit men wearing what appeared to be blue spandex emerged from an underground elevator system. They forcefully dragged a naked woman—weighing at least 600 pounds—up to the surface, pouring a bacon-lard mixture directly over her. As they doused her in grease, she focused on consuming the fat herself rather than trying to stand up and escape. The two men carried long rods that generated huge, intimidating, electric-popping pulses, forcing the remaining animals to scurry back.

The Professor realized he had been to this world before, though he couldn't determine whether its people belonged below ground.

"Murderous!" Betsy whimpered.

Her voice gave them away. A massive bear came lumbering toward them—bounding heavy, hungry, and near-airborne at times across the rocks. It didn't slow in the least as it approached the twenty-five-foot gap of the ravine, the only physical barrier between them.

Down below, the blue-spandex-clad, twisted Superman archetypes turned their gaze toward the group, hailing someone through a bulky, 1950s-style wireless intercom.

"Tesla lived longer here and was never disgraced; he only grew in power, Council. To that point, Custer never lost either, and Tartaria formed an alliance with the US—known here as die vereinte Kraft, or the United Power!" the Professor blurted out in breathless haste.

The mighty, ravenous bear managed to hurl itself 12, perhaps 15 feet through the air, continuing to run toward the group by taking deliberate, impossible steps through the open sky. The scene felt like a bizarre freak circus show where consuming the spectators was the final, endless act.

"The SS wing of World War II Germany runs the world here, Professor?" Nick gasped as Betsy readied the midpoint of the candlestick rod.

"Got that massive Mylar blanket handy, Professor?" she demanded.

The Professor gripped the reflective material, shaking slightly, while Larry peered down the 65-foot drop to the crevice floor. The bear was already bounding upward and making incredible pace—30, no 25, no 17 feet away and closing fast! But it got hung up on a large, protruding rock along the cliff face.

A squad of tall, chiseled Supermen holding their rods began loudly cracking and shocking their long torture devices as they emerged from trap doors on the surface.

"I'll tell you all about this place when we return after our victories, esteemed members!" the Professor called out. "This one is quite a story. Remember, though, the essence from each world becomes an active part of us, and how we use its energy is entirely up to us as a collective—as that great wheel of the zodiac in the sky plays a game of Russian roulette with our souls!"

With that, the Professor wasted no time. He raised the massive sheet of reflective metallic protection, ready to throw it over them as the light blast forced the veneer to wrap around everything that wasn't being bleached and purged of living error.

The Supermen, now resembling a small army, began barking into their intercoms and levitating toward them, buzzing their torture devices. Crackles of electric charge went off like nightmarish, war-torn dreams—echoed phantoms of agonizing, tear-filled, endless nights.

The bear freed itself from the rock cliff and hungrily charged the group of allies as if possessed, genetically altered, or both. As Betsy released her candlestick, the brilliant light began to consume those murderously intent, card-carrying sadists. They watched the faces of those superior, chiseled, seven-foot-tall glorified Nazis zeroing in on them, each having selected a target. They were serial killers with state pay and a cause, making it the ultimate irony that the great light originated from the group below rather than those who claimed to be pure.

Larry could see the sheer muscle and anguish of the poor, frenzied bear trapped within its own rewired, destructive programming, and he was glad to see its suffering end.

As the Professor threw up the sheet, outstretched hands intending to kill, study, torture, or modify them vaporized in the light of truth.

A dull, echoed roar from the bear, a sharp slice of space, and the rectifying buzz of pure frequency occurred as the dimensions collapsed and dispersed around them, leaving that world behind.

They found themselves back in the central cave as a familiar voice calmly spoke outside the blanket.

"Not necessary, Larry," Cook said, as Larry was just beginning to grip his unsheathed candlestick. "You too, Varginah and Nick—put 'em away. Some worlds want to die, and this one was already on the brink. Maybe it died a long time ago?"

It was Agent Cook.

"Oh, you guys can come out." It seemed like only a fraction of a second since Betsy had released that candlestick. "Purity goes a long way here. Come out, let me tell you something from the inside."

Curious and eager, they dropped their guard as their heads emerged from what felt like the ash of violating rubble.

"Imagine this: of these 28,500-plus light spectrum spinoffs—each containing fractaled, though fractured, remnants of the same world—and these main hubbed worlds here to boot, I have traveled to nearly all of them. None of them, no matter how harmonious or evil from the outside, could ever fuse with another. That is, until now. All the good and evil in your world somehow manages to pull that off, but even that can't go on for too long. So, we set the dial at 21 billion cycles or years from your view. Each nuclear clock is set ever so slightly differently in each world as the Grand Paradox moves on."

The group stared intently at Cook, hanging on every word, still smelling the alpine air and feeling the adrenaline bite of a death that had already reached out to claim them.

"Is a child an annoying pain in the ass, or a reason for living—or both?" Cook continued. "That is the hard question only you can uniquely answer for yourselves, and that the universe, ontology, or God and his, her, or its many faces posits to every moment of your existence. As for me, I only exist when I have to exist—when I'm needed. Otherwise, what is the point of suffering and ultimately being consumed by the weight of my own experiences? They are far too vast for any single universe to juggle!"

"It makes it easier, doesn't it?" Cook said as he picked up that brilliant blue, fresh diamond of potential—so ephemeral now, an entire world reduced and consolidated right here.

"Well... done better, but you had to see it, experience it, feel it. And that's why I don't really exist out there in any one place; the sheer mass of my experiences would fold in and consume me. I would probably become yet another black hole. Look back at where that horizontal opening was—that's your way out, it's still there. Every universe has a central core, every universe has a master link, a seam... and that one over there is fading quickly. When I leave with this diamond and plant it carefully at the location of your next controlled engagement... in what is it, Larry's purple world of wisdom? Oh, you'll love this one!"

The group, still jarred, remained almost silent. The Professor and Betsy were still clinging to the blanket as they walked in shock. They had two more worlds to conquer before any victory celebration could be had, and they wanted to finish before 11:00 AM tomorrow.

Time remained constantly with them as the crystals inside them undulated to the new universe—the new standard being absorbed and synthesized through their experiences and ultimate exposure here.

Only the 25-foot-long, 3-foot-tall opening remained, revealing dusty rock on the other side as it sat like a fallen monolith. As each got onto all fours, placing their hands down on an endpoint that a temporal part of them projected, they each experienced their own private universe, yet collectively as a group.

The cave felt hauntingly familiar and welcoming as they each took in a deep breath of fresh, musty, subterranean cavern air in reassurance. They walked out into the main corridor, now so inviting and recognizable. They felt better down in the recesses of reality, far from the blinding, perpetual light above that carried so much weight.

Nick kicked at a fragment of lunch below him—a green chili, still plump but dirty. He looked up immediately at that dark, menacing corner beyond the pyramid that left only a shining green crystal.

In the chambers, they looked at one another with a solid sharing of humanity, frazzled and feeling war-torn. They stood in a circle with their hands on each other's shoulders, looking up, weeping at times, their breathing heavy and tear-filled.

"The appreciation of air!" Nick nearly yelled.

"Yes, air."

"Yes, our air!" The group cemented and celebrated this resounding fact.

"Something so overlooked," added Larry.

Their hands refused to let go as they pulled those beside them closer, looking down in appreciation and relief, biting their lips, pressing forehead to forehead, ear to ear, feeling the raw surge of life.

"Ha ha," the Professor laughed fairly loudly.

"What, Professor?" Nick asked curiously, able to look eye-to-eye and see the dirt, pores, and beautiful blemishes so unique to him.

"I wonder if all the bullshit we are going through—this sick and twisted, yet amazing little game here..."

"Yes?" added Varginah, all of them standing now, looking curiously at the Professor's unfinished thought as he drew in another deep, full breath.

"The air... milk, mother's milk. I wonder if whatever is behind all of this—that great jester in the sky—sees us more like greedy little kittens still soaked in the blood and fluid of birth, searching for that teat as some unseen, warm, wet, massive force begins to lick our eyes clean!"

That left them all standing, feeling the full weight of existence, the fight for it, and in that moment, still breathing greedily, heavily absorbing the air, mother's milk, and all its life-giving properties. The Professor finished, beginning to lower his arms as they all did.

"The nectar of the gods, the nectar of the gods."

And they all began to walk up the graduating, graded, slightly parabolic sweep of that ancient stairwell—not nearly as ancient as those caves. Seeing the horizontal crack before him, Larry bounded up to open that blind light of familiar anticipation. He chuckled as he grasped the bell-shaped doorknob and twisted it to his right, but to the door's face left—that chiral duality in all its undulating glory.

Upon entering the room, there was a flickering, small, brilliant light, then for a moment, a Daria seated on the couch who oddly and comically looked to be pregnant with Rancor—the sleeping cat who kept stretching out her belly, his chamber, as she obliged always with ever slightly more room to move. Then she and Rancor could be seen no more as Larry and Varginah curiously felt the couch for any traces. They were both there and not there, yet that thin trope of distinct and separate realities was increasingly becoming that rapid, blinding oneness of the flicker.

Looking a little less freaked out, Varginah and Larry each sank deeply into their respective ends of the couch, while Betsy collapsed fondly between them. She placed one hand on each of their nearest legs for reassurance and support.

"Ohhh..." breathing out in a moan, "I feel exhausted!"

Agent Cook stepped out, with Daria and Rancor passing through the wall on either side of him. Noticeably, Daria's clear, pure crystal now stuck straight out of her chest as her tech elegantly and efficiently morphed to make space for it, treating it as an additional port—for now.

"I grabbed these two from a space where only non-human agents that have passed through multiple universes could remain for long," Cook explained. "In short, I pulled them early from a state of liminal stasis from your view."

"Oh, I quite liked it, didn't you, Rancor?" Daria said.

Rancor meowed loudly and approvingly, looking as if he had just come from a humane and luxurious holiday spa treatment center.

The remainder of the wrecking crew lumbered down, kyphotic and beat-down, but perhaps more vigilant than ever. Each was taking on the hardcore, leaned-out, fight-ready vigor of a highly trained, seasoned professional fighter making it to the final round—still with plenty of adrenaline-fueled, excitatory spit and vinegar remaining. Betsy collapsed back, supporting her neck and the back of her head against the high, upper crest of the couch frame, while Nick leaned forward, popping open a can of sparkling water with soothing peach overtones.

"Well, seeing you now, Cook... lay it on us," Nick said, exhaustedly slugging down the popping, spring-filled bite of carbonation, producing a momentary, burp-inducing relief. "We all learned our lesson. The air feels good here, and we want it to remain that way."

Nick sank back into the leather-buttoned, high-backed chair—which his mother had accepted as a gift, along with all the other items in this place, from the odd, older, and maybe ancient time-travelers who made up the original Council of Seven Spheres of this universe, at least.

Rancor jumped up onto the laps of all three people on the couch, making it known that he could stretch out and take up as much space as possible.

"Man, this cat is long," Varginah said, looking back at Daria and past Betsy's head. "What did you do to him in there, wherever that was that you were, Daria?"

Daria was now hovering several feet above the ground, viewing them all as she faced away from the far corner. She wasn't turning into anything else by herself; she was no longer built to compromise.

"I want you to win," Daria said, looking upon each one, including Agent Cook. "I like your brand and shape of the newly formed universe that's to come. Plus, I think it would be good for the babies—your babies—to be born there. They are now within reach, just over a few more hills. Only purple and green are left now, right? The shift light that integrates everything into one seamless feature?"

Varginah and Betsy both grabbed at their wombs, which for the time being still looked tight and fit like those of a Pilates instructor. As they both dropped back next to each other, touching their heads, they knew how close they were and how these children would be more than kin. They leaned back to give whoever was in there a little more room.

Varginah leaned back on the couch, doing the same, while that long, fluffy cat, Rancor, stretched out even further. He extended his hind legs and claws, pressing one leg against each of their stomachs slightly, but painfully enough to almost peel back skin.

Pressing against their bellies, Rancor looked intently into Varginah and Betsy's eyes, holding himself in an awkward physical position. He stared at them from Larry's lap as if to say, Because I can, or perhaps expressing more deeply, Because I know who is in there, within your wombs now, and I eagerly await seeing you. Come out as soon as possible!

Rancor blinked. Fully puzzled though only slightly alarmed, Varginah sat fully erect with a straight back. Smiling, she grabbed at Rancor's feet and tugged at them playfully, as if he were a freshly killed rabbit about to be skinned. Betsy playfully felt the fullness of Rancor's belly, poking it with her pointer finger.

"Who are you even, Rancor?" exclaimed Varginah.

Rancor playfully and unseriously played along like a jester, moving quickly, but not quite at cat speed. He inconveniently used the moment as an excuse to beat up on Larry, putting his full weight upon him. It seemed like he had gotten bigger and longer.

Larry felt Rancor's power as the cat made an abrupt jump from Larry's lap, landing several feet away, effortlessly popping a button off the Pascal suit at the left sleeve. No one noticed as it dropped to the back of the couch and slipped under the couch padding.

Rancor meowed deeply, groaning out loud as he took on a Felidae form that leaned further into an evolutionary transition toward a cosmic Iberian Lynx, unlocking the superpowers of cat-kind within him.

Agent Cook looked upon Rancor with admiration. "Man, that cat has seen some battles. We have fought some together."

Rancor stood serious, facing Cook along with the entire team, listening intently.

"Those worlds represent the worst and best parts of you," Cook continued. "They live within you now—within this diamond that you will all soon fuse with and become a part of. The good parts, the not-so-good parts, the fuck-ups, the failures. We are all one big universal family about to unfold into trillions of people, beaming finite and ephemeral universal possibilities. And we are nearly there!"

No one was hungry, or horny, or concerned with the accordion world outside in all its expired partiality. The lethargy they felt had been lifted by their victory and their fearless entry into meeting these worlds head-on.

The people out there in those worlds weren't the people that they would ultimately become; the old world had to die before a new one could thrive. Old, worn-out ideas. Procrastinated, rotten projects. Rusted old car bodies in the backyard, oxidizing into a burdensome, lazy, expectant reformation.

The new participants weren't going to be mere spectators, but active participants in the game of life.

Agent Cook grabbed at his left pocket. "I am going to plant this diamond in the exact place that only I know where to place it! That is generally your entry point; the rest you have to figure out for yourselves. And as you have already put together, that task has both been completed an infinitely long time ago and also has not taken place yet—forever about to happen, forever becoming. That is how these windows and pockets, and the fractal-streaked patterns of time, partially form into a miraculous stew of digitized Mandelbrot matrices. And then there's us: the thinking, talking, breathing, seemingly slight randomness of potentiality, always full of unmet quantum possibilities, boundless and timeless in our selfish little art. Our thoughts then evaporated, we are more relevant to one singular bubble pattern of a world—a universe—but a seeming god to them all. Our choice."

Cook turned his attention to the group's philosopher. "Larry, Thycius, I want you to take this diamond with you and safely nurture it into a condensed transition. This means that wherever you choose to enter, taken from the fabric of your own mind, will be the point and time of entry to that world. Place this diamond anywhere, just don't touch it while it condenses into ever more density and absorbs your purple world and all its spiritual, carnal, thoughtful, and cold wisdom, becoming the truest possible representation of the philosopher's diamond. I want you to retrieve the diamond of your world and bring it back with you before we all conquer that last green sphere. Varginah must face that one, as only she, carrying this purple diamond with her and her green crystal within her now, can be the first to open that portal at the end of her dark green hallway."

"Yes, it's true that door doesn't exist to anyone else but Varginah," Daria knew full well. "It's what makes her a mystery so powerful and wise, so beautiful and agreeable—conflicts that resolve within her and from her, the mother of a new world, a new universe in fact! And I must go with you so that I can assimilate and absorb the entirety of this pure crystal now tightly embedded in the port of my chest, contained in partiality. My presence is drawing away all the purity of this old world. I see it's night outside, but we will get through this!" Daria went on.

Daria opened both of her six-fingered hands, which were empty, and a scanning, printed image manifested five square cubes—one for each of them.

"Take one piece each and consume it all," finished Daria. "The properties within this substance, pulled from the organic ingredient panel of universes, will cure your tiredness, offer you clarity, and effectively work within your souls as the final synthesis awaits. Amino acids that aren't of this world, in all their infinite chiralities as well. Minerals taken from incomplete universes, only indigenous to them. Light trapped in vegetation, crystallized through the process of countless worlds and mitochondria, archaea, and bacteria from every universal state—even the short-lived ones that died before these properties could be known. The stem cells of otherwise unknown and unheard whispers of potential! May the old world die!"

They all took in the delicious, unsuspecting block, which looked unassumingly like a brown military ration.

But momentarily, each of their eyes shone with the brilliance of their collective shift light. They felt the power and the presence; each of them was a god of their own realm.

In past times—earlier, much earlier times—battles had ensued over who would ultimately claim supremacy and victory, though they knew none of this now. They only felt the impending union of completion, knowing that it had never been done before and must have been solidified from the beginning, omnipotent.

Chapter 14: Recovery

Rather than walking through the door and down through the hollowed, cascading corridor, they floated straight down through the floorboards as well as the thick granite stone underlying that. Without hesitation, Rancor rounded the stairwell effortlessly—existing in the wild and the liminal as all nature yielded to him everywhere in all his supremacy over it. In his existence he held a midpoint in nature and its teleological, Faustian deal-making, as if to say, we'll stop at cat; that is sufficient.

Rancor entered that purple, blazing, and spinning corridor as Thyscius indisputably placed that diamond boldly through the portal, commanding what comes next. In his other hand, the center Holy Mother Candlestick pulled to him, and each person drew one suspended in the air, summoned to them as the team floated through the light.

They entered an unknown realm of light and reason as long, sweeping flashes of geometric forms streaked past. The entire universe had been stuck in a rhetorical loop of its own natural philosophy, along with all the subjects, words, and worlds that stemmed from this great limiting factor—in all its flat, self-justifying circularity.

It was a world where true techne and the art of self-flagellation bowed only to the altars of a forked, inverted science.

Upon entering, Thyscius had no idea what to think—so the group floated there, moving between the foreground of his projected corpus callosum. The diamond itself was tucked into his pocket, summoning the Larrys in mind everywhere and nowhere, acting as an anchor point.

They had realized themselves—all of them—and in that seasoned moment, they considered taking this diamond, boarding that pyramidal, weird-ass ship in the basement deep within those waters, and allowing their own heavenly place to form as they shared a network of thoughts but remained entirely independent as well.

Was it worth risking this for anyone else? The children within Betsy and Varginah could remain there always, within the continuous, unbounded womb of the universal mother. Without words, they quipped in one profound realization: Maybe that's all this ever is?

Larry flew without the others at his side or rear, like geese perfectly firm in an arrow formation out of season—vicious and ready to break legs with his wings and bite. But Daria's crystal guided and soothed them, anchoring them back. She was more powerful than anyone or anything could imagine: a God-killer that emerged from ontology to solve a riddle with effortless ease and the patience to mellow throughout great cycles of eons.

They flew past formulas and writings from the battle within Larry's mind, but he was the least deliberately conflicted of them all—a flying Diogenes, already finding his fattened place in the midday sun to dismiss those men who thought themselves into the rapid spin of self-perceived greatness. The mind-link became hilarious as Rancor added with a meow, "Alexander was great at chasing his tail."

Great stories streaked past them in beautiful wave patterns, along with spirits that made up the realms from Gottlob Frege to Leibniz to Euclid, as binary words became various bubbles of distribution, popping above heads to furnish light and reason. Symphonies played as great philosophers paired with their likenesses, and joining with compatible composers, translated the words from the place they were now.

The solid wall where Max Stirner showed Thyscius a mirror of himself, an amulet against demonic activity. Phantoms flew past—the actual men staring boldly and conjuring figures like Rumi, St. Francis of Assisi, Siddhartha Gautama, St. Seraphim of Sarov, and countless other experiencers who nearly touched the great light but lived in the wrong universe.

Random streams of energy, completely disrespectful of time, rushed by like hurried lyrics. The group was absorbing, extracting, and plundering the fruits of this world.

The eyes of these phantoms could be seen by the inhabitants of that most perfect world, pulling the soul out of it so that it could be planted as a product of choice within the hothouse of some unseen cybernetic dictator. The group worked as one legion: active, hungry, lapping up and drinking the nectar of men, extracting from the now barren and juiceless world beneath them, as Job questioned the cosmic architecture. Genius was collected up, digested, and consumed, while the remnants were simply discarded into the void.

In his haste, Thyscius, acting as an angry, all-consuming God, intentionally gripped his Holy Candlestick while staring with great conviction into the mind of Methuselah, the wisest man of this world. Thyscius drew the life and essence from him without regard, finally releasing the candlestick. Methuselah looked upon this spectral phantom after 969 of their years and lost himself, his world collapsing into the crystal diamond that sat beneath their feet.

They all looked down. They could not look upon one another. Though their eyes were huge and all-knowing, and their light was brilliant, the weight of wielding absolute power left them drained and humbled.

"Well, pick that fucking thing up, why don't you? That was anticlimactic," Nick muttered.

Daria and Rancor looked on, undisturbed. Daria only noted, "It is a process of knowing," while feeling her chest, confirming that the pure crystal had indeed absorbed into her and become a living aspect of her being.

Cook wasn't there. It was up to them to press the buttons on their Resonators, but they didn't. They only stood there in the quiet stillness of their own reverence and awe.

"I am ashamed of myself. I can't ever recover from that," said Larry, looking at himself and genuinely meaning it. "I just stripped those great thinkers who were far beyond myself—men I would give my left arm to converse with—and drank their entire world like it was a half-drunk, shotgunned malted beverage."

"Is it up to us to say it's not? I mean, look at all these deep thoughts everywhere, and look at us: fifty-cent words that amount to nothing but over-inflated pomp," Nick countered. "You know what I think?"

"What?" Larry asked.

Nick went on, "I think Methuselah, or whatever that guy thought of himself as, is what kept him going all that time. Narcissistic fuel, self-flatulence. I mean, did you see the guy? That world was like a meal in waiting, and I am not altered or changed, but profoundly struck by how we could feel any guilt for taking a long-lived, painful, short-sighted hubris and temerity and transforming it into a living synthesis of something elaborate that their over-bloated universe could never even imagine. Now, I'm sorry, Larry, but you were right to show wrath and anger and resentment toward those old-school guards. Of course they felt self-righteous—they were already roadkill long before we ever came along. A lone bubble floating in a greater cosmos, waiting to be consumed."

"Oh, that's dark, Nick!" Varginah whispered.

"I second that," Betsy agreed.

Varginah turned to Larry. "We just went along for the ride, and I met Athena, Clea, Enheduanna, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, and Saint Teresa of Ávila. They handed me their knowledge, warning me of man's tyranny. You only experienced the profound fucked-upness of yourself and men, while from my view, I will carry this diamond into the final realm of the Green community remembering that. All men—and you are a sweet and kind man, Larry, and you, Nick—I love you both, but you are limited. This next phase has to be carried by a female, guys. Betsy and I experienced none of what you experienced, but we could see it all taking place as if from the sidelines."

Larry handed the diamond to Varginah after she clarified this absolute self-truth, finally understanding why Rancor, in all his wild maleness, was content to be a cat, and why Daria chose to be female.

"Betsy, what did you experience in there? I could feel the others, but I couldn't see you," Varginah asked.

Betsy answered quietly, "You're both wrong. I saw you both devouring knowledge and gobbling up wisdom like it was a buffet. No, I sat back with Daria and Rancor, watching it all, absorbing the fact that this is just another filtering step for whatever is behind life, existence—whatever sits behind all this. It seems more malevolent to me now. Male, female, good, evil, right, wrong. I hope that when Var takes that last world out, she does it as an honored transfer of wealth, of a rich, vibrant community—a universe that wants to pass on the Promethean torch, the legacy of wealth, knowing that these steps are a necessary evolution."

Completing her first thought, Betsy then went on, "I was linked in with Daria and Rancor. They were sharing with me their vast wealth, showing me that the sphere of green holds in it a backdoor, pentagonal doorway that is a reverse of all these worlds. I was shown by those two more wealth of final synthesis in information than you could ever learn from mere mortals on any plane of existence. They freely gave me that while you all were seemingly gobbling everything up. Ridiculous, really."

The zodiac, perennial downloads—isn't it all the same pomp, only wearing different clothes? Nick thought to himself.

Varginah held the diamond in her hand and looked down at it, knowing what it meant. She had to honor everyone in this universe now clutched within her right hand.

"We must pass on this gauntlet of wisdom without becoming corrupted by it in the process," Varginah said. "The green realm is diplomacy, and now, frankly, I am worried about how wisdom itself is being taken on and registered into this upcoming new universal realm. Will we have angry, aggressive philosophers and artists carrying on a vindictive flame for some cause they know nothing about, unaware of where that resentment and anger stems from? I think you may have cursed us, this new world, and we cannot take it back. But seeing through Daria's perspective and why she sat back interpreting it in her own way, it is all inconsequential to her."

"Let's take this lesson and move on," Betsy said, now holding her Resonator and eye-signaling everyone else in the group to do the same. "On three, then? And when we get back, let's forgive ourselves for still being human. Can we at least agree on this?"

She looked intently and sternly at everyone. Rancor, jumping up into Daria's arms, began to flicker and flash first. The rest of them, skipping the countdown entirely, thought only of that living room at 168 Apricot Lane.

Chapter 15: Everything Becomes Old Hat

And just like that, they were back, feeling a certain laissez-faire in the process.

"I haven't said much compared to how gregarious and social you all seem to be. The truth is I have been pensive and even pragmatic in my communication with you all here, my friends—and this dying, hemorrhaging world that I won't miss at all," Larry said, sitting in his well-worn vintage suit, looking like the homeless man he had been for many years, now appearing to be draped in overpriced thrift store novelty clothing.

They were all standing in the kitchen, knowing they needed to eat but having no appetite now that they had consumed that life-morphing ration Daria had supplied only moments prior. The mix had altered them in ways they could hardly begin to put together here, but it laid the foundation of an ongoing metamorphosis that would ultimately transform much more than who they were now.

"We did what we were supposed to do. And damn it, why did Daria feed us that instant-Viagra cosmic hard-on cookie anyway? Not her fault—it's our lack of diplomacy and power that is the real takeaway here!" Nick added. He quickly and anxiously ducked behind the short wall separating the kitchen from the living room, snorting a healthy bump's worth of what separates the privileged from the fodder. As a dark, cold, clammy glaze came upon him, it didn’t feel the same.

"Beer?"

They all raised their hands collectively.

"I could honestly use more than just a beer... guys, how about you?" said the Professor.

Nick did his usual surprise hard-liquor bartender move and grabbed a heavily chilled, extra-large bottle of vodka from the freezer's side door. "Orange juice, cranberry juice, or straight? I even have some pomegranate juice in the back of the bottom refrigerator shelf," Nick kindly offered.

Betsy and Varginah declined the alcohol, but each agreed to some juice with ice.

"I'll just have mine with ice, Nick," stated the Professor.

"Me too," said Larry. "Make it big glasses with only one ice cube for me. I haven't drunk in years, but I intend to start now. End of the world, end to the trauma, the end is a good thing I'd say!"

Having something to divert their massive, weighty inner realities, three sat on the couch, one sat in the high-backed chair, and one sat on the leather ottoman.

Betsy cut in with a positive injection to the recent down-note feeling in the room by raising her glass for a toast. She had opted for the cranberry juice with generous portions of crushed ice from the ice machine concealed within the refrigerator door. "Then to new beginnings, Larry." She smirked at Larry thoughtfully, acknowledging all the hell he'd gone through in this life, sinking back into the leveling maternal aspect that made her fundamentally who she was.

"That was a weird one, and it's nice to see you all back to your former selves!" Raising a toast, Betsy sipped her Cape Cod with crushed ice as she sat on the far end of the large living room couch, away from the cellar door—the obvious vortex of attention within the room.

Daria was pulling a fluxing, vibrant string of plasma light along as if it were commonplace, as Rancor—an interdimensional god of first nature by all accounts—did what cats do, chasing it, lost in his own playful world. The Professor, now sitting in the high-backed leather chair, packed a fresh pipe of Turkish tobacco, asking if anyone minded.

Nick calmly replied, "Turn on the fan, so as not to set off any alarms or alarm the senses." Varginah jumped in to do so. She was still standing there nursing her vodka and orange juice screwdriver, using her vast human intellect to rationalize and update the goings-on and where they were now from a more mathematically analytical point of view.

"It's nice to smell high-quality tobacco smoke," added Varginah. "My grandfather used to smoke it back in Brazil when I was a small child." Then, remembering the name of the aroma as she attached the tobacco packaging to her grandfather's face and voice in reflective memory, she added, "Jaguari. And on Sundays when he was out, he'd pick up a Pacotinho Irlandez. He'd opt for that when the tobacco store was closed on Sundays and he'd forgotten to pick some up earlier. I miss that man." Closing her eyes and grabbing at her heart to cling on and savor the smell and the memory, the Professor's tobacco smoke gave off that familiar inviting smell, and she was back there in time in a sense.

Larry, noticing his missing button and seeing the misshapen drape of his suit, shuffled, scuffing his feet on the cafe miel-colored carpet in a depressed, man-child-like swagger, continuing on to the downstairs bathroom toward the back bedrooms, then stepping to the right toward the bathroom at the end of the hall. He entered the bathroom and looked into the mirror upon closing the door. He was still the same Larry; nothing had elevated, nothing had really changed, and he couldn’t celebrate that. He began to cry, being bombarded with the memories of all his sixty-three agonizing years, all the miles and wear, and his rejection by society. Why didn't this all happen sooner? Friends, a home, a place to belong, a cosmic fight for universal balance and order—he was tired. As he stared into his own eyes in the mirror for answers, he found none.

"How the fuck did I end up here?" Larry blubbered, as snot and drool came pouring out. "I'm not really a bad guy, am I, to kill my heroes?"

He reflected on the fact that the more he tried now, the more he validated whatever pernicious entity sat behind it all. To solidify any victory was to certify all the wrongs done to him. Would it all go on in a mad loop, with this perpetual roller coaster of an insanity infinity loop? Were they the cosmic scapegoats of some multifaceted master agenda?

His blubbering drew attention, as Betsy knocked on the bathroom door. "You okay in there, Larry?" Even with all that world-destroying cruelty that Larry exhibited in that purple world closure, Betsy knew that something else was drawing on them, moving them around like pawns on a chessboard. Maybe the two were bound somewhere between that magenta gluon pink and purple light, both vying to transcend to that expressive blue and simply voice out absent conditions in harmonic song. This is what they shared: that yearning for higher principle. Betsy knew this somehow, felt it inside her bones. She knew that world of stoic philosophy, men staring at their own shadows on cave walls enjoying the smell of their own philosophical flatulence, had to end at some point. The conjecturing went nowhere and served nothing, and they both knew it and had already outgrown it, but something was boxing them in, limiting them, and they all wanted to fly.

Larry shot back, "Yes! Just cleaning up my—my suit and shaving a bit, Bets!" then adding, "Thank you, my dear."

Nick looked like a male model with his overgrown stubble, and the Professor was, well, the Professor, with a large, sweeping mustache and a naturally well-shaped blonde beard, his wild, thinning blonde hair showing the mad rush of a world-changing thought on his brow. But Larry looked like an old wino—at least to himself. He loved philosophy, but to actually travel into the matrix—the very stew and glue of what held these men together—was disappointing. He didn't feel validated. What would it take? This was already the most radical conceptualization of any cathartic dynamite toward a spiritual growth beyond his wildest imaginations. He was glad that he did it, but he felt in that moment, flashing before his eyes, that these philosophers he idolized were nothing but self-indulgent tribesmen now, who were clearly given no power of their own, so they searched for it in novelty and existential componentry. They still brandished their own weapons, though quite possibly through a form of cowardice, validating one another in never-ending high-brow diatribes in eternal rhetoric and dialectical exchange.

Larry relieved himself, humming, holding his underdeveloped phallus by any worldly standard model, and realized why his internal world was both a blessing and a curse. It was a rich tapestry that drew him into a place where he always had more meaning than the brutal, connectionless, and transactional world where he held no true significance. But somehow he was picked, or even further assaulted and used beyond that veil of comprehension. Was it a blessing or a curse? All of this he vied to know, and that was the root of his philosophical quest, he now realized, in the destruction of them, the twilight of the idols. He was beginning to burn down the false constructs of a prison house within his mind. He didn't want to be inside; he wanted to be wild and free, unchained and unrestrained on the outside always, sleeping underneath the stars, but not a world that would reduce this ultimate freedom to homelessness, being unhoused, or any other ostracizing, reducing term the syllogistic-track cybernetic drones would dictate as a voicebox to the dark council. A new way and new order had to prevail, but how, and more importantly, where? Was there indeed another realm beyond all of this? The very thing those philosophers all wished for in all their long meanders as well as feared in all their written compulsions.

That divisive place where his doppelgänger had decided that money and outward worldly success would be the better choice, synthesizing life, experience, and meaning entirely antithetical to his own. He scrubbed off his suit, shamefully reminded of how useless he was to this world, and maybe any other—old and pathetic.

But somehow, someone had seen him and noticed him. He realized then that he had long ago accepted he was no good, allowing the streets to decide his fate. What was this entity or computational system, after all? Was it choosing the most exploitable members who were in reality uber-codependent? Was there another Larry, a better one, awaiting tomorrow when that clock struck 11:00 AM and the truth would be revealed?

He raked a men's razor—that must have been Nick's at some point—over his face, using only soap and water, shaving a natural shape out of the odd, asymmetrical, random hairs popping out around his mouth, mustache line, and beard. Then he quickly washed the remaining soap off his face with warm water and grabbed a small towel to dry off. He washed his hands and used that same towel with warm water to clean off his sleeves and suit, finally leaving his hands under the warm water and closing his eyes, letting the sensations of the world as it is begin to sink into his reality.

Larry came back into the living room. Daria was alone and could be seen walking freely in the backyard in the darkness. The clock on the wall read 1:00 AM; it was November 11th. Everyone occupied their own spaces, collecting themselves and preparing for tomorrow, and Larry had lost his taste for philosophy entirely.

He sat on the couch alone. Too little, too late. Rancor sat in the corner, where Larry didn't notice him at all. Betsy was in her own room with the door closed, while the Professor kept his open. You could hear his British broadcast radio playing, covering news and playing infrequent music while he shuffled papers, writing down closely remembered maps of worlds and diagrams. No one tried to see how high they could jump nor tried to fly outside. The world had done a very good job of reducing them to another face in this world, and maybe across all of them, no one wanted to stand out, to be envied or hated. The universe had already shrunk around them enough on their collective watch.

Daria paced back and forth, exhausted from always campaigning for something, summoned to do jobs no one else could when she only wanted to sleep for another billion years at least. She wanted to dream of worlds instead of making them up or destroying them. The first universe and the first world—would this new one be easy and simple, or more demanding still? She kept walking and pacing in the backyard, unconcerned with drones, satellites, neighbors taking her picture, or finding a reason to justify the theft of entropy by way of drama.

Varginah sat in her room, thinking about how evil men had been in her life and how she wished things could be different between her and Betsy. She would rather make love and relax than fight wars and kill worlds. She never wanted to touch another science book nor look with fascination at the stars. She wanted to live somewhere, anywhere, away from everyone and forget about everything that had ever taken place in her entire life.

The solemn moon hung over them; they did not grow tired or older, while new organisms flourished within them and gave them abilities and powers that they only wanted to use to escape and dream.

Nick looked at his email and saw scripts and offers for movie deals from his agent from days ago, along with licensing agreements for the movies, docuseries, and television spinoff shows he had already either acted in or produced by name. Every PDF was a wild new story that paralleled more vividly their lives. There was simply no escape, and the highs and lows of secret drug use had ill to no effect on him after Daria gave everyone that very sobering foodstuff that stripped them all of the convenience of ephemerality as an excuse for evermore. He felt it as did they all; they were eternal and did not deserve it. Eventually, some sci-fi channel would show this story for free. The world went on like a redundant nightmare of mediocrity. There was no spaceship nor device that could take them anywhere but where they were in their own heads. Maybe Cook got to them all, he thought. Maybe this is the way to sour a person from the inside out without having to do the messy work of scraping them off the sidewalk?

Everyone unanimously realized within themselves that Cook had it right—he didn't have to exist, and he didn't even have to show up. There was always another Cook who would do the cleanup. He could stay inside himself and not take up any space nor add to any form of entropy at all.

They all rushed into the hallway at the same time with dark hoodies on, looking like some emo drift crew about to do some shadow, coked-out, irresponsible street racing—but it was worse: they were about to destroy the world. Walking in a single-file line downstairs, they entered the living room and saw Larry sitting with several bottles of every prescription pill that he could find and a bottle of whiskey that he hadn't opened yet. They approached quietly from each side as he came into clear view. He was holding at least thirty pills of mixed variety in each hand.

"Thought I'd end this madness, kids. You caught me—the real Larry, the homeless Larry, the worthless Larry, the rejected Larry. I was just suddenly realizing..." He dropped the pills into the rocks glass he hadn't poured the first drink into yet, as some of the pills clung to the sticky sweat from the heat of his hands, or to remind him to get the fucking job done.

No one argued with him. They looked blankly at him. They were committed to the same task. Like some solar cult that bombed trains with arcane symbols on weekends until they drank the Kool-Aid, they were ready. There was no guilt inside Betsy or Varginah in denying such a miserable existence for two souls—maybe more? Maybe two sets of twins or triplets. What's the fucking point of this bleak universe when everything, every day, can be reduced to the binary and concepts.

Betsy spoke up, "How many of those fucking pills you got, old man?" as she took a seat beside him, tilting her head onto his burly shoulder in admission that they were indeed parallel to one another in sight and mind.

Nick popped open that whiskey bottle. "You know, I was saving this for the release of a movie project, and I'll never act again... that's for sure. Too much drama, I'm overloaded now." He tore off the plastic and pulled out that strong, stinky cork, sniffing it before tossing it to the ground and pouring at least five shots' worth straight down his gullet. Betsy grabbed the bottle next, putting Nick's attempt to shame, and in no time the 750ml bottle was polished off as the 168 crew passed it around, and Larry tossed the thing to the ground. Rancor remained in the corner, not stopping anyone, his back turned to them all. The solemn depression of this dying world had even begun to get to him, work its way into the wild. A mastermind was behind it all, but why?

They all sat, buzzed as hell. "But nothing is spinning yet!" said Nick. The alcohol obviously being worn off far too quickly as their bodies were transformed, but the mind was stuck in this solution, unable to finally break free.

Varginah said, "I'm going in by myself, so don't bother coming after me. There's no reason to. I'm going on a one-way, no-return suicide mission, no Mylar-looking fancy blanket, just be, and that holy mother candlestick pure light." She grabbed that V-marked candlestick and checked to make sure that damn worthless but brilliant hypercube diamond was in her center, poncho-style single hoodie pocket.

They were all wearing some form of black sweats or black jeans. Larry stripped his suit off shamelessly before his crew, all the way down to his dirty tighty-whities, showing his lack of masculinity and his estrogen-rich, fatty, grotesque body, but he didn't care.

Nick pointed toward the entry to the living room, saying, "To the left, there is the laundry room. Grab some dark clothes, they should fit you. We're going into this thing kamikaze and stealth, all together."

Larry rounded the room exposing his flopping fat rolls and his disproportionate, flat backside; skid marks from his underwear were noticeable, but no one gave a shit anymore. When he returned, he was wearing all-black sweats, thick material, some brand new with a price tag still stuck to the side of the sweatpants. His black hooded sweatshirt had some dark blue surf symbol over it—the only definably different thing than the others. He tossed his suit down like trash, not bothering to put it in the laundry room, knowing if they survived this he'd probably come right back to it and put it on again. But there was no longer any anticipation or forethought any of them were casting forth into a future point; the world was dying, and in large part, so were they. Their psyches didn't like or enjoy the thought of eternal life; they had lived far too long in the shameful walk of limitation and consequence from a falsely virtuous higher moral order. The old world was dead. Sex was dead. Dreams were dead, and the reason was gone. If they were to go on, they needed a new reason why.

"Got your resonators?" Varginah asked. They all displayed theirs. "I'm going my own way after this. We take out this final world, then I am going off to limbo land away from everything. It's all dead to me now."

They shook their heads in agreement. This was no test of powers or floating through floorboards; they walked down the traditional way. Daria walked the grass off in the backyard, pacing back and forth, ready for this to end anyway so she could leave and be done. Rancor had lain there prior, but now paced unhappily with the crew.

"Let's get this fucking over with," said Betsy.

They walked down, now very buzzed, bordering on drunk, into that cold, dark space. Even the gates only pulsed dimly, as if in some form of hibernating stasis. There was no machine or state of existing that would cause anyone here to chase their tails again. Holding their resonators in hand, ready to say their final goodbyes, with a simple push it would all be gone. They could live where no one could ever find them again, anywhere in time—in a liminal place with a reset universe as a clean slate to disappear into.

They walked into the furthest corner as it instantly became pitch black. They kept walking past the forks of the other knockoff chambers on each side, straight to the furthest reach of the tunnel, where Daria—inhuman herself—was met with a solid rock wall. But the black void was there and invited them in, appearing like Vantablack magnetic fragments of demoniac black-hole quicksand. Varginah walked through, holding the diamond in her left hand, the candlestick in her right, and the resonator in the pocket at her waist.

Chapter 16: Destroying Your World 

They each walked through the void and found themselves standing in the upstairs living room. Rancor went back to smell the spot where he had last slept, confirming it was exactly 2:00 AM—virtually the exact same time they had walked down the cellar steps at 1:58 AM.

They exchanged glances. A rocks glass filled with an assortment of pills and an empty whiskey bottle lay on the nearby carpet, its cork discarded carelessly. Outside, Daria was still pacing the grass on the back lawn. The place smelled exactly the same.

"I'm going for a walk," Varginah announced.

"I'm grabbing another drink first," Betsy replied. She pulled a fifth of rum from the built-in living room cabinet, which was packed tight with glass bottles, figurines, and family photos illuminated by ambient lighting. She popped open the bottle and took a generous, biting swig before Larry reached for it. It passed to Nick, then the Professor, and finally Varginah until the bottle was quickly emptied. Looking slightly surprised that no one had stopped him, the Professor grabbed another.

They walked out together into the bite of the late November night. Rounding the driveway in their dark crew wear, they looked like a stealthy band of teenagers. Through illuminated windows, neighbors could be seen watching the evening news, though most homes were dark—asleep for the night. A man walked his large Rottweiler. A couple of offbeat cars sounded strained and tired driving home from work, and an out-of-place delivery van drove hastily by. All were heading home or transporting something trivial and useless to another tired soul somewhere nearby. It was past midnight on the outskirts of the city—any place, anywhere, nowhere really.

The night was crisp, and the sky was dark and blank, but a tinge of cobalt hung in the air.

To the 168 crew, the night felt like it could both go on forever, looping in futility, or end this very minute; it did not matter anymore to any one of them. Walking side by side, carelessly down the middle of the street, they headed toward the ocean and toward that invitation of the never-ending horizon. There was always one somewhere, just as beautiful and yawning. Even on a starkly plain planet in appearance, with only a distant, dying dwarf star to infrequently warm an icy, barren surface, beauty could be seen everywhere. On this one, however, that shimmering, dark liquid mass reflecting the moonlight—oceanic tides of H2O—was the same in appearance as Saturn's moon Titan, with surface seas and lakes that look just like water but are actually filled with liquid methane and ethane. Replenishing to some life somewhere, but not here.

Each took a warming, welcoming swig as they passed the bottle between them. The 168 crew, now fellow warrior comrades and friends, all paused. The street was dark, solemnly lit only by sparse streetlights. There were no comets of death and doom, no cinematic, end-of-the-world apocalypse. There was a world and its people churning, chugging, and struggling beneath the cosmic hegemony of secret societies and fluctuating markets posing as trends—a broken world constantly making an effort to bandage its own self-inflicted wounds, as the duality of it all inflicted another wound on the other side. But the reality and the reminder always hung over everyone everywhere: no one was special, yet everything remained the same.

"Let's walk back," Betsy suggested, her cheeks and nose flushed red from the nip of the impending winter weather. Nick gave her a childish, playful poke on the tip of her cold nose. Slurring her words slightly, Betsy looked eye to eye with Nick as he hugged her, as if they were a couple always in some way. "I don't really care what happens, do you?" she quipped, batting her eyelashes, looking into his dirty slate-blue eyes.

The Professor, polishing off the last bit of their shared bottle, asked, "Where did Varginah get off to then?"

Larry answered with a laugh. "Well, she is pretty darn buzzed. Maybe she went back to the house to fall asleep, or..."

"Or what, Larry?!"

As the moment hung, the Professor dropped the bottle, leaving the sound of an empty crack from the stubborn glass unwilling to break, as he began to turn and run back toward the house.

Then, as it hit them all, they began bounding back toward the house, but there was no sign of Varginah ahead of them as they continued up a steady grade. Breathless and drunk, the thought came upon them as they bounded left, now cruising and clunking awkwardly, flat-footing it in a half-drunken, severely restricted gait. Now the four had advanced far enough to bring the house back into view with only an eighth of a mile stretch to go. They retired their efforts in unison, walking slowly from fatigue while intently panning forward, zooming into the near distance. As they once again picked up their speed, post-oxygen consumption, they walked briskly. Varginah emerged holding the very thing they feared: a Holy Mother Candlestick firmly in her grip. It was already done. With that 'V' initial vetted on the end by the Professor with his pen, this world's fate had been set. Instantly, their worry somehow left them; someone had to do it.

"Varginah, Varginah!" Nick cried. "What are you doing?!" There was something he wished he'd done, or maybe he was just getting burned out by the constant change. Then, a sigh of relief—what was done was done. They all began to realize that they had a job to do.

"Don't try and stop me, Nick!" But the clocking grip of the HMC could not be reversed. Varginah went on, "This is the same damn world we have learned to hate our entire lives. There is no true diplomacy, just a bunch of fucked-up actors in a meritocracy. If kids ran the world, had access to the nuclear codes, or a red button, it would have been over in five minutes." That got them all thinking clearly, letting Varginah further cement her point. "It's a rhetorical supply chain of master-slavery, countries built on the backs of slaves—a neofeudalistic kakistocracy. Nothing has ever changed or will ever change. It has to end!" Varginah was yelling, letting it all out, finally saying a 'fuck you' to the world. "Furthermore, fuck you world, Earth, and all you psychopathic assholes!" She didn't care how loud she was or if anyone emerged from their houses; she knew they wouldn't. "Cowards! Until it's your worthless fancy car or the illusion of your checking accounts, then you care, right!" her voice projecting even louder now.

Standing face to face in the front yard, Nick grabbed her around the waist and tried to give her a playful twirl, but she became entirely insulted, pushing Nick away and nearly loosening her grip in the process. Nick raised his arms as if to say steady now, calm down, but this only incited her further. Varginah had some words to say.

"I don't want you, Nick! I don't need any man, okay? I just want Betsy, but everything is all fucked up, and you knocked us up with your strange, randy... w-what did you say, 'half-god blood sperm or something!'?" Varginah spat. "Just tell me now, am I going to give birth to some kind of fucked-up alien or something?!" The stress of it all made Varginah feel better now.

Betsy, feeling inspired and appreciative of Varginah's brazen declaration, screamed to further the point as loud as she could: "Yeah, fuck planet Earth and all you assholes, perverts, and child molesters behind closed doors! Fuck every last one of you pompous, trashy weirdos!"

"Doesn't that feel awesome!" Varginah said, winded and gasping at the ocean-chilled, autumnal crisp air.

Then Nick, the Professor, and Larry looked at one another, yelling a bellowing, synchronic sing-out in a tremolo distortion: "Fuck you, planet Earth!"

They stood in a semicircle spanning the front yard and the sidewalk below. If one looked closely enough, a bold Daria could be seen standing with Rancor at the top of the stairs, quietly watching the scene unfold. She had gotten nearly as far as she could in cycling out the cosmic rays of Phulus, Veesta, and Rasheef into disparate diamond prisons within her networking. They were not punished; in fact, Daria was probably the most just ward that ever existed. Her wards were being reeducated, as she knew full well that in the coming cycles, the probability of them returning was most likely inevitable unless something did catastrophically change for the better. But she was always covering all bases. As Rancor was still here, now free from that damn cave system below, maybe in the next aeon, phase, or rebirth of a new world entirely, he had actually well earned his freedom.

"What do we do after all of this, huh? Something is really trying to fuck with us, Nick, and I'm just going to be the bigger man and get this shit over with!" she declared, firmly planting the rare-metal rod into the grass of the front yard as if establishing a new ownership to existence itself.

A man walking a large Rottweiler looked up in nosy, presumptuous amazement. If there were a later, his right brain would attempt to convince him that this group was merely putting on some late-night, corporate confidence-building exercise for the nearby Bay Area elite, or simply that it was an acting class exercise. The mind must use the illusion of psychology to rationalize its way out of pure left-brain lies and rhetorical syllogisms.

"Do you want to know how it all ends, sir?" Varginah called out to the man gruffly, looking at him deadpan and squarely eye to eye.

The man kept walking, but Varginah was persistent. "Sir, sir... well, do ya?" further prodding the poor ridiculous man.

The man scampered away, pulling his dog along with him while struggling to pull his falling jeans up.

"Cowards... they're all cowards!" Varginah yelled. "Everyone in this world is a coward!" But the neighborhood and the world lay fast asleep, tucked away dreaming in their own paracosms. There were no Pentagon planes or CIA operatives sweeping in like everyone had imagined with Agent Cook. Only the higher operatives sat unconcerned, remaining indifferent to the kinetic destruction of the entire thing. The HMCs caused an immediate Glueball reaction, where the entire universe was nearly instantly exposed with virtually no delay, then reduced to the master diamond compacted by unleashed pure magenta light. This world would be enveloped on behalf of Varginahs everywhere.

"They go along with us, Varginah, because they don't know what to think or do unless they are spoon-fed the plan!" the Professor noted. "This warps the human mind; it has warped all our minds and broken us down. It's done a remarkable job of doing so, don't you think?!"

"No, no, finish it," Betsy urged. "Finish it. We'll all get what we want, we can go our own ways now—whatever comes next. Or... or we can be a family, but we all have to have the courage to set off that final candlestick and declare what we want, what we are going to do next without question!"

Betsy grabbed Varginah and kissed her passionately. "Cycles, cycles, life, girl, cycles," she muttered, squishing Varginah's nose and pushing her cheeks together to force an open-mouthed pucker until Varginah had to laugh. Varginah pulled away, leaning down to touch Betsy's cold lips, wet from the night air. "That tickles."

Drunk, bold, and thoroughly sick of the charade, Nick grabbed Larry and the Professor by their arms, whispering into their ears. Like young children, they agreed and ran into the house, only to emerge with four more candlesticks.

"We decided that we hate this place," Nick announced.

Betsy stepped back up the stairs. "I hate this place too."

Daria now sat on the front porch with Rancor, quietly recording and remembering.

"Let's burn this fucking place down," Nick said. "Do you think that Steve across the street and snide Brenda next to us, or any of these idiots, really know or care about what's actually going on? They probably think these are some kind of romantic candles or fireworks that will make loud noises and keep them up. But they only get up to keep the toxic powers in play, and we can do something about it right now, guys. We can burn this house down—Earth, our house, God's house. Let me fucking burn the thing down with something far greater: the souls from a world that God turned his back on. Let's burn it down with them!"

"What do you say, guys?" Nick finished. Each member of the final Council of this version of Earth now held the very devices that would end it all in their eager, ready hands.

"What happens to us then?" Larry asked. "Didn't we have the power to survive and come back here because of Earth the way it is now?"

"Wait, is this even our Earth?" Nick countered.

"I don't care anymore, honestly. Guys, I am done... like, done-done, okay? Earth sucks, Earth people suck, and maybe we suck!" Varginah declared.

Betsy quipped, "Wait, didn't we already do it all? Like, wasn't the whole plan to only have our universe, Earth, the last one left... isn't that what this is?"

Larry jumped in. "It's a test, it's a trick, damn it, can't you see?"

The Professor nodded. "Yes, yes, Larry, I think you're right. Of course, it's almost exactly like Earth—what better way for an evil, inferior chameleon to hide, huh?!"

Daria floated down, holding Rancor.

"Daria, you've come to assist us. Is this world identical to Earth in order to trick us? Or is this a test to see if we are trigger-happy, to see if we would blow ourselves up?"

Stroking Rancor, Daria replied calmly. "Did anyone ever tell you what the final goal was? Only that there is a deadline and a quest for supremacy of worlds was ever implied. You found the tools yourselves, while Agent Cook gave you the way out by handing those resonators to each of you. Why do you concern yourselves with anything outside of this? You could go anywhere right now, alone or together. You could always go back into that pyramid and see where it takes you. The choices—don't you see you have too many choices? I gave you the food of transformation. You will never die; you haven't even begun to test the power and freedom that this alone gives you. But here you argue like children in the front yard because you are stuck in what they think about you—what people think. Well, they don't matter. What they think and believe doesn't matter because they will always bow to the consensus. Now you have to ask yourselves if you are willing to forever leave this limiting mind state and simply transcend."

"Transcend... transcend, is... is t-that what we're doing?" Larry let out a mad laugh. "Heh, ha, heh, heh... Dammit, you're right, you're right, Daria, that has been the point all along, hasn't it?" he said, teetering on a breakdown.

"Transcend. I'm doing it. I'm setting off the candlestick right now, then it's decided!" Varginah said.

"But you don't even have the Professor's protective shielding blanket! And to that point, haven't we already transcended? I mean, think about what Daria just told us. We each have a resonator. We have crystals embedded within us. We were given those rations by Daria earlier. Varginah is holding a diamond that has to be by far the most valuable artifact ever seen on Earth, and it's hers, all hers personally. I have enough script material to put me in an unending, eternal list of B-movie roles. Didn't we make it? Isn't this as good as it gets? Maybe this is as good as it ever gets?" Nick reasoned.

"Yeah, but I want to end things here. I'm sick of this place. It's sick and fake, and it feels like a deceptive Groundhog Day—if indeed this is Earth and not some utopia that has gone unnoticed. Has anyone tried to look at the news, call someone, or look past the obvious?" Varginah challenged.

"It's Earth. I know it's our crappy Earth. There isn't another us here unless, for some reason, they walked in through that door the same time as us and created some sort of paradox or something," Larry said.

"Paradox," the Professor repeated.

"Yes, a paradox where we never know what the right choice is, or if we are in the original universe that we initially began from," Larry added.

"What if we just corrected it all and returned to the universe humanity was always supposed to really be from? I mean, chiral amino acids and sugars, and how things always feel somehow off. Well, do you feel that way right now?" Varginah quipped.

"Well, do we just wait until 11:00 AM tomorrow? What time is it now?" asked the Professor.

"Oh, you're fucking with me right now... the time is 3:33 in the AM," Nick said. "Yep, now it's 3:34 in the AM."

"I say we blow it. It's the only way to move forward, I think," Varginah insisted.

"Maybe it resets our problem—humanity's problem of always feeling like we're moving forward, when we never get anywhere anyway!" Larry added.

"But we have to, don't we? It's written in our nature to think we are progressing, moving forward like rats on an exercise wheel," the Professor said.

One might think they would all be a little more passionate and concerned, but they weren't.

"I'm doing it." Varginah pulled away the remainder of the sheath, gripping the middle of the Holy Mother Candlestick. What was done was done, and by way of unflinching impulse, she kept holding it, realizing this was the end of their world. "Do you think I could hijack the entire world this way?" she joked, breaking the heightened alarm of her commitment with levity. "Hold this thing for ransom as they try to figure out how it works, and eventually implode me and the Holy Mother into a vacuum of our own doing?"

The Professor cut in. "Well, it's done. I'll go into the living room and at least grab the protective blanket from my backpack. Be right back, okay? Don't do anything impulsive while I'm away," he finished, rushing up to the house. He returned almost instantly in half-trust, unfolding the massive, memory-shaping, metallic, mylar-like blanket.

Sensing an odd, stale moment of silence, Rancor let out a tired, low groan-meow as the Professor stepped back into the circle.

Relieved that the ordeal with the humans was finally nearing some sort of end, Daria stated, "Regardless of what takes place here, it is all inconsequential in the grand scope." As neither she nor Rancor were affected by the Holy Mother Candlesticks in the slightest, they continued on in unbroken, invincible archetypal existence. They didn't miss anyone. They didn't grieve. They saw the entire puzzle exactly as it sat before them, in all its attempts at clever meaning—the ontology of low-vibrational quasi-existence.

"Okay, ready, guys?" The Professor motioned for everyone to gather in. The skittish, alarmed man with the dog had returned. Standing curiously nearby, he had been listening for God knows how long as he drew closer to them, as if trying to make his way in.

"Not you, you skank! How long have you been lurking?" Nick snapped, seeing the absurdity of it all.

"About ten minutes," the stranger replied in a dull, jittery, cluelessly aloof tone, not quite understanding the point of entry nor the stakes involved.

"Scamper away then, scruff," Betsy said in amusement, knowing another version of the guy was taking up space and equally clueless in some other off-shoot or flip side of absurdity within that diamond's asinine probabilities.

"Go get your own blanket," Varginah added as she finally let go of the candlestick, dropping the sheath from her other hand as if already letting go of it all.

"Why did you hold it so long, Var?" asked the Professor.

"Well, you were getting the blanket... I wasn't sure what to do, to be honest with you," she admitted.

"Well, that gives us two or three long, agonizing minutes. Does anyone have anything to drink then, or a rare smoke?" the Professor asked.

Sorites Paradox of John Tinnerman

Varginah pulled the hypercube diamond from her front hoodie pouch. John looked convincingly amazed as the dimensions danced in her hand with perplexing brilliance. She dropped it a few feet away as if to say, this old thing, aware that every universe before it still lived and pulsed within its crystal matrices. She then trailed back to stay tight with the group in casual militant order.

"Got a cigarette, do you, there, guy?" the Professor asked, giving John a stern up-and-down look to divert his spellbound attention from the diamond for a moment.

"Y-yes, I do, actually, I d-do," he stammered, pulling a short, filterless cigarette from an already opened soft pack in his front right pocket.

The Professor stood expectant, placing the filterless cigarette between his lips. "Oh, oh..." John muttered, nervously producing a lighter as the flame failed to catch on the first try.

"How many minutes is that then?" the Professor asked the group generally.

"At least one or two minutes until the candlestick blows, Professor," Nick answered.

"I'll tell you what then, sir," the Professor continued, dragging on the harsh, filterless, sobering tobacco. "What's your name, sir?"

"John... J-John Tinnerman, that's my name, with two n's," he replied.

"I want you to go up into that house, and straight in front of you upon entry, all the way down that long corridor, you will see a built-in shelf on your left. Do you understand, John?"

"Y-yes, I do, sir."

"Be creative and go grab us a nice, big bottle from that shelf, do you understand, John? Surprise us—it can be any bottle, any bottle at all, just be creative. Show us what you're made of, as long as it's the hard stuff," the Professor finished.

Nick cut in just as John was nervously stepping away. "And John?"

"Y-yes, sir?"

"You might want to haul ass like a nuclear bomb is about to explode up your ass, because this thing here is a world destroyer," Nick warned.

John was now running for dear life, crying and yelling to his mother. His dog, Jocko—in total personality-sync behavior mirroring John—was equally wide-eyed, running scattered and freaked out in a mimetic, schizoid, frantic sprint. Pleading to God or the open air, John begged his ex-wife for forgiveness, apologized to his third-grade teacher for the firecracker that blew a kid's finger clean off, and then cut back to apologizing for "cheating and being a terrible partner" as he disappeared into the distance.

"Ready, guys?" Larry asked. They all held their candlesticks, preparing to grab them in a flash, anticipating the cleansing wash of bright light they craved to finally destroy this place and all the sin in it—which they knew might just include themselves.

They half-expected John to get caught up in the process, giving him a task to divert the anguish.

The Professor took one final, deep, hard pull from his unfiltered cigarette, then tossed it away like a U-boat captain about to submerge with his crew. Pulling even closer to the group, he raised the protective metallic memory-blanketed dome over them—sweeping up into the air with both hands as wide as possible in a smooth cadence, taking in large doses of that bone-bleaching holy stuff. He exhaled the smoke under the partial occultation of the blanket, breathing out toward John as he made out the hazy, silhouetted, frantic shadow returning in a scattered pigeon flight. That equally goofy dog ran and barked by his side like some white-trash K-9 hillbilly militia exercise gone wrong.

Seeing the looming threat, John ran full force, pulling up his pants with one hand while carrying a bottle of sherry with the other. The dog confusingly bumped into his legs, slowing his stride while John still attempted to pull up the sagging slack of his loose jeans.

"Wait, John," the Professor said. The group paused, peering out with full attention upon hearing the commotion. "Is that... is that sherry, John?"

Larry shook his head in total disapproval. "No one would choose sherry," he stated, looking around at the perplexed group.

Betsy glanced at Varginah, both shrugging their shoulders in confused disdain. "Sherry?!" they echoed together in disgust.

"Yeah, John is an asshole," Larry added. "He deserves to go."

John was just ten or twelve steps away from the finish line when the Holy Mother Candlestick's pure light soul-charge detonated. Reaching out in panic, John hung in their minds for a brief moment as the flash of brilliant light enveloped him in apocalyptic wonder.

"Sherry, really?" Nick quipped.

The Professor descended upon them with the blanket, cocooning them within as the memory cloth wrapped around them and the world folded in on itself.

"I'm personally glad that the world's gone. Who the fuck chooses sherry as a final send-away drink?" Larry muttered.

They remained collectively amazed by the idiocy of the man. John represented an inbred contempt for humanity as a whole, exposing the lacking luster of human qualia. John—or some hybrid, amalgamated version of him—would continue on in holographic ignorant bliss, acting as if nothing impacting his feeble world had ever taken place.

Crouching and taking in small purifying blasts from the detonation, the group would go on in an unbroken kinetic chain, huddled together, each loosely gripping the mylar-like blanket actively clinging to them.

There was a shared suicidal impulse for that blast to emit its nuclear, polarizing wrath upon them and whatever souls remained within—an emotional truth and a melancholic madness that bound them together.

They all released their candlesticks with the same agreed-upon sentiment, flinging them while staying under as much cover as possible for creature comfort's sake. Yet, wanting to make sure the thing was actually dead, they felt a searing, tingling sensation instantly work its way up through their briefly exposed fingers as they hurled those world-ending weapons of mass destruction out into the alchemical madness of it all.

Some of the 168 crew dangled their fingers out far too long, prodding, taunting, and teasing that great first-source beast—like children reaching from a backseat window to catch the capricious wind of escape from their ignorant captors.

That first purity within them defiantly clung on. Yet, purity burdened with impure memories was a sentence to pietistic self-deception, even if this group somehow managed to maintain its unique, Stirner-esque identity.

"That's five candlesticks, five altogether—the most we've ever done so far!" Nick observed. The eradicating soul-force of burning, scorching light would not be in vain for a world craving its own long-awaited self-immolation.

"Ready to take a peek, or wait longer?"

"It seems alright now," Larry said as they began to stand before their legs fell asleep and their lower backs gave out.

"How do we get out of this place?" they wondered, panning around at the bliss and what it meant for them. "Do we use our resonators?" Betsy asked.

Like rats already frantically searching for an escape, hypervigilance had won over a long time ago. Is a being led by the amygdala—whether yours or a co-dependent existential source—actually living? The thick sediment hung over them all, now compacted deeply within. They had stepped into the next product of a crystalline matrix prison, a morphing flux field—that beautiful, ominous infinity cube. But was it the final one?

"Oh, let's find the final diamond for Cook when he turns up. He'll need that in 21 billion years or so, right?" Varginah added, searching for the artifact.

And there it sat: brilliant, dense, and heavy.

"Damn, this one is heavy, like a solid gold brick. And look at those holographically, morphically twisting dimensions of that hypercube—brilliant, best one yet, I'd say," the Professor remarked.

Varginah stuffed the final diamond straight into her front pouch pocket. It pulled immensely on her sweatshirt, accentuating her cleavage.

"Black hoodie crew. Well, what's next, pull out the resonators or what? Should we think of the living room at 168 Apricot Lane or dream bigger?" Nick asked.

They agreed.

"I'm alright with it."

"I'm alright with it all the way down the line."

They prepared the resonators. "Okay, this time let's actually make it to a three-count. Everyone got theirs?... Okay... one, two, and three."

Their eyes shut tight as they each imagined the room at 168 Apricot Lane, but nothing came—they were still in the white space.

"Are these things broken? Say, where is Daria, or Rancor, or Cook, for that matter? Do you see some kind of doorway or opening of any kind, anyone? Should we wish for somewhere better, more exotic, when we press? How about a huge farm with everything we need? Each of us has a massive, nice house owned free and clear, a big pile of money and riches, a fully stocked food pantry—ready on three, sound good?" the Professor suggested.

"Oh, and world peace," Varginah added in a snarky tone.

"Yeah, sounds perfect. Ready: one, two, three, press."

They clung to those resonators as a final lifeline, but there was nothing to tether to. Shutting their eyes, leaning in with deep concentration, they formed a circle, gripping one another's shoulders with their free hands. Each imagined with sheer conviction... then, nothing.

Larry broke the silence. "What the hell, guys, really?"

Standing up again and scratching his head as they each pulled back in equal, perplexing profundity, he asked, "Are we going to be stuck in here forever? There must be a way out, right? Are we going to starve in here? I could really use a turkey croissant with bacon, smoked cheddar, and mayonnaise about right now," Larry joked in his hunger.

Instantly, one appeared exactly as Larry had imagined it, driven from the raw impulse of hunger and emotion. It had to come from a source somewhere—the sentiment hung in the air.

Witnessing this, a positive excitement returned to the group.

"Okay, start small, start small. How about a nice, humble two-story home?" Larry muttered with conviction, squeezing his eyes shut.

One appeared just as Larry pictured, drawn from a deep, long-lingering need impressed within his psyche.

"Ha ha!" Larry began to laugh. "Well, does this mean there isn't anyone else? That is, we are all that exists now, is that right?" he asked in partial defiant relief. He curiously walked over and entered the house, experiencing what his mind, through raw emotional will, had conceived and then manifested—his dream home exactly as he'd pictured and felt it from somewhere before.

"I get it, guys. We can't leave here, but 'here' is really anywhere if you think about it, right?" Nick reasoned.

"So we just have to be super careful what we will to happen... I don't know, shouldn't there be planets and death and all that stuff, a balance?"

Now beginning to feel the full weight and consequence of their wishful wills in process, Betsy added, "We could be really selfish and not invite anyone else to exist." She looked around, taking notice, feeling the bleached serenity and peace.

"But you're going to have a kid, you too, Varginah!" the Professor reminded them.

Neither Betsy nor Varginah rationally believed they were actually pregnant with complete conviction; rather, the fact had been planted into them from somewhere, like a seed.

"I don't mean to be cruel, but will they be assholes too, these theoretical kids? Maybe only one of them, then what?"

Betsy lightly hit the Professor. "My daughter or son won't be an asshole, he or she will be just me and Nick!... Oh shit, is my kid going to be an asshole? Really, I never thought about it that way."

They saw the genetic combination of probabilistic, undeniable likelihood.

"Won't we need a delivery doctor, or do we study it ourselves? I mean, can we imagine books and manuals and stuff like that?" quipped Varginah, feeling as if she should have studied far more in life under the overwhelming burden of the task.

"I'll try," Betsy said. "Yes, a book on pregnancy just like I saw on the internet, and by the same author—here, it just miraculously popped up in my hands."

"Wait, open that book up, Betsy," the Professor added curiously.

"Why, it's empty," Betsy

Chapter 17: Into Thin Air

Agent Cook arrived out of thin air.

"Not so easy building a universe, is it, guys?" quipped Agent Cook.

"Say, what are you an agent of anyways, Cook, hmm?" asked Varginah with dead seriousness, as they all looked upon Cook in vacant abandon.

Where had he been?

They were entirely reliant on him now—an arrangement none of them felt comfortable with.

Cook answered matter-of-factly, absent frills:

"Long ago that original Council conjured me, imagined me, called me Agent Cook—and before that, I don't remember even existing, and yet I always have. They couldn't wipe that stain of memory away, at least not with universal finality, as if arrogantly attempting to box up the devil within his own inferno. The fact is, I don't exist unless my rote set of special skills is needed, and you seem to have hit a stone wall."

Cook paused, then continued:

"You see, Betsy would have eventually pressed her resonator against the diamond as she'd done before—taking her to where I am, which is nowhere, because I have experienced everywhere and am nothing. But you all have destroyed and suicide-bombed your 'everything'—I find that interesting, twisted, and yet holding a stubborn insular continuity. As you all continue to insist that you are indeed 'someone,' each of you... so what is it that you want, or miss, or need? I would venture to say that this limbo is the place you always end up in—the very place that you always actively, collectively return to and yearn for."

"Even now, Betsy contemplates an inborn fear: manifesting a qualified, forensically minded, narcissistic, psychopathic, and syllogistic lettered doctor—not fully mapping out all those fractals that such a mind connects to. Not contemplating whether or not she is legitimately pregnant with a mere idea or an actual entity bound in living, breathing flesh. The consequences of reaching out for someone else to clean up the mess, to take on uncomfortable duties... a midwife would be plausible, but then you return to general acquisition in that academically glossed-over Mr. Fix-It. That, my friends, is evil. The pharmakon—the witch doctor turned politician and friendly mason—always bringing that claiming of flesh to that dark council pulpit in quiet, false requirement."

"With a total lack of true saviorship, and survival metrics washed away into general consensus and lengthy, categorical explanations. No doctor can substantially assist one who has already, in total self-reliance, begun to assist themselves in true apothecary virtue—that responsibility in living and going on. Didn't that story passed down through various reinterpretations of Biblical Genesis carry with it a Satan offering up an apple from a tree, claiming to fix it all from a garden and its people that required no fixing? That lie carried forth through the human madness of a supply chain."

"That societally praised, skilled paternal doctor figure who parasitically persists, promising to fix it all in hard-set personal arrogance—he who is undoubtedly annoying at breakfast to his entire imprisoned, superficial, synthetic artifice of a family, living props, as he purposefully and loudly crunches on that same burned toast slathered in artery-clogging peanut butter or granola as a form of authoritarian torture to their ears."

"He is in church, always pitching his snake oil; they—the people—have to sit idly by as witnesses to the unworthy, darkly infused celebrity of his slow-churning, crunching Masonic sadism."

"He, without personal shame, tries to express the organic yet mistakenly resynthesizes it as a human flaw. Murderous, yet possessing a photographic memory, that Dark Council installed him cybernetically—gifting and cursing humanity with him through lofty, spiritually spoon-fed, qualified academic rigor, and matriculating pre-existing mastery as a mimetic form toward that left-brain madness of backward-engineering oneself for self-conscious inner validation. But his type and form spread out like a virus into the world, an interconnected network of corrupted demonic physicians who couldn't pass the cybernetic front—turned butchers, murderers, rapists, and all inquisitive knife-wielding types bent on peering under the dress of human existence, operating on it, and tearing it apart with deep flesh-fetish satisfaction."

"Yet he is that shifty father to children who act more as cardboard cutouts or victims of his sadism. He demands endless consideration from the people because he knows he belongs to no community. As a witch doctor and a preacher turned politician, international businessman, and Mason, he is the philosophical physician, make no mistake. His family and children are merely alive with an inconvenient pulse, holding no genuine meaning for him. With nothing raw and vibrant inside himself, he arbitrarily acts out his stifling limitations, infecting the entire world with academic nonsense. He exists as an aesthetic barber, bleeder, and physician in every town, standing as a malformed beacon of geomancy—a black lighthouse."

"Ultimately, he assists no one, yet that suicidal notion of the masses—a sentiment shared by you here—is a covert wish that the physician would murder you when alone with him. You want him to clean up, quickly sterilize, and discard the messy stain you clearly see yourselves as: the physician, the barber, the bleeder, the morbid undertaker. His children take to suicide, and another patient dies at his self-justifying hands—yet he remains the best ER or delivery doctor, or whatever title he adopts and the Dark Council propagates for the record. It doesn't matter; it is all false titleship."

"The point is, you already have peace, a house—a nice house, Larry, good job on that, way to go, great imagination—but with no running water, no natural lakes, streams, or mountains with snowcaps melting under the sun, not to mention all those planets orbiting with at least semi-precision. Are you prepared to remake everything, to make mistakes that linger sloppily over an eternity? I understand you can all live forever now, but is this a gift or purgatory? You were nearly at each other's throats!"

"Besides, the power of your resonators is useless now that there is nowhere left to dial into. Nowhere other than the inversion and the flip side, anyway. You would invariably only end up in the ultimate truth of this Möbius strip. Think of it as a safeguard ensuring you cannot use them; otherwise, you would be locked into a theoretical past. Keep them near you, regardless."

"I mean, I hate this, but I don't want to go back. Honestly, the suspicion that I am being played grows by the minute!" Varginah stated bluntly.

"Yes, played," Betsy agreed. "Where is the Council of Seven Spheres now?"

"It's easy to blame, to fashion a scapegoat—but have you ever considered them as anything other than what they are? They are evil and vile, necessary in any world you create; they are the serial killers you recover from and the doctors who merely pretend to treat the cause. The same sadistic coin, flipped only in the illusion of choice. Have you willfully summoned them, or wanted them intensely enough here—the Dark Council? No, because your yearning for peace overrides that rhetorical horror. You want to escape into tranquility, but you must, in turn, provide provisional balance. Betsy, you wanted me here, and eventually—because you have done it before—you would have figured out how to come to me. I simply saved you a trip. Plus, traveling there would leave you in a state within a state, a double limbo."

"Again, no trick questions, no metaphors: what do you want? I am asking you," Agent Cook said. "I have always been, but I am nothing. I am the fix-it guy people have always imagined, and they always manifest me when they want someone else to repair things for them. Well, I have. As far as your imagination can take you, and all those before you since the dawn of space and time squared with infinity. But here we are. Why? Aren't you happy? Isn't it enough? Larry, how was that turkey croissant? Was it everything you wished it would be?"

"Go ahead and wish for a glass of clear mountain water. The water exists with no mountain required—do you genuinely need more? Of course you do. Your mind instinctively invents reasons or origins for where the substance originated. You retroactively rationalize its source rather than accepting its fundamental quality as simply being present. Does substance require a conceivable origin? Do you see the limiter here? You have stripped yourselves of the divine, the sacred, and the unknown mystery."

"The answer in your mind is never enough. When I ask what you desire above all, the answer is peace, yet you do nothing to ensure it takes place, because you refuse to experience peace. Well, I am here to give it to you—just ask for it."

"Okay, peace," Betsy stated. Then she paused. "Nothing happened?"

"That's because you already have it. Since there exists no good or evil, only you—you are faced with the fact of Cybernetica or Cybernetic Reasoning. Are you in fact an incomplete Monas, or are you admittedly a mere fraction of another sort? A mimetic strand to a highly limited end point?—A blank space with close friends where you can wish for anything you can imagine and it's there."

"What you are conditioned to crave is chaos, where true peace does not need to be experienced because it is an antithetical defensive movement. You were either always the singular sun being occulted by their chosen parallax view of you, the small, limited black moon, or the blazing inferno they had to cover their eyes from, only pretending to see. You want to think that you overcame some obstacle on your way to peace, because peace is already there and you find it boring."

"Well, we don't want to go back, and we don't want to wind up building the same world and universe, only sloppier, so now what?" questioned Larry sternly.

"Take what you can get, like you learned a long time ago, Larry—when there wasn't the idea of choice, there was just the decision to use whatever was most within reach. Where you had put yourself in the phantom specter of The Others. Well, that's all you ever really have, and this isn't a game, nor is this some cosmic, holy lesson—just you and the choices you make. So what'll it be? We must come to some resolution eventually."

"I want to live in a thriving, chaotic world, but live away from it, to drown out my boredom," Larry said. "I want to be pleasantly annoyed by people of every kind, knowing that they are safe and happily miserable, but be able to get the hell away from them. Is the reason for the moon, as you say, a mass diversion? I want to hear my annoying family member asking for money on the phone and to be in agony over the right thing to do. I want to be free and still relish in the fact that nothing is my fault and there may not exist free will, and who cares anyway!"

"Which is why you live in limbo and I live in perpetual black," Cook replied. "You exist, and you hate it. You are stuck, left always with choice. Everything exists, and I don't, and I love it. For me, these choices are an inconsequential checkpoint within the slave's self-amassed device or the excuse of self-torture. You, Larry, are already free. You live as men like Max Stirner—whose true name was German philosopher Johann Kaspar Schmidt, and who should have been remembered better in all worlds and should be in the new world—and that, my friend, is what you are, Larry... Thycius. Further, others who were constants in countless worlds of iterations, men such as Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky—they saw the punishment awaiting the future man. Well, you, Thycius, are that homeless wreck from the outside who is and always has been a Blazing Sun inferno. When that wrath shows its face on you? You are not present to abolish Pure Truth beyond reason. You are the crucified, the true artist that does not sacrifice himself for the vanity of a canvas, so to speak. Therefore, just maybe, you want everything to keep existing while you don't?"

Cook paused, letting the weight of the chiral realities settle over them before speaking again.

"Before you decide to do anything, to go anywhere, it is critical that you listen to my words. There is another side of existence—not a dimension, but an entire chiral reality that is inverted. The biggest question is which side you are really on, as the two have masterfully been blended together since the beginning. This other side balances out everything you see here. It is either the child's dirty closet that no one sees, or a Saturnian garden that exists because no one can see it. The best way I can describe it would be the theoretical fourth law, or zeroth law, which exists simultaneously on your side as well as this other side—shall we call it the pentagram side of the whole from our view? We are the closet they stuffed full with all the occulted dirt and grime of their world, and we in turn do the same until each is a murky, equal gradient of abstract ego. Today, one must know itself; one becomes the machine that drives the engine of this universe in the Ego of Pure Reason."

Cook continued with burning intensity:

"On your side, where you're from, even though you have five fingers, you should invariably have six fingers and tails in your physical makeup. At first, your world thought this a gift when beautiful visitors coaxed your people to believe—a quilted stitch of untruth into a modified gene expression now embedded within you. You must return to the truth, the ultimate truth, the Pure Truth. Whereas on the other side, that darker side of reality from which you come—though not originally—those people should have both wings and horns. This, that same Council too, from them... do you see yet? It is biosemiotics and the allostatic patterning of the Great Design altered with generationally perpetuated gene-edited self-doubt. An entropy machine of perpetual disharmony. But I am the byproduct of this from every conceivable iteration, a black-hole storehouse that has no ego to exist. This energy is yours to have—it always has been!"

"The Great Design?" quipped Nick.

"Think of everything as a matrix, a network of pattern distribution," Cook explained. "Most anybody walking around day-to-day, laissez-faire, would think that buying a soft drink posed no universal consequences—no imminent universal or horizontal danger. Yet the symbol pattern on the can, and the fact that it even semi-existed, is only fueled by your true existent state. The fact is that there would never and could never exist a multitude of actual full-souled individuals with self-wills and true identities. No, these are cybernetic strands of limited self-proclaimed gods—the very things that you entertained in your living room, financing your lives, once ruling your mother. Or, in this case, entire realities chirally bounded in a juxtaposed energetic system which shares a central artery, and that is what is at the center of it all. A dark abyss that no one can control; I am that child's closet, and I am fuller than full. Now so dense and popping at the seams, I have enough fuel to begin a third reality, universe, and world, and you are all the benefactors of my reality!"

"Here, hand me the diamond, Varginah," Cook said, holding out his hand. Varginah was sitting cross-legged on a floor that her mind had centered together as that undeniable corpus callosum, alongside her cohorts—a base floor or midpoint of a reality that still bound them.

"Oh, you mean the Diamond. Here you are, Agent Cook," Varginah answered apologetically. She handed him the beaming, translucent, fluxing pattern—undulating in shape and form, appearing as a window into something far more complex than any singular consciousness could reduce to a single coherent thought. But she was not passing along a mere symbol; she was offering the final synthesis of everything she held dear and knew to be true, and much more: the All Cube. She was passing every known version of this side's existence to the void, which, all too ironically, would not exploit it.

Cook took the diamond. "Oh, it is brilliant, but it is just a placeholder to the entire reality, or to the dimensional understanding that it represents. Everything is transactional, but it is not always clear what that means."

"Allow me to be more distinct without warping your minds—which are now like this diamond: finite and non-fungible as a reality currency. Tangible, but not—the last of its kind. You, my friends, hold mass stores of wealth, not only in your very persons, but in the informational bit-fields within that blueprint, far too numerous to even comprehend. You are this diamond in a sense, a mystery to yourselves. You are the teleological seed to humanity's future. You are only limited by the partiality and awareness of experiencing yourselves in selfhood. In short, you are selves, the only selves, reduced like these diamonds of condensed information!"

"Take the horns and tails scenario I mentioned before. Now imagine a faction that did business since the beginning—maybe one of you here now?—decidedly swapping fragments from the six-sphere side to the five-sphere side, but their commonality is that they each hail to a seven-sphere resonant base master system. They must remain in partiality as a temporal marker both to exist and to have a reason to exist, but once we are complete? Well, here we are—limbo. We want for nothing, we need nothing, we become greater than any world that could house us. Therefore, no society could survive us, and we cannot stand their rhetoric, so we become nothing: an artifact that none can look upon or witness, but which is that final midpoint of the condensed mind in its final reduced operational base prior to duality, prior to existential principles in code. The thing already is complete. The seed of the oak tree is not cursed by mitosis or the cancer of expectancy in becoming; it is in itself mastering this form of stasis. You have not yourselves to share with anyone outside—there is no outside. Inversion is all that's left. The unstoppable engine of human understanding at its base—your base!"

"From the outside, we are like what lies at the center of it all—only in it, everything is found. Some civilizations have referred to this as the Monad, or the Monas, or the One. Well, guys, you are like little monads. You could be a universe away from one another, but through a common shared string or stream of likeness, your perception—Nick, to Betsy, your child, a One to become—has already been since the beginning. Seven in totality are you all; a Schrödinger's master puzzle box made of itself and in itself for no one to figure out. You will never give birth, ladies. Truly, there is no true proof of your pregnancies—too soon?—but a knowing, and there it remains. No outcome, no stillbirth, just being and becoming, always flourishing. There is no time here, the greatest gift that you gave collectively to yourselves. From the seed that is All. You are you, and I do not want to be you, so I am me. I am nothing, and therefore I am free."

"But I am a little different, you see. I may look like an everyday guy to you, but look at what happens when I take off my sunglasses—the ones that your collective minds, long ago in a shared stream of information, fabricated to deal with such unsolvable matters and hard questions, so as to maintain a self-perceived transactional justification thereby which to grade others on, to trade other people through a false sense of superiority. To know me... but you do not. You cannot know nothingness or the great sorrow that never ceases to be and thus has always been."

Cook continued, "Now, why do I appear to wear shades? Why did you put sunglasses on me? In an ancient time, it was just a scarf wrapped around my eyes. Same me. But here you go." Cook removed his dark sunglasses and revealed the blackest eyes imaginable.

As they looked longer, they were drawn into the void. Blackness sent venules and arteries spidery-thin across his orbital bones, consuming his whole visage. But that is what he had always been; the glasses merely concealed what the mind needed to complete a face, a form of familiarity. Cook never demanded a form. He is gelatinous, a black hole, an abyss—but he does not need you to be or become. He is nothingness, and all those replications through times and eras transit into meaning where there is none.

The crew stood mesmerized, each within an inch of being sucked into his complete, spread-out, blacker-than-Vantablack, all-consuming void.

He transitioned back to his former self and replaced the sunglasses on the construct of his face—a collective projection of this Faustian circuitry of limits; corpus callosum—the right side absorbing information that the left brain could not accept, a shared midpoint where there is none. And that midpoint in between is where Cook had always existed and where they were now, unknowingly forming the new universe, the new dialects and language coding interacting within this swirling now that never was. Just electrical sparks, energy in the density of forming space before the cube of time is manifest.

The group pulled back, coming out of their trance.

"I don't want you—not for food, or in any other way," Cook said. "I just want you to be. To be free like me. But you are stuck in a midpoint always, and some of us are forced to reconcile a way through for you. So here it is. This projection, the first ray of existential master principles shooting out. Or we can invert the notion and return to a new edited and improved version—the same world, yet dimensionally mended, expanded with the same base pure principle, now a flicker that visits everywhere in every moment to keep the course correct and to constantly guide and remind."

"On the pentagram side, it is slightly further from completion, but just beyond the midpoint. There, they adopted something the Council of Seven—yes, your elders yet dastardly children—planted in that place to maintain this highly entropic ecosystem that feeds from and borrows off your world. Siphoning your energies to maintain all your mediocrity and to ensure they never need to grow, while still remaining elevated by default. That is why you can never seem to get anywhere. They feed their initiates a story of individuality and what that means: that without showing supremacy and sacrificing others, you forfeit, either becoming energetic food or defaulting to a slave morality."

"Well, I see that this is probably too surreal for you all, far too complex so that I do not have an anchor to elaborate further. But humanity is an action; that is your superpower, but in the continuation of the self. So I am freely giving you a choice: to return to the cave system that always is and always will be, even if it is not physically in existence right at this moment—which it isn't in time, but it is the only moment that ever was or will ever be in your view. Which leaves the question: are we outside or inside the Great Monad?"

Are we food, or does it feed us—or is it a simultaneous, paradoxical mad loop, since it cannot be seen, witnessed, or experienced by any outside observer? Cook thought to himself. So it claims, in all its self-perpetuating narcissism, to see itself through us. We are repulsed by it, so it strikes it from our memory, yet we remain—but how? We are equally as hideous as it, but a copy, and oddly it finds us, itself, its mirrored inversion attractive in all its self-contained narcissistic glory—supposing truth be a woman!

Addressing them directly, Cook said, "As far as the choice before you now, it is the same visual hallucination you chose through autogenic response, pareidolia. You can only ever see yourselves, yet so many variations have existed and currently remain—all these places to hide, derivations. Everything is a metaphor of the mind, and ultimately, there can be only one central mind. Imagine how vastly great and complex this mind is; we must each be an infinitesimally small aspect of it, if we are anything at all."

"The cave. Back through the cavern. By the way, you haven't even looked to see how your subconscious has shaped the room of that house to become a symbol, a beacon of familiarity—a pattern for distribution. In this, humanity is like a hermit crab—scavenging on what is already there and perpetually re-appropriating this universal material for something else. A constant swapping in the uniform utility of transaction, because you cannot be still and simply know—gnosis being the only food ever required."

"The home! You will no longer have a home above the caverns, because there is nothing outside of them; there never was. Rather, it's just the long, arduous history of self-entitled universe-building constructed from the scraps of discarded ideologies that formed the Earth and its dirt, its grime, its carbon, its base, and sadly, its meaning. Forever a child reaching out with a net in hand to catch the butterfly that is complete numbers and their duality in meaning. The torso, the brain, the spine, leading down to the dungeons of the anal appetite of digestion, are the corpus callosum, the synaptic cleft, the microtubes, and the geometry of aromatic amino acids; and the geometric bounding of light is all that exists. Any other extension is a fragmented byproduct of the perpetual infancy of the Council of Seven Spheres. Humanity needs bigger and better goals. Will you offer it this?"

"Since you couldn't come to a consensus opinion—half of you are in shock while the remainder stay mute—I will hang onto this diamond and plant it in those caves that you imagine. But first, you must destroy this idea of a home... Larry?"

Cook thought to himself, and Varginah caught it like a white butterfly in her net, snatched directly from an eastbound wind: One child, if ever born, could become a third sex while four are male and 3.3 are female to make up the Council of Seven Spheres, leaving enough energy to drive the great void forward, that I might one day be relieved of being man's perpetual dumping ground. Should you celebrate this or reject it? This child being more male than any Uber-Being, present as a mind but horrifying as the Great Monad who is All in One. Should you split the child into quartered fractions psychologically to discover this, or kill him physically in the attempt? Could we ever implicitly trust the fear of man and his nature—so saith the transient gods that you refuse to become?

Larry looked up. A stark certainty washed over him: he didn't want a home. "A home, and the idea of it, is an evil thing," he concluded, as the growing sentiment circulated among them. "They use it to leverage you, reduce you, and treat its absence as the mark of an outcast. But I want no home, that's the truth. That is why my house remains incomplete and always will. That house back there... I saw it in a magazine and I suppose I used it as an unfinished symbol tucked deep into my consciousness through all these years. That is society's house, and we have already slain it. I don't want a home, and I would love to destroy this one now!"

"Me too," Betsy agreed. "I never fully trusted or actually wanted a home. Just a place of my own to be myself within myself—to be safe from humanity outside, knowing how inherently vicious they are. That is why it is so hard for me to accept that there had all along been an even more evil place than our former world. Tell me, Cook, how did we not destroy it too?"

"Because you cut off its food supply," Agent Cook said. "You can't destroy it, just like you cannot destroy an entire brain without killing the host altogether. But nature finds a way, doesn't it? One side still imagines the other, even if the other side of the brain remains a phantom. Right now, they have created a shared psychosis. Well, we collectively cut off that supply!"

Cook added, "There will be two sides to reality, and the corpus callosum—an energy torso, an electric wall—both divides and shares the experience of existence. An open exchange between the two was always supposed to be the mutual way. Jealousy, envy, and greed... one side couldn't see that they were near-identical paired qualities in every way. Imagine watching yourself and growing deep-seated hatred and, eventually, envy. Seven and seven leaves a one planted for growth. While five of the pentagram and six of the hexagram fall short in a deferment by a debt of one each, eleven is not life, but perpetual death. As the female perpetually denies that she seeks the void because man finds her utterly hideous, as the Monas looks upon itself. This is why the witchcraft is equally transferable between the two halves. Your former side in philosophy and on the inverted flip side bound in religion each equal out to the same shame-based debt that perpetually never goes anywhere but in me. I am the void!"

Chapter 18: Beyond the Bicyclic Heteroaromatic System

"I am the probability that should not exist. Countless souls absorb into me always without my asking, creating the void. I am, by default, all the gifts they take with them that they never acknowledge or even see in themselves—too diluted in the drama and addicted to hate. Well, I am neither evil nor hate, nor am I hell-bent on suicide. I have inadvertently become the most powerful entity that has ever existed other than the Monad, but still small in its scope. I took nothing from humanity, but through universes, time cycles, and aeons, they chose this void, and there was none prior to it. Make the right choices this time, and I will become an energy now that can feed the world for all eternity. The density that humanity has placed into me is yours—it has always been yours!" proclaimed Agent Cook.

"By the way, I am not a Mr., nor am I a Friar, a Saint, or a Sage. I am, however, the massive gift of raw agency itself that you all piss away with contempt—but the energy, the dynamo of this gift goes on. Where the Holy Mother Candlesticks are the willful release of capsuled soul force, I represent the true squandered soul of each soul. The soul with a soul. The spirit of the soul that fears entering through death. The soul that perpetually denies its own brilliance—that unrealized fire of each soul? Well, that black-hole void, my friends, is me!"

Larry imagined himself a sledgehammer and then a tractor, his hatred of what held him captive fueling the richness and completion of his imagination. "Fuck you! Fuck you, come down! I am my own home, goddammit!"

The crew, seeing this, imagined their own destructive devices. Nick imagined a machine gun, while Betsy imagined a blowtorch, now yelling, "Fall, all houses, and all that was fashioned to contain us bastards!"

As flames consumed the structure, it morphed into every home they had each known, and every home humanity had ever built.

Varginah was angry about something else: the plants and the trees. How nature itself represented a false reality—a setup, as she thought. So she imagined plant poison and separated the now-screeching sentient forms into burning oblivion.

"Well, my, you are good at destroying," Cook added. "But are you capable of unlocking only the best parts of yourselves, of humanity, and leaving no people left out, nor places where dark aspects and mutated forms in the shadow might lie? Of course, we can do this all again in twenty-one billion years from now."

"And," he said, "that oddly elder crew of The Council of Seven Spheres, now on the other side sitting back while you remake the universe, will, in their view, watch you fail again and again. Those are offshoots of you. You can't go it alone without data for rancor—the wild, the untamed, the calculating and refined. This you need to existentially be. But you must always have a healthy relationship with it, with me, and that is the true key."

"Understanding how to replicate yourself, and not use that gift as a punching bag or a crash dummy," Cook finished.

Cook brought the diamond over to the burned, dusty pile that once was the house first manifested by Larry—but was, by all measures, every home, every form of Faustian captivity in truth.

"Well, now that that's burned down, we can begin."

Cook bent over and drew with his finger in the ash, first sketching the world of six spheres—six spheres perfectly surrounding a singular center. He then drew a line straight down and a line across the middle, forming a large plus sign, a cross. Above this, he wrote: parabolic and hyperbolic midpoint continuum.

"See this? The corpus callosum I mentioned, the place in between—that's where we are now. You might see it as the eye of the storm, only the eye itself is the energy pulling, twisting, and conjuring the storm using these two distinct realities. The other I'll draw here."

He sketched the world of five spheres, the pentagram reality, placing it on the far left of the midpoint. He went back, drawing a firm line under each title to embolden the concepts.

"Now this diamond—the diamond of all diamonds, far beyond five-dimensional states—represents the center of it all, the closest thing to a Monad here. Wherever we may reside in the Monad, or outside of it, wherever." He firmly placed the physical diamond in the exact center of his ash diagram.

Over on the left, he drew an arch whose ends curved sharply toward the pentagram depiction. "Over here, we have parabolic action to a midline or midpoint, while over here..." He stood up, moving to the far right over the realm of six spheres—their world—and traced a bold, hyperbolic X pattern.

"The thing that made your represented reality so powerful and unique, and only partially why you are here now, comes down to how this X shape consists of two parabolas generating their own midpoint and midline, thereby producing a unique and distinct tension. This is why it felt as though you were somehow separate, a distinctly contained self within a self-sustained, contained environment. But all the while, this other side over there was shaping and forming everything from proteins found in genetics to amino acids. Holding ceremonies and rituals. Taking wealth, precious metals like the diamonds from destroyed, condensed worlds, and selling them off as commodities—soul food, if you really want to be explicit. That group of elders used the pure source as an eons-long, in-built business model that now pretty much runs itself. Right at this moment, we over here are making up our game plan, consolidating all that we’ve got, all that we have learned, and that pure crystal within."

Cook gestured broadly to their immediate surroundings. "Daria’s chest—that is the localized space that you are in now. While this diamond here in the center of the diagram is a pattern, a concept just like you and myself, where there is energy, there is life, and we have all the energy. Right now, Daria sits disturbed, perennial, as she holds Rancor, who is also a former teleological complete and total absolute. The fact that there will exist animals. That these animals will have a specific pattern and form fractaled out from the midline of a seeming average house cat—who, by all definitions, is kind of scary. So with Rancor, there are all animals, wild and wise. With Daria, all technology, and the fact that everything has a circuitry, a pattern, and a binary. Daria operates from her base. How do you think she could track down elusive gods? And might I remind you, you would be gods—you were gods in that purple realm of wisdom. So you can see how absolute power itself gets overplayed and boring, and gods like the elders made a fatal mistake when they began to play with their food."

Cook paused, letting the weight of the realization settle.

"Now, we can manifest the cave together. And the truth is, this diamond was always resting mere feet beneath you. What do you think powered that pyramid structure, that spaceship? Well, that is still hard-set into Daria, who lives in a digitally mapped-out space that no one can alter or destroy because she lives in a world of mathematical constants. You burned down your homes, but the reality is that the structure was built around mathematical principles. This is in truth a war between Pi and greater Phi—a flat, excitable circle versus a Bloch sphere, the golden mean, the Fibonacci sequence. Both are required because all geometry shapes and forms..."

Cook’s finger blurred against the ash, tracing an impossible, shifting diagram of a hypercube resonating out a Metatron’s cube emanation.

"What the fuck, Cook? You're freaking me out!" exclaimed Nick.

The image in the ash moved, pulling, flexing, growing, and shrinking. It pulsed, lighting up distinct areas and chambers of geometric fields.

"Is that... is that the zodiac?" Betsy fell to her knees in disbelief, but the impact didn't hurt her because the ground was never there.

"See, guys? Energy, patterns, flow-through, life! Pretty simple when you remove the complexity of exponentials, really," Cook stated, then went on. "Do you know how in your world you had mysticism as the core, main tenet? Why was that Pascal suit so valuable to you there, Larry?"

"Yes," replied Larry, still staring at the living, moving image drawn in the imaginary dusty debris and sediment that once manifested as his house.

"Well, on that side, religion is the weak point. That side, those elders amplify the importance of religion far beyond mysticism or fact-based, zodiacal Tarot reading. In your world, those same religions are seen more metaphorically, almost purely philosophically. But your world sees this here clearly every day, and you took it for granted every day as well," Cook said, furthering his point. "There, on that pentagram side, dials can be turned and controlled with power. Sure, it is a place of secondary power, but to feed from the source? Well, that grants someone or some group the ability to use a never-ending charge card that has no upper limit. You removed their source. They had no idea you were even capable. They thought you were them. How wrong they were."

"Why do you work for them then, Cook?" demanded Betsy.

"Work for them? Work for them?" Cook chuckled, a dry, hollow sound. "They are the ones force-feeding me souls from their world and your former one. I monitor them and all my replicated versions. The hand-off that is taking place right now is the primary reason I have monitored them. When I no longer exist, then there is order. I must maintain a balance, but for them and you, there is freedom in choice."

Going on, he said, "You will need to go to their dying realm through the center now, which is exactly where this diamond rests. By jumping into this diamond, you will emerge back in the cave as if you never left—pyramid still there, everything exactly as it was, with no world above you. Just the cave system and its waters. Then, you will go to their realm and absorb their energies without allowing it to corrupt you."

"From this, those two babies not yet born will begin the new Council of Seven in the new world. So, you did create a new world, only not in the way you initially thought. There, you will train them to build this better world of six spheres on the other side. You are quite literally stepping into an inverted realm and fixing it from the inside. This, if successfully done, will allow my energies—all energies—to amplify through the two hemispheres as an unstable engine, only as long as it is kept pure and free from corruption."

"You must now live within the realm of five spheres, birth your children there, and begin a new religion there. I hope that you will elevate it beyond your past world's standards and allow that world to become the principled world of Seven Spheres—what the Council of Seven Spheres was supposed to have established so long ago now. Use me and my infinite energy, and allow purity to then access your world, and your children's, to link with the Monad and grow your world to the 21-base dimensional core of realities—never experienced nor seen, but teleologically always resting there, waiting since the beginning of all. Become a vital aspect of the living. It is happening in cellular structures and realms, and time and biology is not what you think or believe."

Agent Cook made his final declarative statement, standing as he always has and always will: an agent for the all-mind, the good, the Monad ever-expanding and becoming more.

But could they? To lose everything and the idea of something...

This wasn’t a light that illuminated; it was a light that devoured. It was the violent, multi-wavelength fury of the accretion disk, the searing X-rays of collapsing stars, and the phantom glow of Hawking radiation born from particle-antiparticle pairs tearing themselves apart at the edge of the abyss.

To escape the loop, they could not turn back. They had to plunge directly into the dark, utilizing the accelerating friction of their own undoing to trigger the ultimate quantum fluctuation. They would not find God in the blue sky; they would find transcendence by going right through the center of hell, tearing open the vacuum until the darkness itself was forced to emit something from nothing. As the event horizon closed behind them, the static of the old world finally snapped. The loop shattered, and they stepped into the blinding, forensic glare of the inverted light.

They are waiting there. Eyes black, indifferent. The barrier beyond the gates of sin. The lineage passed on through transcendence. A diamond of the human perspective unfolds into the hypercube stuck in the gravity well of the inverted realms beyond.

Cook assimilated himself—or rather, he was dispersed; they became a new diaspora into the greater multiverse. An offering to that rate-coding signal's firing phase. To the energy taken up and passed forth by the great synaptic cloud, a storm of unfathomable potentials with seven spheres finally spinning in the outer chamber of that great resonating Metatron's cube now active within the hypercube. Still independent, but now actively interfacing and understanding those unseen gradients of light and exposed fully to it, without limitation.

The group was one when revealed by the fires of the seven spheres, which unlocked the unstoppable torrent of energy as a continuous, smooth-running engine. Maybe a cell had, overcoming its internal cancer, finally found a way through? Perhaps the victorious combination of precisely the right asymmetrical and equilibrium-based stasis could finally level the way through as a supercharged dynamo and a line of return. A new checkpoint as horizons and distances never to require transit nor the slow gradient of time to pass by—the understanding and unfolding of new, complex, multilayered ultra-dimensional forms to simply morph into and become, the great distance reduced into the fabric of all.

Is it Hell in knowing?

The original root of the word scene comes from the Greek skēnē, meaning "tent, stage, or theater stage."

"Is it Hell for one to become an arm and the other to become a leg? For one to actively be the supra-conscious while the other maintains its characters in the subconscious? For the active polarity of male and female to work in harmony as one fluid body? Has anyone lost their autonomy, or have they become liberated in this now-active body of knowing—of how to traverse this multidimensional landscape that demands far more than one singular, fixed persona? In this respect, all partial personas are left as errored placeholders, craving to become an active aspect, an integral member of the body as a whole.”

Dark Stellar Knightly