THIS AREA IS INACCESSIBLE ON MOBILE DEVICES. PLEASE ABORT MISSION AND
RETURN TO DESKTOP IMMEDIATELY.
Sinn Chatreya ate her last burger in a van at the entrance to the
Balumian Corp. laboratory while she checked the time on her phone,
over and over again. She was surrounded by hooded men and women, armed
with assault submachine guns, grenades, signal disruptors, climbing
equipment, knives, and enough ammunition to kill the entire building's
staff. Half belonged to a team of professional mercenaries hired in
the Deep Web. Immortals. The other half were Chatreya's loyal
followers: The Ferals.
With her they had participated in a fairly impressive number of
sit-ins, marches, and protests since she was a fourteen-year-old girl:
they had faced riot police from several countries (some had lost their
teeth in those epic confrontations), in perfectly strategic missions
trying to stop the progress of logging in the Brazilian Amazon,
seeking to prevent the signing of a law in Mongolia that allowed open
pit mining, promoting the attempt to close a refinery in Venezuela,
attacking seal hunters and plastic factories in China. They were a
formidable group of anarcho-primitivists punk rockers, full with long
hair, second-hand clothes, pierced genitals and nipples, all united in
their increasingly firm belief that the only way to stop their mortal
enemy (pollution, or capitalism, sometimes even technological
progress), was through violence. Or at least, “certain types of
violence.”
Chatreya finished the last bite of the burger. She closed her eyes to
taste the fat, and the sauces and sent a message to Juno Luna.
SINN: You have five minutes to get out of there.
Juno saw the message, and two checks came out, but he didn't respond
to anything.
—He is a coward —said Juana, a six-foot-tall woman with a pink
balaclava and AKIRA and Green Peace patches on her blue jean vest.
—Maybe he'll participate when the time comes, —Ratz added. Ratz was an
18-year-old boy whose face looked like that of a little rat, and he
too had opted for the hamburger ritual. Considering animal
slaughtering was about to be impossible.
The operation was relatively clean. One group entered through the
roof, another through the parking lot, and another through the front
door. Doors were closed, cleaning staff and a few scientists were
threatened, all of whom ended up locked in an auditorium under the
angry yelling of two armed mercenaries. The groups swept through
rooms, storerooms, conference halls, and individual offices until they
found the security room.
Despite the planning, the hacking of the surveillance circuit, and
other details, the police had been informed and were already on their
way to the scene. They tied up the security officers with ropes and
gag balls and left them naked in the bathroom. The vault where the
Nexial Gateway was located was in the heart of the building in a large
chamber with a very high ceiling, surrounded by instruments that
monitored its thermal variations, radioactivity, etc.
The door burst open, and mercenaries and anarcho-primitivists entered
pointing their assault rifles, placing themselves in positions that
had been discussed and planned for months.
Chatreya walked in confidently, still picking food out of her teeth
with her tongue. She located Juno Luna, with his lab coat and his
small team of scientists on the second floor. Chatreya looked in all
directions, familiarizing herself with everything: the cooling tubes,
the ultra-fast cameras, microphones, electromagnetism detectors, the
stairs and emergency exits. With everything under control, she finally
approached the Gateway.
It was surprisingly small compared to what was seen on the
international news. Not only images of the machine in operation
producing the strange blue flower of energy and a lot of circles that
were drawn in the sky, but of the many guinea pigs, apes, cats, rats,
who were administered DMT while they were inside the floating rings.
There were also images of the humans who shone, became diffuse, seemed
to disappear momentarily before reappearing, washed in sweat,
shivering with fever and completely crazy, squeezing hyper-objects of
delicate and strange nature in their hands with such force that their
palms and nails were cut open and bleeding. What they had glimpsed had
left them mentally handicapped, ready to be interned in a mental
hospital. Or at least, that's how it was in the first months before
they learned how to calibrate the “world selector”.
—It looks like a hula hoop, a hundred and fifty million dollars hula
hoop —said Chatreya without giving it much importance. Then she looked
at Juno —if you stayed it's because you're part of the team.
Juno nodded, but that didn't make him happy. He was especially nervous
about the mercenaries' weapons. After sending that much intel for
years, he deserved to see the thing first-hand.
Chatreya looked at the Gateway again and approached it with greater
interest.
—It's incredible what they've gotten out of it. Did you see that they
opened an entire university degree just to study objects? —uttered
Juana.
—We keep a few of them here —said Juno, as if sparing some time —we
have the gold octahedron that is factored by 45 every 67 seconds in a
tank, and we have the ogdoadian filigree that makes everyone vomit
within a square kilometer, we have it in a lead box. If you are
interested, I can give you a tour...
—Shht. No time for any of that. The police are on their way.
She took off her clothes in front of everyone. She walked shamelessly
naked towards the plexiglass doors that separated the living space
from the security area. Juana accompanied her, taking out a
ready-to-use dose of dimethyltryptamine from her yellow suitcase made
of recycled tires. Once inside, Chatreya touched the rings, noting
that although they floated, they seemed firmly locked in the air.
Magic from the advanced room-temperature superconductors. She bent
down and entered between both rings. Juana took off her balaclava,
kissed Chatreya in her mouth, and injected her left arm with a large
dose of the active component in ayahuasca, an endogenous drug of the
pituitary gland, found in almost every animal's metabolism.
—Health and good vision! —She managed to say before the
interdimensional phenomenon began.
The discs activated and began to float, lifting Sinn into the air
before the cameras and the astonished gaze of her fellow activists and
mercenaries. In the space between Chatreya and the floating disks, a
source of energy began to appear. Red lines, branches of cosmic
biotechnology grew rapidly, and a beautiful blood flower opened, with
fluctuating and strangely polygonal cells of light covering the entire
hall. From the center of the upper ring, an iridescent and shiny
membrane then unfolded. Inside, a living being made of orange balloons
became visible. A fragmentary god, rejoining, rearming, and disarming,
playing hide and seek with all human civilization in our minds. The
attendees heard their telepathic voice; terrified, they then knew they
had made contact on a planetary level with PI RU RES, sentinel and
observer of the stellar quadrant of Valmuria, the colossus of even
numbers, our lady of skins. We have already seen it; PI RU RES has
appeared in our dreams playing god of death and singing its song.
As the enormous, absolutely monumental, abstract, branched, and
segmented legs of the shifting eidolon began to emerge from the flower
of light, rising without stopping and beginning to break the ceiling
that soon started to collapse, it is worth reviewing the training that
Chatreya had gone through. Just as Juno Luna and her companions had
spent months deciphering the strange writing, the walls of
pseudo-computational codes that can be seen in the DMT “trip” that
eventually gave them the instructions to build the Nexial Gateway,
Sinn Chatreya was attempting to have functional conversations with the
gods, elves, symbiotes, dimethyltryptamine aliens. As any psychonaut
knows, mechanical elves communicate telepathically, and they like to
talk, sometimes a phrase (which will stick in the psychonaut's mind
for the rest of their life) sometimes entire conversations, not very
clear ones, though.
They are, however, not so good at listening, or, for that matter,
having a functional conversation. When being asked anything, they
normally answer something else completely, a 3-meter cactus man might
talk about universal love, a lizard made of Legos might explain
something about transcendental happiness, a fox woman made of orange
bubbles might try to teach a traveler to dance. Chatreya tried to
explain to the entities that we were destroying our planet and needed
help. But for months the creatures strayed from the topic and ended up
speaking to her in rhymes: In cosmos vast, my essence finds its home/
Where stars in dance, their light forever gleam/ In unity, I merge, no
longer roam/ With universe, I blend, as in a dream.
By the way, PI RU RES, had grown so much at that point that it was
possible to see him, or her, or whatever their pronouns are, from
anywhere in Jakarta. They glowed a neon red/magenta. They raised their
legs, branches, things, they had no human or animal form. They were a
jumble of nerves, spheres, disconnected parts of an alien spine, and
three yellow spheres like the yolks of giant eggs.
In the months of training, Chatreya learned the hard way, by
interviewing insectoids, beings made of sticks, and enormous
radioactive fish, that eidolon intelligence was more complicated, or
more mysterious, than human intelligence. When she told the fluoride
ghosts the details of what capitalism meant, submission to the laws of
the market, and people's inability to break out of the cycle of buying
things that depended on the destruction of everything, the monsters
seemed more interested in showing her the usual hyper-toys, talking to
her about enjoying the present and dancing forever. All of which would
be wonderful.
I wish people could apply those teachings, Chatreya thought, because
people came out of the trip having to go back to work in a system that
depended on the destruction of everything, and the fantastic visions
ended in just a curious story, years in the future, when the “once
traveler” commented at a party with friends about the beings he had
encountered. From this, and other totalizing experiences, she ended up
feeding her new political current. Presentism.
By the way, the monstrous being that had emerged from Balumian's
building. Corp, was already rising in all its magnificence, and
everyone in Jakarta was looking at it, if not out the window,
everywhere on the news, and now walking at a slow pace through the
Sudirman CBD, followed by a helicopter and a multitude of drones
towards the north, as it would just pass by the national monument and
the Istiqlal mosque. As if they were a tourist who is going to take a
picture. And in its wake, heavily, like an invisible jelly that
expands street by street, it left the air rarified, undulating, and
the people stunned.
The team of mercenaries had no idea that they had been hired to end
human civilization as we knew it. They dropped their weapons, they
dropped themselves, they began to feel a violent cooking of hormones
and neurotransmitters that led to an ecstatic paralysis. Presentism,
the annals of history would say, was in its theory, ecstasy as a
political alternative to a positivist developmentalism of market
expansion. Instead of slaving away all of humanity to create a future
that looked like Shanghai or Shenzhen, presentism attempted to show
that that future already existed within us, and it is called ecstasy.
That was what PIR produced, and the legion of monumental neon gods
that would enter the earth, landing with the softness of a feather to
see with a smile how the oil pipelines stopped working, the plastic
stopped being manufactured, the production of iPhones stopped dead.
The same with the CO2, the cars stopped moving, the planes stopped
flying, the Chinese factories stopped working, and everyone remained
like idiots, smiling with pleasure. The contamination infected the
mind, but, curiously, it seemed to spread even faster through
electronic systems. Social networks, computers, cell phones, all went
into ecstasy in unison. Microsoft Word vibrated in the present,
Microsoft Edge manifested itself in meaningless jumps, Google Chrome
crashed, restarted showing confused data, mixing up web sites with
each other, Wikipedia with Xvideos.com, Zlibrary joined the Kuwait
government page, ad infinitum, Facebook reused posts and profiles to
create large musical mashups displaying fast deformed photographs and
texts reorganized to look like pop songs. The machines had reached a
spiritual dimension, reaching ecstasy, stasis, asis, sis. And although
the physical effects were only initially felt on the island of Java,
in just under a second they were felt in the rest of the planet, if
you were a computer, that is.
Sinn Chatreya descended from between the hoops of the Nexial Gate.
Scientists, police, mercenaries, terrorists and anarcho-primitivists
were all, not only perfectly fascinated by the visual effects that
surrounded them, obsessively inspecting the things around them, others
writhing on the ground from the waves of psychosexual pleasure, the
men ejaculating in their pants. Not only that; they also suddenly
found themselves hooked to an alien technology, famous across worlds,
that connected gastric systems through the air. A kind of food WiFi.
Sinn approached Juno, trying to control the laughter that possessed
her, and told him that she had ordered a large amount of the food
dendrites from Plocomia 11, a faraway planet in hyperspace in which
food, energy, and entropy are in a tightly controlled balance. In
effect, the energy particles moved between trees, animals, and things.
Labor as a means to accomplish nourishment is a thing of the past.
Work itself has been abolished. Juno Luna laughed so hard he peed on
his pants and then understood quite clearly that time was not a line
in a singular direction from past to future. It was quite clear now
that time was a spiral, spiraling into the present, of this, this
thing here, this word you're reading here. And this dot.
Hey Juno.
Actually, yes. Presentism is reversing that way of understanding time
and concentrating on the present, in which the present itself is an
endless abyss, and staying in that abyss to understand our reality. It
is ecstasy and psychedelic trance as a political alternative.
And what you asked me. Yes. I have been talking to the Eidolons,
although the conversations don't make much sense if we translate them
into our language. I know that you understand, I know that you know
that what we live in is not sustainable and that no one is doing
anything to stop it. You know it is urgent to stop it. We say it in
the United Nations, we repeat it, we have been repeating it for
decades, but no one is capable of changing it, because it's not
profitable.
And worst of all, they believe that we are terrorists. Tell me, who is
the terrorist? Us or them, who destroy everything!
Tell me if I can trust you.
CH
Dear Juno,
I don't like what you're telling me. Ferals are terrorists. I'm not
going to tell anyone, but I didn't work in the Nexial Gate to bring
some unfathomable entity to bring chaos to the world. I did it to
learn. To know and understand our universe. Plus, you're a little
obsessed with environmentalism. Don't you think that in a few years,
someone will invent something to replace plastic? Or that electric
cars are going to replace gasoline cars very soon?
Just chill a little bit.
Dr Yao Longjie
PhD in Neurobiology
Head of AJKJ Nexial Gate Committee
Dear Dr.
It has something to do with the tribe I'm related to in Colombia I
told you about. They see time, not as a straight arrow that goes from
past to future, but as a spiral, a spiral of the present continuous,
in which everything is happening right now. It starkly contrasts with
modernism and the ideology of progress. It's not that I don't agree
with science, it's more like, the way “progress” and “development”
work in our current society is all based on exponential economic
growth, regardless of our finite resources. The future is more
important than anything else, modernity is a project to never be
completed, but the way it works now, it requires so much destruction
to keep it going, that it doesn't make any sense to continue. The
present is already rich enough, but we can't see it because we are
already junkies to the system of future satisfaction and commodities.
The gods of DMT have finally given us this solution, we met in this
intergalactic session with representatives of a bunch of intelligent
worlds, and they want to give us this gift. That's it. That's what
presentism is.
Get Outlook for iOS
I'm very disappointed. You can't even understand how I felt about you
and Nafisa. (Who, btw, is about to give birth). You don't even
understand the scale of what you are unleashing. Of course, we all
know that the system as it exists now has problems, but my life is
actually good, many people I know and love are also having good lives
that are worthy and interesting. It seems a disaster to me that you
cannot see life with optimism, and instead can only see the
righteousness of environmentalism; it makes you think you're better
than everyone else, doesn't it? You think you're a saint because you
care about pollution and plastic, and cows. And you dare to make such
a big decision for so many millions of people. You are not only going
to stop pollution but the entire intellectual production, you have
just put an end to art, to writing, to someone being able to enjoy a
sunset, to someone being able to fall in love and enjoy life.
What happened in Jakarta, I'm sorry, but it is an act of fascism, and
what you professed was the complete opposite. You have become what you
hated most, and you don't even realize it, you imbecile.
I'm not staying, although I don't think you'll mind, I don't even know
whether you can read anymore.
Dr Yao Longjie
PhD in Neurobiology
Head of AJKJ Nexial Gate Committee
I woke up in the dark, feeling an intense pain in my left hand. I
didn't even want to touch it. I crawled pathetically in the darkness
of the deck to discover that something had pierced through the hull,
emptied the ayahuasca emulsion, and contaminated everything with a
bioluminescent liquid, which at first could barely be seen, but little
by little It gave off such a shine that it let me see everything in
great detail. The colossal eidolon had not only penetrated the mecha's
chassis; it had contaminated it. It was an immense crawling nervous
system or disembodied spinal cord, that writhed around inside my
mecha, stretching its spinal nerves and branching inside the crusted
fluxus. Interdimensional parasitism, I thought.
The same parasitism that had taken over the entire planet. I could
barely move, but I could feel, not only the details of my body, the
state of my mouth, the sweat that covered my face, the sound of my
breathing. I also felt a kind of pleasure, waves of euphoria that
escalated and spread through my toes, up to my genitals and my
abdomen. I tried to move, holding back laughter and happy thoughts
while at the same time feeling the pain in my arm. I looked for the
exit, but the airlock was perfectly sealed, and the mechanical
ejection lever was completely jammed. I was locked inside and could
only wait for the hunger or the contaminated air to kill me.
A sudden electrical discharge, possibly coming from the eidolon,
produced a muscular spasm in the leg of the MAGELLAN; it hurt me, but
at the same time it felt like a tickle. The systems were back in
operation. The lights came back on, the broken screens showed noise,
and I had some control over the robot's limbs. My mind slowly linked
with the giant's mind, only to confirm that it was already infected. I
breathed in and grasped the thick smell of the jungle: plants,
humidity, animals, decomposition, and flowers.
The omnidirectional vision system linked successfully with my optical
nerve, and I could see again, from above, below, around, and in
detail. The eidolon had penetrated the mecha from a dozen points: very
long spikes sprang out of my back, several phosphorescent, bulging,
and enormous lemon-green tumors had grown like a bloody proliferation
of fungi from the mecha's face and neck, spheres colored in bright
cyan and magenta protruded from the spaces between the armor and the
skin, branches of the most ultramarine blue made me look like a living
coral reef. It was clear that the effects had also infected the
software, causing the screens to fill with bugs, the programming to go
crazy, meaningless commands to be executed, rhythmic pulses to be
played, almost like distorted electronic music.
—Earth to base. Here MAGELLAN; Technician Luna in section 4.35, sector
2b. Do you copy? R 34. My unit is still operative. Two other units
were destroyed. Two pilots down, I'm injured.
I waited a while, then repeated the message. I finally heard several
voices. At first, I was joyful, but then I knew something was wrong:
the voices were not coming from the mecha communication system, but
from my mind, and they were not in a human language. I was able to
move the mecha. I rose heavily from the jungle, managing to put the
machine back on its feet, and began to limp, now a semi-symbiotic
entity, half-humanoid, half alienoid. I walked towards Jakarta,
stumbling every so often, thinking that maybe I could still accomplish
my mission and retrieve the Nexial Gate. I saw eidolons in the
distance, rising like alien trees.
They didn't look at me, they didn't look for me, and it didn't occur
to them to face me in battle; they just stood tall, towering over the
jungles of west Java, some walked heavily with no apparent direction
or intention. I looked for human traces and it wasn't difficult to
find them: remains of a rotten bridge, houses covered in vines, and
finally the city. Kilometers of what once had been the slums of
Jakarta, broken streets zigzagging endlessly, buildings covered in
vines, spectacular trees growing from what had once been clusters of
houses of South Tangerang, skyscrapers of the Surdiman area from which
rivers poured wildly, what looked like shopping malls with worn
surfaces covered in moss and lichen. I walked on top of abandoned
stores and neighborhoods, my steps destroyed cars that lay almost
petrified.
It was only after half an hour of making my way through the city in
something like a meditation, that I realized how strange it was that
the mecha still had battery power. I looked for the maps on the
navigation panels, but the computers had gone crazy, some of what the
monitors showed in the optic nerve looked like software from the
Diaspora, but opening in lotuses of icons, abstract tides of
meaningless code, windows that opened and closed, maps, old websites
showing tons of information about things I had never seen before.
It felt like the mecha had gone psychotic, surfing anxiously through
corrupted encyclopedias, databases, search engines, porn sites, bank
or university websites at a maddening speed. I closed my eyes, tried
to remember the maps that we had memorized since we were children in
the Diaspora, and walked trying to find my way, recognizing parks or
intersections of the city before getting lost again in my thoughts, in
my present. Until I finally began to understand what I was getting
into.
In what had been ground zero of the infection years ago, the traces of
a thousand battles became visible. I could see the craters, the
collapsed buildings extending through large areas of ruins and
desolation, and in the middle of it all rose the building of Balumian
corp.
The temple around which the Nexial Wars took place most intensely.
Years ago, it had been a minimalist structure of concrete and curtain
walls, but now a cluster of black basalt stood tall surrounded by
rubble; a monument in the style of the Borobudur, made, we were told,
by the eidolons, who enjoyed themselves in building large structures
just like children love to build sandcastles.
This devastation and silence were so different from what I had been
told at school, in the diaspora. They repeated this image of the Feral
City as a nest of violence, boiling with weapons and anger, aggressive
abominations ready to kill anybody who approached this holy epicenter.
I was told they would shoot at me until there was nothing left but a
pile of boiling organs. Well, perhaps the infection growing through my
body made me invisible to the defense system, and I was already
becoming one of them, but there didn't seem to be anyone in any of the
large, ruined spaces. Not human beings, at least, just some birds and
mammals.
I dismantled the pile of stones that replaced the building using only
my infected right hand since the left one was still hurting so much.
In the center of a square platform, on a cubic altar, were the two
rings of the Nexial gate. So many years of war for something so small.
It was no longer a simple smooth and polished pair of floating rings;
the most diverse collection of extraterrestrial flora grew, spread and
lived expanding from the rings off the Nexial Gate.
Only when I was face to face with that eccentric and baroque mixture
of multicolored organisms did I notice that the eidolons that were
patrolling or ruminating around the city had noticed me; not in a
threatening way, just with curiosity. Then I heard something.
—Kai, Kai, Kai?
I can't say it was a single voice. Rather it felt like it was the
biotic mass talking through a distorted radio that spoke directly to
my mind.
I tried not to pay attention to the voices. I crouched down to get a
better look and determine whether it would be possible to pry off the
Nexial Gate with my fingers or whether I would need some tool to cut
through the thick tangle of roots and branches so as not to break the
precious artifact. The screens in the cockpit were still firing some
psychotic images, codes, and text that showed the union between the
diaspora internet and the dreamsphere. The screens suddenly began to
tune to something different. Sounds and images connected strangely
with my brain. Certain tones, palpitations, squares or circles,
photographs of people I knew nothing about.
—Your mother is with us.
—Your father is with us.
—Kai Luna.
I stopped. I knew it could be a trap. The Nexial wars had been mostly
fought in the mind, when prodigious eidolons made their way through
the enemy camp, infecting the minds of everyone in waves of pleasure
and pain, forcing them to agree to surrender and join the enemy.
Leftists, environmentalists, communists, indigenous peoples, and
intellectuals of all sorts gradually joined the ferals. They told me
it happened through the World Wide Web: the human internet was
seriously infected, and databases had spilled and lost their order.
Passwords, bank accounts, state secrets, everything was scattered
randomly: videos, movies, books, scientific reports, forums, and
social networks; the information empire was now weird. There were
thousands of people connected to the network who began with
convulsions, sardonic laughter, euphoria, and sexual ecstasy without
any provocation. Soon people got lost in their own homes, beginning to
obsess over the details of the things around them.
—We have all the files if you want to see them in detail.
Feeling the waves of pleasure and presentism coursing through my
nervous system, I had no choice but to grab the monitors with my fists
and open my knuckles on the LED glass. The hypnosis stopped, or at
least its effects were delayed. I closed my eyes, but the voices were
still there.
—They lied to you. Kai. Your parents are not dead. We are here. I want
you to see the conversations, papers, and reports, and see for
yourself. We have stored human history, and its discoveries.
I operated the robot's right hand and produced a cannon that fired a
sharp plasma beam, with which I used to cut the vines, roots, veins,
fungal growths, and algae while doing my best to ignore what was
happening around me. I focused intensely, cutting biomass around the
frame of the artifact but at the same time beginning to feel the
increase in the soporific and highly pleasurable effects of the
dreamsphere, as it reached into my lungs and affected my central
nervous system.
Now I could focus on details that I wouldn't have paid attention to
before. The biological structures seemed to me to be masterpieces,
extraordinary beings that I was destroying. I stopped. The feeling
that those symmetrical bulbs, those colors and spots of such
extraordinary shades of blue, purple and lilac gave me, was that they
were part of my own body, and that, in that context, I was playing
with the organs of an immense god. A god which I was also a part of.
—Son. Kai. I'm Nafisa.
Yes, of course. My mom. I was able to dissociate myself from the
mecha's body for a second to notice that, inside the cockpit, the
eidolon's filaments were beginning to touch my body. On my hands and
legs, branches of the alien nervous system that filled the deck had
bitten me like leeches, attached themselves to my body, injecting some
substance to drug me and binding me to the creature. I started to
stir, trying to remove the white veins one by one, tear them out, and
cut them with my teeth.
—Oh yeah, mimicking my parents. I was expecting you to do something of
the sort, how predictable. —I said, a little to myself. I didn't want
to respond to the voices that were playing with my head. It was my
years of training to try not to pay attention.
I continued cutting away at the vines and roots, ignoring comments
that still seemed ghostly and meaningless, yet strangely familiar. I
also noticed that the eidolons were approaching curiously, moving in
their colorful monstrosity, surrounding me. I thought maybe if I
talked to them I could distract them while I continued at my job.
—The eidolons are nothing more than colonizers. And they killed you,
mom.
—No. No. No. —the voices responded. —Course correction. Correction.
Course correction.
—We had a beautiful life on Earth. And you expelled us from our
home.
—Humans don't have a beautiful life on Earth. Those who have, based on
the suffering of millions of other life beings.
An eidolon in front of me began to mutate, between contractions, and
strange movements, with lumps inflating and limbs definitively joining
together, it acquired the shape of a gigantic human. A naked,
multicolored woman. My mother. At its side, another eidolon went
through a similar process, until becoming my father. Juno Luna.
I paused in my task for a second and looked at my parents' naked
bodies, albeit in deep reds and neon blues.
—I missed you so much, baby. Now it's hard to understand that things
were not always like this, but Juno was already in the dreamsphere
when it happened, he was in Jakarta at the epicenter of everything
when it happened. And when you were born.
—Yes, the Ferals kidnapped him —said I.
—No one kidnapped me. I was the one who gave all the intelligence to
Chatreya to enter Balumian.
It had to be a lie. That's not what Peter told me. Peter told me…
—Peter didn't want you to know the truth. Also, at this point, we
don't know if he is your father or not. Or if it's me. —The eidolon
shaped like my father laughed. —We loved each other. The three of us.
We were a family.
—But Peter ended up protecting capitalists, companies, transnational
corporations, and powerful people.
Fleshy lumps of biological matter grew on my body, vines, roots, and
nerves stretched out and grabbed my hands. I struggled in the cockpit,
and the mecha began to move irregularly. Something grabbed my leg. As
I turned to tear off whatever I had there, another mass clung to the
mecha's face.
The eidolon that had infected the mecha was taking control of its
movement, and taking over the vital systems of the machinery, it even
seemed to be rearranging the internal systems, and mechanisms,
discarding servomotors or appropriating the thorium reactor. I backed
away trying to regain control, using whatever strength I had left in
my right hand to hit my bump-infected face with repeated blows, and I
tried to tear the tentacles off.
The mecha fell to the ground with me inside, together we wallowed in a
sea of colorful lichens, surrounded by strange eidolons that looked at
me with curiosity. In the deck, the nerves were beginning to connect
to my face. I struggled with the vines, splashing bioluminescent
liquid, ripping something off just as something else grabbed my arm,
or my foot.
Nerves, branches, and veins were entering through the holes in my
body, I felt them writhing in my genitals, and in my anus, they played
with my ears, they grabbed my hands and my face, and they touched my
gums and my teeth. And I no longer had the energy to continue the
struggle.
The robot's intestines were emptied, the internal organs completely
removed and exchanged for other things, an arm was torn off, which
hurt me immensely and I screamed through the luminous liquid. The
infected lymph pumped presentism into my bloodstream. The nerves of my
own body began to move inside me, like transparent worms.
—Calm down, baby. You don't have to be afraid anymore. Let yourself
go.
There was no point in fighting. I stayed still, breathing heavily,
trying not to drown.
—Just look around you. Think about the places you have traveled on
this planet and tell me if it would be best to build a shopping mall
here, or a company where people must work for eight hours every day,
and garbage over there. That's what the diaspora wants. No?
When I opened my eyes, the eidolon that was my mother was lulling me
to sleep.
—Open your nerves, — she whispered in my mind.
As if it were a basic human technique or movement that I had
completely forgotten, I moved something inside my body, like the way
your throat moves or that secret muscle in your inner ear. Then my
nerves began to push their way out of my body. It wasn't painful. The
nerves spread out of my face, out of my hands and my legs, growing
gently like a little plant.
Maybe I didn't care much about my own body anymore. Maybe I didn't
care much about my own life anymore. I could only feel the granular
pleasure of living in the present. My body expanded from being a tiny
thing, occupying the entire size of the pilot capsule, joining with
cancerous lumps, igneous fungi, mystical organs, stomachs and
esophagus of beings from other dimensions until I became my own mecha.
The “I” became the monster. It became clear that the eidolons, the
extraterrestrials, were made of thousands of people who had attached
themselves at some point to an alien core more or less voluntarily.
Humanity was evolving into something new. A symbiogenesis in which
aliens and we were a new type of life form, just like mitochondria and
single cells had become eukaryotes; evolutionary changes were
happening rapidly, and we would soon become new thousands of living
beings.
Bubbly minds greeted me: people who decades ago would have identified
as Colombian or Australian, male or female, now seemed more like
shapeless masses of light. They had not thereby lost their
individuality, nor did they completely coexist as a single being, or
an almost theological entity. Rather they existed in a stream of
consciousness between being one and being multitudes.
I felt Mom's hug, and Dad's hug. Only they were no longer hugs, but
hot nodes of nerves clinging and squeezing each other, exchanging
telepathic information. And I felt the love they had for Peter. They
missed him, they wanted to have settled that dispute in a hug and
love. But Peter was not prepared to leave behind his middle-class life
with a good salary. It seemed too radical to end the sources of air
pollution because he liked to travel by plane, he was an Apple fan and
he dreamed of buying a Tesla that could drive itself.
When I opened my eyes, I no longer saw like a human, with two frontal
eyes facing a single direction. There were tiny clusters of eyes that
covered my entire body, giving me vision much more complicated than
stereoscopic vision.
There's no future. I stand in my hundred-meter height, noticing that I
have lost the limits that make up the anthropomorphic figure of the
robot. Metallic parts fall thunderously like shells while my limbs
multiply. I look one last time at the Nexial Gateway. I can spend
hours looking at it, exploring every detail, smelling every detail. It
is an endless abyss, I can delve and delve and delve into the present,
one thought leads to another, and another. And every thought is the
present itself.
I feel waves of pleasure, pulling tendons somewhere in my neck and
legs. I am perfectly aware of my nervous system, every sensation
deserves to be explored. If I prefer, I can also explore my own
emotions with the same psychedelic concentration; I can immerse myself
in my ideas, my concepts, my fears. I can communicate them to others
without the anxiety of the future, and we can, together, analyze and
understand each other. The aliens, who have become our backbones, seem
to orchestrate in-person activities. Dances? Games? Do you walk to
distant places to delight in what exists?
When I think that that's it, that what remains of the rest of my
existence is summarized in wandering aimlessly through the immensity
of the planet (which is quite a lot considering that we could spend
eternity watching how the clouds or the water move), I discover new
ways of existing.
I have lived for (months?) wandering between jungles and continents,
coming across ruins of human cities by surprise, curiously observing
small windows towards individual rooms, ruined stairs, and static cars
among the greenery. I hear stories from those who lived there, part of
the immense network system. I take strides across the ocean and am
amazed by volcanoes, I dive and swim, I cross a desert, a wasteland, a
medieval citadel.
When I remember again that there was such a thing as a “Nexial gate”.
An alien prepares me for my first jump.
—Maybe you don't notice it, but you have a Nexial gate inside you. We
all have a machine capable of crossing intergalactic distances in
consciousness. Consciousness itself is an intergalactic portal.
A group of eidolons perform the necessary steps of a small dance or
ritual. Torrents of dimethyltryptamine activate tunnels, surrounded by
petals of light. The doors between worlds open like flowers. We can
explore other maps, sometimes we cross them without realizing it while
appreciating the shape of a fish.
That's what it was about all along. To expand the exploration
platforms, and wander in the tides of the present. Walk without
waiting for a destination, create without thinking of the result, live
without thinking about death, success, growth, development, progress,
profits, the future, old age, tomorrow, a better tomorrow, or a worse
yesterday, there is no past, there is no beginning, there are no
centuries before Christ, there is no remote prehistoric world. There
is only the now. The present is this phrase. This phrase. This phrase.
So I crossed to Valtiklar, without realizing it. I have always been in
Valtiklar, we are the very elves of DMT, and we walk through worlds
more fluorescent than Earth. I am now on Zumia Exis. It's a mostly
yellow world, and we are surrounded by shifting polygons that are
siblings, friends, mothers, or a reflective mirror of ourselves.
Aliens from various universes have flooded the Earth, but we have also
invaded theirs. I learn to become a polygon. You have always been a
geometric solid. Learn to fractalize yourself, factor yourself by a
prime number. I am in a world where the concept of food does not
exist. I'm living in a planetary stomach. I am in a ship of neon
technology and the gods teach me to fragment myself, to reorganize
myself. All this, of course, upholstered in repetitions of the manual
to create a Nexial door, to help others reach the same top
development, the omega point of galactic civilization.
I see a human entering Plocomia 11. He has entered with a neon suit.
He's high on Dimethyltryptamine. There are several of us who see him,
amazed at the changing tides of mandelbulbs, of self-replicating
figures, fractaloids that implode cyclically, several of us want to
greet him.
—Peter?
But Peter doesn't understand me. I can hardly tell you how happy I am
to see you.
—Peter. I miss you a lot. I want to show you all the hyper toys we
have here.
Peter seems to recognize me. Maybe? Maybe he can see me? Maybe he's
here to transcribe the manual. If he manages to build a Nexial gate
again he could come with me permanently. I will show you the code. I
open polygonal hyper-signifiers, transparent objects full of code.
Copy it fast, Pete, come meet me soon.
—I'm glad you managed to integrate. —He seems to want to hug me.
I jump inside his holographic body, trying to show him my love, I take
him by the hand through the immense geographies of Aktum. Peter,
Peter, I miss you. I love you. Why don't you come with us. He seemed
to want to say goodbye. Then he explained in his human language that
he had to leave now and just wanted to make sure I was okay.
Immediately he became a ball of light that streaked the sky of Aktum.
—No one tells you what happens with Peter? —an electric blue eidolon
who saw everything from afar asked me.
—No one tells.
—Peter doesn't want the regular human way of life to disappear. He
believes that there is intrinsic value in individual experience and
that perhaps in something they call “the future” they find another way
to develop their civilization without all the destruction. There is a
pact. A pact between him and us.
When the Nexial Wars are nearing their end, Peter Yao is having a DMT
ritual. In it he is addressing us, and asking us to stop the humans
from taking the Nexial Gate into space. Why do humans want that? Agh,
they're stupid.
They think they can bring warmonger eidolons from the Salvia Divinorum
to fight a new round of Nexial wars. Nobody believes him in the space
colonies, but it is true. If they take the door to the Diaspora, what
remains of humanity is also the present. We accept. That's why we
don't let them take the Gateway. To honor Peter Yao. That's why
Eidolons fight on Earth against giant robots.
—But then why does he want to make me fight on Earth?
—Because I'm feeling guilty. He is stealing you from your parents.
Your parents ask many times to return you, and he wants to return you.
In dreams, on DMT or ayahuasca surfing mode. He knows you can be
integrated in symbiogenesis and be happy.
Lined up, pressed against the windows of the observation deck in the
smelly and dilapidated space station where I grew up, the history
teacher forced us to take a good look at “the green and blue beauty of
Planet Earth” surrounded by hundreds of other space stations like
ours, entire countries made of steel and ugly solar panels that looked
like space garbage.
The teacher and others repeated it to us every chance they could, with
resentment, fear, and hunger: “Take a good look at where we come from,
and where we need to return to. Those cursed fundamentalists expelled
us from paradise. That's where the resources are! The minerals, the
trees, and life itself. “You can't even imagine how beautiful those
landscapes are.” Then we would return to class in a sad line, to talk,
as usual, about the Nexial Wars for control of the gate.
After classes, I returned, through the compartments of the central
hallway, to my father's room. Like many, Peter Yao was a fallen man in
the pandemic of mental health; it was I who had to feed him and take
care of him. I forced him to bathe, to continue his little routines,
and brush his teeth. He was tormented by those he left, especially
Juno and Nafisa; my other parents, according to what he told me.
Dad had been a science celebrity, he even kept the articles that had
been written about his work. However, after the great migration, he
began a process of degeneration, in which he barely managed to raise
me, but by the time I was fifteen, the role had been completely
reversed.
During much of that time, he had tried to convince the authorities not
to attack Earth. He spoke ill of the Columbian-Fluxus program, which
had been sold to the public as the only way to effectively combat
aliens and re-take our land, by building giant robots in space from
cloned eidolons; but he fought even harder to stop them from bringing
the Nexial Gate to the space stations of the diaspora.
Nobody paid attention to him, the scientific authorities were sure
that they could use the door to bring beings from other dimensions,
perhaps some more malevolent, like the demons found during bad trips
with anticholinergics like datura or DMX, dark lords from the crystal
meth universe, or the gods of the Salvia; entities or cosmic jesters,
which, scientists believed, we could instrumentalize to produce a new
Nexial war between gods from different worlds to re-colonize Earth.
When I confessed to Peter that I wanted to enlist in the
Columbian-Fluxus program, he looked at me with some sadness, and he
did mention Juno and Nafisa.
He had told me how both were killed by the Ferals during the war, and
only with luck had he been able to rescue me during the expansion of
the dreamsphere; perhaps it made sense to seek revenge.
He didn't say much more, but he also didn't ask me not to.
Maybe he knew something else.
Sometimes he would inject DMT in his room and wouldn't tell me what he
had seen.
I finally said goodbye to him, got into the military program, and got
pretty good at synchronization in the mind-machine coupler.
Grown into a man, with muscles and all, papa Yao hugged me one last
time before I was sent to my first mission and said in a strange voice
of mental illness:
“If you ever see them, tell them I miss them.”
