In this rare communion with the residual powers of a once accessible god he considered all that might be procurable for the petitioning for those who were willing to ask. But of all the world, he offered only a short and simple prayer. He wanted for nothing other than to be led to the woman who had entrusted such a sacred possession with his family all those many years ago.
“Imagine standing before a locked door without the key. By all logic, you shouldn't be able to pass. But suddenly... you find yourself on the other side! Welcome to the curious world of quantum tunneling, a phenomenon where particles defy our classical expectations and 'tunnel' through barriers they technically shouldn’t be able to overcome. It may sound fantastical, but without quantum tunneling there would be no stars. There wouldn’t even be elements!"
“What is everything? Which is really, I think, the ‘one’ thing. I mean, I guess you could say that the one underlying thing that is actually real is the mathematical abstraction which gives appearances and properties to all things. But even if this is the case, what does this derive from? Why, or how, is this underlying mathematical abstraction even a thing?”
“But if I were to venture a futile attempt at couching it in human language, as inadequate as it may be, I would say it is like an idea. One sublime, all-encompassing idea. An idea so powerful, it can only be manifested in narrative form, of which everything experienced, dreamt or imagined is but a tiny fragment—or, to put another way, a single ray of light infinitely diffracted—that taken altogether, comprises the incomprehensible whole. The supreme reality as they would say in Hindu philosophy. Or the absolute truth.”
“And I have this sneaking suspicion that certain glimmers or excitations that arise out of this timeless, dimension-less, vibrational field are so powerful, so brilliant, that this pure consciousness, this ultimate truth, is constantly finding its way back to them. And I believe we’ve all been there, and that we’ll be there again and again. In a sense, I believe we’ve never left.”
She simply could not believe what she was hearing out of this little dressed-up doll of a girl with the colorful ribbons in her hair and pastel polish on her nails. She believed not even the heart-incising priests of old harbored this amount of cruelty.
It was a revolution of the nameless in which the anonymous masses prevailed over those obsessed with immortalizing themselves in stone and in blood and even in charred remains.
They buried him at the base of the stone bearing his name and image and then stood back to quietly contemplate the enormity of the life that could still be felt to arouse the soil beneath their feet.
“You come from a large family, don’t you?”
“Well, growing up in the city, we may as well have been the fucking Waltons,” Joshua joked. But with the psychic glaring at him humorlessly, like he was an obnoxious middle schooler sounding off, he gave up the shtick and spoke plainly. “I’m the youngest of three.”
Stranger still was the sight of a couple humpbacked wayfarers waiting for the bus, as if they had just escaped from a time capsule, somehow not getting the memo about the apocalypse.
“You’re so basic and magnificent at the same time. It’s like you’re just one of those middle-aged guys who goes to the gym and tries to hide his gray hair, contributing to his 401K and all that. But then at the drop of a hat, you suddenly become Indiana Fucking Jones. Emphasis on fucking!”
“And the guy in the photo?”
“Joshua Newton. We have strong reason to believe he’s a cyber terrorist who just happens to have some knowledge of your manuscript.”
“My first fan, huh?” she chuckled. “Is he asking for a signed copy?”
The agents weren’t amused.
“Oh shit,” said Joshua. “Geomagnetic storm.”
“Yeah,” said the man from his car. “That bitch finally did it! She finally unleashed her fury on us!”
“Oh, so when the sun does something horrid, it’s a woman,” Karen scoffed. “Probably started her period, is that it?”
“Well, I’ve been googling a bit. It seems there is a new Harappan site in Pakistan, near the Indian border, which also has an interesting tie-in to my book.”
“You mean right about where a terrorist group is currently pointing a nuclear warhead?”
“I know, but hotel rates are next to nothing!”
“In fact, many are already falling dead in their presence, no doubt due to the same sorcery that is glorified in their holy book, which also provides hints of their true intentions here. And they are not reassuring.”
And to the west the salmon sky waned behind the blackened peaks of the Rockies, leaving their shadows to bleed darkly over the dying hopes of a once-mighty nation.
But for those farther north, the machinery of white supremacy and imperialism reasserted itself with vengeance, resuming its voracious ravaging of the land and the souls symbiotically connected to it. The doctrine of greed and raw power once again rearing its ugly, inexorable head.
“She’s not my soul mate. And anyway, terrible fucking sub-genre. The whole, you-think-you-found-your-true-love-only-for-your-real-true-love-to-come-along. And then, of course, hilarity ensues.”
“First of all, it’s a great fucking sub-genre because it’s absurdism at its diabolical best. Sisyphus himself would be laughing his ass off pushing that goddamn boulder of his up the hill for the bazillionth time.”
Which is real?
The photon that hits the surface at a precise point for our benefit,
Or the photon that hits every possible point when we’re not looking at it.
The field that varies over time and space as a vibrational ocean,
Or the field that annihilates the very notion.
Which is real—
The convincing holograms encoded in the event horizon,
Or the inevitable arc toward total oblivion.
The Me’s who are entangled to every random quantum process,
Or the Me’s who average out to utter nothingness.
Which is real—
Chaos, order, creation, destruction.
Or is there only the unreal,
The equilibrium of everything and the harmony of nothing.
“What has the world come to?” said Nima.
“It’s self-fulfilling prophecy, writ large,” said Dr. Farah, answering the question.
And that’s how she would always think of the concept of Besa and those who embodied it. An integral part of a new and unwritten canon to replace that which had been outgrown.
Jarvis took in the miracle of it all through his eyes and his nose and even breathing it into his chest, but the greater miracle was always the one at his feet, singing and jabbering and pausing only to flash an occasional smile his way.
It was the same Karen Godwin he had remembered from the short amount of time they had been lucky to spend with her. Petite and unassuming and as ferocious as Durga the warrior goddess when encountering the obstructive forces that stood in the way of liberating the pure of spirit.
“Whatever is, is right, including what your innermost instinct is compelling you to do. It instinctively knows its own nature and the ways it is meant to manifest itself. No need to explain or define or otherwise characterize. And any attempt to do so would be woefully inadequate anyhow.”
After all, she thought to herself, the story would play itself out according to script, regardless of her personal preferences. It was better to spectate through the perspective of the detached witness than to fool herself into believing she could sway the stylus that wrote her character into the play-act to begin with.
The bed canted as they all piled into it. The four of them with their limbs part-layered and interspersed like four bestie girlfriends at a slumber party and Joshua clutching at each of them with tears streaming effortlessly down a face which didn’t appear to be aware it was crying.
Her eyes and the fullness of her concentration were cast down upon the glass-like surface of the water that she trawled with a finger to compose new patterns for the currents to carry both onward and back and every which way.
It would be the humble nameless god born of the rich soil of Anahuac versus the belligerent, self-aggrandizing overlord from the land beyond the pitiless Great Deep, clashing in a war of wills for supremacy in the land of her ancestors.
While those of Tlaxcalteca ancestry achieved elegance by way of tasteful simplicity, those hailing from bloodlines reaching beyond an ocean and a bloody history of post-Roman kingdoms vying for supremacy favored a style befitting a royal spectacle.
Under their vigilant yet helpless watch, Lilith slept, entombed in blankets and tethered by tubes with the incessant chime of monitors burning a permanent audio track into their brains.
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