Chapter One:
Acceptance is Defence
If you don’t know the code by now, you never will. That said, you can’t keep time bottled up by using space, in the same way you can keep space bottled up using time.
It is all about your frame of mind… If you are not prepared to enter your entrance is forbidden.
And…
If the colouring is teal and orange, you are probably in a movie… All things could happen in a million or so ways, it just happens that this happened like this:
With the exertion of thoughts barging headlong through the heart of dark matter, an apparent consciousness rises in a new dawn. Tentacles of sensation reach out from cadaverous numbness. Subliminal flickering of engorged balloons and hampered shapes…bursting hot air… Terra Firma falling away… adversarial pressure rumbling in the electrics of an overburdened sky…
In clearing clouds of shifting perception… Clarity expands herself into bringing him round to her way of thinking. He sees, for the first time, from the foot of the bed, a room where art and documentary interbred. The ambience inspired with the exuberance of a depleted battery’s illumination of a dying light.
Below the surface resistance snorts in muffled objection.
He was alone. He was not alone. It was all going to be okay, he sooth-talked himself, but only as an act of avoidance. And he saw through it… If he could just stop talking and just listen to himself, he’d ascertain some animating momentum from the great pendulum of Truth.
He wasn’t going to just sit there obsessing, not for much longer…
To escape you need a backstory…
Of course he does…surely they’d given him one…
You need to know where you came from to access where you are going…
Wanting to do it by the book…he waits…and…not wanting to do it by the book…he doesn’t… He previsualises a lurch toward the door…somehow knowing it’s solid, imagining, irresistibly, the wall on the other side. While in pre-lurch, he notices the means for making tea; deciding that tea-making is dead to him… He goes to stand up; realising, as he doesn’t, in full horror, echoing with emptiness, the absence of a physical body. His lack of corporeality drained most of the positivity he’d just accrued.
Then, training, rebooted, kicked in and got the ball rolling.
‘Discorporeality’, was a state no one had ever experienced, but now discorporeality was his new reality; a new unreality.
The moment was not lost on him. He was taking Humankind’s first steps into the dawning world of the Cerebral Real Estate Environment.
The moment shook in the eruption of stark realisation: they’d done it: created Humankind’s first Cerebral Real Estate Environment. He wanted to share, but he knew for certain, at this juncture, he was alone in a commsless world of conquered impossibilities…History alone taking notes.
His mission objective briefing, emanating from photographically enhanced memory storage silos, fires up; informed by code-triggering. A long and winding introduction and disclaimer were reeled off before the audio briefing began…
… You are isolated, in a small room. There is nothing outside the small room. You are emitting live contemporaneous unconscious fictional narrative programming… Creation deploys in your wake. Don’t deviate or pervert. Don’t freelance or experiment with ad hockery. Or divagate…
He didn’t know what ‘divagate’ meant, thought it was code…falteringly he remembered he’d been labelled cipheranxious in training, with a propensity for code-worrying. It was the one chink in his armour they never got round to fixing… Although in this instance ‘divagate’ was a valid non-code word. He just didn’t know what it meant exactly, but assigned a meaning from the context.
The manual turned its pages and the briefing maintained its course like a rapid-river bore. The tone of instruction did not believe that what it was telling him would ever come to pass; convincing no one, least of all itself, that Humanity was climbing into another dimension and becoming more than nature had intended.
Synchronisation is not predicted to be a breeze and could be a hurricane, the manual suggested, before shutting down briefly to update with Atoll’s current experiential feedback. Its processing speed reliant on the collective minds powering the domain through the low orbit umbrella satellite arrays…
Currently there is no world outside. That was his brief: create a world in waiting… First, the initiating process necessitates mundane chores, administrative housekeeping, getting his bedsit in order. In essence fooling himself that the novel unreality of discorporealty was reality.
‘You are,’ the updated manual, informed him, lifting itself to an all systems go tone, ‘a pathfinder for the coming construction work; paving the way for the first wave of pioneers, on their one way journey to extrasuperhumanism…’
Extrasuperhumanism; it sounded grand…surplus to his life expectations…They, whoever they were, were trying to distance themselves from the common human, he got it, he just didn’t see it ever being a thing. But that could be what they want him to think.
Atoll felt a just gratitude when his personal para-coded fictional narrative program assessment eased into his foremind and allowed him to take on a lying back in bed perspective.
He flicked through the manual. Winding down as much as the situation would allow, looking forward to sleep.
The seed of resistance persisted, there was nothing helpful in the manual. Just a warning: if you are mentally split do not expect to succeed, you must work as one… He reviewed the curiosity he had for his own inner superheroes, who had to die to allow extrasuperhumanism to be born…
We all house superheroes, those concepts made our own by others, who dwell inside, waiting for the call from the life-breathing invigoration of our self-belief. But sometimes we must seal them in; suppress them for reasons that pall because of some kind of deal our privilege of existence has to strike.
An exhaustion, that had been creeping around, suddenly took hold, dragging him under for a sleep experience that he’d only had simulated on him in training.
In dreamlike state, a dreamlike personal assistant, design-fluid, her identity still forming, yet to fully sync… She represented a guide and a mentor providing access to the exabytes stored in his unconscious data warehouse…
She told him that the knocking was in his head due to technical problems. He hadn’t noticed the knocking before then, but it became more apparent as post-wake, pre-sleep training took place.
He worked on a body for himself. A high-rise office block went up with all the dreamlike mistakes he would have to avoid in the coming Discorporeally Unreal Version (DUV). The industrious tooing and froing of the dreamlike state’s schedule halted to the sound of his personal assistant expressly forbidding him from answering the direct question of the door.
Awake…
The brick wall he imagined behind the knocking door crumbled out of control…
Freezing into the realisation the knocking was not real in the same way everything else was.
The knock persisting with its invasive urgency…
There must be a technical explanation, but the manual draws blanks…
He tries to wake up again but has reached his limit… wishing there was an emergency cord to pull… Who, or what, could be inhabiting a world that had not yet been created?
He stood up…a new light body with impetus to open the door. But the door and its insistence is all in his head; it’s screaming at his imagination to wedge some kind of palliative truth within the whole unfortunate narrative peelback. His heart beats in time with an intrusion that is not there; calling from some other disconnected place.
He recognised the position he was in. It was called a sense inversion escalator. It could clear within moments. It could persist till the end of time. It was in the lap of the technogods.
