MONDO 77CL44 is a world inhabited mainly by deteriorated shells. Deteriorated shells and those soon to be deteriorated. What more can I say about this world? What more is there to say, other than this? It is a decay-phase world and that is that…
The shells act out the arcs of their decay trajectories with perfect fidelity, never deviating from their mapped-out courses by so much as an iota. And the whole time the deluded and hypnotized consciousness trapped in the shells continue to hallucinate that all is well. That nothing bad is happening. That was all one big party.
The hypnotized consciousness continue to fantasize lives of one sort or another, none of them reflecting in anyway the grim reality of what is going on. Such is life in a decay-phase world such as MONDO 77CL44, if it can be called such.
This situation is like that of a lorry driver who has succumbed to fatigue whilst driving his heavy goods vehicle down a steep mountain road. He is fast asleep and mere seconds from plummeting to his death, and yet he dreams that he is sprawled out on a deck-chair on a beach in Tenerife. To say that an illusion like this is ‘precarious’ is to make a tremendous understatement, and yet it is to an illusion such as this that the deluded denizens of MONDO 77CL44 are clinging…
Of course – as we all know very well – time-flow is subjective and in these decay-phase worlds it can be stretched out practically indefinitely – we are trapped in the moment before the vehicle plunges to its destruction, and yet it is – to us – as if we have all the time in the world…
In the final stages the illusion starts to stretch to breaking-point, however. We come towards the limit of the life-time of the illusion time and here time starts to race – it goes faster and faster, until even in our dreams we can feel the mad panicky rush of it. Such is life in a decay-world such as MONDO 77CL44, if we can go so far as to call it life.
One of the names they have for this world is Urath. This is a distortion of the truth. Urath is the source world, the True World, whereas the world they call ‘Urath’ is no more than a darkened echo – a decay-world, a ghost-world, a world inhabited by deteriorated personality husks…
Lycanthropy is no joke, I can tell you. I know it sounds all kind of romantic, or intriguing, or whatever, but the reality – for me at least – is very different. For me it started with difficulty in peeing – I could only pee in small little spurts. And no, it wasn’t a prostrate problem even though I am a man in my late fifties. Whenever I went out I kept having to stop every few minutes to piss on different objects. You know what I mean – car tires and larger-than-average rocks and dustbins and lampposts and things like that. I got in trouble for this a number of times, I need hardly tell you. Ended up in the local police station a good few times, got a number of verbal warnings and even had an interview with a psychiatrist. Who listened carefully to me and wrote things down. What a jerk. Those guys really piss me off.
Then the next thing was that I stopped being able to go out during the day. I grew super-sensitive to sunlight – it hurt my eyes. I ended up developing full-blown photophobia, which turned out to be to my advantage. Going out only after midnight changed things for the better as far as getting pulled over by the law was concerned. There are less people around to notice if you piss on a car tire at three in the morning. And the one that do generally pretend not to have seen…
And all of that was only the beginning of my troubles. There was never anything spectacular, nothing like what you see in the movies, only lots of annoying frustrating little problems with my behaviour. Itches that required scratching at length, the desire to lick my own crotch excessively, the ungovernable urge to sniff dog’s arses whenever the opportunity arose. Being perennially fascinated in crap and piss wherever I came across it.
I have already mentioned that I couldn’t go anywhere without having to stop every two minutes to take a piss – neither could I walk further than a few yards without having to sniff and snuffle about the ground for the slightest trace of someone else’s piss. When I go by one of those little alleys where the local winos are inclined to go relieve their bladders it can take me half an hour or more to pull myself free. I need hardly say that I find this deeply demoralising (not to say embarrassing) – this sort of thing is just not the life I had in mind for myself. It’s no way to spend one’s time…
Intellectually speaking I was starting to notice degenerative changes too. I no longer had any interest in reading science-fiction novels – my life-long obsession. Instead I took to looking out of the living room window at people going by and growling at the back of my throat if I didn’t like the look of them. This I did as quietly as possible as I had already had the dog warden around a good few times acting on the complaints of the neighbours.
I keep having strange dreams these days. I dream that I am chasing fast-running furry little creatures though fields. Running them down. The chase excites me beyond measure and I often wake myself up by the strange yelping noises that I am prone to making at these times. Sometimes I even manage to catch one of them and I feel its warm soft furry body between my jaws. It struggles to escape and this excites me even more. It excites me to fever pitch. I close my jaws in delirious satisfaction and feel the hot blood gush forth, and then I wake up – full of strange intoxicating passions that I cannot even begin to explain. It is as if I have drunk of a wine that no man ought to taste. A maddening wine.
More and more frequently, I find myself wondering – am I a man who thinks he is a dog, or a dog who thinks he is a man?
Embarrassingly, I also find myself being attracted to the local bitches, finding them – against my own will – charming and alluring to the extent that I can barely restrain myself from leaving the house in hot pursuit of them. I live in dread of the day when I am no longer able to resist their charms. I need hardly say that this is not a road I particularly want to do down.
Nobody ever tells you about these unpleasant – of not downright sordid – details. You don’t hear about this sort of stuff in the movies. Trust me – the people who make those films are full of crap…
In the thirty-odd years I spent working as a xenobiologist a lot of very strange things have happened to me, but nothing that comes anywhere close in terms of sheer unadulterated weirdness to the events that unfolded last October at the annual INUFOC, held last year in Alberta, Canada. It started the way all these damn things start – 200 to 300 people packed into a third-rate hotel somewhere in the boondocks. I can’t even remember the name of the town – all I remember is that it was a God awful hole in the back-end of beyond, as these places always are. It is some kind of tradition, as far as I can see. The first three days were terribly hard going, unusually dull even for the International UFO Conference. I found myself wishing after the third day that something would happen to save me from having to sit through the rest of the week and enduring as I did so the interminable droning of another two dozen pathologically pedantic self-styled UFO experts, parapsychologists, krypto-parapychologists, xenobiologists like myself, futurologists, conspiracy theorists, and – of course – out-and-out cultists. If only, I remember thinking, I could develop a case of dysentery, dengue fever or turkey flu that would allow me to stay in my hotel room. Or perhaps there could be some kind of natural disaster that would necessitate the premature termination of the conference. At the time, 8:32 PM on October 26th 2016, I could have had no way of knowing just how frighteningly prophetic this thought would turn out to be.
The last two days of the conference passed without event – although involving astronomical levels of boredom on my part just as I had anticipated – and then on the Saturday morning we all woke up to discover that we were in the middle of a tremendous blizzard which had, so far, produced drifts of up to ten feet deep in places. According to the local radio station it was set to continue throughout the weekend which meant that we were all effectively snowed in. It was clear to everyone that no one was going anywhere even if the conference was technically over. I say ‘technically’ because it should be obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about UFOlogists that when you have 230 odd (and I use the word ‘odd’ advisedly) individuals belonging to this most singular breed trapped in a hotel everybody involved is going to carry on discussing UFOlogy just as intensely and just as obsessively as ever – conference or no conference. Arguing more than discussing to be perfectly honest, since my esteemed colleagues are unfortunately very well known for taking their own opinions far more seriously than is good for them, or is actually justified by the evidence available, for that matter, and getting as a result very hot under the collar if a fellow UFOlogist saw fit to interpret their data in a different way, or – God forbid – to dismiss it entirely.
If you really want to rile a delegate at a UFO conference just try questioning their data. Or – even better – try challenging their pet theory about what that data means. A lot of these guys are, in my opinion, major obsessives. Some of them are frankly delusional as well, into the bargain – which doesn’t exactly help matters, as I’m sure you can appreciate. A psychiatrist would have had a field day in this place, I guarantee you. What am I saying? A psychiatrist? We would have needed a coach-load of them. And a few lorry-loads of the strongest antipsychotic medication on the market. The really powerful stuff – the stuff they only use for the real hardcore cases. Anyway, as I was saying, without a very large helicopter, none of us were going anywhere in a hurry and so we all just settled down and got on with it, for the most part with a degree of stoical acceptance that I found quite commendable.
The first few days went smoothly enough – bar a few fist-fights amongst the parapsychologists – and then the first sign of what was about to unfold made its appearance. One of the hotel staff, a maid by the name of Dolores, appeared in the lobby in an obvious state of hysteria. A few parapsychologists were attempting, in typically inept fashion, to question her and get to the root of the problem but were clearly getting nowhere. In fact it was apparent to me that they were actually succeeding in making things worse rather than better and upsetting the poor Dolores more than ever and so I took charge of matters myself. It transpired that this lady had knocked on the door of Room 643, had received no answer, and so had entered the room to make the bed and tidy up and so on, as was her usual practise in this type of situation. What she had subsequently seen had upset the balance of the poor woman’s mind to the extent that she was no longer able to express herself in anything even remotely approaching a logical fashion. As she was stripping the linen off the bed – Dolores explained to me between sobs – she had heard a peculiar rustling noise coming from the wardrobe. Thinking that the guest in room 643 might have been taken suddenly ill and fallen into the wardrobe whilst reaching for a shirt (which apparently had happened before) she ran over and threw open the wardrobe door, only to see something which resembled nothing so much as a giant blue maggot with hundreds of gossamer threads being extruded from one end. The creature was busy weaving these threads into a shiny silvery case which it was in the process of encapsulating itself within.
Before the horrified Dolores could gather her thoughts the giant blue maggot shot out a thick sticky cord of silver fibres and snared her deftly around the waist. Having thus secured her, it proceeded to draw her slowly in towards it, with inexorable force. All of a sudden, Dolores told me, her wits returned to her and she realized that if she didn’t act very quickly she was done for. Reaching down to the leather holster which she had strapped around her calf, she drew a six inch double-edged serrated diving knife which she kept there and stabbed her attacker a number of times. When it relaxed its grip on her she severed the cord with which it had snared her and made a run for it. At this point in the narrative I of course expressed incredulity that she would have conveniently had so formidable a blade so closely at hand – a blade which she surely wouldn’t have needed in the execution of her day-to-day duties as a hotel chambermaid. Dolores assured me however that this was quite normal for maids working in this particular hotel – some girls carried cans of mace, some anti-rape alarms, some had brass knuckles, some knives like the one she was wearing and some even had illegal black-market tasers. Apparently there had been one or two incidents in the past involving male guests and it was now the custom for the girls to take precautionary measures against being molested. In this case such prudent precautions had undoubtedly saved Dolores’ life.
As soon as I had succeeded in getting this remarkable story out of the poor distraught chambermaid I and a number of the younger, more agile delegates made all haste to the scene of the incident, only to discover that the wardrobe was now empty. All we could find to show that Delores hadn’t in fact been imagining the whole thing was a sticky puddle of a pale straw-coloured, unpleasant-smelling fluid on the bottom of the wardrobe, amongst a number of what I felt to be rather garish-looking shirts that had been dislodged from their hangers. After taking several samples of the fluid, and thoroughly checking the room, we returned to Conference Room B in the Roosevelt Suite where most of the delegates (the ones who weren’t still in bed) were gathered and broke the news.
The effect on the assembled UFOlogists as you might imagine was as if someone had just let off a bomb – the room exploded into an unbearable hubbub of feverishly excitable voices, each voice trying to shout down the other. Here we all were, it occurred to me, each one of us supposedly an expert in the field of UFO’s and alien life forms, and all we could do in the face of an actual genuine real life encounter was to argue frenziedly with each other like a pack of hysterical and utterly ineffectual lunatics. To say that I was profoundly disgusted by our collective response to this challenge to our professionalism would have been the most masterful of understatements. And this incident was to prove to be only the beginning. It was merely the foretaste – the appetizer one might say – of what was yet to come.
I keep having bad thoughts about people. I don’t know why. Some fella walks by and I kind of sneer inwardly. “Arsehole!” I think to myself. Or I pass by some woman in the aisle in Tesco and think “What’s wrong with you, bitch?” It gets worse. Even little kids, playing away innocently, or doing whatever it is that they do, cause me to experience feeling of intense dislike. Its not like they’re doing me any harm or anything, but I can’t help thinking to myself what they’ll be like when they grow up and this thought immediately sickens me. They’ll probably grow up to be solicitors and accountants and PR men and pharmacists and sales reps I think and then my heart becomes full of darkness and I find it impossible to take any pleasure in their innocence.
Teenagers really get to me. I really have to struggle to control myself when I see teenagers so that it doesn’t show on my face how much I hate and despise them. Useless arrogant self-obsessed little fuckers. They should be ethnically cleansed. What really gets me is that they obviously feel think that they’re so fucking smart. Smug little bastards that they are. When it is also very obvious indeed to anyone who isn’t a teenager themselves that they are actually brain-dead retards without an original thought in their heads. A bunch of pathetic tools. Everything about them is dictated by the fashion industry, the music industry, the mobile phone industry, the social media industry, the ‘lets exploit teenagers industry’.
They’re dumb but they don’t know it and that’s what annoys me so much about them. Mind you, that’s true about the whole human race, and that is why people in general irritate the hell out of me. Overhearing conversations is something that has recently become particularly unbearable for me. Some woman would be sitting close by in the coffee shop and she’d start talking to her friend. The moment she opens her mouth I start cringing – everything she says is so painfully redundant that I can’t understand why she bothers to say it. And yet say it she does. Not only does she say it, she delights in saying it. She can’t contain herself. On and on and on until I feel like getting up and leaving without finishing my coffee.
And there is this self-satisfied tone in her voice, as if she’s coming out with veritable gems of wisdom. It’s enough to make me scream – the sheer bloody torture of it. People always have this habit of saying “If God exists then why does he allow such terrible things to happen?” Then they look smug, as if they had just said something both original and terribly profound. I think to myself, “If God exists why does he allow you to carry on existing?”
I often wonder why God doesn’t just annihilate the whole human race. Has He no self-respect? Or am I wrong to think this way?
Sporullax was a world populated entirely by insects and I knew right from the beginning that if I stayed there long enough I would end up becoming an insect too. If not something worse – by which I mean something even less human. I will explain why I am making this rather dramatic statement shortly. After they found me – which didn’t take them long – I was of course taken into custody and subjected to both intense scrutiny and endless questioning. I must say that I was on the whole treated rather well but found the insectoids to have a distinctly cold manner. Perhaps that is because I cannot read insect emotions – if indeed there even is such a thing.
Naturally enough, since I was the only non-insect on the planet, they wanted to know everything about me. This however was a bit of a problem given the extreme anatomical divergence between myself as a terrestrial mammal and the alien insectoid race that was holding me in custody. For a start, they communicated to each other with chirping noises that they produced by rubbing a pair of specially adapted back legs together. Later on I learned that their ears were located on their legs too – but not the same legs that they used for speaking, needless to say, or else they would have deafened themselves every time they tried to say something. The problem in communication was solved via the insectoid race’s highly advanced technology. This technology was so highly advanced that it didn’t actually look like technology at all – at least, not to my eyes. To my eyes it simply looked like a pile of dung. The translation device consisted of half a dozen dull grey globules, each about the size of a grapefruit, heaped up in a mound on a metal plate that had been placed on the table between myself and the chief interrogator. These globules didn’t do a thing, other than simply lie there looking for all the world like so much poop. They had a curious look to them – they were almost furry but not quite. Perhaps velvety would be a better word, but I resisted the urge to stretch out a finger and touch them.
Despite their decidedly non-technical look these grey, poop-like globules soon got to work and overcame the immense communication barrier that lay between me on the one side of the table, and the tall dark-blue many-limbed representative of the insect planet on the other. The way this advanced technology worked was – and obviously I didn’t find out these details till later – by slowly releasing a rather unpleasant-smelling gas of organic origin and complex composition that had the property of inducing hallucinogenic, out-of-body experiences in anyone who happened to be close enough to breath it in. But this was no ordinary hallucinogenic, out-of-body experience where you simply waft off into some altered state of consciousness, seeing hundreds of complexly interlocking faces of elves and fairies or angels or whatever else in the duvet and floating up above your bed to look down on your own inert body. This wasn’t like that at all – under the influence of this very specific gas the subject was placed immediately into a rather standardized consensus hallucination. A consensus hallucination is of course a hallucination that one or more people can share, a bit like a multiplayer real-time virtual world on the internet, only a lot more immersive. If you are a gamer you know what I mean.
In this consensus hallucination the insect interrogator and I sat in comfortable and expensive-looking leather armchairs arranged around a low coffee table in some sort of spacious and well-appointed club or bar. Two tall glasses of bright mauve liquid with multicoloured straws poking gaily out of them stood on the table between us, whilst all around us, on identical leather armchairs sat these fantastically heavily wrinkled, massive bodied, immensely solemn-looking creatures which reminded me of nothing so much as rather over-weight bull elephant seals sitting up-right. Their faces too were full of deep wrinkles, and they bore expressions of great gravity and dignity. These very singular-looking creatures appeared as far as I could make out to be playing cards and smoking cigars. I turned to face my interrogator who was now completely unrecognizable – he now had the appearance of a shiny pink seal whose skin was stretched rather tighter than it ought to be. The over-all impression, curiously enough, was of one of those dreadfully cheap and garish brightly-coloured imitation-leather handbags that you can see in the handbag section of any high street clothes store. Looking down at my knees, I realized that I too was a pink and shiny seal-creature with more than just a passing resemblance to a cheap and nasty handbag. I scratched my nose with a pink shiny flipper, doing my best to adapt myself to what had just happened without very much success.
Somewhere someone was playing the piano, only it had a curiously wet, slushy, gushy, gloopy sound to it. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the notes were spilling out from the piano as a liquid and washing around the floor like the tide coming in at the beach. I dismissed this odd feeling as simple synesthesia and didn’t worry any more about it – I had more important things to focus on. All around me the card players played on, smoking their cigars and taking no notice of us at all. The insect interrogator who was now a luridly pink seal simply stared at me, apparently waiting for me to say something. I cleared my throat a few times and tried a few words, which came out amazingly in a language I had never heard before. It turned out that in this consensus hallucination both the interrogator and I spoke the same language, but it was a synthetic language, put together specifically to serve as a bridge between our two very different cultures. I explained to the interrogator in this bridging language that my ether-drive had started to fail, forcing me to crash-land on the nearest habitable planet. I told him that I was hoping to obtain some sort of technical assistance, so that I could fix the drive and continue on my way. The interrogator nodded gravely and said that he felt that this could indeed be possible, given the fact that the insectoids were a very technologically advanced race, but that first I had to be assessed thoroughly to make sure that I did not constitute any sort of a risk to his world. When he was satisfied on this account I would then be allowed to travel freely around the insect planet and seek whatever help I needed.
The questioning started so gently that I hardly noticed. It was more like being interviewed by a biographer than being questioned by a state official – not at all what I expected. The interrogation started off with questions about my earliest memories, and what I remembered about my childhood, and then moved on to my teenage years and secondary school. I didn’t mind answering, although I could really see the point to going into such detail. I found myself not wanting to talk very much about my years spent in secondary school. I explained that my school experiences were almost entirely negative and that I had no good memories of this period at all. I remembered that I had a dislike for my headmaster, although I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything specific that he had ever done to earn this dislike, which seemed as strong now as it had been thirty years ago. The interrogator noted my comments gravely, but would not let the matter drop. He wanted to know what subjects I had studied and which ones I enjoyed the most. Which subjects I was good at and which ones I had difficulty with. He asked me about friendships I had formed at this time, how I got on with my peers, and whether I had ever had any experiences of being bullied. What I used to do in my spare time, what interests I had, what my relationship with my parents was like at this time. What books I used to read.
As I say, I was impressed by the interrogator’s thoroughness. These insectoids weren’t sloppy – they certainly didn’t believe in cutting corners. But after an hour or so I was starting to think that perhaps they were a bit too thorough. Surely they didn’t need to know quite so much about me in order to ascertain whether or not I was a threat to the insect world. My attention started to stray. I kept wondering about the great, grey wrinkly creatures, the ones that sat all around us at the other tables. I couldn’t understand what they had to do with the translation process. I also noticed that there were numerous small dark shadows which kept flitting rapidly in and out of the deep folds of their grey flesh. Where they parasites or symbiotes, I wondered? When I asked the interrogator about this phenomenon he paused for a long time, as if trying to work out how best to answer me. Eventually he spoke. “These creatures are criminals”, he replied, “or at least you might say that they are potential criminals. The small fast-moving entities that you see crawling over them are police. In this world police are very small and they swarm over everything like lice. Their function here is to monitor the grey creatures closely and detect signs of criminal activity before it goes too far, before it advances too much and starts to disrupt the strict protocols of our world. At the same time, however, these creatures are also extremely valuable and important to us, in ways that you might later come to understand”.
This made no sense to me at all but since he plainly wanted to get back to his job in questioning me I didn’t pursue the matter any further. We resumed the pattern of gentle interrogation with which I had at this stage become familiar with. A number of details were starting to strike me as odd about this process. The first detail was the interrogator’s eyes. Although he was otherwise entirely expressionless, his eyes seemed to positively glow as he listened to me. There was something very warm, very accepting about these eyes. In addition, I realized that I found them remarkably beautiful – they were full of little flecks of various subtle hues and as I tried to focus on these coloured flecks I had the peculiar sensation of falling. I was falling inwards, somehow, and after a moment of this I felt compelled to pull myself out of it, and come back to myself. The sensation was extraordinarily pleasant, but at the same time it greatly disorientated me. When this happened I forgot where I was and what was supposed to be happening – not that I really knew the answers to these questions anyway. As a result of focussing on the interrogator’s eyes I completely lost my bearings and in some strange way the general craziness of my situation receded further and further into the background. It seemed very peculiar to me that I no longer found what was happening strange. The other curious thing that I noticed was that I was starting to lose track of time – I had no reliable sense of whether I had been sitting there at the table for minutes, hours, or even days. If anything, I had the distinct feeling that I was moving sideways in time, if that was at all possible.
In an attempt to counteract this growing sense of disorientation I made a deliberate attempt to focus my vision on the great grey creatures that were sitting at the other tables. After a while I started to notice something that I hadn’t picked up on before. Every now and again one of the creatures would get up slowly out of its leather armchair and ponderously make its way to another table. I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen this happening before. And then I noticed something else. I noticed that when one of the creatures vacated a chair it left something behind – it left behind a number of the large grey velvety globules or balls that I had earlier thought looked like dung. Bent-over monkey figures with sad human faces carrying wicker baskets on their backs then rushed up and collected these grey velvety balls, filling their baskets and then scampering off again, looking for all the world like ball-boys at a tennis match. I could not for the life of me work out how I could have missed all this going on. And then, as I continued to watch, I became aware that the big wrinkly creatures weren’t playing cards at all but eating what looked like over-ripe fruit, the juice of which was dribbling down their chins. A smell that was mid-way between very ripe pineapple and fresh paint filled the air.
Another thing that had also changed was the music – the slushy piano had been replaced by the somewhat tinny twanging of banjos, alternatively fading out and then slowly building up again amidst the omnipresent ambient background sound of distant crashing surf. I wasn’t sure if I liked this effect any more than I had done the underwater piano, but it was certainly different. As I watched, the big grey figures continued – in a slow and dignified fashion – to eat the fruit, which was piled up on the tables between them.
I turned my attention instead onto the being opposite me. I was starting to figure out that the more I looked at something the more the details changed and I wanted to test this theory. Sure enough, as I gazed at the interrogator, making sure to avoid looking into his eyes, I became aware that his body no longer looked like that of a seal. It looked more like the body of a shiny pink penguin now, only it was really only the rudimentary outline of a penguin, just as if the artist who had been in the process of sketching it had got fed up half-way through doing it, and could not be bothered finishing it properly. There was a great deal of shiny plastic-looking surface area with no real details anywhere, apart from the eyes, which looked at me gravely and compellingly.
“Don’t look too long at any particular portion of our virtual environment,” the interrogator advised me in a disconcertingly squeaky voice, “the continuity starts to fail and the overall effect is not a pleasant one. In addition to the perceptual problems and paradoxes that creep in, it detracts from the matter at hand…”
I apologized and promised not to try it again. Instead, I allowed myself to remain focused on his gaze, without looking too deeply into it. We moved on then to my time at university, and what the interrogator referred to as my ‘experiments’ with mind-altering drugs. I didn’t think that it was quite right to speak of my use of drugs as an ‘experiment’ but assumed that he was just trying to be polite, and avoid thereby the inference that I was an out-and-out degenerate, lacking in self-control and any sense of caution or responsibility.
I quickly relaxed back into the process, and as I did so I again began to lose the ability to orientate myself within a linear time-frame. I decided to surrender myself to this odd effect and not worry about it – I didn’t after all have much choice in the matter. Surrendering to the interrogation process was no great hardship – usually answering question after question is a gruelling, or at the very least tedious, business but somehow this was different. I noticed that long-forgotten memories came to life under the gentle probing of the bizarre fluorescent badly-imagined penguin-like figure sitting in front of me. Incidents and scenes that I hadn’t thought of for decades came into my head as vividly as if they had only happened yesterday. I remembered things in that session I didn’t even know had ever happened to me. Some of these memories invoked very painful emotions it is true, but I had no resistance to them all the same, whereas under normal circumstances I am sure I would have done. Obviously I did have resistance to allowing them into consciousness – otherwise why would I have forgotten them so thoroughly? Instead, as I recalled all these lost events, these lost incidents from my life, I experienced a profoundly deep sense of peace, even though the feeling of sorrow associated with them was often so intense that it brought tears to my eyes. I found this sense of peace strange. It seemed so natural, it rested so naturally and easily with me – as the company of an old and dear friend is natural and easy – and yet at the same time it was entirely unfamiliar to me. This feeling of peace was a stranger to me.
I can’t say how long this recapitulation process went on. As I say, my ability to estimate the passage of time had slipped away from me. Something however – some inbuilt instinct for self-preservation – kicked in at some point and I started to recognize that my whole state of mind, my whole sense of myself, had entirely altered. On the one hand it felt very natural, but on the other hand as I have explained it was also frighteningly unfamiliar, frighteningly strange. It was strange when I paid attention to what was going on, and tried to bring back some kind of normal perspective onto what was happening to me. I struggled to come back to myself – I knew I was missing some vital sense of myself but I couldn’t work out what it was. Then I realized – it was my memory of myself that was missing, my memory of who I was.
Everything became very clear, very quickly at that point and I knew exactly what was going on – my memories were being very thoroughly removed from me, leaving behind nothing at all. How this was happening was obvious – the moment I recounted my memories to the interrogator they ceased to belong to me. They were no longer mine; they had been taken away from me. The interrogation process that I been willingly submitting myself to was systematically stripping me of my memories, and quite possibly my personality as well. It was erasing my history – cleanly and with absolute efficiency.
I couldn’t tell how much of me had already been erased. An awful lot of it, maybe almost all. I now had a sort of an intuition – although maybe it was no more than a panicky fear – that I had been sitting here for something of the order of ten or twelve hours. Maybe even more. For a minute or two I was too choked up with horror to speak, and then my voice came back to me in a rush – ridiculously hoarse and weak and tremulous. “You’ve tricked me,” I choked out, “You’ve wiped out all my memory…”
The ridiculous pink plastic penguin-thing facing me across the coffee table remained as calm as ever – as far as I knew it was incapable of not being calm. It slowly shook its head, “Of course I am removing your memories. What else did you think this was about? How else can we be sure that you will not be a threat to our world?” I could not answer, I was shaking all over, quivering, whether in fear or in anger I could not tell. After leaving me a while to recover my composure, the alien interrogator spoke again, “As soon as this process is completed then you will be free to come and go as you please. You will in fact be truly free for the first time in your life…”
“You are talking nonsense,” I replied curtly, my presence of mind slowly starting to come back to me now after that terrible initial period of shock. “How can I possibly be free to complete my mission if I can’t remember who I am? Do you really expect me to believe that?” The figure in front of me shrugged its narrow penguin shoulders. “That is up to you. That is a chance you must take. If on the other hand you refuse to continue with the interrogation then you will remain in the holding facility, unable to leave and being subject to regular monitoring by the police-lice like the unfortunate creatures you see all around us. They have refused to surrender their memories to the purification process and as a result they constitute a permanent threat to us. That is why they sit here as they do, amusing themselves as best they can.”
I sat there, digesting this latest bit of information. This certainly put a new complexion on things, but I wasn’t just going to give up like these poor creatures obviously had done. Without giving any warning, I jumped up and lunged across the coffee table at my adversary, doing my best to seize him around the throat with my flippers. Unfortunately this didn’t work very well as I couldn’t manage to get a grip. I then had a brainwave and – instead of trying to strangle the interrogator – I aimed a savage kick at the table, which went flying.
Grey figures turned slowly around in their chairs to look at me, expressionless. Everything seemed in slow motion. The table was in the air, just hanging there. To my amazement I realized that I was feeling great waves of compassion washing over me, wave after wave of compassion from these solemn grey spectators. I wondered what this meant. What did they know that I didn’t?
And then the table came down with a clatter and I was back in the original interrogation floor where I had obviously succeeded in kicking the real table over, the table that had been loaded up with the big smelly grey dung-balls, which were now rolling off in all directions. All around me insect eyes swivelled in my direction and the sound of urgent chirping filled the air. I had escaped one trap only to find myself in another. What was I to do now?
The chief interrogator was hurt. The table – which in the real (insect) world was considerably bigger and heavier than the coffee tables had been in the consensual hallucination world – had come down on the distal segment of one of his rear legs and a pale, straw-coloured fluid oozed out on the floor between us from the injury. These creatures weren’t so damn invulnerable after all I realized, taking heart at this thought. And as for their so-called ‘advanced technology’ – it had turned out to be no more than shit. Literally.
I sensed that I had the advantage in some way – I just had to figure out how to use it. And quickly. Before the uneasy stalemate broke and the initiative passed instead to the insectoids. Possibly the answer lay in sudden dramatic action – these creatures obviously had a slow metabolism, whereas I, being a mammal, could muster up a lot of energy for in a short burst of frenzied activity. Perhaps I could surprise them by going into berserker mode.
And then, before I could get any further with this line of tactical thinking, four doors burst open, one in each corner of the room, and four streams of heavily-built, bluey-green beetle-like creatures – each about four foot in height – filed into the interrogation space. The beetles were walking erect, antennae waving, each clasping to its chest a ball of the grey velvety dung material. And then, as if on an unseen signal, they all started to simultaneously pelt me with the dung-balls, which rained down upon me from all directions. It was all over. I hadn’t been quick enough; the advantage has passed to the alien insectoids and they – with characteristic efficiency and effectiveness – had made their move.
I tried to hold my breath for as long as I could but it was useless. I was now surrounded by what looked like hundreds of the grey dung balls, and they were all releasing the hallucinogenic gas into the air around me. With the very last of my strength I rushed at the insect interrogator and seized the tall, spindly creature with a vice-like grip around its throat, “Tell your beetle buddies to back off “ I roared, glaring at close quarters into its expressionless insect face, “or I’m gonna rip your goddamn head clean off your body…”
He looked back at me calmly and I was surprised to see pity in his eyes. “Don’t you understand?” it asked, morphing this time into a white, gnome-like figure with incredibly ancient-looking eyes, “the insect world exists only in your mind. It isn’t real – it is a psychotic hallucination that you are trapped in. The so-called interrogation process was an attempt to free you from that hallucination. Its purpose was to free you from the false self system, the maze of deluded thinking that is keeping you prisoner…”
I let go of the gnome and collapsed in a heap on the floor. I had no more strength left in my body. As far as I could see, I had turned into some sort of hairless, wrinkly little goblin, all crumpled up and pathetic-looking and quivering with impotent range. We were back in the bar, but now all the big grey elephant-seal creatures were gone. There was still music playing, but this time there was something different about it. This time there was a bit more to it – I fancied – than the banal and frankly contrived ambient stuff that had been playing before. Slightly out-of-focus electric guitars wailed and howled in complex counterpoint to each other, the sound interwoven with the swirling strains of some unearthly synthesizer. The distant crash of surf was back again, only this time it was augmented with what I took to be the electronically synthesized cries of seagulls. And behind everything was the beat – that steady, driving heart-beat. It took me far too long to recognize why that regular pulsing beat affected me so much. It was the beat of the Star Drive.
I was suddenly struck by the most unbearable pang of pure sadness. Tears ran down my face. The gnome was watching me and as I registered its gaze I felt again those waves of compassion washing over me. I don’t know how long I sat there on the floor, all crumpled up, my face wet with tears.
Finally the gnome spoke. “When you have been disentangled from the false self system,” it said, “then you will free to continue your journey.” This still made no sense to me. “But what about the broken star drive module?” I asked him, shocked at the sound of my own ridiculously reedy little voice. “Who is going to fix the ether-drive if I forget about my mission?” The gnome-figure shook its head, “The star drive is not broken. That is not where the problem lies – the problem is with the false self system. The problem is that you are trapped in a false viral identity which is obsessed with the idea of fixing the star drive.”
“Your continual misguided attempt to fix the star drive is the real problem. Your attempt to correct the glitch is itself the glitch. Once you are free from the viral memories and beliefs of the false self system then you will discover that there never was any problem with the star ship. The ether-drive functions perfectly, as always. It cannot go wrong. It is incapable of malfunctioning.”
What this timeless gnome-being was saying to me remained as incomprehensible as ever. He made no sense to me at all. And yet – at the same time – it did seem to make a type of sense, on some level that just I couldn’t figure out. The gnome held my gaze for a moment, and then spoke again. “Your capacity to perceive reality is extraordinarily limited” it told me, “It is almost non-existent, but not quite. And the tiny portion that is still working is seeing everything upside down. This is why you are so confused. There is no insect planet. There are no insectoids. They all belong to the false self system – they were manufactured in a last-ditch attempt by that construct to save itself.”
“The insects are only in your brain. Or rather you are the insect, all rigid and impervious and incapable of feeling any genuine emotion. The hard shells of the insectoids – as you call them – represent your own brittle personality. Their mechanical exoskeleton represents your own heavily-defended and virtually humourless personality structure, which has gone viral and taken over your life. In reality you are the stunted little creature you now perceive yourself to be. This is your true form – although in time you will have the possibility of growing less contorted, less corrupt, less addicted to fear-driven delusional systems of belief”.
I sat still then, unable or unwilling to take all of this in. I had gone blank. For a moment or two I felt as if I was involved in some sort of tremendous inner struggle, and then everything suddenly came clear. I knew what I had to do. It was time for me to play my final card.
I still had one weapon left to me that the gnome didn’t know about, couldn’t know about. One last card. And it was a trump. In my head – my real, human head, that is – was a biochip that contained a special long-range relay device, which in extreme circumstances I could activate. This relay was designed to perform two simultaneous functions – it would relay 6000 terawatts of power from the ship’s core, destroying everything within a 2 km radius, and it would upload my personality and memories (what remained of them) back to the ship’s computer where they would be safely stored on the hard-drive. In order to activate this function I had to interface with the bio, which could only be done by visualizing a long and complex sequence of geometrical shapes. This coded sequence would in all probability be one of the very last of my memories to go since it had been written into the physical structure of my brain many thousands of times using a neurological pen. It was the ultimate fail-safe.
I was awake in the dream. “Wow!” I thought to myself, “I’m awake in the dream!” I was thrilled by the idea of it, I just couldn’t take it in: I was dreaming but I knew that I was dreaming. I was consciously dreaming. “This is fantastic,” I thought, “I’m consciously dreaming.” There was a tremendous feeling of freedom, of liberation in this. I felt much lighter in myself, less awkward and ungainly. My touch was lighter – I hardly made contact with the floor as I walked. My senses were heightened too – a whole world of hitherto unnoticed sensory stimuli lay around me, rich and inviting. “This is great,” I said to myself, “I’m awake in the dream.” I was delighted, I was over the moon. I couldn’t get over it. I was on a high. “What a great buzz”, I said to myself, over and over again, and “How fantastic is this?” The possibilities were endless. I remembered everything I had ever read about lucid dreaming and I also remembered all my completely fruitless attempts over the last twenty years to achieve lucidity in the dreaming state. Like trying to remember to look at the palms of my hand during the course of a normal, unconscious dream, which is something that I had read about in one of Carlos Castaneda’s books. And now I had actually succeeded – I was awake in the dream! I had achieved lucidity. I felt so great. I felt wildly excited. I felt elated beyond measure. And then after a while it somehow dawned on me that I wasn’t awake in the dream after all. I had been mistaken. I realized to my great chagrin then that I was just a bit of a silly old dick-head really. A bit of a plonker. A bit of a tosser. I was actually a total and utter knob-head! I wasn’t awake in the dream at all – I was just dreaming that I was…
I took it all in. The general air of decay and dilapidation. The boarded up shop-fronts. The bus shelters smelling of urine and covered with obscene graffiti. The discarded cans of Tennents Extra littering the pavements. The hard and incurious faces of the women on their way back from the shopping mall. Talking away, pushing buggies with ignored-looking toddlers strapped inside. I took in the nuance and tone of their voices which was sharp and overpoweringly judgemental as they swapped stories of who had done what, and with who.
Looking down a side-street I noticed some activity. A group of people in tee-shirts with very short hair-cuts. My interest was immediately kindled – was this some new youth cult? I switched on my Dictaphone and checked the mike concealed under the lapel of my jacket. As I walked down the side-street towards them I tried to read the subtle semiotics encoded in their appearance. What was their socio-economic background? Were they political? Quasi-political? Crypto-political?
As I got closer I could make out what their activity was centred on. They were taking it in turns to batter something, kicking it with their boots and striking it with lengths of steel piping. It was made of metal and glass with plastic wiring strewn around it. A telephone box? What was the significance of their behaviour I wondered. Was it some form of status frustration? I made a few observations under my breath for the mike. When I got closer it became apparent that they were all surprisingly old. Most were obviously middle-aged and others were even older. Past retirement age probably.
“Alright fellas” I said.
“Whad’ya want, spunk-breath?” answered one of them, squaring up with me and staring me right in the eyes. There was no escaping the aggression.
The rest of the group sniggered and chortled at this jibe.
“I’d just like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.” I kept the tone of my voice even, unflustered.
“What sort of fucking questions?” the same bloke was talking. Probably the leader, I thought. He was tall and thin with a gaunt, shrewd face. Grey stubble and yellow teeth.
“Sort of a survey,” I explained. “I’m an independent researcher.”
The response was unequivocal. “Fuck off” the gaunt guy sneered. He turned his back on me and resumed kicking at the tangle of metal and plastic on the ground. The others slowly followed suit, some laughing, some swearing.
No sense in pushing it, I thought to myself as I left them at it. Even a limited response such as this meant something.
Spirits came to live in me. The bad sort, that is. The very bad sort. Bad spirits. Malignant spirits. Evil spirits. They came to take up residence, like a crowd of burnt-out old crack-heads gathering together in a disused house. With the roof falling in and the smell of piss everywhere. They talk to each other but what they say doesn’t make sense. They are deteriorated – like wet-brain alcoholics who can no longer put words together. They want to talk – out of pure habit, out of pure reflex – but they can’t do it. And even if they could do it they no longer have anything to say…
They are full of malice, these evil spirits. Full up to the brim with malice. Full with seething, bubbling, pointless, malice – malice about nothing in particular. Like their speech, their malice is misdirected and incoherent. They don’t have any choice in the matter. That’s just the way they are – they are deteriorated. They carry on in their deteriorated way all the time. That’s what they do. That’s all they can do. They can’t sink any lower; they are the lowest of the low. They are just vehicles for malice; they are just conduits for pure, sheer, unadulterated, corrosive evil…
And they want me to become one of them! They keep inviting me to become one of them. To join the party. Become one of the gang. Part of me actually wants to. Part of me likes the idea! Part of me is excited by the idea – that’s the part that has already been taken over by the motley rabble of evil spirits that live inside me. The part that has been contaminated. Contaminated by their filthy presence within me…
Who am I kidding? It’s not part of me, it’s most of me. And soon it’s going to be all of me. I’m going to join that party, the party that’s going on in my head. It’s a forgone conclusion – I don’t have the strength to resist. Soon, I’m going to be partying – partying with the deteriorated personality-husks that have taken up their unclean residence in me. Soon, there’s going to be no difference between me and them….
I wish I could learn to like people again but I can’t. That capacity has now gone from me; that aspect of my personality – the ‘liking’ aspect’ – has been lost to me. Permanently, as far as I can tell. It’s as if it had been surgically removed. Now, when I see people I am struck by how weirdly mechanical they are. Like so many insects. Chittering to each other. Preening themselves incessantly. Masticating their food. Jabbering away to each other like morons. Waving their antennae. Doing the inane mechanical things they like to do – like so many ridiculous, preposterously self-important androids. People leave me cold – they leave me profoundly emotionally disengaged. They are mere ‘things’ to me. They are worse than things…
I don’t even find them interesting any more, to be honest. More than this, I confess to finding people actually repellent. I find myself experiencing overpowering feelings of distaste, repugnance and disgust. People nauseate me, they sicken and revolt me. I have to struggle to make sure that the intense revulsion I feel doesn’t show itself on my face. I feel sometimes as if I am on the point of throwing up, and occasionally I even have to turn away and make the effort to swallow the vomit back down again.
This makes my job very difficult as I have to deal with the public every day. I have to attempt to be sympathetic to people when I secretly loathe everything about them. I have to listen to their pathetic problems all day long when the truth is that I couldn’t care less whether they live or die…
So how did this terrible thing happen to me, you may wonder. How did I become so incapable of even the most basic kind of empathy? What brought about this most unfortunate change in my personality? What went wrong? Was it the result of some kind of trauma or bad experience? Was it an accident? Was I the victim of a particularly vicious assault? Am I a victim of bullying? Is it perhaps the case that I have developed some rare form of late-onset sociopathic personality disorder?
The answer is a lot simpler than that. My problems with liking people first began when I started working for the Department of Social Protection as a Community Welfare Officer …
I’ve just bought a brand new personality robot, the very latest thing. It’s pretty much like any personality robot though when you get right down to it – very mechanical, very limited, very set in its ways… It’s appallingly dull and ludicrously inflexible and -as a consequence – it’s absolutely guaranteed never to surprise. It’s a damn good buy, in other words! It’s just what the doctor ordered! You should run off and get yourself one straightaway – if you haven’t already done so, that is…
Allow me to introduce myself – I am undifferentiated consciousness. For one mad moment I was going to say, allow me to introduce myself, I am Mr Undifferentiated Consciousness and I live in such-and-such a house in such-and-such a street. I live in such-and-such a town, in such-and-such a country. My hobbies are travel, bird-watching and hill-walking. I am a Methodist, a Lutheran, a Baptist, an Evangelist, a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a Jehovah’s Witness. I am a Seventh Day Adventist. What appalling madness! What filth! Even saying it makes me squirm inside – even the idea of such labels seems to me vile, unclean, a defilement, a sordid and repulsive contamination…
And it is also funny – I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s such a pile of bullshit. Q – What do you call someone who takes bullshit seriously? Someone who is heavily invested in taking ludicrous bullshit very seriously indeed? A – You call him Mr Differentiated Consciousness. You call him Mr Ego Robot. You call Joe Normal. You call him Peter Persona. You call him Mr Prim and Proper. You call him The Mask. You call him all kind of things like that…
I’m sorry, I’m going on too much. Maybe that isn’t so funny for you. Maybe it’s a private joke. Maybe you have to be undifferentiated consciousness to get it! That’s a joke itself, you see. A joke within a joke, and possibly neither of them very funny.
Anyway, that’s enough of that. As I say, I’ve just bought a new personality robot. They’re all the rage, you know. Everybody has one. I am reliably told that many people would never be seen in public without one. Especially if you happen to be someone of standing, someone of importance. To be spotted without your ego robot would be a positive scandal. “Oh my God,” people would say, “Did you hear? He (or she) wasn’t wearing his (or her) personality robot! Can you believe it?”
Of course it’s true that these robot personality suits are very uncomfortable and they have an entirely detrimental effect upon one’s sense of humour. But all the same – one has to have one. What would happen to the world if we all ran around the place entirely undifferentiated, as undifferentiated as the day that we were born? How irresponsible is that? Who would be there to take the bullshit seriously if everyone did that? Some people seem to think that bullshit takes care of itself!
That’s enough of that. I’m sure you’re getting heartily sick of my silly prattle at this stage. I’ll stop now. Excuse me while I slip into something uncomfortable. Excuse me while I just get into this fine robot personality that I’ve just bought. I know it’s a rather unpleasant (if not to say downright sordid) business, as we’ve just said, but it’s the responsible thing to do. it’s incumbent on us. It just ‘has to be done’, as they day…
