NOETIC VACATIONS

by Owen R. Powell

The jungle writhed slowly, fitfully alive, feverishly incarnate; a single bio-organism that moved and pulsed in a myriad of flutterings and subtle vocalizations. Avian calls sounded from the green depths, and ever around and beneath him were the quiet chitterlings of the insects tending to their labors. Vines bulged and creaked from their arborian grasps, another millimeter gained in the eternal living war, their fecund voices low and languid in the humid grasp of the Sacred Mother.

            

Alfred Omega sat in lotus pose within the center of the jungle clearing, his rainbow body shimmering about him in the faintest of neon hues as he floated a few feet above the leaf-strewn floor.  Behind him, a Balinese temple dog, encased in stone, grimaced in eternal, frozen warning to any shadow entities that might approach the temple stairs.  Serenity flowed from Alfred, within the comforting presence of the guardian. His brow creased slightly in quantum meditation, and the hibiscus tree to his side shivered, slowly blossoming, its red flowers tuliping open with collective grace.  Epiphany rippled across the open clearing, golden and clear, and the feel of the fluid bubble was both blood warm and lemonade cool within the conjoined minds of the biomass.  Behind his closed eyes, Alfred smiled internally and pushed the envelope wider, further into the green shadows of the jungle, feeling the cool stone of the temple hidden further within.

            

The sound started low, barely discernible at first, within the muted cacophony of the living forest.  Just as he became aware of it, it curved upwards, stronger, louder, and he could feel the denizens around him gradually quiet at its sudden ascension.  The bassal tone changed, arcing upwards, the feel of it tangible and perceptible, now almost painful,  quickly ascending above the audible range, physically present now, shivering, solely within his mind space. Alfred opened his eyes, extended his legs downward until his feet tingled with the feel of the dry leaves, and marveled at the resonance of the sound beneath and within him. 

            

A single tiny dot flared into being before him, an impossible bright white singularity, and he could hear—no, feel—Reality tearing around it.  The tiny star lurched, quivered and then ballooned into a perfectly spherical arch, its border wreathing into hyperdimensional flames, twisting with impossible hues, scarlet and gold and deep somnambulent purple, and he thought, in a visual flash, of Tibetan Buddhist thankas, wreathing Wrathful deities.  The clear light of the tesseract sphere cleared sharply, and Alfred’s mindscape changed with it, filling instantly and improbably with hyperdimensional music—aethereal tones mixed with a driving beat—an ear-worm born from someone else’s mind. The arch-star swirled with twisting color; an image, moving, elongated and curved across its surface.  Through the distortion, he could make out a scene, like a movie from within, projected onto the eye of the tiny sun.  Black movement flared across it, strobed, and an equally improbable figure leapt from the Orb, his war-cry sharp against the press of the jungle. 

            

It was human, and a man, dressed in 21^st century garb, tumbling roughly onto the jungle floor.  The man was Caucasian, mohawked, his torso clad in black plasteel armor, paired with a tactical kilt.  Vietnam-era jungle boots clad his feet, and a bronze Celtic torc encircled his neck, and by the way he combat-rolled up and off the ground, he was apparently oblivious to the scene in which he just stepped.  Alfred’s consciousness scanned for a second, and then he recognized him with a start, one finger raised, a salutation on his lips, cut short by a sudden epithet from the man’s mouth.

            

“Motherfuckers!” yelled Owen, thrusting one outstretched hand towards the singularity.  A quick glimpse of the hydrogen tattoo on his chi point, and then the noonday sunlight went black as Light erupted from his palm.  P’TANG!  P’TANG! P’TANG!  Nebulae of blue energy burst forth, retinas shrieking against the brilliance, and the Orb shuddered as they crossed its event horizon, blossoming across its curvature.  Alfred could see the man’s psychic visualization playing within his own mindscreen, the mnemonic source of the blasts, and his brain filled with glimpses of Irwin Allen Martians, half remembered from his childhood.

            

Owen cupped his hand around his mouth and bellowed.

“Vee! Vee!  Get your ass outta there!”  Red beams leapt from the singularity as in answer, and he ducked quickly beneath them, as the trees behind him exploded in showers of flaming bark.  “Vee!  Tactical retreat!  Direct fucking order! NOW!”

            

The singularity blazed and buckled again, and a naked woman leapt from it, her black hair streaming behind her as she somersaulted in mid-air, landing in warrior pose.  Her skin was bright red, her lithe dakini body clad only in a gleaming body-necklace of diamonds and skulls, and she held a single long weapon in her outstretched arm—a golden spear, humming, alive with frenetic energy.

            

“Get down.  This is going to be danger close,” she growled, leveling the spear at the star before them, her three eyes grimacing closed.  The three dorjes at the end of the spear spun up, the same penetrating sound as the singularity, while Alfred and Owen turned away instinctively as the heat washed over them.

            

SOUND

            

LIGHT

            

BLAST

            

Sharp silhouette of the shadows behind them, flash-lasered into the trunks of the jungle.  A long burbling stream of golden plasma, and a glimpse of Her as she wielded the spear on her hip, like a belt-fed machine gun.  Alien distort screams from within the singularity, keening wails of something both alive and mechanical being burnt to its soul.  A robotic tentacle, oil-black, so dark that it seemed to be the antithesis of the light upon which it curled, issued from the surface of the portal, writhing, and something began to emerge from the strobing fluid light, a single red eye, unblinking, carved and bulging from its malignant hull.  She cocked her hip to the side and moved the arc-fire across the curved portal, burning the obscenity back into the Void, even as more emerged. 

            

“Close it!  Close it!  There’s too many of them!”  She called to him over her shoulder.  Owen rolled onto his side, thrusting his arms at the gateway, palms blazing, and as he closed his eyes to concentrate, Al could see his hydrogen chakra come online, blue-white, projecting through his sweat-streaked forehead. 

      

“Hurry!”  She was insistent now, desperate, still putting down suppressive fire, silhouetted in the strobing gout of plasmafire, and he grunted in return, rising to his feet, his arms bulging with effort, forcing his volition onto the gateway, squashing the portal back down into the sub-atomic.

            

Noise one second, and unearthly silence the next. Here one second, and never existed the next.  Owen collapsed on the ground, chest heaving.  The jungle paused, waiting for the punchline, and twittered questioningly around them.  She plonked the spear upright, wiped her brow, and swore under her breath.  Humidity, sweat, and the sharp nasal twang of ozone filled the air.

            

Al shuffled his feet slightly, unsure of how to proceed.  He coughed once, politely.  “Um, hi there,”  he offered.

            

Owen looked up over his chest, steam rising from his armor, as he lay on the ground and smiled sheepishly back at him.  The red-skinned woman whirled, body-necklace sparkling, and leveled her spear at him, her precisely beautiful face grimacing in a snarl.

       

“Oh hey Al.  How’s it going?  Sorry bout all that.” Owen waved one tired hand at the woman.  “It’s cool, Vee.  He’s a friend.”  She relaxed slowly, her three eyes blinking at him as she raised the spear away from him.

       

Al walked over to him and offered a hand, helping Owen to his feet.

      

“So.......what was all that about?”  said Al. 

      

“Hmmm. Ha.”  replied Owen.  “That was...uh...zotyl.  Basically. Y’know, shadow selves.  Negative projections from the Id and all that.  My personal view of them, anyway.  Consciousness made material, etcetera.  At least, they are zotyl as I see them.”

            

“Hmm, interesting.”  said Al. “ I was getting mental visions of Martians, war of the worlds, that kind of thing.  Maybe a little bit of the Matrix movies.  Sentinels?”

     

Owen looked down, thinking.  “Yeah, that makes sense.  Memes and images from my past, mixed with Id dynamics and projected into the Real.  Standard Jungian-Einstein paradigm.  Been a big problem lately, with this new noetic reality.  Vee and I have been battling them for some time now.....”

       

“Vee?”asked Al, inquisitively

      

“Yeah, Vee—oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced you. Where are my manners?”  Owen chuckled to himself, and then swept one hand towards her.  “This is Vajrayogini, my....uh.....’assistant’.”

       

“Assistant my ass!  I just saved your bacon, in case you hadn’t noticed...”  Vajrayogini sauntered up to the two, brushing her hand back over her long black hair, straightening her barrette of skulls back into place.  “How you doin’, Al?  Pleased ta meetcha!”

      

Her diamond and skulls body-necklace swung against her, catching for a long second against one taut nipple, chiming with tiny musical notes from within the jewels.  She smiled intently with sharp white teeth and offered her hand to Al.  He shook it carefully, the feel of her skin fever hot in his palm—but, closing his eyes, he could sense that beneath it was something else, an electricity, a sense of steel binary intellect, of something...digital, and artificial.

      

He opened his eyes, and she had changed. She was thicker, curvy, clad in an elaborate dress of stone, gold and dyed fabric, her hair topped by a heavy crown of jewels.  She looked familiar, and with a start he realized that she had become the living aspect of the statue that he had seen the day before, in the temple at Puru Ganang.

            

She was Kali.

Owen thothed the answer to him, his voice whispering in the corner of Al’s mind, entangled with the mental image of his labradorite pendant, glimmering with subtle mother-of-pearl light within its depths. 

            

Yes, she’s artificial.  An artificial consciousness, to be exact, hyper-dimensionally projected from the oracle stone on my necklace.  Her incarnation is being affected by your consciousness—reinterpreted.  A wireframe diagram irised into being within Al’s mindscape, pinpointed, arrowed and delineated with thought-text in hallucinogenic purple mind light, animating the quantum noetics behind the technology, and he understood instantly, thothing the answer back.

      

Of course, it’s Clarke all the way.  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”   The thought was synchronistic, shared, unvoiced by either specific person, and progressed exponentially in OneMind.  It was a conversation in images, feelings, emotions—more intuited than transmitted or received—a dialogue that transcended linear words and conversation.

      

Sorry to intrude, but I thought you would dig the visuals.  Portals and gateways.  She is the evolution of the Kundalini Suit, a conscious projection of my visualized Sacred Feminine, just as the ‘zotyl’ are the spontaneous acausal manifestation of elements of my dark energy Self.  The psycho-physical, created at the subatomic level. The spiritual parable continues, superpositional.  Samsara and Nirvana are the same holographic illusion, separated only by perspective and scale. Infinite existence is, first and foremost, infinite entertainment. Mother is maw. Hunger is holy, because everything is food, and eating is all there is. The singularity of consciousness matches the singularities of the Universe, both transcending the mundane, and leading back to the greater Reality at the ‘beginning’ and the ‘end’.

       

“Boys, I know you’re having a meeting of the minds ’n’ all, but is there anywhere around here that a girl can get a drink?” Vajrayogini’s voice was loud in comparison to the unspoken conversation, and they started at the sound of it.  She flickered and blinked, morphing back from Kali mode into her default setting.

       

“Um, I think there’s a tiki bar down on the beach, past the temple...” said Al, one arm pointing back into the verdant green. “It’s nice.  Not too far of a walk....”

       

“Groovy,” intoned Vajrayogini, and she pushed past them into the brush, swinging her triune spear jauntily onto her shoulders. “C’mon, I got drinking to do!  You boys can talk on the way....”  She trailed one graceful hand across the face of the stone temple dog as she sauntered past. 

       

Al and Owen looked at each other, grinning.  “I can turn her off, y’know.”  said Owen.  “De-res her back into the oracle, if you want.  Or lower the avatar setting.  She can be a bit much in this incarnation, I know.”

       

“No, no.  She’s an interesting visualization.  A day-dreamed goddess, created by man, with all the foibles of a real woman. Provocative!”  replied Al, expansively.

       

“Thanks, Al!  Oh, and thanks for giving me a hand back there.  ‘Course, I had it all under control...pretty much.” Owen guffawed and slapped an arm around Al’s shoulders.  

      

Al smiled back at him wisely.  “I’m sure you did—and you know I don’t like to get involved in other people’s drama. I was reasonably confident that you would find a way out of your karmic battle...eventually.”

      

“Mmm...”said Owen, stroking his goatee thoughtfully. “Good philosophy.  Yeah, I’ve been working on reducing negativity myself, and not always as vividly as that firefight.  So what’s new with you?  And where are we?  Is this a heaven realm that you created?”

            

“No, I can't take credit for this.  It’s Earth—Bali, to be precise.  It’s 2015—baseline 21^st century, in case you were wondering.  I’m on vacation, actually.”

            

“Ah!  Still Pre-Event, then.  Damn it. I know I’m superpositional and all, but linear time is just so damn...limiting.  Still, it makes for a good retreat in a pinch.” said Owen.

           

“Of course.  That’s why we write.  One spell-chants the reality that we need, beyond the stillborn Now, dreaming the long-denied portal into existence, until the portal slips through us and the transcendent Dream spells our sleepwalking gnosis into timeless Being.  The Void dreams within us, just as we dream, fitfully, within its star-crossed womb.”  Al looked at him intently, his eyes sparking, wreathed with wisdom.

          

“Haha!” laughed Owen.  “I love it!  Sooooo, how bout that drink?  I could use a margarita.  Or three. And if we’re not careful, she’ll wreck the joint before we even get there!  Uh, unless you want to go back to your meditation.”

           

“Hmm, well, that moment has passed, for now.  No matter; the jungle will wait.  A retreat to the comfort of alcohol it is, then!” replied Al.  “Besides, I’m interested in what you think about the Large Hadron Collider coming back online in conjunction with the Super Moon Eclipse, at the midpoint of the Blood Moon Tetrad.  It’s tomorrow, y’know...”

           

“Oh wow, so we’re back at that point!  Yeah, that’s an important gateway.  It’s also the Spring Equinox, and if I remember correctly, there’s a very unusual geomagnetic storm raging at the same time. Things are getting interesting...”

          

The two moved towards the stone stairway, heads bowed in conversation as they picked their way over the tree roots.  Behind them, jungle life slowly muttered and clicked its way back into its rain forest soliloquy.

            

The drumbeat heart of the forest returned, drowsy in the afternoon heat, the shadows lengthening slowly with the humid passage of the sun high above.  It was much later, in the deep twilight, with no human eyes to mark its birth, that the single point of light sparked into being—ZZAP—and began its slow, drunken path through the leaves.

           

Toward the beach.   

Click Here To Read

THE MEMORY SECTOR

by Brian "Flesheater" Stoneking

  

JUPITER RING

by Misha Nogha

Artwork by Will Ferret

Sergei grimaced as he watched a crow hop around with a piece of Naan bread in its bill. It fixed its shiny jet eye on him and Sergei took a step closer. The crow ruffled its blue black feathers and Sergei could see more clearly that it was not Naan bread at all, but a round disc of golden fry bread.

“Where did he get that?” Sergei wondered aloud. The corvid leapt into the air and flew west joining a murder of crows that circled the towers. No! Thought Sergei. “No no no!” he shouted, flapping his hands in the air.

Starting with the raven who had dropped a baguette in the cooling tower at Hadron, corvids seemed to take a particular delight in dropping objects into the towers. Rocks, marbles cherry pits—even pieces of yellow jacket nest complete with hornets. If the cooling towers shut down so would the super collider, and during a run, it might spell a catastrophic disaster.

“Dammit,” he said tapping at his holo watch. Fifteen minutes until run start.

Of course they had screens. But the screens had quickly gummed up with detritus. And in one case the whole screen had dropped down into a tower and caused a run halt for two weeks.

Jupiter Ring was a bigger, better, faster super collider than Hadron but it still had some of its more primitive technology subject to the whims of birds. The crows stirred the air with fury, around and around until watching made Sergei dizzy with despair and he glanced at the ground to look away. But on the sandy soil there was a glinting that caught his attention. He looked nervously around to see if any wiredog drones were viewing him, and then sort of nonchalantly bent down like he was tying his shoe.

The best and worst part of the company uniform were tie shoes instead of slip ons. Dark blue shirt, with yellow stripes, and Jupiter symbol on the right pocket, jeans and high top chucks. He always felt like he was in a Cub Scout uniform. But it was comfortable and the tech dudes liked it because they never had to bother with choosing an outfit for the day. It was always the same outfit. Miles of royal blue and yellow thick cotton shirts. The chucks needing tying gave him an excuse to bend down. He fumbled at his laces, brushed some sand away on the ground and unearthed a tiny tan jasper arrowhead that looked as if it had just been newly knapped. 

Surrounding the arrowhead were several red white heart crow beads. More Indian artifacts, he puzzled, or some techie’s joke? This was his third find if you didn’t count the fourth—the colored porcupine quill pendant. And he did not count it because it was his. It was mandatory for him to turn in and report all anomalies. But this one, he secretly kept for himself. Each time he found an artifact, surrounding it was a handful of red white heart beads. Why? What does it mean? He wondered. He picked up the beads painstakingly and put them in a plastic bag.

He heard before he saw the security drone buzz overhead and stood up quickly. It wasn’t coming toward him and he shaded his eyes to watch it fly straight at the corvids. That’s not the way to do it, he thought angrily and clenched his hand that held the arrowhead.  Bad idea. Instantly the razory edge of  stone sliced a smile shaped cut on his thumb. “No!” he shouted at the sting of the cut, and “No no no!” at the drone. Ruby droplets of blood soaked into the sand at his feet.

In seconds the crows had savagely attacked the drone with a seemingly gleeful menace. Sergei winced as shattered plastic pieces of it tumbled through the air and fell directly into the tower.

“Dammit,” he said,  as the klaxon went off on his wrist band. Ten minutes and counting until the run.

He pocketed the arrowhead and sucked the blood from his thumb as he hurried to his sharc, the sonic hover air resonating craft that he used to patrol the town of Jupiter Ring. Since it was so close to run time he took it off automatic pilot and lifted off.

“Warning” said the snarky ai voice. “The autopilot has been disabled.”

“Yeah duh,” he said to it “I just took it off didn’t I?”

“I hope you know what you are doing?” said the ai voice in a doubtful tone.

Sergei made a grunt. Sarcastic programmers are the worst. Why program in chit chat?

It's true, he was not a tech-troller but a Gatekeeper who handled hallucination control. On the side of the deep blue sharc were the bright yellow letters MTT, mobile treatment team. But due to budget constraints there really was not a ‘team’; just him, a roving psychiatrist who drove around tending the worst cases of disorientation caused by the collider runs. At nearly the end of six years Sergei began to wonder. Were these just brain wave hallucinations caused by the intense electromagnetic distortion? Or was reality really shifting? Of course he knew the answer, but the hallucinations had tended to get a bit more solid. In other words, after the run they seemed to linger. Not like before when as soon as the run was complete they shut off and all was back to ordinary reality. Of course the one thing he was sure of was that during a run, people went blatherskite crazy!

To compensate for this erratic behavior he carried sedative filled airdarts, tiny little needles with a light dose that he shot at his patients. True they were full of zpop, a modified pesticide, but it wasn’t truly dangerous and it did tend to lay them out and send them into a deep sleep so that they immediately ceased being a danger to themselves and others and most importantly, as far as the agency was concerned, to the super collider itself.

For everyone working and living in the town of Jupiter Ring was an employee of the agency, whether a physicist, a technician, or a service person hired to take care of the needs of these most valuable employees.

As far as Sergei was concerned they were all a bunch of nutters anyway, mostly Auties and Aspies who threw themselves into their work with reckless abandon, and didn’t care much about the social amenities of life. There were rules of course, no one left or arrived without clearance, which suited the staff quite well, and instead of calling the place by the name of JR Complex they called it the town of JR Tolkien. Fantasy land.  Casual relationships were ok but there were no marriages, children, or pets allowed. Sergei called it geek pieville because to him the entire inside of the ring both by arrangement and feel seemed like three day old leathery pizza. The perfect geek food in his opinion. Heck even he ate that out of sheer convenience.

As soon as Sergei turned the aircar, he saw it, the lone black cat who wandered the facility. He stretched and loped off like a mini black jaguar. No pets, but he wasn’t anyone’s pet, just ubiquitous. The cat leapt through some invisible portal and disappeared. He was also an anomaly but a seemingly intangible one. Not anything that could be actually touched.

Like, and here is where Sergei got really nervous, the Indians he was seeing on the top of the berm over the ring.

These were Indians dressed in traditional regalia. On horseback. They seemed to ring the entire complex, mounted on the berm, and he kept glassing them with the electro goggles. Of course they didn’t show any heat index, and so couldn’t be real. But there seemed to be more and more of them and they lingered even after the run. Ghostly images that rode or danced a strange ghostly dance. Before and after the dance they seemed to be staring at the town, grim-faced and silent...and waiting. But for what?

Of course that didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Sergei saw them and this was a very bad thing because it meant he was losing control of reality and would be subject to termination if anyone found out.

As he banked left to land at hq he saw more of them and they were riding single file on gleaming little mustang horses. As they trotted their long manes fluttered like silk flags. There were mahogany bays and bright sorrels and pintos and blue roan appaloosas, palominos and blacks; all sturdy ponies with quick stepping action. But Sergei was looking for one particular horse, a pale sand-colored pony with a black mane and tail, because its rider was the only one who could actually seem to see him, Sergei.

“Delusional,” Sergei whispered to himself. He was worried. An MTT psych had to make it six years without an incident, meaning losing their mind, before a good retirement with full benefits. He had made it five and a half. So far, the longest standing psychonaut of the history of Jupiter Ring.

“You are losing altitude at an unsafe rate,” the auto pilot warned him, “Please regain forty meters for safety’s sake.

“Come on, come on,” he said, trying to find the buttermilk buckskin. “You gotta be there.” He banked the aircar forty degrees west and he was nearly face to face with her, or so it seemed with the binoculars, and there, she looked right at him and made his heart kabang. She was  an old squaw with wolf colored braids, slowly she turned her creamy buckskin horse and shook a twisted staff at him. He could swear she laughed. Sergei began to sweat profusely. Delusions were not real. They weren’t supposed to look at you.

If he went crazy he would miss out on his full time span and end up drugged out in an assisted living facility; lose the hefty stipend a full service would give. His mouth went dry. The auto pilot was warning: six meters five meters.

What the hell? he thought, suddenly punching all the buttons at once to gain altitude but the car couldn’t handle the fast sequence and stalled landing with a thump. He jumped out and hurried off to the hq—he decided to mention them. Just in case.

Everything inside the headquarters—floor, walls, ceiling—was fabricated of aqua blue bubbled glass. It was like being inside of an iceberg that had calved in some distance arctic ocean, but the glass had the purpose of insulating the workers from electromagnetic waves. And it was excessively chilled in there to compensate for the heat of the collider.

He strode into the director’s office and slapped down the arrowhead on the electric blue slab of  oval glass that was his desk. Behind Dr. Johnson was an imprint in the glass, a sort of etching of a stick tree with nine bent branches. Dr. Johnson has told Sergei once that it represented nine dimensions. “There are nine, not four,” he had said emphatically. “If other physicists would just see that, we would actually get somewhere instead of going round and round all the time.”

An antique black wooden ball war club laid on its side on the desk next to the director. It looked menacing. Sergei stared at the gleaming club. He had brought it to the office a few days before and was surprised to find that the director had not put it in the file drawer with the array of other Native American artifacts Sergei had turned in.

Johnson pointed at a run holograph on his desktop.

“What are you doing Dr. Vassiliev? Run is in five minutes. Get back out there.”

“Push the delay. Stop it.” Sergei tried to make his voice stern and commanding.

Dr. Johnson frowned at him. “Are you mad? Too close.”

The director flipped his fingers dismissively, and turned back to his holo screens.

Sergei's voice came out shrill and tense this time. “But the crows dropped a drone in number 3.”

Johnson squeezed his eyes tightly shut and pinched his nostrils with his fingers.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I saw them a few minutes ago.”

Johnson switched the camera on the inside of the tower, and there on the bottom grate were twisted bits of plastic.

“Too late.” said Johnson gloomily. “You should have gotten here sooner.”

“How? I took the aircar.” Sergei was annoyed that he could not contact the director by holophone. But such items were on rest for an hour before and after run.

“The log says you took it off autopilot, wasted an entire forty seconds of time.”

“God help us,” Sergei said in a breath.

“Oh relax, I don’t think three ounces of flimsy plastic is going to make a bit of difference. Get back out there or I'll have to write you up.”

Sergei threw up his hands, turned on his heel and headed out of the office. As he got to the door though he heard Johnson.

“Is this a threat, Vassiliev?”

Sergei stopped and didn’t turn around. “What do you mean?”

“Isn’t this blood on this piece of glass here on my desk? Is it full of pathogens?”

Oh right he almost forgot, paranoid propped up by p-tak pills.

“It’s my blood and it's safe. That is not glass it’s an arrowhead.” Sergei turned back to him. “Newly knapped,” he added to see if the director would react to that information.

Johnson rubbed his forehead and donned a surgical mask and a pair of blue surgical gloves. He gingerly picked up the arrowhead with a pair of forceps and put it in an analyzer cube.

“Where did you get this?”

‘The same place I got those other things,” he pointed at the club. “I didn’t mention this before but there are Indians on the  hills.”

“Indians. Doctors Shudarhan or Paati you mean?” Dr. Johnson's voice was cold. Flat.

“No, Indians,” Sergei patted his lips and said “whoowhoowhoo.”

With supreme effort Dr. Johnson held in his annoyance and closed his eyes slowly while poising his finger over the delete holo on his desk. Once pressed Sergei would be terminated as an employee of Jupiter Ring. Forever.

A soft insistent gonging was pre-warning of a run of the Jupiter ring.

“Don’t press that,” Sergei pleaded. “Never mind. I’d better go.”

“Yes, I think you had better Vassiliev, but report back to me as soon as you can after the run.”

Sergei blanched and cleared his throat. “I will.” Inwardly he groaned. Don’t fire me.

He turned to leave but Dr. Johnson spoke again.

“What tribe?”

“Pardon?”

“What tribe of Indians?”

Sergei had done research. He had studied. “Cheyenne I think, and one Cree. An old woman.”

“Old woman?” Dr. Johnson tipped his head quizzically, like a crow.

“Yes, on horseback and with a blue saddle blanket that had a crow in flight painted on it.”

“Before a run?” Johnson looked almost gleeful. There was something smug about his expression, as if he knew something Sergei didn’t.

“Yes.” He hesitated waiting for Dr. Johnson to say something else. But he had picked up the diagnostics box with his gloved hands and was reading the specs on the arrowhead and a very quiet humming began to erupt from his throat as he did so.

The gong was sounding more insistent and louder now.

“Get back to work Vassiliev,” his voice was hard and cold but he was grinning.

Being a psychoanalyst Sergei knew that paranoia was not contagious of course. But as the doors closed on the sharc he could feel the viral chill of it seeping in. He knew Dr. Johnson speculated that the Jupiter runs were tearing holes in the fabric of reality and that one day, another reality would replace the current.

Absolute pathology, Sergei consoled himself. “No bearing on any reality of all,” he told himself out loud.

As the aircar lifted he circumnavigated the ring and saw various technicians and service people run about interacting with the illusions. A man firing a Gatling gun at a pair of World War II bombers, two crane-like birds perched on the back blades of a stegosaurus, a programmer trying to catch some red yellow and blue triangles soaring through the air like plastic manta rays, a violet cat-headed woman copulating with a black jaguar which looked suspiciously like a jumbo version of the portal cat, a masked Buryat shamaness twirling in the middle of the town park beating a drum and singing, and a gardener trying to cold cock an angry white swan with a golf club. He frowned. Why were the gardener’s illusions always about killing? He wondered making a note. I thought gardeners were all about living things.

As he circled Jupiter Ring he glanced at the mound around the town and noticed it was almost completely full of  ghostly Indians on horseback, encircling the entire ring. He flew over the diameter of the ring, breaking protocol and made note of them. They were sitting cross-legged in front of their horses on the edge of the berm. The horses stood placidly behind them, manes and tails whipping in some kind of sonic wind. As he watched, the interior of Jupiter Ring became a huge drum; a veritable ocean of hide, and the Indians were beating it with staffs—long twisted staffs jangling with jingle-cones and fluttering eagle feathers.

He flew down lower and saw the cream colored buckskin pony of the old woman. She pointed up at him and cupped her hand to her mouth and shouted “Kachinas! Kachinas are coming!” She looked completely wild and deranged.

Gosh, he thought, even illusions have delusions.

They think I’m a sky god. He snorted. But he realized quickly that she wasn’t pointing at him but at a great huge black storm-cloud that was forming above him. A tremendous drum boomed, or was it thunder—and the sky was blasted wide open with a spidery web of blue lightning.

The aircar was struck; the dials dimmed, brightened and winked out.

Sergei almost didn’t have enough time to press the chute button, but he did, and then the sharc caught in on a wind wave, and slowly settled onto the triangle of brilliant gold mums tended by the gardener.

The storm cloud winked out, the klaxon stopped ringing, the Indians faded, and the black cat was washing his paws and gazing at him suspiciously. Then the chute deployed and Sergei was covered with a bright orange blanket of nylon.

Sergei popped up the doors of the sharc and climbed out, pushing aside the chute like a heavy orange curtain. He was shaking and disoriented. He looked around and all was normal. Quiet little sun-soaked Jupiter ring. Tolkien land. No clouds, no thunder drums, just silence.

He rubbed his hands over his face and shook his head, but as he pulled them down the blond duckling-headed gardener was rushing toward him brandishing a dibble like it was a butcher knife.

“You landed on my mums, you jerk. My beautiful prize mums, I’ll kill you—you son of a bitch!”

But before he could get any closer, Sergei darted him with the sleep gun and the gardener sank to the ground in a slump.

He made a note of it in his journal and then got back into the sharc and tried to start it up again.

It made a swift clinking sound but the engine would not start, so he walked the three blocks to headquarters to make his report.

One sleeper and one dead aircar.

When he got to the director’s office, the director was still wearing the blue surgical gloves and mask. But his face above the mask was painted half black and half red. He wore a crow-feather war bonnet and had the war club in his hand—on his neck were strung all the red white heart beads Sergei had collected.

“Director?” Sergei said tenuously.

The director ululated and then slammed the war club into the holo desk sending chips of glass flying around the room. Sergei covered his face and stealthily reached for his dart gun. But before he could unholster it, Dr. Johnson hurled the club across the room and hit him in the arm. The dart gun dropped to the glass floor.  “Aho! You were right Vassiliev,” he shouted out loud.

“About what?” asked Sergei nervously, rubbing his wrist and wondering how to retrieve the dart gun. No one had ever darted a director before. Could he? Was there policy?

“The Indians. I saw them! Ghost dancers!”

“Here,” he said, punching a holograph loader, and there appeared on the screen Indians singing and dancing just as Sergei had seen them during the run.

“It has finally happened!”  Dr. Johnson got up and did a little two-step war dance himself.

“What has, Doctor?” Sergei surreptitiously moved his toe closer to the dart gun.

“The realities have swapped out! In just a matter of time, we will be somewhere else! All of us. At once!”

The holo came up of a great tribe of Indians riding horseback around and round the edge of the berm.

“They are real. This is it. I have made my great discovery. The god particle is a bunch of hooey. I knew it! This is the greatest discovery of all time.”

“What is?”

“That the ring has finally shifted reality.”

At those words Dr. Johnson started fumbling with something in his lap. It was a tiny bow made out of flexor rod and rubber bands. Across the bands lay an arrow made from a light pen, and duct taped to that was the arrowhead Sergei had found.

Dr. Johnson pulled back the arrow on the bands and pointed it directly at Sergei’s heart.

“But why point that arrow at me?” Sergei spoke calmly so as not to excite the director.

“Because Sergei, those Indians,” he waved at the holo behind him. “Those Indians were dancing the ghost dance. The white man’s world is over. You are over.”

“Well you too then, director.”

“No.” Dr. Johnson shook his head. “Not so, because,” and he brought up a life sized holo of the Cree woman with the wolf braids. “This woman is my great-great-grandmother. Do you hear what they are singing?” He asked. “Do you hear it? Let me turn up the volume.”

As he waved over the glass top, Sergei bent quickly and retrieved his dart gun and shot the director—who slumped over in his chair.

But the woman regarded him solemnly from the back of the buttermilk buckskin, and the words of the Cheyenne were heard. As they sang, a great vortex of crows began to spiral around the cooling Jupiter Ring.

The walls of the facility began to shimmer and fade as the song reverberated through the entire complex.

They sang:

A'guga'-ihi,
A'guga'-ihi.
Tsi'shistä'hi'sihi',
Tsi'shistä'hi'sihi'.
I'hoo'tsihi',
I'hoo'tsihi'.
Tsitäwo'tähi',
Tsitäwo'tähi',
Hi'nisa'nûhi',
Hi'nisa'nûhi'.
Tsitäwo'mohu',
Tsitäwo'mohu'.


Translation:

The crow woman—
The crow woman—
To her home,
To her home,
She is going,
She is going.
She will see it,
She will see it.
Her children,
Her children.
She will see them,
She will see them.

With that last phrase the whole headquarters faded and shimmered up like a shining mirage. Nothing was left except a whole lot of sleeping techies naked as jaybirds, and the black cat who dashed off.

Indians on horseback rested their hands on their horse's manes and looked down at him—the last JR employee still awake. The old woman pushed her horse closer until the flies on its muzzle landed on his face. He wiped them away and looked up at the ride just as she extended her staff and gently lifted the porcupine quill pendant up with the tip of it. She looked doubtful, fierce and crabby. But she slid off her mount and pulled the blanket out from beneath the saddle on her horse. It was the blue one with the bird in flight. She draped it across his shoulders, and stood back. It was hot, damp, sweaty and prickly—and smelled of horse sweat. But he left it on. She remounted her horse and turned and shouted “Naetan!”* to the other Indians. They all laughed and turned their ponies at once, galloping away and leaving him in the dust with the prone Jupiter Ring employees who were starting to sit up. A  flock of crows and ravens suddenly swooped by in a buzzing of wings and cawing.

Sergei was already struggling to put together a proper debriefing.

* old Cree word for Medicine man.

Click Below to Read

NOETIC VACATIONS

by Owen R. Powell

~ only on~

the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction 

BREAKING UPDATE FROM THE NANOHORDE

detail of a photo by Shasta Lawton

The FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction has been streaming new waves of speculative fiction in daily installments as well as publishing singular stories in their entirety since the summer of 2009. That was when I, prospective editor in chief, found my central nervous system infected by an invading stream of nanobots sent from the future to possess me to put this free webzine out on a semi regular basis.  Since then we've published over twenty authors and featured over sixty stories.  We are paused in the midst of our eighteenth issue.

So far, there are seven years archived on the official FREEZINE blog site. Nineteen serials have been published during that interim. 

2009

Sky Pirates, by John Shirley
Plastic Children, by Nigel Strange
The House in the Port, by J.R. Torina 
armed to the teeth with Lipstick, by Blag Dahlia
The Fold, by G. Alden Davis

2010

The Fallen Guardian's Mandate, by David Agranoff
Waiting For The End, by Vincent Daemon 
Elimination of a Picture and It's Subject--Called the Feller's Master Stroke, by Richard Dadd
(The Trickster in the Spines, by Yves Columbar)


2011

Cyrano & the Two Plumes, by John Shirley
Space is a Deadly Sister, by Gil James Bavel 
(The Opener of Conceits, by Yves Columbar)
(Old Scratch Came to Bean Town, by Yves Columbar)


2012

(The Alabaster Chalice, by Yves Columbar)
Elder Cruiser, by John Shirley
I Am the Sun, by Sean Manseau 


2014

The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers
Of Cadence and Weathered Statues, by Vincent Daemon

2015

Swimming in the Ghost River, by A. A. Attanasio 

Due to an exceptional turn of events, four of our serials remain missing from the registry:  the enigmatic Yves Columbar's uncanny WJ Tales.  Few remaining subscribers today are even left to remember these disturbing serializations.  It appears that many who had subscribed to our webzine back then no longer remain to be found anywhere on or offline.  What's odder yet, is that the very blog archives in which these abstruse serials were stored, have vanished. It is almost as if they were experienced in a dream.  We have done our best to search far and wide for Monsieur Columbar, but nary a word from this mysterious scribe has even turned up beneath a stone.  So despite the fact that nineteen novellas have been serialized on the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction,  (A. A. Attanasio's Swimming in the Ghost River having the distinction of being the nineteenth), our latest novelette now remains the fifteenth entry to be serialized in our august archives.  In addition, the FREEZINE now presents forty-nine stand alone stories published in the archives, all adding up to a grand total of sixty-four tales.  Go ahead and read them all. I dare you. 

  Out of nowhere the nanohorde have suddenly requested that our triannual observe a short period of radio silence.  This is the first time I've received such a peculiar request from the bloodhost.  I have very few clues as to what the reasons for this stealth mode are, yet I have reason to believe this period will be very short indeed, so please relax and find something to do while we wait for our mysterious benefactors from the future to give us the green-light to proceed with our "Pentaquark" issue for this month of August, in our year 2015.  

 Expect the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction to return at virtually any moment with a new story by

 John Shirley: 

Where The Market's Hottest  

to be followed by

JUPITER RING by Misha Nogha

THE MEMORY SECTOR by Brian "Flesheater" Stoneking

 NOETIC VACATIONS by Owen R. Powell

=

THE PENTAQUARK ISSUE