Captured in ice

Njoro opened her eyes.
A throbbing pain radiated from the back of her head.
At first, she couldn't orientate herself at all.
It was dark, apart from a small, strange light shining out from atop a tall figure standing in the middle of the floor facing her.
The light was as cold as the walls of the snow cave she gradually recognised as the place she’d been in before something happened to her. She'd never seen such light before.
"Who are you?" she said to the lightbearer.
The figure said nothing.
She could sense an intense negative energy filling the cave. All blocked-up. Nothing flowing freely. The creature was human like herself, but was totally out of balance. She could sense this effortlessly, so the imbalance must have been very apparent.
"Do you want something from me?" she asked.
The lightbearer still said nothing. It just stood still, radiating fear.
Then it said:
"When I want you to speak, I will ask you to."
She thought this behaviour most peculiar.
She decided to shut up anyway.
The off-balanced human was preoccupied with staring at, and fiddling with, some small device it wore on its left wrist. The device let off the same kind of cold, lifeless light that shone from atop its head, but this one seemed to have a wider spectrum with different frequencies of color radiating from it. The flickering dead colourplay lit up the face of the strange human. Judging by the body build and voice, it was a male, and she saw that he had covered large areas of his face with more artificial-looking materials like the one on his wrist. He also lacked all traces of facial hair, something she found quite repulsive for a grown male.
She decided to give up gathering further understanding of the intruder from the exterior, and rather examine this thing from the inside.
Assured of his total immersion in whatever he was doing with the strange instrument, and content after he rudely assumed that she would not speak unless he wanted her to, she closed her eyes and reached for the Innerworld.
She could see the flickering of millions of lights like tiny stars as the veil tore, and suddenly another world opened up before her inner eyes. She moved towards the hairless device-man. His soul looked even more stark than his exterior. It was as if all his yin energies had been blocked out of the system. Suppressed. Suffocating. Dying.
Njoro had trouble breathing as she got closer to him. She knew it was lucky she was in her dream-body and didn't need air.
Very strange. His whole being seemed uncontrollably dominated by male powers. Just as she was about to look further inside, her mind suddenly broke her concentration:
Pi!
She'd been so preoccupied with trying to examine the intruder that she'd forgotten all about Pi.
Where on Earth was he?
She abruptly left the Innerworld and opened the eyes of her physical self.
She could hear her body breathing faster than when she left.
The light-head didn't take notice. He was still staring into the thing on his wrist, touching it with the fingers on his other hand in tiny, rapid movements.
Insect-like movements, she thought. Not very graceful.
She grabbed the chance to look around inside the cave.
Then she saw it.
Mungpuk.
The Eskimo's dead body lay on the cave floor in the darkness by the wall. She hadn’t noticed it before. A gaping wound beneath his chin led to a wide patch of dried, dark blood covering his upper body.
It was horrible.
She could feel a terrible sorrow fill her soul, and tears pushing through.
What a primitive, savage creature this must be. She couldn’t even imagine how a living thing could do this to one of its own. To take another human's life required the ability to totally block out all one's birth-given empathy and natural connection to the collective consciousness, and by performing this action the Savage proved that he had long since crossed that line.
This meant that she was facing a great danger.
If all empathy and connection to the Soul of Everything was blocked, she had no means of communicating with the creature on any profound level.
She hastily blessed the soul of her passed-on friend and travelling-companion, and then decided to leave the matter of grieving until the situation allowed for it, and instead search for Pi’s whereabouts.
As there was no-one else in the cave now but herself, the Savage and Mungpuk’s dead body - no other presence, living or dead - she felt great relief.
But she was still anxious about wherever else Pi might be.
He had to be somewhere out there. Alone. Hopefully not hurt.
She decided to take another look from the inside as the Savage was still busy.
Eyes closed. Mind still. The flickering of lights, and once again the Innerworld opened its gates to her.
She was floating across the vast, blue landscape. She could feel the tiny pinpricks of crystal icicles penetrating every pore of her facial dream-skin as she flowed through the chilling air. She filled her lungs with the clean coldness, and even though she knew this was her senses on overload giving her sensations that weren't really there, as they were on the physical plane, she enjoyed every second of it.
Njoro simply loved sensing. It didn’t matter what her senses told her, as long as they were present.
As she crossed the ice-clad dreamland she looked all around thoroughly for any kinds of tracks, like recent movements of life-force, imprints on the dreamweb of passing emotions, basically any trails she could possibly follow. But there was nothing there. Not even signs of a stray bear or some other lost polar animal.
And certainly no sign of Pi.
He had to be somewhere out here.
At least he had to be alive, as there were no signs that any being had crossed over to the far side as she could see, and she knew the Savage wouldn't have been able to move him or his body to a very remote location in so little time.
"Hey, witch! I'm talking to you."
She rushed back to reality and opened her eyes.
"What do you people eat?"
The Savage was standing in front of her, shining his cold headlight straight into her face.
She felt very uncomfortable.
He spoke Global quite well, but with a very strong Middle-Northern accent. He must be from the Nova Baltica area, she decided. That's where the most fierce outbreaks of revolt against the House had taken place over the last few years.
It would also explain the strange devices he was carrying.
The main argument in the Middle-North for declaring independence from the Global Unity Circle was down to the resistance they met against their urge to speed up the technology race.
"You probably wouldn't enjoy it very much", she answered.
"So it's all stuff like the smelly lamp here, then? That'll be lukewarm seal-gut stew for dinner, then?"
“Actually we had plans for whale blubber tonight”, Njoro said. “Whale blubber and lime-juice. It’s very nutricious and keeps the scurvy away.”
The Savage said nothing. Then he pointed the headlight down, and she could once more make out his hairless features. His attitude was as unpleasant as before, but at least he had decided to stop blinding her for now.
He pulled some boxes out of his sack, opened them, and started eating the contents.
When she kept looking at him without a word, he said:
"You hungry?"
She shook her head.
He raised his eyebrows and just continued eating. After a while, he said:
"So, tell me. Where's your other friend? You travel in threes and twos, don't you? Law of five.”
Njoro said nothing.
He continued: “The first entourage had two sorry souls in it, so that automatically makes yours a party of three, right? Funny how your superstition makes it all quite easy for me, isn't it?"
Njoro froze from the inside.
"Are you going to tell me, or do I have to make you?"
"I don't know." Njoro said. "I honestly don't know."

04-08-2008

Vix woke to the alarm of his old bedside clock.
It showed 06:55.
The date showed 04:08:08.

He rushed out of bed, opened his laptop, and there - just as he had feared ever since the weirdness went down in April, but never actually suspected would happen: his blog had already been updated.

It read:

Hi,
Can you see me here?
Am I now?
Or am I in the future looking back?
In case I am, please try sending a confirmation from the past.
If I'm not here, then no problem.
Thank you.

"This is totally fucked up.", he said aloud to the empty room.
Beneath the text was a link to the track by The Barry Cack Ensemble he'd uploaded back before the summer.
Or in the future.
Back then.
Which meant just now, actually. A few seconds ago, to be more precise.
The link showed zero plays and zero downloads, so it must have been just posted. Not that his blog had many hits anyway.
Maximum weirdness.
He knew he had to do something. And quick.
He hit the 'add comment' button, and wrote:

Oh shit! Yes. I can. You are most certainly there. Or I am, or was there... Or here? Double-shit! Possibly looking back, yes, but more probably from the past, as I'm here now - in the present, I mean. Oh, this is so totally out there.

He gave up, and decided it was better to make a new post, in the present time, as if to cancel out the one he just had read from the future of the past.
He wrote:

I don't know if this is good or bad.
I am here, I was here, and I will probably always be here.
All at the same time.
Maybe there's still hope?

Then he posted "Disco Computer" by The Hex Pistols.
The lyrics went:

Disco Computer
Take me to the future

Never before had a song felt so in place.

What the hell was going on?

The Savage exposed

Mac moved slowly towards the second camp of the House of Lhasa entourage. He had taken out the first party at the previous camp a few hours earlier.
The Eskimo back there had given him quite a hard time, but the House Warrior had been an easy prey, once the dogs had passed out due to one of Mac's gas-tubes. The gas only meant they would sleep for a few hours, but in temperatures like these sleeping almost definitely meant never waking up again. And anyway, sleeping or dead, they were out of play. Without the dogs, the House Warrior had no waking fellow souls to connect to with his mind, and therefore no-one to alert him of the intruder.
"That's the problem with his kind", Mac thought to himself. "Too bloody dependent on others. No self-sufficiency."
He had quickly taken the Warrior out with his knife.
Effective and to the point, and once again aided by the goggles he'd been provided, together with all the other goodies from the R.O.S.E. arsenal of tech: Another hard argument in the ongoing debate among these Ancients concerning their fear of technology.
The Eskimo had been more difficult. He reacted in a split second to Mac's attack on his cave-mate and had been on him in the next moment, trying to wrestle the knife out of his hand in the darkness.
The very darkness that Mac didn’t have to worry about.
Eventually he had managed to win over the knife and swiftly slit the Eskimo’s throat, blood pouring out all over and making crazy fireworks of blue and green flash inside his infrared goggle view.
It had been kind of pretty, Mac thought.
Now he was moving in on the dogs of the second party.
The direction of the wind came straight towards him, and the canine watchers had no clue of the intruder sneaking up on them.
Same strategy, he thought as he closed in, gas-tubes armed and ready. Why change it if you keep winning?
He felt the blood rush to his head.

Njoro woke with a feeling of total terror filling her entire soul.
There was no sound of the dogs. Everything was quiet. Not even the wind was there anymore. The whole cave was still dark.
Still, and filled with the most terrifying fear.
Then she realized it.
Someone was inside the cave.
But it was far too late for a warning now. As the thought hit her, something else did, too.
Hard.
For the glimpse of a second she felt the taste of blood spreading in her mouth.
Then everything went black.

Mac double-checked every inch of the cave through his night-vision. There was no living thing in there except the unconscious House Witch lying at his feet and another dead Eskimo.
He could sense that something was wrong.
These people never used to travel in twos. They avoided too many even numbers in their entourages, and as the other group consisted of two members he expected this one to be a threesome. The Lhasa people were much too entangled in superstition to go easy on these matters, so something must had happened that made them take extraordinary measures on this trip.
It just wasn’t right. They were far too dependent on both their superstitions and eachother to take risks like these.
He couldn’t help but wind himself up on the topic yet again.
All this was their own fault.
Their ways didn’t allow people any kind of privacy or individuality, and that’s probably why the climate in the Middle North had changed like it had for the last decade. People were ready for something new. They were tired of the talk of 'the old ways' and the constant reminders of how to live, how to breathe, how to fucking stand when pissing. It was all 'well-meant advice' of course. Nobody was obligated to do anything at all.
That was also part of the problem, maybe the biggest one of all.
This endless struggle for harmony.
And their eternal mantra of how fucked-up things were before the 'Age of Restoration'.
More like the Age of bloody regression, if you asked him.
Nobody did, though.
He was a simple man who had a simple job to do, and that's how he liked it. No questions asked. No headaches.
But he had to admit that now that new groups like Mr. Sykes' organization Research On Soul Evolution had started working on unraveling the past in a more thorough way, he felt that some kind of progress might once again be the steps for mankind.
It was merely the question of dealing first with the obstacles to progress that these people represented. They never seemed to give in their resistance towards the world spinning around, and what irritated him the most was that, in spite of their shortcomings, the Traditionalists always seemed to be one step ahead of the game when it came down to digging up information from the past, even quite useful information.
But when they did find something that could have been of value, it was always all about 'making it work for the common good of mankind' - if they dared to take a closer look at whatever they found. Most artifacts were just given silly names and put it on display in one of their sacred spaces in the Golden City, located far away from most of the globe’s population high up in mountains of the Far East.
What's the problem with wanting to exploit knowledge?
To advance? Get ahead?
They would probably never understand the claustrophobic boredom they evoked in any middle-northerner looking for some excitement or change.
Couldn’t they at least recognize the worth of just some technological advances R.O.S.E. and their competing organizations had come up with during the last few years?
Which reminded him:
Why the hell couldn't he pick up the missing third person on his WristSat?
He couldn't have gotten far if he had left just before Mac arrived, something that must have been the case. Could it be that they had some kind of warning anyway?
It was weird still.
They were so afraid of the weather that it was very unusual that they would dare to move anywhere in a storm like this.
He decided he would just have to wait here in the cave.
They wouldn't let a pretty young 'Sister' like this behind.
He’d best keep her breathing, but tied up. She would most certainly try to use her skills to call on her missing companions when she woke up.
The smell was killing him. Burning walrus blubber.
"What the hell is wrong with electricity?" he thought, tied up the unconscious House Witch and lay himself down to have some rest.

As he was sure the R.O.S.E hunter was sleeping, Pi came out of the dream-hole.
His body had been standing beside the Savage ever since he entered the cave. He had been warned of the attack from pictures Sha-Ton had sent from the far side of the Dreamtime. His blessed brother had also given him the message that he himself wouldn't be coming back. Not this time. Not with the broken body the Savage had left him with.
Not until it was time to struggle through another birth would they meet again.
Pi looked forward to see him, and wondered what lives they would hold on their next crossing of fates.
He had also been given the message that most probably the Savage's attack wouldn't harm Njoro more than that she would be thankful to have been so lightly hurt, but that she'd surely would become furious when she - in the close future - would wake up and eventually know that Pi had let it all happen.
Surely she would forgive him when she understood his plan.
Surely.
He would have to move fast. The third party who took the alternative route would have reached the destination by now.
The R.O.S.E. hunter would have to meet his fate, and Njoro would be scared, but would come out of this stronger than ever.
He quietly went outside. The dogs were all dead.
It was not a good situation at all, but the weather had lightened up, and he could use the moonlight once again.
He started walking.
“You’ll be fine, Sister Njoro,” he whispered to the freezing night. “Just fine.”

Hazy days

The last few months had seemed even more of a grey, shapeless soup than anything Vix could remember his life resembling before.
Ever since the wormhole experience had hit him back in April he’d just been dragging himself through each day, the only highlights being cups of tea and the occasional good piece of music found either in his own collection or through one of his online sources for aural enlightenment.
He hadn’t had the energy to leave town on Sundays anymore, and he had greatly missed the company of Mr. Friend throughout all this time spent meandering around in close orbit.
He also felt as if he had nothing to report to the world, so his blog had gone into temporary hibernation.
And even if summer had crept in on him, Vix hadn’t noticed the shift in the world around him, which had left the grimness of a chilly winter and was now turning into a warmer, smiling place.
That was until one morning he’d woken up and gone outside to get some food from the supermarket.
As he stood in line waiting to pay - pre-counted coins in hand – he noticed that a little child was staring at him.
Not that he was unfamiliar with the situation. Kids always found him particularly interesting, and they had the ability to undress his soul in seconds. They could make him feel as if his nervous system suddenly was running on the outside of his skin, and doing so quite effortlessly. Just by radiating their kidness.
That’s why he avoided them.
But this little girl was special.
She just kept looking at him with a stern expression on her face, as if he’d broken some major rule of hers, and was about to face some kind of punishment.
From a two year old.
She just sat there, securely fastened in her stroller, giving him the evil baby Eye, while her mother was busy putting her purchases on the conveyor-belt of the checkout till.
He felt very guilty, and it psyched him out completely.
His mind started rushing, looking for whatever it was this little power-being was seeing inside him.
As his flickering eyes tried to find a spot in the room where they could rest and be safe from being looked back at, he realised it had become very warm inside the room.
He found a temporary safe-haven to stare at in a mirror mounted on one of the walls behind the checkout desk.
Not that he liked mirrors very much.
It was then he saw his own reflection for the first time in ages.
A thin, colourless male in dark, far too wintery clothing was standing in line in the supermarket. In one hand, he held a shopping-basket with less than ten basic items in it. In his other hand – a closed fist – he clutched a handful of warm, sweaty coins.
He looked like a cross between a zombie and a soldier who’d just survived landing on the shores of Normandy during WW2. But more like a pencil-drawing of such a figure than a real person. Like a drawing that someone had changed their mind about and tried to erase from a wet notebook.
He looked like a grey, charcoal shadow put in a shiny, summery world painted by Van Gogh during the last months of his life.
Vix looked back at the little girl.
She had a healthy-looking skin-tone, a pink and red flowery dress and bright green shoes.
He had nothing of the sort.
Vix thought it rather scary that he had turned monochrome, but reckoned it was down to his poor diet and lack of sunlight through the winter, and that it was fixable somehow.
Then - without warning - the little girl, while keeping her stare firmly on Vix, slowly opened her mouth and hollered, in a loud, shriek:
“BAH!”
The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up.
The girl kept her stare, now bundled with a triumphant little curl on her lips.
Her mother turned around, shushed her and sent Vix a quick apologetic look, although it shone through that she couldn’t agree more with the kid that he’d definitely deserved getting “BAH!”-ed.
Vix didn’t know where to turn. The Judge-Dredd-gone-dwarf-in-flowery-dress with her lethal-muscle-in-mum-disguise blocked the exit, and other people had queued up behind him. And he couldn’t just jump through the mirror on the wall, like in dreams.
He tried to sink through the floor.
No good.
He had to pull himself through this one.
It was a question of keeping his stare directly focused on infinity and ignoring the signs bombarding him from every angle.
Still, he knew that this was a warning.
Then he had a strange revelation:
It struck him that he himself was the problem.
That whatever had attempted to communicate with him from this gallery of strangers had its roots inside him, but only surfaced in the outside world.
That he was talking to himself through others.
Yes, that was it.
He was the one who had to re-think matters.
He was the one who had to change.
“Eight-fifty, please.”
The girl working the till stared blankly at him.
He’d been so lost in thoughts that he’d put all his stuff on the belt and put down the empty basket without noticing.
The kid and her mother were nowhere to be seen.
He quickly put the coins in the machine, grabbed his food and left.

Back at the Shelter he wrote some notes.
A day like this demanded it.
After he finished the notes, he sat down in his chair and listened to some music.
Things were changing.
Possibly, something had already changed.
Time would tell.
The image of the little girl wouldn’t fade away.
He wondered how different his own life would have been if only he’d been that kind of child.
With that kind of power.
Fearless.

Sniffing warm blood

Mac was lying flat out on his belly in the cold snow, scanning the evening landscape through his sub-spectral goggles.
The Lhasa entourage had given in to the weather, and was probably sleeping already inside the snow cave. Something radiated heat from within the snow.
Human heat, he guessed.
Fuelled by warm blood.
"Success.", he whispered to himself.
Luckily, the howling storm didn't interfere with the vision through the goggles, even if all he could see with his bare eyesight was white stripes of hurling snow. Another point added on the list to shut the mouths of the technology skeptics that seemed to fill the planet - like the ones he was hunting down on this very assignment.
For all he tried - not that hard, when he came to think of it - he couldn’t understand the resistance the House of Lhasa and all the Traditionalists had put up against all this wonderful new technology. They feared it like the plague, mostly based on their silly old tall-tales of global catastrophes in ancient times and other far-fetched myths.
It was a case of standing in the way of progress.
His progress, among others.
They simply wouldn't accept that the whole area of the Middle-North was all turning pro-tech these days, and that the new prosperity they were encountering was mostly due to the fact that people in his region were open to new thoughts. Embracing technological progress was a big part of the new thought that was about to lead them into a bright new future.
Of course, they had to get themselves into trouble like this.
Fatal trouble.
He remembered the day when he left Riga for the Northern Ice. On his way down towards the zeppelin pier he had noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Some brand new, electrically illuminated boxes had been put up next to the walkway. They were all the same size, about three by two foot, and across a shiny synthetic surface were printed a set of historical 'reminders'.
These had always been around, though always made out of natural fabrics and materials, hopelessly illuminated by smelly candles.
The new ones shone with bright electrical light.
Much more sensible, although the puzzling thing about this was that he’d never seen progressive technology applied to Traditionalist nonsense like this before. It made him wonder who put them up; Traditionalists loosening up to progress or forward-thinking people caught up in old bullshit ways of thinking.
One of them had read:

I

feel

You

feel

He feels

She feels

It feels

We

feel

You

feel

They

feel

All religious nonsense and nothing the world needed in this day and age.
Maybe these people would become less backwards-thinking now that he was about to sneak up on them in the night, and that it was all down to his utilization of recently developed tools that enabled him to track them down?
Pity they wouldn't live to be able to change their ways.

08-04-2008

The raging storm inside him only got worse the more he tried to calm it down.
This time the fear had grabbed him from behind, with no warning. He'd just been taking it easy at The Shelter, surfing pointlessly around the usual websites; checking out blogs on anything from freaky theories surrounding Italian aristocrats to old obscure disco records; video 'shreds' that made heavy-metal bands sound like they played even worse music than they originally did, and forums where no-one really had anything to say, but were worryingly eager to say it - when suddenly he'd heard the voices from the void again.
At first he'd tried to put on some calming music. When that didn’t do the trick, he had gotten up and left the computer on the desk, made a cup of tea, and walked around the room for a few minutes repeating lines to himself like: "It's not coming. It's not coming. I have control. I have control.".
As he did this in a louder and louder voice, his mad next-door neighbour had started banging the wall.
He realised he couldn’t stop what was coming.
This time there was no escaping.
He’d sat down in the pink inflatable chair and had unwillingly started counting in a hissing voice between his teeth.
Random numbers at first. Small numbers. Large numbers. Then only even numbers. No odd ones. An endless string of even numbers flowed out of his mouth.
Then they started narrowing down to just a few.
Eight.
Four.
Two.
Zero.
Zero.
Eight.
A pattern was repeating.
Eight, four, two, double-zero (two again), and eight once more.
All even. All ruthless and stale - like all things straight and quadrant.
All of them answering to their Master:
Two - the square-root of evil.
His mind was rushing.
Zero is all.
One is being.
Two is where it all shatters and all that once was whole is now broken; where one will becomes many and everything loses itself to the desperate measure of trying to stay in control.
Control was lost by leaving One, and then there was no need for control, everything was simple, left to the natural flow of events - with its own sense of order.
Not many - but all at once.
Riding the wave - ready for whatever might come.
Carelessly flowing through the worlds.
Carelessly surfing the Apocalypse.

The numbers and squares were dancing mechanically in front of his eyes, vibrating faster and faster until he felt his soul was about to be ripped apart and he would be able to take no more.
Then he hit the wormhole.
He tumbled and turned through the moist darkness. Flashes of light exploded before him, red flesh illuminated from within revealed pulsating, black veins that squashed and throbbed as his body was transported through the narrow tunnel perforating time and space.
This was the wormhole. The tracks of the old Serpent that wiggles its way through the fabric of The Ages.
Somehow he knew this, but still had no idea of where he was heading, or why he suddenly found himself in this situation.
In the middle of the turmoil, a dim light slowly appeared before him. It grew brighter and bigger, and with a whooshing sound Vix was born into a crazy brightness.
He gasped for air and tried to take in his surroundings.
Out of the brightness, he could vaguely identify some shapes, as his eyes adjusted to the light. They were familiar shapes. In fact, they turned out to be his very own room, and he turned out to be the very same Vix, sitting puzzled in the pink inflatable chair in the corner - very similar to the situation he'd found himself in just before he hit the hole.
As the shock of the experience gradually ebbed from his body and the numbness lost its grip of his limbs, he lurched out of the chair and over to his desk.
The computer was still on. He quickly typed the url of a daily newspaper site to see if everything looked normal online - or at least familiarly abnormal.
It did. The same tragedies, the same nonsense.
He checked another site. Same thing.
Nothing of an alarming nature had happened out there in the “real” world as perceived through his blurry technological window.
Still, he had just been hurled through something very strange into something that felt different from before the hurling started.
Then it hit him. He stared at the header of the webpage.
The date on the page read:

August 4th 2008.

He frantically typed a few different url's to other newspapers, blogs and forums he’d just visited that morning to check the date.
His built-in computer clock wouldn't do any good, it was permanently set to January 1st 1970 due to endless battery failures that kept re-setting his clock to this date (he always wondered why this specific date had been chosen in the first place).
All of the pages he checked showed the same date.
All of them showed the wrong one.
The date when he got out of bed this morning was April 8th 2008.
The date he’d been surfing the web for nothing in particular had been April 8th 2008.
The world around him now insisted upon August 4th 2008.
At least it was the same year, he thought. Another year would have given him a very bad sci-fi kind of vibe, and that's the last thing he wanted on top of everything else now.
The weirdest thing was that everything looked so normal. At least as normal as he felt things could ever appear through the channels of his own perception.
But maybe - just maybe - if he narrowed his eyes and looked at his surroundings - just maybe it could be that everything had some kind of special and strange glow to it.
Or it could just be the kind of glow that things seem to have on days where everything seemed just like any other day - only that things had a special glow to them. He had been in that situation before.
He couldn't decide if it was that kind of glow, or a completely new and therefore strange variation of a glow.
Whatever type of glow it was, his gut told him this whole situation was way out of the ordinary.
Then he had an idea.
He logged onto his blog, and wrote the following:

Hi,
Can you see me here?
Am I still in the now?
Or am I in the future looking back?
In case I am, please try sending a confirmation from the past.
If I'm not here, then no problem.
Thank you.

Then he uploaded "Pongdit Panara" by The Barry Cack Ensemble, partly because he thought the track fitted the strange-kind-of-glow situation, and partly because he decided he’d be more assured of that whatever he was experiencing was really happening if a tune that most definitely was from the past showed up in the future somehow.
Or in the now - only with this weird new feel to it.
This was too much.
He logged off, left the desk and sat down in the pink inflatable chair again. He tried to wrap his mind around the situation. There had been no warnings, no signs of what was to come. He’d just had a normal day, then been hit by the numbers, and then hurled through the wormhole.
Could it be that it was due to some hidden meaning in the difference of the two systems of reading the date on the different sides of the Atlantic?
Could it be that the American date-formatting with its often irritating month/day/year-variation hid a means of transportation through time-tunnels to dates with the same numbers in the European system, with its more logical - due to its natural sense of growth in scale - day/month/year way of spelling?
Or it could be that all this was due to the numerological fact that all numbers in both dates – the one he’d just left and the one he’d ended up at, were even numbers - and all based on the number Two. He had a real problem with the number two to start with. It was the reason there were squares in the Universe, and going from there everything from the tax-authorities to fascism were products of the number two manifesting its ruthless stale edges throughout the world.
He wondered if he could have found himself on February 2nd instead. Or the 8th in any even-numbered month, or something else connected to the root number of two.
Or if it had anything to do with the binary system?
Maybe if now things started going all wonky with numbers like two, four, and eight - what would be next? Sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four. Shit! This thing could run all the way into two-hundred-and-fifty-six. A thousand-and-forty, even. And then what? How fucked would that be?
As he sat there and wondered, he didn’t notice the slight flickering of the light in the room. It was not like a flickering lightbulb, but a kind of flickering of the light within the fabric of the room itself, and from within all the things in it.
By the time he had noticed it, it seemed like the very base of reality was pulsating with light.
It freaked him out, and his knuckles turned white as he clutched the small blue pillow that had been lying next to him in the pink inflatable chair. He dragged it up to his face and tried to hide behind it.
He quickly pulled his feet up from the floor and curled up, foetal, as if attempting to shrink and sink inside the chair and become invisible to whatever horror was coming.
Then: All suddenly went quiet, like in a vacuum – the way they say it is quiet in outer space.
And then the blinding light filled the room.
And without something stopping and something else beginning he once again found himself inside the wormhole: The mad speed, the throbbing flesh, the whooshing sound, the soundless screaming.
And then it stopped.
He was sitting in the chair like before.
The blue pillow had been compressed to a minimum due to his paralyzed grip. A low humming like a defective electrical fuse could be heard, as if it came from deep beneath the Earth.
Then it gradually disappeared, and he was once more sitting in his dusty and glowless old room.
And once more the date was April 8th 2008.

He uploaded a picture of a Shoggoth to his blog that evening.

"It seems", he wrote, "the shit is most likely to hit the fan, after all."

From a bird's perspective

The hole!
The hole is the 5th direction
North, South, East, West
Up, down, left, right
And right there!
In the middle
Go through the hole!
The hole in time
The hole IS time
The tunnel of the great Kukulcan
The Serpent's tracks through the Ages
Go through the hole!