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!

Reminders from the Dreamtime

Njoro felt good. The food hadn't been too bad. Actually she would never have believed that stewed polar bear would ever feel so satisfying, had anybody asked her back home. Or that lying here, thousands of miles away from any settlement, far into the northern ice-cap buried in a snow-cave in a raging storm, could have felt so much like home as it did now.
She thought of the day they left Lhasa.

Leaving the city, all the walls along the port had been decorated with banners. The banners contained the usual 'reminders'; simple messages meant to keep you remembering the basic truths of life. Things like the fact that you were never alone. That everyone came from the same Dreamtime, that we all have the same needs in life, and so on.
Along the brick corridor leading to the windcraft, there were a series of glass boxes on the wall. They were all backlit with candles, and all contained simple verbs in different conjugational forms.
They were meant to be concrete reminders of how one shared the same experiences in life, regardless of their viewpoint, sex or other seeming differences.
Whether one was first, second or third person, singular or plural, masculine, feminine or neuter, it was all just down to simple variations in grammar.
The first one read:

I

am

You

are

He is

She is

It is

We

are

You

are

They

are

The message was a very simple one, but very effective in explaining such a basic concept, she thought to herself. She let her thoughts wander, and found that she was getting very excited about the journey they were about to embark upon, now that they were actually leaving. Something seemed to open up inside her, like an invisible extra skin that she'd never noticed before, but became very aware of now that it started to disappear. Another sign passed her head:

I

breathe

You

breathe

He breathes

She breathes

It breathes

We

breathe

You

breathe

They

breathe

The message seemed all too appropriate. She had to admit that the last year in the confinement of the House had started wearing her down a little. To the point that most of her meditations were mostly spent on keeping the positive charges flowing freely, instead of doing some real work. Not that she didn't appreciate her duties and all the trust that gradually had been put into her as the years passed. She almost blushed at the thought of the clumsiness that permeated her entire person in her apprentice years.
It had been her mother that first had suggested she should join the House. Not that she hadn't felt the attraction herself throughout her early childhood. Every sign was there. Her insight was very strong in her earliest years - as they usually are in children before they became confused by their external learning. But Njoro had something more on offer. She remembered one incident when she was about three years old. One of her friends had lost her toy. Not any toy, but the one toy that makes the daily struggle of any three year old worthwhile. The kind of toy that would give comfort when gravity had played one of its naughty tricks, or when the world seemed nothing but a ruthless dark void, loveless and scary. Her friend had cried her eyes out, and no-one could give her any remedy for her great loss. Suddenly Njoro had said, without looking up from what she was playing with on the grass, "It's behind the large bush behind the well." And it was. It was the first time she could see so clearly and know how to use it for something specific, and from there on everyone knew her skills would only grow stronger with time. She knew this, her mother knew this, and when the first delegation from the House visited them just after her fifth birthday, they all seemed to recognize her as an old friend. She still remembered the smells and sounds of that magical visit. There was much laughter and warmth that day.

I

feel

You

feel

He feels

She feels

It feels

We

feel

You

feel

They

feel

But even if the House proved to be exactly the home she believed it would be on that summer day when she was five, over the years her days had given her fewer and fewer challenges when it came down to using herself to the full. Not that she didn't enjoy the feeling of safety, but something inside her had started to get restless, wanting to move on, even to seek some kind of danger. At least these were the feelings that surfaced now that her invisible skin had started to disintegrate, and they were finally setting out on their great journey to the north.

Pi walked a few paces in front of her. He was talking to Sha-Ton while gesticulating energetically in the air between them. He smiled, as always. She was a little anxious, but still very excited about how they would function together now that they were on their own in a small entourage far from the safe haven of the House.

I

love

You

love

He loves

She loves

It loves

We

love

You

love

They

love

Oh, shut up.