Ever since he got up this morning, Vix felt uneasy.
It seemed certain that something unpleasant was waiting on the steps again.
Code red.
Not an unfamiliar feeling, of course, yet it was setting off his inner alarms as he’d been surprisingly OK for the last few weeks.
He got up and checked his usual websites.
Nothing too strange.
A few suicide bombings, famine, new threats of global terror, general decay, yet more desperate measures taken to try and rescue the world economy, recession, climate change, pandemics ...
No, nothing special, shocking or unusual.
Still the feeling lingered. Some really bad stuff was about to happen. He could tell. Or?
He checked in on his blog. No threats there. No traces of spooks tracking him down. He checked the stats. No wild escalations in the number of visitors. He ran the most recent IP's against the list of government IP's he'd found on an underground website that suggested such information was essential for survival.
No matches.
This increased his uneasiness. Invisible enemies were the worst sort. If you could identify the threat, half the job was done. With invisible dangers you were helpless.
He got up and put the kettle on. A nice cup of tea would surely calm him down. Or coffee? He rarely drank coffee at home. He didn't have the facilities to make any high standard brew here, he only kept some instant in the cupboard for emergencies.
This was an emergency, he thought.
But he quickly left the thought. It would probably make him feel even more wired.
Tea it was.
He put on some music. Ambient this time.
His nerves seemed to settle a tad, though mostly on the surface.
If nerves had surfaces.
Could it be his recent postings on Facebook?
Now, that's a scary thought. What if his little anti-capitalism activist meddlings had managed to rub against the hairs of some powerful beast?
No, this was too farfetched. There were millions and millions of people with accounts on Facebook. Surely no-one would take notice of his little campaign. Or?
He decided never to log-in again. Not from his home IP, anyway.
The same eerie notion was still there after four mugs of tea, Biosphere’s ‘Patashnik’ and KLF’s ‘Chill Out’. By no means a positive sign. What else could he possibly do?
Give in?
Surrender to the Darkness?
Yeah. Maybe that was it! He could just stop fighting. Let evil be evil, and let it enter his soul, rather than try to run away? Or fight it.
This was insane.
But what if it worked?
A chance in Hell?
But he had little choice. Something was lurking in the shadows.
He decided he had to try a new approach.
Whatever the cost.
He sat himself down in the pink inflatable chair, put on a gloomy face, and tried to let go.
Then he stared into the computer screen on the desk across the room as if it was a lost soul that had stumbled into the presence of the Master of Darkness.
He tried to let all his fear flow freely, and fill his whole being.
Then it all came.
The monsters crept out from where they had been hiding under his bed when he was a kid. The angry witch from the old white house with the overgrown garden from up the road came running after him.
Then the most twisted faces snuck out from the shadows. Demons stared at him from behind televised deceiving politician eyes. Space warped, and he knew he would be crushed and cease to exist if he couldn't hold his concentration on the will to endure his own existence.
This was fear. THE Fear. It was his fear, still it was far beyond his control now. He knew he couldn't have stopped it if he wanted to at this point.
Images from the depths of the most darkened parts of his tormented soul spilled out like from a burst dam at Hell's hills. A river of blood flowed towards him with every murder he'd ever witnessed – real, as in his dreams, or fabricated, as in the movies he'd seen and computer-games he'd played.
They were all real now.
He soon found himself all alone in a wide landscape, the only living soul in the Universe.
Afraid of Everything.
It was only Vix, and the Void.
Then he saw the contours of the Pyramid again.
It twisted and turned like an enraged animal, screaming with agony as it stumbled across the vast landscape of the expanded world of Vix’s mind. Large lumps of its triangular body were falling to the ground, as it struggled to keep itself from falling over. It seemed much smaller than last time he saw it, and everything about the image told Vix he was witnessing its death closing in.
"You're dying", he whispered, shaking with agony.
But the roars of the monster were so loud he couldn't hear himself.
“This is it. You’re dying!” he repeated.
Then, out of nowhere, everything went still.
Totally quiet.
And he felt calm.
Calm like he couldn't remember ever feeling before.
The images faded, and his insides soon turned into the most tranquil, peaceful little place on Earth he'd ever visited. It felt like he was sitting in a forest next to a happy little stream, listening to insects and birds on the most beautiful summer afternoon.
He just sat like that for a while, and even though he'd be happy to chose an eternity of this, he eventually opened his eyes.
And smiled.
He got up and walked over to the desk, logged on to the blog and decided to post something on his blog.
He scrolled through his recently played tunes, and decided to post a track by The Alien.
The Alien was one of those freaky artists that he had never been sure if was deadly serious - which would make him a very freaky figure indeed - or if it was merely a tongue-in-cheek type maneuver, with equal doses of wit and twistedness.
He still wasn't sure, but decided to post a track by him anyway.
He chose "Extract #4", supposedly a sample of East African rhythms 'abducted' by the artist and processed with alien technology.
Surely this couldn't be that serious?
But you never knew. There were freaks out there who believe they are far worse things than from outer space.
Then he flicked through his pictures folder, found a picture of Satan, uploaded it, and wrote:
I can face you now.
You're my own doing, aren't you?
He logged out of his blogger account.
Vix felt brave this evening.
He hesitated for a moment, then logged into his Facebook account, although he’d decided never to do so ever again.
Nothing unusual. One friend requests from a guy with a cigarette-smoking monkey as his profile picture, and two messages in his inbox.
One of the messages was from a guy who basically asked Vix if he could take over the administration of his group ‘Save the Rich’.
“Go make your own statement!” he thought, and decided to ignore the request.
The other comment was in a totally incomprehensible foreign language in a strange alphabet, and came from one Eno Ishtar.
One alarming thing was that Eno Ishtar had a profile picture that looked very much like The Alien, that he’d just posted a track from.
Weird.
But something he could live with.
More than one hundred members of his group ‘Save the Rich’, though! Things seem to get a life of their own inside these digital organisms, he thought.
Vix closed the computer down and walked back to the pink inflatable chair.
"Good.", he said aloud to the empty room, in an assuring voice.
"Or bad", he added.
Then he said:
"It doesn't matter, it's all the same now, anyway", with a tiny streak of triumph in his voice.
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