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.

The Blood In The Machine

Vix was standing in the middle of a field, next to a friend.
He didn't know who the friend was, or if they had met before.
At the edges of the open space were small houses, and something that looked like a public café, or restaurant. There were people there. All of them men.
Vix and his friend walked past the gathering of people, who stared at them with shadowy, silent eyes. They didn't much feel like joining them, or even exchanging a brief, polite moment with them as they passed. They didn't know why, it just didn’t feel quite safe.
As they walked around and towards the back of the public house, they could see the landscape opening up. Something was ending here, and something else was beginning.
It was then his friend noticed the fence, and shouted "Look!", as he pointed at it.
As they moved towards it, they could see that it was tall, maybe 6 or 7 meters high. At some stretches, it had barbed wire at the top, and at others, broken glass. And at other parts it was more of a wall than a fence.
It seemed to go on forever around them, the houses, and the open spaces between and beyond them all; but the whole place was so large that one easily failed to notice that it was completely encircled by this fence, at least until one reached the outskirts.
"What the hell is this?", his friend said.
"Looks like a fence. More a wall in some places.", Vix replied.
"I can see that. But why?"
"To keep us from entering what’s beyond, probably."
"Entering what? There's nothing out there but wilderness, as far as I can see."
Vix scratched his chin and gave it a quick thought.
"Or...", he said, "To keep us from exiting."
"Exiting what? This small village with all those rough lads back there?"
"No. To keep us from exiting our prison."
As he said these words, he felt a rush of sadness rolling up from his stomach and through his chest. It left a kind of sad taste in his mouth, and he had to swallow to get rid of it.
"A prison. Why the hell should we be in prison?", his friend said, in an angry voice.
"I don't know. Probably just stuff we've done."
"I haven't done fuck all to get on the edge with the law. Ever. Why the hell should I be here? This is bloody outrageous!"
His friend was steaming with anger now, but Vix just felt the sadness that had taken residence in the back of his throat.
"It probably is.", Vix replied. "Outrageous. But we're still in here."
"I'm getting out.", his friend said, and immediately started to climb the fence.
He instantly managed to get quite high up, but as he approached the top there was too much barbed wire to go any further without getting a nasty injury.
Vix looked at his friend struggling for a while, then he started to climb himself. But the same thing happened. As soon as he came close to the top, the wall became so dangerous that he had to back off.
Soon they both descended, and had to catch their breaths on the ground for a while.
"What do we do now?" His friend was still angry, but slightly more desperate-sounding.
"Maybe we can dig our way beneath it?"
"Of course! It can't be that deep when it is so high", his friend said enthused.
Vix though about why it couldn't, but when he took a closer look, he thought he could see a small opening at the very bottom of the fence a few meters to their right.
They ran over to the spot, and discovered that there was snow on the ground here, not sand, as they had initially thought.
"Strange.", Vix said. "I didn't notice the snow from over there."
"Neither did I, but let's start digging."
They started digging, and quickly got the light snow out of the way.
As they got deeper, they found that there was a steel wire net that seemed to stretch down from the fence and deep into the ground. They tried at different spots, but the same thing happened at every attempt. It was useless.
Totally knackered, they both eventually gave up, and sat on the cold ground in silence.
"That's it.", his friend said after a while.
"That's what?", Vix replied.
"We're stuck in here."
"Yeah. Seems so."
"I really don't wanna go back to those people. Or be locked up in here anymore."
"Me neither."
"Let's try to find another way. There must be a way of contacting someone on the outside."
"You mean like a telephone?", Vix said.
"Yeah. Or a computer. Let's look around for a bit. If this is a prison, I still can't see no guards anywhere."
His friend was right. They hadn't seen anyone who looked even slightly like prison guards. Only the men at the house, and they were far from guard-like in appearance.
"Ok. Let's have a look around."
They walked quietly past the big house with the men, and across the small field, that now seemed more like a square. Things seemed to change slightly when looked at twice in this place, something Vix found strange but still not straight-out disastrous, so he let it pass.
At the other end of the field-turned-square, they reached a small one-storey house. It looked like the command-office of a military camp in the kind of movies that had military camps in them that looked like this. Very simple and sparsely decorated, if decorated at all.
There seemed to be no-one there, but the door was left open.
They snuck inside.
The office was very simple, with a desk, a chair, a dustbin and a single coat-hook on the wall.
There were no pictures on the wall, or on the desk.
On top of the desk was a computer, but no phone.
The computer seemed old, the kind with a large tower cpu-unit standing on the floor beneath the desk, and the screen and keyboard standing on top of it connected with wires.
The computer was in sleep mode, with the kind of floating text screen-saver that used to be popular in public offices in the past, often hiding an ongoing game of solitaire - if you were to touch the mouse and wake it up from its digital dreams.
The text read: "Hello."
"Do you think it's connected to the Internet?", his friend asked in a whispery voice, as if to be sure not to wake the computer.
"I don't know.", Vix replied. "Let's try it."
He touched the mouse. Nothing happened. He pressed a key. It woke up. There was no solitaire behind the screen-saver, but a small login window on a green background. A message said "press any key to log in".
Vix pressed any key, in this case “z”, and was prompted for a password for the "guest" login.
"Shit.", Vix' friend said, still whispering, even if the computer was now awake.
Vix typed "hello" in the password field, and pressed "enter".
The hard-drive made struggling noises as it wound up to speed, and they were logged in.
"Wow!", his friend said. "How did you know?"
"I didn't.", Vix replied.
He quickly opened a web-browser and checked in on all his regular sites. Everything looked quite normal. Just like any other day sitting by his own desk checking the same websites from his own computer.
Soon he had forgotten all about the fact that he just had found himself confined in a strange prison, and that the whole reason he was standing here bent over a strange desk in a military command-office-looking office with a stranger who was now a friend was to try and get in touch with the outside world and eventually escape.
His friend had also lost himself, and was just standing next to Vix staring at the screen, reading the latest news headlines without ever clicking on them to see the whole article behind, checking the latest blog posts of new and old music, scrolling through the forums for anything that hadn't been discussed last week.
They were two imprisoned souls with the most powerful oracle of knowledge in history at their hands, but they just couldn't come up with the right question, or even remember to ask one at all.
Suddenly his friend snapped out of it, and almost shouted: "Look!".
He was pointing at the cpu-tower at the floor.
The computer's box had opened up as by itself, and inside a mix of wiring and electronics were mixed up with something that looked like transparent plastic tubes. Liquid flowed and bubbled through these clear plastic veins. It was steaming with heat, and in places the substance had started boiling.
"That doesn't look good.", his friend said.
As Vix turned around he could see that the plastic tubes of the computer had grown out of the box behind their backs and were now stretching across the room to other electronic devices they hadn't noticed when they arrived.
"This whole thing is gonna blow, we have to get out!"
At that moment Vix suddenly realized that the liquid inside the tubes were nothing but the steaming, undulating red substance that flowed through his own veins.
This machine was running on blood.
"No fucking wonder there are no guards here.", he said to his friend. "This whole bloody prison is alive!"

Weather interrupt

As the storm grew stronger, the visibility grew proportionally weaker. They could no longer see eachother if the distance between them extended more than a few meters.
Njoro felt uneasiness build up inside her, a feeling that would surely cloud her inner vision, if it were to become any stronger.
This would not do them any good. They needed her vision to be as clear as possible to be able to move securely ahead.
Pi had halted his dogs just ahead of her. As she caught up with him, he looked at her with his ever-smiling eyes and told her in his assuring voice: "We might have to take a rest for the day. This storm's not gonna give in for the next few hours, and the light will soon go."
He made it sound like he was passing on some really happy news, like the birth of a new child in the family, or a greeting from a very good old friend that sent you his warmest love.
She was freezing cold, she felt exhausted, and increasingly anxious about the whole situation. But her slight negative charge didn't stand a chance up against Pi's considerable positivity.
"Let's just wait here for Mungpuk and Sha-Ton. We'll have to dig a snow cave. I can start right away."
As she watched him get to work, she wondered whether this was going to be another one of those terrible nights, with icy cold and wet clothes that had to be taken with you inside the reindeer-fur sleeping bags to be slowly melted by your body heat. Or would they use some extra fuel to make the fire big enough to hang their clothes to dry inside the cave?
She knew what she’d prefer.
She let the dogs loose, and fed them some of the bear meat from the sledge. They had two whole bears split between the two teams, so food was not the biggest problem. Not that she didn't dream of fresh vegetables or a dish of spicy dal and a cold (yes, cold - provided the surroundings and the dal was steaming with heat), sweet lassi.
They always kept some of the dogs tied up, as any curious polar bear would get the dogs trying to chase it out on the ice again. But not tonight. No bear would walk around in this weather, and if it did, it was more likely that it would just curl up and go to sleep next to the dogs to keep warm. At least she thought so from her own, freezing perspective.
"You can start moving the equipment and food inside."
Pi had their shelter for the night ready. She knew that what was just another hostile heap of snow less than an hour ago would soon feel like home. She crawled through the tunnel and into the main chamber, put out the skins to sleep on, and rigged the lamp for burning the walrus fat. She hated the smell. It got into their clothes, hair, mouths. She felt like the rest of her life would smell like this when they got back home. If. She shrugged, and abandoned the thought immediately.
"Can you feel the others?" Pi's head was in the entrance tunnel, surrounded by the fur-hood of his coat, making him look like some kind of fur sun.
"I'll try."
She sat up and rigged herself in the middle of the cave, kept her back as straight as she could, closed her eyes, and let the pictures come to her.
"It seems they've done the same."
"Ok? Far back?"
"No. Something about a dog with a wounded paw. Wait. Sha-Ton must have left the picture for me... There's something blue there... Morning. Still waters. The two of us tied to this cave in some way or other... Shit."
"What?"
"Nothing. Noise.", she lied. The last picture was actually of the two of them tied together, but no way she'd pass that one on. What an asshole Sha could be. They were the only ones on the trip with proper skills on the insight, so they had to look after all the communication. But he kept putting in small, teasing details for her, maybe hoping that she would forget to filter the pictures and burst the bubble to Pi. The last thing she wanted was for Pi to know that she was the laughing stock of the rest of the whole entourage due to her mixed-up feelings towards him.
"I think he's saying 'wait till the blue light dawn tomorrow, if the wind has stilled, hang on in your cave, and we'll catch up before moving further'."
"Aha! Good. Good. Let's eat. And make a fire to dry our clothes."
She actually looked forward to yet another pot of stewed bear. And the smell of the walrus-fat lamp.

More about shapes and structures

”But let's go back to those Pyramids again.”
Vix was sitting at the window table in the coffee shop with Mr. Friend. They both had their freshly topped-up coffees on the table in front of them, and Vix felt very comfortable about the situation.
”Yes. What more about them?” Mr. Friend asked.
Vix could feel that he was getting nervous again, as always whenever he tried to close in on this subject.
”You never seem to get around to tell me anything specific about them when they turn up in a conversation. You always mention them briefly, but then you move away from the subject into something else. I want to know more.”
He wondered why this topic would always build up such emotion in him. He could vaguely remember his dreams, but had more than once woken up in the middle of the night, sweating, with his mind fixed on a pyramid-shaped figure.
It didn’t make sense. He’d never even been to Egypt.
When he’d googled ‘pyramid’, he would get 35,400,000 hits ranging from food-pyramids to Meso-American architecture to wild theories from scary-looking, right-wing biased websites in the south of the USA.
”You’re really interested in those things, arent you?” Mr. Friend looked at Vix with an inquisitive look on his face. “For any specific reason, may I ask?”
”It’s just that I keep seeing them in the strangest places, that’s all.”
He didn’t feel like being too specific about it to Mr. Friend.
“Any particular pyramid that catches your fancy?”
“Umm... Not really. Let’s see… What about the one with an eye near the top?”
He made it sound as if he chose this one for no particular reason, which was somewhat weird, as he actually did choose it for no specific reason.
”Ah, that one. If you look at it from one angle, that one’s just an extension of Constantine’s Labarum mixed with some old Egyptian ideas.”
”I don't really follow you. It’s just some kind of symbolic mash-up?”
”If that makes more sense to you, please think of it as just that.”
“It sounds a bit coincidential put like that.”
“Oh, far from it. The Labarum is meant to symbolize the monopolization of faith – the transfer of all spiritual power from the people to the self-appointed keepers of the truth, who themselves continued to practise all the pagan arts and techniques behind closed doors in order to keep in touch with the sources of life, and thereby being able to sustain their own personal power.”
”So you’ve told me. And as the masses lost touch with Nature and their own spirituality because of this, the ones at the top expanded theirs. Blah, blah. And so it goes.”
”I’m glad you do your homework. It proves that I’m not just talking to an open window. There's enough people in my position doing just that."
"There's a lot of people in your position?"
Mr. Friend didn't answer his question, but just continued talking, "This strategy proved so successful to our old friend the Emperor Constantine that things couldn't look better. But it didn't stop there. The next thing on the agenda was that all religions but Christianity started getting persecuted and outlawed within the Empire. After Constantine’s two sons came to power, they immediately started persecuting all religions other than the new ‘official’ and heavily moderated version of Christianity, and in 391 Emperor Theodosius the 1st declared that anyone caught practising any other religions would face the death penalty.”
Vix’ mind started wandering, and he was weighing the thought wether or not it was possible that Mr.Friend had been working for the Discovery channel or something similar in the past.
He snapped out of it and posed a question to keep him going: "But why turn around and outlaw simple beliefs?"
"Any spiritual practice based upon natural science, like meditation, herbalism, ritual and affirmation of the forces of nature do actually work as tools to vitalise people’s personal powers and their relation to the world around them. That’s why anyone, like our Emperor, who set out to build a hierarchial system of monopolised power still had to get rid of all such practises among the masses.”
”To weaken people? So you're saying all this could also be the reason for everything from the witch-hunts in the middle ages to the persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese government today?”
”That’s exactly what I’m saying. Those in power want to keep these practises to themselves, while the masses project all their spiritual powers through external sources like The Church, and thereby get weakened and start losing faith in their own creative powers - the same powers that they would actually need to run their own lives in a healthy and satisfactory fashion."
Maybe – just maybe – Mr. Friend had been working for the Discovery channel, then gone mad after a trip to the Amazonas to cover a lost tribe who’d fed him their most potent hallucinogenic? Yes, that was possible. That would explain the mutant-like nature of the old man. He was a perfect mix between a very articulate gentleman and a rambling madman. He was careful to not reveal his thoughts, and threw in another comment to keep the conversation flowing: ”But that's how Christianity got treated by the same people in the beginning. Wasn’t it an actual threat to them?”
Mr. Friend became very pleased with the way this comment did nothing but underline what he himself had just said.
"Exactly! Instead of trying to eradicate these new ideas, they just hijacked them, re-wrote them, and released their own version. And this was the very end of Constantine and Licinius’ ’Edict of Milan’, the one that declared total religious freedom within the Empire - and let Christianity into the warmth only a few decades before.”
”And then the shit really hit the fan for 'independent' wizards and witches, I guess?”
”That was the start of more than a milennium of blodshed in the name of the now copyrighted God of the Roman Catholic Church.”
Or – it could be that he came from a religious background, maybe had been a minister or priest? After all, he had a total hangup in religion. Maybe that was it? He’d set up a missionary in Brazil, and gotten kidnapped by the same lost tribe as in the Discovery channel theory, fed the same lethally potent hallucinogenic - and lost his marbles.
Only - that would not explain his TV-presenter-like skills.
”Amazing.”, Vix said, irritated about the way his theory didn’t add up.
”Oh, it’s very fascinating indeed. And this time they had a more long-term plan. When the whole Roman Empire fell to pieces from the late fourth to the late fifth century, the Church already had their first ’Vicar of Peter’ or ’Bishop of Rome’ in place, with a new kind of power rapidly expanding.”
”What kind of Bishop was that?”
”The figure also known as The Pope”
”Ah. That explains how the Labarium-thing ended up on his hat, too.”
”Among other things. As the position of the Church had cemented itself solidly within most of society by now, it had no real borders anymore. It had spread its tentacles all over the European continent. It didn’t even suffer much from the Empire being split into smaller pieces through small wars and uproars. This fact rather strengthened its position as a gathering point for people. After some time the power of the Church exceeded that of the political leaders and little regional Kings.”
Evangelist-TV!
That was it!
Of course. Mr. Friend had been a presenter in those dreadful Evangelist programmes where they pull the savings from old ladies through the TV-screen. That explained it all. TV-Preacher, missionary, potent hallucinogenic and 'bang', the cultural Frankenstein that is Mr. Friend was born out of a cloud of smoke.
”This must have been very effective, as they even managed to bring those crazy Vikings in on it. To make these guys turn their back on Thor and Odin to join the crusade sounds like a real miracle. That’s plainly quite impressive.”
”Well, yes, they did manage this, but only after the Norse Viking King Olaf Tryggvason had been in some very shady negotiations over in England. There are even two contradictory ‘official’ historical explanations to his conversion to Christendom. One is that he met a hermit from the Isles of Scilly who convinced him to betray his Gods of old and start following the cross. Another one is that he received a nice slump of money from the King of England - of which a large part were money paid to the king by the so called Danelaw in the North of England. The Danelaw also paid some kind of 'protection' money in order to be left in peace from Norwegian Viking raids. Whatever really happened, when Olaf returned to Norway, he was on fire and slaugthered every living soul that tried to oppose his newly embraced doctrine, burned the temples and made a right mess.”
Perfect TV-pundit styling again.
”Charming. And it worked? The Norsemen all became good Christians?”
”I’m not sure of how deep it really stuck, but yes, he was quite successful. Not only did he enforce his newly won compassion for his fellow man on the people of Norway by efficient use of his sword, but he also succeeded in bringing the people of Iceland, Shetland, the Faroe Islands and the Orkney Islands to their knees.”
Damn! The Historian didn’t fit the theory that well. He’d forgotten all about the museum aura that surrounded Mr. Friend. He knew far too much about history far beyond the narrow view that a man with a Evangelist background would have known.
Back to square one.
He almost fell out out the conversation, but threw in a last minute comment: ”No wonder Norwegian black metal artists were so eager on burning churches.”
”Well I guess it's quite an explainable reaction if you dig into history on a deeper level than they let you in on in school, only it’s about a thousand years too late, and anyway as I said this is still just one aspect to the story.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that probably a lot of great things came out of all these changes, too. However gruesome they seemed, and however cunning their enforcers were, this was still a step on the evolutionary ladder, still just a part of an ever-expanding universe for mankind to dwell in.”
“That sounds like a mix of some silly hippie fodder and a cynical fascist excuse.”
Vix realised he had no idea who or what Mr. Friend was.
No idea at all.
“If you wish. But anyway, if you'd like to direct your anger towards anything today I'm not sure the Church is the right thing to aim at. Do you really regard the Church of today as an institution that can reach into people's lives and keep any kind of control on anyone? In my experience those taking refuge in it these days are either those who are hiding from the immigration authorities, those who honestly believe in human compassion, or those who have too much to hide on a personal level and is scared to death of being exposed.”
"Could be, but from all you've told me it's unlikely that these people would let go of such power."
"They would never let go of any power, but they're clever people. Why would they keep on steering a sinking ship? No, they move where the real power is. You'd be more likely to find the darkest priests at board-meetings or running governments these days."
Vix was so disappointed about all his own theories on Mr. Friend’s background falling to pieces that he realised he’d lost interest in the whole conversation. In a sulky teenager-like way, he snapped: “Ok. That's all fine. Interesting. But still no pyramid-talk?”
“This is all ‘pyramid-talk’ as far as I’m concerned.”
”But you’re started saying the eye-pyramid thing came out of the Labarum? Why would the Catholic Church’s secret power-elite of Emperors and the like in the early first century, or whoever is behind this, pick such an ancient figure as a pyramid as part of their new symbol of power? I thought the pyramids were over 3000 years old, at least the Egyptian ones. This doesn’t make much sense as this whole story about the Labarum came more than a thousand years later.”
“Oh, the pyramids are a lot older than that. But the point is that this specific power-elite we’re talking about had now put a lot of effort into centralising political, economic and military power so they could keep it all at their own hands. They had also succeeded in “hermeticising” spirituality and the natural sciences to only be available to the chosen few, and they'd presented a watered-down variation through the Church that they controlled themselves. But they still had one more thing up their sleeve that needed to be expressed symbolically in their new seal.”
“Which was?”
“To show that they were now also controlling history.”
Maybe Mr. Friend was just plain mad. Full stop.
“Controlling history?”
“Yes. History. You know? The most rightful heritage of our species apart from the very globe we live on. The ancient wisdom and experience of our predecessors that is to be freely passed on from generation to generation to teach us all where we come from, where we might be going, and why some moves and choices in life might be smarter than others.”
“Sounds kind of a big deal.”
“Oh, it’s probably the biggest deal there is.”
Or a dangerous political extremist. With ties to the old regime of South-Africa? And Nazi-Germany? And the Communists?
"How?"
“Imagine if the people on this planet knew their history correctly? Do you think they'd be as easy to mislead? What if all this mindless entertainment got replaced by the real stories of what happened to The library of Alexandria, or the real story behind the ancient wisdom of the cosmos encoded in the Mayan pyramids, knowledge that had the Catholic church so worried that they made sure all Mayan writings ended up on the fire. Or the real history behind the modern banking system? Do you think people would accept all this bollocks happening to them now if they had their history-lessons right?"
Vix got worried that Mr. Friend would burst, or have a heart-attack. He really wound himself up to the point that a ranting red-faced old man with gleaming eyes had replaced his usually oh-so-smug appearance.
"Whoa! Take it slow here. That's a lot of information at once."
Mr. Friend dried his forehead with a napkin, slowly sipped his coffee, and like a cat that had just tripped on its own tail in front of your very eyes, he had restored the elegance like nothing ever happened, at least nothing that he didn't want to happen - in a matter of seconds.
"So they've stolen history, and to symbolise this they've made a sign that has a pyramid representing history, or knowledge with an eye at the top, representing the insight of the chosen few who sits at the top of society's pyramid, right?"
"Right."
“But if this is all true, why this obvious use of symbols? Anyone could break the code at any time, and then it would all be out in the open.”
“Oh, but vanity is often extraordinarily present among the power-hungry. And they love their symbolism. And what they really have a habit of utilising, is symbolism that usually mean nothing to the uninitiated, but that still manages to show off their success to those of their opponents who understand all this symbolism, the people they would want to know about their superiority.”
“To piss them off.”
“Probably. But also to make them feel conquered and powerless. To send a signal that there is no point to try opposing their will.”
Mr. Friend gazed out the window, and Vix wondered whether he felt conquered and powerless.
”Just one more thing.”
”Yes?”
”What if there actually exists living creatures, or living structures like that?”
"Like what?"
"Like a pyramid."
”Like a living pyramid?”
“With an eye near the top.”
“Pray you never meet one.”
”I think I might have already.”
”Well, then you’ll just have to put your faith in the weather.”

He ended up playing Pong for a couple of hours back at the Shelter. It was a nice thing to get lost in this evening, he thought. As he started having real trouble keeping his eyes open, his playing reached such poor standards that he decided it was much better to give up for the night.
"Strange thing." he thought. Why would people like to change their games all the time, to make them more complicated? Wasn't life complicated enough? Leisure should be just that. The challenges of life were constantly queuing up, anyway. There was no stopping them, as much as he ever tried.

As he fell asleep, he soon dreamed that Nikola Tesla came to him. Tesla told him not to worry, that he was all right where he was now. He also informed Vix that he held no grudge against Thomas Edison, should he wonder. He insisted that his life's work had been much more successful due to the fact that he didn't have to deal with too much public attention and fame when he lived, but rather had the luxury of being able to concentrate on his inventions.
This made Vix feel much at ease, as it was something that had bothered him all his life. At least ever since he had developed a special interest in Tesla and gotten very angry on his behalf, due to the terrible lack of recognition history had offered him and his fantastic work. Tesla assured him that his support was much appreciated still, and to show his gratitude he had designed a very special gift for him. The inventor had then presented the most beautiful machine for him. It was an old-fashioned black&white computer screen mounted on a varnished wooden base. All the electronic components were openly exposed, but the whole construction had the kind of elegance and finesse about it that only true craftsmanship could provide.
The machine was mounted on four long metal spikes, and at the front end a brass sign with swirly lettering read: "Pong".