Returning to the source

On the way to the airport Vix felt extremely excited and light at heart.
His luggage was been packed meticulously, almost Zen-like, with the optimum items needed for the trip something he found extremely satisfying.
In his backpack - to be kept as cabin luggage - he had a newly acquired book. It was about the Mayan Calendar and seemed well-cosmic.
He had his mp3 player with his top-notch headphones connected. The headphones were so big that they made him look like some kind of oval Mickey Mouse, but the sound quality was crystal clear and loud enough to shut everything else out, so he didn’t care that some people stared at him when he wore them.
His laptop was fully charged, and although he wouldn’t be connected to the web in flight, he could always play a round of “Pong” or go through his notes as planned.
When he arrived at the airport he went straight to the check-in. He had come very early, so he had plenty of time.
Well through the humiliating, and in his opinion, totally unnecessary security-check, he’d picked up an overpriced sandwich and a bottle of water.
He sat down at the gate, even though his flight hadn’t even come up on the board yet. There were actually one or two flights to depart from this gate prior to his.
“No problem”, he thought.
He was on top of time, and was thoroughly enjoying it.
After setting himself up properly, he put on his oversized headphones, pressed play on track one in the optimized music library. It was in shuffle-mode, and after his clean-up he couldn’t go wrong from here.
Then he opened his laptop and accessed the free airport web courtesy of his flight number.
He checked the news and some music sites.
At one of the disco forums, where he’d just been checking out what parts of his record collection were worth before taking them to the second hand store, there was a strange thread that caught his attention.
A sequence of posts, each containing just a couple of lines of text - all contained rather cryptic messages.
The thread was called:

"Earthbound – Surfing the Apocalypse"

Which he found to be quite a funky title, although he found this to be a strange entry into a forum focussed upon disco.
As far as he was concerned, most people into that kind of music rather preferred the bright soundtrack of a carefree lifestyle rather than cryptic, sometimes dark communications from shady sources.
The absurd thing was that the string of near nonsense had a strange familiarity to it that he found inexplicable.
He didn’t bother reading it all to see what the fuss was all about, but decided to have his say anyway.
He had created a user account for the forum when he went through his records. He logged in and wrote the following reply to the thread:

“Everything is connected.”

Then he thought no more of it, and continued to circle around in the usual manner, clicking randomly, checking the same bookmarks three times, but finding nothing of interest.
Somehow, this just made him restless again.
Vix put down the laptop, drank some water, and picked up the book about the Mayans.
He’d already been through a few chapters during tea-breaks, in-between cleaning out his flat, and it was certainly fascinating and out-there reading.
After reading for a little while, he put the book down again.
He would have to change his strategy.
This didn’t work.
He picked up his laptop again, and logged into his blog.
Then he uploaded the track currently playing in his headphones.
It was "Kool Karma" by Illumination. It sounded optimistic in a subtle way, and it suited his expectations of his destination well.
Then he posted a picture of a scenic beach again – this time without any nuclear explosions in it.
It wouldn’t be appropriate at this point.
But he felt as if this post wasn’t enough.
He thought he could do better.
Now that everything had changed inside him he felt a new kind of responsibility, something he’d never felt before.
Earlier he had checked in on the site peacerael.org, as it happened to be one of his most recently added bookmarks. Not much happening there.
He opened his mail program, hit the "new message"-button, and filled in the mail-address to peacerael.org.
Then he scratched his chin for a bit, and then wrote his first ever poem:

PARADISE BOUND

We're heading down

The Cosmic drain

But that's all good

It's all ok

Cos there is no pain

On the Cosmic plane

So have no fear

We’ll soon break through

Both time and space

And in their place

We’ll all create

A secret garden

Where we’ll walk around

With a mental hard-on

For all to see

A peaceful, magic

Shit-cool

Perfect

Playing-ground

For you and me

(Vix, age unknown, and irrelevant)

He studied the result, felt very pleased with himself, and hit "send".
Would you know it?
Vix.
Poet.

He boarded the plane.
First, he entered the wrong corridor, and got some bad looks from the business class people up front.
It didn’t bother him at all. He just worked his way through the aisle back to his own compartment. The compartment where the real people travelled.
Tourist class people.
He sat down in his seat and buckled his seatbelt.
The woman next to him smiled at him.
It made him feel comfortable.
Soon they were accelerating across the runway, and before Vix knew it, he was on his way to Okinawa.
After he had had his little meal with some half-decent tea, he pulled up his laptop and flicked through some notes in the soon-to-be-perfectly-ordered ‘ITS_JUST_LIFE’ folder.
He then sat back and listened to some tracks from his mp3 player.
The woman next to him stared at the huge headphones, showing no signs of remorse over her obvious rudeness. They were that big.
As he flipped the seat to the resting position, he let out a small sigh of relief.
Moments later, he fell asleep.

Vix was standing in a very strange room.
It was some kind of workshop, with large metal objects and rolls of copper wire stacked against one wall, and a messy desk full of big papers with strange scribblings on them.
The whole place smelled of dust and burned rubber, and the more he looked around, the more he got the feeling that he was inside a very old building. In fact, everything in here looked very old.
He sensed something was not quite right.
He felt perfectly fine, only different somehow.
There was a door to his right. He decided to go through it.
On the other side, he entered into an old-fashioned library.
There were books everywhere. All the walls had tall dark wooden shelves filled to the rim with books and stacks of documents.
Vix sat down in a large leather chair. Next to the chair was a small round table, and on top of the table was a black notebook.
He picked it up and looked inside.
There wasn’t much written in it. A couple of charcoal sketches of something he couldn’t interpret with certainty, with some ancient handwriting below.
He put it back on the table.
Then he noticed his hands.
They were not really his hands.
He looked down on his lower body, and discovered that it wasn’t his body either.
He jolted upright and started walking around the room.
This was not good, he thought. Not good at all. But what to do?
There was another door on the far wall. He decided to open it.
Behind the door was a darkened room, and in the shadows he could see a large bed, a chair, and a small table with an old Victorian washing-basin, a mug and a mirror on top.
He walked over to the table, swiftly grabbed the mirror, and returned to the door where the light shone in from inside the library.
As he lifted the mirror to his face he kept his eyes half-closed in case something had gone more wrong than he could handle at this point. After all, his life had started to un-warp these last few weeks, and the less of this otherworldly kind of shit he got himself into, the better.
As he peeped through his squinting eyelids, he could make out a man’s face. He opened them a little bit more.
Vix was sporting a dark brown moustache and dark brown hair. The surprised look of two brown eyes met his own as he opened them up wide.
Shit!
He knew this face.
It belonged to Nikola Tesla.
He slammed down the mirror, almost breaking it in the process.
“Shit!”
The last thing he needed was some kind of morphing shit going down.
What to do?
He couldn’t really afford things going all pear-shaped at this point. He decided to try and sort this out in a civilized way.
He gently lifted the mirror, and said:
“Thanks for the Pong machine.”
“You’re most welcome”, the man in the mirror answered back.
“It’s a little puzzling - meeting like this, I mean… I’ve always admired your work, but…”
Vix couldn’t find the right words.
“Not at all!” Tesla replied. “I have something to show you, something of great importance.”
“Oh…” Vix said.
Then Tesla started walking, with Vix inside.
He didn’t stop until they were standing in front of the messy desk.
“Here!” the great inventor said, and pointed at one of the drawings. “I never really put my ideas down on paper, but due to the fact that I will have to show it to you, I’ve slightly changed my routines this time.”
“Well, thanks”, Vix said.
Tesla/Vix then picked up a big rolled-up paper, and spread it out on the desktop.
“This”, the inventor said “is the key to free energy."
“Free energy?” the same mouth replied, this time at Vix’ will.
“Yes. It’s my Over Unity Machine. It transforms energy from the Earth’s magnetic field and turns it into electricity.”
“But how?” Vix could feel a major overload about to take place.
“It’s simple. Like all my inventions, like all good inventions. It simply turns one form of energy into another. Nothing of great genius, really. It just exploits a natural resource that’s already there - in abundance, and, based on the principle of a simple mobius coil, translates that resource into something that this planet never can seem to get enough of.”
“Wow!” Vix said. “Mobius what?”
“Ahh!” Tesla said, smiling, then continued: “Dear Victor, of course I don’t expect you to understand the underlying workings of my invention. I just need you to carry it with you into the future. There will be a time when the battle over energy will darken this Earth as it has never been darkened before. Man will kill and slaughter to no end to obtain access to more and more energy, and the generation of this energy will all be based on bad technologies with little efficient exploitation of the fuel it’s utilizing. Still, because there will only be a few greedy hands controlling this industry, the system will be kept afloat at all costs, and any attempts at creating alternatives will be played down, and even be directly opposed. Eventually this will lead to a great crisis with a very, very costly outcome for humanity. So, you understand that I am giving you a great task in choosing you as the courier of my blueprints for a different solution.”
Vix could feel a new panic wave building up inside, and all he wanted to do was scream “Okinawa!”
Instead, he said:
“But how on Earth am I gonna do this?” He lifted the mirror up to his face again, staring desperately into the stranger’s face.
“Easy. I’ve printed it all out on this walnut”, Tesla said in the mirror.
“Walnut?” Vix replied.
He looked down, and saw that he was now holding a walnut in his hand. At first it looked like any other walnut, but when he lifted it up to take a closer look, he could see that there were tiny words and formulas carved out all over the walnut, like one of those Guinness world record miniature bibles that had been printed on a nail’s head.
Then he looked in the mirror again, but this time Nikola Tesla had gone, and in his place a red demon with a wide grin stared back at Vix.
He screamed, the demon screamed, and the Demon/Vix almost lost the walnut with the plans for Tesla’s Over Unity Machine.
“Go away!” Vix shouted. “I am your Master.”
The red demon-face gradually morphed back into his own face, but just as he was about to feel that he got the situation back under some kind of control, he almost jumped with fear again, as his face morphed once more – this time into some sort of alien. Or more half an alien.
It had greenish skin, and one big black alien eye, but the other one was much tinier and resembled a human eye.
“I am your Master, too. Fuck off!” Vix shouted to the half man/half alien.
The face morphed back into his own.
“Good, good, good”, he nervously said to his own familiarly anemic and unhealthy reflection. “Now, let’s find a way out of here.”
He turned around, and headed for the door at the far end of the room.
Just as he reached it, he heard a terrible sound coming from behind him. A deep animal growl. A raging, deadly, savage warning of an imminent attack rang in his ears.
He turned his head in the fraction of a second, and then saw it.
A large, black gorilla came running through the corridor at the other end of the room.
He threw the door open and rushed out, then he slammed it closed and turned the key that was sitting in the lock on the other side.
He desperately looked around for something to help him solve the situation.
Then he discovered an old dusty Xerox-machine standing by the wall.
It was just what he needed.
He frantically placed the walnut on the glass surface of the copying machine and hit the ‘copy’-button.
The machine lit up and made a whirring noise as it started copying the walnut’s outer shell covered with Tesla’s construction drawings.
The banging on the door got wilder and wilder and the growls from the gorilla now hit an all time high.
He was about to accept the fact that in the next moment the giant ape would succeed in tearing the door down and go for the kill.
His kill.
Then it struck him.
This wasn’t happening!
It wasn’t happening at all!
This had already happened.

Vix woke.
Weightless.
Falling.
Then he remembered the plane he was in.
Around him there was total panic, with people of every breed and shape crying, shouting and waving their hands in the air.
Some were also praying - especially the ones that didn’t look particularly religious to start with.
This was bad.
In front of him, the open laptop still stood at the small seatback table, unmoved, as if by magic.
Vix was still buckled up in his seat.
He felt incredibly calm, and had no intention of panicking or losing his focus.
He simply pressed the button to put his seat back to the upright position, hit one key to wake the computer from hibernating, and then started typing into his still open ‘ITS_JUST_LIFE’ document.
The words and figures from his still very fresh dream had somehow fastened on his inner retinas, and he had no problem re-constructing Nikola Teslas construction drafts from the walnut/Xerox copies down to the most intimate detail.
His mind was super-clear, and he knew he was meant to do this, so it had to be done.
When he’d finished, he closed the laptop, put the table back up, and – locking his body firmly between his and the seat in front of him – lifted the seat bottom and took out the life-vest undereath.
Then he put the laptop into the empty compartment where the life-vest had been, replaced the seat bottom, and put the life-vest on.
It was a very difficult maneuver, but he still managed, cramped in the tiny space between the seats in a descending plane.
Then Vix sat down in his seat again and thoroughly buckled his seatbelt, sporting a bright yellow life-vest with a red plastic whistle attached.
And waited.
Gradually the floor in the corridor started slowly throbbing, and soon the whole metal tube of the plane cabin seemed like gently breathing.
This warbling effect stayed, very slow and comfortable, and Vix had no fear of the sensation.
A figure came walking casually along the isle towards him.
He knew this figure.
It was the Black&White man.
“So, we meet again”, The Black&White man said.
“I guess so.” Vix replied.
“How have you been?”
“I’ve been good, I guess. Just fine.”
“Splendid”, The Black&White man said and clapped his gloved hands together once.
“Say, would you care to join me for a nice little walk. I guess we could need some fresh air both of us. I don’t care much for sticking in here.”
Vix looked around him.
The cabin was now filled with smoke and screaming people. Sparks were coming out of the walls, and everything was falling apart all around them.
“Great idea!” Vix said.
There was nothing he wanted in the world other than go for a walk with the Black&White man.
“Where to?” the Black&White man asked.
“Okinawa.” Vix replied.

Defeated by the whiteness

Njoro fought her way through the howling wind.
The skis felt like enormous lead chains tied to her feet.
She wondered if she would be able to withstand this for much longer.
She’d been walking for days. Ever since the passing of the Savage.
He had eventually given in one morning. Not that he hadn’t put up a fight. So much power in him. Such a pity about the misuse of it, and the consequences he suffered.
Anyway, it’s probably turned out a great lesson for his soul.
It’s all about learning.
Now she was learning her own lesson.
She had been forced to move purely by intuition, and never expect to see further into her own future than as far as her eyesight carried.
At the moment it was as far as the tips of her skis.
She would have to dig a cave.
She loosened the sleigh she was pulling, picked out the wooden shovel and started digging.
Things had acquired a certain routine now that she’d been on the move for so long in this place. It wasn’t long before she could slide herself through the narrow entrance and start rigging her temporary nest.
Soon the fire was made, and she no longer smelled the strong smell of the burning fat, but only looked forward to the rich portion of bear she would soon be digging into.
Under the circumstances, she did well. Alone.
A satisfying feeling.
After eating, she crept into the fur sack, and soon as she lay down with a steaming cup of peppermint, she couldn’t think of a better place on Earth to have occupied at this point.
She let her thoughts float. She thought of Lhasa. Of Pi. Of the frozen expression in the Savage’s face as she left him back there in his icy grave.
No ceremony, just a brief blessing, and then she had set off.
How many days, she didn’t know. There was no point in counting – it wasn’t about such things as days and nights. The light was absent anyway, and the only thing that mattered was being on top of the moment.
If she survived the moment, her reward would be another moment, and so on.
A simple arrangement, and not such a bad deal after all.
There was magic also, even if she didn’t dare to make any journey into the Otherworld, as there might not be anything to return to in the physical world if she left it for the merest fraction of time.
She was fragile.
And that made her strong.
At one point she had been working her way across a part of the ice that was surprisingly flat and agreeable to cross.
Above her the stars shone clearly, and there wasn’t so much as a gust of wind, but it was bitterly cold.
At first she just kept staring at the tips of her skis as always. It was a question of hard and determined work to walk while pulling the weight of the sleigh. Then, as she paused to breathe and have some water from her pouch, she glanced at the sky.
A fantastic display of the Aurora Borealis spread out across the sky above her. Flickering waves of green, blue and violet were flashing above her like nothing she’d ever seen. It was as if the sky had exploded, stretching thousands of kilometers into the heavens.
She found herself speechless, gazing into the colourplay as though spellbound.
They’d had occurrences of the Northern Lights before on this trip, but nothing like this. This time it was as if Heaven itself had come alive and opened its gates to her.
Then she remembered something Mungpuk had said during her first encounter with the phenomenon further south. He mentioned that one of their old tales told that if you were to find yourself alone with the Lights, and waved something white at it, you would disturb it and could risk it stretching down from the sky and get you.
Njoro thought for a while.
It was just her, the ice, the Earth and the Lights.
She felt brave.
She unfastened the small leather backpack, and fumbled around inside. Then she pulled out a small piece of white silk that she had used to wrap her sacred stones in before leaving them all behind in one of the first camps.
She hesitated for a moment, then lifted her arm and waved the white silk at the sky.
It was quiet.
Very quiet.
“Well”, she thought, “It’s a nice story.”
Then she re-packed her sack, put it on, and started fastening the sleigh to her harness.
Just as she was fiddling with fastening the leather strips, she heard the sound.
A low, humming sound coming from deep below the Earth.
It grew in intensity, and above the humming she heard icy cold sparkles of something that sounded like tiny crystalline explosions.
Then there was light.
White, ruthless light, shining from all around her. From within the arctic night itself.
She instantly ducked and hid her face in her hands, trying to cover her ears with her elbows in the process.
A difficult maneuver, especially when you’re panic-stricken.
She lay there for what felt too long, and didn’t dare glance upwards to the sky. Her heart was pounding manically, and a terrible wave of regret washed through her mind.
She was sure this was the end of her journey.
But eventually it seemed like the deep sound faded, she could feel the vibrations leaving her body.
She tried to lie as still as she could for as long as she could, but had to peek out after she’d started shaking with cold from not moving.
It was gone.
Only the stars were shining.
She dried the sweat from her forehead as she rose to her feet.
Then she slowly started moving, in a quite unstable and not very elegant way.
“Point taken”, she thought.
Then the girl Njoro from Lhasa kept moving into the dark landscape, with her eyes firmly fixed on the tips of her skis.

A white horse dies

Vix was standing in a field.
To his left stood a red barn. It looked as if it had just been painted, and was in good shape, even if this kind of barn most definitely must have been built long ago.
The barn was surrounded by green fields as far as he could see, and to his right a horse was drinking out of a wooden trough. The horse was light grey with small black-patches all over and a long ragged mane. He seemed like a kind of working horse rather than a show horse or something fancy.
But he seemed like a good horse, Vix thought.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a person came riding towards him on a tall black horse.
He was dressed in full plate armour, and was holding a long sword in each hand, and at first Vix didn’t recognize him, but as he came closer he could see that it was his friend from the living prison he’d once been trapped inside.
Vix tried to wave and make himself noticed, but his friend ignored him and instead rode straight towards the white horse and decapitated it in one movement.
As Vix stood speechless, the blood started gushing out of the headless body and into the water-tray and the surrounding ground, as if its life-juices returned to their origin of water and earth.
His friend rode towards him holding the horse’s head by its blood-stained mane, his two swords dripping with blood in the other hand.
"What the hell are you doing?" Vix shouted, with tears in his eyes. "He seemed like a nice horse."
His friend just stared blankly back at him, like his savage actions meant nothing at all – almost as though he hadn't even noticed what he’d just done.
Then, a sense of panic grew inside Vix, and he said to his friend:
"We have to get rid of this head. And you have to clean your bloody swords. Otherwise we'll be in deep trouble when they return."
Vix didn't know why, but he had a strong feeling someone would be returning soon, and that they would be in deep trouble when they eventually did.
"That's fine", his friend said.

Alone, all one

Njoro gently dried the Savage’s face with a warm cloth.
He’d been getting worse and worse during the early morning hours. His temperature was constantly rising and falling, and he seemed either to be delirious or unconscious.
She’d tried everything to restore his balance, but it seemed almost useless at this point.
It was as if the imbalance in him had grown too extreme for repair, and that no-one but himself could reach in to where these things could be set right again.
Maybe it wouldn’t even be possible at all in his present incarnation.
Most things pointed towards that.
She wondered what she would have to face if things turned out that way. She had been too shaken to have any clear vision since the Savage entered her world, and now she was focusing too hard on trying to help heal him to be able to see into her own future at all.
Whatever the outcome she would have to put her trust in Life, as always.
The great force of Life would always reward you for daring to trust in it.

Full cycle

The ticket for Okinawa lay on his desk, on top of the closed laptop.
It was early October, and Vix had spent all morning preparing his move, like most mornings for quite some time now.
He'd packed everything he could think of as useful to bring into his new future, and had left the rest in selected piles on the floor.
The piles were getting quite big.
Once in a while he would walk over to the desk, pick up the ticket and read the destination out loud to himself:
“Oki-nawa!”
Then he would smile, and investigate the ticket printout a little.
After he had made the decision about moving on that day before the summer, he had started working very systematically on executing his new plan.
The first thing he had done, was to go and pick up the little red box from the top of the shelf.
The box itself was a simple cardboard construction, and wasn’t really all that red anymore. On top of it, written in weak, worn-out marker-pen greenish grey stood the words:
“Secret Stuff”.
Inside, there were various items of varying importance to Vix. There was a torn one dollar note, an old comic-book, a passport, a pile of stained letters from various official instances, a half-empty packet of chewing gum, a playing-card (the Jack of Spades), and a leather wallet.
Inside the wallet were a series of plastic cards. Most of them for various bonus-programs at stores he’d visited once but hadn’t had the nerve to refuse the offer of joining their bonus program when the cashier had asked, in their robotic part-of-the-job tone.
And then there was the ID for his old bank account.
This account had been with him since before he’d left, and like most of the other luggage from back there, he’d left it untouched and un-thought of since his departure.
Finally it was time to face it, and put it to use.
It wasn’t a question of a bottomless supply, but rather like a decent pension if he put it to modest use.
The ticket reflected such modesty.
He would have to fly via Tokyo. It would take time, but that was fine with him.
He owned time, and anyway he’d read somewhere that because of the Earth’s curves or something, the actual route to Tokyo passed over the North Pole, which he found very exciting. He would try to tune in to check if he could sense anything special when they were near the pole point. You’d never know what could happen.
The last few weeks had been filled with lots of dizzying emotions shifting between tranquility and restlessness fighting hard for his sole attention.
The more he had thought of it, the more he realized how these last few years had just been pointlessly dragging out, and sometimes he would feel very sorry for all the time he’d wasted.
Wasted in the wrong way, that was.
By thinking about these things, he had also discovered that he had forgotten all his motivations for coming here in the first place. Not that it had been the wrong move initially, he didn't have anything to stick around for back where he came from.
Not that he really cared about.
It was just that back then it didn't really matter where he set course. All he knew was that there was no 'home' left, and that he had felt a strange kind of magnetism pulling him towards this city.
This time it was different. This time he had an actual feeling of being on the verge of something new. Genuinely new.
Whatever that was.
For the last three days he had even gone through all his vinyl records, even the ones serving as a base for his bed.
He’d done this quite a few times before, of course, but this time he set out with the intent of actually doing something permanent about it, and not just end up playing old classics into the night, and then going to sleep and waking up in a mess of empty sleeves and stray vinyl all over the floor the next day.
No, this time he had actually gone through the whole pile systematically, put the more or less insignificant ones (about seventy percent it turned out) in crates by the door, to take away to the second-hand store the next day (with intent of parting with them forever).
The interesting ones (the remaining thirty percent), he had played through one after the other, side after side, and then thoughtfully decided if they were real essentials, or if they had to end their relationship with Vix from now on.
The essentials had amounted to about ten percent of the whole collection in the end. “Not bad!” he thought, even though he knew it was.
He had then checked every song on every essential against his library of digital music on the laptop harddrive, and if he could find it there he had put that record in his special boxes for bringing to the small storage space he'd rented for the stuff he would keep. Just in case.
If he couldn't find that he already had the track digitally, he had recorded and catalogued it there and then, before filing the record in a box.
All this had of course taken many hours and numerous mugs of tea to pull off, and when the last record was done, he'd celebrated with a loud playing through of an early nineties techno record he thought was long gone.
This had been around 5 AM, and his neighbour had of course gone completely off his trolley and shouted threats of axing through the wall to behead Vix.
But instead of getting nervous, Vix had started giggling and just let him shout until he ran out of steam.
It had felt nice.
It was as if they were just good old friends with the mere habit of addressing eachother in very noisy and rude ways whenever they communicated. Which wasn’t actually often, as his neighbour usually did the shouting and Vix usually was preoccupied with shutting up.
After this, their last communication, he had felt content with the day – and night’s work, and thrown himself across the mattress on the floor to catch some rest.
And when he woke this morning, he had just continued going through his remaining belongings.
There were masses of stuff on the computer that he had forgotten all about.
He decided to get rid of all this digital junk too, it didn’t really matter if things had any physicality about it or not. He wondered whether Buddhist monks had to include their files and folders when it was time to sum up their seven earthly belongings.
Vix owned a total of 1.322.432 files and folders, which he himself concluded was far too un-Zen, and so he had rearranged his folder system in every category, put a lot of stuff in the trashbin, and then backed up his most essential stuff to an online storage service.
He thought of sorting all his notes, but ended up just collecting all the documents in a folder on the desktop to go through later.
Maybe it would be a good pastime for the plane-journey.
He named the folder "ITS_JUST_LIFE".
After a short tea-break, he finally emptied the sack full of his unpaired socks on the floor, picked out seven matching pairs, and put all the remaining socks back in the sack.
He then carried the whole thing outside, and threw it in the dustbin.
This made him feel indescribably satisfied.
Back inside he sat down by the almost empty desk.
He opened the computer and logged into his blog.
Then he wrote down some words he had found on the back of the sleeve of the rave record from last night’s neighbour-tormenting session.
It read:

The interface between physical manifestation and abstract idea.
As a symbol.
Balanced.
What can the human race learn from the realm of physical law?
What function in it?
Stern reality.
Is there nothing left to chance?
How to match free will with unfree order?
Life lives inbetween.
Life suffers when forced into total control.
Reality collapses when raped by total chaos.
This eternal riddle.
Does it help to try to understand?
Does it help to ignore?
Is the key to translate?
Are we the ones who forgot our place?
The Inbetweeners?
Diplomats?
How can mere humans make peace between the two strongest forces in the Universe?
Is love really balance?
Will we ever get it right?
And left?
Are these the right questions?
Can I shut up and dance?

He uploaded a picture of a sunny beach with a nuclear explosion in the horizon and posted the track "Earthbeat" by PM in the post.
He loved this track. It had traces of a dubstep beat and pace, but sounded strangely harmonic and frankly quite pompous.
It was the kind of cultural fuck-up he always dreamt the real future would hold when he was a teenager, the kind that would give any sci-fi story the authenticity needed to keep up at least his interest in it.
Future acid dub, it was.
He logged into the dubstep forum and located the thread where he initially found the link to the track, and wrote:

Future acid dub!

Strange thing, this 'future' business.
Come to think of it he'd always loved music he considered to be 'futuristic'. But futuristic in the sense of describing the kind of future that never came - the more promising kind of future.
Maybe he loved it because it was the carrot on a stick he needed to keep up his hopes through the darkness?
From old Jamaican dub to New York disco to Italian electronic pop to Detroit techno to German minimalism to London dubstep - in Vix’ mind all of it was music that pointed towards brighter days - even the darker stuff, with its promises of technological superiority.
The stuff that was supposed to save the world.
His harddrive was full of these things, and it made him happy to think that he could carry them all with him inside such a small piece of gear that his laptop was.
At least he wouldn't be lacking entertainment, if that's what he would call music.
Mr. Friend would not have been pleased.
He thought of the old man, and smiled.
So many things had changed so fast.
But it didn't really matter. He had been going around in circles for a long time now. But the circle was about to end. He could tell.
It had gone full cycle.
But where exactly does a circle end, and another one begin?

Doomed

Mac knew that things weren’t going his way.
Not at all.
Not even slightly.
He was shaking all over, feeling cold as the ice beneath him.
The efforts of the Witch didn’t seem to help much either. She’d been padding him with reindeer skins all around his body and given him hot water with dried peppermint leaves to drink.
It was as if her very gestures warmed him more than the actual hot fluid and furry covers.
He was sometimes delirious, seeing old friends in the cave entrance from time to time. He was happy they would check in on him, but their faces didn’t reassure him very much. They would be smiling when they arrived, but soon adopted gloomy expressions, and some even shook their heads as if to tell him he’d really made things difficult for himself this time, and that there wasn’t much they could do at this point.
All this and more he could read out of their faces, and at no point did he find it strange that he could do so.
It wasn’t until his Grandfather stood in the cave opening that he got a little worried. Worried, not because the old man had been dead for years, but because his presence made him remember so many things from his childhood days.
Emotional memories.
Noise.
His granddad had been living next door where he grew up in the forests just a few hours north of Petrograd, and together they had been hanging out a lot, getting into all kinds of situations.
Sometimes situations involving big trouble.
His granddad had a simple philosophy:
Life, was all about survival.
That, and having fun.
Much fun.
They would spend a lot of time in the outdoors, going on all kind of expeditions in the forest. Mac had learned to face some basic facts of life on these trips. One being that you should always make sure you were on top of things, whenever setting out to challenge the elements.
Not so at this present moment.
He’d also learned that it was either a question of the survival of you, or your prey.
Not necessarily him at this present moment.
This might be a good moment to get seriously worried.
His granddad suddenly interrupted him:
“Why weren’t you listening?” he said.
This confused Mac. There wasn’t another being on this planet that he had listened to more than this old man.
“What do you mean?” he answered, not finding the slightest bit strange that he had gotten his voice back.
“I mean what I say, as I have always done. Why didn’t you listen? Look at the mess you’re in now.”
Mac felt a rush of sadness inside.
A feeling he hadn’t felt since last time he saw this man.
When he died.
“But what do you mean? I owe you everything. All my skills of survival I can thank you for. All my preparations for these challenges were made from your advice. I don’t understand.”
Mac was on the verge of crying, and it almost made him panic – something he never did.
“To think that I spent so much time on you, and all you ever learned you could have learned from the most insignificant, lost fool on Earth.”
The old man looked both defeated and angry at the same time.
“Please, I don’t understand. I listened! I did nothing but listen.” Mac tried to file his protest without bursting into tears. He was suddenly the seven-year-old boy out in the woods again, only he couldn’t ever remember ever being corrected in this way back then.
“Matchek!” the old man said sternly, addressing him as a young boy. “Survivors don’t just barge into situations and act as blind idiots. They don’t close their ears to their surroundings and dilute themselves with their own excellence. Real survivors listen all the way. Didn’t you get this? It was my only message to you. Why did you stop listening?”
“B..but. I listened.” Mac tried to protest.
“No you didn’t. You stopped listening when I was no longer there. Real survivors keep on listening. Listening to themselves.”
Mac couldn’t hold his tears back.
“I listened, I really listened!” he just repeated.
“Then,” his granddad continued, “then maybe you listened to the wrong Self.”
The old man left, and Mac cried himself into a deep sleep, unable to stop shaking.

Okinawa

The winter months had felt lonelier than ever before.
Since the disappearance of Mr. Friend Vix had just fallen into a new kind of psychic coma. The days blurred together and nothing seemed to be important enough to even think about doing.
He knew that this couldn’t go on for much longer.
He’d lost interest in most of the things he used to care about, and the blurry window to the world that was his computer screen gradually lost its transparency as the days passed. Now he could spot his own reflection in the glossy screen more often than he would get transported through it and out into the vast world of digitized information.
The only bookmark he had added during the last few months read: ‘Okinawa’.
It all started when he stumbled upon a travel site by chance, and found himself clicking around on different holiday pictures of scenic views and clear, green waters.
Instantly he had thought of the usual disasters lurking behind such poisoned eye-candy: tsunamis, typhoons, earthquakes and the like.
But then he had found one picture, all these thoughts had disappeared, and he found himself strangely at ease just looking at the picture.
Above it, bright red letters spelled out: ‘Okinawa’.
Soon the word would become a magical mantra for Vix.
At any time he felt uneasy, which wasn’t really that often anymore, as he was too indifferent to even feel uneasy at most times. Maybe the feeling was more restlessness than unease when he came to think of it. But anyway, when this feeling of unease turned into restlessness crept in, he would simply say the word ‘Okinawa’, and everything would be OK again.
Although it had become a way out of his waves of restlessness, the magic of saying ‘Okinawa’ only transported him back to the grey, muddy soup that was his daily life, and somehow this wasn’t enough.
He almost missed the fear and panic attacks from the time before that day when he let it all rip and let so much of the fear out of his system.
He didn’t really miss it that much, though.
Around him, it had become summer again without him taking further notice. It only gave him a feeling it wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, and that this wasn’t a particularly good realization. Next thing he would know, the winter would do the same, and then he would be really screwed. He knew he couldn’t stand yet another winter in this place.
He had to do something about his situation.
Some major changes had to be made.
And he was up for it.
There was nothing more to lose anymore.
The more he contemplated on this thought, the more euphoric he felt, like a rush building from pure thought and entering his bloodstream.
He got out of his chair and stood in the middle of the room.
Then he said: “Either you follow the rules, or you break the rules.”
He straightened out his back as if to hold a public speech – his first ever - and added: “Or you make the rules!”
Then he went over to the washing basin on the wall, and stood facing the dirty mirror above it.
It was there, in front of the dusty blur of his own reflection, that Vix made up his mind that, before the end of the summer, he would be moving on.
“I am Salmon”, he said out loud to the mirror.
And in that very instant, Vix decided to change his life forever.