1.)
Shit. I’m enwombed again, just after I took a swing at Typhon, in his purple robe… Oh. Ow. That vorpal sword of his must have…
Ow. Shame.
I liked that head.
I remember dying. I think. Not important. I’ve died a few times already. Dying sucks. So does Respawn.
I’m here in here somewhere. It’s cold in here, or maybe that’s just the chill of self-awareness in my little bundle of morphing, as-yet undifferentiated cells.
Self-awareness too early, the warm rush of a formula in Logic that my old teacher Mandelbrot told me about, one called the Child of Destiny. I failed Logic the first six tries, at the Academy, but the sense of the formula stayed with me:
Every Thing interconnected in order to create One Other Thing. It can be mathematically proven.
E Pluribus Unum, if you will, or maybe Ex Nihil. Not mine to say. From many…Us.
How strange it must be for you Four, you Scientists, you smug labmade Gods listening over the little mecha shoulders of the Guardians and saying absolutely Jack Shit to us about it, thanks…
How strange for you to hear this continuing deposition from one yet or sometimes unborn, a ghost who trickles down the centuries, into the ink of the canon’s mouth, and ear!
But I have been born already, variously, as Man, Woman, Creature, Plant, kicked up and down the chain so many times already by the choice I made to follow my amok cousin back in Time, and end the mis-begotten creature’s existence in every form, no matter who helped or what hindered, hell or high water, the Devil or the deep green Swamp…
Got to stay with it. Got to teach these new cells to remember the Real.
To everything, there’s a precedent, sparks of causality fanned by cold currents swirling up from the dark edge, beyond which starlight wavers weird like water, past what we can see…
History doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Nothing comes from nowhere. I have lots of time to think about all this. I think. Down at the deepest wellhead of Dream.
I remember that it was (is?) a bleak, cold winter when I and the other six of my coterie elected to leave Shang 2, the Shining City Beneath the Hills... in soul, that is, while our bodies still twitch and piss into catheters back there even now, and report back through optical fibers in our ear canals and foreheads. (The Guardians swab us down with silver nitrous nanoracle goo, getting us ready for the next attempt.)
I remember the day we all first plugged into the Tank, yesterday, a thousand years ago the day after tomorrow. Up on the surface of Earth, in the proud towers Mom’s prouder people build and hold, that black snow was falling, falling, falling past any prediction the Guardians could make.
Even they throw up their eleven-million-apiece little metal mittens, past a certain point, and thus avoid the Kill the Weatherman syndrome all too common to Imperiums like my Dad’s. But at the time, it didn’t exactly take a weatherman to see the weather.
I remember everything Mandelbrot ever injected into my head to prepare me for riding the wheel of death and rebirth with full knowledge of doing so, to trick my conscious field into remembering the Kabbalah of its unique makeup…
I remember. But nothing, No Thing, could have prepared me for this reality. (By the way, I got the old memo about where I’m popping out next, the John Brown gimmick. And I am not happy…)
I remember the first rotation, the first permutation my teachers ran the Tank through when we willingly plugged into it through the little interfaces in our ears and between our eyes that let out our Gifts, and change us from merely Awake to… full Illegitimi, after we go through the screaming nightmare of Bastard Basic Training.
I remember my first attempt in the Tank. I remember telefactoring back into some distant Scythian slave-ancestor’s body the very first year our Enemy roamed the Earth. (I think.)
I remember Rome. What we did there to extinguish my cousin Typhon only drove his essence so far into this time-track that we’ll never unravel his influence completely. We Bastards of the Universe had (have?) to ramp the Tank forward, and forward, and forward AGAIN.
Just to lose more and more of our original identities every time the Guardians running the tank in Shang 2 hurl our essences further down the stream, to return in new skins again, again, cursing the first twenty-odd years of existence until we can break free of the hateful cuckoo-nests where we happened to Respawn that time around.
(Sigh) But we all got our stories, and I am the least among these.
He closed his eyes, and the Dreamer dreamed on…
