MASS TRANSFERENCE DEVICE 2012

The most powerful thing that a human can do, is, above all, to think.

INTRODUCTION: Transmission 001.002.000 I come to you from a star. I bring you light. With this light, you will grow. You will grow until you make your own light. And you will shine your light back to me. In a world without time, this has already happened. You do not exist; we are the same.

AND SO IT BEGINS: Chapter 1 STARS LIKE US The Illusion It is the year 2100. The world is in flux. Large numbers of people are being redistributed, both by choice and by the manipulation of the vast social engineering apparatus, or, as those who know call it The Illusion. There are those who live outside the illusion and those who live inside. Cultures are designed. Long ago, cultures were fermented over time. Now, time does not exist, at least in that sense. In the illusion things dont progress in a simple trajectory, they dont ebb and flow like the tides. Instead, this life is a repetition of the same thing over and over. The faade changes, tastes change, neighborhoods and relationships change, but they do so only to uphold the illusion of the passing of time. Beyond the faade, the system remains in a state of static equilibrium. No revolutions, no triumph. No hindsight, no dreams. People experience conflict, but only that which is designed as such. True conflict does not exist. The fluctuation of reality, of Activity versus Dormancy, Aggression versus Cooperation, Love versus Hate, and Right versus Wrong, as they push and pull on the path of time, have been reduced to an unwavering horizontal line. All life continues unchanged by the unfolding of events. But this is not life. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows that we must see night and day in order to maintain mental stability. Everyone knows that we must slumber and awaken to maintain physical cohesion. Just as this is known, so it is for the vicissitudes of life. For this reason, it is engineered into the daily ongoings of the life of the submitting population. In a sense, they choose to live this way. They understand the necessity for cyclical change and submit to the illusions that have been so thoughtfully articulated for their well-being. It is not blissful paradise, though some choose a more seductive version of the illusion. It is not base destitution, though some are cunningly diverted into the upper realms of poverty. For the most part, it is life as usual. Unthinkable crime and horror have been minimized, though with it, unforeseeable epiphanies and ecstasy. That is not to say that these do not

exist, just that they are managed, controlled. Ultimately, they, none of them, ever happen. Nothing happens. Plants grow, wind blows, and insects crawl in crooked lines, but all of this has been arranged. This has all been done for the betterment of humankind, for the Greater Good. Now, there are some who deny the illusion. That is not to say that they deny one illusion for another, as most do that is, in itself, a false choice. But no, these others, they live, painfully, in the Constant Now. This Now does not supply spiritnourishing change. Love is not made stronger by the vanquishing of hate. Silence does not exist, for there is no unrest. These others, they choose this life, this non-life, again and again, moment after moment, in a battle of Self Preservation vs. Self Destruction. Life outside the illusion is not long. Those who walk away face hardships for which the coping mechanisms required have been bred out of them for generations. Those who turn their backs also lose their connectivity to the anthroposphere, the collective will to live that people propagate amongst themselves and which is the fuel that propels human life through the barrier of time and into the future. These are those who orbit the anthroposphere, who surround it in a web of purpose supported only by their own belief in an underlying force a threat. They claim to feel its danger, to see its light coming on the horizon. They are dismissed. They feel too much, it is said. They are known to travel throughout space in the way memories slide through the mind. The population at large is told to stay away from them, both physically and mentally, for they creep. They create thought, but not full thoughts as we are used to fragmented thoughts, half-thoughts that require another human like themselves to come together into a fully formed idea, but at the risk of remaining forever unfinished and unanswered. Their creeping thoughts represent a bubble rising to the surface, bursting and rippling its wake outwards to crash on the shores of the collective consciousness. They are disruptive. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about them at this time. They disrupt our way of life and their numbers grow with the passing of the days, more creeping, feeling, thinking

people. They leave us because they are afraid, and they make us afraid. Transmission 011.002.018 <Lower Body> Disruptions in the Non-Gravitational Field Non-dimensional gravity is the force that pulls together things of otherworldly nature. In that beyond which the physicality of humans exists, there are forces pushing and pulling. This dynamic has an influence on the physical human world, just as we, through our own actions, have on it. The human mind is the nexus of these two worlds, and with it we have learned the ways of manipulating both for our collective benefit. Not all can have access to this other world, and thus to the full potential of their own minds, as the disturbance of so much multi-directional intent would make it impossible for us to manage such control. Chaos, which still exists in this model of human-universal interaction, is accepted, monitored, and responded to accordingly, just as it always has. The chaos outside our anthroposphere can not be controlled, only responded to. The more intelligently we respond, the more efficiency we design into the system. There will always be some who attempt, even successfully, to interact outside of the physical world of the human. These few are disruptive to the anthrocentric sphere, as they enact powerful flux in their own non-gravitational fields. For those managing the anthrocentric nexus, their meandering, and occasional mastering, has potential for the redistribution of power in innumerable, torrential, and unpredictable ways. They themselves are totally unpredictable and difficult to redistribute amicably within the network. As their numbers grow, so do our resources being implemented to identify and monitor them. As of yet, their geochronometric position can not be identified via conventional measures. Evenso, could this be achieved, their interactions would be, yet still, impossible to manage effectively.

Our inception analysts are capable of detecting the locus of their non-gravitational disturbances, and we are making expected progress in using these methods to gain more information about them. Recorded Thought: On Fear We havent been far, but things happen fast. Our hair grows long, our mouths dry and our stomachs hungry. Having never experienced these conditions so ever-present to our distant ancestors, we are constantly tempted to return home. But alas, we can never return. There is a force more perseverant than hunger, more powerful than the magnetism of the anthroposphere. It is fear. It is unknown to contemporary humans in its raw form, and it becomes the most implacable force in the universe to those who have been made aware of its presence. We have been summoned by this fear, for reasons unknown to us. Fear is difficult to understand; it is like walking with death. For those in the anthroposphere, the Black Friendship occurs quickly and quietly. People dont typically recognize its presence among them. Those who die continue to be represented in the form of their self-replicate until the full expiration of their generation. Once this occurs, all progenitors are redistributed in the network so as to lose all physical memory of their ancestral generations. From this undetected pivotal moment, people experience the dead as vividly sensual, yet inarticulate memories which can pass as real to those willing to submit fully to their own personal illusion. But imagine, for a moment, that you have no self-replicate, and that no one is managing your generation you no longer belong, after all, to any generation. Imagine that at any moment you may feel the pain of death, the spiritual pain of total loss and disconnection, and that it may come at any time. It may come in the midst of this very thought now being communicated, thus terminating thought before it reaches completion, resulting in a question that can never be answered. We, as the human race we have become, can never know what this incomplete thought-fragment feels like unless we have left the networkings of the anthroposphere. For us, it produces a sensation of pain akin to that indescribable thing: Fear.

What we fear, however, is not death, or worse, extrication from the anthroposphere and subsequent loss of the selfreplicate. The fear that begins by calling us softly, and later by grabbing hold of our thoughts, is that of a different kind. We see the Great Patterns. We hear the flow of information, and feel its transformation as it subtly, at times, and boldly, at others, moves back and forth on the trajectory of existence. We propel its acceleration by our very being yet fight with all of our awareness against its inevitable terminus. What we fear is the cyclical change of our collective life. Time a boundary beyond which the general population has no access holds within it the panorama of the unfolding of the universe. The push and pull of non-physical forces concentrates all life to the point of singularity, and then rips it apart again to become the dust of creation. As humans, we are inevitably approaching the point, and from then we will see all that we know and feel disintegrate, torn from us into the vacuum of cyclical existence. What we fear is this moment, which is the end of all humanity as we know it. The Anthroposphere Around the year 2000, humans began their exploration into the use of a digital network of interaction. Within ten years, all humans existed simultaneously in both the conventional world and the digital world. This was, as stated, mostly exploratory in its developments. Humans had never experienced the simultaneity that came from the digital network, but soon, the entire spacetime structure of their collective existence became surmounted by a mind-shattering theory of non-time, which was itself brought on by developments in energy use, distribution, and storage of the early 21st century. When, in 2040, humans, collectively, in a sense, formed the anthroposphere, non-time began, paving the way for the selfreplicate. Human existence, from that point on, is categorized into two parts before the anthroposphere, or in time; and after the anthroposphere, or outside time. Once the anthroposphere was officially stabilized, all living humans were grouped, by age, among other less important variables, into Generations. These are the Generations proper, as the Proto-Generations refer to the population born in time.

Shortly before the first of the protogenerational population was set to expire, it was discovered that they could continue to exist within the anthroposphere as virtual entities. Though the expired generations could no longer interact, their presence could be felt by others still living. Henceforth, all humans living and otherwise have gained access to the self replicate, a virtual entity that can exist simultaneously with the living human, while technically interacting at another geochronometric position. The only difference between the self-replicate of the living and those of the expired, is that expired self-replicates are more like vivid phantoms, ghosts recorded in the old stories of human memory. By around the year 2040, all humans being born were done so into the anthropo-spatial position of the human network. Humans had come full circle by this time, so that, by the modified evolutionary product of human conjoinment, their offspring was designed to interact within the anthroposphere only. The social engineering apparatus was thus complete, and, by 2070, the whole of human existence, active and extinguished, could be safely controlled. Hassam Flessihfo It is now 2070. Hassam is 30 years old. Hassam lived a normal life, just like everyone else. He was born into the anthroposphere, and followed the typical trajectory of development of collective anthropic existence. He formed relationships in the network and contributed to the acceleration of human development by contracting a selfreplicate to go through the timewall to monitor the extraction of useful materials from the history of the Earth. His was the Pre-Cambrian, Geological, where very basic single-celled organisms had developed enough to be effectively programmed, but not so much that they had to be reverse engineered to do so. His job was simple follow the flux of the contacts on the ground and redistribute their awareness accordingly. When surplus material was located and acquired, awareness was shifted to other areas. The progress of his self-replicate was such that by the time his Generation was less than a third of the way to their expiration, he was relieved of his obligations

and redistributed in the network to pursue a more randomized existence. He met new people, learned new things, and discovered new connections to other, less populated nodes on the network. He began to spend more and more of his attention on these nodes, which meant less and less time existing in selfreplicate. Most choose to have multiple self-replicates, through which they can pursue many endeavors and thus spread their personal network far and wide for an enjoyable post-expiration existence. Hassam had become less and less interested in preparing for his post-expiration existence, as he felt a small seed of fear in his body when he tried to look forward to that experience. He was threatened by this fear and yet at the same time, determined to overcome it. He came to believe that only by testing it, which meant drawing it closer, could he tell if it was a real threat, or just a shadow of his ancestors. He felt that he was preparing a trap, for when the fear came, he would snare it, investigate it, and contribute his conclusion to the Greater Good. At the same time, he was, in a way, facing potential reciprocation for his frequent attention at the more unpopular nodes and his extrication from the sphere became a topic of debate amongst the governing body of individuals who managed the expiration of generations and the redistribution of self-replicates. Within a very short time, he became great cause for concern, and was cleared to have his individual awareness monitored for pattern recognition. But, by this time, they were too late, as his anthropo-spatial position seemed to have disintegrated; In essence, Hassam had been sucked out of the anthroposphere and swallowed up by the universe. Transmission 011.003.013 <Upper Body> The Outer Fringe Collection and Schematic-Specific Scattering of Anthromatter Multiple positions of high concentration within the anthropospheric network are experiencing increasing levels of flux. The experimental reciprocation with which we engage the universe at large is growing as expected, though there is concern of a developing lag between this flux and our own

ability to effectively utilize it. Compounded with this lag is the enhanced distribution of disturbance within the network. This disturbance is a primary focus for our schematic apparatus, as it reduces redistribution effectiveness by raising the potential for scattering of anthromatter beyond the point of full recognition. We are all fully aware of the consequences of partial recognition, as we have confirmed redistribution channels reaching out beyond their anthropospheric limits in significant amounts. This growing, partially existent fringe population amplifies the effects of disruption, evertightening the spiral of exponential progressive existence. Our threat is twofold and our ability to manage its consequence reducing by half. The schematic apparatus is undergoing intergenerational response experiments on self replicates of the 1st Generation. Conclusions on the potential for full recognition in the Outer Fringe using time-enhanced self replication remain forthcoming. Hybrid retrocognition remains qualified as an unlikely alternative. We hold tenuously to the intent of the system, and expect phasing-in of applicable response operations prior to the initiation of Generation 3. As always, we work together in full cooperation enjoying the expansion of existence. Absolute cooperation is required to adjust our management capabilities in response to our currently changing universal provisions. <Mediated Transmission> Our star is shining. Together we are expanding our sphere of existence beyond the earth and into the Greater Universe. Matters of seriousness were not mediated for the population to engage with; theirs was only to exist. To create existence, that was a serious matter. Absolute Concentration is the moment when all conscious life on earth organizes itself into a single entity. The effects resulting from such synergy are unequivocal in geologic proportions. It reaches instead into the range of stellar flux, but one rather in a non-dimensional universe. We travel to the

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past only using energy from the future. Its impossible to go backwards first. We thus must travel forwards. A crescendo in the simultaneous advancements of varying technologies led to the first ever theory of non-time which was simultaneously implemented in 2040, liberating humans from the linearity of time. Exploration in this new realm, however, was limited to projected existence, meaning that humans could only go to the future. This was fortunate, for energy is more easily harvested in the future, where the earth has concentrated and become a kind of star itself. With this new source of energy, humans became capable of doing things unimaginable to their ancient predecessors of simple fire-power. Soon enough, (the term itself a colloquialism used for expressing a form of existence rather than a passing of time, since time did not exist) time travel into both projected existence and proto-existence became feasible and then applicable and finally full-blown. The full scale implementation of time travel into proto-existence yielded amazing discoveries of the time differential energy surplus law. This law states that matter which has traveled from the past into real-time, brings with it an inherent amount of energy proportional to the amount of time traveled. The dilemma presented here is that humans cant avoid Absolute Concentration, for it would mean the loss of their energy source. Paradoxically, Absolute Concentration will inevitably, obviously, destroy human individuality, and although it is the fate of humanity, the future from which humans draw the energy that propels their progressive existence, they refuse to accept that fate, not by slowing down their collective concentration, but by experimenting with alternative distributions of individual members of the population and their self replicates. The only solution to averting the total disintegration of absolute entropic fate of individuality is to simultaneously bring Earth to Absolute Concentration using self replicates. The self replicate is traded with the real human and sent into the future to become one collectivized conscious organism of starpower magnitude, while the real living humans move backwards in time towards a proto-existence, loosening their

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grip on the pinnacle of their technology synthetic life and becoming again one with the Earth. It is difficult to make the transition, however, because they have, due to the evolutionary effects of anthropospheric existence, evolved to be totally reliant on the anthropospheric network, and thus can not live without it. To go back would be like removing the umbilical chord of an organism in utero. So choose die a collective death of anthropospheric malnourishment, or suffer the dispersal of individuality. Conflict exists. On the Self-Replicate: People no longer interact in the way they were designed to by their physical evolution. During the transition from physical evolution to mental, the human body ceased to evolve (by its naturally selective definition), experiencing instead a change in mental constructs and eventually in collective interaction. Having developed the self-replicate, people could experience omni-spatial presence. They work while, at the same time, playing. The total separation of self into multiple entities allowed for unimaginable developments in energy use, while at the same time encouraging interpersonal interaction to increase to the point of full integration. Everyone can interact with everyone else all the time, at the same time in fact, outside time. Experience, in a way, is shared rather than lived, in the ancient sense of the word. This great system of human life is managed by the Exogenerational Body. This limited group is responsible for the maintenance of our collective life form. They redesign the anthropic network and redistribute its nodes as necessary. They also create vast diversions for the spiritual health of the people. Collectively, these diversions are called The Illusion. While many self-replicates perform the work necessary to uphold our way of life, others can at the same time commune in the warmth of their own chosen groups of conscious entities. The composite of all ones choices within and between these networks and throughout all of ones self replicates, is called ones life the people youve met, the things youve done, all of those are offered to you and either acquired or non-preferred, attracted or repelled. Technically, there are no new experiences offered within this illusion, only

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shared experiences endlessly redistributed. People come and go, in unifying cycles called Generations, but their selfreplicates will always be bound within the anthroposphere, sharing the Great Experience. The only difference is that choice is not available there is no acquisition or nonpreference existence simply sways to and fro throughout the sphere, riding on the currents of the universe that have been focused by the collective purpose of humankind. On Decisions: Members of the Exogenerational Body dont die in the way of the rest of the population, for they need the continued ability to make decisions. Beyond the anthroposphere is a governing system Gravity powered by the non-physical forces of the universe, pushing and pulling at the trajectory of existence. In order to move forward, humanity needs to make decisions, thus exercising their gravitational prowess. They will always end up in the same position on the trajectory regardless, in their own sphere of collective existence, like the climbing of a rope, hand over hand, each decision advances us one grasp further towards our end. This overseeing group of choice-makers, the Exogenerational Body, withstands the passing of the generations and the interaction within the anthroposphere. They feed their spiritual necessities from the excess energy in the system; no more and no less is ever taken than that which is required, and its use is always programmed into the total equilibrium of all life. For this group, the most critical of consideration is energy transference. Out of moral reciprocity for being in complete charge of an essential life-system, these officials are of a process of reverse evolution. They are descendants of their future selves. It is always in the best interest of the officials to do for the Greater Good of their ancestors to come, as they would simply cease to exist otherwise. The most distinguishing categorization of this exogenic body is that they exist within time. In time, things change, thus decisions are required. For the rest, outside of time, they dont have the need to, nor could they, make decisions theirs are more like preferences. As no new experiences are added to the network (they are only redistributed amongst humans), there is no need to choose, in a timewise sense of the word. The

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choices of the population at large are just a shifting of experience from one to another, whereas the choices of the overseeing council are the manifestation of a foothold that we use to advance, collectively, as a life form. As one development led to another, Hassams personal life changed trajectory, one arc at a time, until he faced a moment of extreme disequilibrium. He searched further, now seeking rest from his discomfort. His discomfort now became inflamed, the path before him splintered into one thousand directions, one of them becoming, reluctantly, the only possible way. It is said that general population does not make decisions. Something else, then, must have sent him forward.

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Chapter 2 ESCAPE Transmission 011.003.026 <Lower Body> Redistribution and Partial Recognition Living Humans are the locus of all Self Replicates. Lifeforce is sustained by living energy distributed via the anthropic network. The Greatest Good grown from the fertile fields of this sphere has been that of the everlasting self-replicate. Our trajectory of progressive existence has expectedly taken us to this omni-directional multiplicity of individual consciousness. Naturally, in a world without time, the living human should not have to experience such drastic interruptions in awareness as that which comes from death. Channeling awareness through the self replicate, we have now confirmed, can release the great tension of human life within a physical body. Occasionally, the redistribution of the anthropospheric population is necessary to more effectively redirect universal throughput. This is a simple matter relative to the greater system. Proto-generational population, however, present a more complex function currently being handled by a number of different compartments. Due to the residual emanations of energy flow within the anthroposphere, the potential for quasi-existence has been evidenced in areas located outside of anthropospheric limits. As we struggle with the extinction of peak Proto-Generational Population, redistribution to these locations has undergone substantial experimentation. Transitioning protogenerational humans to extraanthropospheric existence is not executed without interruption to awareness, and does not yield full recognition. Piecing the Puzzle completely is beyond our ability given the supply of universal energy available at our position. We will continue extra-anthropospheric redistribution, as we are certain that such matters as partial recognition will be resolved at a further position in our progressive existence.

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Transmission 011.003.026 <Upper Body> Proto-Generation Extinction and Potential for Uninterrupted, Non-interactive Self-Replicate Existence We are approaching a climactic moment in the use of selfreplicates to sustain uninterrupted transition beyond generational extinction. The size of the proto-generational population requiring extinction is reaching its critical point. The system capacity required to provide synthetic lifeforce for these members is already shifting our center of flux outside of its manageable position. Attempts to remedy this development have fallen into two basic categories. One solution-path is to rearrange energy flows for greater deliver-efficiency. This option provides only temporary augmentation. The other group of potential solutions share in common their focus on the use of self-replicates, though differing from the operations used regarding Generational Population. Having spent most of their lives via the self replicate, the generational population shifts their existence during their lifetime, not at the moment of extinction. This factors the required energy into smaller, more easily manageable units. Proto-Generational Population, in contrast, find self-replication to be an unnatural way of existence, and forego its practice (when in fact it exacts a strain of mental fortitude they lack by way of their less developed mental evolution). Coupled with the long portion of their lives lived prior to its discovery, their transition to synthetic existence upon extinction requires massive amounts of surplus energy, cancelling all potential operations aside from hybridized partial reconfiguration. The latter alternative solution-path allows access to protogenerational existence as self-replicates. To interact in the anthroposphere requires direct energy access, whereas noninteractive existence needs only secondary energy, this being provided in excess via living entities in memory of the extinguished. Willing experimental proto-generational humans have proven thus far the possibility of uninterrupted transition that is to say, they need no reconfiguration for continued existence. Operations lack full verification at this point, as willing participants tend to lack reciprocating living memory centers. Exogenerational Body members do not adequately substitute for living memory, nor does any member of Generational Population that did not know the volunteer.

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Results have proven effective transference, but not sustained synthetic existence. We expect an unprecedented breakthrough design postulate negating the need for previously connected living memory centers by mirroring the protogen member itself as an entity in star-time. This postulate is scheduled according to universal coincidence; its surfacing is not certain, as the center of flux has been shifting increasingly distant from its ideal position. Rust Finegold: Bioremediation and Exogenerational Status Rust Finegold would never be a creator. He had been working hard at his trade for, what was soon to be, a lifetime. He was a schematatech. His fascination with the structures of perception and cognition in the anthroposphere began early in his life. He secured a position as apprentice to a member of the Exogenerational Body. His charge was, from that point on, to arrange and rearrange the schematic framework of the anthroposphere. Some apprenticeships awarded exgen status after what, for many, have been only ten earthyears. Rust had been at it longer, and yet his progression was becoming less and less prosperous. The schematic apparatus was under great stress during his tenure there, and things were only getting more difficult to handle for his outdating breed. The more recent entrants had such a focused attention that they made Rust look like an amateur, and their superiority overshadowed him with every setting sun. Rust was no genius, no wonder. He was fortunate enough to gain a position working for the Exogenerational Body, and hardworking enough to maintain it. But alas, he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, as they used to say. His fate was certain, and soon to be final. His position would become unusual and certainly tragic by human population standards, but a natural cycle-product of exogenerational existence nonetheless. When contracting an apprenticeship, as he had, and working at it for such time, as he did, to finally fail meant a harsh and, ultimately, impossible transition back to anthropospheric life. The consensually determined protocol for such a transition was bioremediation. He would become like a tree, living a proto-existence in preparation for re-entry. He would see them on his way to

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work, along the roadside, standing tall, basking in the warmth of the sun and the blue of the sky, performing a majestic, perfected duty. He knew, from a point too close to the beginning to willfully admit, that he would one day be there, with them, continuing in his support for all life, albeit now in the capillary action of his plant fibers. To attempt exogenerational status was a risky intention. The door behind doesnt close; it disappears altogether. Rust, as so many others, competitively outbred, would never find his way back. His life would yet be remembered, every year when his new leaves grew into branches, and when the old leaves fall to the earth.

Neither Hassam, nor any active human had ever experienced such a thing. He was certain that he was witnessing an unprecedented event in human history. He was wrong, of course. History was a cold idea by now, and humans had very well experience for this phenomenon. Yet Hassam was somewhat correct in his intuition; for them, it had happened in reverse. Him, he was struck where he stood, paralyzed by severe cognition deficiency. In conjunction, there was a growing torrent of both sensory and ultrasensory information coming towards him, making him less and less capable of making sense out of any of it. Penetrating slowly into his wakefulness came the repetitious barking of packs of dogs alongside him in the vast, slightly declining landscape. Their barking, in its repetition, gave him something audio-tangible to hold on to, and so his awareness began coming back with every punch of their barking pattern. The cadence and rhythm of their projections was at times a form of natural music, and at others only a notch higher on the staggering torrent spreading towards him. There were dozens of dogs at first, and then hundreds, all barking, breathlessly, exasperatingly. He could not see the thing that they warned of. From the direction

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towards which they projected, birds came swinging and cruising at swift speeds and in the thousands: ducks and geese flying high and smaller birds staying low to the ground, the disturbed fluctuation of their patterns making the moment all the more difficult to comprehend, and yet somehow crystallized in its anticipation. He focused his awareness, tightening his grip, reigning in all that he could see, hear, feel, fighting, indomitably, to see that which was coming towards them. Still, he could not move. He was all awareness now. He tuned his perceptive channels, sharpening his vision, but could only see the thousands of birds speeding away. His other senses took over, but his awareness was still a sea of confusion, punctuated with moments of sensations that came to him in unrelated pieces, until all of the sudden, he felt something. Like a force, or a breeze, but it was cold and wet and slow moving and all the sounds faded away except for a trembling that seemed to come from the earth itself and the sky above at the same time, and it sped up its pitch a deep, boneshaking growl, paired with a scratching, increasingly screeching howl. It was like wind, the sounds, but it didnt move in synchronicity with the force he felt on his face and body. Everything was alien. Soon all of his vision faded away and before him he saw only clouds, but more perfectly rounded, and only those bulbous forms, as the ground had by now disappeared. The sky was still blue and the clouds grey and white, but growing, tremendously larger until he truly felt his physical body disappear, his awareness unrestricted by space and time, a transition that, for a human, would terrify beyond disengagement, beyond any feeling a body could feel, like being fragmented into useless dust of the universe, yet reaching, grasping, gasping to hold it together, to maintain purpose, intent, existence. A pressure mounted on his awareness, the force, and the rumbling and the growing size of the white shapes until they took over the blue sky and even the grey shadows, and his awareness had, finally, at this moment, reached its limit. A vacuum, like the silence after the ringing bell has gone away to the open sky, he felt nothing. But only for that moment. The vacuum began its oppositional descent. Everything came smashing together. Forms rushed, tumbling, and crashing away from him, forming larger and larger pieces

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and smashing into each other making sounds that crashed his eardrums and harassed his body violently. He was no longer a human. Humans were no longer there. Only him.

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Chapter 3 INTENT TRAUMA: When will it end When will I wake up I cant breathe Trauma I wake up with a cold hand clenching my throat. My skin is soaking wet, and my head is spinning. My hair hurts. I am delirious. I am restless at all times. Hopeless. I dream of peace, and am smashed in the face with the cold, bony hand of reality over and over and over. I suffocate on my own blood gasping polluted air, my eyes sting trying to see. I wake up into a nightmare, over and over and over again. The pain in my back wont go away. It will be there Forever. The day gets worse and worse and worse. From the moment my eyes open and my mind Snaps into consciousness with a ripple of pain in my back to this time now, when I furiously write to seal my thoughts shut and prepare for sleep that will be mercilessly

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ripped from my warm, glowing dreams; I suffer, intolerably, unbearably, a mental anguish, seasoned with physical burning and a host of discomforts all psycho-somatic, mental and physical, a teeth-shredding bloodfest, wrestling for dominance: mental anguish that turns to physical pain that burns to mental anguish and back and again. No reconciliation, no resolution. No hope. No peace. No end. His story would not be told before it became legend, for his arena may well have been in another place, in another time, offering a story incommunicable to any living human within the Anthroposphere or without. He was thus alone in his journey, which made it worse, and he was soon to find out the difference that had taken him astray from his fellow inhabitants of the Outer Fringe.

TRAVEL:

The first thing he felt was the emptiness, then loneliness. He was an endpoint. Not the passing of awareness, but stopping. He was a vessel, separate from the world, to be filled, and for now, full of nothing. An amalgamation, encapsulation, of antimatter awaiting a catalyst, a charge from which something would spring. And the grain of expectation, the small energy of anticipation was his own awareness of this separation. This imagination bubble, yet to be a physical thing, not reacting, not observing, not. Just a bunch of nothingness inside a bigger bunch of nothingness. But his awareness reached out, recoiling at its boundary, and executing transmission of that first bit of data. The subsequent cascade of crackling, the reverse-popping sensation became retained explosions, contained in the myriad granules massing, compounding, transforming. Through time, he sprang like a shot from one end to the other and back. Confusion, erratic repetition, convulsory gyrations shook and shocked him unexpectedly

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and unpredictably. The shots became slower, and fell into a rhythm, complex still, but reassuring in its organization. It became slower, slower until the individual bands of time stretched apart from each other, releasing a deafening, deep, slowly vacillating tremor and then his body came to him and with it gravity and with that the crushing, breath-squeezing force of existence in this extra-anthropospheric world. He gasped and gasped more breathlessly for a single moment of pause but was crushed and rattled so defeatingly, so uncontrollably. He was paralyzed, living death, watching his own self extinguished by the indomitable force of reality. Then it was gone. He lost, and accepted his loss. At this, he sighed a grieving, lossful sigh, and in this, his first breath of his new existence came to him, not out of the monodirectional will to live his was not enough but out of the resolve of acceptance. In these situations, your will to live can never be as strong, as your lack of will to fight. In it, the universe speaks your language, translates for you, assimilating you by a means no mind can yet understand. And he did not understand, but he proceeded to perform the first act of extra-anthropospheric existence: He decided to keep going. As it turns out, feeding on the unfamiliar nodes of ancestral thought as he had done so many times prior to his escape had proven its worth. But they were no defense against the immediate task set before him. Hassam had undergone a transition that no human had ever experienced. For him, he chose self-extrication as an alternative to spending his life in the hands of that overseeing group of humans. They are no different than me. To trust my life in their hands? Id rather have my own. And so he left. It was expected to be a hardship one could not prepare for. But others had done this. Selfextrication was becoming, unfortunately, more common among general population. Unbeknownst to Hassam, however, his interactions with ancestral thought, especially those of his own lineage, had initiated a rapid transformation of his core of intent, a silent shadow eclipsing his vision, rendering an exact replica, representing the reality and replacing that which it simulated

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with a new focus of purpose and of being. Because of this, his struggle would be paramount, and like no other. And though much of this entanglement was put before him by acryptocratic means, it was unbeknownst to Hassam, and particularly to the Exogenerational Body itself, that said body had prepared a conditional engagement, purpose being to inhibit full manifestation of his extra-anthropospheric existence. Hassam had now been officially self-extricated. He joined many others, some of whom were tempted there inceptively, some of whom were redistributed. All of them, yet, had faced the same wild, bodily refusal to submit and assimilate into this alien world. Having come from the anthroposphere, these folk had no preparation for such an existence, tethered to the earth, limited to a physical body. It was worse for anthropogenic self-extricates and notsomuch for redistributed protogen, as they had tasted once this life of gravity. Their bodies had not been deprived, at least in its earlier years, of its pulling, pressing forces, making its return less severe. Hassam, as a member of the General Population, spent his first day in the extra-anthroposphere in complete agony. The pain experienced went beyond that of the physical, living body. It was the inability to achieve recognition, to make any sense out of any things that wreaked absolute havoc on his mind. His body was stretched and squeezed in ways he had never known or wanted to know, but it was the blurring of distinction, the loss of clarity that set the mind insane. No up or down, front or back, in or out. He curled up in protection, extended his muscles in preparation. But nothing ever happened, just a stream of confusion and bewilderment and despair. By the second day, he could tell where the ground was and he could feel the pain growing in his stomach and of course in his sandpapered mouth. Pain was just as extreme, only more acute than the previous day. It wasnt his entire body, but specific places; not an unpunctuated wave of madness but a series of repeatedly unfolding, developing and crushing tragedies. By the third day he was desperately hungry and though the forces of physical existence commanded his body with total helpless obedience, the pain from thirst grew utterly irresistible, threatening the function of all other processes. The

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inside of his body seemed to rub together gratingly, creating such a friction as to ignite his insides until his breath expelled flames and inhaled frozen choking air. He didnt know what he would do, but he resolved to rise up from his geotropic position, and he did, but all the blood in his body did not, and he fell back to the earth. Somewhere between the earth and the sky, thats where you have to be. You will want to stay down, saving this life for those who are worthy. You will want to rise above, leaving the struggle for the suckers stupid enough to submit. But no, you must stay in between. That is where the real stuff happens. He got up once more, this time successfully. Still, he could not see, could not hear. He was pushed forwards by a primal force that reminded him of the motion of the single-celled organisms he extracted in his service duty. His mind was forming, as such memory and internal recognition was previously totally absent. Shortly after standing up, he was back crawling on the ground, and shortly after dying of thirst he was submerged head first in a pool, choking himself to a sharper awareness, filling his body with life-nourishing liquid. He coughed and spit and took deep breaths in between gulps and his head came out of the water and his face, dripping with satiation looked up and for the first time he saw something in the blank nothingness of his recognition, the most recognizable, most settling and yet most frightening of all somethings other humans. They were non-threatening and not surprised and he took their cue. All of his senses had returned and he could hear them speaking quietly, and see their figures swaying gently. He could hear welcoming tones and a sturdy voice spoke and a hand reached out to contact him. His senses, for that brief moment sharpened and penetrated into the minds of the others and he felt their intent and for that fleeting moment, he felt the interconnectedness between them. These people fed off of each other, they supported each other. They reached out to welcome him into their group, but with the same swiftness that moment of inter-gravitational insight came, it receded. His vision went blank and the voices silent and the water no longer splashed his skin. He drifted off. He came back. They pulled at him, consoling him with their uniquely comforting human sounds, embracing him with their genuine care. But alas, the support with which they, together,

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upheld this vicious reality, the way they opened-up and extended to him, collapsed. He receded again into a vacuum of consciousness; he could actually hear their voices and see their faces fading away. Memory of all human interaction disappeared. He was alone. He was left with a single thought in his mind the collectivized reality that supported recognition in this world was inaccessible to him. Why and how were not there, nor any other question, only this thought, this fact, this thing that was hiding in the shadow of his intent, keeping itself secret until this moment. Yes, his struggle would be different. This day was over. Another change would arise tomorrow. He would be left by these welcoming folk to find his own way. They were perplexed as well, but had matters of their own to attend. He would, from-this-point-on, exist in absence of the collective spirit of human interaction. This was not what he expected. This was the unknown the worse place to be, alone. Transmission 012.002.003 <Upper Body> Self-Induction Inhibitor Placement Corrupt data feed near Proxima Santafa has evidenced highentropy self-induction of extricate origin. The atypical protocol for extricate-generated induction has kept pointsource outside of scanning capability limits. Projected existence remains within the acceptable range required for successful redistribution in that region, as throughput reduction will be in effect there indefinitely. However, tangible data corruption is propagating through concentric zones of habitation. Unchecked, this recurring mechanism has traced-causation in stable-settlement interference. Stable settlements, as primary hubs for full recognition of redistributed population, will become more vulnerable to selfinduced interference with the expected increase in flux amongst its inhabitants. Retro-active exocate placement has been initiated. Tangenttuned schematic matching will increase intent encapsulation capabilities upon initial contact, which is expected in the next respective day-cycle. Point-source tracing of retro-active placement is not accessible in this instance, leaving us to rely solely on identifiable data

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corruption streaming through the six major settlements on the North/South geologic contiguity. Outer Fringe disruption is, obviously, outside of our purview, due to our intensity of focus on the primary redistribution hubs. This arrangement spreads an immense vector field, with the subsequent potential for volatile and memory-latent redirection tied to the transition between Proxima Santafa and its geochronometrical neighboring stable-settlements, of which there are two. The results of this operation will be evasive, and our window of reaction, once open, will close swiftly. Contingent response protocol is being simulated. Outcomes are not in-synch with expected projection. Duplicative exocate placement is, because of the datastream deadzones involved in this operation, not tangible in potential trajectories. The Upper Body in regards to this operation is currently on high-alertness. His steps were unsure and he stumbled over his feet. All of the needs of his body raced towards at once, every moment coming again, all at the same brute force, making it impossible to attend to any one. This made walking difficult and thinking non-existent. He felt himself along, at times, with his hands. In times of clarity he could see a few steps in front of him, taking precaution against the sudden weight distribution of his lanky, unsynchronized limbs. Sometimes he fell to the ground by mistake, sometimes he fell on purpose. He continued nonetheless. A day passes, and another. His intuition told him to head outwards from his point of entry, as it would always be likely to pass others through as well, creating a greater disturbance more easily detected. Hassam was yet unaware, but he had come through the most highly concentrated geographic position in use, a sign of either great stupidity or great stamina, as it was that the higher the volume, the more disintegratingly dissociative the force of extrication. So either fortunately or unfortunately, his was yet to decide, he felt intuitively that he should leave this place, and make haste, for there was a fear coming for him, the true nature of which he was wholly unprepared for in anticipation, but provided for in life-forcing formidability.

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He found energy flows by their characteristic greenish phosphorescence in the morning sky and followed alongside. His path happened to be flanked on the other side by a massive geologic uprising, covered in green pompets and blisters and dimples. For all of his lack of cognition, he figured he could follow this path with ease, and so he moved forward, slowly at first, often losing his focus, forgetting his purpose, but later more steadily, as with the rising and beaming of the sun came his only partner in defense, his only multiplier of will, that energy from a star. He moved closer and closer to the illuminating energy flows and could now make out their parasitic neighbors, the network of a disorganized, diaphanous web, flickering in buzzing shocks and hissing lulls, not glowing like its host. The Protoflows, as they were, originated anthropically, were a human invention of utter survival. The only usable energy form outside of the anthroposphere, it is emanated as a residual of the exchange between extricated humans. Faced with the impossibility of living in gravity, humans did what only they could ever do they came together, and in their gathering generated a primitive form of collective cognition. With it they could stand on solid ground, and build a protective space, and with the swiftest of ingenuity, they could even ferment their own culture, if only a transitory passing. Hassam was not part of their organizational apparatus. His piece was from another puzzle, apparently. He shied away from entering their comforting places of rest, and eventually moved closer to the other-flanking mountain. Within two days of forward momentum, he had enough in him to begin ascending the slopes, and by the third day he woke up within clear sight of the peak, and so later went to sleep under its moonlit shadow. Sunrise was difficult at first. To rise with the sun was hard enough, but in order to cover enough distance from the entry point, Hassam had to force himself awake in the pre-dawn darkness. There was a stillness, into which every move threatened disruption. He could barely see regardless of light level, as his cognition was still fluctuating between clarity and disorder. But now in this total silence and phantasmagorical

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light, he had to get himself together, drawing up all his energy to release, first, that initial explosion to intent execution. That release of will was imperative to his purpose that day and every day. It was the building up to it, the latent growth of intent, which, under other, more anthropic conditions, would be provided at no effort. In the anthre, you dont want; you just change direction. This storing up of will, this building up of purpose, of a story that will serve as justification for your actions, your defense against the constant struggle between the two-headed monster of reality. He struggled to support his reasons for progressing. All around him was hopelessness, but really it was nothingness, waiting to become. The sun would not do it for him, yet he could not wait. So he focused his inner attention, squeezing it down, further and further, a spring, wanting to be at rest. With every scene of the narrative complete, with every layer of sureness, the will expands, until with the first physical manifestation it explodes, devouring the earth and beyond. And he snapped and the awareness came rushing in, sensations by the millions, rushing, shapeshifting, making no sense at first, just sparkles and rattles but then becoming things splitting into groups and dropping into categories, the ten thousand things begin to make sense, the picture becomes clearer. The light on the horizon grows and he can feel his body, the weight of it, its weightlessness. He stretches it and shakes it and grows around him a bubble the size of himself and he breathes in to assimilate the data, and he breathes out, to equalize the pressure, and he stares straight ahead and watches the landscape come into focus. His awareness, if it were a tree, would have its roots and branches now reaching out to the limits of his vision. All that he could see before him were now real. That morning he gathered his external graspability and touched upon all of the sensations that afforded themselves to him. After a long moment of study, he could decipher a pattern, a line in the very distant landscape, waving in and out the sinusoidal path of extrication leading right from his point of entry to fan out into the disarray of protoflows. Here, he became cognizant of the volume passing through his own point of entry; it was quite substantial. He had no idea, to

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this point, the amount of humans coming through, and he subdued his surprise, and it extended itself further, his surprise, at thinking of all the other points of coming-in. How many humans were there, leaving the anthroposphere, crushing their will, unremittingly, and most importantly, how did they find themselves here; was it by choice, or by force? And then he remembered, humans dont exactly make decisions in the anthroposphere. They are pulled by the universe, or so they believe. But that was an illusion, one that, for Hassam, was now becoming more transparent by the day. And the passing of days continued, and he noticed that as his cognition grew and his path extended outwards, that when he surveyed the landscape, he didnt surf along the incoming data, as he was familiar with in his prior existence, but instead, when drawing in on the attention of a thing, he focused on the reciprocal pulling of subject to object. He saw the path in front of him and he pulled himself along, while at the same time, the path itself opened up for him and in doing so, drew him into it. There was a mutual desire for connection, the world wanted to be known by him, for it was him. Dreams The air that night was cold, and he breathed it in deeply, charging and flushing his body of the residual cognition of the day. He looked forward to this moment before sleep; it was the last moment before he fell into that catatonic-like state of the nightmind, and at this moment he felt peace. He enjoyed that moment, and then he was lost. Hassam found himself in a park, one he knew from his youth. There were people he recognized, but they were much younger. His awareness expanded further and he found that in the park, the fields and playthings he had known were gone, or rather, it seemed, they had never been. Wild animals grazed on the grass where he once played games. At this, his awareness pulsed, rising to a higher pitch than he had ever been exposed to in normal cognition. He then realized that he was in the past and he began to know the park, not as he had known it in his youth, but in a universal way. He became the park, took on its age, its agelessness. He bounced under the feet of his young friends and watched itself, its trees, its fences, it was himself,

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and he was, again, lost, this time in a place he knew before memory. This was before time. When he awoke, though he had slumbered longer than expected, he found comfort in that the sun had risen to a preferable height and was greeting him with reassuring rays of warmth. He could feel warmth now, and with it a whole agenda of sensations competing for indulgence. His cognition was strong. He continued, piecing together the intricate patterns of his cognition one day at a time, re-establishing the linkage of individual-universal energy, and stretching on the chords of the earths geo-centric force. His cognition was such that he could reach both ahead and behind, and so now he could follow his trajectory in reflection THOUGHT: Life was full of itself. That is something all humans know. Many things, even very important things, have been lost through our interconnectedness. But this, this truth remains. And such were the things he was told. Upanishads, shamans and Shangri-las; there was no end to the things that came in his way in meandering the anthropic network. Dirty Nodes Hassam repeatedly stumbled upon dirty nodes, as they were called: anthropospheric anomalies where bundles of memory gathered for what registered distributively as having no traceable purpose. Within the network, energy and awareness circulated freely, requiring only the gentle adjustments managed by distribution oversight. In certain areas, however, memory-type awareness gathered, slowing the flow of circulation. The disturbance created at such positions was insignificant, and regulated with little effort oversight. People like Hassam never intended to move toward these nodes, but it was more than chance that he found himself interacting with their musty, patina-polished characters. Furthermore, having been relieved of his service duty at such an early stage in his generational existence, he found himself retuning to such places on a more frequent basis. It was as if his gravity was mutually attracted to this memory-type awareness, or rather,

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that he became more aware of their symbiotic relationship and the spiritual sustenance it offered. It used to be already built-in. Now we have to fabricate it. Weve been separated, so we have to construct a bridge, to do it for real, in our new reality. But because of this fabrication, the result tends to come off as fake, phony, constructed, fabricated. Go figure. The more we forget, the harder we try. And every thought created a new question, that would continue to answer itself, and again. -How were they convinced? -Well, its simple. The human body and the mind are both amazing things and we are grateful that life has given itself to us in these ways. So it goes like this: imagine youre walking in the woods now walking itself is staggeringly complex kinesthetically, but lets take that for granted and so you breathe deep and smell and hear and see everything around you, and yet, for all that, your mind can be somewhere else entirely, somewhere completely different, experiencing other sensations, and all this happens to be very commonplace to us. But it gets better because you can be doing this being in one place with your body, and another with your mind and not have to control either one! Theyre both basically running on the instructions youve written with your lifes experience and those of your ancestry. So they say: Well take your life, and make it a program thats what they called a binary decision sequence, programs and you can execute however many you want and update them however much you want. But theres a flip. Yes, the reversal is that it isnt the body in the physical world thats replicated with the mind as a locus. The body becomes home base. Right, the body becomes the control center and so the world, the multiplicity of experience takes place all in the mind The Anthroposphere. Well, actually, at that point it was the pre-anthropospheric era they were in. I am The Anthroposphere. You are the anthroposphere. I cant even imagine making that kind of deal. You cant even imagine having only one you. As The Anthroposphere you dont have access to their thoughts yours is only to move forward.

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But Hassam did have access. He could follow writtenthought, unlike most of his generation. That is why he asked so many questions of his ancestors and his people. Because theyre a rigid, fast growth organism developed before the use of central processing units. Even the smallest insect exerts some force on the direct flow of universal energy current, thus resisting, even in the slightest, that pull of human will, that bending towards our own purpose. From that, of course comes the reward. Its just pure entertainment and research when done with plants and such. A personal hobby. Sure. In general though, we work on the biological scale. Everything else is manipulated exogenerationally. So what then about human creation at the anthropological scale? Only as a collective, nothing individual. I may be wrong, but the idea is an ontological contradiction. The whole form of anthropogenesis is based on the collective will. It is a collection, just as a tree is a collection of individual cellular processing units, for example. It is because they work together, sans self-control and sans especially self disruption sequencing. Exogenic manipulation isnt executed by individual intent either; they are only living-in-reverse, kept running by the continuation of their self-existence. They are tethered in this way, trailing along, on a them that is yet-tocome. They dont overtly make decisions either; they just follow themselves into the future. For them, to make a decision, which implies potentially making a wrong decision, is also an ontological contradiction. They would cease to exist upon misaligned progression; one subtle waver, a single misstep and the horse of their carriage disappears. Then why do we call them creators, and we are not? Right. When you get down to it, they are no more than we are. They pull on the strings of anthropospheric existence, but not by their own design. Only because they feel it on their fingers do they say they have done it. It was really someone else. If it was someone else, he wondered who. Upon discussing the Fringe, the dialogue unfolded, though shifting between characters:

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-Humans are still reliant on that idea of a body. Things can only be real if there is a body to make it tangible. Thats something we havent bred out. The whole three dimension thing it doesnt have to look like that. Our minds are so complex that its just easier to keep that up. Whether we need it or not, making things tangible enhances the experience, so thats why we do it, or rather, have it done to us. -So what are they doing when they get extricated, or extinguished? Are they just settling for a less real life? -It seems weve already settled. Not me so much as you, and its not like youve done it on purpose. Having been born into it, you never made the decision, never noticed the difference. As for me, I can see it. Thats why we dont do the self-rep thing like you. -But how could you be so content with one life, when you can instead have so many? -More isnt always better. This is what we know; this is how we do it. -So what about this new redistribution? Isnt it forcing you into that lesser way of life? -Its different, its not easy for me to express to you, because you were born into this. In a way, youve evolved past it, we designed into you, programmed you to use this, and use it well. -So well in fact -Yes, so well in fact, that for you to think about it hurts. -And it does -But it doesnt mean the same thing to us. We cant change ourselves. Not like you. Did you ever wonder why you can genetically modify yourselves and we cant? You cant even imagine what thats like, thats why you dont think about it. -Thats basically ancestral memory, ancestral thought. -Yeah, to you it is. This was a giant step for humans, a chasm that can not be easily spanned to travel back from. Weve come a long way, and turning back is never a part of the story. -So what are you saying, about the Fringe, I mean. -I mean that when we get sent out there, its not the end, the way you know it. Its more like things as usual, for us. We have a body, we live, with eachother. That anthre-jam is good stuff, I wont deny that. We appreciate the conde nser infrastructure thats been set up. To me

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-Thats what Im talking about, who cares about anthropic energy when your life has been taken away! -Pause. -Pause. -Correct that. You need to think in mirrors. Our life is not being taken away. It is your death that was taken away when you were born into this world. For me, I never expected to live forever. Im comfortable with that. Its what I know; its what Ive seen all my life. Its expected. Life continues to be real for me, inside or outside. My life will always be real. -I think its a sorry tradeoff. I think its the wrong way to do this whole thing. You cant take away a woodpeckers wings, and then give it a picture of a tree, and say, here, you can still have it -This is why you cant catch me. Youre in the photograph. Im on the other side of the camera. This is all an illusion. I can be in this or outside of it, it doesnt matter to me. -Well if Im wrong, then why the big deal about it, as you say, because we sure dont have this transmitted? -Look, all you need to know is that we make it possible for you to come out, why the heck you would want to, Ill never know. But its our complacency with your tradeoff that has set up this place. Its our living together, in the way we know how, that gives you the ground you walk on out there. Think about whats been going on around here and you should be able to figure out why its a big deal, and especially why you havent been hearing about it. I cant tell you everything; sometimes you have to try and think for yourself. Pretty outdated concept for my Generation, said the Ungrateful Youth to the Old Has-Been. Hassam knew of ancient wisdom and the fading ways of the Proto Generations, but with his frequent interactions at the dirty nodes, he found himself penetrating and permeating deeper into their particular interface. He had a special connection with these positions, he thought. He felt a certain fittingness in their projections. Hassam also carried with him personal artifacts, handed down through his lineage beyond the protogenerations. These bundles of writtenthought worked to integrate him further into the dirty nodes, and made him more compatible with their interface, giving him more understanding of their quasi-articulated thought.

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He always wondered why so many others had no interest in the ancestral thoughts of their lineage, and why the more intelligent network managers made no efforts to make more accessible the meanderings of memory-thoughts. Couldnt they open them up? Wouldnt that negate the anomaly of these anthropospheric echoes? You think too much, for a human with such little experience, for a thought with such little power, for a time with such little patience. Sure he thought too much, and still waters run deep. Hassams meanderings were disruptive to the undercurrent, not the visible, superficial current ubiquitous and everpresent to general population. In the deep cracks and crevices of anthropic fabric he dislodged foundationary thoughts, cemented thoughts upon which evolution progressed; there, rearranging the footholds of his forefathers and dangerously manipulating his own potential for reacting and assimilating in regards to his own way, he worked well beneath detection. Socially, he was left alone on account of his seriousness and his otherwise amicable nature. He seemed to know what he was doing and to be comfortable with himself and everyone else at all times, and so his actions were rarely construed as conflicting or disruptive. It was not his actions so much as his thoughts, however, that ran contrary to his counterparts. In his mind he was storing up lifetimes of knowledge through outdated forms of communication, recycling ideas in a potent brew of volatile possibility. But he came across as nonthreatening and so it was a surprise both to himself and to the others, that he would find himself in such a position. In the anthroposphere, and for his direct forefather in the time of transition from two-dimensional projected existence, Hassam, like every other, went around without any sensation of his own intent. In his forefathers time, the joys and trappings of reality had become so engineered that people willingly followed the illusion, knowing it was so, but believing so much in it as wondrous evidence of divine provision, or was it the creative powers of human will, that they trusted its subtle guidance as they tread this way and that. Upon transition to the anthroposphere, the believing remained,

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but the knowing was not. The initial generation of the anthroposphere, of whom Hassam was a member, had been mentally evolved enough to ignore their force of individual will in total, in order to submit to the ultimate revolution in human consciousness, and in essence, as they were, the creators of the anthroposphere. They were it, Hassams generation. They lived entirely in it, and as one entity, sharing experience, upon sharing, upon experience; their existence was the closest thing to physical that the sphere could approximate. In wrapping themselves up this way, however, they would be insulated entirely from their physical existence and consequently, their own gravitational force. And so Hassam was unaware of his inner motives, floating from node to node, pulsating along the network. It gave him contradictory thoughts at times as to why he would continually find himself at those vacant, dried streambeds of past life and not in the vast ocean of living experience surrounding him. He would only come to know later, that it was more, in a way, that the memory sites of ancestral thought were pulling him, and he were numb, to their provocation. He imbibed of the wells of knowledge found there, transforming his mind, connecting himself to the entire trajectory of human existence. One could say, though, that he found more than he had bargained for, except that he didnt bargain, not at that time. And so, as he walked away continually from his point of entry, he digested, registering and re-registering, the writtenthought of his ancestors, now taking it on with a whole new mind. He was one unsupported by anthropospheric forces, but yet one unwrapped to the exposure of intent, the connection between the thought and the thing. As he settled into the cyclical patterns of the day-cycle here, he knew this one was coming to an end. He could feel the light from the sun fading, and with it his cognitive power. His thoughts began to jumble and toss, his path began to tremble, no longer the clear vision of the landscape ahead, no longer the crystalline foundation of midday. He was not used to this and it was exhausting. At this time of his day, when, soon, he would no longer be able to concentrate, when his thoughts would become dissociated and his intent unclear, he comforted

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himself with the ancient thoughts of his ancestors. They were written thoughts. He was always confused as to why there were those of his own people who could no longer process written thought; it was a form of time, and time was, by his people, wrapped in the fabric of the anthroposphere, one generation after another. This act of reading thought did more than comfort him in this fear-mounting position. He found strength and wisdom in words. It gave him experience, in a strange way, which he used to help him assimilate. He found an old structure made of concrete, of the time when humans built their own things directly instead of having things build themselves. It was a dam, or a bridge of sorts, crossing a small creek. With his eyes, he sought after the source of the water and followed its twists and turns into a forest of old trees. There, humanbuilt forms scattered the open swatches of scape underneath the canopy. Rusting, rotting humanbuilt forms, at one time for transportation, for recreation, but now used for nothing. What a strange idea, he thought, used for nothing. At this, his thoughts followed the creek, back to where he now was. He chose a spot next to the concrete dam and sat down comfortably and gratefully; it was becoming increasingly difficult to stand at this point. He removed from his bag the collection of written thought he had so carefully wrapped in his own fabric and placed therein. And he read Walking Contradiction Being a walking contradiction is a dangerous game. You have to appease both sides at all times. It is as if you have to split yourself in two, one for the self, and one for the others, and you have to keep them both running simultaneously at all times, but not even; its not that easy. They vacillate when youre alone, you live and think for yourself, and when youre with others, you live for others, and sometimes it flips and goes backwards. The dangerous part, the part that really scares the shit out of me, is when one side starts to fall apart, to disintegrate, and to be overtaken by the other side; when the story I have created, the argument for why I live the way I do, why I do what I do and think the way I think, that will one day stop making sense, like some huge contradiction will arise, a huge hole in my logic, a part of the story I overlooked, and at that moment, it will all fall apart.

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My whole reality will disintegrate beneath my feet and I will literally lose my mind. This almost happened once, at a younger age, following a massive reorganization of my internal thought structures. For a brief moment I began to question the validity of my personal narrative of reality and it began to fall apart. I cant express the fear that comes when one loses the ability to control the processing of external stimuli and the organization of ones internal reality. We all rely on an internal structure that organizes and upholds our reality, but this structure is not infallible, impenetrable, or enduring. There may come a time when you feel it shaking, the slightest tremor reverberates into a fear indescribable. The danger of this duality lies in the constant fluctuation between and reliance upon not one but two of these internal structures. The very nature of this contradictory system which gives it superior stability in the face of the two-front war of reality (external and internal reality), is its Achilles heel. Be prepared, be confident, and be afraid. Be very afraid. And He Was. In the events leading up to his extrication, he had become a balloon, lifting off untethered into the atmosphere. The written thought of his ancestors was, in one way, a hand, reaching out to him, trying to bring him back, or at least to hold him in place, suspended above the earth, just like everyone else. But now, Hassam faced the two-pronged reality, one of which was barely in progress outside of the anthre. The collective human network is in symbiosis with the control apparatus that regulates its flux, just as it always had been. But now that the controlling abilities were entirely anthropogenic, to leave the collective meant losing all support for perceptive organization and consequent interaction. It was as if, no, it was that the air itself was pressing on him for the first time in his life, and he had to fight, every moment, just to breathe, in, and out, and slowly, creating his own world, in order to perceive it symbiotically, in simultaneity, and in synchronicity. And yet, there was the other. The other reality wasnt even there no one was really outside the anthre. People who went

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there became non-human life form, unable to sustain the level of perceptive complexity required for human interaction and growth. This, this lack of the collective conscious, the wisdom of all life on earth, made ones own personal reality an impossible force of existentially devastating consequence. And so, Hassam was afraid. He was heading backwards, straight through the egological destruction of his ancestors, but to reach the other side, before they began their disintegration. It was worse, so much worse for him. This transition, no matter which direction through, was devastating. But, they did it together; For Hassam, he does it alone. It would have been unthinkable, he thought, for my ancestors to see this. The loss of gravity, the anthrogenic flux regulator, even the programmed organisms How did so much change in so little time, he persisted. Superstition, he thought, that my ancestors trusted as if it were science How did we get this far? And why am I going so backwards? I spent my whole service duty traveling back in time for the sake of the collective. Now Im alone, yet I feel as if Im still doing it for them, for us the going backwards, that is it takes a lot to do this. Im scared for us, for myself. They must know this is coming. They must know. But they trust. They trust the ideas of another, offering their own at the altar of progress. Theyre all balloons. They gave up their gravity and left the earth. They are always tethered by the internetwork, but they sway to and fro, free in the winds of the anthroposphere calculated, synchronized winds, almost crystallized in their impenetrable algorithm of self-replication. They may sway freely in the breezes of earth, but they are no longer of earth alone, theirs are scented with the familiar fragrance of human origin planned, systematized, controlled. In the Spirit of the Greater Good, they connect to the anthroposphere wholeheartedly, even passionately. But that was at first during the transition. Now they connect out of tradition. The trajectory of human progress constructs that persistent illusion, tradition, that changes at the same rate as the generations, so that its change goes unnoticed, like a virus, desperately and cunningly finding a way to be in this world,

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their traditions live inside them as a parasite in its host. Their synanthropic existence is flawless in that humans dont even recognize their intent. They celebrated in shedding the restrictions of gravity. Despite the fear of having an anthropospheric disruption of cataclysmic proportions became a very real event, they persisted in relieving themselves of their gravity, offering their superstitions at that altar of progress, and carving out a life for their progenitors where belief in such ideas is not only impractical, its impossible. Transmission 011.004.013 <Upper Body> Entropic Distribution As humans are strictly limited in mono-directional projected existence, our area of management does not extend beyond this system. This has generated the need for alternative detection apparatus and systems analysts in controlling the vaporous entropy of universal energy via the anthropospheric distribution network. In that the use of these residual emanations is not suitable for human cognition, its affects on the extricated user population have been and will continue to be indeterminately unpredictable. The use of energy condensers to map generational effects requires a consistent population, which is unavailable at this stage in development. Group sites experience high levels of population redistribution due to transient, non-protogenerational self-extricates making up a larger part of the groups. The range of volatility amongst the collectivized partial recognition units under analysis shows no cultural compounding agents, though they will continue to be monitored carefully. The Exogenerational Body was fully aware of the once great mysteries of the universe. At least for centuries, man had known of the cyclical nature of planetary systems and galactic whorls. Only in the short series of generations leading up to the anthroposphere did humans come to recognize the linear nature of the expansion of the universe-at-large. What set the exogenic body apart from the pre-anthropospheric era, was that they understood the interplay between these two complementary forces: the geometrically expanding

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replication of binary information, and the organic pulsation of cyclical growth. For all this knowledge, there were yet things of unknown capability, unforeseen value, and potential danger. They moved in clumsy groups of threes and fours, shifting back and forth along their path fleeing the high-concentration transition point. Lacking clear vision, they wobbled in their attempts at forward motion. Lacking the full recognition of their native existence, they were rendered incapable of making their own decisions, forgetting and remembering literally which way they were going. Their only advantage was in their numbers. Even small numbers of extricates could synthesize a basic cognition support network. The outer fringe, as he had now learned, was full of such partially configured quasihumans, fumbling together towards a meager, mutant existence. Had he wanted such companionship it would have been inaccessible to him. His purpose was for something more; his fear the inner, unknown fear came from something greater. But for all this as he was chased by the omnipotent, allencompassing motivator he was at the same time its genesis. He found, over the past days of assimilation, a cyclical exchange between the two, a circuit upon which the fear of an ultimate loss and the intent to overcome it both chased each other round and round eternally, until he could not tell which came first. He felt the smoothing and polishing of a form inside of him, one which had specific shape and dimension and even character, a form which responded to every sensation, every thought, with a consistent manifestation. He could almost touch it, the crystalline gem of impenetrable fortitude, the calculated array of algorithms that process the incoming world-at-large. He could feel its non-physical hardness and marveled at its flexibility for inexhaustible permutations. He would need more, and he was ready for something, anything, to come to his aide. But for now, his intent was real. For the first time in his life, really, he could feel himself wanting. What he wanted, he didnt know, perhaps just the ability to gravitate towards something was all he came here for; the experience alone would be unlike any other exposed to heretofore. He faced immediate devastation but his intent was clear, and with it, for only with this could he

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withstand the onslaught of reality, with it he sliced through the oppressive atmosphere of this fringe world like an invisible blade. More things would happen, more unpredictable and seemingly insurmountable things, but he was now ready to overcome, for there was now a future, and it was now his future. Passing through the timewall had critical implications for the field of reverse-engineering. Without time, of course, there is no reverse, and thus vast mysteries were revealed, via scientists and shamans, to global population. As breath-taking as it was to living humans at-the-time, the wonders of time travel were quickly superseded by the ensuing transformation of non-time. It was the first, and last, collectively and instantaneously accepted understanding of non-dimensional gravity and its relationship to energy and information. Up until that point the scientific, as it was called by scientists, and the superstitious as it was called by others such behaviors were observed and recognized-as-pattern by individuals, presented to the group, and either proven or disproven within. Following the anthropic interconnection of the digital era, and the acceleration of binary information beyond the physical capacity of real-time energy usage, all knowledge became dynamic, that is to say, not fixed. Only momentarily did an idea remain a static image of reality, but quickly became a piece in a much larger puzzle, building and building a more complex apparatus through which we viewed the universe until that final moment when the knowledge ceased to accumulate within the boundary of spacetime. It was at that catalytic moment, that all humans fully recognized the nature of their position in the larger patterns, the non-quantifiable, the unencapsulable, the things ungraspable by the hands of logic. That was when evolution itself evolved, and became an anthrogenic phenomenon. There was a slight ripple in the universe the day some animal stood up on two legs and began using their hands to grab at things. It was like a shiver, a premonition. It was the birth of technology, this moment, and in the distance, individual consciousness. With the hands, that animal eventually became human, and created the world, first together, and then in each their own image. There became my

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world and your world, and the collective -conscious shattered, and at this, the universe shattered as well, into the dimensional realities of space and time. And so, there was a reason, at one time, for humans to exist within the dimensional realities. It was through this construct that the individual was able to create an image of the world, into which is embedded the mind of the creator. The fictitious world served a purpose, and that was to permit the separation of the individual from the collective, thus opening the way for the Anthropic Era. Of course, as we now exit the world of space and time, with it we leave behind this era. -Then where do we go? -Where did the monkeys go? -They didnt. -Well then. On Transmission: -Its just like a buzz, youre brain gets fuzzy, and then you just hear it, no matter what. Its kinda strange, but you never seem to be doing anything, or anything important at least, when it comes, so you always hear it, the whole thing clear. Voices Sometimes he heard voices. But not like anthropospheric interaction, where people heard everything said by everyone if they wanted instead they were just faceless voices. And it was more like one voice, a small voice, like that of a girl. And the voice was more like a thought, or a question, as if someone were out there with him, asking the same questions he might was it just his own mind playing tricks, or desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to configure a working reality for himself to live in? Why do they do it, he would hear. And he may very well have thought the same thing, but he would never admit it by asking himself consciously. He chose not to ask questions like that anymore, not out here. He knows too much as it is. One night, while engaged in night thinking, he saw a vision. His ancestors called them dreams real things that are

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happening while your external processing is shut down. This dream in particular, and at this time, made the voices in his head all the more strange and non-trivial. -They have scratchies -Whats scratchies -Stimulant, you have to scratch your skin to get some penetration, some open blood flow, then you rub the stuff on -Why would I want to do that -You cant get anything done out here without some help from another -But why cant you help me - I am, Im telling you, these scratch tabs keep you straight, you see those other guys switching back and forth, off and on; they cant keep their feet from facing forty different ways for five minutes. - -Nevermind, you do need some help. Wait here, listen to some music, itll keep you from asking all those questions. And he heard music. And he heard the voice become part of it, thinking out loud, like a poem but with meaning and intent, like an experienced hunter aiming but with curiosity and genuine discovery in her sights -Its like humming to a song. When you hum along, it sounds great, but try it by yourself, when you have to find all the notes on your own, and you begin to struggle. -Maybe you just need to learn how to sing, Hassam thought. And then he was aware that he was communicating with the voice in his head and suddenly a face now came into his mind, staring at him, and he could feel its eyes, penetrating, and recognizing another human. The blood in his body became boiling hot, and he woke up instantly, rushing to the surface of everyday awareness as if coming from deep under water, and now gasping for air, and now slowing down, and his eyes were now open and only the world looked back at him, and his blood cooled down and pulsed normally through his body. He had fallen asleep sitting up and his bones were stifffeeling. He stretched his whole body out towards the sun and

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shook himself like an animal with fur or feathers. He stared straight ahead and tried to see the waves of pattern flowing before him. It was barely ever there now, as it always had been all his life. He now had to make it be there. He had to try and when he succeeded, he had to maintain it, against everintensifying pressure. He could only get so far. Ive got one days worth, he thought, and he was sure of himself, and that felt good. He had completely forgotten about the dream. The voice didnt even leave an echo in his mind, not even a trace, and the face was even further. All was quiet and he thought very little as he moved along on his only slightly bending pattern of straight lines.

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Chapter 4 CONJOINMENT Inevitably the fringe drew him closer. He knew they had nothing to offer him; not their density of social interaction, or even their energy condensers, could be of any help in furthering his purpose. But there was something in that place that made him want to go there. He didnt want much at this point: to eat, to rest, and to satisfy his intent, but though it seemed counter-productive, and surely counter-intuitive, he gently curved his path over the next two days to come back down the flanking ridge, across the valley in between and up close to the outer band of habitation living off of the entropic cloud of anthropospherically-directed universal energy. At the moment the sun collapsed in shadow the valleys ahead of him, Hassam was keeping close observation of a group of riders making their way into town. They rode steadily, straight ahead, yet it was after dusk, the sun had now faded and with it his grip on the sequence and relevance of events, and he wondered why the riders could make it such long distances. He knew they took stimulant, they all did, but they had something else holding them up, keeping them straight, it was the force they shared as a group, that collective energy that supported them, just like in the anthroposphere. Why was it made to be so difficult for him? Not only must he penetrate through this wall of existence alone, but it was his aloneness that made it that much more impenetrable. The riders in question vanished into the rhythmically pulsing glow of the energy condensers surrounding the perimeter of their destination. He came closer, and at this distance could hear the hissing of their energy condensers, see the flickering lights of burning fiber dipped in oil, and he could smell the flavors of fringe life, pungent to his nose, but curious to his mind. And most of all he could begin to feel the chatter of information being exchanged between humans. Accessible or not, their interaction matched various receptors, imbedded profusely throughout his memory storage. At this moment, his gravitation towards these memory-manifestations outranked his need for preparation prior to entering, and he followed his intent into their relatively elaborate cohabitation.

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His thoughts became fragments and condensed into globules and fell to the ground, in a watercourse, draining away towards the town where the riders were headed. Though he could no longer think in this condition, his body knew how to follow the course; to their destination of human collection his non-cohesive body was naturally attracted. The residual energy emanating there was enough to keep him aware at least until midnight. He became the trickling path, stretching and hunching back and forth, a total loss of control, his mind simply followed the flow, as water does, until he reached the limits of town, where he evaporated into the air and condensed onto the outer bubble of the Outer Fringe habitat. Whole once again, he looked straight ahead and entered their collective dwelling space. In this settlement camp he was immediately assailed by incongruous neophobic sensations. People of the Anthroposphere were known to discuss the genetic and cognitive mutations of the Outer Fringe, and were even known to carry on simulations and simulacrance of their twisted and awkward culture, but for all that, Hassam was struck in his passage by a brief moment of settling-in, an externally codifying, internally integrating pause. Or so he thoughtit was total synesthesia. Things were disappearing and reappearing and changing constantly from one thing to another. What happened visually would disappear and become a sound in his ears; then silence, and it would reappear again. Really, it was all just a swooshing blur, like waves in a turbulent sea. Only simple incidences and recurrences flashed through his veil of confusion. Of the recurrences, for example, he saw things turned into people and people into things. A person would sit on the ground and become a bench, and then the person would reappear, sitting on the bench, but the bench would then disappear and he would just be sitting there, on nothing; and there were all manner of things flying through the air, as projectiles coming from one place and going to another, and as orbiting or floating, and as falling and rising. People moved about bouncing from foot to foot or floating by or walking steadily on their hands but with their hands in the air, in a reversal of geotropic force. People collided and blended right

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into one another, became larger, amorphous gyrations and split apart again sending people and hair and clothes flying and floating in all directions. The ground changed color, in big spots and small spots, in different colors at different rates and where people stepped it burst and spread out and like an elastic band snapped back. Small cylindrical huts appeared, spitting out foodscraps and clouds of dust and then disappeared again leaving a flexible membrane on the ground, where at the same time, yet somewhere else, children would shoot into the air, as if from a volcano and fall out of the sky right onto the flexible pads and bounce up and down and stick out their tongues like long leather belts. Numbingly volatile apparitions slid past shifting their shape at eye-stuttering speed and they slipped right through solid modular structures that werent really solid because they organized and reorganized their pieces at varying speeds, slowing down when people walked away and speeding up when they came closer. The slow-happening things he felt, the biological, the geological; the fast-moving things he saw, the teleological, the anthrogenic. And humans werent the only things. Plants and animals and even primitive devices (this was a substantially developed fringe settlement) moved about in all manner of ways, flashing in and out of spacetime in what seemed like completely non-patterned behavior. Hassam tried to understand and explain to himself but was left with rampant random patterns stopping, changing and repeating but backwards it was all nonsense at first. His noncognition interrupted by mousetrap snaps of fully immersive sensations, he was dunked under the water and snatched back up with the same urgency. When the folkways washed over him, he was both amazed at what he saw, and concerned as to how long it would last. He had enough in him to remove himself from his body for a moment and like a waterfall he let his surroundings rush past, and float past like the mist, all the while holding on to momentary bursts of reality, and collecting them to arrange like a picture-puzzle. These people lived in disorder. But the further he entered, as he could now walk, not in the normal bipedal locomotive

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fashion, but achieving forward motion by intent only, making forward pull him, he encountered less and less disorder. He could make out steady, solid structures in the not-too-far distance and the flashes and incidences became almost calligraphically choreographed and interacted with others in a way that was too filled with purpose to be coincidental the collective recognition was bringing it all closer to itself, all the meaning, that is, and he began to make sense out of his surroundings and although this was the most alien thing he had ever experienced, soon was he in a better capacity to at least appreciate it. By now, he knew what he was getting into. He could feel their gravity pulling him in. He could now see their ongoings, but also would see it through their eyes, so that he could see everything that was happening all-at-once. He blinked in and out of this kind of seeing, and eventually could control it and use it, and he could now see as normal, normal to him that is, in all-at-once. He knew he would have a mindfull navigating this place, and so he quickly established the three things he needed and engaged them with his intent, so that he could let himself drift and yet make his way there at the same time, and so he named them: some food, a sleeping chamber, and contact and he went about their acquisition. By the time he thought twice, he was walking into people left and right. They moved about in a thousand different ways and not until he came closer to a tight group of buildings and tables and waterpools, could he make out the circuits of traffic. Finally he approached an area of calm, of settled energy and leisure, and he saw people sitting and standing and gesticulating. Like the Ancient Romans, he thought. And then he looked around, out through the eyes of each and saw the expressive gestures across from them, or felt the breeze through a series of faces to the wind until it reached him. The Breeze. Certain things dont change; these basic geological, climatological functions must remain in order for any human, in whatever stage of evolutionary development, to maintain cohesion (if not the real thing, than the memory of it at least). These things, sunrise, sunset and the rotation of the earth and their subsequent circulatory air patterns, for example, these are the rhythms of the universe and, body or

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not, perform an act that demands our entrainment. So he could count on this. It was the pooling of shadows now, but with its primordial signal of rest, he felt its opposite, for it was going to be a long night. Food he found immediately; its easy it smells. A bedroom came less quickly. People knew where everything was, they were connected in that way. Hassam could not tell the difference between buildings as they all looked drastically different, almost grotesque in their variation, and so he had to pull the trick of looking through everyones eyes until he saw what he was looking for. It was not considered uncivil to peer into the interior habitations of individuals, as they shared everything. The ancient concept of privacy, in the public sense, had been dissolved, as so much else, in the ocean of the anthroposphere. But alas, Hassam was mistaken, for he found that at times, intense resistance and emotion would come with some visions, a blurring of sight, or more abruptly, a shutting of the eyes. He continued regardless, as it was the only way he knew how to find what he was looking for under these circumstances, and it was always such a normal thing to do for him, but soon more and more resistance came and sooner the people around him began noticing him and staring at him and so he had to stop. He continued walking, in wide concentric circles, past dense tracts of habitation, always staying a certain distance from the center but not too far away, and he reverted to watching the people themselves as they went in and out about their way and he realized it was harder than he expected to find a place where he could set down his bag and his bones when all of the sudden he felt a crash, but in his mind, and like a meteor burning through the outer layers of the atmosphere, he could feel their eyes, coming to him, to see through him as him but all at once and he was caught unprepared and they jolted through him, their entire collective force and its gravity center passed right through him and twisted and shot back out. He was left with his ears ringing and his eyes watering and it all swooshed past phantasmagorically jolting and popping in shrieks and scratches that spread out and faded until only a small voice was heard, left behind, in an echo: That was close.

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And he responded, but in thought only, and the small voice turned into an anticipatory thought and then a form and before him he saw her standing, holding a shimmering net in one hand and a long stick in the other and staring inquisitively, with slight suspicion, and definitely without blinking and she said to him: -Been here long. -Cant you tell. -Well, whered you come from? -Same place everyone comes from. -Theres been people even going backwards these days. Yo u never know. -Youre young. -Old enough. -Im looking for someone. -You need someone. -What gives it away. -You just got hit by a protoflow. -Is that what that was. -Youre causing a disturbance, you know. Youve brought some serious pull here. -Is that a problem. -Not if you dont stay long. A couple days and youll rip this place apartHow did you get here like that anyway? -I came through like anyone else. I seem to be experiencing some unfortunate anomalies, however. -You cant connect. -Right. - People like to keep their eyes closed around here, you know? -Yes, I think I get that now. -Did you eat. -Yes. -Sleep? -No, thats why I was looking-in. -Lets go then. My cousin has a place. -Okay. One more thing -You need contact. -Yes. -Yes, that would be me. -Okay. -Dakota (still not blinking).

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-Hassam. -Lets go. And she blinks. -Okay. Everyone was your cousin. Not like the separated familial structures of the Anthroposphere, these people were all connected non-hierarchically to each other it was the only way to maintain a stabilized collective cohesion out of such transient population. And so they walked, the others not noticing him so much now that he had contact, and now not having to think about finding a place to rest, Hassam relaxed slightly. -Why did you come here. -Same. It was common response on the fringe, to show your willingness to share indiscriminately. People slid past him now. It was much easier to navigate with contact. -Not out here, I mean here, to this outpost. Hassam was relaxed now, prepared to divulge his purpose, as he knew, from her allowing him social access to the fringe, that he could trust her. -My intent was not to come here to gather the energy of your cohabitation. -You seem to have kept yourself pretty straight without it up until now. -Ive taken the time to learn many things during my lifecycle. And I seem to be grasping the trick of making cognition out here. -There is no trick. What youre doing is unheard of. -That is, in part, why I came here, to this settlement. I have a feeling that something may have gone wrong, and that my transfer might raise concern. -You can be sure of that. -As I was saying, then, Ive come here simply to make contact, in the event that I may need to come back sometime soon; I will then have access, and that is all. -So you know we can not help you. -And you know I can not help you.

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For extricates like Dakota, for those who made the choice to come out, and though it wasnt really a choice, but a carefully engineered option, for she was far too young, after all, to have made such a decision with any tenacity of volition, she knew what she was now getting into. There werent many rules to extricated existence and they werent even rules so much as suggestions. Still, Dakota knew these things: Stay with the group, and stay out of the wind. Life was virtually impossible outside of the anthroposphere. The Fringe made it bearable. Only within a group could you even think about extended interaction. And the wind was the protoflows, the stolen waste energy of anthropospheric energy flows, the residuals of Outer Fringe habitation. Hassam had already once redirected and with it the projections of all the people in Proxima Santafa. For this, Dakota knew that Hassam-as-contact was breaking both rules, in a way. He was not with the group himself, nor was he capable; and he was pulling on the gravity of the entire group cognition so heavily, that, at least once already, he was the wind. He was a disruption. And because of this, he matched something at the bottom of Dakotas mind, a fear that she had heretofore guessed at in the dark. Hassam, not just him, but the situation that he created, the questions that he raised, were in themselves confirmation of that first flicker of fear. What once was a shadow in the dark was now facing her in fierce, confusing, chromatic kaleidoscopic. -Then were even. -This sounds tentative. -This is my cousins place. -Thanks. The very concept of accidents and mistakes were left behind, Old Earth phenomena. Following a form of logic still operated by schematic syntax due to its negative inversion, technically, all events were accidental, and therefore there was no such thing as an accident. The unfolding of any particular incident was not measured or manipulated in response to its adherence to a consensually recognized set of standards, but against its approximation towards an ideal that is yet-to-be. Projected existence spreads across a range of potentialities. It

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was the charge of the Exogenerational Body to make decisions, but only relative to General Population. For the Body itself, progress marched in a direction and at a pace independent of their actions. Even they, were led along, albeit in the way a dog may carry its own leash in its mouth. As such, there are no mistakes, no incidents of accident. This is not to say there are no surprises, or anomalies, as they were more aptly referred to in exogenic grouping. All this set right the lens through which the Body viewed Dakota, her placement, her presence, and her interactive effect on the Fringe. Herberta Jaspers came through in the early cycle and at a young age. Her responsibilities were no match for her skills and it took her a long time to learn the folkways of outer habitation. She grew into her role slowly and on a steady diet of entropy bread. From entropic residuals collected in her own particular way from the cloud, she adjusted her recipe over years of trial and error. It was a delicate operation. One had to know where to set up nets, and at what time of day. She could even feel oncoming torrents of human redistribution and, through both binary and intuitive thought, could tell the difference between the good quality and the bad. Too much residue or the wrong mix or the wrong kind could make a person very sick and it was a sort of magic art for those who could make the subtle adjustments and Herberta Jaspers practiced in that way. She delivered bread to half a settlement in times a bit too long to remember, as things change so quickly out here. Now she is a simple woman living easily; her entropic flow has reversed, thus she needs the bread no more. That night, while Hassam slept, Dakota made her arrangements. She collected those close to her and laid out her situation and her thoughts and her decisions. They were permissive and understanding, as they had been used to her having strange and precocious ways. They didnt believe her story, and they didnt insist on her staying and so they each gave her back their shared memories of interaction, a store of cognition-power that she could use in her semi-isolated trance. She set right the last of her things and waited patiently for

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Hassam to wake up so she could explain to him what they were to do and where they would go. It was the first time Hassam had slept under the roof of the people since he came through. It was different. For one, it was more comfortable. But also, it gave him a peace of mind that he longed for in his separation from his home the comfort of others. Knowing that fluttering thoughts and drawn-out exchanges between people were taking place in the same proximity gave him security. Though he was irrevocably isolated from theses people, he could benefit nonetheless by their interaction with each other. He slept uninterrupted the whole night and woke up to a presence which his more acute senses slowly focused into a hunched figure by his doorway. The meaning came next, falling into place, and at the same time, she called him: -You slept well. -Yes. Thank you. -You expect to be on your way today? -Yes, I do. -You cannot leave here alone, you know. -I have come to this understanding. -Then I will be with you from now on. -This will happen quickly, whether I am alone or not. But I see a great distance ahead, and for that, the latter is the most suitable. -Together is the only way youll get out of here. Its not a decision on your part. I can see your direction. Ive followed it to the end. Ive made my arrangements. The flows pick up with the sun, so you must be expeditious. Your things are where you left them. Ill be waiting outside. And together they left. Hassam had accomplished his primary goal, to make contact. From this point he became more cohesive, but equally as dependant on his partner. Together they set the direction and the pace of their journey. Without Dakotas thorough conditioning in regards to fringe life and Hassams extraordinary resilience to the pressures of disorganized reality, they would be like the wavering masses of runaways, swinging back and forth in unsure trajectories and collapsing purpose. So instead, they followed their path straight-away from the center of Proxima Santafa towards the

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outer limits of the settlement and further to the broken horizon of the Great Rocks. Within half a day, they would approach the nearest post, but would continue past. Dakota prepared for an initial burst of outward momentum and so they passed this post and two more on their way into the foothills, where, as the sun was falling fast and taking down with it their ability to keep going, they set camp in a bowl-like depression alongside a steep vertical rockface. They made their fire up against the wall and unwrapped their dinner from their neatly packaged portions. They ate and drank a tea most popular within Proxima Santafa. It tasted like sage leaves and lavender and was very relaxing. Hassam had no tolerance for its effects, which was all the better, for it was Dakotas fringe conditioning that secured their camp for the night, and it was easier without his confused thoughts interrupting. He was still new here. She slept not long after, and they both went uninterrupted until the first traceable glow of dawn pulled them from their slumber.

They ejected outwards, further into the fringe. Here the distribution of entropic anthro-matter was ever thinner, and its use amongst the people even more wildly assimilated. The weather was beautiful that day. Their bodies have always known the gentle warmth of a clear day, where the breeze was fresh and welcome, not too cold. These sensations had always been afforded. They were necessary. But now it was different. To not know what would change as you went about the day, to not know if some calamitous weather event would be setting in motion miles away, coming towards you to blow you over. That isn't to say that these things didn't happen in the world from where they came, but rather, people chose these experiences, or were cunningly suggested in their direction, as those who knew could understand it. Here, for them, the travelling between settlements, through the outer fringe landscape, for them the weather came in continuous cycles of

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appreciation. To know that there was a force, not anthrogenic, but universal, the raw design of existence, carved into the rock over time to look like a puzzle of lines in varying lengths and thicknesses and directions interacting and integrating in ways that seem possible to interpret in isolated places but explode beyond graspability upon surveying the expanse; this feeling, this plate upon which the weather was served them, was one of unequivocal intangible sensation. The sun came at them, uninhibited by the pull of their own personal will, or that of the collective they left behind, clouds passed beyond the ridgeline, but they were on their own mission the travelers could choose to follow, but they could never lead. Separate, but part of the same system, Hassam and Dakota moved forward into their own personal unknown. Not being sure of the fluctuation between the universal state of operations and your perception thereof, was a type of fear that they both twitched at intermittently. Questions abound, answers waiting in anticipation behind every step. It was exhilarating, they both recognized, as much as it was defeating. They both know that old test if youre fighting, you must be alive. Sometimes, out here, it was hard to tell. They carried on for half a day, having left at the low sun; and now feeling its full strength, they stopped to take account of their position and their approach. They had a long way to go. It was about three days to the next settlement. With Dakota, Hassam found it much easier to withstand the difficulties of everyday existence here, and so was more than capable of making it to their destination. Traveling between settlements was no simple exercise, however. There were reasons why people grouped together in the way they did. It gave them stability. Not just in the face of biological necessities, but for the reality itself. Existence, that simplest of all human activity, was not given, as in the anthroposphere. It had to be maintained with tenuous diligence. The protogens called it losing your mind, and likened it to a condition occurring naturally in small portions of the population, but moreso in the aged. To anyone like Hassam or Dakota, it was more than just a disconnect. To those who had come here from a place where reality was upheld by the anthroposphere itself, individuals had all but

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lost their ability to maintain their own cohesion. Such was not a condition, as the protogens refer. Instead, it was akin to a dissolving, a separation of one piece from another until the whole being became part of the homogenous mixture of the universe. It was not the mind that was lost, but the whole being. Hassam referred to it as being buried alive, a tradition that he had observed in certain peculiar cultures of antiquity. This was the dominant threat that awaited any who left the anthroposphere. Thus people traveled in groups, as it applied the attention of many, all sharing in the responsibility, and all benefiting from the intermittent excess of awareness that revealed itself. To move in a particular direction, for example, became easier as more people shared in the effort, as the capacity required for both cognition and intent could be afforded. The lonely pair that now left the high-volume fringe settlement on this particular geologic contiguity was at high risk for losing their way; it was only the two of them and out here, that wasnt safe. They were well-prepared with sustenance for three days, carried in fabric bags loosely strapped to their backs. Dakota carried a long, thin stick, which Hassam assumed was made of some dark-colored deviceable glass. She said that it helped her to maintain direction, straight lines. Hassam walked with his hands empty, and in the middle of the day, when that excess of awareness peaked, if for only a short time, he grabbed onto the transverse bands of energy that crisscrossed the Earth, propelling himself forward with greater ease. Usually Dakota walked ahead. She could see much further into the distance as compared to Hassam. She claimed that she could see the settlement to which they were headed, but Hassam found that unlikely, as they were yet three days away. She had been there before, she said. He let her take the lead, as he still had a lot to process in this new place. As they walked, it seemed to follow a regular pattern that every thousand steps or so, Dakota would point into the distance and name some place, a small mound rising up out of a long stretch of flat land, or the remnants of an old pathway from the times when all people used to travel under the force

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of gravity. She would give them names and describe events that she had seen or heard about having happened there. She was keen on her responsibility as Hassams contact, and he only later understood that she was not just acquainting him with his surroundings but helping him to calibrate a sort of cultural matrix patterned by successions of individuals and customs. She was helping him to develop an understanding of the people out here, one that he could never have acquired by his own non-conventional means of haunting deprecated nodes of the anthropic network. There, pointing at a hollow, weathered out of the face of a cliff on the upper ridge, a young boy who had left his family, his people, he slept there for one night. The moon was full and bright and when he awoke in the middle of the night, he thought it was the New Sun. He greeted this new sun with praise, as he was convinced of its offering to him of a new life unencumbered by societal relations, and he walked right off the cliff face and floated up towards it. He was never to be seen again. There, pointing at a pathway eeked out of the side of a curved mountain, turning inwards to a narrow gap, a group of men traveling to the same place as us, began hearing voices coming out of the darkened narrow gap between those two mountains, and not heeding the warning of the curious mind during travel, went towards it to hear what was being said in the hopes that they would learn something of the ways of this land, and as they approached just close enough, a gust of frozen wind exploded from the opening in a bellowing roar. The men and their supplies and their animals were never seen again. And there, pointing at those antigravitational formations so prevalent in this terrain, a vertical, tapering thrust of rock, reaching way up away from the ground and terminating in a heavy, roundish boulder that looked as if it should tumble over at any moment, a woman and her child, embraced, she had constructed an egg around the two of them, made from her own saliva after having eaten the sticky plant. She wanted her child to be born again, back into the anthroposphere. I watched her forage in the brush for the sticky plant, like an animal, and I watched her make the translucent egg. In fact, I

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didnt take my eyes off of her until she became what you see here, solid as a rock. Hassam had to admit, upon closer analysis; the boulder did resemble two figures embracing. But were they also never to be seen again? Had not Dakota just called them forth, into his mind, binding them to the gravitational terminus of meaning and memory? On Communication: Communication with others was always an in-and-out thing for both Hassam and Dakota as they traversed the vast tracts of land orbiting the anthropic currents. Dakota came from a high-transience settlement at one of the largest entry points in their contiguous geographic region. With her close group she passed information with feelings and gestures and projections, the kind that are developed in maintaining any degree of collective cohesion. As for the rest of her immediate population, aside from other close groups like her own, much of it was non-speaking, even minimal to non-interacting. Recent extricates, of the kind most frequently located in her settlement, were in such a state of transition, lacking even basic cognitive abilities, that they were less communicated with than acted upon. Nudges, guidance, and redirection, not so much out of self-interest but out of a kind of service, Dakota, in a way, passed on her knowledge of fringe living to these crooked-walking, tremendously hallucinating creatures. As for Hassam, he had spent his formative years in the anthroposphere, where communication didnt exist as it does outside. Either with the close group, or the loose network, experience en mass was simply pushed back and forth from one to the other. They, the experiences, were not taken apart and analyzed, nor were they combined together in hypothesized possibilities. There is no need to think, when one already knows, and so it is in the Anthroposphere, and thus communication as transfer of thought was not practiced by Hassam with his counterparts. It was in his interactions with writtenthought, however, that Hassam made up the difference in his communicative abilities. In this single-stream transfer that surely had to be practiced and learned, Hassam himself

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became adept at the nuances of concentration required for a primitive form of communication. And so, as they travelled, Hassam and Dakota used a variety of techniques for interacting with the people they met, some fluent in the same variety as themselves, and some as choked and stiff as a rock. Interaction with Another Human It was midday; the sun was high and so was their cognition. As such, they were more than surprised when they rounded the corner of a tall mountainside to smash right into another human being. He was completely fragmented, projecting an uncertain path and darting his eyes in a thousand directions when he collided with them. He was frightened that was the basic characteristic of any human they came across outside the anthre. Amidst his incessantly blinking wide eyes and fidgeting head resembling that of a pigeon in stride, he conveyed a sense of curiosity followed by bouts of expectation and disappointment, and eventually that feeble attempt at gravity, always so embarrassing to witness in these unfortunate encounters. Whats worse is the lack of direct communication. Having been out for some distance, both Hassam and Dakota were fully competent regarding articulated communication. Recently-extricated folk, however, know nothing of the sort. Even if they could communicate, their thoughts would be a slurry of meaninglessness. They were like children, seeing the world for the first time, but their desires, their needs, were much stronger and more complex than those of a child, as they were physically full-grown. Dakota immediately reached out her arms signaling embrace, while Hassam reached out his hand, both gestures of an offering of (feigned) familiarity. This was the way commonly used by Fringe Folk to subdue the volatile fluctuations of such strangers. They were so weak and helpless, grasping at phantoms in front of them, convulsing as if being accosted by fleeting spirits of mischief and menace. The full-blown biophobia in their eyes need not be articulated Hassam and Dakota understood. Arhythmical, staccato breaths were followed by uneasy vocal release, sounds that meant nothing but confusion and hopeless desperation.

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-This guy is a mess -Hold him, hold him -Hes all over the place, I dont even think he can see me, he cant even see me -Just hold him down, hell come through, hold him down... His sighs become longer and more intentional, coming out more like that of a crying animal than a broken mechanical object. -You got him, hes seeing you. You hear that? Hes feeling you now. She continues to rub and pat him down. Hassam spoke with reassuring, repetitive tones coming across more like music than language, the intent being to soothe, just as the rhythmic jostling of Dakotas embrace. She looked like she was warming him up. He wasnt cold, physically, he was non-cohesive, a coldness of the mind, a convulsive shuddering of awareness. Hed probably been out for only a day or two. His situation was not good people didnt come out by themselves unless under extraordinary circumstances. Hassam and Dakota, wellworn travelers by now (in this relative timeframe), had become familiar with this interface. They offered residual cognition as best they could, falling into a cooperatively, rhythmically vacillating trance, alternatively pulsing their own awareness into the helpless extricate. As stated, this one was in bad shape. His cognition came together only so much as to haunt him with hallucinations, false renderings of experience that faded his gravity beyond further cognition. They continued their consolation, trying to spark some memory of existence. Channeling such bodily interface would eventually bring him back to his self, at which point he would collapse at their feet, transitioning directly to the nightmind, regardless of the position of the sun or the protection of his body. Neither Hassam nor Dakota could think at these times, they would expend all of their energy bringing the stranger back into himself. They could have left him alone to wander spasmodically across the landscape; they could have lost one extricate in order to save a days travel. But alas, it was to their greater benefit. Every extricate that made it out here would eventually increase their chances by adding to the

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overall collective cohesion of the Outer Fringe. For their own sake, the tradeoff was worth it. He eventually came to his awareness, for one instant, then dropped to the ground. Hassam and Dakota rose up and out of their own trancelike state, moving far enough away to let the helpless human rest in peace, and with enough focus to let the last illuminating rays of sun pull them to the horizon of their day. They had to think in terms of two dimensions, a mental task long unused by either of their lineage. Here in this gravitydetermined world were physical impediments, and quasichaotic climates. These were real data points relevant to their progress. They had to navigate spatially in ways more archaic than sequential communication. But here it was Hassams store of thought from minds long passed that allowed them to proceed. And so they joined their thoughts and together envisioned the layout of their field of engagement. The continental mass was a rectangle, left to right, and they were located on the west side, and moving to the east. Dissecting, through the middle, was a great river, which they must cross, and a vein of mountains just before the other end. It was up to the future to tell at what point they would intersect the mountains, however, and that was still very far away. For now they would rely more on stopping at encampments on a frequent basis, contacting more than a half-dozen in one moon-cycle. These Dakota could see from their current position, and she placed them on their co-tangible map. Most of the camps would be on the outer fringe and as for larger settlements they would have to consider whether or not to contact them as time became clearer. They studied the whole area on many scales and in more dimensions, pooling together their total understanding of the whole place. They studied until they were confident enough to quit. They adjusted themselves for slumber and dispersed into the night air floating fragments and formulas for their forward-motion. And with the coming-up of the sun they collected themselves back together until their direction was set out clearly before them, and that the sun now announced itself on the rim of trees in front of them, it was all considered well-enough and in

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good-timing and they set forward toward the day, and each in their own way. They didnt look like they hadnt the night to sleep in-full and their pace today, at the outset, showed promise. They would be stopping tonight, no doubt, at the first camp outside Proxima Santafa and would not have a chance to rest at that time either but would have to leave there before daybreak. After that they could decide or let it be decided.

Fringe Life Later that day, the air became intolerably moist. A slight breeze now and then disturbed the tree leaves but gave little relief. They had found a place where they could take water and so they stopped to rest during this hottest part of the day. This had become their custom within this geo-climatic condition, as they found they could traverse twice as much land at night than during the day, and so they rested these few moments. It was hard to submit to relaxation and impossible to sleep. By sustaining focus on the twinkling of a stream or the sway of the tall tree leaves, a state of forced hypnosis allowed the brain to function at low enough energy levels as to restore the body to a healthier status. They had become accustomed to this procedure and were capable of becoming hypnopompic instamatically. When they awoke, it was the time of day when the sky turned orange and the horses did too. They had recently chosen a higher, more slow-going path a fortuitous tradeoff, for in the commanding view of the crossvalley below, they saw, on three separate occasions, a small group of riders following parallel to the fringe. None of them seemed related, except in their quizzical formation which changed erratically and even more frantically as night fell. Hassam attributed their riding formation to an unaccustomed group, overcompensating for the lack of purposeful existence at such a distance from the fringe. The closer night came, the more agitated the false

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choice process becomes, and so the riders switched their positions more frequently. Having passed without stopping a generous and much needed outpost in the crossvalley, it was deduced that two of the groups must have been taking stimulant to avoid rest. Only the last group stopped and that was near nightfall. Perhaps they were taking turns. -The moon is full tonight. -I feel it too. Theyll have a tough time keeping up that pace. -Do you think theyre keeping up with us? -I think theyre moving as fast as they can, just like us. -But their cohesion is so volatile, how can they escape with such asynchronization amongst themselves. -It has become easier to fall out every day. -But they will be so ill-equipped to handle this. -They stay close to the fringe; they orbit. They chase their own tail, for now. It isnt real extrication, but they are necessary, for the rest who are coming. -Will they end up like these photogasms we see? -Theyre on their way. The stimulants, for one theyre hard to cut out. Even if youre that close, they make it nearly impossible to re-enter yourself. They arrived at their first human-system in the Outer Fringe. This camp they settled upon was very well regulated, considering the high rate of flux amongst its people. People were always coming and going amongst these anemic settlements sparsely dotting the distance between larger populations. It was an enticing lifestyle they offered but harder than most were prepared for. Half a group would disappear overnight only to be replaced by the same number of new entrants in the morning. Living on the outer fringe was more demanding than most people were accustomed to. Scavenging through waste in search of food, agitating water-purifying microbes, tending energy condensers fixed amid the fast-growth trees. Everything had to be managed and coaxed by hand. Tempted by a sense of independence, people pushed to the outer fringe, only to find a life equally bonded to the daily maintenance of survival. As mentioned, however, half of the group would

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remain day after day, to establish a distinct culture there. It was this core group of people, carriers of a knowledge of things long forgotten (relative to their population), that made it possible for others to realize their dream of independence and freethought. You have to feel the sheer trajectory of your time, in all its precipitousness, feel the rush in your stomach and throw your hands up to it. They wandered into the hot, sweaty dancehalls where people, covered in psychotropic gelatin, danced together in groups that looked like ferocious seamonsters. They were always on the other side, however, tempering their sense of self and their logic, interfacing their rituals in more circuitous ways. The music and the dancing and the pungent air kept them engaged long enough to take them into the satisfaction of walking the streets after midnight, where the irregular glow of the energy condensers cast pulsing shadows on the people. Nets of meta-organisms grew like rising bread feasting on the toxins evaporated through peoples naked skin. Dancers could not walk the streets in the daytime, only after midnight. The sun reversed their toxin flow, and the psychotropic gelatin that covered their bodies at night would sink inwards during the day and eventually mutate their genetic structure in real-time, slowly turning them into the plants from which they derived their collectivizing serum. A steady lifestyle as a dancer for even a short period committed you to a specific lifecycle in which you would eventually withdraw, becoming incohesive and immobilized, laying down roots in the foliage flanking the ever-shifting energy patterns, and gathering with others like yourself, growing and swaying a collective dance yet still, on the swirling breezes beneath the protoflows until maturity spread your spores, only to be collected and offered to the future of your race, and so on By the time they made it to their contact hut, the fire was high. Smoke filled the room and clouded the small flames that periodically lit small places of mysterious faces both smiling wildly and yet steadily holding serious expressions simultaneously. It was always a creepy experience, being among the people of the Outer Fringe. Women clothed in

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snakeskin shedding, revealing but demanding, offered libations of serum-infused fruits. Physically hedonistic activities were shrouded in smoke and primitive music played by manipulating dried reeds and animal skins. Not many animals lived on the outer fringe, but they were domesticated amongst these people and bred for their skin and for their gelatin, which was used to settle the psychoactive spores collected in the evenings. Tree frogs rang amongst the treetops to a deafening tone, making it difficult to leave the hut in such a psychoactive state. It was essential for the two travelers to remain amongst these mysterious people. They must engage in their customs and dance to their music. It was exhausting. Tomorrow, they would both have to reverse their toxin paths and immerse in micro-static fields to reset their molecular resonance. Tonight they would rightfully experience a breach of the collective conscious-stream. Upon return they would have incrementally removed their need for satiation of physical necessities. Hunger, thirst, sleep and logic were replaced by a greater understanding of existence. This advanced level of functioning was required in order to withstand the temptations of their inevitable destination. And with it they exited this, their first settlement just before the light of day.

Along an inevitable trajectory they continued, interrupted intermittently by the various cultural curiosities populating the previously undisturbed forest fringes. The most prevalent amongst them were those who intentionally deprived themselves of sensory experience by co-opting certain neurotransmitters photogasms. They cohabitated in large groups of thirty to sixty people, surviving off of energy produced by the chlorophyll in their pale green skin. They could not truly interpret the presence of the two travelers during their vegetative state, but exploded upon their awakening into violent spasms until their bodies lay flaccid and oozing thick mucous. Waste collectors would be there soon, brought by the horrid smell of the collapsed bodies, and

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bringing with them even more of their days catch. Neglected waste from the transitory populations was swiftly incinerated and evaporated into the energy field. It was not efficient, however, as it slowed down the flows, especially at the warmer times of the year. They left at once; they were no longer inclined to dance with their kind. In all its brightened, sense-heightening attraction, the dynamics of the previous night made no impact like the screeching of human ghosts in photophyllic form, sometimes exploding in ambush and other times announcing their dramatic termination in drawn-out hisses. They pressed on all this day thoughtlessly, numb, and finally settled at a place nestled near an intersection of expansive travelpaths from the time of automated geotropic travel. Nightmares of flying spirits, green and smelling like spearmint swept through the night while they slept. Their awareness was tugged at by the alluring call of orgiastic frenzy coming from the previous night. They resisted. They were strong. Their path had remained straight these days. But they had already begun to feel the effects of their contact at this last settlement, a reorienting of sorts, and with it a lapse in streaming cognition. During this lapse, the energy transmission fields had been rerouted, and destabilized the surrounding atmosphere. This would cause new traffic patterns in the waves of transitory bands migrating with the flow, just on the outskirts. But more immediately, it caused for them a disruption of their trajectory, a blinking inversion that dislocated their intent. Were they now moving with the rotation of the earth, or against it? Were they leaving the cryptic spot of the photogasms, or were they heading back towards them; could they trust their will to progress, or were they giving-in without even knowing it? But through each other, they shuffled back and forth their purpose until they were, once again, on track. They had been at the trail for quite a stretch before they even realized they hadnt made cognition yet today. Everything got fuzzy and they had to make a stop. They were both very aware of the fact that, unlike every other morning, they had come awake and stepped on their trail without the need to configure the world before them. They were both instantly aware at that moment of the power that comes from two people partnering

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in the way they had. Together they were learning how to stabilize a collective. Today it was all morning, but soon it would be all day. They were the answer to each others question, and gravity was growing on them. It was sundown again, and so they settled down. Long, thought-growing discussions tested the fortitude of their cognition, making this downtime all the more necessary. They needed to allow themselves to destabilize, to float off into the ether. The back-and-forth between them, about omni-spatial presence in a two-dimensional world, in a one-dimensional world, about the fate of reverse-evolution, the symmetrics of universal energy, and walking in straight lines something Dakota found difficulty in doing with any consistency all this intercourse brought to light the differences between the two, and helped them find common ground upon which to build their unified foundation of partnered collective cohesion. Hassam realized, for example, what it meant to be so much younger within his own Generation. Dakota wasnt evolved enough to be completely incompatible, thoughtwise, as this was the marker of division between generations. She was, however, very different from Hassam in her needs and wants regarding spiritual sustenance, for example, and, almost quizzically, regarding her inability to follow writtenthought. Much of what Hassam knew about the world, the deepest parts, the interconnected, inter-influential, yet quantifiable parts, he knew from following writtenthought. Dakota, on the other hand, knew things by extracting information from collective experience. This gave her knowledge a strange smell he knew no other way to put it. Her knowledge seemed to have been turned and tossed, fertile fields of the collective anthropospheric soil, sprouting a lifeform of its own, a vessel of encapsulated extra-anthropospheric experience, releasing a scent of something alien to him, a fragrance foreign yet familiar: vaguely synchronistic, while differing in uncognitable and intransferable, yet fundamental ways. The knowledge that Hassam enfolded was pure, he thought. It was clear, sure. It was ancient wisdom, and the only way this comprehensive, yet targeted penetration of reality could be transferred was by writtenthought. His understanding came

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from a direct source, from another humans direct thought narration. Hers came from, was distilled from, the collective chatter. Hers was an evolutionary product of the mind, a masterful categorization, organization, testing of applicability and consequence and patterning of data. His was a single stream; hers was an ocean dripping through a hole the size of a retina. Before that stream, he thought, must have been a river, and before that a Great River But he could never know what that was like. In this age of multiple simultaneous existence, his direct lineage reached out very far, back into the America, a phenomenon named after the man who first orbited the earth. It had become the strongest concentration of universal energy flux known to humans, and gave great evidence, internalized by many, of the exponential-growth effect of the anthroposphere on energy concentration. It was at these limits of his lineage, where humans began to see the acceleration of change within a single generation (generation by the uncollectivized, ancient human definition). This transition in collective human evolution was the first of which to be followed by such increasingly dramatic stages. These changes were so dramatic in fact, that Hassam found inaccessible many of their concepts and thought patterns. Yet this knowledge was deeply affected by the thoughts of his lineage. As it came to him, it had been absorbed into the successive generation, understood as best it could be and passed on, interpreted and reinterpreted to maintain its cognitive power respective to the accessing mind, physical artifacts of writtenthought waiting to finalize their purpose in the transmission to another human. Through their transmission, Hassam had, initially, been unwittingly transformed by them, and later purposefully strengthened by their power to build his cognition. True, if not for his reception to the direct thoughts of his ancestors, he would not be in this particular predicament in a world which did not want him, with only a stranger who seemed to know more about him than she should but, if not for these scraps of graphomaniacal pattern, he would have been devastatingly defeated the moment he ruptured the anthrecircuit. In this world that both took the ground away from him and yet smashed it against his bones, and for this stranger who at once

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pushed away his presence in competent independence, only to pull him towards in shared outcome, he could balance the forces. He could interact with its world, breathe its moist air, and he could share it with another, only through the transformation executed in him by his lineage of human ancestry. If not for much else in his life at this position, through this, he was connected. All this settled in his mind, as their bodies rested. They always found a place buffered on the north side (the fringe side), with shade and protection from trees and not more than a meandering movement away from running water. The sights, smells and sounds in these places were helpful in the attempt to disintegrate their minds. They followed a procedure by which they settled from one level of activity to the next. First they sat for a long time, making sure to tune in completely to the birdsong around them. Then, they tried to eat. This wasnt always successful, for Dakota that is. She tries to pick it up and it dissolves into and around her hands, reforming on the other side, and as she tries to grasp at it, over and over, it falls through. She gets more and more frustrated until, out of anger, she tries to pick it up and throw it, but again, it ignores her grasp, and she begins waving and then swinging at the air, and her eyes close and everything becomes black, and she sees a serving of plants and boiled birds eggs and nuts and she can smell it and even taste it; it crunches and squishes in her mouth and as she swallows, tears swell and run from her eyes. When she opens her eyes and her closed fists, the food is right before her, and so is he, eating it, and she reaches out with three fingers and puts the food to her mouth. Its there, for real this time. -Just because its there doesnt mean its real. -I can tell the difference between whats real and whats not. -But your mind must connect with it; it must connect you with it. Without actively, mindfully engaging with it, it doesnt exist. -Trust me; Im engaging with it. -Youre fighting with it. You need to become it. When you want it that bad, you send yourself further away. The Generations have trained us to use desire as an exit by which we leave the limitations of this world. That is where we have

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been trained to nourish ourselves, as well as every other thing that we do. You need to do the opposite you need to come back. -But you just said that if I try, I will push myself further away. -But I didnt say you had to try. She pretends she doesnt hear the last thing he said. Shes rolling a cigarette now and one shred of leaf is sticking out and shes gently pulling at it, disingenuously focusing all her attention on it. It tears off and she ignites the leafshreds and inhales and becomes the leaves and the smoke and exhales; her body dissipates and rises up to the sky and it is dark and she is now moonlight shining on the plants and she goes to sleep inside the Earth. You cant try to fall asleep, she thinks, but she is already there and her thoughts fall apart and rearrange into strange bits, and danger is asleep for now too. Humans are visual creatures. Over countless cycles of evolution, they have used their eyes as the primary sense organ, thus making the visual interface their primary means of communication. Internal vision is responsible for the transmutability of thought. Humans create a visual replica of themselves on the outside world, codifying their internal experience into a visual language, and then manipulate and arrange that language in order to consciously communicate both to themselves and to others. But before there was vision, there was feeling. A stirring something woke Dakota in the mid-night. She scanned her surroundings, fuzzily recognizing parts of their camp amongst the earth. But another layer hung in front of her vision, a layer of all black, of nothingness. She could still see the silhouettes of trees in the moonlight, but more immediately viscerally it was an emptiness, trying to become a thing. Something was pushing out of her, a memory, a feeling, a reaction in mid-action, unfinished. She reached back to find where it came from, and it retreated further, shrinking itself into non-existence. She let it be. She let the black screen take over, and it came again. This time she didnt try to bring it to the front of her mind, she let it grow at its own pace, a seed of a thought nourished by her simple awareness. Patient observation yielded her a small vision. The feeling of a

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moment came streaming back, through the visual interface, a panoramic projection of the mind. She was somewhere, in a place, something was happening. Then it came torrentially. She was flooded, submerged, immersed, fully permeated, and the connection between the dream and the reality was established and she experienced the thing fully. She was amongst people she didnt know, but they were all familiar to her. They didnt notice her; they were comfortable in her presence. They were outside, but under an immense, close shade, and it was twilight. The people seemed to glow brighter than the flickering shades of scattered lanterns, their eyes and their clothes and their teeth flashed and she felt the curves of their hair and the gestures they made as they interacted together, little pieces when seen as pieces, but an enormous, decadent organism when seen all-at-once. She heard voices and watched things change from one pair of hands to another and she felt in her mind the ideas exchanged between minds. A chatter of thought, separated into fullyformed and partial forms alike. As her awareness pulled in and out of focus, she saw individual thoughts, then groups of thoughts, and she saw that sometimes, in some places, large groups of individual thoughts would come together and expand to a crescendo and collapse, sending waves and ripples outward to other places at other times. She would hear voices, shouts and laughter, and follow it through the crowd, meandering at times, shooting directly at others, waxing and waning. The people, together, made a feeling that she could actually see, synchronized to their moving and swaying cacophony. Their chaos then became symphonic, ringing with the clarity of an angels voice, and then turned back to crumbling mountains and ruckus. She felt that she was in between them; she could feel the surge as it passed through her, collected, expanded, exploded, releasing her. She felt that she was above them, could see the flickering forms, flowing as one. Then she felt that she was them, the beginning of them. Every pulse of their existence came from her, and when she gasped they gasped, following, and when she charged, they charged, pushing her forward. Then she settled; the prickling of crystallization putting out the

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shimmering flashes one at a time, but accelerating, and all of it turned black, blank, and nothing but the in-out breath was with her, and she awoke. The various alternate realities experienced in dreaming were common to Dakota, moreso than to Hassam. Waking life in the anthroposphere, for her, was interfaced via a vast selection of experience-rendering forums, many inaccessible to Hassam due to his less developed breed within their generation. And so, more often than not, she found no need in telling of her nightly voyages. The rules of physical reality were a more interesting topic of discussion for her, and since Hassam had much content to offer, having spent so much time amongst those nodes of Old Thought, she had much to gain from its transfer between them. She liked to play with the ideas therein, pretending what life would be like in the Anthroposphere if it were bound by those old rules of Earths physical reality. Hassam had never known that life either, but he was so steeped and stained in Ancient Wisdom that to imagine a world where people were attracted to the center of the earth was, for him, quite practicable. In fact, as expected, it was his exposure to these thoughts that prepared him to face the self-disintegrating force of extra-anthropic existence. The nightmind was, for Hassam, a time of uninhibited exploration and interaction, one that gave him strength for the following day of relentless pressing on his will to survive. He found also that his goabouts in the nightmind were not useful content for discussion; dreams were for sustenance of the self, not for that of the collective. One night Hassam met a young technophyllic individual. This interesting character, a protogen on life-support from a large familial group, was allowed to plan and experiment with various devices and materials and applied concepts. Timed-up materials afforded the curious mind endless mutability. This young man thought to repurpose a single-celled selfreplication organism to interface with solid bodies over multiple successive growth stages, allowing gradual reciprocal assimilation. It grows out of your mind. All you do is strap the sample on a slow-growing organism, it becomes imbedded, both physically and genetically, while the organism develops a

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structure, at which point the assimilator intervenes. Later on, the next night, Hassam found himself interacting with that same youth, only later in his existence, and he discovered, by an intensely alien experience, what happens when one spends their life intercepting solid-body, slow-growth organisms: Hassam exposed his mind to the sensations of a small pine forest. This young technophile, over countless growth stages, and as many self-replicating organisms as his collemulating support network could provide, had interpenetrated so far into his own anthropomorphic hybrid creation, that he allowed it to assimilate him. He swayed in the wind, baked in the sun, felt the trampling of critterfeet on his wrangled roots and the resonance of birdsong in his canopy. Nightmind adventures as such were common for Hassam. Experiences such as these, however, he found both difficult and unnecessary to communicate. At all of this, they both spent less time talking about their dreams, and more time in communion. Then they would hum and whistle together a song they half created together, and half copied from the birds. This process guided them with a smooth transition to that part of the day where cognition was no longer possible, and their minds could then enter a night, long with disconnected, unabiding thought-sensations. Their songs had become more playful, yet more structured. They still copied from the surrounding birdsong, but only in texture their progressive patterns varied wildly from the short spurts sputtered by their unknowing animal contributors. Dakota took great satisfaction from these songmaking sessions, as it was the solitary remainder for her of the kinds of interaction she was used to with her fringe group. Hassam was glad to engage, as it made him feel the oneness between the both sides of his self the world before, in songmaking with the birds, and the world after, in songmaking with Dakota. Though they both knew that no other humans were or could participate in their devoted interactive creation, they kept in mind their audience, the people, the ancestors they wanted to be with, to be in the presence of, to experience life with. Theirs was a digression of purposeful, self-initiating illusion, done in service of the collective and of their familial individuals. Most importantly, it was done to enhance the eventual conjoinment of these two home-repelling travelers,

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for only in solidifying this joint foundation of partnered collective cohesion could they prepare themselves for their yet unknown purpose. It was still, and perhaps forever would be, a natural human response against overwhelming, paralyzing newness and unknowing and the fear of a fate that accelerated ones living plasm to the point of an unsustainable unbalance. In the face of such circumstances, humans always seemed to make their coming together a prime focus of their individual intent. They were assimilating rapidly into the energy flows of their new, alien home. Articulated intermental communication always regulated the flux between them, and the number of topics with which they exchanged ideas enthusiastically, approached infinity. Reflecting upon the juxtapositioning of the life which, only after this short an absence, seemed generations away, and the life now, the pressing, growing, expanding and emotionally interpenetrating life, Dakota released an inner tension: -Humans are weird. -But were human. -But not like them. -No, but still, were human; were really not that much different. -But they do such strange things. -We do strange things. -But we do things because we have to. We get hungry, and thats why we eat. They just eat, but it seems like they dont know why. -Im pretty sure they know why. -Right, but they do it because theyve been told that its what they need to do to stay cohesive. They dont get hungry. They dont even think about hunger. But then they act like they really want that food. They think about food, but not hunger. They want to eat, but not to be full. -I guess it depends on where you draw the line between what you need and what you really want. She draws, quietly, the line in their mind, then erases it and draws it again, but erases it once more. Where does it go? She looks over at him, and looks away, moving her eyes back and forth to look like shes registering the landscape, or counting

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stars. They dont need, but they do it like they need it. Is that what it means to want something? Isnt it fake? How do they even know what they want anyway? Its not like they ever make real decisions. This one or that one thats not a decision. -How can you want things when everything is already planned out for you? -Its not really planned out; chance, and that little bit of chaos, is what makes the system livable. But anyway, sometimes you just let yourself get tricked into thinking you need it. -But thats like submitting to the illusion, you know that everything happens for a reason and that whichever one you choose doesnt really matter, its going to keep moving forward regardless of what you do. -What they do. They dont do it for humankind, they do it for themselves. All things, from their own point-of-view are out for their own survival. Its not their job to maintain humankind; there is a system in place for that. -It doesnt work. -If it didnt work, we wouldnt be here. -Maybe I dont want to be here. -No problem, you can still want two different things at the same time He shrugs his shoulders and raises his eyebrows. - -But you can only do one of them. -Why would I want to do both? She blinks her eyes while staring at him, and turns away, shaking her head. -Because youre younger. Younger people have strange ideas about the way things work. Her mind is working and little ideas are coming and going and growing and melting. Piece by piece she has begun to see the difference out here. Its still so nebulous, but her purpose gets stronger every day. She has begun to see her way through the denseness, the waves of pattern. Things arent crystal clear, but at least they are there, sharing their existence with her. She is satisfied, and a trickle of exhilaration comes towards her, but settles back into satisfaction. She stares at the ground and

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watches little mushrooms pop up and get bigger and explode into fluorescent dust. The dust falls on the ground, right near her feet, and, still glowing, forms a long line that stretches out into the distant landscape and towards the horizon, all the while branching out into a network of tributaries; and once it hits the edge where the earth meets the sky, they all burst into a flash of light, brighter for the new moon. Mushrooms begin falling out of the sky and are picked up by all the little critters all sharing the land with them and they are carried away to their homes in and of the earth around and as they scamper, like dust from their feet, pulsing fluorescence floats and flutters low near the ground. It disperses and dims and when it is over and all is silent and dark, night has taken over once again. Hes dreaming now, but the thunder bugs are still there. All night, he is here and there. The stars say to him: -Come to me. And he says: -Ill be there soon. And he closes his eyes, and wakes up.

-Can I tell you that I know when youre thinking about me? -You just did. -But do you know? -I know. Its unusual, but its happening. -Its so we can use each other; at least thats what I think. Its whenever you need me for something, I can feel you pulling on me. -People used to be this way, back in time. Its how we survived. Not like what were doing, but for much more complex things. -Seems complex enough to me. Recognition is nearly impossible sometimes. I dont know how you did it before I came here.

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-I keep my familiar. When Im fragmented, I let them decide for me. -Decisions are the hardest things to do. -Its the only thing to do. We are working our way to a point where we can just decide what we want and then experience it. But out here you need to rely on ancestral thought for that. -I know but thats what makes it so hard, its like unlearning something youve known all your life; I had been in the anthroposphere, there you just floated from one experience to another, you never even thought about it, and then, with my people, out here, you act only within the group, with the people. Now that Im actually doing it on my own, the patterns are too much. -The thing is, for me, stay low-maintenance. True his functioning state of cognition was so basic, so minimal, that he maintained cohesion with but the most strained of resources. And his was in direct contrast to Dakota. Even at her most efficient level, she required more work, more striving towards the center, more withstanding of geospheric pressure. Her internal conflict catapulted from one side to the other, whereas Hassam had tightened his in to a practically unwavering balance. How else could he have come through with such a store of ancestral thought that he ripped apart and dragged with him a substantial portion of transference infrastructure? And as for her, how else could she reach out into the distant yet-to-be and bring back to her what-it-is? Whether she wants it or not, these things are accessible to her and they pull on her constantly, so that, try as she may, she could never muffle it to quietude, and must always support it, and Hassam was one of these things. Direct contact with human thought, pre-anthropospheric thought, and not that of the protogenerates alike, but generations far gone, through silent following of writtenthought, Hassam studied the struggles of those innocent-minded humans, lived in their structures of reason and was warmed by the hearth of their emotions until he could actually be them, to replicate their mind within his own, even down to the individual within himself. They were no longer present in this world, yet they had an urge still to be in it, as all life is wont to do, and through him they succeeded. And in channeling his ancestors in this way, he was able to slide in

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and out of the turbulent forces of a life vacant of the winds of the now-humaned world. And this was now to be the nature of their relationship. They moved in tandem, mutual reciprocation, using each other to progress. Their paths were separate, but parallel. They were in respectful acknowledgement of each others purpose and worked together to fulfill all that was set before them, and most importantly, to attempt for to succeed was not yet certainty to create their own time, their own space, and not just for them but for everyone, and forever. The how of this was yet to unfold, and yet-unknown. Here was without the omni-existence, the total shared reality. Here was a place within time, where things had yet to happen, new things, not yet born or experienced or shared or forgotten. Those who attempted this task would determine the direction of the future. Transmission 012.002.103 <Lower Body> Extra-Anthropospheric Retro-Network Anomalies The trajectory of progress maintains at all times its direction within the range of projected existence, as set forth by the exogenerational body force. Drastic shifts in the angular momentum may send a sequence of events far off the straight path, but it will not veer beyond the spread of potentiality, that spread expanding and contracting out as a function of the intensity of the point along its sequence. The limit is what allows such coordination between Body compartments. Through their varied interfaces with the myriad subsystems running in support of anthropospheric existence and redistribution alike, general population is adjusted accordingly, in preparation for any shift from direct transgression. The more drastic the shift in trajectory, the more pull the body has on the timeflow of cohesion. Such parameters are flexible, in regards to general population, and are primarily the domain of the distribution signification apparatus. The entirety of General Population, by way of this quantum protocol, never experiences the shift; it is, in a way, absorbed by The Body, rendering a smooth path for those who follow, or rather, for those who are with them, or rather, neither, for

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both time and space do not exist in their world, that inhabited by humanity. And it is in complex arrangements such as these where the simultaneous trajectory of the extra-anthropospheric retro-network displays its most extraneous anomalies, some of which may never co-evolve into the panorama of exogenic oversight. After a long trail and at a sluggish pace they finally came upon the perimeter of the camp Mis-Sissity, along the Great River. It was their custom to approach encampments after dusk. Mis-Sissitys phosphorescence kept a steady glow, not like the epileptic flickers of remote fringe locations. From a great distance across the plains they could make out the double hemispheres of glowing skin, cleaved down the middle by the river, and carried along with it a trail of luminescent clouds of anthropic fog, heading downstream until it dissipated into the air. They came at it straightaway and the glow of this extra-anthropic bubble began to change colors as they approached, in excited patterns, and in the way a dog wags its tail upon reuniting with its master. This place was big, bigger than any settlement they had either ever come across. Its wholesomeness, its human warmth, enveloped them and drew them into its elegant rhythms of human activity and expression within. People walked to and fro but in stops and stutters and leaps and slides sometimes turning their bodies to just miss each other. The lush foliage overhead would bob and sag in sequential patterns down the main causeways, compounding another overlay on the people abound. Children played in comfortable-looking niches and corners and under stairs and around condenser posts. In a dense population such as this, people stayed up all night and day, resting in shifts so that the soothing hum of anthropic metabolism could continue indefinitely. It would be of no trouble for them to replenish themselves here with food and a chamber and so they took their time, accepting the deliberate, slow and easy pace as a reward for such a draining journey thus far. Precognition: On Love -Love isnt a big deal out here. People just dont do it. We have love for each other, but its not like that, not like what youre about. You know that feeling, when the air is pushing

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on you? We dont get that, because of that love we have. Its so that it pulls on you in every direction. We use each other like that; its a gravity for us. But you, you can do it to each other. We dont do that. Its more like a group love. Its that love that you leave behind when you come out here. Its how we get it back. Well, it seems so. Like I said, we dont do that one-on-one thing, but its because we cant. That takes strength. Were sapped out here. We just need to get by. Love is not just in the background, no, its under our feet we feel it every moment. We just cant go past that, we cant take our feet off the ground, you know? Sleep? Tonight? Nah, weve gotta go out. You need to see this place. Its like these people have never seen the moon after midnight. They came upon a performance at an intersection between two rather thin walkways. The intersection opened up into a courtyard and declined into a bowl shape so that the performers were below passersby who had to walk around the ridge of the bowl to get past, though many chose to sit on the edge and watch. At the bottom of the bowl were three large men, all wearing thick cotton shirts with crisscrossing striped patterns, their faces covered in curly beards. They walked around in circles, braiding in and out of each others paths and every time one passed another, his legs would invert and he walked like a bird until he passed another, when they would switch back to normal. Their legs seemed to separate from themselves, yet connected together as one large organism. And this was entrancing to watch. Soon their arms began to flail like they were grabbing things from the sky and throwing them at eachother, and the motions of their hands began to streak and blur until they too came together in synchronicity. Like a person spinning plates, these men were upholding an illusion of hallucinogenic proportions. Their motions sped up and interpenetrated to become a pulsing web of fibers and forms, each glowing segment growing in size until they were completely transformed into a charged ball giving off strong waves of cognitive stimulation that felt the way a huge audience sounds as it cheers louder and louder in anticipation. And then the ball began to roll around the concave courtyard in small circles at first and wider and wider

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orbits as it rose to the rim, all the while the center of attention concentrating to a density that made it impossible to look away. The little ball-performer lifted up out of the bowl and shot straight into the air until it became invisible and the onlookers became breathless. And then, like faraway footsteps, little residuals began falling from the sky and bigger ones formed in midair and then dropped down and soon the bowl was filled with it, a liquid conglomeration of pure life where the onlookers could see in the pool themselves rippling into eachother, becoming eachother. Such performances, or rituals as they are sometimes called, are not a rare occurrence, and their complexity and intensity increases with the size of the settlement that enables them. Engaging in such performances was habitual to some, and mere entertainment for others. Time was relative during such experiences; it only took a moment by the collective, and so one could do this over and over, all night. This veritable unlimited sense of experiential accumulation, however, is what led to such conditions as these in which the surrounding population had become altogether disinterested. They were, in a sense, only for travelers. The population participated, surely, in transferring the meaning of the performance, but during the transmission, as well as at its conclusion, they were nowhere to be found. For Hassam and Dakota, it was almost a necessity. Even indirect participation in such an event would yield them enough surplus cognition to last for three days out in the wild. This was a place where the anthromatter flowed freely and its manipulation and transference was refined, of high quality. From place to place the folkways changed with such erratic pattern. Here, for example, they could expect a night of deep interaction concentrated, meaning-creating experiences. From where they had previously come, it was nothing but conviviality, meager sustenance, and transient. And so this was new for them. Before they went out for the night Hassam and Dakota prepared themselves both individually and in unison. The moon was full, and they could feel its gentle pull, releasing,

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just slightly, the constant burden of gravity on their physical frame. In a population this concentrated, they would surely be exposed to swiftly redirecting anthropic flow, making it very easy to let cognition flow in tandem. But that was not an option for the two travelers. Effective execution of physical agility and mental concentration was of utmost importance for them. As the moon gave them such small but replenishing relief, they set their cognition to a steady trance, entrained with their surroundings, the spirit of this place, that they might know it better on a deeper level, making it less likely to become lost in the vicissitudes of the night-to-come. On their own they did this, and then together. As a pair, their power came from their ability to distribute processing between themselves. A form of sharing that scaled-up their cognitive efficiency, they found in each other their only usable anthropic resource. After some time, having adjusted their bodies and calibrated their cohesion, they were ready to leave. They exited the small chamber they had secured for sleeping, in case they did get the chance, and walked a short distance to wait at a bench in front of the market near the corner where they had last met their escort. Shortly, he appeared from around the corner, carrying a box of contraptions and a flower, which he promptly offered to Dakota. She took it and placed the stem in her headband and made a courteous gesture to the gentleman. Though its meaning could be separated into ten thousand, smiling was universal amongst humans. -There are two neighborhoods I enjoy in Mis-Sissity, one for general entertainment, and one for more specific types of diversion. He handed Hassam an object from the box under his arm, a wood-carving, a geometric paradox of intertwined tentacles, dull-colored, but pulsating at a slow, breath-like pace. -Well start with the general and work our way down to the more specific activities need to get you guys warmed up. I pick these up for my friend, he doesnt get out much. I give him a visit whenever the moon is out in full, thats when their pace is quickest. You give him this one and hell tell you a story. They help him remember, put some substance back in

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his illusion. Yeah, hes one of the old-timers, hes been here since the beginning. Youve come through here at the right time, you know, good timing. Lets go, I cant stand still under this bright of a moonshine. They walked through one of the main arteries of the settlement. People and pillows and flags and lights of all different colors floated past in their usual dance of synergistic interference. They could have walked all night; this street did not sleep and there were any manner of diversion. One such as either of them could have soaked it in, the people, the thoughts, the patterns and all at little-to-no effort on their part. The action in this place was enough to support the full cognition of one even weaker than what their travels had made them. They partially participated in every other ongoing that passed, holding long enough to reach the next one: Two women debating over the length of their shoes as to which were the shortest of the two, a man with an oversized sheep and a miniature shepherds staff begging for carrots at the market; there were trails of people moving in serpentine fashion through the crowd growing and shrinking as it picked up and let go the particles of its wave. It was amazing, especially to Hassam, how these people, these extricates, could maintain such complex engagement with each other all with such little resources. Anywhere on the fringe, such a degree of human interaction required vast amounts of anthropic flow. Yet these people had crumbs. But alas, humans create something out of nothing, it is what they do best, and with this potential they, for this place at least, upheld a formidable collective. The flow created within was powerful, and dangerous, but it was part of the dance, and it was calibrated by the people. All one needed to do was be with them, engage with their ways, and the flows would naturally submit and support. From one to the next they jumped in and out of hundreds of interlogues, their escort leading them forward, but in a meandering way, as he knew by their slow eye movements and genuine smile that they were matching already with the ways of alignment here. Eventually they came to a sort of vacant alcove one turn off the main street. It looked empty and dark at first, but as was the typical manner of things here on the outside regarding not

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just light but all forms of energy: intensity increased with approach. Soon they could see a steady stream of people one or two at a time, entering and exiting and shuffling around and standing comfortably and they approached an empty space at the back. And when they came in to lean against the counter and take orders with the young server, a trio of stools restructuralized out of the bar itself, as thunderous clouds shift and rearrange their myriad parts in such nuanced and simultaneous transformation, at a scale that is too fast to believe, but too slow to deny, in that way things turned into other things. Everything was always in motion and so it was more often than not that objects would appear to have formulated in thin air when in fact they are just in the midst of such a well-integrated environment that things are always in a constant animated state of pausing and reformulating, set forth in their rhythm by surrounding anthropic change. The young server behind the bar smiled while wiping the inside of a tall vessel with a white towel, effortlessly spinning the cup in one hand and twisting the towel with the other, waiting patiently for them to make up their minds, and so they did, one at a time, as was the custom in even the most densely-concentrated habitats of the Fringe. So they saw through the server and made their own drinks and turned away from the bar to face the crowd of breathing, shifting humans, healthy enough to be safe, flawed enough to be interesting. They sat comfortably sipping their drinks while not a single patron of this establishment gave them acknowledgement. Their escort had no contact with this place, or the people of it, and that was by his design, so that he could, undisturbed, calibrate their awareness to the general nature of anthropic flow here. Recognizing the general behavior of the inhabitants of this large settlement assimilated their cohesion accordingly, as not to attract attention when later engaging in more in-depth interactions. Shortly, they arrived at the old mans chamber, the man who didnt get out much, and were welcomed inside with gestures and thoughts of embrace and joy-of-company. He was a dejected and forlorn man who had given up just about everything to keep-on. His room was austere, empty and unloving. There were no things constantly changing and rearranging, in fact, there werent many things at all. So t hey

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promptly made seats for themselves around a central canister of long-empty residual anthropic matter. Over the can, Hassam offered the wooden carving, which now expanded and contracted vigorously, and upon touching it the man took in a deep breath and seemed to lift out of his seated posture. He took on a new appearance and he also took a second welcoming to Dakota, who he seemed to interpret as a close friend from some other time. But he settled his renewed attention on Hassam, sizing him up, and though he found it peculiar, considering Hassams cognitive capacity at this moment, that he would place himself in such a precarious position as to betray his apparent objective, the old man found meaning in their appearance here in his presence, at this time, and he began commune and directed his thoughts on these things which were of important consequence to the purpose at hand: -I been here aways and I seen it all. Imember when the way was, back when it was still the earth. People now they travel in long curves, but then it was that they could move about in straight lines, breaking up the curve into a thousand little pieces if they wanted to. Now, you see, they cant even want to. Circles and circles, they just keep goin round. They know it and I know it but aint a darn thing anyone gonna do bout it. Cant go anywhere anyways and we learnt that the hard way. We s like trees, man! We cant move. We cant move away else we spread it too thin, and no man can make it on his own, and thats the truth out here more than it ever was. -I see you all is a couple a travlers, and I see you all travlin in them straight lines. I cant almost believe it, but I see you come in here, straightaway, and sit down like you own the place and this young lady right here, seems like she owns my whole memory too. Seems to be sharin all mthoughts here with me. -And how do I know all this, you ask. I know like I said because I been here everywhere. Cant git one past old eyes like these. And I know where ya goin too. You s agonna keep goin til ya re-set this whole place clear from one side to the other, and they aint gonna member a thing about it. But Ill tell ya now, before this night is through yas both gonna be on the ra-dar. The big boys dont miss a beat, and with an act

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like this here you gonna both be on the top a the list. They still wont find ya for a ways yet, but they gonna be lookin, you bet. And you gonna be lightin up the place and aint nuthin stoppin these two. I can see all that and Ive told ya, even though the young lady can find out for hself. I told ya anyway, because you was so kind as to bring me a little piece a sunshine. Hell without these all I see is that empty bucket, you bet. -Now we dont need to go on with the courtesies any further, Im sure your man wants to get goin so yous can tear up the town. But first, one last thing, and right quick with it That thing you got between you, right there, theres a little piece a sumthin growin on the two a you. Now thats sumthin I never seen bfur. Now I know you know what ya doin, and I know you gonna keep goin to dend, but with that thing I dont know what you gonna do with that. And the old man and the escort shared a moment of transaction, and before long they were out the door with not another word. The way he had spoken to them was nearimpossible for Dakota to decipher, but this was of no matter, since she followed his thoughts and not his words, as he had said she did. Regardless, they had no idea as to what he described as that thing between them. Hassam assumed that he referenced their ability to perform non-public synchronization, while Dakota understood his statement as a warning to avoid letting their cognition be so interpenetrable to each other. What he meant was neither of these. And because there was no reconciliation after repeated cycles of varying thoughts between them, they decided that it was a fact that had to be left to unfold in its own time. In the way that one does not perceptively register in realtime the physical deterioration of age in a world within time, neither Hassam nor Dakota could see this. There were situations in which the trajectory of time had the potential to bring forth great shifts in the dominant patterns of cognition, shifts beyond which any possibility could exist. Usually there was a range of possibility, and with enough cross-cancelling points of logic, the future was in plain sight. In this case, however, there was no vast network of logic-points or human brains, or whatever the representative manifestation, and thus

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no probable future. This apparatus of human thought was inaccessible to them, and events beyond a certain threshold of precedence were to them, as to mostly all others, unforeseeable. They were headed into an unknown. They knew that. The old man knew it. And unfortunately, the Exogenerational Body knew it. As stated, they were still a long way from having point-source data on them, but they were definitely starting to show up on the radar. And there was something between them, and though, by keeping in mind the old mans warning, they were alert to catch a part of the equation previously undiscovered, it was like trying to see the layer of film between your eyeball and the air. From this point on, they remained hyper-vigilant, but it was no use, not for that purpose at least. For this night, the time had come for a settling-in. They decided upon falling-in with a group with whom their escort had direct contact and that was to be spending tonight in small collective transport. -Half a dozen people, very serious. They practice often, so they know what theyre doing. And they had good reason to believe him. This was the type of activity that drew the two travelers to this particular escort his channels in small group interaction came through most readily. These types of groups were not transient; their makeup was developed over multiple sessions until each member could resonate in touch with each other. This is what Hassam and Dakota came here for. They took off for the semi-subterranean gathering place described by their contact, elated from the vivacity of the night and by the so-far effective trajectory they held in meeting their expectations. They walked beyond the bright horizon of the center of camp and let the flickering lights flash slower and slower and more sporadically and when their path was illuminated only by the clicking energy condensers above, their escort transmitted in a half-auditory, half-tactile way, the scope of the scene they were about to enter. Hassam and Dakota, despite contact, were strangers to these people, and resistance was inevitable initially. But they had to play with it,

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not a total defensive stance, and not a full-force message of intent. -In and out. The dance. Show them what you want, and put it away. Come back with something else, and fall back again. They need to feel you out. The tuning with this group is succinct. Youll go deep, but itll be hard to stay in-check. Once we go in we dont stop until we reach the end. Then we wait. If you can make it that far, we can stay as long as you like. But remember, we are in time, and you have a greater purpose. The meeting house was unmistakable: small in a relatively open area, and resembling an ascending stack of successively smaller blocks so commonly used in the development of preconscious humans. This was at a much smaller scale but carried with it the same statement of clear intent to transcend the geotropic force. The lighting outside at this time and at this distance from the center of camp was dim, but the moon was still bright, giving the surroundscape an eerie, frozen feeling. Flanking the dark entrance were two simple fountains, each shooting a stream of spurts intricately sequenced to create the phantoms of things, now water and gravity, now a face in the water, now a pack of wolves, but as Hassam looked into the upsplashing water, he could feel it looking into him, and saw that he was looping with it so that he would think bird and a bird would fly out and into the moon, and Dakota, who was in common communication with such experience, noticed his discovery, and sent the bird flying back towards the fountain, and he saw a cat snap at it, and she saw the bird come out of its stomach, and they played back and forth in this way when suddenly they both saw a horse, large and lanky with long bones and no hair and it stopped moving and the water stopped moving and a massive tangle of webs spread over the horse and it moved to block the entrance. The loop disconnected, their thoughts became empty and then, in a flash the horse lifted its head and revealed an expansion of wings that covered the entire house and the two travelers felt its strength and its struggle to release from gravity and it lifted into the air; they didnt see this but felt it, as if they both were the soaring creature, above everything, but then, just as quickly as it had appeared, with one deafening flap of those

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tremendous wings, it disappeared, leaving only the gentle twinkle of the fountain. All of this happened in two footsteps and by the third, the fountain went flat and the entrance, now behind them, became dark, as if the outside were now inside and the other way around. But the light here had a steady pulse which immediately skipped a beat upon acknowledging their presence, and with this they could feel the resistance. It came at them first as deep, grumbling voices and even sharp commands, to which they responded with a mixture of rebellion and obedience, as they were advised. There was an ensuing cacophony, swirling around them which made it hard to manage, but soon the voices fell into whispers and then giggles and Hassam and Dakota could feel the strange group groping about their inner dialogues searching for information regarding their intent and their purpose. Their escort was no longer so, he was part of the group now, and they were alone to engage this experience. They stayed and went with those people. They reached a climactic point, sustained it forever, and came back in anaesthetic reverse fashion and upon exiting their communion, they focused their attention until a harmony of reverberations came through them in unison. -Our last days are far from near. But we can no longer control this thing. Only in our imagination is out there a place simple enough for our recognition. And that is the stalemate we face. We keep it inside; it is all we have left. And yet we find ourselves so busy being out here, managing this persistent barrage of reality, that our inner peace, the platform of our individuality, dissolves, piece by piece. We cant help it; all this you see around you all the diversion, deliberation, distribution it grows. We must come together, overlapping, synthesizing, in ever-increasing complexity, in order to withstand the concentration. Ha! And in doing so, we spread thin this base layer of the person and become a flimsy film that will, eventually and irreversibly, snap and shred and shrink all in one instant. The Absolute is necessary. Yet, our last days are far from near.

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Those living in the settlements minor, those who you have certainly encountered if you are here from such a distance as you say, they are unwilling. They see the end, and they turn away. They are trying desperately to stay the same, but they cant hold it up. With the world swirling about them in -vortex, getting tighter and tighter, it jostles and jolts them, sometimes in terroristic ways. Once it gets so bad, you cant just come here and be with us. They know that. Its a decision, leading them in only one direction and albeit towards the same cliff, they will approach it much faster than us. You both must know this: There is no way out. This time, this thing that we have dissected and recombined, evaporated and condensed, over and over to the point of ubiquity, there is an aspect of it that continues indefinitely. There is a direction, and to avoid it or deny it is not an option. That would be an illusion. Go ahead. See through it, right to the other side. They all go to the same place, and that is through the Anthroposphere. If youre not there, which you are not, and we are not, then you have already lost. Fight and become monsters, submit and lose your self into the collective. Either way, you are no longer in control. They left the place in effusive and gracious affect, and walked back through the streets, whence they noticed a small tail of followers, simple-minded carousing folk, weak of intent and short of sight. And then it just so happened, that as Hassam noticed a feeling of threat coming from their following, a great flash of light preceded a slashing bolt that literally ripped the sky in half, the collective of anthropospheric energy was momentarily dissected in two. And then he heard a sound totally repulsive like thunder but backwards. And he registered a delay, for only a moment later did his surroundings let out a distinct shudder that shook upon itself in feedbacking tremors. He was confused and his sense of threat increased the beating of his heart and all the things around him began to pulse, and when the fear increased, the pulse would accelerate. And at one point he became so confused by his fear that another flash, blinding and at the same instant, a smash and rumble that shook the ground under his feet.

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He was terrified. Deaf and blind. Everything happened in immediate succession and by the time even Dakota saw Hassam losing his step, he was already fading. Before she could even process, she jumped to him. She shook him up, she knew this, had done it one thousand times. The rest did not see the light nor did they hear anything; it happened, but it was not for them to know. No matter, Dakota roused him to a normal, if not subdued, state. And immediately upon synchronization Dakota knew the manner and severity of the progression at hand. The trail of figures behind them had dispersed, but more spectators gathered and disappeared shortly, but in enough repetition to cause the trio, the two travelers and their escort, to move along and veer off. They needed to regroup. Both Hassam and Dakota were certain that their time here was coming to a close, and rapidly. They had accessed their purpose and would apparently be exiting with no extended courtesies to their escort, and he understood this all very well. They shared parting secrets and bid farewell and were headed, at once, right into the center of this settlement, as they had yet to cross its Great River and proceed through its eastward side before fully exiting. They pressed ahead like wolves, steady and single-mindedly, back into the center of camp, tapping into the collective paradigm as not to draw suspicion, though it was already too late for that. In fact, people were careful to avoid them, as they felt the inordinate pull that the two caused on the local gravity. With this, and with ease, they passed through the most concentrated spot, along the river, and were soon faced with the lapse of dead space flanking its banks. The main protoflow of Mis-Sissity passed through along the river, and to approach at such a distance was safe yet, but every step from here on out was a leap of faith. There was no telling the physical strength or the dissociative power, and most importantly, of the behavior of these backlashing agglomerations of anthromatter. Ahead they pressed regardless. They were being squeezed out of this settlement. Every beat of the collective now one step slower than their own, until, soon, they would no longer be in match with this place, its anthropic flow once supportive would then become an obstacle, impeding them

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until finally they would be trapped. What in the world had they done. There was only so much one could do to prepare for the trials of life on this backwards world. They were slowly figuring out their own way. They were completely synched into each other, simultaneously processing, interpreting, and questioning in tandem. A cycle of thought processed through them in echoes, changing each time and growing in its probability of becoming, and all manner of things began interfacing with their environment, manipulating its various features, the pulsating wood carving they called forth from earlier that night bulged the land underneath to extend out across the river, but not far enough, and by that example, recollections of their night manifest themselves, made an earnest attempt in delivering them a solution, and shriveled back into their collective depository. And when one of their failed attempts resurfaced as a great horse rising up out of the water, they both knew instantly that this was their answer and they concentrated their attention instead of letting it flow, as they had been up to this point, and the horse became superimposed on itself and split in two and became bigger and bigger until the entire visual field was devoured. They couldnt see anything, but other faculties were hard at work. They wrestled their concentration to maintain the feeling of rising against gravity, not becoming weightless, but instead being lifted against the pressure. Of course this put tremendous stress on their ability to keep cohesion overall. There came, painstakingly, a rhythm in the thrusting above and forward and they began to feel their own collective cognition fall into its train of punctuation, thus freeing up excess attention toward other things, and their vision was reclaimed, as if a thick fog had evaporated into the air, and they circled back around for a moment, they could see the arced lights encircling camp Mis-Sissity and the vacant streak of blackness that was its lifeline, the Great River, and in looking on with relief, and now from a sizable distance, they saw a flicker of the light and a ripple that charged outwards from the center line and then a hundred thousand tiny exploding flickers and all went blank and dark and lifeless and then switched back on in an instant, resuming placid ebb and flow, albeit at an indistinguishably slower periodicity. The

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reality of this incident spun them back around and they raced in the direction of the spinning of the earth, riding a potentiality that by the standards of a people unaware of their position in the universal trajectory, would have presented itself as terror-stricken prophecy. Water formed in fist-sized droplets and burst in the air. The ground shook down below, then violently, then cracked and split into hundreds of precipitous cliffs and ravines. They flew steadily, with their eyes stretched open despite their disadvantage to the night sky. Mathematically coordinated nets of glowing white fibers guided their course eastward towards the mountain ranges. As the pressure regulated, the deafening swish of the horses wings through walls of water became quiet, almost mimicking the heartbeat in Dakotas ears and all of the sudden she could hear the buzz of the large insects jumping amongst the trees. They flew low to the ground to avoid the energy transmission fields. The insects pulsed their polychromatic phosphorescence at irregular intervals to illuminate, like lightning in the clouds, the thick carpet of deciduous treetops rolling below. They flew, on these creatures of their own collective creation, for how long and for how far they knew not. The lines of dawn were changing their brightness and color, yet it seemed that this period of transition was paused as to extend the duration of their atmospheric travel. Nonetheless, the sky eventually gave-in to the bursting forth of the sun, and now in exceptionally accelerated increments, the sun grew brighter and warmer until it engulfed the riders and released their cohesion and set them to rest in a shaded hillside within one days travel of the nearest settlement. In other words, in the course of one night they had accumulated enough propensities to exercise their state of fringe life beyond the horizon of the entire settlement from which they had just now come and in so doing, reset their temporal calibration. Whatever it was that made that place stick together was now theirs; in return they give hope. But in the great calculations of the passing of time (as it had the tendency to do so out here) their trade would prove to be equal. And Hassam and Dakota knew this in some way, and

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they now rested with no thoughts in their minds, the field of their next engagement clear of all debris and distraction. It may have been days later or merely hours when they awoke, but it was midday and they were both more hungry and thirsty than they had ever been, and they scouted downhill until they found a flat spot near a shallow stream and Dakota, just before she put her hands in to wash her face, saw the water pool and reflect back to her a face and upon seeing it she recalled the street performers and their collective-pool trick and she had to wonder what their show would be like now, now that their ways had been shaken, and would they even take notice. But it was for the better, she convinced herself, and dipped her hands and shattered the reflection and refreshed herself and Hassam had been doing the same. They eerily acted in unison more often every day, entire meals being eaten bite for bite with each other, their thoughts interpenetrating to the point of a single stream. It was an inevitable side-effect to their universally-curious position, and one that would lead to their eventual discovery in earths timespace. They spent that afternoon setting lines for fish and though they were painfully famished by the time the sun was on the descent and the fire was hot, they cooked their catch with patience, and ate it in the same manner. They set more lines for the morrow, and, having been convinced of the amplitude of their ventures by the lagging response in their limbs, they put in for the night. On Causation: Pulling on the strings of insanity, even they knew not what they did, for even they were the strings, but played by who? Who played those strings was no more than the song through which they exist. Song, when heard, is not playing; it is only a way of playing, an expression of song itself. The expression has no origin; it is in things but not of them. Certainly nothing makes anything, in fact, the very act of making implies a sequence a before and after and without time, this is already. The Exogenerational Body has dismissed its causative implantation in regards to the increased frequency of transmission of self-extricate disruption, and according to the

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previous thought upon causation, they are only stating the obvious. For an exogenerational body, as such intelligent matter superseding direct physical interaction the development of a single instance of self-induction managed to deliver an alarm that was the closest thing to physical stimuli that a body could be exposed to. There were a whole batch of anomalies tying together and feedbacking each other to create an unfolding of significance never seen or projected in extraanthropospheric existence. Also, as usual, they werent prepared for this. Transmission 012.002.003 <Upper Body> Potential Extricate Conjoinment This specific atypical operation of inhibiting fullmanifestation of extricate-origin intent has outcome into a highly multiplied version of itself, and is embedding rampant anthromatter of an accelerating behavior. Actions initiated to inhibit volatility in the anthropic scatter have extended in tandem with the increased expansion of the redistributive field of engagement. Accessing direct manipulation of the nongravitational field is yet obstructed by an inverted network analysis maximus. The overlays of the anthropic nexus have separated, diminishing throughput of anthropic matter to stable settlement habitation. The settlements under affect report no disturbance in their induced simulations, despite diminished throughput. Reverse geochronometrical simulation, in contrast, results in outcomes matched with significantly reduced anthropic emissions. This anomaly has imported possibility of potential extricate conjoinment amongst a transient module-grouping within the Mis-Sissity habitation.

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Chapter 5 IN PURSUIT -Sir. -What is it. -We have confirmed actualized information of a potentially disruptive self-extricate. -Well, go ahead then. -There was a substantially declined userload at one of our key distribution hubs. We matched it against throughpoint and found evidence of a massive transfer. It had ruptured the fabric, sir. -Rupted the fubsted?! -Yes, sir. Quite resistant. It came through at such a magnitude as to allow us to trace it all the way to the second largest settlement in the immediate proximity of the Santafa entry point. -Well where is he now, then? -Traceability is not available at this time, sir. -Tracem!? -Yes, we understand, sir, but that directive is not available at this time. Typically throughput of this magnitude would transmit enough disturbance as to be recognized by even the apprenticeship, but this one has remained undetectable. -Hes not there anymore. -No, sir. Unfortunately, we believe he has multiplied, in a way. -More of him? -Not self-replication, sir. There seems to be two distinct recognition patterns absent from transgenerational data that both match a reception feed passing through that entry point. -The same? -No, different. I mean, they were different, but now theyre the same giving off the same feed. -Conjoinment. -Well, yes, sir. But no, not just that there is another feed as well. --Another partner? -No sir, we think its new life. -Nonsense. -Theres no other explanation.

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-Impossible. What do the schematatechs read on this? -They have no explanation. -Trace them. -We are doing our best. -Trace them. -Yes sir. Transmission 011.006.011 <Lower Body> Gravitational Field Disruption Inhibitors A team of schematatechticians, experimental branch, have detected the use of gravitational field disruption inhibitors in two key areas of the Outer Fringe Collective. Having been verified by inception analyst feeds, explicit go-ahead has been initiated. Point-source of these field-smoothing effects is distributed beyond minimum density threshold, requiring reverse geochronometric simulation. We expect timespace tracing before Third Redistribution preliminary operations. Patterns to be aware of include diurnal, geotropic, and biogenetic. Every decision that you make, is you, in the process of creating yourself. To want. It had become more complex than he imagined. There were two-way forces meeting him constantly. It was not as he expected, as there were people here, on the fringe, that exercised their own disjointed, mutant intent. In large groups, Hassam experienced interference that made it difficult for him to concentrate. As he looked forward, to draw his path towards him, he could feel the pull, trying to take him in one thousand directions. Underneath it all he knew where he was going. It was the details of his journey that evaded his forethought. His story was not his alone. He may have been rebirthed into his role as creator, but there were so many others responsible for influencing his decisions. There were these sycophantic extricates who could not make decisions directly, but tried (albeit unconsciously, or co-consciously, as it were) with all the more power because of it, to guide him into their own nebulous intentions. People on the trail, people in the settlements, they all had their needs. There was an underlying pattern, of course, as they were all connected to the same outcome regardless. But this made it no easier for Hassam to navigate this sea of possibility in making contact and

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generating experience in service of his own purpose, or what was now their purpose. To read writtenthought was one thing. But to read the thoughts of living humans was another. Granted, interthought access was available outside the anthroposphere, but here there was that proxy entity of the individual, soon to be a vestige of the pre-anthropospheric era. People could present ideas not in line with their purpose. Surely, individual humans of extricated or redistributed status had no self as was known to the ancient humans in time. The fringe population consisted of groupindividuals, groups of people who shared a common goal, so as to dissolve ones own into the group. It was a division in reverse of the anthropospheric trajectory of progress, but it was the only way of surviving out here. Regarding Dakota, this phenomenon was even more complex. Together the two were ascending into the world of their own creation, an ever-expanding sphere of reality having its genesis in each of them. Yet still, Dakota, at times, interfaced with Hassam from behind the veil. He could perceive in the quality of their communication that some essence was corrupt or inactive. She had come from a tight group to which she had been attached all her extricated life, but she had the unusual ability to withstand certain assaults on her cognition with an individual reciprocation. She could act separately, on her own. This was distressing to her. With no support from those close to her, no guidance regarding the nature of self, she felt the need but mostly out of reflex to defend herself by deactivating, intermittently, certain thoughts. This caused a problem for Hassam. Although they shared the common purpose, there were times when he must rely on Dakota for specific guidance and information. The withholding of even a fraction of her mental support in lieu of defending her self left him making decisions based on potentially faulty content. As it was that anything not communicated in-its-entirety was bound to leave him in a less than optimal position. It was a delicate interaction, and one that he was at somewhat of a loss for performing with the same skill with which he had so far learned in his shortduration, high-intensity endeavor thus far outside the network.

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There was another thing, another point of unequal communion between them. It came mostly at times following some of the more intense moments, such as losing cohesion in the midst of a compelling group, or fleeing the wave of attention brought onto them in their highly unusual and somewhat alarming interactions amongst these quasi-populations. At these times of denouement, Dakotas manner portrayed a quiet complacency, in-check cheerfulness, and slight expectation of a specific position within their trajectory. And when too much time had passed during which each of them became lost in their own experiences she would exhibit the opposite tendency, an avoidance of some event that seemed bound to happen. Hassam was oblivious to her inner-processing at these times and could only imagine where these places were that she apparently saw in the distance along their path, and why she would not shine the light on them for him to see. At regular intervals, according to the moon, Dakota would take off on her own for two to three days. She would leave him with the supplies, and even prepare enough food to last the duration of her absence. During this time, Hassam traveled lightly, and conducted himself in more of an exploratory fashion. When she was gone, the night would shower down sounds of insects, surrounding Hassam in warm thoughts of the abundance of life. This happened over the number of moons they had traveled. But now, Dakota had stopped leaving. The timing was appropriate as they had entered trying terrain and they relied on each other too heavily now. A long mountain that spread north was meant to be their path, as it rose above, but in parallel to, a primary vein of transmission. Their power had strengthened through their conjoined effort. It was time for them to access the anthropic bands directly. Only under nuanced conditions and impenetrable cohesion could any such as them succeed in manipulating the narrative fabric of their progression in the way they had. Its not what will be; we can never know that. Its the transition. And it is there, in-between, where creation intercepts.

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Dont let them tell you it is the One Creator; it is not. It is you. As it is written, so it is. Already. He folded the flattened paper, still fighting its folds, wanting to be open at all times. He placed it with the rest and felt himself moving forward, unalterable. When you think about life, when you used to see the buds of the acorn in full, and then the acorn the discrete triangular pieces thrusting upwards, outwards, overlapping in a distinct pattern. When you would think about the on-off switches, set by infinite variables, you would bask in the glory of it, the glory of life. But then life transcends biology; all of our concepts of life and its behaviors now being conferred upon information, not matter, as its substrate. The virtual palimpsest was a paradox at first. Copies upon copies of copies, pieces taken apart and put back together but having been exchanged with identical pieces of another. Put simply, though, it was just the concept of a thing a thing as based in matter becoming a non-physical thing, an idea. There were no more things, or at least not much that mattered. It was all ideas. And ideas dont require a physical platform, they need only a mindspace. How do you build a culture on that? There is no more building in the sense we of timespace had known. And so our cultures as well dissolved and diluted, too meager an entity to compete in this world. Culture needs layers of age and decay; it mimics the biological in that sense. To the point, he who relies on his body to house his mind, his mind will always behave as a body and according to the rules of timespace. As the mind increasingly manifests itself in its own environment by its extended reach into the world, propelled perpetually by force of intent, it feeds more on itself and less on its environment. As an information system, its input becomes internally, not externally, generated. Eventually the external environment disappears altogether, and we are left in

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the mindspace alone, to interact beyond the limits of the previous system of the scale and quality of the physical earth. There is no need to pretend that this new world doesnt exist. As the ancient dwellers of the new continent could not resist, by any means, the deconstruction of their world, neither can we. Yes the world we have come to know through our previous generations is beautiful but what makes it so? Is not that same thing available to all? Can we not accept and assimilate a new aesthetic paradigm? It is simply knowing that the other way exists that keeps us from living our old way in the peace and beauty of our predecessors. That is why you see these monstrosities, these twisted chimeras of life all around you. We are pretending to live our old ways, using the rotten waste of real experience, in time. We do not create anthromatter, we only use it. We give them nothing back, except reflection, and they have enough of that already. Hassam was in a puzzling situation in regards to his reading of writtenthought. Successive generations born into the Anthroposphere were no longer able to use it. For them, of whom Hassam was a part, it had become an outdated mode of transmission. It was uncommon then, and at times outright lunacy, for general population to engage in such an activity. As for the protogenerate, for those who had acquired the ability to read this kind of ancient transmission, such reading was practiced and learned at a young age, granting them the ability, even in old age and even within the Anthroposphere, to find it useful for some purpose. Thus, the puzzle, for Hassam, was that he had not been granted with this ability to know the thoughts of the past as they occurred to the thinkers themselves, and yet he found great benefit in the processing of such information. Accessing written-thought for Hassam was much different than for protogenerational access. The protogenerational reader would visually scan the linear pattern of information, piecing together a meaningful sequence. In the successive anthropospheric generations, the patterns were engaged with visually, but not in such a rigorous, sequential way. In fact, it wasnt done at all. They look at the patterns, but it is not

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them who do the work associated with it. The visual information is formulated into meaningful patterns of ideaparticles and transmitted to the reader as a narrative of symbolic visual and auditory language. The fully immersive richness of communication within the anthroposphere paled exponentially the enlightening quality of such written-thought interaction. However, in this there was a directness of transmission, a concentration of thought that, for the determined user, could provide penetrating insight into the essence of such universal ideas as thought itself, or the development of life, or the process of universal energy transmission. Hassam buried himself in those picture-voices, and as a result was both ignored by his peers and exalted by his ancestors.

Oh sure there were people outside the settlements. It was rare, during the length of time leading up until now. But with every setting sun another wave of redistribution washed up on the shores of this earth-trapped land in which all manner of humans were twisted in irresponsibility. Some came too young, and learned so fast as to put unforeseen pressure on the resources provided, as in the case with Dakota. Some came too old, and having not-even the will to live. And some came so saturated with the lifeblood of the anthroposphere, that they became asphyxiated and dehydrated and their heart slowed down to critical slowness to take stress off the body, but to no avail, and led them instead backwards through nature.. And of these some might have been shot back into the network as corrupt distribution, some may have lived only for the first moment, and upon making their only decision, their last decision for this was no place for exercising such luxury they disappeared, succumbing to the twin forces of inside and out, at their most physically-constituent molecular level, to take up the game of existence from a place much further back in the formulation of the great narrative of progress. They speed away in two directions both smaller than the eye can see

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and larger than the mind can imagine; they leave the human sphere. They leave only a trace of their decision, their single act in time, by an invisible pulling, upon anyone and anything in their specific chrono-geolocation. Their presence, this effect, lasted only a moment, followed by a brief sadness, an emptiness, and then balance. Both sides now were even; the network thinned its circulation, and the fringe populations gained a crumb of awareness, one of countless more that would be collected and put-into-action, and relied upon for their own menial existence. And finally, there were some, such as Dakota, as already referred to, who lived out their lives in as close to equilibrium as their particular conditions would allow, and although those conditions would vary, and thus their effects, one thing consistent was their great strain on the collective cohesion, and, one and the same, their fascinating manner of cognition. These were the types of people to be found either bouncing between settlements, or orbiting their homebase in pathetic attempts to contact and assimilate with other groups from other places. What you wont see are protogens who were distributed during the first wave, when the system was in its robust, confident ascent. It worked for protogens to go back. They were still familiar with a pre-anthropospheric existence, and the available infrastructure in place was in balance with their demand, which was minimal. Things changed quickly, however. The system grew forth protuberances and anomalies unaccounted for. Dont be fooled: knowing everything, even the future, does not guarantee that the knowledge will come to be at use in the right place and at the right time. There is always approximation, like two frogs croaking in the night they are bound to overlap and you know they will, and they know it too, but when it will happen is hard to guess and when it does you know that its over until the next round: they have to wind up again. And so it is with the constituent patterns, laid out in parallel, lining up at certain moments to become an even pair, and with the addition of the conscious human, and experience, these too will be offered at the temple of progress.

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Those who see this, those who know all of this, they can only do so much. After all, they are only human. And by the time things began to fall out of synch faster than they could be corrected, it was too late to pause and/or modify the approach at redistribution. The network became exasperated and the extricates, who were an unexpected anomaly, and the redistributed, who now were no longer comfortable protogens, but people not optimally suited for transfer, were radically reformulating the landscape of Earth. The network distorted in response, the natural beauty of its youth showing signs of age and maladjustment. That ultimate artifice, the anthroposphere, albeit of the human mind, was still, in its essence, of the human body, and thus subject to the same forces of the universe that bring decay and decline to even the most formidable reality. One would call it a crisis, but in the collective network, thought becomes reality, and the Exogenic Body make it their primary goal to uphold the illusion of external peace and prosperity, in the only way they had designed it to in the first place. In conclusion on this topic then, these were some of the people that were seen out there, and some of the flaws that were responsible for their predicament, and what they were made of and faced with and expected to do. And as for these things, they are known only in the way reported to the reader here, for things of this nature and in these relationships were inaccessible to any one side of the operation and there were nonesuch knownas belonging on both sides, at least not at that time. Little nodes, but pre-nodes, not yet connected, but following in pursuit of their artificial, technological model of the world, teeming with latent consciousness, filling up waiting to burst open, when the Greater Consciousness is released and all the little nodes gush forth spilling into each other, all things-to-beknown become known-by-all. On both sides, each knew the ways of the other, but they knew also that, though all human, they were of two different kinds, and there were always some things, that were so fundamentally different, that they could never fully understand each other.

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Surely, things happen so slowly from the perspective of the individual that these great changes go unnoticed in time on the individual scale, and it is only through the collective lens that an understanding is achieved. And as it were, the centralized structure of information distribution became so dispersed and chaotically organized, the entire population fractured and slid entirely apart from each other as plates of the earths surface, yet without even a quiver. It was so unprecedented, so alien an operation, that it triggered not even the slightest reverberation in their awareness. But that was for those on the one side. As for those on the other, it was simply taken for granted that everyone knew everything. No one person ever questioned the genesis of their transformation, after all, for them, the prioritization of information didnt exist; one thing, such as creation, would reward just as much upon contemplation, as kinesthetic biofeedback and body language during group locomotion.

For Hassam and Dakota, for their journey thus far, they accessed a new platform. Their consummation of conjoinment had yielded an abundance of awareness that ultimately manifested itself in the physical world. It held them down in many ways, closer to the earth. It held them together too, but it held them down. -One of these places has to be the one. I cant see us going much further along this way. Our time will come. From what weve been told of this region so far, there are a few places of surprisingly low traffic, good stability. Its such a risk moving towards these remote camps, though. Theyre so volatile We have no choice; its no use settling for only a few days. We cant keep moving like this. If we dont find settlement

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soon we wont even be able to make contact anymore. Thats a risk Im not willing to take. For many days forward from then, they walked through the most barren of wastelands. At some points along the way, they were so alone, so remote, that another person would have been a days travel away. Had they not been the inextricably linked system they had become, the two of them together, they would have perished out there, after having walked themselves in ever-tightening circles. But as it were, fortune was upon them. As they entered a relatively benign settlement in a wasteland of anthropic detritus, they were immediately directed to an isolated apartment set back from the others and surrounded by large locust trees, a sight quite rare on the fringe, as the dynamic shifting of protoflows cleared out of their paths anything so brittle as a locust tree. Before they could announce their presence at the door, it opened and their contact came outside to greet them in an overbearing manner of politeness and care. As she introduced herself, she checked them over, looking into their eyes, testing the tone of their muscles, stretching the skin of their faces and gauging the quality of their hair as if she were grooming for insects. This intimate caring-for and trying-to-do was reliable evidence of an elderwoman, now going back to nature, who had been taken from her position as a steward of the headless youth, those extricated prematurely. Her influence on their growth had become a detriment to a potentially prosperous generation in this particular settlement. Each gathering, each grouping of people of almost any size carried-on wider the hope-granting prescience that the youth among them, especially those whose lineage was uncertain, might acquire in their fragile beginnings of development, a new way-of-being to be used and passed on to their progeny in a trajectory that led their people out of this world. All unfounded mythologies, of course, but nonetheless, there were times when those such as their contact, the figures in charge of facilitating these flashing bulbs of potential liberation, deteriorated to a point where they could no longer function in concert with the others, and thus became a strain on their particular network. After so many

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days and moons and suns-around, these women were perpetually locked into a state of overextending themselves in a delusional effort to prepare the youth for a world without. This, logically, was antithetical to their purpose in the collective albeit quite absurd an idea in the first place: There was no future in a world without the Anthroposphere. Theirs was to advance in the hopes of liberation, not to buckle-down in the defeated fate of a future of absolute limitations. Now, then, she, their contact, lived by herself caring for infinite, empty, dustless rooms of her apartment and the ageless, snarling branches of the delicate locust trees surrounding. -Come in, please. Let me take your things, here, change your foot-coverings and let me make you something over the fire. Sit down, right here, go ahead, right there. She went on like this for an uncomfortable length of time. Once they were settled, and drinking a warm broth with herbs and flowers by the baked ceramic fireplace all surrounded with pots of many sizes for cooking for who knows who, and with handmade, half-finished colder-weather clothing lying about, also for who they knew not, Hassam and Dakota allowed these friendly-trying surroundings to relax their cohesion and blend with each other and their host. She told them her story and began with a recounting of all the domestically-centered activities of which she was once capable. She was a victim of progress, of time. Her mind was so concentrated on her duties that she neglected her own personal keeping-up. She worked harder than anyone in her settlement, but her way became lost, and her services told a story for the example of others of the need to remain close to the collective, and the predictable existence of those who did not. Despite her depressing narrative, she spoke very evenhandedly about the ongoings of a people in a world of an earlier time. Her contact was so immediate, in fact, that it made one wonder as to how she could have become so separated from the filaments of living interaction. Then again, these people,

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out here, were completely backwards. To remain with them, albeit for the sake of ones own survival was to march with them into a dark oblivion. This Hassam was coming to understand. She continued: -We had been designed up to that point, to use our intuition in combination with reason. There came a time, however, when our logically-constructed reality far surpassed our intuition. The microscopic world, germs and molecules, all that was ungraspable by the intuition. As a mode of decision-making it soon became obsolete, and was relegated to far less ready-totake-on areas of society, the institutions of society, in fact. Fortunately, so it seems to have turned-out, this left a space, a space for reorganization and growth. Hassam had been down this path once before. In his bundles of writtenthought, he frequently excavated and recognized an idea that language itself could be a face, a representative of the shifting of deep undercurrents in consensual reality. And he recalled from his memory a text that spoke to him, this time in a female voice that matched that of the woman speaking to them now. As she, the host, continued her monologue, she, the recollection of Hassams writtenthought -made-audible, continued in tandem. After all, they were both saying the same thing. And it came to him like this: Fortunately or Unfortunately It has been decided. The recent rediscovery of the words fortunately and unfortunately signals an apparent shift in the paradigm of the collective. In using this new relationship between the diametrically opposed terms as a way of describing an event, there is a distinction between chance and causation. When a certain outcome or mode of behavior or operation is categorized as fortunate, it denies causation and, hence, renders the operation incapable of being rationalized. And to disambiguate, unfortune is not a lack of this

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unrationalizability, but simply a negative expression of its still random operation. To refer to anything as fortunate renders the logical human mind powerless to analyze it, manipulate it, predict its outcome, or prevent its onset. It exists entirely in another realm as a function of randomness. So, in the current collective paradigm, instead of regarding something as a problem that can be solved, it is instead a phenomenon, the true nature of which we can not understand by way of the rational mind. When certain issues regarding either power or people are not recognized as a problem, then there is no fault, and then there is no need for direct action. Surely, this seems like a most unfortunate context in which to address major issues of our time. However, fortune, by its illogical nature, removes the moral compass, the universal right-and-wrong. And in this vacancy, perhaps, there is room for a recalibrating of that compass. All of the sudden, the fortune now becomes ours for the taking, for those of us who wish to see it in this way. This entire postulation was overshadowed by the heightened effect of their contact due to the transposition of his writtenthought on top of her own thought. Somehow, with this addition, one Hassam had perhaps noticed once or twice before but to no follow-up, there was now a great implication presenting itself to him. Was it possible that they were in fact running out of contact, or was he really correlating, in their timebound world, his recited writtenthought with those of his contact? And at this thought, he actually hoped it was the former. The size of the entire world would come crushing down upon him, a sphere now a world contracting to a speck of dust in an instant with him inside. It was not his intent, not in the deepest compartments of his self, to bring his inner world of understanding and knowledge that delivered to him directly by the forbearance of his existence into this place, or any place in this world. This may have been a coincidence; this place Out Here was plagued with them, but Hassam feared that it was not such randomness.

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He was afraid to think his next thought that it might turn around and stare him back, materialized, stuck forever in this world. But then, in good form, both Hassams recollection and their hosts contact became silent in-step. It was now completely dark outside, the fire had gone to embers, and their host, perhaps spent after delivering a monologue beyond her capacity for penetration and endurance, showed them to their room with less too-much than before. When she left, she wasnt seen or heard again for the remainder of the night . He set out his things to prepare for sleep. His bundle of parchments, a ghost, silent, to everyone but him. How is this happening, he was afraid of the answer. For so late in the evening, his cohesion was amplified. Dakota was no help in relieving him, as she was permanently, so it seemed these days, in a hyper state of awareness. Their host was gone, and they thought she might have even left the building altogether, and as it was not unusual to wander through a contacts interior space, the two decided to explore. The home was immaculate, even by the glowing light of their handlanterns. And though immaculate it may have been, ordered it was not; yet it wasnt order, necessarily, that was lacking, but an overabundance of it. The hallways proceeded for a length of three doors, opposite each other to make a row of six, and were punctuated by an intersection. There, the hallways spread out into the other right-angle directions, for, again a space of three doors length, at which point they each again, were punctuated by another intersection spreading in the same previously stated directions and following the same pattern of repetition. By the time Dakota and Hassam reached the third intersection, they were lost within. Seeing no difference within the rooms themselves, as each one was a large main room upon entry that led to two smaller rooms on either side, they entered into one at random. Having done so, and then faced with the equally-offering decision of two other rooms for further inspection, the two explorers split up and walked away from each other and towards the smaller rooms in front of them. There were no doors up to this point, but in the smaller rooms,

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lit more dimly than their main room, those having been lit already and for what must have been no reason at all, since all the rooms were lit but not the hallways, but there was no one around or apparently expected for a good distance and for the remainder of the night, regardless even the smaller rooms, the two of them occupied now by Dakota in one and Hassam in the other, were dimly lit, enough to keep the handlanterns in their pockets, yet not enough to keep the eerie sense of forcibly-muted silence from veiling the two terminating doors, these closed, to the explorers. Hassam, trying to maintain a record of his decisions, chose the door to the left, catalogued his decision and moved towards and opened the door to find a dark staircase leading upwards, turning swiftly, and emanating another dim light at its other end. He noted this and turned around to check the other, and found the same thing, though this staircase led downwards. Having taken total account of the options, he returned to the ascending staircase and upon turning the first corner, found the way becoming narrower in every step. It turned once more and terminated with not a doorway, but more of a flat tunnel raised to waist-height off of the ground. Hassam crouched down and could see through the space to the other side, and in his view was a great room with high ceilings and spectral, refracted light twinkling from every surface, and so he crawled through, but upon exiting the other side, he somehow found himself back in the staircase, in view of another turn leading up an even smaller passage. He decided to try again, one more time, and went up the stairs again, and was made less comfortable by the closeness, but saw again a crevice in the wall smaller than the last, but with a room this time even bigger and brighter, from what he could see of it. So he tried one more time, to squeeze through, but upon reaching the other side, found himself once again on the staircase at which point he went back down the stairs, but instead of widening as he descended, as it had done but in reverse on his ascent, the staircase got even smaller and tighter and Hassam felt a trace of panic. He turned one corner and saw that the way became too tight to pass. He turned around to go back up, and on reaching the first corner was paralyzed with fear. He was out of options, or so it seemed. He was paralyzed physically the staircase had become constrictive

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but more immediately, he suffered from a paralysis of the mind. After having shuddered violently between the two options, no, no, no, no, his mind stopped completely. There was nothing, yet it was so frightening. And then he thought of Dakota, a momentary lapse and then he postulated that she might be in the same predicament, and then it all snapped. He contorted and squirmed his way back around the corner into an even tighter space than before and he went far enough until he could still turn around, only his head this time, until finally he twisted and jammed himself into a space possibly smaller than his own body; he could feel the walls and the ceiling and the stairs all touching him at the same time, pushing against him more tightly with every breath and he felt for a warmth, some form of expected-resolution, and he felt it begin to warm up and the walls and the ceiling and the stairs began to soften, yet encircling him even more thoroughly, pushing into every crook and cavern of his body and everything softened until it took on a sensation of warm water. No light, no sound, just feeling. And he could see another feeling just ahead of him and it was coming closer. Dakota, she was the feeling; she was the place, the place where his staircase was leading, and he opened his eyes now and he could barely see the ceiling for the dazzling shards of rainbow shooting through the room, but not a room an arena. Dakota was there with him, of course, and they smiled at each other for the absurdity, but more in that they were actually frightened. They had both experienced the same thing, in parallel, though in their symmetrically separate rooms. They were, after all, at this point, and in most ways, one and the same. But now they were unseparated, feeding through one another and so one hundred million rainbows exploding and contracting was actually ten-thousand million, and the feeling of relief after being genuinely in-fear, was twofold as well. The room grew in size as they stood there, with each other, and the lightshow accelerated and multiplied its display until they could no longer see the limits of the room itself and eventually everything became white until they could no longer see each other. Whiteout. And then they were outside. It was dawn, soft neon pink under hard navy blue. The silhouettes of locust trees sliced through the pre-sunlit clouds in slashes of

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crooked, wretched effort. Their host was there, holding one of the branches, as if she were helping it grow in that crooked way on purpose. They left without saying goodbye, as she was deeply involved in what she was doing.

When just now approaching over their immediate horizon was the most amazing thing theyd seen yet. It was a child, not even ten years old and carrying nothing but a stick in his hand. He was heading straight for them, and displaying not a trace of fear or even curiosity. In fifty paces they came face-to-face and exchanged a moment of silence. Dakota spoke the whole time from this point on and she asked him questions, not because she wanted to know the answers, but because she was simply amazed and didnt know what to say, and the boy delivered a string of information that, in its detail was inconsequential, but in its implication was staggering. -Well, sure I figured two is better than one but you never know how these things happen and so here I am. My dad is a rainmaker and I dont have much else in the way of family and so with dad always at the burial ground I found myself getting around a lot. And when one day I left I knew it didnt matter much if I came back and so I just kept it up and didnt mind much myself. I been at it for days, maybe half a moon at it. On the side at odd times sleeping, and other times just going at it. Days mostly, but sometimes nights, when its hot. No way, theres nobody out here. They keep closer to the camp and are pretty easy to spot anyway. Where should I go I dont know. Doesnt matter though, its good going anyway. He had no interest in them, wasnt frightened or evasive. Wasnt he in danger? But he was right, there wasnt anyone around, and if so, they could be seen from safe enough a distance and ultimately couldnt be much harm anyway. But wouldnt the monitors pick him up immediately. Or would they? They wouldnt. They arent scanning for solos. But he would signal as missing from his settlement. Maybe he was

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never on profile. It could happen. There were extricates being sent in at such a young age and given to careless supervisors who themselves needed supervision. It was holes like these that made this whole redistribution system incompatible. But how does he make it with no collective reservoir to draw from? Hes young, hes being bred in real-time to deal with this world, even through the collective comforts of his settlement, it still works on them, and makes them have a resistance. Its unusual because they never leave. There is nothing outside of ones settlement. No two can be alike, and to be born into one is to be a part of it forever. This child added a whole new layer to their field of engagement. People child or not, eventually this could happen again people could withstand this on their own. Up until now, Hassam had been the only solo human on the fringe. The whole picture of possibility and purpose changed for them, just then.

It was dark. They had been on the trail for quite some time. He felt something behind him. He was hearing things. He turned around and saw a movement in the dark. Something was following. How did they figure it out already? From which way had they come, and how many? No I think it was just one then who? He turned around again and something was there in the dark, mimicking his movements and he realized it was his shadow. He was paranoid. They had been moving steady for days now. There was a storm brewing, far north and heading straight down the mountain range in direct opposition to the two travelers. As soon as the volcanic-explosion sunset lit up the forward barreling storm clouds in the far distance the two decided to curve in for a small settlement, isolated by thrustupwards naked earth, and seemingly well-protected from such climatological events. They spent an entire day and a half, all the while straining under a tension greater than the strong winds, for these people, in resistance against them, were stronger. As the rain began to whip and whorl, the inhabitants

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tightened their individual anthrestreams, leaving scant invitation for contact, and any of which delivered through was hardwon, yet hard to swallow. -We are not individuals; that is the illusion that comes with consciousness. General population doesnt know this. In fact, it is the proto-generational population, and especially those redistributed back into time. It is their observations on the anthropospheric-born humans that bring them their understanding of this illusion of the individual. General Population is one thing. They are the Anthroposphere. Surely, they interact with each other but this is an antiquated byproduct of the use of anthromatter, awaiting its eventual disappearance. In all, they are not separate points reaching towards each other. Everything they do or say or think is already there, all around them. They are already everywhere. How do you go anywhere when you are already everywhere? Ah, but they are not out here. This is why we can see the puzzle in a way impossible to them. Hassam thought to himself, in spite of his direct communion with this man. Why is he telling me this? How could he think that I dont know this? I am General Population. I am the Anthroposphere. Its an insult to hear this man, probably a protogen on a mission, who came storming through the other side, looking for some kind of revenge for the loss of his precious way of life. So he comes to find a group, to stabilize, and to fester his anger, waiting for this precious moment to reveal to me, to me, the illusion of my people. My people. As if we were different. As if I had no taste of this individuality he speaks of. All the while, the very group he is a part of, this group that allows him to resonate and share his cognition so that he might devise his confused, out-of-touch stories of the evolution of humanity and his place in it and the place of his people and his way of life, this group exists at the sacrifice of his own self in service of the group. Where would he be now if not for losing himself, even partially, to them? But he doesnt see this. And he calls to me, bringing forth an illusion. This man cant even see the nature of his own cognition, nevermind the nature of human interaction. How could he profess, how could he come to me with such confidence, laying out a line of logic the form of which he has never felt? He has no idea the life of the anthropospheric human. And yet

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he claims to see their predicament, as if he is master of their fate, designer of their system. His thoughts are riddled with paranoia, and he shares them, as if they were fine jewelry, to hang around the neck. Yet he continued: -You and I are the same. We are both seeking that great unity, the closing of the circle, but our tails are ever-receding. When do we catch up? We may take contact with each other, but when do we make contact back with ourselves? When do we succeed, or when do we stop trying? At this last question Hassam terminated their communion. He was abrupt, but he anticipated the pause in his thought stream and took it as an opportunity to feign solo introspection. Hassam had come here on the defensive, so as it was he evidenced no discontinuity in demeanor. All the while, Dakota had been following the signs, as she had little choice in ignoring Hassams current mindstorm. During Hassams transaction, moments before his abrupt termination, she made gestures to their escort suggesting a rapid departure, and by the time Hassam looked away, their escort casually nodded to his two travelers, and to the man, and they exited with fake smiles and stiff, stale courtesies. Something was wrong now, and the tone of this night had changed. -Now, you have to understand that there was a time prior to the uninhibited access to thoughts. And by thought, it is meant all thoughts, the thoughts of others. This alone is a puzzling concept for most. But, prior to our anthropospheric transition, it was the-way to have thoughts separated. One could keep their own thoughts to themselves, but, in the inverse, they had to actively commit in order to share their thoughts with others. This is where the misunderstanding, misinterpretation and ultimate misuse of writtenthought comes from. It is too layered of a paradox for the generational human to penetrate the concept of individual thought. In fact, there is no penetrating, as that would imply a vertical mono-directionality

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(if reference to a dimensional model could be permitted) not a horizontal, omni-directional expansion. People do not think. We use the word, think, and words in general, but the meaning of the word think and the use of words in themselves, has practically nothing to do with their former position in the resource depot of the mind. Nonetheless, people do not think about things and they neither conceal nor share their thoughts with others. We are so far beyond that. So far beyond, that writtenthought is starspeak to most: accessing and interpreting it is akin to aligning a matrix over the stars in order to free ones existence. Furthermore, the Body discourages such intercourse, as it pauses-up anthropic processing. And, according to the Body, as well as being a belief that mostly all are in favor of, looking ahead is more important than looking behind. Hassam had double-coded this contact, due to its metalogical nature, whereas Dakota took it as a single stream. She knew that such interaction was necessary considering the emphasis on writtenthought. She was a protogen, of a most hybridized form, and such concepts were like long-quilled jellybags to her grasp. -You can do that. We cant. But wheres the win? When I take this into my mind, or bring it forth from within me, of course I can see it, I can see her face, and her eyes, and I can feel laughter, whatever that is, and see her laughing and her face is really there, in front of me, and of course I do not see every freckle on her face or hair on her head. But I could if I wanted to, its all in there, and thats what wed become so fond of in our generations. Its a long road towards mea ning: to pause, dissect and separate every piece from every other, to analyze each, categorize, rendering its infinite units of discrete information, and reformulating into a meaning-producing entity. And what does it mean to understand, a person? What does it mean to interact, with a person? It is to feel. This is the essence of meaning, and you, all of you, bypass the Long Road. There are no anomalies in your reformulations, no unresolved potentialities for alternate interpretations the reformulation never takes place inside you. That tedious task

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in fact, that which has kept us apart, some of us by choice, some by deft coercion that job has been handed over to the collective. And you get the good stuff. Thats what you call it. But what about those anomalies, those unresolved potentialities? What about those that get left-behind, by the collective, lost in the space of an individual mind? Are they never to live again in the mind of another? If they are not with us, us all of us together then where are they? We keep some, those of us who have never felt The Anthroposphere. For some it is the reason for staying here; some cannot let go. And ultimately, we prefer the Long Road, or perhaps we simply dont know any other way, and dont care to. And Hassam thought to himself how he could never look at the Moon long enough to see the individual blemishes. He never thought to himself, what is that glowing disc? What a silly question. But frightening it was to him, that one of these people, perhaps his contact at this moment, may have posed such a thought, to himself, and exploded forth an answer, perhaps one of ridiculous clarity, ridiculous by anthropospheric standards, as clarity itself was considered a misunderstanding, but an answer unknown to any other, and to have that stay within that one person, frozen there forever, how impossible an idea. Division by Zero he had understood to be a Long Road explanation to a similar phenomenon. But then Hassam thought about Dakota, called her forth into his mind, and she reciprocated and they looked at each other, examining the pores of eachothers faces, and moving on to count the hairs on each others head. And before they could finish they ascended to simply exist, in each others mind. An anomaly of exacerbated proportion they were conjoinment. They could each follow the Long Road, but only so long as it led to each other. And as their own unresolved potentialities expounded, one upon each other, their conjoinment yielded to the next formulation, and it seems to have become apparent as to the results of such an event.

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Their contact, obviously, was unaware of the position of his initiates, but so it was becoming more and more the conditions under which they traveled. The settlement had some basic understanding, some justifiable fear, and with that came greater and greater resistance, but on the individual level, they made contact with their particular distinction unregistered. Masters of protogenerational emulator cognition at this point they had become. And so they continued through, outwaiting the weather against their unwelcomeness. -Truth is, we dont really want your kind here. We could see you comin since yesterday and you was bringin the whole damn thing with ya. He was right. Ever since crossing the river they had been pulling much more weight. Granted, their ability to progress increased, but it was the severity of their disruption in the field that caused great attention upon them, and as their condition was being closely monitored already, it was a bad thing for them and, unfortunately, anyone crossing their path. -We mindin our own business out here. We dont tract no tention, and we dont do no favors. We knows where you goin and we aint comin with ya, not us. You tryina take us further from our ways, tryina fluence somebody to be they true selves. Well we got enough truth here for a hundred generations, but you wont be here long enough to find out. And they wouldnt. It was an inverse of irony that at the apex of the storm they fled, or were they chased, into a shallow alcove and there picked up their only amicable contact. They tapped into non-mediated transmissions regarding redistribution anomalies, as they would indicate the Exogenerational Bodys developments in more sensitive tracking of their disruptor/inhibitor path. As it turned out they were able to access a brief summary of a lesser branch off the premier human-systems of the coastal area, which was in the direction they were headed. The report focused on various small networks of threes and fours spread around a derelict metropolis of pre-anthropospheric significance. Their movement showed spotty transit, as if they were appearing

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and disappearing instead of traveling continuously. They questioned the anomaly as perhaps corrupt redistribution that was sending aggressive anthromatter back into the anthroposphere, but they couldnt match the signals. They were wrong in their prediction of course, but it was now beside the point, as the travelers could continue their eastward movement in pursuit, and remain confident in their decisions, as they were apparently ahead of detection yet. If the Body was still incapable of streaming back data on the redistributed population in their charge as the transmission evidenced then they were still some steps behind the fullscale tracking of those such as Hassam and Dakota, and even moreso for the following reasons. They were only two, and this alone set them below scanning parameters, as groups of two were not known to move about for lack of sufficient cohesion. Three was enough, but two was less than unlikely. Beyond that, however, Hassam was a recent extricate and never made full contact at his nearest point of entry, meaning he was never registered in the scan profile. Next, Dakota was from a fringe-group of distinction in her settlement, because of their ability to enmesh with the cognitive patterns, or lack thereof, within others. In looking for any signature of individuality, she was invisible. This and, she was ripened on the Fringe, and such people never left their home settlement, unless under such circumstances as these, where Dakota could not resist her need to follow the path laid out before her. So she was, and in more ways then that, invisible. Finally, they were creating this journey themselves. This posed the most primary of paradoxes for those examining the situation left of the Earth itself. It is like they were there and yet ahead of themselves at the same time, covering their tracks, as if backwards, with the passage of progress, whatever that is. After gaining this pertinent information and upon abrupt cessation of the storm, they left that settlement rather quickly. But Dakota was bothered by something and made it clear to Hassam shortly after their exit. -What do you think it is? Premature implementation. No, I mean the spotty signals. We havent come across anything like that. We havent made it to that place. Who knows what things are happening there. Weve been hit with some surprises all

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along, but that area is much different. There was once a lot of activity there. Theres no way of knowing what resources are being used by those people, and to what ends. But its in our line of approach; it might be to our benefit to consider the nature of this phenomenon. Besides, we know that it is ofinterest, and the more we understand it, the greater our chance of avoiding interaction. I think they are overwhelmed and there are many areas of concern. I think there is something more happening there. It cant be human activity. What are you talking about; you mean non-cohesive entities or what? I dont know what, but look, everyone here, theyre on profile; theyve got some central point of contact, relatively. -Not us, or me, at least. There are no more of you. At least the chances are basically impossible. I know there are gaps in communication out here, but situations like this dont stay hidden for long, among the folk, that is. So if thats not it, and likely it isnt, then how could any extricate fade their signal like that? Well they arent individuals. Obviously, so that means they are even less likely to lose connection. You cant make a group shut off like that. They have access to something else.There could be any number of substances leaving them incohesive for days at a time. But they wouldnt even last long enough to produce results. Why would they bother to follow people like that? They arent even people long enough to call them so. There is something else at work. They arent holding anthromatter, they cant be. -Nobody gets sent out here that doesnt need the anthre, otherwise they would keep them inside. What if they were already here There was no here before we started to come back out. I dont know, but Im feeling for something and its just out of reach. I know well be finding out soon enough, but I feel that if this doesnt make sense before we get there, were going to have to change course and fast. We cant go on undetected like this for much longer. Its like theres something else that could find us first, and one that we are far from expecting. I know the fringe folk talk about the breath of the earth, and if thats what you mean, then okay, Im ready for that. Not exactly; this isnt mere geometry. Lets just be aware that someone else might be watching us here.

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-Is this another one of your stories? I thought I had enough lessons in the folkways. -Oh this isnt one of our stories. Were way beyond the voice of my people out here. Transmission 011.005.022 <Lower Body> Geotropic Quasi-Anthropic Forces Upon penetrating into the non-material spheres of existence bound to the Earth, humans were consistently confronted with contradiction in logic and potentially disruptive forces beyond anthropic control. And upon reversing back through the more subtle complexities of the Great Patterns feeding that ferocious appetite of greater consciousness, humans encountered many other entities, beings that were close enough, in an anthrogenic sense, to be detected. In certain circumstances, their forces were negligible, and in others, considerable. The Exogenerational Body recognizes the presence of quasianthropic forces of geotropic behavior. These forces, of those that are known, are in co-existence with our schematic apparatus in that they are anthrogenic. These entities, though similar, differ considerably from self-replicates in that they respond to universal energy via a separate network which is geochronometrically specific. They exist in spacetime, but not as matter. Upon increasing redistribution of our own network, we have begun to notice slight behavior modifications in certain, less concentrated bands of these quasi-anthropic entities. Projected inception models show negligible effects on system efficiencies well into the next generation phase. It is expected that, as the more concentrated bands of this earth-bound quasianthropic circulation have been assimilated, the less connected branches of their network will become manageable as well. This prediction, however, rests on their subsequent response to universal energy flux in their specific geochoronological positions. -Perhaps they will come to an understanding. -Conflict never yields to resolution. Conflict can never be overcome.

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The sun set slowly, shining shafts of spectral light through the fiddling leaves. Things were quiet, or was it the blanket of insects that rose undetected and now equalized every other sound. The breeze, their footsteps, the thoughts in their heads, it all sizzled into one sound, one continuous, random flicker of light, hypnotizing. There was something about this place they were approaching, something distinctively different. It was now the calm before the storm, or so it felt. This was not the kind of storm that threw raindrops, that they could shelter themselves from. At that they could defend themselves with patience. This now was not a meteorological event. Instead, a waiting-space, a vacuum. Whatever was there ahead, it was gorging itself on everything in its vicinity, leaving nothing behind. Rampant and rapid. This was where they were headed. As they approached what was now shaping into their final destination, that part of this great mass where the land stopped and met the ocean, an area of concentrated encampments dotting the landscape with much more frequency than hitherto, and thus offering a more stable environment for the enduring undertaking ahead of them, as they approached this lands edge, they no longer traveled in straight lines but in wide circular paths that became smaller and tighter. Their cyclical travels now were not unlike the dog, who, before settling down and after having chosen a place on the earth upon which to rest, paces around and around until flopping down its full weight, and handing over the burden of gravity back to the receiving Great Matter Puller. The topographic conditions varied widely in this area; they could pass through mountains, to valleys, to beaches and back in less than one moons time. And though these varied vistas offered themselves with such ease, the two travelers, slowing their pace now at the near-end of their journey, spent much of their passing-through in the mellow mountains that ran mostly parallel to the coastline though still at a great distance from it. The locations in these needletree-shielded hunks of slated rock, gorged by the timeless passage of water, both frozen and liquid, across and through their veins, these places held a strong numinosity, as Dakota had now been referring to it, a

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sense of great presence. Dakota could see across time, an act inaccessible to her until having met Hassam, and one which gave her a peculiar insight into the feeling of a place. She was developed into maturation on the fringe, and so she could see across people, as anyone could, or had to in order to stay cohesive, but theirs was a different kind of seeing from the one Dakota now exercised on the undulating foothills and severed crevices of this place, and her reflex of seeing through otherseyes was of no use out here, as there were no others. Their travels, for the most part, had been, intentionally, through very remote territory vacant of population for days at a time. This loneliness, the isolation of a place either intentionally neglected or simply forgotten had become greater now, and paradoxically so, as they were, with intent, advancing towards the vast concentrations of population of the region. There was no one to see through, and for this, perhaps, Dakota had become very sensitive to a place across time. Surely, there was no one here now, but had there ever been, at any time, she could see through them she could see the place as they saw it. She was unsure as to the sophisticated nuances of such an act, as she had never formally exercised it prior, nor had she encountered evidence of its use amongst her people. To Hassam, however, to see across time was quite natural. His entire working life was spent in a time geological eras apart from his own; his life, in its entirety, was spent in the anthroposphere, a place where the sequentialization of time didnt exist. The true anomaly, then, for Dakota, was in the thoroughly understood fact that all anthropospheric inhabitants, by the nature of their separation, were unable to join with protogenetic humans. They, Hassam included, could not see, unencumbered by feelings of reciprocal shame inherent in privacy, as it was with others of similar origin, but rather they saw them as other, as an entity outside of themselves. After all, they were inside of the anthroposphere, together. Despite her having crossed through into an anthropospheric existence before her self developed, she yet saw the veiled illusion of time disintegrate before her, and in her own way. When they passed a stone block building, ruins of a civilization from another era, she could see it as it was when

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people actually lived there. She could see animals grazing in small sunny patches, water trickling through artificially diverted streams, wooden doors on houses and smoke rising from their stacks. Before them was nothing but waste, the remnants of ancient human habitation, taken back into the cradle of the earth on its endless journey back from the artificial to the natural. And so she would tell Hassam, here was the house of a large family, or here was a place of public congregation. And he would see what looked like a great stone alter, something he had heard about in relation to ancient traditions of human-body sacrifices. No, corrected Dakota, thats where they cooked their meat; I can smell it right now. But there were times when Dakota was taken aback, struck with such intense numinosity that she had to stop and sort through the alien disturbances it caused unto her cognition. One day, they had come upon a small graveyard. There were rows of tombstones, most of them just little blocks, probably indicating the locations of a body of a small child. In ancient times, they both knew, many children were produced for this very reason many did not fulfill their primary purpose of subsequent reproduction. Strange to think of such a purpose in life, as it had been, forever, practically, for both of them, that the concept of reproduction had grown out of its biological, organic shell, no longer bound by the limits of a physical world. To think of such a time gave even Hassam a moment of repose, which was soon conditioned by Dakotas reminder of their own purpose, the two of them, and its ironic comparison to such an idea. But Dakota was too cognitively affected to stay with this forewarning, as it were; she was being assailed by something spirits was the only name that came to her. As she stood here upon these graves, these artificial demarcations of human struggle, misfortune, love and eternity, she felt the lives of those marked below her. But it wasnt just that; she could hear them as well. All manner of sound that expresses any human condition pulsated in her ears softly and then to a crescendo where she could see eyes flashing and tragic last moments of life, and sometimes passionate closing of the eyes in total submission to the great complexities of the universe. She felt so deeply these people, their feelings, that she may have begun to lift off of her feet, their each single eternal expression

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coming together to dispel the force of gravity. They tried, it wasnt possible, but it seemed so real, they tried to take her, to stretch her cohesion to the vacuum of outerspace and to keep that one piece that is leftover, to keep it with them, as if it would allow them access, once again, to the sunlight as it warmed her skin, or to the cool air as it flushed her lungs. She held herself firm, but not before grabbing Hassams hand, as if he needed to hold her down. She could see it, in the same way that he could see, of the ancient earth, those great pyramids, not only those in his mind, but were he to see the structures themselves, would see through them, knowing the passageways within, he would see also that which was not there, visible to his eyes. In this way, she could see where these places were, and the things that were in them, and she understood what they were for and what they meant to the people who put them there. This is when she saw the thing they were after, the thing which pressed on them in terror and yet offered the only means to their escape. In a moment, she could see where it was, and what it meant, and it changed her forever, in that moment. And she was not the last, and stop that moment did not from that point on. Hassam was reluctant. -We cant leave here right now, you know that. Dakota was certain. -Its not okay for us to be here any longer. We cant stay tonight. -They are all over us. I see them everywhere. Everywhere. You need to settle, your hypercognition is running you up. Weve gone quite a distance and over a short period of time He is not safe. We cant stay here. They are all over this place. This is not a decision-to-make. We are not staying here. Their things had scarcely been set down, and what was of it, they picked up, strapped up, and made way forwards into a relatively benign landscape. Dakota was not in a state of overstimulated hyper-processing; she was surrounded by spirits, if you will, cognition-element resonances, that made themselves visible to her by way of every piece of her sensed surroundings. Every animal spoke their language, every leaf,

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when rustled, was a flick of hair on a living persons head. But those were not mere actionless specters in the world; they came with a purpose to maintain her attention, to make her listen to their words and watch their ways. This transfer between humans remains intact and in ways that confounded both travelers upon their own confirmation of it. It was not contact, in the way of accessing the group of a particular settlement. These were like the anti-contact, taking away from any potentially connective node, ones ability to exercise intent. They are specters of proto-intentional humans, still being used by a much greater force of the anthropic substrate. They can, of course, exercise their intent both only as a group not as individuals and only by way of one the likes of her, a protogenerational human of flexibly-configured cognitive resonance matching. They were traversing an ancient slice of the geochronometric earth. There were people here once, humans almost not, who struggled against an entirely different set of conditions, and with an indemonstrably different set of operations in their own momentary overcoming of entropic disorder. Though they had no distinction for these things, their struggle took place in a world beyond our physical reference, but not in the direction of the anthroposphere, in reverse of that, rather. They had never fully entered that physical world. Their interaction, in their collective corporeality was fully immersed in that protophysical flux of codifiable elements, neither one truly knowing of the existence of the other. And having never entered this world, this slice of earth being traversed now, their existence, in this manner at least, through Dakota, had gone unabated and essentially unaltered since a time so long ago, that the earth was then completely surrounded by water in an infinitely-expanding twodimensional plane. It was daytime, full sunlight. They fled expeditiously through many long thoughts. They were in pursuit, but only on a minimal level. Slightly capricious decision-making at any particular moment could disinform their entire track. They, the travelers, would maintain such autonomy until the terminus of their passage. And they knew this. But it was not the pursuit at

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the center of their attention at this time, it was the immediate surroundings. Things which Hassam could not always see, and yet those which Dakota could not ignore. This place had begun to take effect on her after their crossing the ridge of mellow mountains that flank at a distance the edge of the earth. There was plenty of spread before it got to the coast, and they had much land, then, yet to travel. This area had become, according to Dakota, littered with the living. So many people lived here across so many layers of repetition. There was a time, and the last of it almost in living reach, when people exhausted their entire accumulation within this earth-world. They interacted with everything around them in this super-physical space. Granted, these things were imbued with meaning, extracted over countless operations, rendering themselves in countless variants, but still, they were things of this world, this hard earth under their feet now. And so, with every step Dakota activated another vision, another human, another life, living out its entire existence in her in that one moment, and another step, and so on. Hassam had no problem finding the way. He was familiar with this loss of import; the loss of intent, or the initial lack of it completely, was his own initiation into the extraanthropospheric world. This was known to be the after-effect of any self-extrication, though Hassam, by way of his erratic expansion of old-node interaction networks, made an unrepairable rent in the passage which took away from him every trace of combinable elements of his self. He was, as it has been said already, the first, but soon not to be, to have caused such an anomaly in the overall system. He could so easily control the voices; they were insistent writtenthought to him, susceptible to immediate cognitive override. And these meant nothing to him, in fact, until the apex of the very next day. They walked further into the night as was their custom at times, especially those of high stress, and this as such of just described. And though their pace was quick to match the waves of cognition passing through them, Dakota could not evade the slippery static surrounding her, starting out as little

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scratches, articulating and gesticulating into sentences and moments of deep, visceral, animal meaning, every trickle, every touch an effusive moment of contact-in-reverse, of loss of wanting-anything. Her purpose, her vision, was constantly redirected, completely backwards. She would catch herself not catching herself mid-transition between the clear voices and visions of the land and those living in it, and her internal processing of sensory information. All the time she went on like this. Later, neither of them could fully submit to disintegration, and in the middle of that night, when the stars stand still and the fire only whispers: Splashes of horror flashed across her face. Hassam was stunned: had he been able anyway, he could have done nothing for her now. Her breathing was erratic, and made Hassam, through such irresistible contagion, to hyperventilate as well, in staccato syncopated rhythms, disorganizing his own cohesive tendrils. The whites of her eyes burst open and froze there, and her panicked breath began to utter cries. And the moans which through countless iteration fumbled their way to words and more predictably-patterned breaths and full sentences, and her horror turned to a vacant trance and she described the scenes as she saw them: They are chanting. They are in a circle. They move in elaborate unison. They are ordered in strict hierarchy. They do not see each other, yet they see all the same thing. Their minds have not come to them. They interact ferociously, not with each other, but yet together. Their eyes are penetrating through space itself. Their feet are pounding through the earth. Their bodies do not exist outside of the air from which they are made. Its us. Its us. It cant be. She broke down at this point, her unwavering voice cracking into a squeal that echoed off of the rocks and into the night, snowballing unto itself the magnitude of her desperation. It cant be.

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She put her hands to her face but could not reach her eyes to shut them, and just shook her head slowly, mechanically back and forth, still not blinking. Hassam broke out of his own paralysis, more out of instinct than personal intent, and jumped to her to shake her gently and pat her down. He saw everything with her, through her, and felt her calamitous trauma still molesting his stomach. But he refused to see it that way. He grabbed her by the shoulders and spoke into her, trying to wedge his reason in between her layers of fear and desperation. That is us. But we will know each other. Look at me We cant loosen this. This what we have will never go away. Until we are particles smashing into each other in the outer space, and even then, we will know that we are still this. We will go all the way back, but we will go together. She was still moving her head, trying to blink it away, these stone-solid figures, in perfect unison, austere in every manner, their movements stiffened until they lay heavily and motionless, inanimate fixtures protruding from the earth, and she let Hassam take over, and she saw the fire flicker on the ground and the echoes of her fear drift through the trees and she allowed herself to be taken far away from there. Hassams presence may have carried her away that night, but as for the next day, it was from his very presence, somehow, a paranoia, a disruptive inconsistency, emanated, and in an accelerating fashion. Through that day, the phantasmagorical coiling writhing transmutations took place, but they came through him, a flickering cognitive fuzz, demanding attention offering nothing in return. The voices all came from him, the visions all from him. From every twig snapped under his foot and every breath loosened from his mouth, those captivating entrapments, those hollow cries for existence assailed her. She thought it would crescendo when she could feel the cloth on his skin, the air in his lungs, but it was relentless even to these limits, and she soon saw beyond him, beyond even what he could see in his mind; she was outside of the expanding sphere, looking in.

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As their path circled more tightly, Dakota noticed a pulsing pattern along their route that evidenced a sympathetic resonance to Hassam and the mind-deafening thoughts of incessant repetition. They seemed to be circling-in on a zero point. Dakota felt it as an emptiness, an anti-space they were unavoidably approaching. They had circled-in on small settlements before, but not under such urgency, and certainly not in their current state of only one capable traveler. The cognition waves flattened extraordinarily, ever since this recent phantom-episode began, making it so that every new element weighed heavier and heavier on the overall stability of her cohesion. Her over-concentrated response fed into Hassams force on their tightening approach. And with such an approach, the sympathetic resonance rang out in faster and faster periodicity until only the short silences in between were audible, and finally it was whiteout. Dakota had become destabilized.

Unbeknownst to the Exogenerational Body, and this was the most narrative-rich element of the ultimate coming-forth of this development, their executed procedure for limiting full manifestation of a self-extricate anomaly had varied wildly in its trajectory, and as it continued, their intent-of-operation produced a dramatically synergistic outcome the most significant result of which was, in its entirety, invisible to operations oversight, and even had it not been, its appearance would be so unrecognizable as to render it meaningless. Having now reached the point where the Exogenerational Body was, unfortunately, incapacitated in regards to its influence on the long-term results of this particular development, their current movement was one of unfounded precedent. Geotropic quasi-anthropic forces were beyond the reach of exogenic engagement, which means their data was incongruent or incompatible with the feed system, but yet they were not beyond the Bodys ability to interact, albeit with a

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sense of reckless abandon previously reserved for smaller subsystems. Intelligent matter, after all, despite its non-interaction with the physical environment, followed the same universal rules of evolutionary progress. Transmission 011.012.027 <Schematatechs Address> Referring to two separate series of distribution execution. Series A uses a direct, causally-continuous link between distribution vectors. Series B uses a linearly discontinuous network of pre-execution points. Just prior to its last stage, a non-centralized, acausal signal is activated. The latent network, then, in simultaneity, manifests itself, inheriting no reverse path of operation. As it should be obvious to even the inattentive, we are familiar with the distinctions being described here. The second series of distribution resembles simple crystallization. It should be reminded then, that such resemblances can have a tendency to impede our ability to see the depth of the problem facing us. Our unmet objective in maintaining cognitive resonance structures has gone beyond its expected duration. Cognitive resonance structures, via interhybridization, began altering small quantum network fragments soon after the second major extra-anthropospheric redistribution. It was expected to have mapped the initial network of pre-execution points by this time. We are certain that this simultaneous network-shifting will increase in episode and in frequency of duration immediately following the third redistribution, and therefore support the urgency and thoroughness with which this subject has been presented. In that continuous redistribution requires a stable network capable of utilizing, indiscriminately, experience irregardless of its contextual framework, a proliferation of non-centrally activated nodes present a most insurmountable challenge. Predicting and maintaining the cognitive substrate of this distribution-growth is the core purpose of our work. This purpose is, at this very moment, at great odds with the lack within its arsenal of operations to adapt to the radically inhospitable environment of non-sequenced cognitive episodes.

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In an effort to observe more closely the invisible, myriad facets of origin of these network fragments, an isolated branch of our own compartment has been tracking groups of selfextricates coming through a major passage on the main land mass. The majority of them establish their contact through typical distribution models. A few are using the discontinuous method. In that self-extricates maintain a predictable path within the first phase of contact, we are matching the points made by typical-distributors to our projected models of these pre-distribution architects, as we have codified their operative. As of yet, however, we have not met consistent match. Furthermore, only a very small number of our samples have, since the beginning of our monitoring, activated their networks. It should be safe to suppose that these extricates remain cognitively unintelligible in regards to the entire operation dropping points at random, and executing unintentionally. There is a great deal of stress being thrust upon our compartment. Redistribution can not be carried out according to its expectations without stronger affirmation on the part of a stable schematic substrate capable of handling potentially rampant partial cohesion. We are, in essence, the last membrane intact. This sub-transmission is being passed as a marking-point in our work. In light of the heretofore presentation, the following schematatized sub-transmission alerts our unexpected and abrupt conclusion as it relates to the future of cognitive resonance structures. Sub-Transmission 011.012.027 <Schematic Syntax> The following statements are results of an alternativestandard procedure aimed at reverse-collating acausal, preexecution network vectors based on induced schematic outcomes. These statements are to be interpreted within the schemata-syntax only. The two individuals under monitor have been following a partially-predictable path of considerable distance across the entire landmass. Their points of contact have been left in remote settlements of the outer fringe, allowing minimal

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interference for inducing schematic outcomes. The patterns of distribution resulting from these outcomes have revealed no evidence of sequentialization. In the contact-reciprocate plot manifestations, the network has a genesis which comes from the individual nodes themselves. If some quasi-causal pattern could be recognized, it could not be indubitably traced to the alleged initiating extricates. As for the settlements, when studied relative to each other, they show no causative distinction. Currently, and finally, permission has been granted to initiate simultaneous geochronometric induction. The extricates under monitor have yielded a large amount of cognitive and sociomorphological behavior to be used in achieving a high fidelity of matching between the induced outcomes and the resonant potentialities of the individuals. Synchronization is approaching unison, and is expected to postulate its first alternatives with the initial induction of the push-stream. Transmission 011.012.027 <Schematatechs Address> The individuals under monitor have exhibited, thus far, partial-predictability, and so function within our field of oversight. Their manipulation of the entire extraanthropospheric population is the unexpected anomaly of this study. For lack of a more sophisticated metaphor, these two extricates there are only two of them, and this is the first time this is being acknowledged by our compartment, but between them, they seem to be carrying a mobile anthropospheric nexus. Surely it is not exactly as it sounds, and there is a great amount of work to be done in mapping this phenomenon in its entirety. Due to the larger reach of anthropic debris interaction that has been found at these sites, especially those of redistributative origin, this study is being transmitted beyond the limits of our operations. It is understood that by doing so we forego any further decision-making for the duration of the period. Upon completion of the third wave of redistribution, our monitoring of the self-extricates in pursuit will resume feeding only information of a predictive nature. It is also understood that, by this later phase in our overall trajectory, the portion of live

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connections exhibiting predictable-potentiality may have reduced considerably. -We will take a moment for the conflict amongst us to resolve itself. There was a silence in this room of hard-standing humans, each one in such severe concentration that their bodies turned to stone for eternity. Once resolved, they continued with their ways, established through habits and parents and by design and by fortune, and though they each went their separate ways in the course of their days thoroughfare, they all were headed in the same general direction. It was with that consensus that they endured those eternal moments of conflict. Despite their namesound, it was no laughing matter to be a schematatech. People needed structure in their lives, some thing they could rely on as a consistent reference. But the authenticity of that reference had been denatured long ago. That consistency was a lie, to them. They were the static entity, and experience the experience had them more than the opposite. But without that relationship, regardless of its implications, neither would continue to exist in this world. It was so desperate, and the schematatech knew this more than any other compartment of the Body. They performed their operations with purpose and with urgency, but they knew what they did was ultimately irrelevant. Hassam knew much of schematic induction. His anthropospheric duty, working with Precambrian organisms, generated phenomena of study which eventually meandered into The Exogenerational Body, at which point he could only project, in the passive sense, as to its full operational undertakings. Hassam did not himself perform the inductionlike operations; he only provided the response-organism. But his understanding of it was complete. Used on such simple organisms this practice of induction existed entirely outside of inter-communicative groupings, so the nodes acted in unison, and one-dimensionally. By his understanding of schematic syntax, the induced nodes would, in this case, each execute multi-dimensional networks. In extra-anthropospheric existence, that carries out to all nodes within spacetime. Every anthropic corpuscle would have a branch in this. Despite its

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executors lack of interest in this realm of interaction, schematic induction would not stay within its anthroposphericoperation domain. Was it really unknown to them? The crest of a wave of humanity materializing with each induced moment, waiting for a catalyst, a response, to push the bottom out and collapse the entire weight of an ocean of human life. Did they see none of this? They were an object-oriented entity; their vision was set. They were looking at real, living people, and not the lives they had left behind.

There was an increase in the ancient population density, as evidenced in the surrounding mounds of earth littered with human relics. Broken pieces of glass, concrete, and wooden things, all for nothing, unimbued with the filaments of infinity. Hassam could easily imagine, in his days of duty, tracking them down and setting them up for chronological displacement, giving them the conditions for full manifestation of their purpose, in whatever form the group had decided upon. These things here though had only one time in them. They were discarded by infinity. They screamed out to him, but only in his mind. And Hassam could only imagine what, his mate, Dakota was going through. For her it was real. Every shred of human artifact screamed at her, for recognition, for interaction, for use. They screamed out in the names of the people who had thought about them, their structure, their function, their flaws and their meaning. A world of people the world rang out for attention for these useless things, at their prospect of being touched once more, that some piece of them, some part of it, and all that it was, might come through those human hands of hers, the only true place for it to be: human hands its genesis. He could not hear that, and he was sorry that Dakota must bear it alone. Layer upon layer upon layer of life had been laid upon this place here. Individual lives and whole populations struggled

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for existence in this place. Things they left behind but thoughts as well. The debris of their things-gone-to-waste invented a new, unnatural pattern recognition for right angles and colors out of season. He was now, in the place where they stopped, surrounded by these things, these alien artifacts discarded into the relentless dismemberment of time in reverse. Everything, in time, becomes nature once again. These things, being super-natural, or anthropic in origin, just took longer. Hassam waited and waited. There was nothing to do now but wait. Dakota was incapacitated, leaving Hassam in charge, and demanding from him only vigilance. He made a fire from a massive pile of deserted artifacts, and watched and waited. After many of the typical thoughts cycled through his head many times, he began sifting through some of the more interesting artifacts he had come across while gathering for the fire, and he held them up to the glowing backdrop, one at a time, and he wondered who also held this thing and what did they think when last they looked at it. And he came across a plate, transparent, rigid, with four sharp corners and a scratched surface that refracted the light from the fire like sparks of phosphorous. It fit in his hand perfectly and as he felt the scratches he unscrambled a pattern that was familiar to him. He passed his fingers back and forth over the plate it was writtenthought. He had never followed writtenthought by anything other than the path of his eyes. Yet, his fingers were interpreting it all the same, and that single stream, that filament of gravity began grabbing forth all of the attention he had unto it. Thoughts talking to each other, but in symmetry, thats what its like. They conjectured in a babble of languages he would never comprehend, yet upon which he could somehow eavesdrop and extract the essence. Enveloped in nothing but the layers and layers of lives once lived, Hassam, still in charge of his ever-present partner, grabbed her unresponsive hand and then himself let go of cognition to access the etched tablet under his fingertips.

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You Are Not We Are I come to you from a star. I bring you light. With this light, you will grow. You will grow until you make your own light. And you will shine your light back to me. In a world without time, this has already happened. You do not exist; we are the same.

Within a short time after that night, the two travelers made it to their destination. They entered one of the largest settlements on this landmass, and made a closed circuit of contacts in which to enculture their charge, their offspring, the only as of yet to have coalesced of conjoined extra-anthropospheric humans. They made the way for him, and slowly receded into the fulfilled nostalgia of living in reverse.

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Chapter 6 MASS TRANSFERENCE -We cant let them move forward, sir. -Dont tell me what to do. -Sir, their trajectory is succinctly in line with ours. They are approaching real time, -Then we are aware of them. -But they bring with them an anomaly, sir. With that, their contact is unpredictable. -Unalterable? -So it seems, sir. -Then we will decide. -Yes, sir. These next few moments were highly anticipated. The following sequence of events happened rapidly, as all the figures involved, and the body as a whole, were well prepared. It was more of a systematic antiquation that required the breakdown of a final decision in such a way. -How do we intend to manage this transition? -It will be their disappearance, their taking-out-of, that will fuel their departure. It will redirect our movement in no way. They will have left behind an empty space, their earth, and that is all. -Total disconnection? -Absolute. -Very well, then. I see that we have no other options. Before the group it must come. -The winds have changed. -Indeed, they have.

They were gathered in a way common since the origin of socialization. A stark room in a large building remotely situated in auspicious surroundings. They were decorated casually, relative to them, but would have appeared severely

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official to anyone who could have viewed them at this time. The whole of the Exogenerational Body was seated facing a single direction, and one of them stood up and became that single point and took the role of speaker. -We are all well aware of the envelope that encircles us today. It was not even a handful of generations ago, that humankind began a transformation so radical, as to leave its population completely disconnected from its predecessors. -Any possible resemblance to human interaction prior to this transformation has been twisted and painted-over enough times to make it unrecognizable to its inherent beholders. Our surroundings have changed, our minds have changed, our challenges and most importantly our needs have changed. The system is no longer compatible. We have reached a position in this trajectory where we can no longer maintain a way-of-life, a world, a people who we no longer seem to be a part of. -We began this journey as humans. Today, we face the ultimate decision to remain as such. The speaking figure gave a slight bow and turned to take seat with the rest. At the same time, another stood up and took the relieved position. -The ultimate determinant of human existence and the root of all that has been sacred to the essence of humankind since its inception the body has met its final purpose. We can no longer support both. -The system as we know it, is under a critical siege of stressors. By continuing our maintenance of both the anthroposphere and the separated population, we risk damaging outcomes for both groups. At this time it is not yet in the personal interest of the majority to make this current decision in the affirmative, but it is in the best interest. The sophistication of our system in regards to simulating the human-ness of experience, is capable of satisfying any member of the population, but beyond; its not reality, but it works better.

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At this point, The Body stood up, and again, one of the group made for the front of the room, this time making physical connection with the current speaker, and exchanging words of reassurance. Everyone in the room continued standing, and the final speaker stood before them, but this time the Body faced not the speaker, but an invisible point below him, in the center of the room. Everyone looked down at the ground and listened intently and concentrated their attention. -We can quiet only the uppermost ringing of our anxieties in knowing that acceptance is inevitable. If, today, we decide against this, we will only submit tomorrow. Trajectory does not change course. If the Body is in resistance, let it submit. There was silence, total silence, less than silence, a vacuum sucking more nothing out of an already empty chamber. -It will be today. -Activate the Mass Transference Device.

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Chapter 7 SAMM ASHCROFTT His name is Samm Ashcroftt. His friends called him Ashcraft. They say hes from outerspace, and that he came from a crashed spaceship. -His parents didnt even have sex. They had like thought-sex. --Thought baby. ---Hes a freakin alien. In fact, Samm Ashcroftts parents did engage in some peculiar activity that would and yet would not be considered sexual reproduction by most human accounts. Hassam and Dakota shared a bond that no two other humans shared. They could feel each other the tug that a person gravitates towards themselves when they see something they need, but, in this case, its a need that tugs back. They needed each other in a way that humans havent had to in much time. As a result, Samm Ashcroftt became a special young man, with special duties conferred upon many, but yet to come, and for now, only upon him. -First I see a fuzz, then a sea of orange dots, not so bright, but bright enough, you know they swish from upper right to lower left, when, all of the sudden, a black spot appears, blacker than the other black surrounding it, and in it, a new field of pink dots bright pink, super-bright theyre moving in another direction, from top to bottom, and they get brighter until they feel like theyre burning into the blacks of my eyelids, and then everything gets crazy, even the black background, and then its all black, and it becomes hard to keep control at this point, but then all the black turns into a particular formation and a pattern of red and green dots appear and disappear and reappear, always in different formations and ratios and it gets more and more complicated until I just cant keep track, and thats where I lose it. -Yeah, Im still at reconfiguration. Ash, what does the fuzz look like to you? --Yeah, how does yours go? -Same thing. Dots and stuff. Little dots. But thats it. I cant go past that.

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-No way, youre getting a little old to be slacking off on this stuff you know. -Yeah, but it always just turns into real things. -What do you mean real things, like people and stuff? -Yeah, everything. -But are they doing things, or are you doing it, like is it just your own magic creeping in? -No, it just goes, like waves, out, or like the reconfiguring patterns, it keeps getting more complicated, but its just not dots, its, like, everything. -Youre weird. --Ashcraft. ---Alien-ass retard.

Reflection I am entering middle age. It seems like last year that I was observing and experiencing my transition into adulthood. My consciousness has expanded so tremendously I cant keep up with it. My mind has stretched beyond its known physical parameters, stretched beyond comprehension. I have been challenging myself to grasp the impossible, magical worlds and rules, and dissolving into the Great Spirit, grasping a sense of peace and interlocking within the Great Patterns. For me, the act of vision has become so flexible and concentrated, so alive, that it excites me; it tells me what to do. I am living in a dream. My reality and I mean this and I am not crazy my reality is in part created by me. I am reading collective thoughts. The pushing out and the pulling in are equal; my thoughts are being born from, yet creating the things that happen in the world, our world. We are all connected, but we can feel it, hear it. I hear people calling me, pulling me. People are amazing. We are amazing. We are one thing. We are on a journey that will last forever, and we will all always be a part of it. The world is a beautiful place.

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Earth, 2100 -Samm Ashcroftt

In this time he revealed to them the nature of the transition which led them into such a backward world, so backwards, in fact, that they thought they were progressing forward, with time, in a most ideal fashion. They were, in time, headed blissfully into their own ignorance, into the time before words, before thoughts, before existence. Blissfully. And so he began his story by reciting for them the poem given to him, created by him. He held the words in his hand. The light shone through the transparent plaque, refracting through the etched letters. He spoke, out loud, and the words sank in, every ear saturated, every mind connected, all to his. And he went on to tell their story to them. -It is the year 2100

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