*
Proximity to Self (See Also: Self-Association):
This is another disputed and hotly debated term. What is known objectively and irrefutably: Time/Space travel utilizing an Einstein-Rosen bridge (See Disambiguation: Worm-Hole) places great strain on the human body. This is particularly true for travel done without an appropriately shielded vehicle, which will have devastating, cumulative, and permanent deleterious effects on human physiology.
To be clear, no account of self-association (encountering another iteration of the self) has yet been independently or directly verified. Individuals have been observed to be “causally entangled” or temporally-tied to alternate iterations of themselves (See Also: Specific Intersection). In these cases, physical trauma to the brain and nervous system appeared post-facto in those claiming to survive “Proximity to Self.” Something happened to these people, though it was not observed and recorded. Complicating matters, the constellation of symptoms that fall under “temporal psychosis” make these individuals unreliable narrators (at best).
*
Fragment: 0x4D
Date: Spring 2023/EOT (End of Time)
Subject: A (79)
Location: Arlington, VA/ EOT (End of Time)
*
We lived on the eleventh floor of a beige filing cabinet. One of those high rise complexes with the million identical lofts above shitty chain shops. I can’t prove it, but hand to god, some architect who is lazy has a kid who likes Minecraft. Blocky, flat top, bland as hell no features that mean anything. That’s where those buildings came from. Ugly identical balconies and shops out front of the block. Inside of the block is a brutalist square of concrete with these little sad raised beds and skinny trees. That’s what our home looked out on to. That’s where I.
“This is stupid. You know all of this. You were there.” She’s sitting cross legged, cliché meditative pose, with a joint pinned behind her ear.
The HVAC man in Flannel levitates before her. Lo-fi hip-hop echoes off nothing. The ash falls from nowhere to nowhere on the scorched plain at the end of time. They hover over a wooden dojo floor, one wall with paper and wooden sliding door to nowhere. There is a micro-cassette recorder hovering between them. “We record these stories for posterity.” He tells her that every story matters, and the circumstances that led to her “falling through” are important.
“That makes no sense,” she says fucking with a shoelace, sitting and slouching cross-legged on wood floor. “This is fucking stupid.” The woman named ***** extracts the joint, pinned behind her ear by her glasses, lights it and inhales. Fuck, that’s strong. She blows the smoke out her hook-shaped schnoz like a dragon, closes her eyes, begins to float.
She continues: Tom and me weren’t doing well before the pandemic. We were unhappy. And everyone around us was happy and identical and a family and so very beige. We were this uniquely unhappy little almost-family, two pieces that didn’t fit anymore. We had a “ten-year plan”, made when we were undergrads, actually still kids. We made the plan in school, both there on the GI Bill when we met. We would take turns putting each other through grad-school. We would get career set. We would have a kid. Eyes closed, another long drag, cough, continue.
Except, I got a job we couldn’t talk about. Kids didn’t fit with it. And I didn’t want to. I just didn’t fucking want to. He did. I mean he really, really did, like collected-dad-jokes wanted to. And he would have been really great at raising someone else’s kid. But I was not doing that, that fucking process, to me. He just couldn’t understand how I could change my mind. And I couldn’t convince him that a plan made by a kid no longer applied to me. It’s crossing a river. Except it’s way over the hill. And yeah, you’ll change when you cross it, but what if you change before you get there?
“Heraclitus?”
I guess. That’s where we were, pre-split purgatory when the pandemic hit. There was a really nasty pneumonia in Johannesburg. It was so bad that “tinfoil hats” thought it was man-made. It wasn’t, no “Bond Villain” could have done better than nature. I leave for work, discreetly, and the bug beats me home. Tom went in the first wave. No goodbye. No time to grieve, just grief. It wasn’t like the other places you showed me, there weren’t variants and waves. I mean, there were, later. But there was “Rona” and she brought a fucking tsunami. She looked like the slow-burn “End of Days.” The next three years were a blur. Turns out it’s hard to maintain any kind of stable government, anywhere, when the “end is nigh.” I’m saying the “threat environment” became quite complicated, until Deus-ex-Machina, it wasn’t.
Vaccines. Treatments. Treaties. Things weren’t so bleak. We could bury our dead. Other people could grieve.
I was ok, good, fine. That’s me: “good man in a storm.” Stiff upper lip until everyone else got to feel safe, and I couldn’t unclench. Took a leave of absence, was told to take a leave of absence, still on lockdown. The tide was turning on the pandemic, but it takes time to get shots in arms. It was really house arrest in a time capsule from 2020. I was alone with myself, in close proximity to me. All the time. In a tomb.
I’d had the bug by then, one of the weaker ones, and I was vaxxed. My sense of smell was gone, so I boxed his clothes, his shit. Two or three year old landmines all over the house. Put it in a box. Get it out when lockdown lifts. And that’s when the stupidest fuckin’ song comes on: sad bastard singing about trains and some wicked woman shit. Hobo-revival rip-your-heart out folk, might as well be emo. That’s what it is: boxcar emo. His life had contained as much adversity as a well-worn body pillow, and that was his music: hobos in box cars and blues men at the crossroads with the devil. I’m on the balcony smoking, and this guy moans “woman” like it’s a Zeppelin song. Eleven floors up smoking, and I think it would take less energy to nose dive into that concrete court yard than to yell at a Bluetooth speaker to “Shut the fuck up.” So I jump.
She finishes the joint. Opens her eyes. Flannel man snaps his fingers, gestures “come here.” She hands him the roach. He files it in his jacket pocket: “but you changed your mind?”
She nods. Someone in the courtyard saw her and shrieked. In that instant time slowed and the shriek stretched, oscillated, echoed and became something almost mechanical. The great 56k modem scream in the sky, an obsolete lesser god’s song. The windows shook, every flat plane of glass rippling on every filing cabinet balcony shaking like a speaker cone and shattering prismatic.
“I saw a hand in the slow-mo reaching from a balcony. You.” She nods at the HVAC man, floating cross legged across from her. “I twisted, caught it. You damn near pulled my shoulder out of it’s socket, and we landed somewhere over there.” She points out on the plain.
*
Fragment: 0x54: “The Cruel Tutelage of the HVAC Man: Pt. 2”
Date: N/A; EOT (End of Time)
Subject: A(84)/A(79)
Location: EOT (End of Time)
*
The training-montage continues: five figures on the scorched plain. Cinematic silhouettes, camera pans: three faceless men in jumpsuits. One broom-stick wielding Ronin named REDACTED. One cross-legged HVAC man levitating in a weed cloud. The three opponents posture and circle: Mantis style, Tiger, and a Drunken Boxer. A(84) lifts the stick high, weight poised on the balls of his feet.
Tiger style charges. A(84) side steps, and it’s two quick wrist flicks, stick up/stick down. The broom is a blur. A(84) swats the punching arm, pops back up into Tiger’s face. One down.
Mantis creeps in, more cautious, one hand a clenched fist the other an “S”, held high. A(84) attacks, sword-thrusting the broom stick. Mantis flows around it like water, “S” hand pulling sword arm down, pivot-hip, drives the fist into A’s face. He’s half-second staggered, hops back a step. Mantis lunges, throws a right hook toward A(84)’s face. Broom-sword up in a blur to block the blow. He glides, monkey-steps close to elbow Mantis back. Continues the motion, swings the broom like lightning, tip whip catches its jaw. Two down.
Drunken Boxer sways up slantwise. A(84) swings a feint toward its head, blocked and disarmed, the broom stick clatters across the wood floor. The Boxer twists toward him, too fast. It throws a suddenly sober combination: lunge-punch to the gut and two to the face. A(84) is on his back.
He flips back to his feet and adopts the style. The two figures stagger-sway on the plain. They slither up off balance. Odd angle punches. Swaying tangle grappling forth and back, till Drunken Boxer takes one half too many steps. A(84) catches its garment, hip-toss trips it, holds a fist cocked in front of its blank face.
Enough. The fighters rise and bow to each other, curt respect. The faceless men in jumpsuits fade away. “There’s someone you need to meet” and a second figure materializes out of the HVAC man’s weed cloud. The silhouette starts hazy and takes shape schnoz first. A(84) sees himself, he but she. The nausea and lurch, and he can’t comprehend or focus on the whole. Be not afraid. The eye can only see a single clear feature at a time, at first. It feels like his eyes are being pushed in independent directions. By the time he adjusts to “Proximity to Self”, he’s bleeding from the ears again, though he knows it not. There is some aphasia, some embarrassing bouts of breaking-into-song, “Drinking Again” by Sinatra.
After what might well be a long time, millisecond or millennium, writhing on the wood floor babbling when he wasn’t singing. A(84) rises to his knees, holds a nostril closed with a finger, empties a blood clot from the other side of his hook-nose. He moans a long, “Ohhhhhhhhhh.” Whines, “Matts not a blunt rot. Thas muh pasta.”
A(79), patiently puffing on the sacred herb, blows some at him as if it will help. “Bless his heart.”
“That’s not a blood clot. It’s all crinkly, dude, that’s a piece of my fucking brain.” And he vomits all over the whole mess. The faceless custodians, jump-suits ever pressed and neat re-appear silently. Two help A(84) to his feet while a third cleans the mess.
“I guess we’ll never know.” Flannel man, shrugs. The faceless custodian offers a napkin, steps aside. A(84) babbles about “What the fuck happened and why the afterimage undertow, why the aphasia and synesthesia and the shakes and quakes?”
A(79) says that iterations, like cats, are best introduced slowly and in a controlled environment. Why? Because that shit will break your brain, dummy. First time can kill you. She lights another joint, hits it hard. Holding her breath, says: “This is not my first rodeo.” Blows smoke out her nose. She points to the joint. “I’m insulated. For reasons that are not mine to reveal, you couldn’t be.” There’s pity in her voice. “The first time you see yourself, learn to see yourself, it hits like a sledgehammer.”
A(84) slumps back to his knees. He accepts the Deus Ex because he wants to know the Machina. To understand.
Flannel man, still floating in his weed cloud, turns and high fives A(79). This, this is good, this is his team. You should’ve seen the last guy, the last you, another one of them real sensitive types. His head exploded, and he died shitting rainbows. Wait,what,huh,how? But this guy? You. This guy right here, pointing emphatically, this guy has some brain function left. We are good, good to fucking go.
A(84) has finally noticed the blood dripping from his ears. He gives a thumbs up. “What meow?” Tries again, “What now?”
A(79) takes a long drag, in that holding-a-hit-voice, smirks: “Now we go fuck up Rambo.”
*
Fragment: -0x63 “Let’s go Fuck Up Rambo!”
Date: EOT (End of Time) ; 1/1/2020
Subject(s): Convergence Condition ( A(99); A(84); A(79))
CFC Breach? NEGATIVE.
Curve-Status? NOMINAL.
*
The facist, A(99), thinks he hears a crow caw on the wind at the End of Time. Nowhere’s Endless Antechamber is, as far as he can tell, empty. The product of a dead God, no doubt.
He’s smoking, leaning against the wall of a dry-rot barn, two bags at his feet, looking like an apocalyptic cigarette ad. There’s one remaining scrap of the barn’s original color: blood red paint over the entrance. He foolishly hesitated the first time he walked through the door. No force prevented him crossing the threshold. This was not the book of Exodus and the blood red paint would not protect the fragile thing inside that broken barn: the pale pool of light linking to a world-entire. Dead Gods do not have the will or power to smite, muttered under his breath. He thinks he sounds ominous.
Inside the barn, as out, there was no symbol sacred or profane. No color, save the paint outside. The man walks forward, lugging a bag in each hand, his gait somewhere between a penguin and vulture.
A(99) sits cross-legged in the light, as he has done thirteen other times. He stills his mind. The empty man concentrates until the fluorescence flickers, as if he sees 60 cycles in a second and one cycle in a year. He opens his eyes to a world, quite similar to innumerable other Earths, suspended before him like a hologram. This world is nearly identical to yours.
Sitting, meditating in the pool of light, the fascist feels as if he is looking through God’s lenses. He shifts position, kneels, presses his face to the floor. He then presses his face through the light, half-melting through the hard-packed ash of the barn floor. Half ‘elsewhere’, half-hovering ephemeral over the Earth. Television, radio, internet. The non-corporeal fascist is a charged cloud of potential, a ghostly-observer consuming communications, weighing, measuring, considering, entangling. A(99) learns to hate all over again as, in two years of observation along their ‘timeline’, there is no Coronavirus outbreak on ‘Earth 14.’ None.
The world beneath him is not harmonious, not by a long shot. Half of the humans on it seem to want to choke the other half over a host of reasons as fucking foolish as they are familiar: gender, genitalia, or what to call God. Climate change? That’s a fuckin problem (but they’re working on it). Microplastics? Oh yeah, they’re realizing that’s a problem too. What’s different by cosmic-coin toss, or die-roll if you prefer, from most iterations of Earth is this: these humans do not seem to make war on one other with our usual frequency or vigor (or are not doing so in the span A(99) observes).
In two years of ‘Earth 14’ time, he sees no trace of plague or pandemic. As little points of light emerge for him across the globe, Specific Intersection entry-points (weaknesses he will exploit), the malevolent vesper begins to obsess over the plague that seems to have passed over this gentle Earth, only half-as-fucked as any world he has ever seen. He begins to obsess over it, the germ he carries but has never seen, trying to search every inch of that Earth for the pestilence.
Then it happens: the (relatively) peaceful Earth stands still. An extra-solar object. Nah-it-couldn’t-be. Yes it fucking is. There’s a generation-ship out in space on its way, two-years out from that Earth spewing “Greetings” and “Salutations.” ‘Earth 14’ anxiously anticipates peaceful first contact with other intelligent life. It is Spring 2023 when A(99) pulls his head back through the floor of the barn at the end of time, grinding his teeth.
Outside the barn, his hands are shaking as he tries to light a cigarette, fails. Falls to his knees screaming. The scream becomes an empty, raw, animal wail. It pours out of him, shrieking hatred for that world and its great human-host that has not wronged him. A reader might be forgiven for expecting something else, perhaps that those people down in human-ville would or could make the fascist’s heart grow “three sizes.” You could be forgiven for expecting a change, a yearning toward decency in the man.
No, the man, untouched by the wonder he extinguished in 13 dead worlds, finds his cigarette and stands. A(99), the vile thing, lights the other vile thing on his lip, takes a drag of death and summons “all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” A(99), prepares to pour that hatred on a (relatively) peaceful world that rebukes his ideology and the “inferior soul” that clings to it viciously.
When he slithers into the pool of light again, it will be January 1st, 2020. Before he sets physical-foot in world, he has work to do upon it: propaganda, information warfare, mis/disinformation, simple-sabotage, etc. Here, as before, cell phone in-hand and typing away half in-world/half-out of time, he would infect the world before he infected the world. Only when he had them at each other’s throats would he set his profane-foot in their world physically, appearing through those little points of light scattered on the globe that he previously committed to memory. There would be the pop of quiet-lightning, and he would step out of a closet or through a wall, bringing death in his wake. Two years later, the cosmic neighbors coming to great those humans would find a tomb and a single hungry wolf waiting to greet them. That was his plan.
He flicks his cigarette butt on the ground, resolved to do great evil. The predator’s eyes catch two points of light on the gently-rolling plain’s horizon. He thinks he hears the hum of an engine, faint rolling thunder. Fascist shuffles in his pocket, finds the tiny pair of binoculars. Searches for the swerving, lurching source of light desperately, finds it: the two halves of a 1990-something Ford sedan hurtling toward him in perfect tandem. Car billowing smoke, a figure perched on its hood.
“Nope.” A(99) darts into the barn, grabs his bags, and dives through the floor.
*
EARLIER IN THE 1990-SOMETHING FORD SEDAN’S FRAME OF REFERENCE
*
Flannel Man is driving. Gear duffle rides shotgun. A(79) and A(84) sit in the back seat. HVAC man in flannel and A(79) pass a blunt back and forth. Despite the two halves of the car, long-ways, being held together by magnetic magic–slinky sparks stretching but never breaking–most of the weed cloud lingers, hot-boxing the passengers in pot smoke.
A(84) coughs, “Guys, I’m pretty sure I lost brain tissue back there, and I don’t know if this is the level of baked I would like to be when battling evil.”
“Nah, man.” The HVAC Man is resolute “Blaze hard. This is a fine automobile, but it’s not temporally shielded.” He twirls a finger in the swirling weed smoke, talks over his shoulder “we have to ‘shield’ it, or you really will lose brain, or something. Smoke up.”
A (79) lunges over, leans back seat to front, digs in the gear, awkwardly drags a tactical vest and mirrored sunglasses out of the duffle. She puts the stunner shades on, passes the vest to her companion. “Put it on. Better than Kevlar. You’re fighting Rambo with a stick.” That’s funny. You’re not joking. She pulls a pistol from a shoulder holster, checks it. Inspects a case with three syringes, blue liquid. Stashes it in her coat. A(84) wants a gun. Flannel says no,” You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” A(79) explains the plan too-quickly while Flannel nods approval.
“Repeat it back to me:” she demands from her mirror self, through the reefer cloud.
“I get a broom or mop handle, keep Rambo occupied, immobilize him, you take the typhoid out of Mary, and we apprehend.” Again. He repeats. A(79) makes her mirror-self chant the plan again, again, again. Flannel man is beat-boxing at the wheel. Excellent. Enough.
A(79) leans in close to her other-iteration, the fuckup A(84), examining him. She is searching for something in his familiar face. She is too-long, too-close, inches from his face, whispers: “I’m not going to kiss you.”
Of course, that’s weird, why would I think that? But here’s the thing, miss. I’m way too high, and you are way too close. She looks A(84) in the eye, intensely. Searching. Flannel flicks the end of a blunt out the opening in the roof. A(79), maintaining eye-contact, reaches over the other passenger, opens the car door.
“Tuck and roll, fuckup.” She shoves him out of the moving vehicle.
The blunt end strikes the plain, lightning strikes the scorched ground, a prismatic pool opens-instantly beneath A(84) to swallow him. It disappears as quickly.
*
“Punch it, Chewie.” A(79) to the Flannel Man at the wheel.
“Yes, Ma’am” He floors it. The car leaves the scorched plain, contour-flying inches above it, smoother than smooth. A(79) climbs out the open door of the moving, flying, car and onto the roof. She creeps forward onto the hood, crouches low, clutching the lip of the hood by her finger tips, a runner in the starting blocks.
She sees the little rat’s cigarette cherry on the horizon before she sees him. Watches the ember tumble away as the man skitters inside. She braces. Flannel man pushes pedal through the floor, the car punches through the barn door, but the fascist is gone. Lightning strikes the Ford. It vanishes.
*
A(84) wakes up on the floor of a custodial closet in the Greyhound Station in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, at midnight on January 1, 2020. He finds his feet, wipes the blood from his nose and ears, and breaks a mop over his knee. He waits in a closet, repeating the plan under his breath.
*
The fascist stalks through the Greyhound station, lugging his bags like a passenger. He’ll board a bus. He’ll start the spread. But something’s off. No noise. No people. The whole interior of the building is an oversized hallway, a few hundred yards of passageway. Empty. Lonely liminal. Left side, countertops and kiosks. Right side, a glass wall with a lovely view: busses. All through the narrow corridor station, not a soul. Not enough uncomfortable benches. Too many fake potted plants. Stained carpet. Not a fucking soul. The fascist spots an analogue clock on the wall: second-hand creeps the same 15 seconds, then repeats.
A(99) drops his bags, creeps cautious toward the entrance. Feels a wave of nausea, pulls out a pistol. A force like a magnet turns him toward a custodial closet. Out pops an iteration of himself. “Doo, fug?”
“Drop your weapon” from a stoner waving a stick over his head. The fascist shoots A(84), in the chest, twice. He twists. Lands on his stomach, broom beneath him. The fascist rolls the iteration of himself with his foot, about to shoot him again.
Head lights on the wall. Behind him, an empty Ford sedan hurtles through the glass wall from nowhere to embed itself in a fast-food counter at a high rate of speed.
Fascist distracted, A(84) brings the broom stick up. Laying prone, he swings right, swats the pistol from the fascist’s hand, swings left, catches him across the chin, dropping him. The stoner leaps to his feat, pins the fascist, broom stick across his throat: “I am not a violent man, but I will break your windpipe if you force me, you fascist fuck.” The villain’s hands grip and strain at the broomstick pressed to his neck.
Boots hurrying over broken glass, A(79) kneels by his thigh grabs the syringes. Sedative. Vaccine. Treatment for the virus. She gives the undeserving man three injections “Synthetic T-Cells from the best time-line, you piece of shit.”
“Now what?” The villain’s hands slack, fall from the broom stick. His hands creep slow, almost-restful toward his side, as he struggles to maintain consciousness.
A(79) stands near the prone villain’s feet. “We lobotomize him, clip his wings so he can’t travel, toss him in the car, and we drop him back where he fucking came from, where he will remain.” A(79) pulls a tool from a pocket, a rod that twists-hisses-whirs and expands into something, a device, like a too-large staple-remover, or a snake’s open mouth, or a check-out scanner-gun. Only the bottom jaw has “fangs”, two red-hot metal leads. Presumably, those leads were meant to go up the fascist’s nose, to lobotomize and cauterize.
“Is he supposed to be asleep? Like, asleep, asleep?” A(84) looks over his shoulder at her, takes his eyes off the man he has pinned to the floor.
*Pop* from the taser in the right hand of the half-conscious fascist. Two wire leads tie the woman’s thigh to the device, the taser, in the right hand of the fascist. She goes rigid. Drops.
A(84) feels the first blow. Feels it take his breath. He is marveling at how little it actually hurts when he feels another. Another and another. Left side, arm pit, above the vest and under his arm. Between two ribs and straight to the lung. Looks the fascist in the eye as the villain stabs him again. Left hand, sinister, tiny knife had to have been clipped to the same belt that held the taser. A(84) tries to speak, can’t, gasps and slumps as the man crawls out from beneath him.
Turns his head, lying on his back and bleeding out. A(84) sees her in the foreground, twitching. Background, the drugged and dazed fascist crawling into a custodial closet to escape. Quiet lightning. Fade to black.
*
CONCLUSION PT. 3
ARC 1: INCOMPLETE
*