Pentamyala

 Synopsis: After the accidental death of his wife, Turner moves into a house owned by his friend. He and the housemates begin to experience a strange state of psychedelia each night, perhaps due to something within the house itself. As Turner mourns his wife's death, the other housemates explore the endless possibilities granted by this transcendent experience. The nature of this experience changes over time until it becomes clear there is more to it than they can understand. With Turner stuck in the past, the rest of the residents are unable to move forward into greater realms. But maybe moving forward isn't as grand as it seems. Maybe something more sinister lies beyond the horizon. 

            The magician and his assistant took the stage to the applause of hundreds. Richard Wagner’s “Fall Amongst Hammering Dwarves Smithying Away” blared over the theater’s speakers as the master of illusions wowed with a trick of golden ring wizardry that entranced the crowd and had everyone pondering its secrets. Following his flawless opener he performed a series of tricks and bewitchments enshrouded by puffs of smoke and sparkling lights, as the rest of Wagner’s Das Rheingold provided the only appropriate soundtrack to such a spectacle of trickery and stage occultism. A lovely levitating assistant; a sleight of hand that caused coins and cards and pocket watches to vanish without a trace; animals materializing out of thin air; the transformation of one regular everyday sort of thing into another everyday sort of thing; walking on water; a confounding cigar box juggling trick. This was a magic show that perpetuated the culture and traditions of stage magic without reinvention or innovation. It was what every audience wants. Sheer showmanship and easy entertainment.

The music pulled the show through majestic mountains and perilous depths before heralding a climax as lavish as its opening.

All shows must come to an end, and every magician saves his best trick for last. In the case of our magician, the last trick was a common one. He would saw his lovely assistant in half. The girl crawled into a body-length black box to the accompaniment of Wagner’s Rheinmaidens mourning their lost gold in musical sadness. The magician pranced around interjecting witticisms and cryptic phrases into the air like a parakeet in the midst of a nightmare, and a chainsaw presented itself, seemingly materializing out of nothingness. This was another of the magician’s tricks—his last before the finale. He started the saw, gassed it twice for effect, and demonstrated to a gaping mouthed audience the ease with which it sliced through small wooden statues before turning it on the box that contained his assistant.

            The saw was halfway through the black box when the assistant screamed and shook in violent convulsions, fighting to free herself of the restraint. Those in the crowd familiar with the kind of stage magic that laces itself fancily with comedy were amused by her convincing acting. This wasn’t the first time they’d seen a magic show in which the disastrous accident on stage was yet another trick. But as the box split open and the hysterical assistant fell out, her intestines and liver and stomach pouring out of her abdomen, and blood pooling across the stage, it became evident this was either the most realistic disaster scenario depiction in a magic show in years, or the real thing. When the magician dropped the chainsaw and fell to his knees beside his moaning, dying assistant, held her head in his hands and he cried out to the woman, who was not only his lovely assistant, but his lawfully wedded wife, it seemed everyone in the audience became aware that they were watching a real life tragedy unfold before their eyes. In a minute the woman was dead, her screams and cries now gone, replaced by the hopeless cries of her husband. Ambulance sirens rang in the distance not long after. The audience dispersed, some climbed on stage to see if they could help, and everyone in the theater that night would go home remembering nothing of the hour long performance except for the tragic end.

            How strange it is that in a show meant to deceive the crowd, intending to impress them and surprise them by relying on their expectations only to turn the course of events against them, how strange it is that in this show, an event that occurs exactly as it seems to is what really takes the crowd by surprise. The trick in magic is to get the audience to expect the normal and to surprise them with the unlikely. The first magician to wow an audience with the saw trick held an audience that believed they were about to witness a murder, or a horrible accident. The audience’s expectations over all these generations have changed. Watching the same trick, the audience anticipates the trick, the survival of the boxed girl. What bizarreness it is that it is this anticipation that, as always, works against them. This time the reaction is not amazement and awe.

            Turner Leftman—this is the name our tragic magician—was fortunately not convicted of murder or of manslaughter in the accidental death of his wife. An incorrect preparation of the black box, which happened to be the fault of the late assistant, was found to be the culprit. But Turner was kicked out of the Magician’s Guild, an irrelevant turn of events that meant nothing to Turner, for after the accident he would never dream of performing stage magic again. How could he? His lifetime of devotion to magical tricks and eerie sorcery was now at an end, and he began to regret the focus and singular interest of his childhood and early adulthood, as it had stunted his development of other skill sets held by most men and women his age. Having no marketable skills besides his diabolical stage presence and his flair for style, Turner found work as a high school drama teacher.

            It was due to some great roll of ethereal dice that Turner was able to find a new home only days before being evicted from the house he had rented with his wife, who paid all the bills, but sadly left him with nothing upon her death, having invested it poorly over the previous months. This new home was a home unlike anything he had ever known, because he shared it with others. That’s something Turner never went in for, even after high school when it was all the rage for a few friends to move into a rundown shit-town apartment together just to say they had a home of their own. Now, at 35 years old Turner was living with his long time good friend Marcus D’Marcus and a few complete strangers.

            Marcus had bought the cabin that became Turner Leftman’s new home just years earlier. It was built for a nobleman of the land, an important doctor at the town hospital. For reasons impertinent to the story the doctor couldn’t move into the log home, so he had it auctioned off at a meager price that even Marcus D’Marcus could afford.

            His first roommate was his girlfriend, Ebonica Temple. Ebonica was a girl who could never remain single for long, not because she was particularly beautiful, or because she stole the hearts of every man she met, or because her personality was remarkable in any way, but because she was the type of person who had never really gotten to know herself. She avoided solitude at any cost because her fear of herself was, like that of so many others, overwhelming to the point that she couldn’t go to the movies by herself, couldn’t go out to eat by herself, had to surround herself by the very people she put on pedestals before tearing them down, and would never, in any conceivable way, “find herself,” unless by accident. As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” This was true of Ebonica. Her low self esteem and her even lower capacity for developing an interesting personality meant her sexuality was all she had. Marcus was drawn to her sexual dynamo, and their relationship flourished on rock solid foundations of empty lust for a good long time.

            “This is Ebonica,” Marcus said, when he introduced her and Turner shortly after the fatal magic show. 

            Turner found her appearance standard, not worth the narrative space required to describe it. When they shook hands her lipstick stretched wide across her face and her beetle-like voice squeaked:

            “Marcus says you known each other forever.”

            “A good while,” said Turner. “How long the two of you been together?”

            “Not long enough!” she said. And everything else that came out of her mouth was of the same caliber.

            What seemed like a week was only a half hour as Ebonica and Marcus captivated Turner with stories of their romance and identical opinions. Ebonica put her lack of interests and passions on display for all to see, as she spoke so fondly of Marcus’s hobbies that it was obvious she effortlessly took on the personality and interests of her current soul mate.

            Marcus and Turner had known each other since high school, the same high school currently employing Turner as a drama teacher. For years Marcus fancied himself something of a lady’s man and an alpha male, with no life experience or personality traits on which to base these fantasies. He capitalized on these imagined attributes, and often offered sexual and romantic and girl-catching advice to impressionable and naive friends, regardless of being asked, and regardless of his own ignorance of women and human interaction. Ebonica was the third girl he’d dated in his life, and her want of personality which manifested itself in obsessing over Marcus and going nowhere without him made all his friends believe he was truly God’s Gift to Women. He believed it himself. The day Turner moved into the cabin he met one of the fellow housemates, a friend of Marcus. His name was Partridge Johnburst.

            Partridge had a disorder called MBF Syndrome, a strange offshoot of Asperger’s Syndrome characterized by the obsessive and socially inept qualities first identified in the three individuals for which it was named.

            On the second floor of the home, Marcus guided Turner to a bedroom where a  man toyed with a setup of high-tech devices with whirring, beeping, flashing parts holding his attention tight.

            “This is Partridge’s room,” said Marcus.

            “And you must be Partridge,” said Turner, eyeing the skinny guy in bifocals with a face full of pubic hair.

            He stood from his devices and nodded at Turner before descending into an out-of-nowhere explanation of what was going on in his room, without bothering to introduce himself or ask Turner’s name.

            “I have three Magmo SPCs running through a SplakMax belly module I stayed up late optimizing last night.” He seemed to overflow with pride as he pointed out the components and waved his hands over his technological empire. “Over there is my Datafarm, my milk fridge, and my sacred texts shelf, all feeding into a DCPBGK-Elf109 harddisk controller that actually prints a Jones Plot over frequency space.”

            “I don’t know what any of that means,” whispered Turner.

            Partridge failed to notice any lack of interest or understanding, and went on.

            “I can align any set of belly modules with my eyes closed.” Partridge smirked, but his eyes were dead as carpet. “Look at this.” He sat back in front of his mess of technology and typed on a keyboard, flipped some switches, and turned knobs, all with his attention on Marcus and Turner to be sure they were watching. There was a click, then a short siren. Partridge leaned back, with his arms behind his head. He raised his eyebrows and grinned, as if awaiting overdue worship and praise from the two standing in his doorway. It now seemed his pride was more a sense of self-important bragging in regards to something no one cared about but himself. Turner nodded.

            He and Marcus continued down the hall to an empty room, where he dropped his bags, only to pick them up again when Marcus said the room belonged to another housemate, a man named Cleavage Crimson, who Marcus had met in college. Cleavage was hardly ever home because he was a social butterfly who knew a lot of people in a casual way, but had no close friends. Tonight, like every other night, he was making the rounds downtown, stopping at every bar in sight to have a drink, looking for familiar faces, but not really enjoying any of it. Keeping up appearances was hard work.

            The room next to Cleavage’s was Turner’s. Here he dwelled in the weeks and months following his wife’s death, decorating it only minimally, the only particular worthy of note being the silver necklace he set on the table beside his bed. It belonged to his wife, and from now on it would never leave his side. In his pockets during the day, on his table at night, it would always be close. Within the wooden walls of the cabin he mourned daily. Being alone meant being unafraid to pity himself and being free to doze off into depressed dreams. But he couldn’t do this forever. The family room came alive nightly with Marcus yelling at the TV, or Cleavage telling an indulgent story about his bar life, or Partridge belaboring a point that didn’t need to be made. Turner came down to sit with the others and to talk about friendly things most nights after work. He needed to be around others when grief showed its teeth.

            One of these nights was a quiet, regular one, mere hours before Cleavage left for the bars.

            “Can you show us some magic?” Ebonica asked. She was lying across the couch, her head resting in Marcus’s lap.

            “Do you do the trick,” asked Cleavage, “where you wrap yourself up in a coat and disappear, but no one knows you’re gone until you appear behind them? But the coat’s still there, like you never left it.”

            “That trick really isn’t impressive,” said Partridge. “I can simulate the effect with a helmet mounted tryptophone and a smoke machine.”

            “I’ve done it,” said Turner. “But I don’t do magic anymore.”

            “We know,” said Marcus, scanning the room with a look of disapproval. “Rest assured, buddy, this is a magic-free zone. You ain’t gotta say any more. But if you’d ever like to talk about it sometime I’ll be all ears.”

            “Me too,” interjected Ebonica.

            “Thanks,” said Turner. “I’m sure sitting in my room or touching the walls of the house will be enough to sooth my nerves. It’s as if I’m returning to nature, like the gods intended. Surprising the difference a wall of wood can make when you’re used to touching dry wall every day. Like a shot of oak through the veins.”

            What Turner didn’t know, and Marcus didn’t know, and Ebonica, Partridge, and Cleavage didn’t know is that this cabin, like all homes made of wood, the stoic, silent, ageless, sturdy, always mighty body of the trees, harbored a certain subtle life force resonating on frequencies unknown to man, in the form of energy and fields completely untouchable via all hitherto methods attempted by humankind. The metaphysical reality of trees, as rumor and legend both have it, is psychedelic and paranormal and inexplicable. Every one of the billions of trees across the earth possesses a link via soil, water, rock, air, and some strange field permeating all things living and dead. This link goes beyond what humankind can fathom, and as it so happens, forms a collective consciousness that encompasses the planet, flows through every window, every wall, every door, every chimney, and ear, and eye, and body, and mountain, and skyscraper, and fortress, creating a living swell of energy shared by every tree that has ever been. As bizarre as it sounds, it happens to be too true for words to convey.

            The cabin was alive. Or, put more plainly, it was filled with a sentient, sapient force that was undetectable to the inhabitants within. This ancient life force reached back eons into forgotten eras, forgotten ages and periods of past Earth, beyond the Jurassic, beyond the Triassic, into the Paleozoic era, past the Permian, all the way to the Carboniferous period, 350 million years gone. Predating the dinosaurs by over a hundred million years, this disembodied consciousness floated silently among the house’s inhabitants, seeping into and out of their ears and noses and mouths, swirling around their heads, resting beside their bodies as they slept and dined and talked and lived. Partridge’s religious and technological obsessions would not find this kind of entity in line with his type of thinking. Cleavage’s fixation on endless social interaction would not grant him the patience to notice it. Ebonica’s vapidity would only pose a threat to comprehending this thing. Marcus’s self adoration would close him off. Even Turner’s wounded heart and career of magic would grant him no special insight into the trees. This was a presence all too ancient and learned for the minds of humans. And to call it mere life would be a trifle, for such a label as life is to reduce it to something less than it is.

            Turner said nothing else, and the discussion, like one of his tricks, metamorphosed into something new; from the topic of his career to the subject of Partridge’s newest obsession that was of no interest to the others in the cabin. But to call it a discussion would be inaccurate, for it was merely a monologue spouted by Partridge that the rest of the housemates found themselves wrapped up inside of like a ghoul’s straightjacket, with no way to escape or interject or interact. Cleavage left for the bars, Marcus told a story to Ebonica about pirates who turned into worms, and Partridge continued talking about his fantastic interests, as though he held a captive audience of thousands. Once a man who performed for an audience of hundreds, Turner now found himself on the other side of the performance. He was the audience—Partridge Johnburst’s audience of one. And he wasn't listening. He missed his wife. It was time to go to bed.

            A little after midnight Cleavage came home to a quiet cabin. Light intoxication set him up for a good rest, but first he sat in the living room examining the phone numbers he’d received that night. He giggled about the things he saw at the Longhammer Bar; those thespians could improvise the pants off the Statue of Liberty. He thought it silly all the things he saw at the Short Skirt Saloon; he loved redheads in mink coats and stylish glasses, but when they went home with boys with goatees he could only shake his head. The Gorgon Pub was boring tonight, no snake handler shows until the weekend. Halfway satisfied with the events of the night, he went to his room and let the beer in his blood take him under.

            The stillness of the night was compounded by the cabin’s remoteness. Not a car was heard, not a city light was visible. Stars twinkled above, coyotes howled in dark woods not far away, and the trees of those woods, still snug in the ground and their branches intact, stood like arms reaching to the sky. In an age where humans no longer practiced rituals and sacrifice to appease the trees, they had become distant from man. But never did their watch cease.

            Marcus and Ebonica’s naked bodies lied entwined in one bed, asleep in postsexual ecstasy. Marcus dreamed of beavers building dams in the wrong rivers, flooding entire neighborhoods he was helpless to protect. Ebonica dreamed of haircuts that were too short and new shoes that were too big and boyfriends who were too nice. Across the hall, Partridge slept on top of a pile of Coke cans and Mountain Dew bottles, dreaming he was the head doctor of a hospital in which everyone acknowledged and worshiped his brilliance, but every patient was a cannibal, complicating his job tremendously. He twitched, knocking a few bottles and cans off the bed, and a drool-soaked smile cracked across his face. Down the hall Turner shoved a photo into his wallet of him and his wife, taken the day they had learned they shared a love for the same visual arts style. Art Deco. A cabin’s organic walls and rustic air were as far removed from the style as one could get. No threat of tragic association, here. Next to his room Cleavage curled up above the covers and fell into a dream of surreal chaos involving a 16^th century man-of-war, a never-ending train conducted by a wheelchair demon, a living painting of tortured souls, and a subterranean maze that emptied at a temple in the core of the planet.

            These dreams, like all dreams, maybe meant nothing. But it is not the dreams that mattered on this night. What mattered was that the housemates dreamed at all. Turner lied back after setting his wallet aside, and after moments of feeling that his heart was frozen and his life was over, he fell asleep. He, too, whisked away into dreams, dreams of kissing a creature under a staircase at night, with a flaming Testarossa driving circles around them.

            The presence of five sleeping humans dreaming amongst the life force of the trees in the cabin walls brought into existence something new and alien to the human race. The early stages of a collective consciousness was forming in their dreamspace. Seedlings of a linked cosmicism much like, but far inferior to, that of the trees. One could not help but assume it is the trees that allowed it to happen. The next morning presented the housemates with dire confusion and a sense of connectedness never before known. And it went like this:

            Ebonica said, “Something very weird--”

            Cleavage interrupted, “—happened to me last night.”

            Turner looked at them both: “I knew you--”

            Partridge budding in, “Were going to--”

            “—say that,” finished Marcus.

            They were quiet for a moment. The birds cawed outside, the morning sun lit up the brown wooden kitchen.

            “It’s like--” started Turner, fidgeting with the hot water dispenser on the countertop,

            “—we’re inside each other’s heads,” said Marcus.

            “Nooo,” said Partridge, unwilling to believe it.

            “Do you think we’re--” said Ebonica,

          “Leather belts?” said Cleavage. “No, Ebonica. We’re not leather belts. What in the--”

            “Wretched hell?” Turner said. Hot water splashed into his cup, joining his teabag.

            “It’s just that--” she started,

            “—there’s no sensible thing to think about any of this,” said Partridge, “so it has to be some scary fairyland fantasy, or--”

            “—or a Demicro Cruise Control chip that’s been planted in our… cerebellum-ellums? What is this word? What are Demicro Cruise Control chips?” said Marcus, finishing Partridge’s train of thought that had derailed into an off-topic, unrelated subject, as it always did. For a moment Marcus was unable to contain his unvoiced opinion that Partridge was the sort of person who would watch a football game and get lost in the useless details of grass length on the field, or worry about whether or not the field lines were painted thick enough, oblivious to anything and everything relevant happening before his eyes, prone to getting upset at the groundskeeper of the stadium instead of noticing the poor sportsmanship of the athletes. The rest could feel the opinions held by Marcus, and the sentiment spread through them. But let us return to the events to be described on this morning:

               “It was like I lost myself, my identity,” said Turner. “Like I was lost in a…”

            “…nebula of thought and self…” said Marcus. “Or a fuzzy cloud of absolute openness and…”

            “Complete knowing and feeling and presence,” said Cleavage. “Real weird.”

            “It didn’t feel like a dream” said Ebonica. “I was out of my body, like I was just pure thought and energy. But it was--”

            “—as real as this tea,” said Turner, taking a sip. “As real as this cabin, or this kitchen.”

            “Or this hangover,” said Cleavage. No one laughed, but a blue jay somewhere outside cried out into the morning sky.

            They stayed in the kitchen talking about their experiences, sharing opinions of what this development could mean, how it came to be, why it happened at all. None felt too comfortable about it.

            “I bet it’s because we’re all kind of, you know, deep, intelligent, thoughtful people,” said Ebonica. “Like we’re in tune with things and we can connect on that other level, and like, we know how things work. So the real version of reality is shown to us, because we’re on that level. Someone, or something, is lifting the veil, sharing the secret, because it senses something in us.”

            “That’s exactly the opposite of what I think,” said Turner. “I’m sure none of that is true. It felt like a weird vibration, sort of. But like I was disembodied and was vibrating on a…”

            “Spectral plane,” said Partridge. “You felt like you were oscillating on a spectral plane populated by gray phantoms.”

            “No,” said Turner. “Not quite. But that eerie feeling, I got something like it when I first came here. This was an amplified version of it. It’s a little scary.”

            Marcus laughed. “It was only a dream each of us had, and we’re influencing each other by talking about it, and we’re feeling weird because intense dreams do that. They make you feel helpless. Now we’re tricking each other into thinking we had the same experience. Something we saw or ate or heard in common last night. That’s what it is.”

            Ebonica nodded, despite her real opinion being quite different.

            Cleavage was quiet in order to brainstorm the ways he’d relate this story to his friends. It wasn’t much of a story at the moment. But it was something to talk about at lunch.

            Every night the phenomenon repeated. Once all members of the household were asleep, their dreamful or dreamless sleep was replaced by an altered state of unconsciousness, an advanced state of being, a higher level of thinking, a oneness with all things, including themselves and each other, granting each a feeling of tranquility and the sense of self-actualization. This was the only time of day Ebonica became aware of thoughts higher than those of herself and her material interests; it was the only time of day Partridge knew there was more to reality than his self-described superbrain had already fathomed; it was the only time of day Turner’s thoughts were not on his dead wife, or the dreadful prospect of existence without her; it was the only duration of time over which Cleavage was not concerned with how he appeared to others, or what his reputation was really worth; it was the only time of day Marcus did not fancy himself the king of everything, or the picture of perfection. These nights were brief hours away from the regular. But it would be too much to ask that the house’s inhabitants took anything valuable away from these nightly experiences, for such times are often seen as opportunities  of entertainment and vacation to the uninitiated mind, and nothing more.

            If ever a housemate was not home or not asleep with the rest, the effect was absent. No irregular higher thinking occurred in their minds, no form of escapism and enlightenment enraptured their souls. Only with all present and all asleep could this effect run its course. Quickly they learned the ins and outs of the odd mind-state that flowed among them, that connected them.

            Weeks slithered by like an unwound Ouroboros, and time’s illusion pressed forward against the dense fields of matter and mass and energy everywhere and in all things. The cabin’s occupants got used to the psychedelic effects of the night, each finding their own purpose to it in the context of their lives, each discovering something worthwhile in its effect on their psyches. As though each had spent years of obsessively studying complex subjects and ideas, on these nights their visions were filled with the kind of imagery that came from repetitious thinking devoted to difficult concepts—where one slaves away from sun up to sun down only to find his entire field of thought and view plagued by answers and questions sprouting from the very roots and stems of this long thought, unable to escape into the dark of dreams or slumber—and these visions were elucidated through some cosmic gateway into uncharted worlds of immediate knowledge and wisdom. There is no way to collate all the thoughts and feelings the housemates experienced over the weeks following the initial episode. All were different and dynamic, undergoing many changes within their bodies and minds, influencing the transformation of perception of nature itself, of life and death and the great beyond. It must suffice to say that all five human beings in the home changed into something more, but something still limited by human elements inherent to each. Their connections to each other grew into an unfamiliar social dynamic until they had achieved, a month and a half later, what can only be called a collective consciousness. The possibilities birthed by this collective consciousness were like none predicted by the parapsychologists and futurists of the time. And through it, strange things became possible.

           

            “I saw the aurora borealis last night,” Marcus said one afternoon, as Ebonica and Partridge were discussing time shares in Montana, something neither knew anything about, but both insisted they knew more about than the other. “It wasn’t a dream, either. I was there, in the freezing cold of Alaska’s mountains.”

            Neither Ebonica or Partridge cast any doubt on Marcus’s statement, because they knew in a strange way that he was not lying. They could sense it via the abstruse connections through which they had previously read each other’s minds and finished each other’s sentences.

            “I was naked, because I sleep naked,” said Marcus. “This makes me think I somehow was there. My body and my mind, complete. I wasn’t home in my bed, it wasn’t like a dream.”

            “Were you thinking about the northern lights before you went to sleep?” asked Partridge. “Because I…”

            “Not the northern lights, but I was thinking of Alaska. The weird thing is that without any clues or other information, I know exactly where I was in Alaska. I know which mountain I was on top of. I could show you on a map.”

            “I ask this,” said Partridge, “because the other night I went to bed thinking about an exact location in Lewiston, Maine. The street I lived on when I was young. That night I was in Lewiston, Maine, on the exact street. It was night, the exact time I should have been at home asleep. I know this because I was wearing my watch. I always sleep with my watch on.”

            “Why do you have a watch?” asked Ebonica. She made a joke about watches being antiquated items of an ancient people. The joke, like other facets of Ebonica, was so unimpressive it doesn’t warrant being repeated.

            “You could feel the air and the cold, right?” asked Marcus. “Because I could. I was freezing. I thought I was going to freeze to death, and the next thing I know I’m back in my body, in my bed.”

            “Yes, I felt everything,” said Partridge. “There’s no doubt in my mind I was really there. I only focused on the place, and at night I traveled there.”

            The inhabitants discovered, over the next twenty four hours, that when they slept they were capable of astral projection: projecting themselves to wherever they focused their minds. It became a worrying thing at first. The inhabitants were unsure if it was really their bodies being transported, or simply their minds. If the body went, safety was a prime concern. If it was only the mind, danger was negligible. Body or mind? Which was being projected in the night? When the collective conscious state transformed yet again over the next week, this question was answered.

            “Have you time traveled?” Partridge asked Turner one morning, his hair a longer mess than usual, and heavy circles under his eyes.

            “I beg your pardon,”  said Turner, who was looking at a small silver necklace he’d found on the floor of his room just minutes earlier. It was identical to the one his wife wore. Now he had two, the original still resting on his bedside table. Knowing that was impossible, he inspected the new one as his housemate told him of curious happenings.

            Partridge pushed away his plate of waffles, finished after two bites. “Time traveled. You know what that means, don’t you? Traveled to another time.”

            “I know what it means. I haven’t done it. You mean through the--”

            “Yes, through that collective nightmare we share. We can time travel. You know how, don’t you?”

            “I can’t say that I do, Partridge.”

            “When you’re in the hyperstate you put your mind’s eye on a specific time and you’ll go there. Breaking free of the floating, helpless, quantum entanglement of the hyperstate takes some time and work, but when you do it, it’s…”

            “Breathtaking,” said Marcus, coming into the kitchen. “And horrifying. Showing up in another time and place is weird. I just did it last night. You have to think about the place, too, so you know where to end up. And it’s not just a dream. Definitely not a dream.” He pulled up his shirt sleeve to show off a long cut down his arm, still bleeding.

            “What happened to you?” asked Turner. He put aside the mystery necklace for the time being and took an interest in what seemed more than just sleep-induced visions.

            “I got this last night,” Marcus said, rinsing his arm in the kitchen sink. “Actually, I got this in ten years. While I was connected in that starless expanse of dark universes of thought--”

            “The hyperstate,” said Partridge.

            “No. When I was in that, uh, let’s call it a psychedelic trip, I thought about whether I’d get to see North Korea in my lifetime. You know I’ve always wanted to see it, Turner.” The sink was full of blood.

            “Yes,” Turner replied. “I know.”

            “So I became really focused on North Korea last night, and for no good reason the arbitrary point of ten years from now entered my mind and I thought about whether I’d see North Korea by then. You know when you’re in that state we go into, and you can feel on multiple levels and think on multiple planes of thought. It’s simple to focus on a time and place and be moved there. Seconds later I was in North Korea, and it was ten years from now. Like the instant transportation we do in our sleep, only now it’s through time as well as space. It was scary and surreal. That’s a fucked up country, man.”

            “You wanted to see it,” said Turner.

          “A squalid shithole if ever I saw one. I’m not going back. Not now or ever. I got this,” Marcus indicated the cut along his arm, “running from the military police. And probably for being a white guy who didn’t speak Korean. I climbed a fence and fell onto a housetop, slid down through what Koreans probably call a back yard, and got cut on a metal rod for hanging clothes and dishes. The nice thing is you can return to the ‘hyperstate’ whenever you want, and leave the time and place you’ve traveled to completely, like you were never there. But it’s real. You’re really there, as much as you’re really here, in this kitchen. Like the astral projection, this shit’s real.”

            “I just came back from two months onboard a slaveship bound for the Byzantine Empire from some unknown location,” said Partridge. “Don’t ask me how I got there. I don’t remember. But this wasn’t the Byzantine Empire of centuries past. It was a future Byzantine Empire, and the world was a lot different. Teleportation had been recently invented, and as a result of the teleportation of humankind everyone had lost some vital thing that made them human. You know what I’m talking about? It was a common belief they lost the “spirit” or “soul” when they teleported. Anyone who was teleported became a replicant of what was once a man or a woman, while the original one died. It was thought everyone who teleported had their consciousness and personality transferred to some unknown realm of existence, maybe erased altogether, while their replicants carried on their work and lives on Earth, with the same memories and knowledge, but completely devoid of that human spark, not knowing they were in fact replicants. So many refused to ever teleport, but the appeal was huge. And in this age, not teleporting meant big problems for transportation. Because transportation in this time, sometime in the 50^th century, is congested and almost impossible. At least on Earth. The manufacturers insisted everyone who teleported would still be themselves after the act, and would remember any and everything that they’d ever experienced. But we had our doubts. You could tell there was something wrong with people. Early teleportation victims were messed up. Real bad, too, like they were changed. I met a few in my travels, and they couldn’t act normal.”

            “And the slaveships?” asked Marcus. “You seem to have drifted from the point.”

            “Right,” said Partridge. “As I was saying…”

            Partridge and Marcus discussed the implications of time travel and their respective adventures therein, during which Turner’s thoughts turned to his wife. Time travel could allow him to save her. He would only need to stop himself from killing her. For the rest of the day he devised a plan to bring back the woman he loved. He would stop the show, break the chainsaw, sabotage things in some way so as to save her, but to otherwise have no adverse effects on himself or others. He had seen the right movies. He knew the dangers of time travel, and the paradoxes one might easily spring upon the world. That night he put the mysterious duplicate necklace in the closet, and forgot about it.

Night fell, the housemates saw themselves to bed, and Turner fell asleep, fell into the collective consciousness known by some as a hyperstate, known to others as a starless expanse of dark universes of thought, known to others as a psychedelic realm beyond reality, and he fixated on one point in space and time. He zoomed into a wormhole of emotion and consciousness; dark and light and pain and emptiness were a typhoon through which he slid, shapeless and fast.

            He landed on the stage where his wife died. There was no blood on the floor, no audience in the theater, no sound anywhere. It was dark. He was wearing the shirt and underwear he went to sleep in.

            “Must be right before the show,” he said. But it was raining outside. The night of his fatal performance was a clear night with a full moon. The sky was covered in clouds, no moon visible anywhere.

            He walked around the theater until finding it to be completely empty. When he ventured outside he looked at the marquee above the theater’s entrance, which read:

            Cluffhouse Theater Closed. Rest in Peace, Luna Leftman. Our thoughts are with her friends and family.

            Tears swelled in his eyes. This shouldn’t be here. Maybe he messed up. He didn’t travel back far enough. With a thought, he was back in his high-floating aimless void of consciousness, outside his self, outside his world. Try again, he told himself. He focused again on the place, again on the time, this time more intently, and in a whoosh he was back.

            The same empty theater, the same clean stage, the same rainy night. He ran outside. The same marquee message. He said no words and sat on the wet ground, exhausted with grief.

            Our love was real, Luna. It wasn’t Marcus and Ebonica love. I wasn’t only in love with how much you were fixated on me. I really love you. We didn’t even have cameras like our friends, but we had a kind of love that was wet and slippery, in a good way. Not the kind you take pictures of, but the kind you live. That love ain’t going anywhere, my love.

He returned to the hyperstate with stress that soon evaporated into emotionless drifting among the disembodied selfless ether. Here he would spend the rest of the night.

            The next day at work he instructed his students on the fine art of losing one’s inhibitions. With earsplitting shouts and flamboyant movements of every joint in his body he showed them the mannerisms and actions he ordered them to imitate in attempts to break down their walls of shyness, to free them of their shells and to get creativity and inspiration flowing. As his students acted like sugar-junkies trapped in a closet, Turner thought only of the time and place his wife died. If he thought hard enough, he supposed, he’d be able to return there that night. His problem was inexperience. That’s what got him stuck on that stage at the wrong time. He only need focus his thoughts on being in the right place at the right time, and by bedtime he’d meet the requirements to get there. How he reasoned his way to this conclusion he wasn’t quite sure, ut it felt right. And going by feeling was about as good a path as any when dealing with something as inexplicable as a nocturnal collective consciousness. His excitement at the prospect of having his wife back freed him to show his students even more whimsical and theatrical spectacles of play and practice. Soon everyone was showing off their amateurish ventriloquism skills and making each other laugh. Even Turner laughed.

            That night was a repeat of the night before. Again he was back on the clean stage in the empty theater. Again, a cloudy, rainy night. Again, the marquee announcing his wife’s death. He tried throughout the night to return to the right time, to no avail.

            He went downstairs in the morning to find Ebonica in the kitchen sharing a story with Cleavage and Marcus.

            “Everyone was immortal. I think everyone. Nearly almost everyone. It was something they did to the DNA with technology, and people could live forever by staying young and never aging. When they got old they had their DNA changed so they were young again. They could do it whenever they wanted to, forever.” Her hair was neatly combed and she looked wide awake, unlike the others.

            “I met a man who was four thousand years old! And he didn’t look any older than forty! His name was Mazman, he had a gray beard, gray eyes, the biggest eyebrows anyone ever had.”

            “What year was this?” asked Cleavage.

            “Nine thousand something,” said Ebonica. “The 99^th century. Overpopulation was a thing. You think it's bad now, it was really bad in the 99^th century. People lived forever, the world population grew into the trillions. But oh my God, Marcus. It was beautiful.”

            “I can imagine, baby.”

            “The sky was an endless purple. Air was more… rich. More filling. Mazman said people lived on eighty other worlds, and built their own colonies that drifted through space. Society was, I don’t know, it seemed peaceful and perfect.”

            “I can imagine,” said Marcus.

            “I didn't understand Mazman’s words because the language of the 99^th century was so weird it didn’t sound real. But a telepathic kind of intention-transmission was possible because of this thing.” Ebonica held out a small flat device on the end of her finger, the size of a postage stamp. It was black and smooth. “You put this on you,” she pulled up her shirt to show a small square mark under her armpit where the device fit, “and it allows you to communicate with others who have it. Doesn’t matter your language. You transmit the ideas you want to. Mazman’s first transmission to me was that I was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen.”

            “You were in your bra and panties, weren’t you?” Marcus asked.

            She smiled.

            “That’s the thing that gets me,” he said. “We must be physically moved to these places we’re seeing. You’re wearing whatever you went to sleep in. If you want to do some traveling, you’d better sleep in the clothes you want to bring along. That’s how you know it’s real.”

            “I was practically naked, Marcus!” said Ebonica. “But Mazman didn’t care. He showed me so many things.”

            Turner eagerly waited for Ebonica’s story to end before he asked the others if they’d tried traveling into the past.

            “My first time,” said Cleavage. “I tried that. It doesn’t work. Not really well.”

            “Yeah,” said Marcus. “It’s like you get stuck at about the point all this started. I think you can’t go back past the time this sleeping hyperstate thing began.”

            “Actually, it doesn’t go back beyond the first time we time traveled,” Cleavage said. “That seems to be the farthest back I can go, anyway. But who cares? Who wants to see where we’ve been when we can see where we’re going?”

            “Fuck.” Turner left the kitchen for his room. On his way down the hall he stopped by Partridge’s room and saw his housemate playing with electronic components and tiny flashing lights.

            “You ever traveled to the past?” Turner asked.

            Partridge looked at him, knocked some things off the desk closest to him, clearing a space for one of his big pieces of equipment that he rolled into place, and seemed lost in thought.

            “No interest in that,” he said. “Future’s my game. Where you think I got this thing? I’m not sure what it is, but I’m gonna make it work. Found it in a trash heap in the year 3113. I think it’s alien.”

            Turner had no interest in technology from the future, no interest in alien trash, he had no interest in immortality, teleportation, a progressing humanity, an idyllic world of prosperity. He wanted his wife back. He went to his room, put the silver necklace into his pocket, as he did all mornings, and went to work.

            That night Turner tried again to throw himself into the past, moments before the screaming, bleeding, violent death of his wife. Again he couldn’t seem to go past the dark night full of clouds and an empty theater. He’d found a dead end in time. Astral projecting himself—or more precisely, as the inhabitants discovered, physically projecting himself—he appeared in the cabin. It was night, the first night of the housemates’ ascent into higher realms of time and space manipulation. He crept slowly through the creaking cabin, careful not to alter the past. But he was altering it already simply by being there, so he hoped only to alter it imperceptibly. He was fully clothed, having taken note of Marcus’s comment that this spacetime transportation took one in whatever clothing they slept in. The whole thing still seemed hard to believe. Now he would confirm it for himself. He would see if it was real or a figment of imagination.

            Upstairs he saw Marcus and Ebonica in bed together. Partridge was sleeping on his bed full of cans in the next room, he peaked in the room across the hall and saw Cleavage curled up at the foot of his bed. He walked to his own room and saw himself sleeping on his side, snoring. His cell phone was plugged into the wall. Turner cupped his hand over it to block the light as he turned it on. The date was three days earlier; the night everyone started time traveling.

            “It’s real,” he thought. “If not, there’s a way to prove it.”

            He pulled a note out of his pocket he’d written earlier in the day. A simple note with a word and a picture on it. If this whole bizarre thing was real, not simply a product of the strange collective consciousness on his perception, this note would confirm it as truth, or break it open as hallucination. He placed the note under the bed, where it was the only thing in an otherwise empty space of carpeted floor.

            Turner left the room and focused his thoughts on returning to the hyperstate of consciousness, inside his own bed, his own time, in a very loosely defined sense of “inside”. And seconds later he was there.

            Before going downstairs the next morning, he checked under the bed. There was the note he’d written the day before and stuffed into his pocket. He was still in his clothes. The note was a picture he’d scribbled of a pig with a carrot in its mouth. The line under it read, “Porkcarrot.” It meant absolutely nothing. He drew it for no good reason.

            “I guess I could have been sleepwalking.” He felt around in his pocket and noticed the necklace was gone. He had it in there all day the day before. He remembered it being in there when he went to sleep, as it departed from his usual routine of putting it on the  table. It was in there so it would travel with him when he went to save his wife.

            Turner checked the bed, looked under the sheets, flipped over the mattress, explored the entire vacant floor of the room on his hands and knees. The necklace was gone, as though it had vanished into the same mystic ether the housemates disappeared into every night. He remembered the necklace he found on the floor three days earlier. It must have fallen from his pocket while spying on himself the night before. Or, three nights ago. But last night, to him. He shot over to the closet and found the necklace on a shelf where he put the duplicate days earlier. If the other necklace didn’t show up, he knew where he’d find it—in the past. Turner’s mind folded into multidimensional diamonds and tesseracts as he tried to understand the implications of the lost and found necklaces, how there could be duplicates, then a lost one, how they could seemingly appear, disappear, how time and matter worked, what, if anything, was suggested by the ability to bring something to the past and make an infinite number of copies, whether or not this violated any physical law, and from all of this mind-folding perplexity, he wondered again at the sinister nature of this mental hyperstate that had so subtly come into their lives, why and how they could travel through time, why their bodies were still here, in beds asleep, while they traveled through time. Was he really himself, here? There he was, right in front of himself, asleep in a bed. Could one make infinite duplicates of oneself?  He thought then, with so many avenues of confusion to get lost down, that perhaps it was good their travel into the past was limited to such a small window of time. Not good for him, however, for his quest to save his wife was now impossible to accomplish. A dead end to a dead past.

             Imperceptible to the cabin’s residents that night, the wood that composed the walls and floors and ceilings throbbed in nanoscopic ways. New atomic movements carried uncountable quantities of tree essence through the lumber, soon to float into the air circulating through the home. A higher state of collective consciousness would soon open itself.

           

            Ebonica pushed a shopping cart along under obtrusive fluorescent lighting while Marcus and Cleavage threw cans of soup and containers of spice into it. Overhead the Muzak station played a tender pop ballad made for the radio, but perfect for the canned food aisle.

            Cleavage crammed his hands in his pockets, turning his head to peer down every aisle they passed, in case he saw someone he knew. “What I don’t get is if we go to this psychedelic state every night, and we can travel through time, in which our bodies are most definitely going with our consciousness, what happens to our sleeping bodies? Do we have two bodies, then? A sleeping body and a waking, walking, teleporting, time traveling body?”

            “Turner found out the other night,” said Marcus. “Kept trying to go back further than he could, and decided to prove to himself whether or not this is all real or a figment of our imaginations. Or our collective imagination. He says it’s real. He saw each of us sleeping, himself included. It was the night we first became able to time travel. But he said our bodies were all there in our beds. Looks like for some period of time there are two of us. One of us sleeping, one of us traveling.”

            “But listen, I have a thought,” said Cleavage. “When we time travel, we can stay in the future as long as we want. Days, weeks, years. Partridge spent months in one of his futures. I’ve spent days, at least. The thing is this: when we return to our sleeping, transcending selves on the bed, we’re returning at exactly the point we left, or right before it even. So in that way, there’s no missing time, there might be no measurable way in which there are two of us.”

            “But like I said, Turner saw himself while he was in the time travel state.”

            “But he didn’t time travel that night, remember? He didn’t time travel until the next night. So for him there was no paradox.”

            “Right,” said Marcus. “Weird. I bet if any of us went back, though, we’d see ourselves. He said he saw us sleeping, so we were still there, while we were time traveling. But maybe you’re right. We just return at the right time to create no paradox. But I guess there wouldn’t be a paradox, because one of us in the past and one of us in the future makes sense. There’s ‘one of us’ at every point in time, in a sense. I mean, as long as we’re alive. Ah, nevermind. Something like that.”

            “That’s creepy,” said Ebonica. “To think he was walking around the cabin when we slept, but at the same time he was also in his bed… I don’t know how to feel. It’s spooky. I wish he’d stop creeping around in the past.”

            “He’s more concerned with saving his wife than seeing what else there is,” said Cleavage. “The whole future is out there, literally, at his disposal, he has the luxury of going anywhere and anywhen, and he can’t get up off the floor of the past.”

            They turned down the milk and cheese aisle.

            “You have such a way with words,” said Ebonica. “Turner’s heartbroken, Cleave. Maybe you wouldn’t feel the same way. You don’t care about women. Have you had a girlfriend? Love can do that to you.”

            “You’re right,” Marcus said. “But Turner’s gotta get past the past. It’s impossible for him to save her.  Once he sees the future he’ll lose everything. His regrets of the past are gonna be wiped out.”

            “Speaking of regrets,” said Cleavage, “have you been to the year 2109? You see what Google’s been up to?” He threw two packages of sliced cheese into the shopping cart.

            “I haven’t,” said Marcus. “What’s in 2109?”

            “The Google Brainstorm is in 2109. Google spent a decade or so developing all these tools to maximize the potential of your brain and your interactions with others, so they claimed. In the future, I mean. Not just developing, but finding other companies that were building useful pieces of technology, then swooping in and buying those companies, expanding their resources, and diverting their efforts toward new projects that all seemed linked into one ominous goal. I say this of course only after witnessing it firsthand, and seeing its first whole year of activity. Like everything else Google, it took off and took over, and people immediately submitted to its overwhelming amount of features and potential and promises, putting all their unquestioning faith and love and support in it, before soon finding the brainstorm collected all thoughts from everyone, and created a massive database where you could, at any time, explore the minds of others, invade the minds of others, and, maybe this is most important, you forfeited all personal freedoms to Google and this new company called Albitz. Albitz is a small player, but important. They make models of reality based on billions of pieces of input collected by Google, and they link you to other people, like what Facebook does now, only imagine a hundred years more advanced. Not a small player, really, but small when you compare them to Google. By the 22^nd century Google owns almost everything. And with the Brainstorm, almost everyone. People became walking automatons whose every move and every thought and every action was kept in a database that allowed Google and Albitz to create completely convincing false realities that aid corporations and governments in massively complex and weird ways. It’s a fully artificial reality you’re sucked into, but the more time you spend in it, the more data it collects from you, and the less you’re able to see how false the whole thing is. But people still acted like it wasn’t a big deal, and like it really didn’t matter.”

            “OK. You’re making this up,” said Marcus. “People wouldn’t do that, just give up their minds to Google for a few features and convenience.”

            “He has a way with words,” said Ebonica.

            “Not making it up, man. Check it out tonight. 2109 AD. Make sure you don’t put yourself in any major cities. I haven’t looked at the years following it, but I’d say they’re even worse. These things only get worse before they get better. The Brainstorm is monolithic. Over time the knowledge it started to share was false, not all of it at first, but enough. People were led to believe so many untrue things that those who maintained and directed the Brainstorm had total domination over anyone linked into it. And people were OK with that, because what they got out of it was pleasurable. Over time it lied more and more. Your entire reality is altered by an invisible hand, frequently changed without your knowledge, and without your power to stop it. People were lost inside its machinations. Social networking becomes not something you do, but something you’re hooked into for life, with an always changing system of physical laws and absurd, made up realities that can go on forever. Without the network, which is controlled by Google and I guess Albitz, you’re nothing. Within the network you’re also nothing, but you exist in a steady state of obedience.

“I guess things get better at some point. The other futures I’ve visited are alright. Some even make me feel less significant than I do now. But the 22^nd century ain’t looking to have such a hot start. Once you’re plugged up to the Brainstorm, you’re in it forever. And all changes they make to it are out of your control. Which means the changes they make to you is out of your control.”

            Marcus shook his head. “I can’t imagine any of that’s true.”

            Cleavage smiled. “I believe you can’t imagine it.”

            “Marcus and I visited Mazman last night,” interrupted Ebonica, sounding eager to top Cleavage’s story. “It was a few years after the first time I met him, and he remembered me. It’s hard to go back to exactly the  same time, isn’t it? It’s hard for me. I approximate, and always end up within a week or two of where I want to go. They’re doing some neat things in his time.”

            “I don’t know if ‘neat’ is the word I’d use,” said Marcus. “They’re developing ways to prevent stars from exploding or becoming red giants. Maybe it sounds neat, but it’s also an incredibly dangerous and destructive project, from what I understand. They’re experimenting on other stars, sometimes destroying entire star systems in the process, so they can learn how to prevent our own sun from its inevitable fate. Who knows how many unseen alien worlds they’ve destroyed in the process?”

            “That’s what I was thinking,” Ebonica replied. “Just, Mazman’s beard is neat, still. Don’t you think?”

            The sun beat down on the sidewalk while Partridge and Turner walked to the gas station together. Cars flew past, children yelled in some far away yard, a fragment of melancholy resided in Turner’s gut. He was quiet most of the walk, having nothing of interest to say to Partridge, who was busy talking about his own things. But one of his things caught Turner’s ear. Following a long diatribe about opponents of the Catholic church, from which he went on a tangent about the differing afterlife beliefs of particular religions, Partridge said the following:

            “… like the Mahayana Buddhists, who believe that once a person dies his or her soul goes through a transition to the next life. They enter a liminal state called the bardo. This takes place between two lives, after they die, before they are reborn. It can be as short as 3 days, or as long as 7 years. Usually it lasts 49 days. That’s the standard.”

            “Whoa,” said Turner. “Hold on. Come again.”

            Partridge repeated something he’d said earlier about a Hindu self-immolation death ritual called Suttee, before Turner specified that he meant the thing about the 49 day transition period. Partridge repeated what he’d said. 

            “But I don’t believe any of it,” he said. “That’s in stark contradiction to what the Catholic church teaches, so its likelihood of being true is zero. I’ve only read up on Buddhism because it became interesting after we started going into the hyperstate. But ‘interesting’ is about where it ends, because it has nothing of value to teach me.”

            Turner was no longer listening. If death and the great dark beyond was anything like the Buddhists thought, which seemed to him agreeable in light of the hyperstate experience, and at least worth a shot, maybe there was a way to reach Luna’s spirit, or life force, or death force, or what thing it was that might leave the body upon death. This ancient philosophy offered Turner his first glimpse of real hope in days. Perhaps, then, it was his good fortune that the hyperstate to which all the cabin residents were subjected had evolved, unbeknownst to all, over the previous few nights.

            It was after 2 a.m. when the housemates were asleep. Each drifted out of the body, out of the mind, out of the confines of what constituted reality and mortality, where a state of infinity and cosmic vibrations and vast awareness opened up, filled with whirring and echoed whistles and distant gusts of stellar winds filling their sonic senses. Passages of all kinds opened to them, from stairways and tunnels to windows and doorways, and undescribeable shapes and less entertainable colors appeared around them, although ‘around’ became meaningless in such a spaceless existence as this. They were in the hyperstate.

            The five had agreed to explore a new possibility within the hyperstate, a sort of experimental exponential hyperstate. They time traveled to the same time and place, meeting in the living room of the cabin, at night, while their bodies rested. Here, they lied down and slept again, in a sort of secondary, higher level sleep, to see if perhaps a newer, higher level hyperstate might open to them. And it did.

This visit started like the original hyperstate, but soon took on a new quality as the inhabitants felt an outside intelligence directing their interactions and senses. It seemed as though a being, unseen and unheard, could be felt by all, known only by its invisible persuasion through the void. As each tried to cope with what might be suggested by this outside intelligence, there soon became a hint that there were multiple outside intelligences acting in sync, working together to direct the five inhabitants toward something hidden. Even after weeks of familiarity with the hyperstate, and even in the unmatched comfort and enlightenment of the void, the inhabitants felt unsure of this new direction. Fear manifested itself in what seemed like thousands of different ways, tiny and huge, paralyzing and perplexing. It quickly becomes difficult to explain the true depth of the state of strangeness that came over everything.

--These beings can’t be trusted.

--These creatures are beyond our understanding.

--We have to escape.

--There is nothing left for us.

--The exalted entities have something in mind.

--They’re teaching us to communicate.

Sweeping over the inhabitants’ collective consciousness was the idea that these entities were their masters, and soon the fear with which each fought off control disappeared, replaced by trust in, and obedience to, these creatures hiding behind an ethereal curtain. The inhabitants’ material lives, that Earthly existence in their bodies, seemed now futile and weak, as if each thought and action a mistake from the beginning of life until this very moment.

Memories reaching back hundreds of years flooded their collective consciousness, memories that none of the inhabitants could have formed on their own. It was a sudden flash of recollections of old homes with buried secrets, old lives in vivid realism, with smells and sounds and sights undeniably authentic, old towns alive with bells and business and drunken peasants, old voyages across the sea, expeditions across the continents, expansive memories of exploration and discovery; and new memories reaching further back, thousands of years at least, primitive dwellings and unfamiliar languages wrapping around collective eardrums, it was unlike anything so far experienced. It felt as though they were falling through millions of individual awarenesses, inhabiting each for seconds at a time, moving in reverse through human evolution, pulled down an abyss of time into dark ages and ancient eons.

There was a steady ringing in his ears when Turner awoke in the middle of the night. He couldn’t move. Partridge awoke to the same ringing, the same paralysis. Cleavage, too. Marcus and Ebonica also awoke, frozen, drowned by ringing, staring into their dark bedroom. Like each awakening, this one threw them violently into the loneliness of their own bodies, away from the collective. But this time, it was malevolent.

Each saw the same thing in their own rooms.

Around their beds stood a dozen tall dark figures blurred around the edges, silent, still, and cold. The inhabitants tried to speak only to find their tongues stuck and their lips immovable. The figures reached their arms into the beds, dead tendrils moved across the inhabitants’ legs and bodies as thousands of disembodied voices bounced off the walls and ceiling.

The morning was nothing but a loud recounting of their experiences, pseudo-philosophical explanations and speculations by each, as the housemates uneasily drank their coffee and buttered their toast and downed their milk. The ringing persisted. It could be heard in moments of quiet between confused accounts of the collective experience, or ruminations on the purpose or identities of the frightening entities. It was inside their heads. But so was the conversation. No words were spoken aloud, for in a striking change of social dynamic, the inhabitants spoke telepathically. They were connected in a new way. The day commensed without a spoken word.

In the night, Turner explored a new realm of reality. He could move through the fields of space and time effortlessly, his body safe in bed, but his essence free to go in all directions. The strange new fabric of existence he was part of seemed to transcend life or death, and it was in this area he looked for Luna, or what used to be Luna. It was out of no emotional attachment as he felt when awake, but out of a selfless, impersonal sense of exploration that seemed important only in this state. He was in the past, a month and a half after Luna’s death, and here she should be vibrating or floating or moving if any remnant of her existence remained. But there was nothing. And every night after this, no matter the time he ventured to, there was nothing. He couldn’t find her.

The housemates spent these sessions in the higher hyperstate venturing to new realms not limited to their world. Otherworldly beings greeted them at first in horrific circumstances that paralyzed the inhabitants, but soon gave them the sense of being among highly evolved superbeings. Space was no confine for the inhabitants, and with the aid of these new entities they were able to move into other universes outside their own, where nature itself broke down with new rules. The inhabitants were together in their bodies, but in a state less physical, almost pure energy and spatial. It was as though space itself became matter, time became consciousness, and these dimensions collapsed upon each other to follow the laws of new universes.

After a series of failed endeavors toward his wife’s rescue, Turner accepted the loss of Luna, first overpowered by grief, but quickly guided by the hyperstate’s hyperintelligence toward finding relief in this epiphany. Effortlessly he removed himself from grief and lifted the burdening sense of sadness from his ethereal form, and he joined the others in the new universes. The five senses of the five inhabitants had at once become ten senses in the hyperstate. Now, they possessed perhaps a hundred senses. Maybe more. Senses had no meaning and no distinction any longer, but to those still tied to their mortal and physical bodies, there was no way to understand this deluge of experience without relating it to the familiar reference point of senses. All was new and mesmerizing. It was as though they were among the gods.

Interactions between the five humans and the extrauniversal beings matched no known Earthly parallel. It was incomparable to even the most extravagant of real and imagined events.

--We are powerful.

--If this universe is to open to us…

--We must open ours.

The inhabitants stood in emptiness and were soon surrounded by enormous trees whose roots reached infinitely below them and whose branches stretched endlessly above them, creating a closed off space where the universe’s entities stood watch. Beyond the roots glowed the cosmic microwave background of distant realities, disparate universes all touching the walls of whatever one they were in. Communication opened up in a language absent of sound, but after days of teaching and guidance and enlightenment by the beings, the housemates understood every idea relayed to them.

--This ancient life needs a doorway.

Turner’s job performance suffered in the weeks following this episode. Students found themselves puzzled as he taught about historical figures in theater, discussing the works of Arthur Miller, Sophocles, Euripides, the politics of George Bernard Shaw, the themes of Tennessee Williams, wherein he related with the enthusiasm of a child the personal opinions of each playwright on their own work, an insight he could in no earthly way possess. But it was not in an earthly way he possessed such knowledge. And it became evident to his students he was incapable of teaching in a way that took their personal needs into consideration, instead focusing on higher truths he knew through some esoteric path, that had little relevance to the class. He lost them on forays into the sonic soundscapes of Andrew Lloyd Weber, having no discernible point to make, and no connection to the curriculum. He spoke of hypnosis and voodoo, black magic and astral projection, frightening students with his behavior as much as with his words.

The same troubles manifested in Marcus’s job, Cleavage’s job, Partridge’s daily excursions, and Ebonica’s life. While their ways of functioning seemed the only proper way of behaving in their minds, to others it was like watching a schizophrenic or a madman tiptoeing between the real and unreal. Higher level thoughts did not lend themselves to functional living or sensible relations with others. The inhabitants of the cabin were drifting further into a chasm where the id and ego ceased and the Allmind pulsed. Deeper and deeper they descended, day by day, losing touch with the old, but connecting to something new.

Marcus’s notions of superiority were lost to the void. Cleavage’s frequent trips to the bars ended, no longer finding the validation in social interaction he once had. Ebonica’s lack of personality and self were irrelevant. Partridge’s religious beliefs crumbled in new revelations. The inhabitants gradually became aware of a presence in their home that belonged to none of them. The same presence felt in the higher hyperstate seemed to be with them in the cabin. And secrets of the universe slowly started to reveal themselves, only while the inhabitants were home. They opened themselves to this limitless store of knowledge willingly, accepting, without filter and unguarded, everything. In a week they found the same source of boundless knowledge outside the home, shared by the trees of the forest. Here they could communicate with any and all trees, receiving such bizarre ideas that not one of the inhabitants was able to understand the information. They were given gifts of power.

--We can move things.

Ebonica lifted the water from a creek that trickled not far from the cabin. In the air it twisted into whatever shape she wanted.

Cleavage controlled all the cars in the road on his way to work, guiding them out of his way as he passed, freezing each driver and occupant in a state of timelessness only to cease when he willed it.

Turner impressed his students with blasts of red energy from his fingertips, setting papers on fire, spelling words with flames, and blasting holes in books no longer deemed useful.

With the exercise of their powers, the inhabitants caught glimpses of unexplained things in the world around them, flickering, flashing, hazy shapes that belonged not to this world and not to this time and not to this galaxy.

Marcus saw creatures of hunchbacked shape, with tentacles, long spear-like appendages protruding from what must have been faces and bodies, and shiny, almost metallic flesh, or exoskeletons, or neither, forming some type of body. They were hulks, and they floated feet above the ground, materializing in the hallways of the car dealership where Marcus worked. Around them swirled black smoke and fire of colors never before seen on Earth. And in seconds they were gone.

Ebonica heard voices from within the walls of the daycare at which she worked. They were not the voices of children, or of adults, or of anything she took to be human. They spoke no language she understood, yet she understood the things they said. And for moments, the walls bulged with alien shapes and ghoulish suggestion.

The hundred television screens at Partridge’s electronics store played the regular advertising samples throughout the day, but turned to sinister things on occasion. As though in sync, all the screens flashed to images that terrified Partridge. He learned the images were never seen by others. And they became more haunting over time, hinting at great stores of knowledge and horror beyond his mortal grasp.

Turner, too, was a witness to strange apparitions and ghastly happenings. After the awe-inspiring exercise of his powers in front of his students, he saw faces in the classroom that belonged to entities never seen by human eyes or imagined by human minds. Their expressions were of anger and eagerness. When in an empty classroom between periods, Turner suffered a number of out of body experiences, as though he were being carried through a land of dark green skies, oceans of black liquid, swirling shapes in the air around him, and unseen fields of energy wrapping around him like a prison.

Cleavage’s experiences on the road would have caused his death were it not for his ability to control the cars around him. He saw enormous vehicles soaring through the sky, and thousands of uncanny beings pouring from them, descending to Earth. Moments passed by, and all he had seen was gone.

Despite the unsettling visions and experiences of the inhabitants outside their home, they chalked it up to hallucinations induced by the collective consciousness, and enjoyed the powers that continued to evolve within them.

--We can go where we want and when we want.

The inhabitants discovered the ability to time travel without the requirement of sleeping or reaching the hyperstate. But it was different, now. The future wasn’t what it used to be. The year 2109 no longer showcased the tragic Google Brainstorm; the 50^th century did not see the return of the Byzantine Empire, nor the advent of human teleportation; the 99^th century did not possess a single immortal, nor a human-wide effort to stop the death of stars. All the future was without worry and without trouble. Because it was without humans.

--Time is changing.

--Because we are changing.

--It’s a small sacrifice for what we have gained.

The cabin dwellers, in their transcendent state, didn’t notice the newspapers and TV reporters filing story after story of outlandish goings on. Trees began growing at unprecedented rates all over the world. Trees in the wrong regions, redwoods spouting up in France and Denmark and Russia; forests of oak and evergreens appearing in Antarctica; banyan trees appearing in large quantities across North America and Australia; the rare Socotra dragon tree made millions of appearances in South America and Japan and spread across Africa; colossal banzai trees erupted from the soil in most of Europe and throughout India and Central America. Dendrologists across the globe were without explanation.

The inhabitants’ connection to reality was almost fully severed. They possessed no awareness of the world’s happenings, or changes to the planet beneath them. And all for what they perceived as the transcendence to a freer state of being.

No longer did they require sleep or food. The inhabitants stopped working and confined themselves to the cabin. They were strongest inside its walls. And it is here they were needed the most.

--We are stronger than ever.

Like a hundred million Alka-Seltzer tablets dropped in a bottle of water, the energy density in the cabin grew to stupendous proportions until it exploded in supernatural and paranormal flashes of psychedelia. The explosion tore through space and time instead of matter. The cabin, and the five conduits within, were instantly transformed into the doorway between our world and the outside universes. Other worlds peered in, communicated briefly with the Dendron collective that covered the globe, and saw a fountain of untapped resources and consciousness that now belonged to them.

Turner, Marcus, Ebonica, Cleavage, and Partridge formed the five points of the psychic pentagram. They lost themselves in the murky expanse of infinity to forever act as the passage between our world and the others. Through that passage came beings from other worlds, sentient species so alien and so horrific no human mind could make sense of what the eye saw. Their numbers were astronomical and growing. The trees of the world were exalted as masters, the High Gods of All Things, and the trillion forms of life came from all edges of reality to pay homage, to worship, to obey. Soon the world was overrun by goliath beings and translucent beings and microscopic beings and multi-bodied beings and ethereal forms of intelligence and haunting oscillations of reality’s fabric that transcended life as Earth knew it. The panic-stricken race of man attempted war first, communication second, and failed on both counts. The strength of nations was obsolete in the face of the unbounded and unchained macrocosm. But humanity would not flicker out into extinction as most would have so pleadingly hoped. Mankind was harvested for their potential resources, their bones used to construct mountain-sized altars of worship, their blood used to fuel machines deep beneath the earth, their flesh used to wrap offerings to the trees, their psychic energy used to imprison and enslave their consciousnesses in retribution for their sins.

The brief wars declared by nations were put down almost as fast as they started, by the powerful entities from beyond the stars. Riots and chaos ensued in every major city. With a shortage of trees in the cities, the extrauniversal beings at first payed little attention to the inhabitants or to the activity occurring within. But as the use of humans as natural resources became more attractive, the cities were filled with unspeakable creatures from the farthest reaches of space and time. Men, women, and children were sent to where they were needed most, families torn apart, friendships instantly abolished, and a new order to the world erected in absolute adulation to the trees.

The five cabin dwellers remained in a permanent state of consciousness that connected them to the trees, and let them see with billions of ancient eyes the downfall of their species. There was no room left for their kind. Earth would now serve as the sacred church of the multiverse, the home of the gods to which all advanced species bowed.

The End.