"You still haven't figured it out yet, have you?"
"Figured WHAT out?"
"It."
"I guess not. Have any hints for me?"
"Everything is a hint. Literally, to you, everything. Before, I alluded to the idea of a meaning for you. To the human mind,
meaning is the piece of information that provides a link between A and B, makes many things at once cooperate to form one,
uniform idea or perception. You see, for instance, someone murder someone. You assume there is a reason for it, meaning to it.
You don't know it, but you assume it is as such. Now say you talk to the murderer, ask him why he killed someone, and he tells
you that that someone raped his sister. There is now meaning to the event. The event itself is entirely unchanged, but you now
percieve it as a whole event, your question is answered. This is meaning. I'm not contradicting myself when I said that there is no
meaning to anything, and then turn around to profess to you that you have one. Meaning is created within a human mind. No
other form of being that can influence its environment other than human beings perceive meaning, let alone strive for it, and this
is why you, Micheal, are useful."
"I still don't understand why I am the one you want to fulfill your purpose, why I am privy to this knowledge when I will
ultimately, supposedly, be the harbinger of the end, the one to finalize everything."
"Micheal, you don't NEED to understand. Purely observatory beings, etherial conciences, will see meaning, will see outcomes, will
see all causes and all effects at once. They are not limited by 'time' or 'space,' as they are one with all of it. They have no desire,
no will, no such factors that cause them to focus on the singular, no attachment to self prohibiting them from seeing all. I've said
before, and I will say again, your entire 'universe' is an infinitesimal micron on an infinitesimal, one dimensional point. Just as
there are an infinite sleugh of realms and possibilities within your own, it extends the other way. No conscience can truly
understand how infinitesimal it is, nor how infinite. The only thing that can is the is, because it IS that infinitesimal, it IS that
infinite."
"That's all very interesting, but what are you leading to? What do you want me to take from all of this?"
"That the only thing holding you back from what you would call 'enlightenment' and the Buddhists of your race would call
'nirvana' is your self. You perceive self, do you not?"
"Well I have to, else there would be no self."
"Exactly. What makes you think that the instinct to remain 'self' is right? Why do you cling so manically to your finite, limited
existence when in the back of your mind, somewhere, you KNOW that it is wrong? You struggle to exist, you strain perpetually in
a manner you call living, but why? Of course, there really IS no reason, just the is. You are."
"You're contradicting yourself. You ask me why I do what I must to survive, then say that there is no reason. To you I say that I
just am, and I know it's right, because I am. I didn't force myself into existence, I just ended up here, and since I'm here I figure
I might as well remain here until I die, when- and however that may be."
"Ah ha. Now we're getting places. You are, and you will die. Your 'science' says that matter and energy must be conserved. That
if it appears to disappear, it hasn't; it has merely changed forms. In a way this is right. Within the constructs of your little
playground that is, these rules apply. When something shifts out of your realm, something else comes in to replace it. But things
can be destroyed totally."
"So are you trying to allude to the ultimate fate of my being or something?"
"No. I'm alluding to the nature of things in general. If you take a molecule, any molecule, and look closely enough, what do you
find?"
"Atoms and space."
"Yes! Space! And when you look closely enough at atoms, what do you find?"
"Subatomic and quantum particles, fields of energy, and space."
"Exactly. The one constant is space. There IS a limit to how small things in your universe can be. In your math it'd be roughly
10^-189347828378001201420 meters. The smallest 'particle' as you'd call it fits roughly into that space. Go any smaller, and you
sift into the next dimension down, fall through the cracks in what you'd call reality and disappear. To any observer here with any
observational aid, present or future, the particle will have for all intents and purposes disappeared."
"Is there a point at which the same effect occurs in this lower dimension?"
"Oh yes, ad infinitum. It's exponential too. You have no idea how glad it makes me that humans can understand exponential
functions. They really are the only thing that even I know of that can come reasonably close to putting a definition on reality.
Although they ultimately can't."
"Whats the point at which things fall through this lower dimension into the next one?"
"Well, exponential carries a different meaning here. Imagine you have the number 10^10 written down. To raise it exponentially,
or lower it, in the way I refer to you'd have to take
10^10^10000000000^10000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000... etc.,
until you'd taken the exponent to the tenth power ten times and each time applied it to the number you've been working with. If I
wanted to give you a specific number for the osmosis level of the first lower plane relative to this one it'd take roughly 1100 years
to do so. SO, that is the best approximation I can reasonably give you given the constraints of our correspondence."
"Fuck."
"Seems the best word for it, yes. We shall continue this another time"
"What? First you get me to hate you, then leave me questioning. Then you come back now, pique my interest, get me thinking,
and leave again? Yup, you're gone..."
-=_+-=_+-=_+-=_+-=_+-=_+-=_+-=_+-=_+
Dreams are odd. While you're dreaming, you have a handle on it. Well, you're at least within it, experiencing it, a part of it. But
when you wake up, it's all gone. Nothing left but a lingering sense that something's off, different than it was before and the
constantly fading memories of the dream. You know exactly what's different, too; You. You just can't compartmentalize it into
words, earthly concepts. Only rough, unique sensations.
And this one felt epic, and not epic as in a quadruple kill in Halo, but epic as in the whole universe shifting, changing.
Hyperbole-free, if you will.
Work again. Mark didn't come in today, so I'm doing double duties. Now don't get me wrong, I'd rather be mopping than dealing
with the customers, but now that I have to do both I'm really starting to want to bring a gun to work. I'm not going to of course,
it's a metaphor. But still.
Even at work, even in this odious shithole, that dream is bugging me. The words "sifting down" echo through my head like a
trillion electrons, all orbiting the same, empty, point in space. See? See that? I don't normally talk like that. Normally I'd say bees
around a hive, or flies around a hunk of shit.
Sifting down. Sifting..... down. Maybe it means something. Down seems like in. But not in as in "in". It's wierd. A 4-dimensional
inwardness, I suppose. But down IS the word for it. What the fuck...
"How much is this Serta?"
"The sign says $1199.99."
"Yeah, but I was hoping you'd cut me a deal man. Whaddya say?"
"I'm sorry, only the manager can do that, and only with damaged merchandise."
"Well can I speak with your manager?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because he won't cut you a deal man. Believe me, if I could I'd give away every damn one of these fucking mattresses for $20 in
my pocket, bankrupt the place and walk out happy, but as you can clearly see I'm far from happy, and you're far from getting that
fucking mattress for less than 1200 bucks."
"Excuse me? I could have you fired for treating me like that! I DEMAND that you let me speak with your manager. Now."
"Fuck you" was the last thing I remember saying to anyone in that store.
No more trying, no more resisting, no more feeling like I need to be here, like anyone depends on me or me on them, when the
fact of the matter is that if I walk away and never come back I'm no better or worse for it, and nor are they.
Sifting, down.
Sifting...
Down.
--------------------------------------
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I'll eventually combine the first, this, and the nexts into one coherent body of work. Until then though...