I saw a car on fire, by the side of the road, on my way back to University. It burnt on the wasteland by the Brampton Road, in front of the forest.
It was getting on for midnight on a Saturday in late autumn, and glittering clubbers drifted home, just beyond the warmth of the flames. I sat in my tiny city car, my belongings piled behind me, waiting in a queue of taxis and buses by the station, as alluring shadows flickered past the unruly firelight.
The afterglow of that image stayed with me long after the lights had changed, and I had slowly drawn away into the city.
The xenobiology goes badly: I remain on the course through bureaucratic inertia, and as a pawn in an unholy row whereby veterinary science and medicine divide up species. My weeks have become rounds of penance and subjugacy, with one constant eye on a search for academics who have yet to encounter me, for me to shortly disappoint.
How I hate this place. Neither the doctors nor the vets want these new species. Medicine finds itself unequipped to comprehend the non-singularity of humanity, neither philosophically, nor in daily tactics. Veterinarians feel uneasy at losing the certainty which you gain when you cannot converse with your patients.
I park the car beneath my window, climb the stairs, fumble with the lock, and unpack a few essentials. Quickly, I turn my heater to full-power, so that it can slowly warm my dormant room. In the meantime, I head to the library for a little borrowed warmth. Ten weeks, and I can return again to London.
Along the deathly library corridor hang portraits of past geniuses -- scientists, artists, politicians, explorers, bishops. Intermittently, a grubby glass-topped display case contains shards from past civilisations pinned to board, alongside cards of information. The corridor must have looked just like this at the turn of the millennium.
Inside the library, I survey the assembled books in despair. In a few hours, my room will be warm. There is such an embarrassment of riches in this place, but today they bore me. I wander the blue-grey aisles, stacked floor to ceiling with speech and knowledge, and shame myself by my detached oversight of nearly three millennia of civilisation.
On the shelves lining the corridor between the old library and its extension, an encyclopedia takes my eye, not because of its content, but because of the relentless swathe of green spines which cuts through eighty volumes, and occupies a whole shelf, at eye-level. It was the last great capitalist encyclopedia before the First Dead Age.
I feel a certain guilty nostalgia for the era of the encyclopedia. So many people died unnecessarily, and lived so wretchedly that, of course, it's almost incomprehensible to me, living here and now. But there was a certain seductive aesthetic to the years around Contact.
You must remember that I am, perhaps, the last generation to remember the remnants of the Global Empire and the Globalists. There was no comparison in terms of power, of course. It survived as identity only, as a badge and a story for one tribe and, in the final days, one nation state. They could recite perfectly the Globalist axioms, but no longer understood them. But there remained a thread, at least, from the distant past to the early days of my youth.
I flick through the encyclopaedia, remembering the inventions of the twentieth and twenty-first century, those wonderful devices with their strange obsession with electricity and conduits, represented in the beautiful "schematic" diagrams.
Losing interest, my eyes wander about the library, and I try to find another bored visitor with whom I can start a conversation. But the room is empty but for a few enraptured scholars, and I despair of contact.
There was a time when I could have run away from here, when all of us could have run away. Perhaps I could have lived in the woods, or in a caravan by a roadside? I did nothing so brave, of course. It's a strange paradox: that the option remained was sufficient to make my life tolerable enough that I felt no need to leave, now it is gone its absence is almost palpable. The dream was sufficient.
When I was twenty, I lived in a bedsit in New Hackney, fucked on halofurans, and tried to maintain a companionable expression for the woman on top of me, but probably achieved nothing beyond an incomprehensible modulation of entrenched vacancy. I would watch the policemen on the rooftops: the snipers and the marksmen -- before they were replaced by gunning machines.
It seems to me that I should feel there to be some difference between a human marksman and a piece of engineering. But nothing is forthcoming. I cannot bring to mind any emotional distinction between looking up at the gunning machines and when, a decade or so ago, I would stare into the mirrored shades of some bored paramilitary.
I suppose there are still humans controlling the machines somewhere, entombed under the city in a bomb-proof control room. Or are there? I don't know how I would find out if they had also been replaced.
The snipers would never fire. I've never known one to shoot. Sometimes I would wish that they would -- just to clear the air.
It always seemed to be summer, back then. Such heat! The air would hang heavy, like a sodden blanket on a line. You were praying for the weather to break, for a massive thunderstorm. I would sit in the frame of the open sash window, half dressed, and eye-to-eye with the CCTV cameras, and the marksmen, and look west, scanning the horizon for clouds.
Because we lived on the edge of the blast-zone for the oil-terminal, there was no development to the west between us and the Thames, only the quaint and somewhat inexplicable sight of arable farmland. As the sun set, reflecting off the river, it would mingle with the wheat-fields to produce a blinding orange-red light. In the distance, you could see the blazing gas-flares at the terminal, incandescent, like rips in the fabric separating Earth from the firmament. In my memory, all the time I spent in New Hackney is dyed with those ochres, oranges, and reds. The walls, the people in the streets, the tarmac, and the shop fascias: all are stained crimson. It is as if a scarlet fog hangs over those four years of my life. And the claustrophobia has never felt so palpable.
When we weren't quite sure how the planet would be affected by its slow accumulation of energy, there was this powerful story, about warming, and a flood. It was a buried, ancient story, as pervasive as surveillance: "we live on an island, and the water is rising".
I remember from after my collapse -- after the stage-set of those cardinal summers had fallen down around me in flames -- I would stand amongst the wind, high on cliffs by the coast. From there, I could see features in the water -- features alien to the land -- sunken rocks, buoys, white-horses, the perfect horizon, flotillas of sea-weed, and shifts in light, and shades of green and blue. The water would excite me, but sadden me too; sadden me at its indifference.
You cannot engage with the sea. There is no way, no true way, to be a part of these things, to interact with them, or posses them. The sea remains amoral, detached, and incomprehensibly large and overpowering, like a distant god. And this vital force was consuming the land. And during those blood-stained summers in New Hackney, the water was rising.
I spent many hours in Accident and Emergency, with ailing friends who one of us had accidentally poisoned, waiting for their slow withdrawal, and for the police to arrive. There was little that the hospital could do but to rehydrate us and wait. Twice, I played the victim. I lay there, and inspected an honour-guard of infernal daemons raging overhead, as a polyurethane tube dripped salt-water into my veins.
Something catches my eye in the volume in front of me. It is a long article, obviously written very soon after Contact, about the Xenospiritual movement. I think we all find it very hard to understand the intoxication of those extraordinary times. How could a population so steeped in science and so avowedly atheist, within months of contact with a sentient alien race, have been resorting to ouija-boards and table-turning?
Perhaps it was the initial utter inaccessibility of the species, with their incomprehensible logic and language -- they were little more than a few peaks on a graph in the earliest days -- which drew us towards the methods we had previously used to communicate with the wordless dead?
Does xenospirituality survive to this day? The encyclopedia seems to have been written when the movement was at its zenith. I forget what happened later: did the groups simply dwindle and melt away? Perhaps this subject could become a valuable waste of time before the start of term?
Why am I here, kicking around a fortnight before the start of lectures? I wanted to leave London before the start of the riot season. But, more loosely, how have I become this person?
During my angry days in New Hackney, the police, the soldiers, the riots, the threat, they were all novel things. It is strange, looking back on it, but the feeling which I remember, during the relentless militarisation of our civilian life, was one of freedom, of embarking on a journey, and of beginnings and hope. I studied military history, for a while, in those early times. But now, of course, these sights are unremarkable. And I am a "mature student", circling in a holding pattern over a three-year re-education course.
I suppose that I am quite an amateur at life: I've never been one of life's winners, and have been content to bumble around in lower echelons, getting pleasure where I can. But now I am surrounded by great players. Every choice I make is accompanied by a critique of its implications a dozen moves from now. At each move, the consequences are spelt out to me, and I've lost interest in the game.
The burning car!
Ten years ago, I could lie in bed, sheets half-off in homage to the heat, and stare at the ceiling through military-grade narcotics, and I could think of running away. I would escape civilisation, and become an outlaw. I would walk through musty woodland, and live and die an uncivilised human, a mechanical animal and vital spirit. It was never necessary. But I could still, back then, comprehend, in that heat, with the aid of powerful drugs, what uncivilisation might mean.
Why can I not remember my childhood? I cannot remember a single concrete fact. When I think that I have assembled some coherent memory or impression, I later realise that it is a feeble assembly of plagiarised stereotype.
I cannot remember my mother, or my father. Why is that? What is the first thing which I can remember? It's so hard to assemble these things into order. There is a shimmering in my mind, a heat-haze, from those summers in London which obscures the past.
As a child, did I understand these things more fully: dank forests, the soil, the earth? Did greens and blues and browns ever feel simple and welcoming? Did I really understand what I would read in comics: what it was to be a traveller, or an outlaw, or firestarter? Could I ever have comprehended a fight on a street corner?
A woman I remember, a lover, my earliest memory.
I was eighteen, she was twenty: Laura. That world was already painted vermilion. But before then, before Laura: did I understand "going missing"?
Looking through this encyclopaedia, I am reminded of a time when, it is written, police would be concerned with such strangely unworldly issues as mistaking identity, and of establishing it. How quaint that sounds now, how medieval. It is as if they would also consider ontological proofs, or would discourse on the difference between soldiers and policemen, or concern themselves with the redemption of the population from the stranger of the christian sins, such as "pride" and "security".
I am untestably certain that I once understood these things. I am certain that we all understood them. But don't know how. I can almost remember the comprehension disappearing, in the cherry days in my bedsit with Laura.
But as the future was being dismantled around me and recast in shades of red, I could feel an inscrutable freedom: I would lie and dream of the life of bandits and outcasts, of groups of men on black horses, their breath visible in the frosty air, assembled silently on ridgetops as a prelude to unequivocal savagery. The future pressed in on me from all sides, the heat numbed my mind, and the water rose at my feet, the weight of it all giving a temporary vitality to verdant fantasies.
What followed was such a metaphysical game, a contest amongst various roads-not-taken, that it is almost comical to imagine it could have had any practical implications at all. A battle was fought between soldiers who never used their weapons, and a desire which would never come to pass.
My room should be nearly warm, now. As I think of the heater in the centre of my room, with its ethereal blue glow, I remember a word, one we don't use any more, from history, from a major war in the capitalist era. The word was "gas". It was originally Scandinavian, I think, for some kind of spirit. The soldiers would send poison vapours over each other's trenches. Later there were others who would commit suicide, by breathing in the gas from their heater.
I will take this volume of the encyclopedia back to my room. I'm not sure what there is to be said about xenospirituality, nor what there is to be done. I could try to write a paper, but it's hardly a subject where there has been much scholarly interest of late.
From nowhere, I remember one particular day, whilst I was living in that London bedsit. There was an odour in the air, a nasty sulphurous smell. I had just finished some wraps of crap Iodofuran, and decided to wander to the market, to try to get something cleaner. I slouched amongst other dope heads, struggling musicians, second hand book dealers, and psychedelic tat-merchants and, inevitably, amongst the anthropological tourists from out of town (come to survey the European tribes), and the voyeuristic artists orbiting the throng like slingshotting satellites, gaining energy for their future random destinations. Meanwhile the police stared down from the gods, and I tried to find my dealer.
I remember that I saw at the newsstands something about James Astley -- the soldier-philosopher -- he was at the height of his popularity. Nobody knew where the smell of brimstone came from: I still have no idea. But the scene stuck in my mind. It seems strange to me, now, a popular philosopher.
And there it ends, that memory: there it runs out of steam. I don't know why I recall those precise moments quite so often. Perhaps it is because it was the last time that I had a dream?
I take the encyclopedia volume under my arm, and push back the chair as I stand; the noise echoes around the library. With careful footsteps, I start to return to my room. In my boxes, I am sure that I still have one of James Astley's books. They say that Safety and Unsafety has outsold The Bible and The Lord of the Rings.
As I remember the burning car, there is a flickering in my mind, an intermittent occlusion.
There is no one else in my accommodation block: my corridor is empty. I wander slowly to my room, meandering along barren corridors like a ball of tumbleweed. Cameras and pyroelectric detectors mark my passage. Photons impact a charge-couple device, the door-switches tap. A microphone detects my whistling, and adds a little character to a file. Apparently meaningless acts are collected and assembled, and are built into a story. Somewhere imperceptible bits in computer memory are toggled, and my details accrue alongside existing data. I have no reason to hide from this book-keeping: the records don't go back that far. There is a sense of love, of belonging, in the care and attention of the machine: a feeling of relief from the questions of existence and life-story, as their answers are computed by machines.
I sidle into my room, and search my boxes for Astley's slim volume. If anything, it's now a little too hot inside, so I turn the heater completely off. I find a copy of Safety an Unsafety, and let its pages flick past my eyes. I start to read a randomly selected page, but its truisms and relentless didactic style soon bore me.
It's dark now, and I should probably try to sleep. I take the encyclopaedia to bed, to try to relax. The heavy green volume is awkward to hold above my head, so I turn from one side to the other, as I read alternate pages. The articles are longer than a typical encyclopaedia's; more like small essays.
Laura, I remember, had long straight dark hair, a face with a touch of central Asian about it, she liked green and had an almost boundless capacity for praise and hope. She was thin to the point of emaciation but had no signs of any co-morbid angst. Laura would make a good mother, I think. She is my first memory: eighteen earlier years are missing.
There is mention, here, of something which I had forgotten -- Transcendence. Nobody truly knew where the Transcendent went. The claim was that they had achieved direct Contact with the Beings, and had been gifted with an opportunity to spend an endless moment in some kind of exalted state; a Gift, from them to us.
In the psychedelic haze immediately following Contact, it probably all seemed quite plausible. The Transcendent ones would be lauded as returning pilgrims, as hajji. By the time I knew Laura, in the burning city, it had become little more than a joke. Vagrants who had been through some kind of nervous breakdown, scrounging money on the streets, and mumbling about spirits and sea-monsters: they would be anointed 'Transcendents' by the city's stylish and fragrant.
The excessive heat of the room is irritating me: I clearly spent too long in the library. I roll out of bed, open up an information window, and search for Transcendence. I'm presented with a large amount of irrelevant nonsense, and spend perhaps half an hour tinkering with the ontology settings.
All I can find is a link to some information in an electronic book at a cacophonous online auction: the inventory of which reads like the inventory of a lost-property cupboard at an asylum. My eyes meander up and down the screen; past neglected second-hand possessions, past boxed mint goods to appeal to virgin desire; and I am overwhelmed not so much the quantity or mass of physical objects, not so much a physical effluent; but the number and weight of abandoned dreams and desires, the discharge of ideas and feelings.
I idly fiddle with the skinning of the auction site and I wallow in despondency. I decide upon one in shades of amber, and then return to the search.
Eventually I find a book called The Transcendence, available at a low price. There is only one pre-existing bid. I enter a bid of my own, with a limit of only a unit higher, and now must wait until morning for the auction to expire.
I return to bed, leaving the info-unit on search. I fitfully roll in my sheets. I think I am coming down with a fever. I get up and open the curtains slightly, so that I can see from my bed the stars, and the woods, and the wasteland in the distance.
The info-unit clicks rhythmically all night as it continues my quest without me. My febrile mind turns to the burning car. There is a noise now, which I cannot have heard at the time: a roar of flames. Why, with this ubiquitous security, is there a car burning by the roadside? Are our lives improving or not? What happened before my first memory?
The next morning I rose late. The sky was....
The sky was the same arbitrary permutation of white and blue as it usually is; as it was on the day they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and as it was, though I will never know it, on the day my son was born.
I had won the book, and I began to flick through its pages as soon as the download was complete. What caught my eye, initially, were the long excruciating descriptions of the experiences of featured Transcendents. There was something pathetic about the accounts, like attempting to describe orgasm or severe illness, filled with incommensurable metaphor and overwrought sensation, faced with which I was an uneasy voyeur.
Some other of the accounts, perhaps of the more educated, read like a medieval mystic, rambling nonsense about holding goodness in the hand like the kernel of a walnut: the breed of stuff which led Mother Julian to be so exalted as to have an underpass in Norwich dedicated to her memory.
But it certainly seemed that there are still living Transcendents. The book even included the name and address of one. He lives in Scarborough which, I decided, was a pleasant part of the world, though quite a drive.
The traffic was abysmal. I've only made it as far as Leicester Forest East. This is one of those terrible 'Olde Worlde' service stations, all bolted steel and mock-concrete. There is an accident ahead which won't be cleared for hours. After three hours at the services, preceded by a morning's drive and a poor night's sleep, the grimy wipe-clean surfaces and the unworldly lighting and decor begin to claw at my sanity.
I seem to be trapped in a well-appointed no-mans-land, a decivilised zone, somewhere with an awkward relationship with the effluxion of time, at once fugitive and evanescent, whilst somehow also penal and purgatorial. Powerful but uncomprehending aliens would build a place like this to ethically house human subjects, after running an optimisation in twelve dimensions.
The sun is setting now, and the lights outside begin to shine. I sit nursing a boiling characterless coffee in a faux-styrofoam mug, on the first storey, overlooking the traffic. Not so far away are the waxen white lights of the oncoming traffic. Closer, sits a red stream, slowly tracing a route to the summit of a hillside in the distance, like a lava-flow from a volcano.
On the horizon, unusually shaped copses, which give their names to congested interchanges, are barely visible in deepest shades of green. Being on the the motorway is almost an escape itself, a state of existence with its own imperatives. There is such an excess of useless geography between important places that its very existence is almost an act of resistance. But were we to actually stand amongst the trees of those small defiant woods, we would hear nothing but bawling traffic and smell nothing but volatile hydrocarbons.
Half a dozen police-cars sprint down the hard-shoulder in the direction of the accident. I cannot decide if breakdowns and accidents are a violation of the game we are playing, or merely part of its expression. Do construction sites in a city require our judgement to be deferred, or are they essential to its character?
The police are over the hill and out-of-sight. Behind me, a video-wall is occupied with twenty-four hour rolling news. There have been unexplained explosions in Berlin. The same grainy footage is played in a loop. The incomprehensible roaring German traffic is followed by four dull loud thuds, like a shooting party in one of those roadside groves. The blasts shake the image, and then there is screaming, sirens, and a motley chorus of alarms. And then it happens over and again.
The traffic outside is stationary now. A coin-operated games machine exactly repeats a carefully-crafted but inane invitation until the sound becomes meaningless. Behind the counter, Chip and Kuninu fryers, like eaglets in a nest, call for attention first alternately, and then in syncopated unison. Dry heats of various nameless kinds, from unknown sources, slowly dessicate my skin. Soot cakes the windows. Not, it seems, an old-world decoration too far, but somehow an authentic by-product of 'hyperclean' travel.
If I could open the window and sit on the sill, this could be ten years earlier on the outskirts of London: the heat, the reflections of coloured light, the anxiety and the paranoia.
I look for other people, but there are none of significance. Singles and pairs glide through the atria, as if ornaments on an architect's plan. The automatic plant-waterers are activated, and the pansies and violets, nestling in the galleries in lieu of policemen, receive their daily prescribed quantity of moisture.
Above me, in the restaurant, in the ceilingless roofspace, networks of conduits convey light, heat and fresh air. There are various other vital services of which I am not even a knowing consumer, but they have conduits never-the-less. The excess of piping reminds me of my twenty-second century encyclopaedia.
One of the ducts appears slightly curved, and against the plan of the steel rafters, though it could merely be the shimmer of the heat from the kitchen. But only a moment later, all the cabling and pipework is looking sickly askew, and it feels like the world is collapsing.
Annoyed at the queasiness which is brewing in my belly, by way of distraction I pull the e-book from my bag, and start to read it again. I had an appointment to see a David Shugley, one of the surviving Transcendents from a brief revival of xenospirituality, ten years ago.
I think I have drunk too much caffeine. My arms and legs feel cold, but I am sweating; my heart is racing; I have the beginnings of a headache. I watch as the skew of the ceilingwork propagates around the building. Sizes and perspective are becoming hard to judge now. How much longer must I stay here?
After Laura there were a panoply of less singular men and women. Most clearly, I remember the brittle, vandalised, girls (and occasional boy) starting out upon the world at large; using their anger to build notions of formal ethics to sit alongside their already well-tuned visceral instinct. But who was there before Laura? Surely I cannot be so poisoned by testosterone to have misplaced an entire childhood?
My memory must begin at around the time of the xenospiritualist revival: when the gunners were first stationed on the rooftops.
In a moment, a torrent of thoughts bursts into my mind. I jump up from the table, a little too suddenly, and walk around the cavernous service area. Could there be a connection between these things, between the public and the private? I feel sweat on my forehead, and wipe it with my right hand whilst my left, pointing, rapidly beats up and down as if to provide a tempo for a theory.
I walk past the video-sceens showing the Berlin explosions (perhaps these are also related). It seems clear to me that the rise of the Watching State probably has a causative link to the renaissance of Xenospiritualism and Transcendence.
Was Laura one of the Transcendent beings? Did our meeting somehow move me onto some plane of existence which was unable to communicate with my earlier self? Is it possible to transfer the transcendent nature from one person to the next?
I pace into the large atrium, where the pansies above are getting the final few drips of their daily feed. In reach the middle, where shunned representatives from lifestyle-organisation companies stand behind counters, offering leaflets to the disinterested.
A simpler explanation would be that I, myself, have undergone the transcendent experience. That wouldn't need any transference. Perhaps I underwent it only moments before my first memory of Laura? How would I know? What changes would have occurred to me?
I can see the traffic begin to clear now. I am ready to leave: I must leave. I must ask these questions of David Shugley. Did I cause the traffic to clear, as a direct projection of my thoughts, because of the Gift? And is that something which I earnt myself, or did she?
I race to Scarborough, neglecting speed-limits. Is that why the state are so afraid? Because there are Nephilim walking the streets? Has their grip on power been so loosened? Was there some moment at which it was verified to the establishment's satisfaction that these experiences were genuine?
Summerland House is a strange block of flats, an old building in the style of Queen Anne, set in ample gardens; very well appointed. I walk through the double front doors, and am met by a concierge. I mention David Shugley and he invites me to follow him. Quite a spectacular level of service: David must be rather well-off.
I miss a few things which the concierge is telling me (though he seems quite patient) because I am still trying to ascertain the precise relationship between the Administration and The Transcendent. He directs me to David's open door, and then leaves.
I stand for a moment, confused, in the doorway. He has shown me to what looks like a hospital room. David lies in bed in blue-striped pyjamas, a bearded man of perhaps fifty, encircled with unruly greying blonde hair. Around him are such a quantity of personal effects that it is clear that this is his principal home: a clinic. I sit beside him in an relaxed green chair. In a slow low whispering monotone, and without prompting, he starts to talk into the room.
"I suppose you've come because my name and address was listed in a magazine? Well, good. That's why I let them print it.
"I apologise for my current state, but also offer it in way of an explanation. This is the direct effect of The Gift upon me."
I begin to pay careful attention, and he notices my expression.
"Yes, it's all true. At least I believe it to be so, and that is all that anyone can give to you.
"I was one of the leaders of the revival. Yes. I went to Endemoniada, and I met the Beings. Yes, I was Transcended. My river of experience was punctuated by something devoid of perception, most akin to a dreamless sleep, but which altered my subsequent thoughts and actions quite profoundly.
"I noticed most clearly a loss of all sense of purpose. As a young man I had set myself, as I suppose many of us do, upon a path which leads up a mountain, ascending toward ever richer experience. I accidentally discovered its summit. Of course, I became depressed through a loss of purpose but more intensely I was saddened that this was a state which was so completely incommunicable: it was such a lonely experience.
"There is a strange distinction here. The Gift, as I experienced it, had a form which it would be simply paradoxical to spurn or to avoid. And I am sure that observation applies equally to other Transcendents. However, as witnessed by observers, the subject is undergoing a profoundly diminishing experience: they become more abstracted, less happy, more resigned, more terse.
"But even when I, myself, think of before and after -- of all my life to a moment before the Gift, and of everything from a moment just after -- what happened was clearly a deterioration in the state of being. But considered in the whole, a life with the Gift is a great improvement over a life without it. It acts like an asymptote in the midst of integration. Are you mathematical at all?
He pauses for a moment, reflects and, without waiting for an answer, returns to his monologue.
"The Beings, they come with a machine that fits in the palm of your hand. You have to use it in zero-gravity, for some reason it won't work on the planet's surface.
"The people who accompanied me into orbit, they stood around, and measured, recorded, and photographed. Not other explorers, you understand, not scientists or xenospirituphiles, just my friends and family. They had this strange compulsion to record something which is, by definition, senseless. That was as insane."
It is quite clear to me by this point, as David rambled on, that he had kept drugged for a decade, in some sort of institution, by a fearful government. I pity him, and try to bring him to his senses, but he is talking and not listening.
Nevertheless, I continue to try to tell him about the transference of Enlightenment in the act of Intercourse, and the possibility of Nephilim walking the streets, about how the military is unnerved by the tremendous power of the Transcendents, and the means by which they can manipulate apparently random acts by the power of their minds.
He looks nervous, and tells me that I am shouting. He doesn't seem to appreciate the true implications of his parlous state, of our parlous state. He also fails to comprehend the correspondence between James Astley, soldier-philosopher, and Satan himself. We, true initiates of the mysteries of the universe, I explain, must govern the world justly.
The grime on the windows is also a ploy, it seems clear. There has been no decrease in emissions from cars, or elsewhere, we can simply no longer imagine the water around our feet, because of the men with guns on the rooftops. In a straitjacket of safety, our fiery passions have decayed into mellow quiescence.
I hastily look around for something which I could use to illustrate my point, as he seemed unconvinced by my exposition. An empty glass fruit bowl catches the sunlight on the table by the window, trapping rainbows between its crystal surfaces. Here is the perfect illustration of my conviction. I lift it and take it to David. But I cannot make out something which is happening, and the glass is smashing on the floor.
After a brief incomprehensible cacophony, splashes of red fall all around me, seemingly from me, bursting out of my skin, onto the white canvas of the floor. A strange force begins to affect gravity, pushing it to and fro, such that it is all my effort to keep my head upright. Time, too, begins to move erratically, first it slows, then moves a great distance in one step, as tectonic plates shift in earthquakes. Soon legs begin to struggle under its inconstancy of direction, and I begin to search my arms for a comfortable resting place at a lower altitude. But, in the cracks between blue and brown precious stones, the floor is burnished with unknown metals in strange patterns, and I do not know where it might be safe for me to land. The metal arranges itself into the beautiful geology of Endemoniada.
Doctors arrive, armed with poison, as I manage, with moments to spare, to push my way through to the distant planet. I land with a damp thud. A burst of yellow explodes in front of me, and I can feel nothing beyond an intense electrical pain: no fear; no layers of intersecting thoughts; no weighty colour; nor deductions nor questions.
For a moment I am free.
It is said that we have invented little since the mid-twenty first century; that society and technology is largely as it was three or four hundred years ago. We have made contact with a highly spiritual alien species, or we may have done, and yet this has advanced us little.
Two things, though, they have given us. In exchange for, essentially, all human knowledge, they gave us David Shugley's Gift machine, and also a small tablet, of incomprehensible technology, by which we can breathe underwater.
I have not risen for air for forty miles. I have swum along these rivers, past villages, towns, woodland and cities, and past the noise of motorways and of power plants, for the best part of a day. Every now and then, I have rested on the bottom. Nobody else does this: they fear the police now that we can no longer grasp the law.
We spend our lives suspended in a fluid. We sleep, eat, and drink, immersed in gas. It took until 1600, after many of the great moments in the history of humanity were already distant memories, for an Italian, Evangelista Torricelli, to declare "we live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of elementary air, which is known by incontestable experiments to have weight".
It takes the weightier pressure of water for us to appreciate, viscerally, the truth of Torricelli's statement; or perhaps we can feel it when standing in the gales, high on a clifftop overlooking the \lonely sea.
I swim always on the left of the river, leaving an absence equal to my presence on the right hand side. Like the block of marble which contains all of the sculptures that may be carved from it, in the water beside me swims, superposed, the all great works of art and of wider civilisation, absent only in that there is no boundary to them, no limit or exclusion to their extent which could otherwise separate them from the greater river, from the greater sea, or from the oceans of the world which define the planet. I swim alongside, and within, an sea of innumerable forms, buoyed by the fluid which immerses me.
They gave me a story when I left Summerland House. I had a history of 'episodes', perhaps a congenital predisposition. I was stressed, lonely, paranoid, rootless, disenchanted. It will serve; it is tenable.
Something happened ten years ago, and I spent the time which followed that searching for fulfilment in true, pure, substance; seeking an analytically perfect solution as to what it precisely is which projects these monsters into my mind.
I still don't know what it was that happened. I am still as unsure as I have ever been why there are police on the streets. Nobody knows much about the Last Dead Age, only thirty years gone.
Perhaps all these things are the extended consequences of a great war or disaster? Or there could be something exciting happening, involving fallen angels, cunning robots, or belligerent aliens. But you must not forget that I did take a lot of drugs.
I have become embarrassedly content with the shadows in front of the fire, and in resorting to shameful sentiment. Perhaps it is merely my age catching up with me; I've stopped climbing; I settle for the inevitable. One day it is possible that I will discover the answers, though the chances are slim.
There are other things here, swimming immanent beside me, butterflies filling a greenhouse, blown from the hands of a lover, the smell of the wood and velum in a millennia-old priory, and such like. It is the sort of overemotional nonsense from the articles in my e-book; experiences not at all transferable from one to another, except in their class.
But, there is a continuing power in being immersed in these remains. A vast morphic ocean swims alongside me; my Mother and Father, whom I cannot remember; Laura who was always ready to smile, and who loved to wear green; and also my son, who was born on a day with an unremarkable sky, and whom I will never know.