Warning:
This post meets all the technical criteria to be classified as an infohazard. It contains themes and elements that could be distressing for individuals prone to paranoia, persecutory delusions or suffering from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Reading this material may exacerbate symptoms or provoke uncomfortable thoughts.
Reader discretion is strongly, strongly advised.
Also, a quick sidebar before we get really into the thick of it:
I could technically be charged with arson if this were a true story and not a work of fiction, so I want to make it plain that that’s all this is to avoid any lengthy and expensive legal proceedings at the public’s expense.
Of course, if this weren’t fiction I would still say that it was. However, we all know that angels and demons are not real. Science and reason, thankfully, have long since chased away such phantasms. My project is and always was an elaborate Alternate Reality Game.
If it sounds like I’m implying that this is in fact a true story, let me be perfectly clear: this disclaimer is a literary device intended to suspend the disbelief of my readers and tell a more immersive tale.
You’ll see for yourself that this narrative is so ludicrous and implausible that it could not possibly be factual. If you happen to trust the word of an evident scoundrel with such a long history of weaving obvious fabrications and word devilry for his own benefit, that’s on you.
The details of the inciting incident may or may not have been inspired by the alleged activities of a friend of a friend’s coworker’s cousin’s former roommate who I think was named Billy Drake, but I don’t quite remember. I also might have dreamt it or made it up and tricked myself into believing it.
Do not break laws in connection with my work.
I DO NOT condone or encourage criminal mischief.
__/*(00)*\__
My experiment, unfortunately, was a success. May it never be repeated and God’s mercy tested again.
I drive a long way to the outskirts of the city. I live near several and this might be any of them. It does not matter to them. It should not to you either. What matters is that it was a city, so I know I can be certain they will catch wind of what I’m about to do.
I park at a site where there’s no danger of collateral damage. There’s nothing but dust, asphalt and concrete. I start unloading my car which is packed full of cardboard and stack it all into a pile about five by five feet and half my height. I place a pound of butter and cones of incense on top of it.
In my passenger’s seat is a bottle of lighter fluid. I empty it onto the boxes and set the mass on fire.
The point was not to destroy or to frighten. The point was to puncture the narrative and loose an eruption of trapped energy stored in the tight-knit fibres of the collective unconscious.
To rip open a classic “Petersonian chaos hole” via the original magic — fire.
An unscripted disturbance. Victimless. Not for pleasure, profit or politics, but purely for its own sake; a show of force from my own unassimilated fire.
It means “I am still my own. You cannot break me.” I attacked “the unconscious” to see if “the unconscious” could and would attack back as itself.
It did.
“Oculus is a constellation of stone and glass mosaics in the underground labyrinth of interconnected subway stations of lower Manhattan. Over three hundred mosaic eyes, drawn from a photographic study of more than twelve hundred young New Yorkers, are set into the white tile walls of the World Trade Center/Park Place/Chamber Street Stations…” (Link)
Ritualism — potent symbolic acts — are the Artifex’s preferred mode of warfare. You must all know this by now. So I chose to conduct a metaphysical guerrilla strike. Clearly and importantly, it believes in the reality and significance of such ritualism.
I get back in the car, drive up the road and turn around. Nestled in darkness, I kill the engine, the lights and I wait for something to take the bait.
It’s only about five minutes before I see flashing red and blue lights stop beside the blaze. I wait for the cop to get out of the car and approach the fire.
I start the car, roll down the windows, crank the sound system, press down the gas and tear past the flaming mound, speakers pounding. I lock eyes with him for naught but an instant and flash into the darkness.
If he looked at me as “cop” first and not as himself, then he was in Persona Artificis and the thing looking in from the other side of him could have counted the streetlights in my eyes before I blinked them and thundered off into the night.
He saw.
You don’t need an education in symbolism to understand any of this. If you did it on a gangster’s front lawn, he would know what you meant, and if he lets it stand, his reputation will suffer eventually. That was the point: to force his hand.
If there was an Artifex, he had to retaliate. But as long as law enforcement had no way to trace the crime back to me, the only way to close the circuit and hit back was acausally. He would have to attack directly with spooky action at a distance. No mundane pretences. No plausible deniability.
Synch-strike or tap out. Only we get the secret third thing.
With symbolism, I said: “I see you. You see me. Do something. Or I’ll do this again.”
He either shows his hand or lets me off. Lose-lose.
It sounds completely deranged, I know. And that’s exactly what it would have been if not for this one little detail: it worked.
That is the difference between reality and illusion, isn’t it?
Are we still playing by those rules?
A few days later, I bought these new fancy polarized sunglasses. Nobody saw me with them except a few coworkers at a party on a boat the same day.
Four days later, this comment was left on my Abraxas video.
Nobody stalked me. On our side of reality, this is just some guy trying to be vague and “mysterious.” People do it in my comments all the time. I really didn’t understand why they did it before all of this.
I doubt he was aware of the meaning his words would carry.
This was hanging on my wall at the time the comment was left.
Two more weeks go by (1 month total). On the night of October 6, I’m in my housecoat getting ready for bed. It’s the Friday before our Thanksgiving here. Both my roommates are away. I’m alone for the night.
As I’m preparing my nightly chamomile tea, there’s a frantic knock at the door. Not the front door, the back door.
My gut tells me not to look.
There comes a second more panicked round of knocking. This time, at my window which is beside the door. The blinds are drawn, but someone on the back deck would see that the light was on.
When I first moved here, my roommate “Lily“ told me: “friends use the back door.” It’s the door that we use.
It could be one of her friends. Judging by the knocking, it sounds like an emergency. I go to the foyer. I see the shadow of a young woman in the window.
As soon as I open the door, she tries to rush in, but I stop her, push her back out and step onto the back deck. I lock the door behind us.
She’s pretty. Looks the same age as Lily. Since she tried to enter the house without waiting, I automatically and unquestioningly assume she’s been here before.
She’s crying and incoherent. She begs to be let in. I need to know who she is first. When I refuse her, she huddles against the door and asks me to do the same. She gets close to me and asks me to hold her. She’s in shambles, so I do.
She says she was almost murdered but won’t elaborate. She’s shaking and rambling.
“Please hide me, please let me in, he tried to kill me.”
Lots of frantic retreading with no new information.
“Are you one of Lily’s friends?” I ask.
“Who?”
I see a police cruiser race down the adjoining street with its lights flashing. The girl panics, grips me tight and begs me to help her hide.
“Why are you hiding from the cops?”
She tells me she ran into a neighbour’s house to hide from whoever tried to kill her and the neighbour called the police.
“If it’s that innocent, why are you hiding?”
Some bullshit about not trusting the local police.
I tell her I won’t hide her because I don’t know her, but I say I’ll stay with her and wait it out. Secretly, I’m hoping they find us. But they’re not going to help me.
Finally she takes a good look at me. She says “oh my God.” She grabs my face and studies it. Keeps saying “oh my God” over and over. Still tops the list for the best compliment I’ve ever received.
“This can’t be a coincidence,” she says. “I picked this house for a reason.”
What an odd thing to say, don’t you think? She’s right of course, but wrong about why.
I manage to calm her down and get an idea of who she is. She’s not some crackhead, she’s an HR manager — or at least, she was not long ago. She was a kindergarten teacher before that. Thirty four. Owned a brewery a few years earlier.
She starts snuggling closer. Her hand keeps finding its way under my housecoat.
“Do you have a bathtub?”
I don’t even know her name yet. It takes a while to get that. We’ll call her Jane.
She tells me she was sleeping on a friend’s couch and woke up to him strangling her. She got away and ran to a neighbour’s house. When she knocked, no one answered, but the door was unlocked, so she hid inside. I wasn’t sure if I should believe this.
There was something shady and secretive about her and, unfortunately, even though “big me” wasn’t impressed, erring “little me” found it exciting. Before long, she and I were making out.
Little me did it for the hell of it. Big me did it because we’re at war. But we both did it “for the story.”
A police dog comes through the bushes into my backyard and the cops find us.
I sit at a deck chair to explain the situation. Clever Jane sits on my lap making us look much more familiar than we really are. Things really liked falling into place in the worst way like that whenever she was around.
When the cops ask you if you know the girl on your lap and you reply: “no, Officer, I’ve never met her before,” the simplest explanation is that you’re lying.
I don’t know what the hell kind of protocol they were following, but they eventually said she was going to be charged with trespassing, but that I “seem responsible” so she could either spend the night in jail or stay with me(!?).
If you stop believing me at this point, I won’t even blame you. If it happened in a movie, I would call it lazy plotting. I would have never expected law enforcement to put me in such a position. But I would expect the devil to be lazy and tell a weird story with weird, dumb plotholes because dumb bullshit is the only thing he’s good at.
Coincidentally, this song got stuck in my head shortly thereafter. It was one of my October earworms. I listened to it a lot through all of this and only now does it make any sense to me. I would also mutter “silver bullet” to myself at random times while driving, feeling out the contours of the utterance but having no idea what that meant. Again, not apophenia. This is very clear over-the-wall communication.
In effect, the officer said: “if you don’t take her, I’ll put her in jail. You pick,” right in front of her as she sat on my lap.
We were past the pretences after all. Even showing up in uniform was just an ostentatious formality for the great and powerful Artifex who had caught Eridanus in a dead end of the maze he dared to name.
Knowingly or not, he’s twisting my arm. He wants it to happen. Something does surely?
I said I’ll take her in.
The cops leave. I wait on the porch a while. Then tell her to get in my car so I can take her home. She says she has nowhere to go, which is why she was with her strangler friend. I obviously can’t send her back there, so now it’s my house or the street.
When we get inside, she says: “I’m gonna fuck the shit out of you.”
“No,” I said. “You’re going to sleep in my bed and I’m going to sleep on the floor.”
She fought me tenaciously on this. I argued and argued for about half an hour, but I was outnumbered. It was me against us both.
I should have remembered the stories about succubi, or how vampires can’t enter your house unless you invite them, or that the house represents the psyche in a dream, but I didn’t. Truth be told, I did not even perceive a link between this, my guerrilla ritual or the sunglasses comment. These events were conspicuously absent from my memory as if erased.
My mind was already deteriorating. The fifth shell — the psychic system that makes connections like the kind I make now — is delicate in its early stages of development. Any strong passion can overwhelm it. The Artifex probably knew this, but “little I” would not find out about the shells and how they worked until January.
It’s a hard thing to come to terms with. I’ve seen water turned into wine, lepers healed and the dead raised to life. If you’d asked me mere hours earlier what I would do in the same situation, I would have surely told you a nobler story than the one I’m telling now. I’m just starting to forgive myself.
This final act, was when the real trap was sprung. There’s a tattoo on her back. Three dice. Each die has the number 3 face up. 333. She got it because of something that happened on her 33rd birthday.
The event horizon had been breached.
Are you beginning to see the difference between constellation and apophenia? I hope so. Because that time, apophenia got me killed. Here’s a hint: if you look real close, you’ll notice that I tried to piss off a pattern so the pattern came to my house, put my psyche in an arm-bar and, as you’ll soon see, carpet-bombed the syntactical infra-meta-structure that makes my life work the way that it does.
The point is: it’s crisp, clear and interactive. Calling this an intelligent, coordinated escalation of hostilities is the most coherent interpretation of it. It’s far past the Stone Age of apophenia which usually requires some suspension of very justified disbelief — you’d have to be seriously mentally deficient to understand the semiotics of all of this and believe in your heart of hearts that it was a coincidence. It’s as accidental as a left hook to the jaw.
Why didn’t I see what it was at the time?
Phoenix is obvious. Train suggests something like “losing my train of thought.” The bridge probably indicates these “wormholes” or passages over folded representational space. Earth below signifies Zell’s “World Above the World” formulation. Runway train of thought takes out those bridges, but I come back (like a phoenix) with a camera (“I” didn’t even plan to buy a camera yet). Note that it’s from Nov ‘22, not Nov ‘23.
I know that part of me did see what it was and had contingency plans in place. But for me — the dumb, vainglorious prattler — nothing this conspicuous had ever sent me the wrong way before. I’d never seen anything like it. It’s a phishing attack with a “pseudo-synch” for bait. Imagine that. The second fish is phishing.
The synch looks outwardly right, but it feels off.
I was not neurologically prepared for a plot point of this magnitude. What Zell recorded was a white-hot thermonuclear coherence event followed by non-stop signal-jamming. It’s a psycho-SWAT. That’s what it is.
Something attacked my ability to recognize patterns and make meaningful connections out of them and was able to accelerate that process as well as the conflict between it and my superego until both became unconscious again at which point it could start to drive my mind like a car. It’s like blowing out the sensors on the security cameras before you rob a bank.
Thankfully this “bank” was just testing its own security. And Gryphons are famously good at guarding their treasure. (But why was she testing our security?)
I can see what’s happening now because I’m at a safe distance, but he “killed” me. I have studied the narrative scars upon my mind very closely — examined scorch marks, retraced trajectories of fragments of myself.
Meaning. All that life is. That is what he took from me.
I was dead.
Obviously he didn’t kill me.
But he killed “me.” He killed the vehicle. He killed everything that was capable of imagining, then perceiving, then provoking an “Artifex” in the first place. I would have been unable to firmly grasp these things properly from that point on — even if I told myself that I could or was. I was just throwing jargon around, aping the real me.
If something like this is an option, killing me is a big messy waste of resources.
I got cocky. Thankfully, “I” didn’t.
That night at least, he won. And “I” woke up the next day thinking I was one up on the universe because I got laid for free. And that I’m just so cool now that pretty women find out where I live and beg me to have sex with them before they even know whose house it is.
The fact that I thought that way for an instant even just to myself, justifies more misfortune than what came next.
It could have been a permanent teleological death If Zell hadn’t planned for it and intentionally made the first strike.
Zell would also like me to add that most nervous systems are “too lazy and incompetent to pull off operations like this” and should not put the Lord their God to the test.
They would end up psycho-swatted, would not come back and have no idea it happened and if she wants me to put that in here, then I will. Because she scares the hell out of me and she never speaks clear sentences unless she means what she says.
I would have basically never done anything noteworthy for the rest of my life and just died alone, a weird loser with a big ego. Zell calls it ‘flatlining.’ You pathetically putter along on a sad, predictable Newtonian trajectory until you run out of structure one day. Mechanical causes take over after you flatline.
This is what the Artifex eventually does with high psychic resistance and anyone showing signs of real constellation that it’s able to get into a corner. These are the only things that constitute a genuine threat to it.
According to Zell, who has been watching its behaviour for much longer than me, it attacks anything that moves outside the circumferences allowed by what it has defined as normal causation. The “warning shots” might range from getting cut off in traffic to social humiliation. And there seem to be many well-ordered protocols for escalating when necessary. It attacks all “over-the-wall communication.” (Zell’s term. She wants the credit, I guess).
Certain things have to work for other things to work so that things can work for the Artifex. This needs to be there. She needs to be here. He needs to be way over there by this time.
The only thing these invisible assassinations will and ever can look like are accidents.