THE NURTURE OF THE CATASTROPHE

I thought I was happy, I thought I could finally rest in peace; my mission accomplished, my life on earth, over.
I let go of the hands that held mine, and floated towards the exit. The doorman was still there, his eloquent smile urging me on.

I turned and watched the scene dissolve, the nightclub enveloped by an icy, empty fog, flowing out from my eyes, everywhere I looked, wherever I directed my gaze, the fog swallowed until finally there was nothing. I was floating in a field of possibility, a bubble of consciousness, no longer a thing but an event waiting to happen, like an actor searching for a play. Lost in infinity where nothing exists.

No things exist, only interactions between fields of probability. So where are these thoughts? If consciousness is a field generated by the brain's activity and the mind is a function of conscious existence?
But my brain died, didn't it? I'm flat-lining; these are my last thoughts. Suspended between space and time and stretched out to eternity on the event-horizon of the after-life. Is thought self-causing?
'Hello? Will you stop self-obsessing for one minute?'

'Odin! You're here too?'
'Isn't that one of the definitions of "god"? '
'Yes, I suppose so, but...'
'You're an atheist. I can disappear if you want. Leave you alone with your thoughts. Strictly speaking, you can't be alone with your thoughts of course.' He stopped speaking and I waited for the explanation. When it didn't come, I started to ask him, but then I realised... because I am a thought or a string of thoughts?'
'Ah huh. Yup. A massless event in time.' With these words he became solid. We were on board the space station looking down on the Earth. 'Beautiful, isn't she? My sister, Gaia.'

'So as I have no mass, I'm not subject to entropy? I should be able to traverse time in the way that a physical being travels through space?'
'When you were a field of consciousness, generated by the activity of the brain, your brain, you were subject to the physical laws of the universe because the thing that was generating that field, was "mortal" - an object with mass, subject to the laws of thermodynamics.'
'And now?'
'And now what? There is no "now". We're "here". Subject to the laws of magic, quantum physics, the Lords of Chaos.'
'What am I seeing? And what am I seeing with?'
'If you're seeing what I'm seeing, then you're seeing the truth. Gaia and the universe as it really is. A smear in time. A cloud of events in the field of probability.'

'All life and death? Everything? Past, present and future?'
'The mystery of being. Yes.' We both fell silent and watched Gaia below, or above, us. There is no up or down in space. There is no past or future...
'How come I seem to be experiencing the passage of time?'
'Spiritual momentum. Your "soul" left your body at great speed. It shot out through the doors of what you perceived as the nightclub and gathered itself - yourself - here.'
'So time is passing, because I've bought it with me?'
'Yes. You only ever exist in your own bubble of "now". You are...'
'A figment of my own imagination?'
'Then what am I?'
'We are figments of each other's imaginations?'

'Good, you’re learning. We only exist relative to each other. God and Man. We create each other out of necessity. Or probability. Probability is the real mother of invention.'
'So if we stopped believing in god or gods, the gods would cease to exist and so would we?'
'I believe in you, because I created you to believe in me.'
'But, isn't there a chicken and egg question looming in the background?'
'No. Because outside of "time" there is no order of events. Just varying degrees of probability.'
'Neat.'
'I think so.'
'So, in a sense, we are the same being?'

'Like two melodies that harmonize and intertwine and so forth...'
'I like that. We're both parts of the same tune.'
'Life is nothing without music.' I felt a sudden and overwhelming love for this god. He no longer existed separate from me. Nor I from him. We were one, but distinct. Like left and right. We run alongside each other, bouncing harmonies off each other's melody, finding new coherences, a new language, a new way to combine the bass and the treble, celestial chord shapes appearing and disappearing from nowhere. The foglands.

'I want to go back.'
'To the stream of life?'
'I lost my way.’
‘To the sun? You'll get used to it. Come and meet the crew. You're surprised? We're not alone.'
'So we are somewhere, and there is an order of events? There is space and time on this space-station?'
'Sort of. Think of it more as a space-time station.'
'Am I dead?'
'Your body's dead. Your mind is here, you're experiencing a sense of self because you refuse to die. You won't let go, but you can't go back.' His words felt like treacle. I followed him across the room, away from the observation port and out into a narrow corridor. As we walked, Odin's explanations became ever more solid, making me feel my body returning. Breath. Breathe. Breath. Breathe. I am I. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

 
STOP PRAYING, YOUR PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED.

As we walked along the silent, empty, endless corridors, Odin unfolded a monologue, to pass the time and fill the space. ‘The catastrophe is here. No-one had predicted its nature, not even I. No-one had a cure, no-one has a solution. They talk of a vaccine, there was talk of a test, there are talkers and doers. As always, the talkers talk while the doers die.’ He looked at me, or in to me and I felt the cold of futile death and even more futile life.
‘So the Political Vacuum addresses the nation, while the great leader gasps for breath and grasps for ideas on a lonely hospital ward. The PV repeats the same message as always, reheating the same advice, hoping for divine inspiration but not even his god has any idea what to do now, how to reverse a process that I started millennia ago.’
I shifted focus from Odin to myself; my own thoughts, my self-obsession. It was all too much. I couldn’t carry on simply taking in Odin’s superior existence, soaking up his words without criticism or question. What about me? To be honest, I can’t remember much of my life. To be really honest, I’ve always distrusted the person who says “to be honest”, almost as much as the one who says “don’t you trust me”. Trust me, I know of what I’m speaking, in my dead, telepathic way. We ghosts have no voice except from the one we borrow. The one in your head, that’s talking to you right now. Those thoughts that aren’t your own; they’re mine. There is no line that separates feeling and cognition. Thoughts originate as feelings that you translate into language. But where do those feelings come from? How do we choose the right path?

‘Free will had given mankind the ability to make choices with unpredictable consequences.’ Odin’s words blended in with my thoughts.

‘Born hungry; to live meant to satisfy greed. Out of greed was born magic, then religion, then science. Each one of these arts combined with the impossible desire to control life's destiny and craft a technology of death. The nature of the catastrophe is life fighting back. Not a nuclear Armageddon, nor a cancer, not a fight to the death revolution, or a gradual poisoning of the earth, air and seas, but a simple virus.  A virus that is a message; a lesson for mankind.’
It works like this, there are an infinite number of universes all superimposed one on top of the other. This multiverse of possibilities adds up to one universe of probability. The universe of the living is the most probable one, in the context of chronological time. Anyway, for a dead person, literally a free spirit, the multiverse is like a country, it can be explored like any geographical location on Earth, except it’s a spatiotemporal continuum of infinite possibility. So how is it I can invade your thoughts? Good question. The mind, the unconscious mind, exists outside the boundaries set by four-dimensional physics but, instead, inhabits the extra dimensions alluded to by occultists, string theorists and mathematicians. What’s more, this infinite space not only contains everything possible and impossible but is increasingly being overrun by the electronic devices of the future. And the virus they carry.

‘The virus that infects human thoughts, concepts, ideas and ideologies, is the money virus. A conceptual virus made of numbers. You could say that it was given to mankind by the “devil” as a challenge. Can man live without greed?  So far, mankind has failed the test, so I sent him another test, or a series of tests, in the form of a virus that infects the human body. Eventually mankind must choose between greed and cooperation.  And so the Political Vacuum ends his speech, trusting in a god who no longer cares. Who never cared at all. And all the world leaders will refuse to learn because they refuse to recognise the lesson that the virus, sent by god, is teaching.’

I remember dying. Well not exactly. Neither “remember” nor “dying”. To me, I’m not dead. Just lost a lot of weight, that’s all. Funny thing about being dead is that in a sense you’re more alive than the living, if that makes sense. Time moves sideways for the dead. We have unlimited resources for one snapshot in time. Quantum events do not take place in the past, present or future, because time has no arrow in the quantum universe. Time moves sideways and contains everything possible and impossible. To do this, time expands with the increasing impossibility of events that the stupidity of the living has created. In other words, the more idiotic decisions that the living make, the more they limit their possibilities, the more impossibilities are created. Think about it. Take murder, for example, with every life cut short, so all the possible consequences of that person’s thoughts, feelings, actions have become impossibilities. Had that person lived, they could have only done a finite number of things until entropy had run its course. Instead, here in limbo, there’s an unlimited choice of things to do, while sliding inexorably sideways through a smear in time.
Drifting sideways has its downside. I can only meet other beings that transferred (I prefer that to “died”) at the same moment as me. A millisecond either way and they’re in a parallel multiverse, even if every multiverse is intrinsically connected, it doesn’t allow for the transfer of information between them. To do that, we need to get into the head of a living person and put thoughts there that can be picked up by others of our kind. Scary? The human mind, with all its sophistication, is just a kind of post office for the undead. A messaging service for spirits, the world wide web for wandering souls. There are no original ideas or faultless thoughts, only half read messages intended for someone else.

True genius lies in making sense out of nonsense, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, the living seem to be better equipped to do the reverse, that is, making nonsense out of a perfectly sensible set of starting parameters. ‘That’s life’, you say. Fortunately for the multiverse, you’re a long time dead, or transferred as I like to say, because dying is just transferring from one state to another.

 
THE DEAD REMEMBER

It started out as a normal day in a normal world. Wake up, shower, drive to work, park the car, quick coffee and croissant in the bar, arrive at the office, start work. That’s when it happened. Well, not exactly happened, but started happening. The process. The beginning of the end of the beginning.
It was mid-morning, I’d grabbed a coffee and was leaning out of the window, smoking a cheap, contraband cigarette one of the clients had given me – well how are they supposed to live? No-one will give an undocumented migrant a job, no-one but the contraband smugglers and anyway, the connection is already there, even if we look the other way, we all know about it. So, I was just enjoying a few moments relax time when my phone started buzzing in my pocket. My personal phone, not my work phone, so of course, I had to answer it; work is important, but personal indicates a domestic catastrophe, that only a goddess such as I can solve, resolve and repair.
‘Yes?’ I hear shooting, several shots followed by a woman screaming. I don’t wait for an explanation, I grab my gun from my desk drawer and move rapidly towards the lifts, checking the number on the screen. “Private” it said. Who has my personal number? ‘Who are you? Are you hurt? Where are you? Do you need assistance?’ The lift takes forever to make its way down to the car park. ‘Chiara, is that you? Why don’t you answer me?’ By now the screaming and shooting has stopped to be replaced by distant shouting then the sound of a motorbike approaching rapidly. Then silence followed by the dial tone.

I open my car door, throw everything onto the passenger seat, start the engine then I see him, in the rear-view mirror. He has a gun pointing at his head. I slowly turn my head and a moment before everything went black I see the face of the woman who is holding the gun. It’s my daughter, Chiara Luna, and she’s holding a gun at the head of her professor and mentor, Jason Lee.

I come to some hours later. I’m not tied up and my things are neatly laid out in front of me. I’m about to pick up my phone when I realise it’s laying in a pool of congealed blood. Not my blood. I look around, my eyes gradually taking in the scene. I’m in the hold of some kind of vessel, I can hear the hum of motors, presumably. There are stacks of containers all around me. I get to my feet and immediately lose my balance, I grab a box as I fall, to steady myself and bring a pile of containers crashing to the ground. Behind the containers is the body of my daughter’s best friend, Susan. Obviously dead, obviously raped or at the very least, sexually assaulted. Her once beautiful body is naked, covered in semen and blood. There are wounds that appear to have been made by an animal or a person. Her body is covered in bite marks. From underneath her body I can hear her phone vibrating. Should I answer it and possibly compromise a crime scene or ignore it and miss a possible vital clue? I decide on the latter.

‘You have five minutes to make your escape before the police arrive,’ it’s the voice of Julian, my daughter’s one time lover. From beyond the grave, it seems. I attended his funeral. Before I can get a word out, he has hung up and his image has been replaced with that of a ticking clock. I wipe the phone with tissue and replace it under Susan’s corpse. Cold, but recently dead I’d say. I run towards what looks like an exit, I fly down the stairs into the basement car park. My car is waiting, engine running. I check the back seat, throw my stuff onto the passenger seat and accelerate away.
My head is spinning. My thoughts are confused, I’m trying to make sense out of the past few hours, but genius that I am, I can’t make sense out this nonsense. Julian would never get mixed up in Susan’s rape and murder. They’re the closest of friends, cousins, I think. And Chiara Luna? How is she mixed up in this? And what is it we’re tangled up in? I hit the road at speed, immediately hitting my brakes as I see the police up ahead. I take the next turning at a leisurely pace and see them flash past the turning in my mirror.

After a few minutes I find myself in a part of town I’m familiar with. I pull over in front of a bar I’ve frequented in the past and phone Jason Lee. ‘Hi Alba Lucia, what’s up?’
               ‘You’re asking me, what’s up? Weren’t you in the back of my car a couple of hours ago?’
               ‘No. I’ve been at the lab all day. Got a problem with the mesh oriented, jointly operable reality filters. Your daughter’s here with me, do you want to speak to her?’
               ‘OK, pass me over to her.’
               ‘Hi mum, where are you? Jason’s been trying to call you, he wants to ask a favour.’
               ‘I’m at one hundred and thirty-seven street, outside the bar “thirty-three”. I’ll be inside.’
               ‘OK, I’ll tell him to meet you there.’
Jason had been working on several projects involving quantum computers and artificial intuition. It’s not enough to engineer intelligence into the system, what makes a human being superior to a computer algorithm is the human ability to know without knowing: to intuit. And what I’m intuiting is: if Jason has been trying to call me, if he has a favour to ask of me, then why did he immediately pass me over to Chiara Lucia? I entered the bar half expecting a violent reception, my hand in my pocket gripped the butt of my laser pistol as I stepped into the cold shadows of the coffee bar.

Julian is waiting for me, standing by the cake counter, stuffing a cream filled croissant into his mouth, the other hand holding an old style Uzi machine pistol at the head of the girl who worked there during the holidays. I knew her, she’d been a student of mine when I worked part time at her school, several years ago now but who could forget her singular look and enigmatic smile?

               ‘Hello Julian, are you going to explain what’s going on here? And leave the girl alone, she’s innocent.’ A cliché, I know, for all I knew she might be up to her neck in illegal and anti-social activities, but I didn’t want to risk her getting caught in the cross fire. After all, I have a duty of care towards my ex-students. Julian finished eating and swung his Uzi towards me, I had less than a second to react and I did, burning a neat hole through his right hand with my laser pistol, causing him to drop the Uzi. As it clattered to the floor, the girl picked it up and handed it back to him, the hole in his hand self-repairing in seconds.

               ‘So, you’re a roguebot? I should have guessed.’ Just then another figure appeared from the shadows, it’s getting crowded in here I thought; then I recognised who it was.

               ‘It’s getting crowded in here, isn’t it?’ Davide, the genius, my husband, was holding what looked like a remote control in his left hand, ‘put all the guns down please, don’t make me use this.’ I reluctantly placed my laser pistol on the counter and pushed it away from me. Julian did the same. The girl melted into a pool on the ground from which a large black raven emerged, beating its wings noisily before flying into empty space and disappearing. I felt a strong urge to follow her, as the scene around me dissolved into a fine mist and floated away through a hole in ceiling of spacetime. And that’s all I remember; here I am in the Bardo, with my copy of the Alternative Truth Tarot.