Search Results for 'ice'

“This is not fair !” The guy put down the blue dragon head on the table next to the ladies. He was still wearing the rest of his costume, scaly tail included.

“Oh shut up Leo,” Linda cackled softly, making it sound like she’d called him Leormn or something. “We’re all prisoners here of our own device” she sang. “Who cares about how unfair it is. Even the rat took a break to Mumbai, instead of waiting for his next call by the Board of Authors. You should do the same. And get rid of this silly costume, you’ve had it for as long as I’ve known you. Or keep it. I don’t care.
Next round of cackle is on me!”

The tunnels went dark and deep into the crust. Water was seeping through the cracks and made the progression difficult at times. But she had found her way out.
She could have died in the tunnels, unable to find her way to the surface, but for some reason, Maia trusted her instincts and her senses to guide her through them. Like the water, flowing through.

She didn’t know for sure how far she was from the MARS base when she emerged out, it was hard to tell the distances underground, sometimes you would go down for hundreds of meters, and when you’d look up, the stone ceiling would seem just a few meters overhead.

She wasn’t too sure why she had escaped like this and made herself a target. A sudden instinct, something that told her the others couldn’t be trusted, and that they wanted to clean them up.
Anyway, it was too late for regrets.

The desert wasn’t too bad at twilight, not too hot and better for her to travel unnoticed.
A few more days of walk in the desert, and she could find a road, maybe some motel where to spend the night. She still had a few bucks in her purse to see her through.
All she wanted now was to make sure her son was alright.
Her being alive and out was a threat to their program, and she intended to make the best of a bad situation.

Then she realized the humming sound in the back of her thoughts wasn’t random noise. There was a drone hovering, getting back apparently from some scouting. It wasn’t a military drone by the sound of it, more like a hobbyist’s toy. That meant there was someone out there, not far. Someone curious and potentially useful…

A raucous explosion of laughter cackled in the neighbourhood, waking up Bea from her afternoon siesta.
“SHUT UP!” she bawled covering her ears with a cushion, and looked desperately at something she could throw at the window. Alas, save for a manikin’s leg that looked like she owned a pegleg, and a piece of half-eaten banana, there was nothing she could find.

She resigned herself to waking up, and pried open her little wrinkled eyes in the late afternoon purple light.

Every time she woke up, she had to reacquaint herself with her reality. Not that she was such a junkie on computer duster, as that rat had rudely implied, it wasn’t only that.
A few months before, she had an epiphany. Many years of meditation, guided, in groups, alone, with zen masters and copious reading had amounted to nothing but the occasional nice fluffy feeling. It was when she had decided to drop it all of sheer frustration, and burn all the stupid self-help books that something had chanced upon herself.
She’d lost her ego. Poof, disappeared, like that.

Before that, she was completely adverse to endings, and to any form of deleting.
But now, she understood the words she’d read many years ago that had infuriated her profoundly at the time : “Everything must be scrutinised and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed. Believe me, there cannot be too much destruction. For, in reality, nothing is of value.”

She was. And every waking up was a wake up to her eternal self.
So obviously, the external appearances left a bit to be desired, now that desire was not. Continuity was never there in the first place.

But to live, she had to find again what new reality she had just awoken to, as she did every morning, and after every siesta.
Truth is, she kind of liked it, the non-continuity of it. Before, she would have gloated to whoever that name of an old friend of hers, that she was right about it, the unnecessary of that continuity babble. Now there was no need of it.

A loud cackle outside stirred her back to reality.

“Simulation complete”
Master Medlik reappeared on the City above Ascension Island.

He’d been careful to take the second right at the light tunnel entrance. You can never trust those bureaucrats to process your Id right, and they would just love to put you on another loop of incarnation, just for the spite of it. But he remembered the door from his first awakening. They’d changed its place a few times, patched it and all, but it would always reappear at a convenient place with the proper state of mind.

Anyway, the simulation didn’t go very pleasantly. Of course, the model was a crude representation of Earth as it was, but it was supposed to be the base model for Earth 5D, and so far, they couldn’t get it right. Super-powers, teleportation, faster-than-light travel and technological progress didn’t bring any wisdom.
Before that, he’d tried progress along the lines of open borders and property self-regulation. That no man carries more than he can take, to avoid the big conglomerates conundrums. Well, that fared hardly better than collectivism, and didn’t bring any compassion.

Those parameters were difficult to tinker with. Progress was a delicate flower, and like a bread sourdough, needed careful attention in the cultivation process.

He wouldn’t listen to the little voice. But it was growing louder.

Whenever Nabuco projected to human consciousness, they had the habit of seeing him as a plump looking bearded vagrant, like a Pavarotti turned homeless. It had annoyed him for a while, but now he didn’t mind as much.

Nowadays, he was mostly off the bliss addiction of the Rays, so in a sense, it was fitting. If he were still in physical human form, he would probably have taken on quite some weight. And that made him a sort of pariah too, splintering off the great order of ascension, or whatever They called it nowadays.

With them, there was no denying he’d lived quite the grand life, being ascended and all. They used to called him Master Nebuchadnezzar — well, often Master Nabuco.
He’d gotten on the rayroll almost by luck. He was credited for inventing the chibubble technique, as a way of extracting bubbles and peals of laughter when people get all hot and excited. At the peak of the technique, somewhere around the 1968s, he had recruited and incorporated many gnomes into the fold, as nature spirits known as gnomes had a uncanny knack for extracting laughter off people. With the call for sexual liberation and getting closer to nature, they had plenty of opportunities to get people high, and chibubbles were all the fancy.
It had started to go down as fast as it rose, people were no longer interested in nature, gnomes working condition when forced to move to urban environments were a disaster, and the chibubble production plummeted. Now, the industry was a thing of the past ; sometimes there were a few chibubble memorabilia kept by other Masters interested in speculating on its rare value more than for anything else. Now kitten videos on social media had replaced the chibubble gnomes business and driven a new unseen growth of the Gross Divine Product.

He didn’t know if the gnomes were responsible for it, but living so close to them and nature for a while, somehow opened his perception to the falsity and the insanity of their quest for power. So instead of finding new venues for innergy extraction as they all did, he’d resigned.
Nobody had heard about anybody resigning before, so they suspected him of trying to be original, and maybe disrupt the clever and immutable laws of the universe.
Long story short, he’d managed to escape their clutches, and live on his own, and off unhealthy junk thoughts habits. Those were the worse, the craving of decadent thoughts, maintained by the entertainment and news industries, the social media and all of it. In the long run, that or the fuzzy bliss were faces of the same coin, and debilitating in the end.

Even when he tried to block them, he could hear the thoughts, prayers and all the inner chatter. The spirit world, or however it is called, was a medium ideal to carry those thoughts and reverberate throughout the whole universe. Like sound waves travelling under water for large distances. Now, he could resist the urge to answer, seduce and insinuate. Many of the thoughts were so naive and would welcome anything. He was still a junkie, and those offerings were never helping getting him off the wagon.

Humans hoped for ascension, but ascended masters like him who were trapped in a false blissdom could only hope to resume their path by descending to human form. Such irony.

There was one voice that seemed to stand out. It had the flavour of “dangerous” pinned onto it, the kind of bright colours that venomous snakes and toads have on earth to warn predators to keep off, or else. It could only mean one thing, a genuine seeker of truth, someone who had the potential to tear the veils to shreds.

He’d seen quite a few of those, they were usually young, and for many of them terribly naive and easily corrupted by displays of power. Search for truth and search for power were sometimes so easily mistaken one for the other. The bright colours would fade over time, but they were still dangerous, too unpredictable to be trusted fully. Learned Ascended Masters knew well to leave those to their own device, while tending to the less critical minds.

But what did he have to waste, especially now? Nabuco zoomed towards the origin of the thoughts, observing at a distance, the young Domba.

Lord R’eye, the one-eyed ruler of the known universe, was known by many names, a great lot of them completely forgotten by the masses. He had to constantly reinvent Himself, borrow new disguises, create factions, sprinkle in a few miracles, create order ab chao and voilà.

He owned a few bodies, strategically placed here and there, one of his favourite in Geneva, quite involved in banking affairs. His bodies were a rare indulgence, and he couldn’t stay too long either, as his massive energy could easily get stuck with the lot of them, down to density.
Overall, he was much more comfortable managing his immense wealth “up there”, in the cosmic realms he had helped shape. So many underlings were ready to carry on his biding, and apart from a few small number of very close ergo very dangerous confidants, many of the minions didn’t even know each other, or that they were, for the most part, owned by Him, and part of the same team.

This was a cut-throat business, He had to admit, and everything was based on it. Manipulation and deceit, coercion, coaxing, anything necessary to control and manage the Empire.

One of those confidants, Lord Apex had been summoned and appeared almost instantly.
He had this charming archangelic halo and aura, but Lord R’eye would have none of it. A correction was in order, the latest results were extremely concerning.

“My Lord?” Apex asked in his mellifluous voice.
“My dear Apex, remind me what responsibility I gave you last century?”
“Of course my Lord, the Innovation project, the Great Disclosure and Holographic Contact projects, amongst other proj…”
“And how much progress have we had with those?”
“Well, my Lord surely knows that so much herding is delicate. The interference with Lord Bael’s projects too, you should know…”
“The Desert and Green Revolutions projects, indeed. A great success, so much pain and anguish! That’s what I’m talking, you should learn from Bael.”
“But my Lord, that has caused quite a conundrum with the Mars simulation, which, by way of fractal holographic recurrence, could well impact the whole delicate matrix we weave…”
“Stop your angel speech, Me’dammit. Plain Anguish, so I can understand every word. The Hell pits cannot wait to have you, so you better give some good explanation.”
“I mean, my Lord, that were the sheeple able to glimpse that the Mars experiment is but a reflection of a deception of grander scale in the cosmic realms, that the aliens saviours, or whatever saviours or… masters of any genre, are just ways to fleece them off their power… “
“Everything would unravel like a pile of dominos.” Lord R’eye’s voice made very clear that he had full grasp of the situation. “So,” he continued with the nicest menacingest voice “you better make sure that doesn’t happen.”

He dismissed Apex with a wave of a thought.

If the net of illusions unravelled before they have time to create the Earth 5th Dimension in time to double their profit, it would certainly be a disaster.

A few humans lost through the gaps were a hard to accept reality, but so long as they could cut the losses, it was not dramatic. But they were talking another order of magnitude. It could be a definitive blow. It always had been an issue when the net of illusion became too big in the past. They had bigger and bigger holes. So they had to start again, destroy, and recreate civilisations.
Stupid humans, if only they knew that Ascension was not the way out.

Dispy was starting her own secret Descended Dissent Classes.

It was not long ago that she had a very sudden and all-encompassing revelation at one of her flights above the great tundra of Siberia, which she liked for some reason to fly over, counting the red spots made by the fly agaric mushrooms in the tundra.

She’d been very disturbed by the revelations about her assignment to the Mars mission. She’d genuinely thought she was in for the support of the greatest advancement of humanity since quite many decades, and to realize it was all a quite twisted experiment made her uneasy at her core. She had some profound respect for her teacher, and despite her usual impulses to immediately confront Medlik for the inherent contradictions in his self-professed compassion and wisdom talks, something in her had told her to remain quiet and observe. And more surprisingly, she had complied. And observed very attentively.

During her flight afterwards, the same strong impulse had told her to land in the tundra, right next to a very nice patch of red. Being ascended had the wonderful benefit she wouldn’t feel the bone chilling cold, and she could just immerse herself in the joy of the scenery, and at the same time felt all very quiet and full of love and, strangely, a sort of distant regret for not being able to feel more of the cold and the whole scenery. And in the silence, she had a sudden unraveling of reality like never before. She could see the contradictions she noticed, one after another, destroying every layer of what she thought she knew, only to be left as a silent, quiet and very aware presence. She could have stayed like this a long long time, but she felt the call for the next Ascended class, for which she was late, as usual.

She continued to ponder while she teleported back, and without word (again, quite unusual), formed the resolve to expose more of the truth she’d grasped. Create a fifth column for the Descended, something her old friend who liked spy fictions would definitely have loved to hear about. But for now, she would have to keep it quiet, and maintain her cover at the Order of the Ascended Masters. She’d worked quite hard (well, not as hard as many, but that wasn’t the point) to get to her coronation, so she now had a nice Light Clearance that allowed her to tap into the Coloured Light Rays. This would be helpful.

In the beginning, she’d thought naively that concealing her true motives and secretly recruit like-minded students would be terribly difficult, but to the contrary, she found the light to be very responsive and easy to bend into subtle illusions of the truth. In short, she could still lie very well, and quite effectively. As though the light helped her in her attempts.

At the moment, she just had one student, Domba. They were meeting out-of-body at a hut in Chernobyl. The place was actually quite nice, and teaming with wildlife and surprisingly gorgeous nature. The perfect hideout.

Her course, well, was a course in spontaneity mostly. She would help people question reality, and authority. Something she had been lightwashed to forget for awhile too.

Domba had a pure heart, and was full of illusions. It had been easy to recruit him. She had to start with what he brought to her. At the beginning, mostly quotes of spiritual teachers. She had to teach him to question and see by himself.

“The Buddha said that when we dedicate merit, it is like adding a drop of water to the ocean. Just as a drop of water added to the ocean will not dry up but will exist as long as the ocean itself exists, so, too, if we dedicate the merit of any virtuous deed, it merges with the vast ocean of merit that endures until enlightenment.” – Padmasambhava

That quote he brought was interesting. The idea of being a drop of water lost in the ocean was enough to make her lightskin crawl. Because it reminded her all too well of the manipulations of the ascended masters. Twisting just barely enough the Love stream, so that It would be redirected just were they wanted.

So they meditated on that for now.

Gelly had noticed a slowdown in her sessions.
That, and a sense of desperation in the ludicrous stories put forth by her clients’ subconscious under trance.

Close to forty years ago, she had invented the whole protocol, and had sold successfully quite a lovely series of books on the topic. Of course, all the personal details were removed for the sake of her clients privacy. But the stories were all too good to not be shared with the world.

“Morepork, morepork!” Bathsheba, her pet owl gifted by one of her clients from New Zealand was calling her back to reality.

“You know vhat Bethsy,” she said to the owl while feeding it a small white mouse that she devoured ravenously, “I vonder how das ist going to develop… Not a month goes by now vithout some new extravagant story of ascension in die Fünfte Dimension, and the vorld is not going any better. Meine credibility ist not that gut…”

“Morepork, morepork!” came the answer.

“Bethsy, you know whass, du bist eine kleine Genius”. She had just remembered that her client used to channel a certain unknown in the lore, going by the name of Floverley a spirit quite tricky to get on the line, a bit finicky about cleaning but otherwise, a wise dispenser of snorting good advice and special diets. She surely could help her get her spiel back.

At one of the top level of the Archyramid, the Apex was looking at the innergy balance sheet with a intensely miffed expression.
His minions were looking at him in awe and terror, while the two hellhounds at his feet were sleeping lightly, ready to pounce at the slightest irritation of their master.

It would be difficult to describe the scene in very accurate terms, as under the false cosmic light, illusions and deception were child’s play, and appearances easily manipulated. The trick to appear beautiful and enlightened was mostly to sustain a certain belief not unlike seduction upon the viewer and the reality you wanted to project would endure. Think of it as botox on a very wrinkled face.

The Apex and his minions had a certain warm and fuzzy halo around them, bathed by the fervor and prayers and devotion of their millions of believers. They had to work hard, and divide even harder to get to that. To the believer, they would appear quite saintly, even godlike. But only the belief would sustain the illusion.
All of them were disillusioned many many eons ago, and could see each other rather plainly, without the false make-up. The Apex was a truly awesome, fearful presence.

His voice was soft though, enveloping, soothing and with a hypnotic taste to it, luring you to a sense of false security.

“So, are you telling me there is no growth? I’ve tolerated this little experiment with Medlik and the other fools of the Order of Ascension, this was all very good business and all, but now you’re telling me this little investment was for NOTHING!”

One of the minions, Minux, also known as Tetatron of the Galactic Federation in certain circles dared come one step further, bowing down and raising his voice:
“My dear Lord Apex, we grieve as you do, but this is our painful reality. Competition is fierce, and the sheeple are not as gullible as they used to.”
Lord Apex smiled derisively. “I’ve been in this game for quite some time Minux, so I’m quite certain of something. The sheeple have an infinite streak of gullibility. I just think you’ve all been lazy.”

The two hellhounds woke up and snarled menacingly. They would have easily passed for cute puppies under the mask.

“Dear Lord Apex, as usual you are quite correct. The main problem is that we underestimated their capacity to get bored so quickly. We have to constantly update the light constructs to introduce new bizarre concepts and ideas, so they can continue generate innergy for us.”

“Well, you know how this story ends, Minux, we can’t have slackers among us, and those results are not nearly good enough to get us there. Our Lord R’eye will only give keys to the kingdom to the ones who deserve it. Based on your poor results, I suggest a few of the old tricks: divide and conquer, or throw in a good shitstorm and rally the troops. That should get us through the next quarter.”

“Of course, my Lord. And I suppose… about the blissdom alarity increase for the Ascended Order?”

“You suppose well Minux, you suppose well…”

Pádraig wasn’t too pleased by his daughter’s visit. They had not been on best of terms since she took the job to work on the military project they were recruiting heavily for 23 years ago.

He’d done what he could to dissuade her to join the army, but he couldn’t have done more without permanently creating a wedge between them. He had nothing better to offer her, jobs were scarce around, and that could really have meant for her the once in a lifetime chance for a better future, even if he couldn’t admit it. And by the look of her car, and the ranking on her uniform, it may well have been so. So their relationship was tense, and her line of work was as taboo a topic as his health and cave-carving hobbies.

“P’a, we need to talk…”

He was already on the defensive, ready to snap back at her that he didn’t want a help (or worse, a bot!) to clean out his trailer, or cook for him, but she looked different, almost genuinely preoccupied.

“What is it now?” he said in a gruff voice, his throat sore from all the dust of the cave
“You should take a break from your cave digging P’a, just for a few days. There’s going to be some important activity —military training— around the place, and you don’t want to be caught in between, alright.”

I suppose drones don’t really count then… he thought to himself

Before he retired and made cave carving his hobby, Pádraig was an IT engineer. That was a few years back, and not long after, most of them became redundant with the rise of new generations of NI (near-intelligent) phones and computers. He’d happily taken an early retirement, so that he could enjoy a simple life and get to reacquaint with his daughter. He’d succeeded at least on the first objective.

It was twilight when he’d left his cave, and looking at the horizon, he’d noticed strange shimmering, and a lone bird of prey circling the area in the direction of the restricted area of the desert.
It’d given him an idea.
He still had the old drone in his garage, from the time when they were all the furor. You could buy them on online stores very easily back then, even print them in your house. But then, some do-gooders became concerned, about privacy, security or all that bullshit, and they were banned. Actually, the only ones still flying where from the army, and they would tear down any unidentified hobbyist’s drone, and likely give them some jail time if they had the chance.

It was exciting to do something on the fringe of what was authorized. Pádraig couldn’t wait to see if he could make his old drone fly over the area, check what happened there.

He was a bit lost in his thoughts when the dog’s barking made him notice the white car parked in front of his aluminium trailer, which had triggered all his spotlights.
He had a moment of panic before he realized that the car wasn’t from the men in black or aliens, but worse. It was Imelda, his do-gooder of a daughter.

For all her wired cleverness, there was something that the central intelligence had seemingly forgotten to take into account in her parameters.

Eb woke up in a sweat, barely remembering bits of a horrible dream of being chased and banging on a closed door for escape from a herd of phombies (those guys who had their phones implanted under their skins and would often have a creepy vacant look while in communication).

The banging on the door. According to his mother, if there was something that her nurse Fancy Woo was better at than cooking rice, it was at interpreting dreams. But he didn’t need her expert advice on this one.

His mind was aching from the lack of alcohol, but at least he could think quite clearly.
There weren’t many accesses to enter the simulation, for obvious reasons. Continuity had to be maintained at all costs, to preserve the sanctity of the experiment. That motto had survived the multiple iterations of the simulation since its inception.

Eb knew of most of them, even if he’d wondered about the presence of backdoors. He had not been able to find any since his many years of service. So for all he knew, there were only two ways to get in and out: up and down. “Up” through the fake ships, with the whole stasis protocol, and “down”, through the mines were they would usually send agents from time to time, mostly for reconnaissance purposes.

He looked at the screen, and as he had feared, the explosion triggered in the tunnels by Finnley had sealed their main exit point.

“You underestimate me, my dear Eb” the voice of Finnley merrily bounced on the insulated walls.

Eb was startled. Hadn’t he known that Finnley was just a program, he could have sworn her synthetic voice had a trace of menace in it.

“Finnley” he regained his composure as much as he could “Haven’t the thought occurred to you that the tunnels are now sealed? We cannot let your blue aliens go in and out as easily now!”
“Eb, you do know I do not think.” Her voice was still slightly ominous. “But I ran multiple simulation, and this one still yields the best possible outcome.” she continued more cheerily.
“How so?”
“It is evident. Many of the earlier settlers, still know about the simulation, even if they self-programmed themselves to accept the illusion as better than outside reality. They can become a problem for the evacuation protocol. With the tunnels’ exit collapsed, they have no other way than to comply. Besides, what good plausible aliens come out from the ground, really. We don’t want to miss their grand entrance.
And don’t be such a worrywort about budget, Eb.”