> Dan in Plureality FINAL

I tried to stop it once. Tried to kick it. For an entire year I stopped doing magick, stopped keeping a journal, stopped writing. Stopped making connections or searching for mythology. Instead I worked a lot, I studied Taekwondo, I returned to the city that I was born in, went to bars with friends, and I went for more than a year without changing jobs or moving, a first since I turned eighteen. I was all about the body, getting healthy, being normal.

*


Ms. Amita laughs warmly. “But it was just another hit, wasn't it? Another way of making things strange. Another way of making magick.”

*


Over the next year I begin slowly integrating all my ways of doing magick together. Sometimes it is rough going, there are too many connections, too much to see and hold, too much to doubt. 

Writing a series of journals into my laptop-familiar, changing the style, even the font, to create different versions of my life unfolding. The way that Professor X from the comic and from the cartoon and from the movie are all different but all still Professor X. Either/Or having mutated into And/Or finally evolving fully into And. Plureality, fractal storm of parallel realities and identities all happening at once. Like watching an n-channel universe, living different lives by pressing the button on the magic wand. All of it occurring in the simulation being generated by our brain, mediated, everything is media, Noo Media. Designer realities. The Eschaton has ended, we're living in the Teleon. It's genesis culture. In the Aetion, where everything is always beginning, where every scene is the first scene of the movie, anything could happen. 

It's a lot to process, but I keep walking. In the wave, I can feel her behind me. 

Until I get the opportunity to submit a story about magick, an autobiographical series of articles, to a blog, and I have to look.

*


“And that's why he summoned us,” she says. “To help him pass through it.” 

Dr. James shakes his head. “No, I'm real.” His eyes are wide. 

Dr. Hannah smiles. “Yes, you are. You're real in the same way that money is real, or the government. In the same way that this desk, made up of 10-dimensional strings and empty space, is real. In the same way that 'Daniel' is real. That magick is real.” 

He looks through the mirror. “And who are They?” 

“They are the ones reading this.”


Daniel looks at Them, wondering if it has worked. He feels something like a star in his belly. And They look at him. 

'Come away, human child, to the water...'

Frank's fingers tensed around the cellphone. "I'm telling you, Professor, that something doesn't feel right. It feels like something is missing." He was pacing around the motel room.

"Of course it would feel like that," said the voice from the phone.

"No, I don't mean them... It's - I can't explain it!"

"Frank, please stay calm. You exist now in a perpetual state of discovery and absence, of lost and found. We talked about this before you received the implant."

Frank adjusted his sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Yeah, I get it - we gain and we lose things all the time, every time we shift... But what if we lost something... and then forgot that we ever even had it?"

"I suppose that would be either a blessing or a cruelty."

Frank stared at the table by the window, the weapons spread out on the faded faux-wood surface; the sniper rifle with scope, the pistol with silencer, the collapsible baton. The Godhammer.

The Biting Question of Winter

Frank sipped his coffee, standing under the awning of the bakery and watching the window across the street. He glanced at his watch, the time was 1:34pm. He had been watching this brownstone for the past 4 hours and yet no sign, no hint of anything going on.

His cellphone chimed; a refrain of a popular song transcended into a merriment of random tones to sound melodic.

"Hey Frank." Goner's voice. "Anything yet?"

"Nothing at all," Frank replied. He shifted in his stance, trying to maintain the feelings in his legs. "I think we got a bad lead on this one."

"You want me to spell you for a bit?" Goner asked. "You've been pulling sentry duty for a while now."

"Nah," Frank replied. "I think this lead is dead. I am going to give it another hour and if nothing then I am packing it in."

"Well, phone back if anything happens," Goner stated. "I will be waiting."

"Sure thing, bud." Frank replied. He snapped the phone shut and pocketed it. He took a sip of the cold coffee and tossed the styrofoam cup into the bin.

His attention was focused on a white van that had pulled up to the brownstone, and he saw her step out of a side door. The tip paid off tenfold.