Oct. 16th, 20XX
At the end of my street, there’s a dead bunny rabbit that I’ve been watching decompose over the last several days. If I crouch in close enough, and if I focus really hard, I can actually hear it wasting away. Which is weird, I know. I used to think that I was just a strange dude, that I sought out the bizarre, but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s the other way around. That the bizarre seeks me. Really, it’s probably a little bit of both, and only recently have I started noticing how much we need each other.
I wonder what the bunny rabbits think of us. If we switched places, and the streets of suburbia were littered with the practically unnoticed remains of deceased humans, would the rabbits give a fuck? Rabbits don’t seem to give a fuck about their own kind, let alone us. They’re kinda like little crackheads, always incredibly amped, always making moves, getting into sticky situations, and usually dying way too young. A rabbit’s heart beats between 180 and 350 times a minute, and that’s when it’s not going buck-wild. They’re probably too busy to think about us at all.
I like the concept of change, but not its application. I’ll spend years doing something I hate, just because it’s familiar. I know this seems antithetical to my love of strange things, but I see it as a matter of degree. I’m talking about big, life-disrupting changes, not the smaller improvisations required in having weird experiences. Something new that spontaneously intrudes upon my daily routine? Hell yeah. Messing with that daily routine itself? Not so much. So, when I decided on a route to take on my daily walks, I stuck to it. It hasn’t changed in seven years. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did alter it a little bit, about five years ago, to accommodate a stop at the gas station they built on the lot that used to be the abandoned car service place, but that wasn’t that drastic. I can adapt, if need be, as long as the change is minimal.
This is my route: leave my house, go left, down the street, through the movie theater parking lot (which used to be another, different abandoned car service place), and to the gas station for a snack. That’s leg one. Leg two is really just the detour to get back onto the original, pre-gas station route. It passes the water tower, the Masonic lodge, and the Buddhist preschool, which is a pretty wild combination of buildings to share half a block. From there, it’s leg three, which is a trip down a couple side streets to and around the park, then a straight shot home, forgoing a re-hash of leg two.
The park used to be the main event of the walk. It was a big part of my childhood. When I was a kid, it had all this cool metal playground equipment. It was built during the space age, so there were planets, a submarine, and most badass, the rocket ship. It had multiple levels that you could access via a series of very probably tetanus-infected ladders. The whole thing swayed when you climbed it, and it’s a miracle it never fell over, crushing a class of third-graders who were there on their annual field trip. They took all that stuff down some years ago, replacing it with more conventional, safe (read: lame) equipment. Down a little hill from the playground there’s a creek, nestled inside a tiny wooded area. I go there sometimes to sit and look at the water before I head back to my house. It’s nice.
But the park has recently been surpassed in importance by something that has actually taken precedence over much of my life: the bomb shelter located in the back yard of one of the houses on my way home. At least I assume it’s a bomb shelter. Like I said, my neighborhood was built during the cold war, so it doesn’t surprise me that there would be some remnants of that time littered around. But that’s the thing. There aren’t any other bomb shelters in the area, as far as I know. No one even has a basement in this part of Texas, unless your house is built into a hill, and that would actually make it more of a subterranean first floor. I don’t really know, but I imagine something about the ground in this region makes digging out basements extremely difficult or expensive. So what’s so special about this house, that its owner decided it was worth the time and effort to dig out an underground bunker? I mean, I know that the desire to survive a nuclear bomb blast can be a powerful motivator, but I’m of the mind that if a nuke falls on your town, you’re fucked no matter what, and it seems like everyone else in the neighborhood agrees. Was the original owner just a crazy doomsday prepper or something? Have the current owners kept it as a bunker, or are they using it as some underground guest room, or simply for extra storage? Another possibility is that they filled it with concrete, and all that’s left is the door. If I were President, that type of shit would be illegal.
No, I like to think that it’s still a shelter, that if anything catastrophic ever happened to this unassuming suburb just north of Dallas, that the inhabitants of that house would be the only ones to make it out alive. Then, in some Cormac McCarthy meets Margaret Atwood scenario, they would be left with the burden of building a new society while fighting to survive the old one’s collapse.
As you can probably tell, when thoughts like this occur to me, I entertain them fully. I can’t help it. Ideas tend to pop up in my head uninvited and make themselves comfortable. The only way I have discovered of ridding myself of them is to say them out loud, to someone else. Putting it out there into the real world seems to turn it into something more tangible, something that can now be discarded. Which is why, when I find that I’ve become comfortable with an idea, I keep my mouth shut. I hoard secret notions like they’re coupons in an old lady’s accordion folder, never likely to get used, but never to be thrown away. I let them age and brown, curling along the edges, until they become faded remnants of what they once were, strange inside jokes I share with only myself. Everybody has secrets, but most of them are about lying on a resume or being sexually aroused by feet. I guess I have a couple of those too (not the foot one), but most of my secrets are odd ruminations, like, “I wonder if yawns really are contagious, and every yawn ever yawned is the direct result of another yawn, regardless of proximity. And I wonder if that means that you could trace the lineage of yawns back until you reach the primordial yawn, something like a patient zero of a silly plague that survives to this day,” or, “those Vikings who took mushrooms and then drank their urine to get super high before a battle, how did they figure that out? And how did the first guy explain why he was drinking his own piss?” These are thoughts I covet, and I think about them, along with many others, all the time.
Except that for the past couple months, my thoughts have been dominated by that bomb shelter. What is down there? I have to know.
Oct. 17th, 20XX
It looks like the rabbit exploded. Chunks of guts and what looks like brain matter are now splattered all over the pavement. Is this what happens to everything when it dies? I’ve always thought graveyards were weird, seeing as they’re large plots of land populated with human corpses, but the idea that each grave could hold something resembling this rabbit is pretty disturbing. I need the thing to go ahead and decompose already; it’s making me think about death too much. Other creatures have the decency to die in the wilderness, or at least not directly in my line of sight as I walk down the sidewalk. Death is one of those ideas I prefer to ignore, but this fucking rabbit has made that impossible.
I’m bothered. What’s really getting to me is the fact that this dead rabbit is in no way unique. At any given moment, there are probably billions of dead rabbits all over the planet, exhibiting the exact same process, but I rarely come into contact with them. Rabbits live in the same world as us, but on such a fundamentally different level that our perspectives are not compatible. Two conflicting realities shoved in the same box. I guess my real problem is that I have no way of knowing how much of our human perspective rabbits are capable of seeing. How fucked up would it be if rabbits, like, got it?
There was a guy mowing the yard with the bomb shelter in it today as I took my walk. About 65, 70 years old. Seemed nice. He smiled at me and waved, the most natural thing in the world. I broke eye contact almost immediately and scurried away, a little faster than usual. I don’t want to know him. He has something I want, which is the knowledge of what’s down in that shelter, and that makes him if not my enemy, then at least someone with an unfair advantage over me. Until I know what he’s hiding down there, I need to be cautious.
Oct. 19th, 20XX
I’m going to break in. This wasn’t a decision I made as much as a realization. I honestly had no say in it. My brain won’t let up until I see with my own eyes what is in that bunker. I don’t want to do it. I know that the most logical way to handle this problem would be to tell someone about my obsession, thereby allowing me to move on to something else. And, if that didn’t work, I could just ask the guy who lives there if he’ll show it to me. He actually seems like a pretty nice guy, and he probably also thinks having a bomb shelter in his back yard is cool. But I’m not going to do either one of those things. I know myself. This thought has become a very important secret, maybe even my defining characteristic. I have to solve the mystery, but I also want to hold on to it for the rest of my life. I realize that along with being selfish, this sounds crazy. Like, Dostoevsky passion-killer crazy. But there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t feel insane, but isn’t that what they all say?
Tonight I need to check out the shelter door to see what I’m working with. Real quick, hop the fence, snap a picture with my phone, get out. Tomorrow I’ll go to the library and find some books on how to pick locks. I won’t check them out, because I don’t want to leave a trail. I’ll just sit down at a table and read them. I’ll take notes, but I’ll probably burn them after I figure it out. I have to work tomorrow night, but then I have the next two days off, so I’ll come home from work, get a couple hours of sleep, then break in to the bunker at around three in the morning.
Oct. 20th, 20XX
This is going to be easier than I thought. It’s just an old rusty chain secured by a bike lock. I’ll pick up some bolt cutters on the way to work, and I’ll simply cut the chain. That’ll take significantly less time than fiddling with a pick, and the faster I can get out of there, the better. I just want to take a look and run. It’s probably going to be boring; a couple shelves with some canned food, maybe a jug or two of gasoline, and honestly, I hope that’s the case. But the uncertainty is killing me. I’ve developed all these crazy theories about what could be down there: sex dungeon, collection of Nazi paraphernalia, dog fighting arena. I’ll never be able to relax until I know for sure. It’s going to be hard to focus at work today, but I know that by this time tomorrow, everything will be okay.
Oct. 21st, 20XX
Why do we think that the things we make aren’t natural objects? What makes a concrete and steel building any more synthetic than an ant hill or a hornet’s nest? Sure, plastic doesn’t exist in the wild, but the oil we use to make it does. We’re smarter than ants, so we can make more complicated things, but that doesn’t change the fact that our entire society is just a bunch of stuff that was fashioned by animals. I actually think that’s a cooler concept than what we’re led to believe.
Yes, I saw into the bomb shelter last night. Only it isn’t a bomb shelter. I’m still not entirely sure what it is, but I know it’s not that. In fact, I’m no longer very sure of much of anything. Usually, this would scare me, but today I only feel…confused.
I got there like I had planned, at three in the morning. I had my bolt cutters with me, but they ended up not being necessary. The chain and the bike lock had been taken off the door. Now, if I had been thinking clearly, and not in an obsessive fugue, I probably would have seen this as suspicious. Instead, I merely saw it as convenient. I opened the door, as quietly as I could, and flipped on the flashlight headband I had found while digging through my garage. In front of me was a long staircase. Too long, in fact. This house isn’t on a huge lot, and the yard backs up directly on to the alley. But here were at least twenty stairs, and at a pretty shallow angle. I thought it was odd, but it was too late to turn back. I shrugged and started my descent.
I don’t want to belabor it, but I think it bears repeating that right now, as I write this, I can see how ill-advised and dangerous this whole thing was. Just putting it down in words makes me feel like some stupid colonizer in a Lovecraft story, given ample opportunity to turn back, to leave the ancient crypt un-defiled, but, through naive curiosity and blatant arrogance, decides to forge ahead nonetheless. If I were a character in a Jason Vorhees movie, I would be the slut in the first act who decides it’s a good idea to fuck and then take a shower in the only cabin in the entire camp they said to stay out of. I get all that. Now. Last night, though I was aware of my actions, and though I could tell something was…off, turning back never even entered my mind. So, with that disclaimer in place, let me tell you what happened.
At the bottom of the staircase there was a sliding glass door, the kind you see in fancy restaurants sometimes that get all cloudy when they’re closed. It slid open with almost no effort, to reveal a medium-sized room with a ten foot tall ceiling. The first thing I noticed about the room was how quiet it was inside. It had been lined with layers of sound-dampening foam, jutting out from the walls in weird little cream-colored pyramids. The only noise I could hear was the subtle sound of the wind coming from the open cellar door above me. In the middle of the room was a beanbag chair. Not one of those expensive ones they sell in the mall. Just a regular, back of a stoner van style beanbag chair, patched in places with duct tape. Weird, but not surprisingly so. The room was softly but evenly lit; there were no shadows at all. I closed the sliding glass door, making the silence complete. By the time I was sitting in the beanbag, the lack of sound was already getting to me.
After what felt like minutes but was probably more like thirty seconds, I started to hear the air rushing into my nose and through my windpipe. I could hear not only my heart beating, but the blood itself, flowing through my veins. When I moved, even slightly, I heard the odd tension of muscles flexing and tendons bending. I could hear my stomach acid breaking down the dinner I had eaten hours earlier. I could hear the electrical pulses telegraphing outward from my brain.
I had to get out of there. I knew that too much more of this silence would eventually drive me actually crazy. Just to introduce some outside noise, I said, “Fuck” aloud, and got up and flung open the sliding glass door. I took the stairs two at a time until I was safely above ground again. For whatever reason, probably adrenaline, I was exhausted. I fell to my knees in the grass and gulped in air. Only after I calmed down a little did I see the guy sitting in his lawn chair, sipping his beer and laughing. I thought about bolting, but when he realized that I saw him, he waved, just like he had while he was mowing the other day. He didn’t seem angry with me at all.
“Come on in,” he said. “You’ve seen the zebra. That deserves a beer.”
His house was cluttered, but not in a “hoarder” way, more of a “mad scientist who recently fired his secretary” way. He told me to sit at his kitchen table while he got a glass out of the cabinet. He smelled it to make sure it was clean enough, then he pulled me a draft beer straight from a tap embedded in his wall. He handed me the glass and sat down across from me. I don’t have very many of my own thoughts about our conversation, so I think I’ll write it as close to verbatim as I can remember, without embellishments. His name is Sean, by the way.
Sean: Did you know that when Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics, he was given a house next-door to a brewery? It fed the beer directly from their tanks to his tap.
Me: That’s pretty badass.
Sean: Mine just leads to a homemade kegerator, but I like to pretend. Look, first of all, no, I’m not pissed at you for breaking into my switch room.
Me: Your what?
Sean: Don’t worry about that for now. How are you feeling? I know it takes a lot out of you the first time.
Me: I’m…fine. That was fucking crazy, man. I couldn’t hear anything but at the same time…
S: At the same time, you could hear everything. Yeah. You flipped your senses around, turned them inward. Pretty rare that we pay attention to what’s going on inside our own bodies, isn’t it?
M: Yeah, I guess. What did you mean when you said I saw the zebra?
S: Basically that. You saw things the other way. Like a zebra.
M: I don’t get it.
S: Describe a zebra to me.
M: Um, okay. It’s kinda like a horse, but it has black and white stripes.
S: You sure about that?
M: Uh, yeah, man.
S: Kinda like a horse, but it has black and white stripes.
M: Yep. Look, I didn’t mean to fuck with your shit or anything. I’ll just go.
S: It’s cool. Seriously, nothing bad’s gonna happen to you. Relax. What I’m getting at is: how do you know the zebra has black and white stripes? How do you know it’s not black with white stripes, or white with black stripes?
M: I mean, I guess I don’t see the difference.
S: Exactly. You don’t. Or more accurately, it doesn’t matter. Because it’s all of those things, see? You don’t see a difference because you’re not looking for one. But if you change how you think about the zebra, it will feel, if only for a second, like a totally different animal. But it hasn’t changed at all. It’s exactly the same as before. The only thing that’s changed is you.
M: So, sitting in that room, whatever that was, changed me?
S: Not significantly, and not permanently, but yeah. It changed how you perceive reality.
M: What?
S: The closest analogy I can give you is musical. You play music, right?
M: How do you know that?
S: The other day, when I was mowing my yard, you were wearing a John Coltrane t-shirt. Only musicians and posers listen to John Coltrane, and you don’t strike me as a poser.
M: Oh. Uh, thanks. Yeah, I play music. Not a lot, really, but…
S: You know about synthesizers? Moog?
M: Yeah, I got a Sub Phatty. Don’t play it that much.
S: Nice, we’re ahead of the curve, then. You know about the whole east-coast, west-coast school of synthesis thing? Moog vs. Buchla?
M: Um, I’ve heard those names, but no, not really.
S: Okay. Well, basically (and this is dumbing it down a whole lot), Moog wanted to use synthesizers to make realistic representations of already-existing instruments, like a violin or a clarinet or something. Buchla was more about the signal flow. Both schools use modular synths, those huge wall-sized things that look like something out of Chernobyl. You use patch cables to route the electrical signal to different modules to fuck with the sound. With me so far?
M: Yeah, I’m with you.
S: Cool, man. Well, what those modular synth guys didn’t really understand was that they weren’t actually making musical instruments as much as simulations of the universe.
M: Uh…
S: See, humans are okay at a number of things, but the only thing we’re really good at is making systems. The internet, the economy, um, the city of Denver, hell, the fucking NFL. Nothing more than programs set to run basically on their own, once we set up the parameters. They’re microcosms of the macro. Tiny, little models of the super-organism that is everything. And actually, modular synthesizers are pretty good, as far as models go.
M: Really?
S: Oh, yeah. Different parts of the modular setup coincide with our universe in fairly interesting ways. First, we have the oscillator, the thing producing the signal. This could be seen as, like, God, or whatever. There probably isn’t a God, really, but it’s a useful placeholder for whatever shit we can’t study yet. So, God made the signal, which now exists, whether it hits you or not. It’s like blood, get it?
M: Uh, yeah, man. I get it.
S: No, you don’t get it, but that’s cool. It sounds fucking crazy, I know. But it is kinda like blood. The signal is whatever flows from the source. It can be anything: light, electricity, gravity, or more far-out things like perception and consciousness. The main thing to know is that the signal is real. More than that, it IS reality. Now, you can route the signal directly through an output device, if you want, but to really screw around with it, you’re gonna have to send it to an amp first. People, or, more likely any and all sentient lifeforms, act as that amp. We amplify whatever we encounter. Hate, compassion, confusion, intelligence. When the signal flows through sentience, that’s when we can really get down. Through different means, we can then tweak the signal so that it’s more to our liking.
M: Wait, hold on for a second. Are you saying we can change reality?
S: Tweak, man. Tweak reality. And only in the way that it flows through us. I mean, you’ve heard the idea that your perception is what actually creates your universe, right?
M: Yeah, in, like, books and shit, but…
S: Well, where you think those books got it from? That shit’s real. Once we get that signal, wherever it comes from, it’s ours to fuck with.
M: So, what happened to me down in that bunker?
S: I used to work at Area 51.
M: For real?
S: For real. I worked for Lockheed.
M: Doing what?
S: Radar. Or, more accurately, radar detection and deflection.
M: Damn. Like, stealth bomber shit?
S: Those guys were a little before my time, but yeah, basically stealth bomber shit.
M: Sweet. Are…are you supposed to be telling me this?
S: It’s all been declassified, but even if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t give a fuck. What are they gonna do to me?
M: I dunno, like, throw you in jail?
S: Nah, I bet they would just issue a statement claiming I never worked for them or something. If Bob Lazar can go on Inside Edition and talk about reverse-engineering alien spaceships, I think I’m safe telling a kid from my neighborhood about building dry rooms for radar testing.
M: Yeah, I’ve heard about that guy. Do you know him?
S: No. And no, I didn’t see any aliens or anything. That’s all bullshit.
M: Well, yeah. So, that room down there is like a radar test thing?
S: Hell yeah. That ended up being my main job there. I got really fucking good at it. See, we needed the rooms to be super dry, so we would know that any reverberation of the radio waves was coming from the model airplane, and not the walls. But it didn’t have to be perfect. Small model, close range, it’s not that huge a deal. Except I figured out a way to make it perfect.
M: How?
S: Infrasound.
M: You mean like the brown note?
S: I think that’s a myth. At least I never shit myself doing it. But you know what I’m talking about. Sound at such a low frequency that you can’t hear it. Actually, they think that infrasound, coupled with carbon monoxide poisoning, is responsible for people thinking they see ghosts. It can make you go crazy. But I figured out the right frequency to pump into the room to cancel out pretty much any interference. It was fucking weird. Kinda like flipping a mute switch in the real world.
M: Is that why you called the bunker a switch room? Because it’s got that infrasound shit?
S: No. I do pump the frequencies into the room, but that’s not why I call it that. It’s a different switch I’m talking about.
M: Yeah?
S: Yeah. Going back to the synth analogy. Most syths have filters on them that allow only certain frequencies of sound through to the output device. You tell it to cutoff at different places, and you can control what continues on the signal flow. Your brain is the same way. The reality signal is bananas. Way too much to process for most people. So, your brain filters out all the difficult to handle shit, letting only a small range of frequencies through to your consciousness. What that room down there does is it turns off some of those filters in the brain, making you take on more reality than you’re used to.
M: So, I was becoming ultra-conscious?
S: Pretty much. It sounds awesome when you put it that way.
M: How does it work?
S: Don’t know. I’m an engineer, not a biologist or neurologist. Maybe it increases blood flow to the brain or something. But it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes in science, how or why something happens is not as important as that it happens, you know?
M: Yeah. But how come I don’t feel as weird anymore?
S: You weren’t down there long enough. The amount of time you spend in the room is how long the effects will last afterwards. Your body is used to those filters being on. It doesn’t adapt well to sudden change like that. But the more you sit in there, the more tolerance you’ll build, until eventually you’d be able to move in, if you wanted.
M: Holy shit, man. This is wild. You could, like, be a millionaire.
S: Actually, no, I can’t.
M: Oh. Does the government own the patent?
S: Nope. Texas Instruments.
M: Oh.
S: Yeah. After I left Lockheed, I moved here, to work for TI. You know, not a lot of people know how important this town is to the modern world. In the late 1950’s, a guy named Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit here, and things haven’t been the same for humanity since.
M: Yeah, I know. I met Jack Kilby once. He spoke to my Cub Scout pack.
S: Shit, really? He must have been fuckin’ old.
M: I mean, it was in the mid 90’s, so, yeah, he was old, but not too crazy.
S: Mid 90’s? How old are you?
M: 32.
S: Oh, wow. You look younger than that.
M: Yeah, I get that a lot.
S: Don’t worry. It’s a good thing. It means you’ll live forever.
M: Ha, yeah.
S: No, literally. You’re healthy enough that you might still be alive by the time we’ve figured out how to save your consciousness on a computer and put it into another body.
M: Oh.
S: Me, I’m not so lucky. I’m 59, but I look like I’m pushing 70. I’ve done a lot of shit. Mostly Vitamin K. Turns out my switch rooms make pretty gnarly sensory deprivation chambers.
M: You mean ketamine?
S: Oh, yeah. Big time. I was doing this shit not that long after John C. Lilly. Heard of him?
M: A little. There’s an Oysterhead song about him.
S: Fuck yeah, there is. Also, you’re around the right age. You ever play Ecco the Dolphin for Sega?
M: Hell yes. That game is bonkers.
S: Yeah. A lot of it was based on Dr. Lilly’s writings. But anyway, I don’t fuck with that stuff anymore.
M: Why not?
S: Well, on top of the fact that it took years from my life, it’s not necessary. If you’re trying to reach a dissociative state of enhanced consciousness, you and I know you don’t need drugs. You just gotta go into my bunker. I mean, you’re not high right now, are you?
M: No.
S: There you go. But yeah, I did my most groundbreaking stuff while at Texas Instruments. They gave me an entire hallway of lab space and just let me loose. I could do whatever I wanted, as long as they got all the money to be gained from my work. Fine with me. I don’t trust people who do things for money, and neither should you. My best advice: be extremely weary of anyone trying to give you vast sums of money. No matter the product, in the end, what they’re buying always turns out to be your soul. So, no, I’m not banging rails off some Dominican supermodel’s tits, but I can look at myself in the mirror without my dick retreating back into my body out of shame.
M: What did they do with your ideas?
S: As far as I know, they’re still doing it. The ability to fuck with the brain can be a very enticing prospect. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re trying to miniaturize my tech. They want to do to the room what the room just did to you, which is to flip it inside out. Instead of you sitting in it, they want it to sit in you.
M: Like an implant in your brain or something?
S: Yeah, probably. It’s what I would do.
M: That’s fucking dystopian.
S: Nah, it’s alright. Shit like that only seems like a horrendously bad idea to us, because we can’t imagine a scenario where it turns out okay. People had the same worries about the printing press. Some idiots still get caught up about vaccines. Sure, there’ll be problems, but that’s just how it goes when you’re creating new technology. You don’t get to advance society without first killing a good number of people. I see you looking at me like that, but it’s true. We’re just fucking animals, man. The survival of our species is no more important to this planet or to the universe than the survival of a certain type of bacteria, or some random breed of wild pig. Everything’s connected, sure, but our fear of scientific dystopia is just our arrogance showing. Take a step back, chill out a little, and these things don’t scare you as much, because you realize we don’t matter. Notice we’re frightened of anything that we think will make us “less human,” whatever the fuck that means, but we don’t mind puking chemicals into the sky or dropping continent-sized chunks of non-biodegradable garbage in the Pacific Ocean. That’s the real dystopia, and it’s coming sooner than anything else we’ve cooked up. Actually, if we manage to destroy society before the Earth kills us all, I’d consider that a victory for good, old-fashioned human perseverance.
M: What do you do all day?
S: Sit around, read, drink beer, jack off, you know, basic old bachelor stuff. I’m like a walking Jimmy Buffet song these days.
M: Except you have a bomb shelter in your back yard that enhances your ability to perceive reality.
S: My own personal Margaritaville.
M: Do you go down there a lot?
S: Not really. Once a month, or so. But it doesn’t seem to do much to me anymore. Maybe my filter’s just off all the time now, and I’ve gotten used to it. Or maybe my brain is fried. Either way, it’s just not the same as it was back in my hippie science days.
M: I’ll be honest, man. I’m a little worried this encounter is gonna fuck me up pretty bad.
S: Why’s that?
M: I mean, this is some heavy stuff you’re laying out. And the crazy thing is, it’s making a lot of sense. I guess I just don’t know what to do with this new information.
S: You do the same thing anybody ever does when they learn one of the secrets of the universe.
M: What’s that?
S: Whatever the fuck you want.
So, there it is. Not exactly what I was expecting, obviously. Since that conversation, I can’t stop thinking about the signal flow, and how we humans instinctively make machines to replicate or capture it. My mind is blown. Sean told me I could come back whenever I wanted, to sit in the room, or just hang out and talk. I might take him up on that, but not for a while. I feel like sitting alone with my thoughts, while atmospheric Brian Eno tunes play me to sleep. Thank God I have the next two days off. It’s gonna be a fucking lazy 48 hours.
Oct. 23rd, 20XX
Sean is dead. I just found out, about an hour ago. When I got home from work, there was a manila envelope in my mailbox. No writing, no stamp. It hadn’t been mailed. I don’t know how I knew, but I was positive, before I even opened it, that it was from Sean. I was right. I hadn’t told him where I lived, or even my last name, but he found me nonetheless. In the envelope were two things: an old, beat-up copy of the book “Simulacron-3,” by a guy named Daniel Galouye, and a key ring containing three keys. The first key was to a bike lock, so I figured it was the key to Margaritaville. Why would he give this to me? The second key appeared to be his house key. I have no idea what the third key opens.
I decided to walk to Sean’s house to ask him what the deal was, but when I got there, there was an ambulance parked outside with its lights flashing. A few paramedics were standing around on the yard, talking. I walked up to one of them.
“Hey. What’s going on here?” I asked.
“You know the guy who lived here?” the paramedic responded.
“Yeah, kinda. Is…did he die?”
The paramedic looked around, to see if we were being watched. “Yeah, he said. Not supposed to say, but he just passed.”
I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. “How did he die?” I asked.
“Brain aneurysm, looks like.”
Why am I not surprised? That seems like something that guy would die from. He spent years, decades fucking with his head, but his head got the last word. But why did he give me that envelope? Did he know he was about to croak? And if he did, did he not have anyone else he could reach out to? What does the third key open, and what is the significance of that old book? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I’m going to find them. Part of me wishes I had never even seen his damn bunker to begin with. I thought that finding out what was down there would be the end of it, but I can already feel my new obsession developing, even as I write these words. But, first things first, I have some reading to do.