Standing in the car park, the snow frozen to the ground in treacherous lumps, he suddenly saw again, the meaning of everything. He could not describe it in any clear way, just like he could not describe it the first time it happened. The realisation of that long-ago day hit him almost physically, mixed up as it was, with all sorts of mystical beliefs and strange spiritual ideas that lived in all of us in that place. These days, being in a city and working with solid, dependable machines, this sudden revelation was a strange surprise, an aberration in an ordered world. He was disturbed this time for he thought he was over such childish things
Not sure how to deal with this almost-messianic idea and struck with a fast pulse and spinning head, he sat down on a curb that held in the soil of the flowerbeds and thought about it. The unreality of it all and the fact that it struck totally out of the blue, made him wonder if something had failed in his head; he imagined a gradual leak from an artery, filling the spaces in his cortex, gradually building up pressure until everything collapsed in a gory mess of blood and brains. But this worry subsided; something had taken hold of his mind and like a friend in times of stress, was calming him down, holding him deep within a warmth that seemed to be coming from outside. I am linked to somewhere else he thought. This is a dream, it must be. But everything around him was as normal. The car park was the same as every other day, empty at this early time, sound tracked by birds, the gentle swishing of trees and the distant conglomeration of city sounds, a low hum that suggested a cold day in the park from his childhood.
He thought back to the first time this had happened and how disappointed he was when the feeling faded and evaded description. Though no less a surprise to him, that day was much more suited to what could only be described (embarrassingly for him) as a religious experience. It was rural and sunny, the sounds of crickets and of birds more suited to the moorland that surrounded him. For a few minutes he was as happy as it is possible to be - shown the workings of the world, knowing the deep science that usually was only understood by eccentrics and adepts. He had to struggle against the gravity that kept him place, for he was strangely aware that he was stuck perilously to the side of a spinning planet in a universe that dwarfed him. He could imagine being sucked out into space because for now the world was not solid matter any more - just a shadow of something, like a sub-atomic particle with no influence on big things. The clouds above were islands, drifting in their oceans, for creation had succumbed to the strangeness of the moment and the endless eons of time that lay between him and the first confluence of chemicals that started life had shrunk to tiny seconds. If this lasted he would see the fate of the world in the next few minutes, the gradual colour change of the sun and then its final explosion and contraction. He would be left on a cinder of metal, turning forever around an eternally-fading star until all light burned out and the whole universe was just other cinders unilluminated and dead. And despite this, he knew he was safe and immortal
This was no help in the industrial present. He should be encouraged by this happy feeling but he was both ecstatic and deranged with the strangeness all at once. He stepped outside these two extremes, as he had done with other conditions of mind, to examine and analyse the situation, independent of it being a problem of his. He thought for a moment of a doctor self-prescribing and almost always getting the diagnosis wrong despite never having failed in any similar task on a patient. How rational do you have to be to understand your own mind? He was distracted now, not feeling the ecstasy so intensely. The rational world will always defeat the irrational he thought but then he wondered why he thought this feeling could be irrational. The idea that we are all mad and this is sanity occupied him for a while before he dismissed it as cliche. He was scrambling for answers and an end to the state. What do I look like to other people he thought, stepping to the idea from a worry about the imminent arrival of colleagues. But he was early as usual and no one else would be here for almost an hour. Strangely he was relieved, firstly because he would be embarrassed at being found in what he imagined was dangerously close to some sort of fugue state, and secondly because he was actually enjoying the analysis
They found him 50 minutes later, catatonic and shivering but they were able to gently encourage him to his feet and into the warmth of the foyer where he sat calmly and quietly until the ambulance came. Inside his mind, he was back on the hillside again, a master of science in a world of charlatans, able to destroy any argument of faith with a single sentence. He felt part of the grid of communications that links us all, plugged in and spaced out. He was in two worlds now, a body, breathing, being fed with tubes, uncommunicative and compliant - lost to his family and to any physical human being. However, inside he was lying on the grass of that summer day forever, ringed with electromagnetic signals, a hub of mysterious things that happened in the networks
People began to receive strange emails, weirder messages amongst the weirdness that humans create for themselves in cyberspace. The messages were short, to the point, always scientifically accurate and often devastating in their criticism. The writer had no belief in anything supernatural. Evolution was definitely correct and all the possible levels of equivocation that served to placate all but the extreme proponents of this controversial subject were thrown out in language almost-religious in its fervour and vicious decrying of faith-only existence. The writer claimed all sorts of things and went some way to provide proof for many of them. Some believed he was a time-traveller, with knowledge of research not-yet-done. However, to the writer, time did not exist; it was simply a way of keeping events apart. In the sender's world, everything had happened already and it was his job to communicate all the knowledge of the universe to anyone who would listen ... and especially to those who would not listen for religious reasons. This was a new God to some, but that suggestion, when returned to the sender, was debunked as well, in a stream of polite but fervent language. It would have been nice to hear the person speak but attempts to locate his machine, his email, his IP address, failed in a mess of mechanical and electrical snafus - the messages sent to trace him, dispersing into feeble rays at the back of network hubs - becoming nothing detectable. This made him more like God, the ultimate conspiracy theory.
Not sure how to deal with this almost-messianic idea and struck with a fast pulse and spinning head, he sat down on a curb that held in the soil of the flowerbeds and thought about it. The unreality of it all and the fact that it struck totally out of the blue, made him wonder if something had failed in his head; he imagined a gradual leak from an artery, filling the spaces in his cortex, gradually building up pressure until everything collapsed in a gory mess of blood and brains. But this worry subsided; something had taken hold of his mind and like a friend in times of stress, was calming him down, holding him deep within a warmth that seemed to be coming from outside. I am linked to somewhere else he thought. This is a dream, it must be. But everything around him was as normal. The car park was the same as every other day, empty at this early time, sound tracked by birds, the gentle swishing of trees and the distant conglomeration of city sounds, a low hum that suggested a cold day in the park from his childhood.
He thought back to the first time this had happened and how disappointed he was when the feeling faded and evaded description. Though no less a surprise to him, that day was much more suited to what could only be described (embarrassingly for him) as a religious experience. It was rural and sunny, the sounds of crickets and of birds more suited to the moorland that surrounded him. For a few minutes he was as happy as it is possible to be - shown the workings of the world, knowing the deep science that usually was only understood by eccentrics and adepts. He had to struggle against the gravity that kept him place, for he was strangely aware that he was stuck perilously to the side of a spinning planet in a universe that dwarfed him. He could imagine being sucked out into space because for now the world was not solid matter any more - just a shadow of something, like a sub-atomic particle with no influence on big things. The clouds above were islands, drifting in their oceans, for creation had succumbed to the strangeness of the moment and the endless eons of time that lay between him and the first confluence of chemicals that started life had shrunk to tiny seconds. If this lasted he would see the fate of the world in the next few minutes, the gradual colour change of the sun and then its final explosion and contraction. He would be left on a cinder of metal, turning forever around an eternally-fading star until all light burned out and the whole universe was just other cinders unilluminated and dead. And despite this, he knew he was safe and immortal
This was no help in the industrial present. He should be encouraged by this happy feeling but he was both ecstatic and deranged with the strangeness all at once. He stepped outside these two extremes, as he had done with other conditions of mind, to examine and analyse the situation, independent of it being a problem of his. He thought for a moment of a doctor self-prescribing and almost always getting the diagnosis wrong despite never having failed in any similar task on a patient. How rational do you have to be to understand your own mind? He was distracted now, not feeling the ecstasy so intensely. The rational world will always defeat the irrational he thought but then he wondered why he thought this feeling could be irrational. The idea that we are all mad and this is sanity occupied him for a while before he dismissed it as cliche. He was scrambling for answers and an end to the state. What do I look like to other people he thought, stepping to the idea from a worry about the imminent arrival of colleagues. But he was early as usual and no one else would be here for almost an hour. Strangely he was relieved, firstly because he would be embarrassed at being found in what he imagined was dangerously close to some sort of fugue state, and secondly because he was actually enjoying the analysis
They found him 50 minutes later, catatonic and shivering but they were able to gently encourage him to his feet and into the warmth of the foyer where he sat calmly and quietly until the ambulance came. Inside his mind, he was back on the hillside again, a master of science in a world of charlatans, able to destroy any argument of faith with a single sentence. He felt part of the grid of communications that links us all, plugged in and spaced out. He was in two worlds now, a body, breathing, being fed with tubes, uncommunicative and compliant - lost to his family and to any physical human being. However, inside he was lying on the grass of that summer day forever, ringed with electromagnetic signals, a hub of mysterious things that happened in the networks
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