I watch as two passenger ships collide at the apex of the low orbit aurora borealis area of Polaris’s relay planet. Both ships collapse, yet not, into each other in a strange caduceus of magic in the starry backdrop of the vessels’ courses. The twisted coils of brass and flocked, black steel disappear. The ships vanish into a trapdoor in the universe. I sip, also, on weak fruit tea with my left hand. I mix some of my own herbs in–genuine, dried-up dream flowers from the Hilo K system that were resting in a jar at the bottom of my purplish-green, prismatic matrix, tree-leather satchel.
I’m headed out of here. Been working on this ring planet watching galactic commercial ships for the past couple of days. Overpopulated by people though. Even the tea from this basic street canteen is spoiled by the practically immortal, first contact creeper androids from the Shadow realm robbing everybody at the counter by convincing the spirit of the canteen they weren’t really there and then taking this and that. I whop one in the head with my walking stick. Immortal, and cowardly. It urged the others to scram. I was the only one to see this. I thought.
“As above,” were the words of the tin-voice clerk.
“So below,” I replied, thinking we’d had some understanding, “And so long!”
I begin to rotate my ashwood staff counterclockwise in a third-person manner. My hand dislocates and swerves around the clock until the blurring of matter and space turns bright green, like a portal. And I take a step into it with my left foot third person and fell in the rest. The green portal on the ring planet disappears, and the staff snaps into my right-hand first person just as soon as I’d left. I, now, am somewhere else.
Real Hong Kong, virtually-early 21st century. Kowloon. I’m staring at a street full of pre-market tennis sneakers. The rarest you can find. I’m looking for a purple pair of tweed high-tops, but they don’t have it there, I’ll have to kill a couple of days on the world wide web. The old web. Takes at least a week usually. BORING. It’s good to stop by though. It’s probably the one thing normal about me, as opposed to everything else. Kinda mundane even. You haven’t gone shopping until you’ve looked for an actual wand in downtown London in the late 19th century, and then the complimentary Kashmir sleeve/holster in the wood from an elemental realm in ancient Japan. Blessed and utilized. It’s just the way it is, okay? I use what I need to and as you already know, am wary of third parties’ relentless attempts to corrupt my tasks. I’m faithful yet eccentric I guess. What would you expect from a teenager with a tweed herringbone three-piece suit, an atomic-mechanical pocket watch, and shiny cacao oxfords?
You gotta balance consumption with spirit though, you know. Hong Kong is beautiful, but basically a megacity, even here. Thankfully, it is pleasantly packed with recreation areas and parks.
The back door of a red taxi cab pops open. I’ve got the shoes, they’re somewhere in the pit of my satchel. I’m just gonna head to the park and do some shortwave.
Fern-like palms cloistered on the emerald green pond waves heavily in the oceanic breeze. I pull a coffee cup-sized active metal loop out of my bag. I throw it up in a tree and the extremely unstable software for it starts a boot sequence in my imitation neural network. Imitation because it’s not real. I can’t just go loading spectrum analyzer software in my brain! I shuffle around the bands, mostly tropical. I see someone whistling on the 2600 Hz sideband. That’s right, Hz, as in Hertz. Or you could say 2.6 kHz I guess. That’s like transmitting a global signal on the same frequency that pings when somebody breathes heavily after a run. It’s morse. Not human morse though. Wizard morse though? I don’t know. Wait, no it’s just a call sign. “K, W, I, Z. Okay. K, W, I, Z.” KWIZ. American I guess.
Okay, easy. I call the staff to me, and it flings out of the tree into my hand, I toss it in the bag. I pull out some sigil paint. Spray paint for graffiti magic basically. It’s not really real, so it’s not exactly illegal. I walk over to a secluded spot in the trees and spray KWIZ on the ground backward. Stomp it with the pole. I’m there.
We’re in Missouri. Okay? It’s as humid as a marsh. I’m standing in front of a rickety old post office in a Missouri ghost town. The corroded copper of a sign on the door says “In memorial of the world’s best radio station for wizards.” The door busted open.
“Where to, buddy?” says a young wiz in his teens with a felt top hat and technicolor overalls.
“Why are you transmitting on such a low sideband?”
“Mm, heh,” he pulled his collar, “Just looking for some good switches. Nothing sinister. You know?”
“I know you’re using magic to hack. Everybody knows a crystal ball can only tell you so much.”
The young wiz was rustled, “Cut us some slack! Everybody also knows if there wasn’t magical interjection into society, everything would fall apart!”
“I understand. Just take my advice, look elsewhere. Anybody could hear that. Don’t forget from whence your powers came.”
“Hey, you’re the one that flopped over here on your space broom, pal. We do what we want.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I SAID: We do what we want!”
He slams the door shut, and the post office collapses in on itself and disappears in a geometrical pop. I laugh. Oh well. I’m addicted to the esoteric exploration of this world too I guess. I’m always noticing things others don’t and beat them to it. I’m not saying I need the very core of the secret, I just want to know, roughly, what’s going on. Sometimes the process of obtaining all information is more trouble than it is worth, and often the information reveals itself later.
I’m not really an actual wizard for one. But I do have some things in common with them. As it were, I’m more of a naturalist. I know of the divine and spirit–by what else could the multi-verse permeate, after all. And I also understand that the complexity of symbolism is more than just storytelling or guidelines. There is real hope to be won from it. Earth has some of the best religious complexity in the galaxy going back ages. It’s also again one of those things where I’m not sure I need to know more about that information.
I actually don’t think humans were probably ever meant to leave the Earth. Not while they were alive at least! Just consider the facts. Light is the fastest moving force in the universe. It travels approximately 300,000,000 meters per second. Humans have barely enough energy to run to the store to get ketchup. And when they do, they’re gone for hours. I don’t know. There’s some stuff about time, the observer, dimensions, geometry, quantum mechanics, and logic. I had one little issue when I first started to care about it though. I realized that the things that happen are not the only things that happen. In fact, I am 100% positive my life is happening and not happening at the same time. I never meant to spread my existence so vastly across this extremely vast universe, but, one day, I went to open a window, and another window opened. That’s the only way I can explain it.
I watch a bird in the field, where the building was a few moments ago but now is not. The stave begins to spin in my hand and so I walk back through into another reality. Suddenly, appearing on a train this time… in the sky. It’s real enough, though not part of the primary timeline, but an interesting one. It’s mid-21st century, but that fluctuates. It seems like it might actually be a work of fiction in-process that you can live inside, but I don’t really know. We’re chasing the sunrise into the North. A quick ionosphere drifter from Toronto. I don’t have to guess, I’ve been here before. Did you know you can purchase time travel literature from the in-between mages at popular travel hubs like airports and train stations? Even spaceports. They filter how much strangers can see them based on supernatural fluctuations in quantum foam. If you have residue from lunar soil on your golf hat and you’re at LAX in 1998, uh, it’s kind of obvious. Freaked me out the first time, but that’s a different story. There are so many time travelers, you have no idea. Or maybe you do, are you one? That’s what I mean. It’s really bonkers.
My stomach is growling, I get a banana out of my satchel and have some. The upper atmosphere is incredibly beautiful. I don’t know why Prime Earth, the real one, never adapted these aero maglev ships. They are so simple and brilliant. They do rely on a crazy amount of electromagnetic scorching of the ionosphere with artificial solar flares. What’s wrong with that though? In fact, the green and pink aurora borealis puddles of lights dancing in the horizon are quite beautiful.
I don’t need to be here anymore. I walk through the windows of the lounge cabin and hurtle through the atmosphere at self-destroying speed. My body and mind disintegrate into carbon dioxide and I spread out in extremely high-speed jet streams around the Earth, giving me a better view of the ground below. Some would say this is as close as one can get to the afterlife. I do this every night. You might think I’m already done for. This is just a story though, in which I’m the narrator and the protagonist. I don’t really recommend vaporizing yourself in the upper atmosphere of hyperdimensional imaginary quantum reality and expecting to write about it. No, no. As I am already imaginary myself though, it’s okay.
I stare off a ledge and watched the sunset disappear below the edge of the horizon. And when it did, I disappeared too. I’m watching a marine animal show on Neptune, right in the previously undiscovered seas of the delightful two aquatic planets in the solar system, Neptune and Uranus. Ouranos is actually etymologically the name for Heaven in the Hellenic original scriptures of the gospel. A red mega space squid creature erupts out of distant seas and sonic booms our sightseeing vessel with a blast of warm air.
Drifting has no plotline, and that’s the trajectory of this accidental quantum glimpse that begins here. Nobody can really tell you what it is, you just have to realize it. When you do, you’ll be free. And you’ll realize the perfection of it. Even in unknowing, there is always hope somewhere that leads to the next thing. To teach you, help you, forgive you, and protect you. All by one who sees. There are many mansions in these realms. These realms and those realms. Vaults of divinity. Vaults of light. I’m not sure, do you see what I’m saying? Does it need to be said at all? Like ships collapsing into each other.
