Conversations with REALITY

It was like any other morning, mostly. Gradually, I came to consciousness. Where once upon a time the lights seemed to just flick on, in those days, it was all far less certain. For what must have been a good five minutes, my mind would hover between asleep and awake; not quite asleep but not quite awake, either (I’d say you know what I mean, but I’ve learnt not to presume).

Everything was slower in those days. Life crawled. As I lift my head from the bottom corner of my slightly rough linen pillow, glacially, my world returned to me. Ah, memory. It hurt every time. That’s why, I figured, I was always so slow to come to, to come alive — if you could call it that. The dreamscape, that land of infinite possibility, was a much more pleasant mistress, I guess, than the one I now know as Reality. I always got up, though. A point of pride, perhaps.

As I sat on the edge of the bed that morning — hunched over, elbows on knees — I remember being hit with a sudden wave of loneliness, an unnerving tingle shot through every cell of my body, I’m sure, causing my eyes to well with the hope of tears. I didn’t cry though. In fact, I never did. Not because I found it weak or unmanly or any other such nonsense. I simply couldn’t. Frequently, I’d be brought to the precipice, like that morning, and then — nothing. It’s as if some part of my mind — some part I apparently had no control over — knew how desperately I craved the sense of relief that, by that point, I was convinced crying would provide. So, as if part of some perverse game, it would bring me to the edge, give me a taste of the satisfaction, of emotional release, and then out of spite — for I can comprehend no other motive — would tear it away. Never any waterworks, only ever disappointment. With the world, with myself.

Not only was I made of sadness, I was that broken I couldn’t even let it out, couldn’t enjoy it. With very little variance, this is how every morning happened. Sounds horrible, I’m sure, and I mean it certainly wasn’t pleasant, but it was familiar, and — yaknow what — there was comfort in that. See, I knew the terrain, and I knew I could navigate it. It was as if the acceptance — ‘resignation’ is probably more the word — of my weakness gave me strength.

Another point of pride, definitely.

I made my way that morning, slowly, from the bed to the dark, oaken chest of drawers — a family heirloom, now mine — in the corner of the otherwise bare room, my bedroom. Back then I never felt the need for decorative furniture, furniture for furniture’s sake. I felt it arbitrary, superfluous. I was much more utilitarian at the time, you could say. I felt things should serve a purpose, and what purpose was there to unnecessary objects? It’s not that I didn’t care for art. I did. I even had rather good taste, too, I knew that. It’s just I didn’t feel the need to prove it to others — not that I ever had “others” around. But if I did, so what if my apartment was well “curated”? This was New York, after all. Want curation? — worse, “inspiration” — go to a fucking gallery, then, I’d say. My apartment was for living. It was about efficiency, economy. Productivity was the aim; pretence was always the enemy. And haven’t you noticed how, behind the best interiors, are the most boring minds? I have. It’s a cover, let me tell you. It never fooled me though. Try all you want, you can’t buy interestingness, I used to say.

After getting dressed — black cotton sweater, black denim jeans, tan socks, black Birkenstocks (I liked black) — I made for the kitchen in search of food — and coffee, all the coffee. I had a big day planned, after all, needed the sustenance and the stimulation.

At the time, I was working on the foundations of quantum theory, right. I was a physicist, you see — one of the youngest in the field, actually — even if my colleagues teased that I was fast becoming a philosopher. In my circle, you see, that wasn’t a compliment. It didn’t phase me much, though. The problems I worked on were, at least to a great many minds in the field, merely illusory. Naturally, I was the butt of a lot of jokes; science jokes, the worst kind. I was mocked, ridiculed, made fun of. So I had no option but to be thick-skinned. And I was, for the most part. I also had to have plenty of hubris — which I did, again, for the most part. For here I was claiming that the entire scientific framework we so cherished — at least we scientists — was built on a foundation nobody understood. Not Einstein (though at least he recognised the situation), nor Schrodinger, nor Bohr, nor Pauli, nor Dirac — nobody. The best minds we’ve known, and not one understood, in any deep sense, our most fundamental theory of Nature. That assertion alone ruffled some feathers. And yet, it was only partly responsible for my near-legendary unpopularity, for the disdain with which my profession mostly regarded me. Worst of all was the fact that here I was, young (30) and devastatingly handsome — at least by physicist standards — telling the best minds of our time that, not only were they all too stupid to recognise the myriad problems that were staring them smack in the face, but I was also saying, even if not expressly, that I will solve them; that I, Carter James, will illuminate and resolve the mind-bending mysteries that lay at the heart of our world, this four-dimensional spacetime manifold we call (or once called) the Cosmos.

I Aeropress’d my coffee. What a device that was, huh? The smell of the fresh coffee grinds reminded me that I was awake. Coffee always did that for me. As was my habit, I then poured myself a bowl of cereal — Lucky Charms, I believe it was.

[1] [Even well after it was socially acceptable to eat sugar-cereal for breakfast, I continued to. Something about how it connected me to my childhood, I don’t know. Like the pain I lived with, it was familiar. Familiarity seemed to order my mind, in those days, made it all tolerable. Like how routine makes it all easier, you know?]

I sat down, placing bowl, spoon and coffee atop my newly-purchased Ikea dining table. It was one of those ‘minimilast-chic’ type ones. Rectangular, wholly unremarkable. Good table, though. I took a sip of coffee from the white porcelain mug — it had a little chip on the rim of it which I’d always avoid —and the black liquid warmed my insides like a hug. As always, I began to think about work. What will the world become should I happen to succeed? The relationship between our understanding of the universe, at the level of physics, and the nature of society has always been profound, I reflected. Technology as we know it was the product of physics, obviously. The Digital Age, it was little appreciated, was made possible, after all, by our discovery of quantum phenomena; the most tentative knowledge thereof. Imagine if we actually understood the thing. What, I wondered, would a post-quantum world look like, a world where technology fully exploited the strange underlying mechanics? Yaknow, quantum computers and the rest of it. As in how would it alter our relationship with all things, existence itself? And is the infamous cat dead or alive? Or is it really both, as they say? Above all, that’s what I wanted to know.

I got started on the cereal. There was something deeply satisfying about shovelling the crispy pieces of rainbow from the bowl and into my mouth — taste aside. There was a calming rhythm to it. Up, down, chew, crunch; up, down, chew, crunch. Like that. The pleasant monotony of it sent my mind adrift. This time, I began to introspect, a habit that though I had heard was healthy I was rather suspicious of — they once said that about tanning beds, too, didn’t they?

How had I become so alone? I wondered. It wasn’t always like this, I remembered. There was a time when I lived in the world, along with others, part of a vast web of other minds, connected. People liked me. They really saw me, you know. Understood me. And then they didn’t. In hindsight, it was surely a gradual process; at the time, though, it hit me out of nowhere. It was as if I woke up one morning to the realisation that all those who once cared for me no longer did. Family, friends, love; gone, vanished. I no longer lived in the world, but inside my own head, the loneliest place I knew. I felt as though I had somehow sunk deeper behind my eyes — the world was way ‘out there’ all of a sudden, and I was separate from it. Outside looking in (or was it the other way round?).

Anyway, at some point my consciousness had become heavy, sticky, as if smothered in honey — indeed as if honey was smothered in honey. Work was basically unaffected though, might have even been improved by it, now that I think of it. Ideas, the Platonic realm, had become my safe haven, a place I would escape to when ‘way out there’ got too much.

It was interfacing with other humans that was made excruciating. Every conversation that wasn’t strictly work-related felt like I was drowning, always a desperate battle to stay above the surface. Around company, I was always a little off, a bit weird, not quite right, there but not really. I’d get anxious, yaknow, about having to talk to someone, for no rationally apparent reason, and then I’d get anxious about getting anxious. A cliche, no doubt, but my anxieties genuinely had their own. And so it would spiral. It was as though I had contracted a rare form of airborne asperges; like someone’d sneezed and I’d caught it and now I was me but less-than. What made this all so hard to stomach, though, was how painfully aware I was of the whole thing. I wasn’t oblivious, let alone ignorant. I knew perfectly well how retarded I must have appeared. Not that I have anything against the impaired, of course, it’s just that that wasn’t me, if you get me. I was something else, something other than the way I was to the world. Whatever it was that I was, at some point, I became incapable of expressing it — at least not in real-time. Maybe that’s what hurt most. When it was just me, alone with my thoughts, I was witty, calm, confident, cool. I was ME. But around others I was a wreck. It was as if the structure of my personality would collapse under the weight of other minds, the pressure of their constant judgment and expectation. That’s how it felt, anyway.

Each spoonful of Charms triggered a potent hit of dopamine; each bite an explosion of highly engineered flavour. Gotta love science, I said to myself. As I contemplated the many monuments to the scientific method, I swam my spoon through the now half-empty bowl of breakfast. I wasn’t that hungry, I realised. Introspection always seemed to spoil my appetite in those days, as well as my mood. Hmm.

As I lent back against the chair, I turned my mind to the day ahead. I was speaking at one of the most prestigious physics conferences, about to present my most recent thesis, based on evidence from a slight variation of the famous “double-slit” experiment, which I had run about a month earlier. The wave-particle duality paradox was something I was finally beginning to wrap my head around. Waves are somehow particles and vice versa, that’s what we all knew at the time, but the underlying material of Nature, I had begun to claim, was an energetic field of some kind. Reality is a field, a single one. “Waves” were merely disturbance caused by discrete concentrations of what I was calling “energy” — “particles” — in this “unified field” of ours. Einstein’s intuition of unity, the one he would devote the latter half of his career to, was well-founded, I was certain, even if his efforts towards unification were mostly unsuccessful.

The thought of work was a nice reprieve from the comas of self-reflection I’d been losing myself to. But it was all too brief. A sharp pang in my stomach reminded me of my plight. It was always in my stomach. Like someone’d dug a hole in my gut and filled it with sorrow. It was always there, more or less — the sorrow, I mean — but occasionally I’d be reminded of the fact by a sudden surge of intensity. All I had done was set out to make a life for myself, but along the way, I’d lost everyone who ever mattered, and those who didn’t I’d lost long before. Once I had awoken to the fact there was no possibility, or so it seemed, of returning to life as it was before. I was insufferable, I was told and could feel. The only distance at which people could tolerate me was a very good arm’s length. And the only reason they would was if they were obliged, whether by work or common blood. Of course, this suited me quite fine — my own work demanded I kept considerable space for and around my thoughts. And, as a rule, I didn’t much like people, either. I thought the great majority stupid beyond belief, disgustingly unoriginal, a waste of respiration cycles. So in a way, my own repugnance was convenient. But that didn’t lessen the sting, you see. There is a major difference, I learnt — yaknow, psychologically speaking — between solitude by choice and solitude by rejection. Choice would have been nice.

Still soaking in the cold, thankless bath of self-pity, I returned a portion of my focus to the chemistry that sat on the table in front of me. Coffee and crunch, helluva combination. Another sip of coffee. Lukewarm, it was by that point. I then looked down ahead. The chunks of supposed food floated — carelessly, I imagined — in the calm white sea of full cream milk. Up, down, chew, crunch; up, down, chew, crunch. As I chewed — crunching mostly, but every now and then piercing with my teeth the soft flesh of marshmallow — I concentrated on what was left of my breakfast. And then it began.

You know when you stare at something long enough how it becomes a bit strange, sort of alien? Well, it was my bowl of Lucky, that morning, which all-of-a-sudden became otherworldly.

At first, I thought it was the lack of sleep. I hadn’t had a full night in about a month, you see. But of course it wasn’t that at all. I rubbed my eyes in a lazy attempt to clear the windscreen, though my vision wasn’t deceiving me, as it turns out. My retinas were as reliable as ever. My breakfast, on the other hand… well that was another thing. The remaining cereal had started to, uh, come alive, I guess you’d say — at least that’s how it appeared. The little chunks of processed wheat and marshmallow had begun to pulsate, as though with life. They seemed to be breathing — the bits of cereal, I mean — vibrating with a kind of vital force, expanding and contracting with rapidity, each sending their own subtle yet distinct ripples through the surrounding milk-ocean as they bobbed up and down. In a state of rather calm amusement, for I was still sure at that point that what I was seeing was nothing but an illusion (most likely a simple malfunction of my visual cortex), I scooped up a small mouthful of cereal. No, there was definitely something up, I quickly figured. Not only was my spoonful of sugar pulsating with life, it had also acquired a newfound vibrancy — as if every visual detail had been emphasised, its resolution enhanced. My breakfast had been italicised, somehow, and was now gleaming with intensity.

I remember thinking, in that moment, that I was seeing for the first time. Until then, I had mostly gone through life, I realised, without noticing the subtle textures of the world around me. I could appreciate the beauty of things, sure, but never had I genuinely been moved by the majesty of a landscape, for instance, nor mesmerised by the symmetry of a snowflake. I saw things, but in terms of their underlying mechanics, their physics, yaknow, first principles. Never did I see things simply for what they were, as they appeared, absent the concepts I had attached to them. I had been taught, after all, that appearances were not to be trusted, yaknow, not to judge a book by its cover and all that. But now here I was, both moved and mesmerised, by the appearance of my industrial breakfast, of all things.

Things only got weirder. As I slowly lowered the spoon back into the bowl, reuniting the enlivened Charms with the rest of ’em, I observed another oddity. The centre of the bowl had begun to spiral, like the last bit of water being drained from a sink. Round and round, the remaining contents of my breakfast had begun to spin, slowly at first then faster and faster until it all began to blur.

It’s hard to put into words precisely how I felt at that moment. Either my sanity was unravelling or the world was, I knew those were the only two logical possibilities. Yet I couldn’t decide which I preferred. If it was my sanity, then goodbye to my future, I’d be saying, but the world would go on, proceeding from present to future as it always had. I was always on the brink, it was only a matter of time, people would surely say. If it was the world that was malfunctioning, on the other hand, well that would certainly be the more interesting of the two, wouldn’t it? It would mean a radical upending of our conception of things aka new insight into the physical structure of the universe (so long as the malfunction wasn’t catastrophic, of course). In fact, a minor glitch would be great, I thought, a real boon to science. Let it be the world, then, I decided.

As I finished that oddly satisfying thought, I noticed that the entire room had begun to pulse with the same beatific intensity as my breakfast. My whole field of vision was now surging with a radiant energy in a steady and audible rhythm, percussive like the beat of a drum, but with a kind of high-pitched vibration I can only describe as light-saber-esque. A cross between a gong and a space opera, is how I think of it. The room grew progressively louder, visually more intense. With every pulse, every surge, my bones shook with a mixture of fear of the unknown, zest for the new, curiosity of the alien, and wonder at the sublime.

I then felt my mind begin to open like a breath of fresh air as the room fused itself into fluid fractal patterns, the likes of which I had heard of but never experienced. The difference between the concept of a fractal, as I understood it, and its felt-experience, as it then hit me, was absolutely irreconcilable, I could now confirm. Here I was bearing witness to a stream of sacred symmetry, a liquid rainbow of pattern morphing with an unbelievable perfection from one divine image to the next. In awe of the whole thing, I felt the sense of division between myself and my strange surroundings, the world, begin to slip away, dissolve, until finally there was nothing separating the two. I was the world and the world was I. This was immediately self-evident, obvious. How could it ever be any other way? There was nothing I had ever known with more conviction — and I was far from the ambiguous type. However, this naturally begged the question, What is the world? Or, for that matter, What is “I”?

As the question suggested itself, something gave way. It was as though the floor of my mind had disappeared, been taken out from under my feet, poof. I was falling. Not literally, although it sure felt like it, but as if through the empty space of my own consciousness. What is Reality? the question had become. The reformulation had occurred without my even noticing. But of course! Reality is what this thing is! Reality is what I is, too. And clearly It must be capitalised. But what is It!? And so fall I continued to, through the many levels of my mind, through the many levels of Reality. Fall. And fall. And fall.

What is Reality?

What is Reality?

What is Reality?

What is Reality?

What is Reality?

What is Reality?

What is Reality?

REALITY

Finally, I hit firm ground. REALITY. So this is It, huh? I thought to myself. REALITY. The word had a certain weight to it, a definite sacredness. For good measure, I repeated it a few more times. REALITY. REALITY. REALITY. Each time the syllables left my tongue, I got chills, as the sound resonated with the fresh imprint of this newly gleaned insight. Yep, this is It, the ultimate ground Truth, I was sure. There is this thing called Reality, I mused, and even though I studied It for a living, I had never truly come into contact with the brute fact of its existence. But that had all changed. For here I was, awake, for the very first time — and perhaps the only one among us.

I opened my eyes, having forgotten I’d ever closed them. My entire visual screen was instantly filled with bright baby blue and the odd puff of white. It was the sky. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, manifest perfection, the Platonic ideal of a sky. More sky, somehow, than any other sky I’d witnessed.

Only then did it really hit me that I was looking at the sky. The sky… its hypnotising beauty distracted me from the fact that I was supposed to be in my apartment, at the table, eating breakfast! My ceiling was solid, there were no windows through which I could see. In fact, very little natural light at all penetrated the four brick walls of my unmistakably urban habitat. So how was this possible?

My mind then broke free — not without some effort — of the sky’s magnetism, and began to scan the rest of my surroundings. I wasn’t in Brooklyn anymore, was my first resolute thought. By logical implication, that also meant I wasn’t in my apartment, either. With that clever deduction, I felt my consciousness reasserting its rationality. That’s enough sacred, I imagined my subconscious saying, time to reconnect with the profane.

I was laying in grass, I realised. It was soft, rainforest green and tickled my skin reminding me I was a body. I looked around, having lifted my heavy head off the spongey bed of turf. Space, more grass, was what I saw. Where the fuck am I? And how the hell did I get here? I asked the universe. No response. The novelty of the experience was wearing fast, and so was my cool. I took a deep breath, to no effect so I swallowed another. Again, nothing. Fuck. I began to stand-up, but before I could my ears rung with the sound of an angel.

“Woah, take it easy there, old timer.”

The warm, tender sound of her soft voice melted whatever anxiety had begun to form within me. I was exactly where I was supposed to be — don’t worry, you’re home — her words seemed to say. And then I collapsed, as if her comfort had given me the permission I needed.

When I awoke some moments later, there she was looking over me. Her face… I’m telling you… to say it beautiful would not only be a gross understatement, it would be a severe injustice, criminal. Her beauty was transcendent, you must understand, something entirely unto itself. Her complexion was dark, more than sun-kissed, a deep, delectable caramel. She had sharp features, high cheekbones — the whole deal — but there wasn’t an ounce of coldness, as you often find in a pretty face. Instead, she radiated loving warmth. Her entire face was filled with Life. Her eyes, a rich brown only a few shades darker than her skin, brimmed with strength, wisdom, intelligence — spirit — and yet there was an undeniable softness to them, a certain vulnerability that revealed the unfathomable depth of her humanity. And her smile…

“Are you alright there, old timer?” Her question was charged with compassion, genuine and unequivocal concern.

“Wh-where am I?” Was all I managed to stumble in response.

“You really don’t know?”

“Not the slightest clue”

“Well, we better take it one step at a time then, hey?” she said, again discharging my worry, as she gracefully sat down beside me, legs folded.

She couldn’t have been older than early twenties, I decided, but there was something child-like about her demeanour, an ease or lightness perhaps, as if she had not yet been tainted by the weight of adulthood. Who is this goddess? I wondered.

“F-fine by me” I said, in a pitiful attempt to sound cool, already posturing. For reasons I’m still not entirely clear on, she laughed at that. It wasn’t the intended effect, but I wasn’t complaining, either. For her laugh, a soft and charming chuckle, was a contagious joy. Next thing I knew, I was laughing. It was more of a boyish giggle, really. What is she doing to me? I thought.

“So where are you from, old timer? Do you at least remember that much?”

Old timer? What was up with that?

“Umm, uh, Brooklyn” I said, “But Brisbane, uh, yaknow, originally”

“Mm, I see,” she said, with a note of… was it surprise? “When are you from is probably more the question though, isn’t it, old timer?” Again, old timer. WTF?

“When?” I asked, more than a bit confused.

“Well, you’re obviously not from now, are you?”

“Now?”

“As in now, today — ommmmm — the present; you’re obviously from another time, I can tell… it’s written all over your, well, interesting choice of clothing, shall I say.”

Whatever you say, you shall say it, and it shall sound sound heavenly.

“When is now?” I asked tentatively.

“1500PI, that would be” she responded matter of factly.

What.

“What do you mean, 1500PI?”

“As in the year” Huh?

“W-what about ‘PI,’ what does that stand for?”

“Post-industrialisation, of course.”

Post-industrialisation?

Right about now, I was some conflicted combination of utter disbelief and total acceptance. Not in the middle, as in slightly equivocal or moderately sure, but rather completely convinced in both directions, simultaneously. What she was saying made absolutely no sense to any piece of my brain, as you could imagine, but the way she said made it impossible to doubt its truth.

“I’m sorry, but w-what the fuck is going on?” Am I dreaming? I must be dreaming…”

I administered the pinch test on myself.

Ouch. Nothing. Fuck.

Again, she laughed her angelic laugh. “No, my love, you’re not dreaming, you’re just in another time and place, that’s all”

“But th-that can’t be”

“Ooh, tell me, why’s that?”

“B-because it would go against the laws of physics”

“Ah, the laws of physics!”

“Yes, exactly”

“I think you’d better stay seated, my love”

And so I did, while she proceeded to explain what was in fact going on. You’ve experienced — you’re experiencing, I should say — a glitch, she told me, straight-faced.

I knew it.

This happens every now and then, she explained, a hiccup in the universe, a bug in the software. What happens, she went on, is occasionally two membranes of Reality — two seperate layers of space and time — overlap, creating a wormhole of sorts that momentarily connect the two.

Reality. Wormhole.

That’s what’s happened to you, she said, vaporising any remaining ambiguity. You were at the centre of a wormhole, the glitch-point.

Glitch-point. Breakfast. You.

In the year 2050AD, she continued, the world finally realised that industrialisation was the major turning point in the affairs of humanity, a genuine singularity, far more significant than the death of any single human — regardless of how odd the circumstances of his or her birth — and therefore far more deserving of a role in the marking of time. Hence ‘PI’.

Singularity. Time. Birth.

While I was definitely dumbfounded by what I was hearing, what was most unexpected was just how quickly I found myself attempting to normalise the whole situation.

Well, yeah, I guess there was always a chance the laws of physics weren’t perfectly constant, that they broke under certain circumstances…

Or… I mean… well, if the universe evolved as we did, I guess it would make sense that it would exhibit some quirks of its own… right?

And… There was always the possibility that the universe was computational in nature, remember? If so… occasional glitches would be basically inevitable, wouldn’t they?

In hindsight, more than just trying to come to grips with my new and strange Reality, it was my need for security and control and understanding — at least their pretence or the illusion of — exercising its authority over my mind, as it always had, causing me to manufacture a range of ridiculous narratives against all credulity, simply in order to cope. That’s why I did what I did for a living, I’ve come to realise. Of all the branches of knowledge, it is physics, I believed, that had the firmest epistemic foundation. It was the only thing that was solid, eternal, unchanging. Everything else was slippery, reach for it and it was gone. The lack of security, the lack of self-understanding, the lack of companionship, the lack of everything I sought to fix with an understanding of everything, from gluons to galaxies. Physics was my raft, you see, what kept me afloat in the rapid waters of uncertainty that is Life.

“What year did PI begin?”

“1775AD”

“The invention of the steam engine?”

“Hey! Very good!”

“So, that makes it…”

“3275AD”

“Surely not…”

“You best believe it,” she responded with a smile on her lips and a look in her eye, a look that hinted at the delight she was taking in my helplessness.

“And, uh, where are we exactly?”

“What you would know as Australia”

“What I’d know as Australia?…”

“That’s right… at some point during the 22nd century, the name was changed. It goes by ‘Tathra’ now, native for “beautiful country,” a nod to its traditional owners, all the spilled blood, the spoilt humanity — I’m sure you’re familiar. A token of recompense, or remorse, I guess it was.”

Makes sense.

“Am I here… as in where I was born… by coincidence?”

“My love, tell me you don’t believe in such a thing…”

“What, coincidence?”

She simply nodded her head, still smiling.

“How could I not? Randomness is fundamental, after all”

“You really are ancient, aren’t you?” she asked rhetorically, without any trace of condescension.

What could I say to that?

“If what you’re telling me is, uh, true, I guess so,” is what I managed, a response that suggested a level of calm I really didn’t possess.

“So, care to see it?” she asked.

“Care to see what?”

“The Now, of course”

Of course.

“…Sure,” I said, after a more than slightly awkward delay.

With that, she grabbed my hand, yanking me to my feet with shocking ease. That was when I first noticed her figure. I’d been so enchanted by her face, I realised, that I forgot that she, too, was a body; and what a body she was. It was all sinew, an almost cartoonish expression of athleticism. Draped in a somewhat loose fitting dress — mud brown with white patterned stitching around the neck, and made of a peculiar fabric I’d never seen — her contoured arms were left exposed and glistened in the sun like chocolate diamonds, further exaggerating their already insecurity-provoking anatomical perfection. The effect of her physique, taken in full, was an almost intimidating ferocity, an undeniable not-to-be-fucked-with-ness. I say almost, for the power of her physical form was tempered by the disarming sensuality with which she moved and spoke. A real-life warrior princess, she was.

“This way,” she said as she turned around and began walking.

I followed.

As we walked, the details of the surrounding environment slowly rendered themselves the focus of my attention.

Green, jungle, flower, trees, open space, colour, grass, fruit, purple, purple, birds, blue, yellow, more trees, shit is that a monkey?!

It was the Garden of Eden. And if it wasn’t, it might as well’ve been. The sort of garden paradise you’d write a book about, in any case.

After what must have been a mile or so, maybe more — mile and a half, maybe — the warrior princess came to a halt.

“Here we are,” she said with what seemed to be satisfaction, though I couldn’t be sure.

“Here we are?” I responded, feeding my fast developing habit of returning her statements in question form.

“You’ll see.”

Great, suspense.

After a moment or two, a dull buzz began to sound its way through the tunnels of my ears. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Reflexively, I looked up. What I saw was the first definitive piece of evidence that this was indeed the future. For hovering some 30 feet above our heads was what appeared to be a UFO of some kind. I couldn’t make out much at first, but as it continued its descent and I got a better look, I was struck by the sheer alienness of its design. It was beautiful, that much was unmistakable, yet it seemed to embody an entirely unfamiliar design logic, as if it adhered to a sense of mathematical proportion that was beyond my apparently primitive aesthetic grasp. It was all glass, or so it seemed at first, perfectly geometric in structure, displaying a level of symmetry reminiscent of the experience that preceded my arrival there.

I can only imagine how much of a kick miss warrior princess got out of the whole thing, watching me as she did with those heavenly brown eyes as I stood there slack-jawed.

The flying structure — whether car or plane or spaceship I was undecided — landed next to us. It was big, but not that big. ‘Bout the size of your average SUV but without the wheels — touch bigger, perhaps.

“Well, this is us,” she said, gesturing at the thing.

Right.

As if prompted by her voice, a door to the spaceship — for it had to be a spaceship, I’d decided — presented itself, opening suicidal.

Sheeit.

She twitched her neck toward the craft saying along with a raise of her eyebrows ‘hop in’, so I did, and she followed behind.

The cockpit of the thing (and it was all one big cockpit) was perhaps rather as you’d expect of a flying machine from the very distant future: super futuristic. Inside were six heavily cushioned seats with light cream upholstering arranged in a circular fashion, each facing the others, in the middle of which rested a low-lying steel — or aluminium, I wasn’t sure which — table you could kick your feet up on. And what you couldn’t tell from the outside but that was easily the interior’s most notable feature, was that the glass windows were no ordinary glass windows, but instead interactive information screens, forming together a single panoramic control panel.

“Take a seat anywhere,” she said.

As I took one, buckles appeared out of nowhere securing me to the seat.

Safety first.

What I found odd was that we then took off automatically, as in without her making any apparent commands or interfacing with any of the screens. It was if it already knew what she wanted. The ship, I mean. So I asked her. It knows what I want, she said, confirming my suspicion. How though? I asked. It has access to my thoughts, she replied plain as anything, as if I’d just asked her the day of the week. Direct neural interface, she went on, anticipating further line of question. What, a chip inside your head? I wondered aloud. A number of them in fact, she said. When did that happen? Oh, about a few hundred years ago now; it took longer than expected, as things do, there were a few bumps along the road, the brain’s a tricky device, who’d of thought aha, she went on, enjoying her own sense of humour. Adopting a more solemn tone, she began to explain how merging with technology was both inevitable, in that that was simply the way things were going, but that it was also essential to the continued survival of the human race. The problems we’d created for ourselves, around about your time actually, it occurred to her, were such that fixing them entailed solutions that demanded a level of intelligence and creativity as well as speed of action that humanity didn’t then possess. So, what to do? Turn the dials up, naturally.

Naturally.

During your time, she proceeded, the relationship between man and machine was already fairly intimate, as you know, but it was awfully clunky, full of friction. The first piece of the puzzle was generating the information — once upon a time there was very little, after all — and then it was about making it accessible, putting it all in one place, right, and that was essentially accomplished by the 21st century, she explained. The problem was then one of interfacing with it, obviously.

Obviously.

So we now have a world of information, she goes, but what to do with it? That’s the question, right?

Right.

Obviously you could only read so fast, watch so fast, write so fast etc. So there were fundamental input-output constraints, in other words. She was now on a roll. You’d know better than I, but it was like trying to drink the entire ocean through a straw — if the ocean was a thickshake, that is. Now imagine being able to download whatever information or whatever skills you required in an instant, she said. That was the dream, right?

Right.

Just think, what could a single human being accomplish with the sum total of humanity’s knowledge not only at their fingertips but embodied in their actual heads?

A lot?…

Turns out quite a lot, she confirmed.

It was much to process. In the absence of additional questions, I turned my gaze from just below her face to the windows — transparent metal, I later learned they were — through which all I could see was an amorphous blur of sky. We were flying fast, I figured, well beyond the speed of sound surely. Focused as my guide to the future was on one of the control screens, left to myself, I began to feel the monopoly that my thoughts generally held over my experience reasserting itself. What I noticed, however, is that they — my thoughts, I mean — had acquired a distinctly extraordinary, as in irregular, character. My inner voice was notably brighter, I felt, exhibiting a certain strength — confidence, you might even call it — I hadn’t known since childhood. It was though my thoughts had shed some of their melancholic weight, become lighter, looser. Why? I’m not at all sure. Maybe it had something to do do with the structure of my worldview having just been overhauled. Perhaps my sense of self was remodelled along with my sense of the world. Or, maybe it was the sense that my thoughts — flimsy and fallible as I now knew them to be — no longer carried the authority I once assigned to them, thus was their capacity to oppress undermined. I really don’t know. In any case, my mind was opening, and with it, a world of newfound possibility.

“Take a look,” she said, breaking the silence I’d fallen into. “You can stand up,” she added.

Unbuckling my seatbelt, the familiarity of which surprised, I did just that and made my way to the window. Before I put my face to it, she gave me a look that told me I was in for something, that what I was about to see would somehow change me forever. How does one get that from a look? Beats me, but that’s what it said.

Instantly, the situation became charged with a level of significance and expectation I found uncomfortable. I felt like some sort of circus monkey, a cheap amusement about to perform for a crowd of one. Pushing the discomfort aside, I peered out the glass — metal — with anticipation and now a certain level of anxiety that my response would be judged, scored, perhaps used as a proxy for the quality of my humanity.

City… forest… people… civilisation… nature… technology… earth… human… trees… flight… future… Now… imagination… dream… forest… fantasy… life… LIFE.

Immediately, I understood the source of her look.

Ho-ly fuck.

In that instant, all unease was dissolved by the impossible wonder of the world that met my gaze and replaced by a visceral awe that verged on chemical ecstasy. Like her beauty, this new world lived beyond the grip of words, beyond the reach of even the most fertile imagination. I say that not to avoid the task of description, but in an attempt to convey the full effect of what I saw. The literal inconceivability of it seemed to erode what remained of my conceptual framework; my mind was a sandcastle — one of preconceived ideas and beliefs — and it was being swallowed, in that moment, by the humbling ocean of experience. What was it that I saw? It was as if the Unforeseeable Future and the Prehistoric Past had made a baby and called it The Present; the offspring of an enviable marriage, perhaps the first, between the dizzying heights of human ingenuity and the unrivalled beauty of the earth’s own creative expression. A populous city nestled in nature — made of nature — is what I saw. Architecture that seemed to defy the laws of physics — certainly those I knew, is what I saw. Buildings baked into the natural undulation of the landscape that seemed to be alive and breathing, is what I saw. Flying cars (they can’t all have been spaceships) that filled the sky, is what I saw. The fucking future, that is what I saw.

“So, what do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t believe it, is what I think.”

“Let’s get you a closer look, then.”

Let’s.

Having landed, the door to the ship (who knows, maybe they were all ships) opened outward and upward, ushering in the soft light of the day. It must have been afternoon.

“After you,” she said, gesturing at the door.

With an ambiguous cocktail of feels — excitement mixed with anticipation, ecstasy, curiosity and a hint of what tasted like trepidation — I made my way to the outside. I was now standing at the feet of the future, but before I could register, visually, what stood in front of me, I felt it. The air was charged with Love, Truth, God — all words I never understood but could no longer deny their existence — for that’s what I was instantly overcome with. What I felt wasn’t a reaction to the sight that hit my eyes — at least not entirely — for no frequency of light or combination thereof could have that effect, I’m convinced. No, it was something in the air, I’m sure of it, an energetic charge, an emotional resonance, a palpable frequency of some sort, something… I don’t know what exactly. Whatever it was, though, it was overwhelming in its bliss.

The future feels good.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” she asked, sowing the suspicion that she was reading my mind.

“How did you know?”

“It’s the energy of our people, the energy of our time. We all feel it.”

By this point, I’d done away with my own pretence of knowledge. Ordinarily I would have challenged such a use of the word “energy,” however, given the context, there was no such impulse, for I was all too connected to the fact of my own ignorance, where I stood on the seemingly infinite ladder of awareness. In fact, it was surprisingly liberating. Everything was now up for grabs, anything possible. I was a kid again.

“Does it feel like this all the time?” I asked with some amount of hope.

“More or less. Individually, we still go through ups and downs. That’s the nature of things, after all. But we are always grounded in the eternal essence of Māyā. That is what you’re feeling.”

Māyā.

“…Māyā?” I questioned.

One step at a time now darling, she said with nothing but her smile.

Māyā.

I refixed my eyes upon the world, though whether they were still ‘my’ eyes remains an open question. My sense of self was intact, I knew my own name, held the same memories, was contiguous with my past, but what I felt — the phenomenology of who I was — was so foreign as to cast doubt on whether or not I was still the same person. Whatever the case may be, academically, practically speaking, I was a different man, a different kind of Being. I knew that.

All around me, the world sung with Life. Wise old trees danced to the high tune of the wind, seemingly animate buildings reverberated the deep bass of the earth, while a burbling stream of people flowed rhythmically to and fro, passing me by with an emanate joy I’d have found disingenuous were I not steeped in it myself. Most profoundly, however, was the fact that — and this is somewhat embarrassing to admit — it felt as if the world was singing to me — and me alone. There was an almost sensual intimacy to the experience, like I was the sole audience to which the universe performed its artistry, my entertainment the essential reason for its existence. Like a lap dance from the universe, it was. Only free.

In that moment, I was blasted, by the erotic force of the numinous, from the spatio-temporal shell of my body into the ether above. I was no longer the ‘ghost in the machine,’ but rather the ghost outside of it. I now had a birds-eye view of myself, standing stationary I was as the world danced to its own song around me, for me. And though I was no longer constrained by the physical boundaries of my body, the experience was the opposite of ‘Selflessness.’ Instead, it represented the pinnacle of ego-centricity, the most persuasive argument for the existence of the self. In that moment, I was the centre of the universe, not only a self but the Self. The single Subject within which every Object existed. The only observer. The chosen one.

A weight on my right shoulder brought me back to body.

“Everything alright?” She asked, more out out politeness than genuine concern I could tell.

“Everything… Is,” I responded, the pseudo-mysticism of which was unintentional but after processing seemed to affirm the 24 carat profundity that now suffused the world.

“How about we show you round, then? We only have so much time, after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“A glitch generally only lasts a few hours or so, after which you’ll be sent back home.”

My immediate reaction was one of relief, and then it occurred to me what I was about to lose, causing my throat to clench with anticipatory grief.

“Right, of course,” I said, as if it were somehow obvious.

“You’ll be fine,” she said consoling me.

Again, how did she know?

I didn’t say anything, simply stared into her eyes, the strength of which reassured. She was the Truth, I then understood.

You’ll be fine.

“This way,” she said and began walking along one of many green earthen paths. She was barefoot, I only then realised.

As we walked, I observed people climbing trees, lying in the grass, performing acrobatics, groups engaged in a form of ritualistic dance mediated by the sound of drums, others huddled in circles bowing on their knees to the floor, conducting what appeared to be some sort of sacred nature worship. They were all barefoot, I noticed, and dressed in the same vaguely Egyptian garment as her.

Huh.

Surprisingly, none of this struck as odd. In fact, it all seemed perfectly natural, intuitive, the sort of things any sane person ought to be doing.

Eventually we came to the entrance of a small building that at once appeared as old as time itself and yet somehow from another galaxy. The building, through which people poured in and out, was distinct in its design. Where the majority of buildings that stared down upon us were almost imposing in all their utopian architectural wonderment, this one was far more discreet, humble… homely. The building was at the base of a decent-sized hill, was built into it in fact, giving the impression the hill was a face, the entrance its gaping mouth. The archway that defined the entrance (there was no door) was made of a sparkling purple stone, was shrouded in vine, and bore an inscription, in which language I didn’t recognise. The calligraphy was sharp, however, partly iconographic, almost algebraic in its arrangement.

So in we went. As we passed under the archway, my emotional tuning fork registered an even higher frequency of energy than that which saw me expelled from my body only moments earlier. I braced myself, expecting history to repeat, but it seemed I’d adapted, for in my body I stayed. The energy I was picking up on made sense once we entered and the room revealed itself. It was a bar of some kind, and it was abuzz with people, a literal hive of human vitality. There must have been a strong two hundred people, some sitting, others standing. The ceiling was tall, say 20 feet, and littered with fairy lights that seemed to mimic the impending twilight outside. Throughout the space, great big couches that seemed to melt into the floor were strewn, accompanied by large stone tables that floated in mid-air. The central feature, to the right of the entrance, was the bar itself; though it appeared to be less a bar than an apothecary of some kind, dispensing all variety of bizarre bubbling brews.

“Would you like something?” She asked.

“Will it kill me?” I joked (mostly).

“Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“Then whatever you’re having.”

“Great choice,” She said, smiling.

“Take a seat, anywhere,” she added, pointing to a spare couch.

As I fell into the couch, I felt it move, wrap itself around me, as if it were alive. I lurched forward, startled. After looking round, searching for an explanation but finding none — my reaction apparently failing to warrant the value of attention — I sat back, this time on guard. Again, same deal. The couch was morphing to the shape and weight of my body, I realised. Some advanced form of memory foam, or something. Like sitting on a cloud, it was, for it defeated gravity, rendering one’s mass non-existent. While I waited for her return, I began to take in more of the room. My eyes were drawn to the sea of brown faces, the looks on which ranged from engaged-in-serious-conversation to that-is-absolutely-hilarious. Most impressionably, they were all of a seemingly similar age, all rather young, late-20’s, early-30’s max.

I guess it is a bar.

And again, the bodies were all clothed in the same fashion — maybe it was more Greek than Egyptian — though they were each accessorised, with all manner of understated jewellery, to their own taste (I imagine).

“Here you are!” she said upon return, handing me a large grey ceramic mug, apparently hand-potted, that was charming in its imperfection.

“Thanks,” I said with surprising sincerity, suddenly moved by a disproportionate sense of gratitude, as she took a close seat beside me.

The mug was filled to the brim with a warm and foamy sky blue liquid that smelt of sweetened earth.

“What is it?” I asked, bringing it to my mouth.

“The future,” she teased.

Mmmmm. It was sweet, as it smelt, a punchy vanilla with undertones of hazelnut and what tasted like a close relative of toffee. It was good. Real good, in fact. Indulgent, nurturing, warm as a lover’s embrace.

“Not bad…”

“Right?”

Another sip.

Not bad at all.

“So… I imagine you must have some questions?”

“What do you mean?” I said, still caught in the comfort of the drink.

“As in, like, about the future.”

The full implications of the fact at hand, it then dawned on me, had yet to strike my mind with any real force. I was in the future… there by means of a ‘glitch’. Moreover, I was a physicist… someone who studied the nature of what I now knew to be REALITY… not to mention a human being with some not insignificant amount of interest in the course of things. Further still, and more to the point, I was bound to return to the present — my present, the past — carrying with me the luggage of experience, whatever knowledge and insight was implicit.

Questions… I should have questions.

Until then, I’d been merely trying to keep my head together, I figured, reacting, dealing, managing, processing. It hadn’t occurred to me that I should or could be formulating questions of any present or future significance. Digging for understanding, you know, mining for wisdom. Where had my precocity gone?

Questions?

The propensity for inquiry, it then struck me, is predicated on the belief in one’s capacity to comprehend, a belief I had hitherto lived by but that had just been shook to its marrow. Never had I felt there reason or cause to challenge this premise — the capacity for understanding, the possibility of Knowledge — that lay at the foundation of my belief system, the cornerstone of my occupation. Nor, for that matter, did I ever consider it a premise; I took it as self-evident. Only then did it occur to me just how tenuous it was.

Māyā.

“What is Māyā?”

“Ahhh Māyā…” she said, with well performed dramatic flair, intending — it was clear — to shroud the subject in an aura of suspenseful mystique.

“Māyā is this,” she said, waving her arm around the room.

“Māyā is… this place?”

“Māyā is this place and every place.”

“How do you mean?”

“Māyā is existence itself, space and time, matter and mind, apples and oranges, form and formlessness, life and death, good and evil, love and loss.”

“So Māyā is Reality? That’s what you’re saying?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, why call it Māyā then?”

“‘Reality’ would be quite a peculiar name to call something that is alive, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean ‘alive’?”

“I mean that Māyā, what you call ‘Reality’, is a living, sentient entity, not some strictly impersonal ‘spatio-temporal’ structure, as you probably think it.”

“You mean Māyā — Reality — is God?”

“God is another name, though it went out of fashion long ago. Too much theocratic baggage, as you could appreciate. Think of her more as a sort of super-organism, that should be easier for you to pallet.”

“Her?”

“Surely you didn’t think the source of all creation was a ‘he’?

“I guess not. Though, to be honest, I’m surprised Reality identifies with any gender pronoun. Even human beings transcend such narrow forms of description.”

“Huh?” she responded, obviously bemused.

“Never mind.”

“So how do you know all this? How have you, or humanity, come to know Reality in this way?” I asked.

“We have learnt it from Māyā herself.”

“And how is that possible?”

“There has always been a dialogue between Māyā and humanity, right? Everything we have ever known we have known through our relationship with Māyā.”

“Sure, but…”

“But… over time, as human awareness grew ever deeper, the conversation became increasingly explicit. We, as a species, were gradually afforded greater and greater access to the mind of Māyā, the Universal Mind, the birthplace of all knowledge, the seat of all Wisdom. Once the mind of man harmonised with the mind of Māyā, Truth began to pour, where once it had only trickled.”

What I was hearing was tough to parse, as you might expect, but the ideas themselves weren’t entirely foreign. All throughout history, I was aware, it was claimed that the universe was conscious — a Being of some kind — from the ancient religious and spiritual traditions to the pseudo-philosophy of the New-Age movement. But this was the first time such a claim was being made with the weight of any real authority, the authority of the future.

“And how did that come to pass? How did awareness grow deeper? ‘harmonise with the mind of Māyā’, as you say?”

“How does anything come to pass? By the Will of Māyā.”

“Right… but was there not a more proximate cause?”

“There was indeed, as there always is.”

“And what was that?”

“Many centuries ago, not so long after your time, healing centres — biological repair facilities — began to be established all throughout the world. Specifically, facilities designed to heal the human mind. The effect of these facilities, beyond reducing untold quantities of human suffering, was that a subset of the population began to evolve wholly new neurological structures, structures which fundamentally altered the nature of mind. Amongst this group, intelligence reached new heights, creativity, too, and most significantly, the very quality of their humanity was transformed. In effect, a new taxon of our species emerged.”

“What were these centres using?” I asked, by now fascinated.

“At first, mostly plant medicines and other natural healing modalities. Eventually, they began to employ more… technological interventions.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the cortical implants came first. That’s when things really began to take off. After that, various other forms of augmentation, all designed to regulate biological function in one way or another.”

“So you’re all fully-fledged cyborgs?…”

“You could say that.”

Hmmm.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, that we would become cyborgs appeared almost inevitable. In many ways, we already were, and had been since the invention of writing. But inevitable and actual are of course two very different things. Hearing that the former had become the latter I was torn. Should I be proud or sad? On one hand, we had evolved. A good thing, certainly. On the other, we had — in effect — gone… extinct? Was that good? I wasn’t sure.

“The increase in intelligence and creativity makes sense, that’s mostly memory, processing speed, association, bisociation — mechanical stuff, really — but how has any of this affected the quality of capital-h Humanity?” I asked.

“Well, at the most banal level, it’s all the mind, is it not?”

“Sure…”

“A well configured mind, then, is a well configured human being.”

“Mmm… though I don’t see how ‘well configured’ and Enlightenment — or a direct line to God, for that matter — necessarily go hand-in-hand. Human beings are fundamentally animals, after all. A well configured animal is still an animal, no?”

“This was one of the more unexpected findings, you’re right. The human mind, as it happens, is by nature Enlightened, already pure and uncontaminated awareness, expansive and luminous, divine Love. When one is connected to this fact, to the ultimate nature of experience, to the true nature of mind, there is no illusion, no ignorance, no clinging, no aversion, no suffering — the sources of all evil.”

“But what about humanity’s bloody and vulgar history? If the human mind is, as you say, by nature Enlightened, what explains its unambiguously Evil past?”

“That’s quite simple, really. The story of humanity is the story of a species that was, for most of its history, divorced from the underlying Truth of its condition, under the spell of experiential ignorance, you could say. When humanity was young, this was no big deal, for we were an insignificant species, really. As our intellect grew stronger, however, along with the power of our technology, of course, our derangement became an increasingly grave threat, to ourselves and all other life. The intellect, we have long known, though neutral in itself, has an uncanny capacity to deceive, delude, and derange. It is a layer between experience, a barrier — often — between What Is Thought and What Is. When grounded in awareness, however, it is a powerful and positive force. What the bio-repair facilities affected was a reconnection with ultimate awareness, which technological augmentation then amplified and now sustains, combining unprecedented awareness with unparalleled intellect. That is what got us here.”

As I began to construct a response, my line of thought was intercepted by the sound of a group nearby speaking — almost singing — a language I couldn’t discern.

The inscription — from the entrance.

“What language are they speaking?” I asked.

“Ah, you noticed… We call it Satya.”

“And what is it?”

“It’s a higher-order language that evolved some hundred years after the first generation implants. It has become the universal tongue.”

“There’s only one language?”

“Yes, thank Māyā for that!”

“Why do you say that?” I asked, confused.

“How could a single species be united when they’re divided by tongue? Language has always divided humankind, reinforcing their tribal instincts, affirming their differences. The evolution of a single common tongue changed that, reorienting humanity’s perspective towards the recognition of our fundamental sameness, instilling a sense of unison, solidarity.”

“How are you speaking English then?”

“Do you speak Satya?” She jested.

“Obviously not…”

“Well that’s why, honey! I love that word: honey. Isn’t it great?!”

“Uh, I guess so…”

“We can speak any language, if we wish, any of the documented languages, anyhow. I’m speaking English, apparently, and have adjusted my diction to match yours. Bridging the gap, as it were. But there are limitations to the ancient languages that Satya does not share. That’s why we speak it.”

“What limitations are you referring to?”

“‘Limitations’ is perhaps not the best word… or perhaps it is… In any case, think of any language system as representing the structure of the minds that speak it. Invariably, as the structure changes, so too does the language. This is true at the level of the individual as well as at the population level. Satya is simply a much larger structure than systems of old, a much bigger glove, so to speak; moreover, a glove that’s far more precisely fitted to the shape of Māyā’s hand, its subtleties and eccentricities. Many of the great scientific and philosophical challenges of old, as was speculated, turned out to be merely issues of language. We lacked the words, the right tools for the job. With the evolution of Satya, we had the words at last, the tools, and with them, previously unimaginable insight. Does that make sense?”

“It does… more or less, anyway.”

I’d often mused about the limits of our symbols. Convinced of the shortcomings of words, I gravitated towards the mathematical. But even then, I wondered, was the reach of math infinite, truly universal, or were there parts of Reality through which even the most powerful symbols could not penetrate? On this, I’d always been impartial.

“Your drink, love.”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t forget your drink.”

“Ah, right.”

The elixir, I remembered, remained clasped between both my hands. The blue foam tickled my top lip as I took another sip. It was delicious, I’m telling you.

“Language is really the defining mark of civilisation, the foundation of human action, it turns out.” She continued, unexpectedly.

“In what way?”

“Language is the substance of thought, right?”

“Right.”

“Each language is its own substance, has its own DNA, so to speak. As with differences between organisms, differences in language are also manifest. Rather than phenotypic differences, however, differences in language manifest themselves in different modes of thought, that is, different ways of thinking, different perspectives. These differences are, in no small part, responsible for the historical variance we see across populations, through time and space. Any given civilisation can be understood, with enough study, in terms of the structure and use of its language system. What kind of worldview does the language system bias towards? What are its primary words? How are they being used? The same is true for individuals. For what is human life, but manifest thought, embodied language?”

I paused for a few moments to parse what was being said.

“But surely you don’t believe thought, or language, is the cause of all action? For so much thought only takes place after the fact. The history of humanity, as I see it, is just as much characterised by the absence of thought, as it is its use. Impulse, it seems to me, has been just as influential as thought,” I eventually responded.

“Of course you’re right,” She said, and which I found embarrassingly validating.

“Language emerged from impulse, after all. But over time, language became increasingly influential as a mediator of human behaviour, right, an intermediary between impulse and action, a filter of sorts,” she continued.

“Language, in this way, is really fundamental. For not only is it the primary means by which we think, it’s also the primary means by which we express ourselves. Change the language, right, and you change the thought, change the thought, and you change the experience, change the experience and you change the culture, change the culture and… you get the point.”

“I do,” I said.

And I really did. What she was saying, while fairly abstract, was made firmly concrete by the way in which she said it. Not so much the way in which she delivered the words, no, it was more the way in which her eyes were so intensely fixed to mine. To say she was piercing through my eyes and into my soul would be a bit much, though it wouldn’t be complete hyperbole, either. What I will say, though, is that she was connecting herself to me, melding her mind with mine — with her eyes and with her words — in a way I’m not sure I’d ever experienced. There was a haunting… presence — yes, that’s the word — to her, that, in any other context, I would have found terrifying. See, I was used to a world where people looked you in the ear, the nose, the collar, the left shoe… anywhere but the eyes. Not her, though. With her, it was all in the eyes. And oddly, it was not the least bit disconcerting. On the contrary, it was enchanting, rarefying… humanising.

“But how does any of this really work?” I then asked.

“What do you mean exactly?”

“I mean, how does thought beget action and action beget reaction? By what principles, or laws, I guess I’m asking, does Māyā work? Beyond those long established, I mean.”

“How does Māyā work? Is that what you want to know?”

“I guess that’s what I’m asking, yep.”

“Well that’s the big question, isn’t it?”

“It’s not small…” I quipped, though my wit went unappreciated, for my words seemed to fall on deaf ears. She just sat there, eyes glazed, seemingly engaged in thought — literal computation, I guess. That was the only instant in which I felt any distance between us. Prior to that, we were as one, within each other.

“So… do you know? How it works, I mean.” I said, trying to reel her back.

“Of course I know, honey.”

She was back.

“Care to explain, then?”

“Sorry, I was just speaking to my daughter. She’s the cutest. I wish you could meet her.”

“You have a daughter?” I asked, surprised.

“12, in fact. And 7 boys.”

What… how?

“What… how?”

“Aha, what do you mean?”

“Aren’t you a little… young?”

“It’s all relative, I guess. But I’ve been around a while, enjoyed my fair share of orbits.”

“How old are you?”

“A few days past 400,” she said, flatly.

She couldn’t have been a day over 30.

“Are you joking?” I asked sincerely.

“Are you telling me I look good for my age?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Stop it! You’re making me blush, honey.”

She wasn’t blushing.

“How could you be that old!?”

“Hey! It’s not that old!”

“Again, I can’t tell if you’re kidding…”

I really couldn’t. Would’ve been a strange joke though, I thought, so I figured she must’ve been straight.

“I’m… deadly serious — aha what a saying! Deadly serious! Isn’t that great?”

“Yeah… sure… but how?”

“How am I such a dinosaur?”

“Exactly.”

“Remember the implants I was telling you about?”

“I do…”

“Well, that’s how. Each system — each physiological system, that is — is regulated by a number of microcomputers, in the form of implants. They regulate the flow of biological information, which prevents entropy, which prevents senescence, which prevents… well, death.”

“Wouldn’t that defy the 2nd law? Of thermodynamics, I mean.”

“If we were getting something for nothing, sure. But we’re not. We’re using energy, negative entropy, to defy entropy, to create order. That’s something for something.”

“And where does the energy come from?”

“Where all energy comes from… the environment. We get the majority of ours from the sun.”

“The computers specifically, I mean.”

“Well, we charge them.”

“How?”

“Of a night, we sleep in electrically-charged rooms. Same way you’d charge any device, really. Bio-chargers, we call them.”

Bio-chargers.

“That’s the secret, honey,” she went on, “Energy.”

“Huh?”

“To your question, that’s the key to understanding Māyā. It’s all about Energy.”

“In what way?”

“The essence of Māyā is Energy, you see. It took us a long while to work that out. E = mc2, right, that was clever — but what is E? And how does it really work? Once we did, once we finally understood E, learnt to harness it, alter it, ‘channel’ it, so to speak, we at last had a firm grasp of our fait.”

“But what do you guys know about Energy that we didn’t?”

“Well, only how it relates to human life.”

“Which is?”

“You’re aware of Newton’s third law, I take it?”

“Of course. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. What’s that got to do with Energy?”

“For every unity of human energy transmitted, there is a corresponding unit of energy received. We call it Ānā, or, roughly translated, the Principle of Reciprocity.”

“Sounds like Karma.”

“Yes, Karma was a predecessor, a most prescient idea, really, though it came with some extraneous stuff, about past and future lives and what have you.”

Karma? Really?

“Our understanding is far more logical, less metaphysical, you could say. A simple cause and effect kinda thing.”

“So what, Energy begets Energy? You get what you give. Is that really what you’re saying?”

“In effect, yeah. Though it’s slightly more granular. All the human emotions are manifestations of Energy, right, different frequencies. As with the electro-magnetic field, Energy, in the more fundamental sense, is a spectrum, a spectrum that covers the full gamut of the human experience. Energy does not only beget Energy, Energy begets a proportionate dose of the same frequency of Energy. Love begets love, hope begets hope, fear begets fear, and so forth.”

“The human experience is, we now know, first and foremost, an energetic experience, a relationship with Energy. On some level, we always knew this. We were always striving for better energy, craving it. But we simply didn’t know how to cultivate it, at least not with any reliability. People would meditate, take drugs, go for runs, with varying degrees of success. Now, we just engineer it.”

“You engineer Energy?”

“We engineer the frequency. We tune our minds to the frequency of Māyā.”

“So everyone feels the same, everyone embodies the same energy?”

“Not quite. We are all connected to the same channel, as it were, we are all grounded in Māyā, that is what you felt before, but we each embody slightly different frequencies, which we also engineer, of course. Some opt for love, others happiness, others ambition etc. It’s a matter of taste, really. A question of how one wants to live, how one wants to feel. One’s life then becomes about projecting that frequency, which they receive in turn.”

Upon hearing this, my immediate, impulsive reaction was disgust.

What has the world come to? Engineering emotion…

Upon reflection, however, I’m not sure why. Why was I not filled with pride instead? Why not wonder? Why not elation? Why disgust of all things? My entire conception of morality, I’ve since come to understand, centred around the ideas of discipline, suffering, hard work, restraint. That’s what it meant to be Good. That was my idea of Character. What was Good was Good, only because it was hard, because it entailed sacrifice of some kind, because of its relationship to Bad. I’m no longer so sure. Why should sacrifice, I now wonder, have anything to do with Goodness? Why should Goodness, in other words, depend on virtue? After all, are some not more virtuous than others, simply by nature, the mere dice of circumstance? So, then, what was wrong — if anything — with having control over one’s mind? Of having control over one’s ‘Energy’? Is Good made less so because it’s easy? Does Bad make Good any more than the sand makes the sea? I’m asking you, in earnest, for I still don’t know, even after all these years.

“Let’s get out of here. I want to show you something,” she said, breaking the silence that’d filled the space between us.

“Sure.”

“Finish your drink first, honey,” She said, pointing at the mug on the table.

I finished the remains of the blue nectar, before following her lead as she stood up. The heightened perspective brought my awareness back to the room at large. It had gotten busier. Swarms of people now glided across the space, in every which direction, with a fluidity and grace that appeared choreographed, conducted; a ‘barroom’ dance, if you will. As my eyes tracked the surrounding movement, time began to dilate. Smiles spread from face to face like reverse dominoes in slow motion, corners of mouths turning up, suddenly buoyed by the cheeks that floated above. Sounds, in that slice of time, were but a supporting act — distant background — to the sights that captured my consciousness, slowing the world. What struck me, then, was the interconnectedness of things, how one interaction would spread, like a ripple across a lake, from one side of the room to the other. Everything that was once solid and hard appeared smooth and liquid, like a Salvador Dali.

“This way,” I heard her voice caress my ears.

We moved through the room towards the door like the cover of a Tame Impala album — the one with the ball — leaving ripples of our own in wake.

A mildly refrigerated breeze brushing my skin said the sun was done for the day. The moon in the sky, a scorching amber sunset, was preparing for its shift, ready to preside over the planet, and provide — as it always had — food for imagination and yearning. So much had changed in the world, it occurred to me, yet night and day remained constant, the closest thing to permanency in an otherwise ephemeral existence. Like literal clockwork, they would alternate watch, exchanging nothing as they traded places in the sky except perhaps a knowing nod, the silent expression of mutual cosmic duty.

“Isn’t it beautiful,” she said.

Isn’t it.

“It is, isn’t it,” I affirmed

As the words left my lips, I felt a warm touch against my left hand. It was hers, her hand, holding mine. Taken off guard, I looked at her, my face the symbol of surprise, as if saying “What, why?” She looked at me, her face the symbol of our highest humanity — compassion, love, affection, kindness, all the good wrapped in skin — saying simply “Because.” Before then, “Because” had never seemed like reason enough, for anything, let alone physical contact. Now — as in then — it seemed like the only reason, no reason at all. As if explanation would somehow corrupt the purity, the essence of the act. She turned her gaze from my face to the sky. I did the same. It was better than before — the sky, I mean — somehow more beautiful, more real, more true, when viewed as two. As we stared, together, into the flaming heavens, I felt the cavern of loneliness — the ultimate source of my pain, I realised — dissolving in the light of connection, companionship, contact. Years of psychological isolation, years of rejection, years of hurt, were shedding, for they had no choice, as my heart expanded beyond the calloused shell that had so long contained, and, I now appreciate, served — even if not all so successfully — to protect it.

All of a sudden, I was overcome with forgiveness. It wasn’t the world’s fault, my pain. It never was. The world had never been out to get me. In fact, it had always been there, on my side, giving me love and good fortune. It was just that I was never able to receive, as if there were a hole in my cup. The world would pour what I needed in, but I couldn’t contain it, so out it would invariably spill, leaving me empty as ever.

“Let’s make — while we still have some light,” she said, letting go of my hand.

Did she have to let go?

“After you,” I said.

As we walked along the tree-lined trail, my feet sinking into the soft bed of earth with each step, the sound of rushing water began to assert itself. To the left, through the trees, was a running stream (jogging, not sprinting) maybe 30 feet wide, and lined with grey-washed boulders the size of small cars. To my right, also through the trees, stood the city, tall and proud in its sophisticated beauty, yet humble in the hold of nature’s hands. I was moved by the obvious symbolism. Clearly, it reflected a philosophy, a certain metaphysic that saw the achievements of man — however great — as secondary to the wonder of the natural world.

We’d been walking for what must have been ten minutes, winding our way along, when I began to notice the trees. They were glowing. Yep, glowing. Almost imperceptibly, at first, but obviously enough to’ve caught my attention. As it grew darker, however, it became more pronounced, until eventually it was unmistakeable. The trees were glowing, for sure, a luminescent candy orange.

“What’s up with the trees?” I asked.

“Oh, the trees?”

“Yeah, the trees.”

“They’ve been engineered,” she said, “A variety of pine mixed with some species of New Zealand glowworm. Cool, huh?”

“Treelamps,” I said, the word having percolated with an authority that demanded it be spoken.

“Pardon?”

“Treelamps, that’s what they are,” I clarified.

“Aha yes, I guess they are,” she said, seemingly amused/impressed/charmed by the creativity.

The notion of engineered trees challenged the model I’d begun to form of this people — our future — as nature-worshiping techno-wizards. They weren’t subservient to nature, clearly, nor did they consider it necessarily sacred — at least not sacred in the way that might otherwise, say, render one averse to making lamps of trees, for instance. At the time, I was somewhat flummoxed by the relationship. Now I see that it was simply like any other worth caring about; complex, ambiguous, uncertain, full of compromise and rife with contradiction. Real.

The path began to narrow. Above, trees from one side of the trail had fused with trees from the other, forming a tunnel that can’t have been accidental. Lit by the glow of the treelamps, the tunnel presented as a kind of visual illusion, a portal to the void, like one of those James Turrell installations.

It must’ve been a hundred feet long, the tunnel. Towards the end, the trees began to part, until they were trees again, separate, standing skyward. In front of us was an open expanse of grass, about a football field in size, surrounded by the same glowing pine. Curiously, the trail that led us here didn’t stop. Instead, it extended to the very the centre of the field. A trail to nowhere, it seemed.

“Come on, it’s just up there,” she said, pointing to the trail’s end.

“What is?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

And I did. As we neared the centre of the field, it became apparent that the trail didn’t stop there, either. Rather, it continued down, down into the earth. The path turned to stairs, stairs that descended at a 45 degree decline. As we stood at the top of them, still above ground, she gave me a smile, a smile of reassurance. Face-to-face we were standing. Without breaking her gaze, which was set on my eyes, she took hold of my hand, again. This time both hands. First the left, then the right.

“How do you feel?” She asked.

“Close,” I said, almost reflexively, the word having spilled out.

“Close?”

“Just close… I don’t know… to you… this… everything,” I elaborated.

“That’s perfect,” she said, beaming.

She was always beaming.

Under any other circumstances, such an admission would have been unthinkable. “Not bad” had long been my auto-reply, my default response to the “How are you?” custom. It ticked all the boxes: (a) it didn’t elicit further response (beyond perhaps “that’s good”); (b) it was by some standard true (‘bad,’ being a highly relative concept), and most of all; c) it could be said in a way that basically-almost-nearly masked my pain. “Good” was way too much, a dead giveaway. For in order to work, it required a smile, you see. And in those days, even my best effort was not nearly enough to turn my resting frown upside down. What would result, in those mistaken moments when I tried, was a kind of strange contortion of the lips that seemed to conflict with the weight of my cheeks, a scared/confused/dishonest expression which seemed to freeze time; a painfully awkward experience for all involved, believe me.

So “Not bad” it was. But her question wasn’t driven by the obligation of social custom, nor the automaticity of habit. No. It was instead driven by sincerity, a genuine interest in the answer, a legitimate concern for how I was in fact feeling. And ‘close’ is how I felt, so ‘close’ it was.

“Shall we?” She said, letting go of my left hand.

I nodded yes, turning to face the stairs, before making our way down.

Towards the bottom of the stairs — of which there was precisely far too many for the future — darkness turned to light, a soft buttery yellow.

“This is it,” she said, exposing her wingspan.

‘It,’ as it happens, was a seemingly infinite horizon of human activity, an underground warehouse-cum-factory-cum-playground-cum-library-cum-lab, a giant shell of polished stone, stained wood, brushed metal and reflective glass. But what ‘it’ was exactly, I had no idea. So I asked:

“What is this place?”

“We call them Lila’s,” she said.

“Lila’s?”

“It’s Hindu for ‘divine play.’ They’re basically recreational centres, so… you know, made sense. Come on, I’ll show you round.”

The space was divided, by opaque blue glass, into a grid of sorts, a layout that seemed arranged according to some logical order of activity or craft. In one section, the size of a large warehouse, there were painters painting, at least fifty of ’em. Couches and canvases and people tending to both; paint being splattered with the defiant abandon of impulse — ala pollock — and finessed with the tender delicacy of attention; some painted alone with an intensity that shielded interruption, where others painted together, in groups, with an almost satirical joviality that not only welcomed interruption but demanded it; the atmosphere of which was held together by the techno sounds of synthesizers blaring through paper thin rectangular speakers, the size of billboards, glued to the glass walls.

In another, this one fairly smaller — the size of a three bedroom house, maybe — was filled with high-tech equipment of some sort — monitors and machines made of metal mostly — that ranged in size from house cat to elephant. You could tell by the way the folk were scrambling that they were doing science of one variety or another.

Another was a reading room, silent and surrounded by shelves of books, all bound in classic leather.

“What’s the point of reading if you can just download the contents?” I asked.

“People still like to spend time with stories, for pleasure sake,” she said, “So most of the reading is either fiction or history. But for those that are trying to make advances in various fields of study, in the sciences or the arts, you know, trying to establish new connections or make novel associations, reading remains one of the best ways to interface with the information. There are still holes — gaps — in our knowledge, you see. Holes which aren’t immediately recognisable if you’re only downloading. Going back over the original source material is a way of more carefully examining the ideas, identifying important premises and so forth.”

“Interesting,” I said, in earnest.

We continued along the central corridor, a bus-length wide hallway, observing the assorted scenes at either side, like walking through a convention of human endeavour. There were people printing various objects from scratch — shoes, clothing, electrical components, devices — scribbling equations with their fingers on digital chalkboards, practicing what seemed to be martial arts on soft blue mats, meditating on great big cushions, huddled in circles chanting sacred sounds. It was a smorgasbord of eclectic interests, a vibrant mosaic of passions and proclivities, a patchwork of the human mind, a microcosm of the creative spirit.

“So this is the future’s idea of a good time?” I asked.

“One idea, sure,” she said. “We have many.”

“What do you all do for work, then?”

“Well, this is work… more or less,” she said.

“I thought you said it was a play centre… Lola or something?”

“Lila,” she corrected.

“Lila, right,” I amended. “You said that means play, right?”

“Divine play,” she clarified.

“Sorry, ‘divine play,’” I said with a patronising roll of the eyes (old habits). “What’s the difference?”

“Well, ‘play’ sounds like something kids do. ‘Divine play’ is obviously far more profound-sounding, a non-negotiable activity, something one must do if they’re serious about living,” she said, half-ironically. The other half, the half that carried weight, was sincerity.

“But you said it was work ‘more or less,’ what did you mean by that?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation back on the tracks of truth.

“I meant that we have a much broader conception of the word ‘work,’ than your time,” she answered. “Work is fun is play is leisure is creation is life. We’re not so inclined to draw distinctions where none exist.”

“That sounds lovely, but how do you all earn a living?”

“‘Earn a living’ what an odd phrase,” she said reflectively. “Tell me honey, how is a gift earned?”

“I think you know what I mean,” I said, not entirely sure she did. “How do you make money?” I asked bluntly, leaving no space for ambiguity.

“Money! Oh, we all have plenty of that,” she said flippantly, almost disrespectfully, as if the course of human history wasn’t the story of its pursuit, as if wars were waged for any other reason, or as if the worth of human life had never been measured in its terms.

“And how’s that?”

“Remember how wealthy the planet was in your time?” She asked.

“Yeah, it was doing alright,” I said.

“Well, imagine that with some 2000 years of compound interest.”

“At what rate?” I asked.

“Oh, 2–3%”

“Yeah… wow,” I said, attempting to comprehend the scale of it. I had a pretty good mathematical intuition, so her point made an instant impression. But I’ve since run the numbers, and it turns out I was a good many orders of magnitude off. Turns out, the total wealth of planet earth in 2020 was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $250 trillion. That’s 13 zeros. $250 trillion at 2–3% — let’s split it down the middle and call it 2.5 — over 2000 years is… a lot more zeros, like 30 odd — in interest alone. That’s (3 to the power of x?). Even after inflation, that’s a lot of moula.

“You see, the accumulation of wealth, in the end, was really all about time,” she said. “For most of time, there was no wealth. None at all, if you think about it. Once wealth, which really precedes money, was a thing, the power of compound interest began to exert its influence over humanity. That is, the power of time. Once the ball got rolling, in other words, it snowballed well and truly.”

That got me thinking. They say time heals all wounds. Individually, I don’t see how that’s true, unless you count the cessation of pain as healing and thus consider death the ultimate analgesic (far too broad a definition to my mind). For civilisation, however, the aphorism appears true — at least from my experience. As a physicist, I’d naturally spent a lot of time (no pun intended) with the notion of time. You know, What is it? How does it work? Is it really irreversible? Why does it flow in the direction of past to future? Does it come in discrete parcels, little quantum units, or is fundamentally continuous? Is it ontologically real, or is it merely a construct of the human mind? What is it headed towards? That kinda thing. Like space, time had always been a big mystery to those who studied it. One of those things you take for granted, but under scrutiny, reveals itself to be full of paradox and incredulity.

“All good things take time, as the old saying goes. For our planet, that was also the case,” she went on. “You need to keep in mind that your time is, to us, what the Stone Age is to you and your people: young and poor.”

“And what, your time is old and rich?” I asked.

“Older and richer,” she said matter-of-factly.

The conventional wisdom of my time was that we were plenty rich enough, that the problem wasn’t one of means, but rather one of division, distribution. Was it really the case that we simply weren’t as cashed up as we thought? That we were still ‘young and poor’, as it were? I put the question to her.

“Isn’t the problem of wealth one of distribution, a matter of how to slice the pie, so to speak?” I asked.

“Oh sure, that’s part of it,” she said, plainly. “But you need to have the money before you can worry about its distribution.”

“But we had plenty,” I exclaimed, “wealth was abundant, the issue was that it was so inequitably concentrated. We had billionaires lounging in towers and homeless starving at their feet.”

“There was once a deeply pathological element to the concentration of wealth, certainly, a kind of hoarding mentality perpetuated by a culture that conflated wealth with virtue. Love fixes that,” she said without humour. “But you must maintain the historical perspective, honey,” she continued. “Even if you had spread the money around, back then, it would’ve been awfully thin — in relative terms, that is. You also need to remember, honey, your time was only a couple of hundred years after industrialisation, when the gears began to turn. And not all gears got turning at the same time, either. Each part of the planet was at different stages of their development, different moments in time, moving at different speeds. Inequality was therefore inevitable, a function of the uneven distribution of time. But eventually, the tide of time lifts all.”

Whatever time really is, I now realise, it’s the closest thing to magic. It’s ability to alchemise something out of nothing, future out of past, civilisation out of stardust. Time is magic; the magic of change.

We took a seat on a well-loved lounge that separated a group of expressive dancers from an ensemble of musicians wielding a mix of alien instruments. The walls were made of what looked like opal — bright stone imbued with every colour of the spectrum — the space between laced with the fresh scent of frangipanis on a summer’s morning, the expansive smell of Life. In front of us was a large brass table spread with a buffet of tropical fruits, which brought to mind the starving cries of my stomach. (You hear a lot of things about time travel, what you don’t hear, though, is just how hungry it makes you). I sunk my teeth into the juicy meat of some sort of melon.

“Do some not have more than others?” I asked, mouth half-full.

“What do you mean?”

“In terms of money… wealth, I mean. Are things perfectly equal?”

“Of course not!” she responded, with the venom of certainty. “People are rewarded for their contributions. Some choose to contribute more than others, per their preference, and some contribute in ways that are of more value, per their proclivity.”

“And people are OK with that?”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” She asked.

“I don’t know… I guess I’ve never paid it enough thought.”

“See honey, inequality is only insidious when it’s unwarranted,” she said.

“Unwarranted?”

“When its merely structural, when it mirrors the uneven distribution of opportunity, rather than the inequality of contribution.”

“And so what, you all have the same opportunity? How’s that possible?”

“By and large, sure. We all have the same good health, the same grounding, the same ability, the same access to information, the same access to the financing of our passions, the same freedom to pursue them. What varies is what we choose to do with that opportunity.”

Opportunity.

“And what determines that?” I asked.

“What we do?”

“Yeah… with all the opportunity, I mean.”

“Whatever is our want,” she said.

“You do what you want?” I clarified.

“Of course.”

“But how do you know?”

“What we want?”

“Yeah.”

“How does the sun know how to shine? How does the earth know how to spin? How does the-”

“They don’t know, they just do,” I interceded.

“Precisely,” she said, “that’s my point.”

“But that’s hardly a decent analogy…”

“Why not? We are all spinning according to the same laws, yet we each spin on a slightly different axis. None of us know why we spin precisely the way we do, beyond the fact that we’re spinning according to Māyā’s Will, of course,” she said. “We spin because we must, because that is our duty,” she added with a tone of authority.

“Your duty is to do what you want?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“It’s simply the Way of things, honey. When you are connected to Māyā, when you are connected to the Truth, as we are, the Way is your want, your want your duty.”

“And so what is confusion, then?”

“Confusion is ignorance or illusion — the mind playing tricks, a distorted line, as it were.”

Which was my life? I wondered. Was it the word of Māyā or a deceptive sleight of hand? The Truth or Illusion? Did I do what I did because I wanted to, because it was my duty? On some level, sure. It’s not as if I didn’t have other options. Why, then, was it so painful? Why, then, did it feel so constructed? So artificial? I’d always felt a gnawing sense that what I did was part of some elaborate narrative I had conceived in order to cope. With what? The banality of life, I guess, the fear of mediocrity, perhaps, the pain of childhood, maybe. However, I’d always figured that thought — the gnawing, that is — was the kind of self-doubt that plagues anyone with ambition, something to be resisted and overcome. Now, I wonder, was it deception all along? My life, I mean. It would certainly explain why everything had become so twisted, so dark and sad. My work had contorted everything around me, and knotted up my insides. It had caused me to lose all that I loved, the one I loved, and left me clinging to a single thread of existence I called my ‘purpose’. How could that be Māyā’s will?

I took another bite of the fruit. It was still succulent, only less satisfying now, the prior moment of reflection — the notion that my life had been an act of deceit, meaningless in its fraudulence — having trivialised my previously ravenous appetite. The pulse of music slowed, the tempo of dance too, as if in step with the dull rhythm of my own sudden melancholy.

“Are you alright, honey?” She asked, obviously aware of my changed state.

“Yeah… I’m fine,” I lied.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s just… I can’t possibly go back,” I explained.

“Why’s that?” She asked, with moving concern.

“My life… it was a disaster… a… a sh-am,” I cried, my voice breaking under the force of the word ‘sham’.

“Why honey, don’t say that”

“But it’s true!” I exclaimed, “There’s no way I can go back to it.”

“But you must, my love,” she said forcefully.

“And why must I?” I asked rather desperately, fishing for a reason that would console.

“How do you think we got here?” She asked, the import of her words made clear by the intent in her eyes. “It’s time,” she added, cryptically.

“Huh?”

As the sound left my mouth, my vision began to distort, pixelate, from the periphery in. I felt her hand grab mine.

“You’ll be fine, honey,” she assured me. “Trust in Māyā.” I couldn’t see her face any longer, only the amorphous mix of colour that suggested it. But her words struck the intended cord. I felt my body calm, my mind relax, my spirit surrender as I dissolved into the fabric of Reality; the fabric of the past, my present.

As I said: it was like any other morning, mostly…