Like I said, we’re living somewhere in the wilds of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. This is where we touched down, and we haven’t moved much since. Such is the way with quests. They take you where you need to be.

Bubba was the first person from your space and time to find out Leita and I are from the future. I would prefer no-one knew, but we had to tell Bubba because he was figuring it out on his own, and things were getting a little weird between us.

What happened is Leita and I searched the world, found a secluded place which still had internet access, and dropped in. Where we landed was a semi-abandoned outpost used by forest rangers. The outpost had everything we were looking for except Bubba. We weren’t looking for Bubba. We didn’t know he was squatting there when we set down. It happened he was on a hiking trip gathering information for a book he’s writing at the time. He had already been gone for a few days when we arrived. To us, the state of the place certainly looked like it was abandoned, and then possibly broken into by a bear, but as it turned out, it was only Bubba who broke in.

Big Bubba Haze. The name says it all, doesn’t it? Well, not really, but I doubt if you’d be too surprised if I told you Bubba’s of a philosophical nature, with occasional bursts of paranoia depending on what he’s smoking at the time. With this disposition, it took him no time at all to figure out something was up with Leita and I.

‘How come, there’s no tracks from you guys coming up to the lodge?’ he’d ask, or, ‘Why didn’t you bring any food and gear with you? How come you don’t know how anything around here works’?

It went on and on, and Leita and I weren’t being fed any backstory on this quest which usually tells you who you are in relationship with everyone else. Normally, you’re not walking in cold, and you can bullshit your way through things. We weren’t getting any backstory at all. We figured it was because we weren’t going to be doing much interacting up in the mountains of BC. Still, without the backstory, we had to make up stuff on the fly, and looking back, it was pretty lame. I can’t blame Bubba for thinking we were full of crap.

The BC bud can be blamed a little bit for me giving up our secret too. I should point out, in the future narcotics are designed on your specific genetic and psychological profile, and regulated by AI to optimize the personal experience. You have no idea what trippy can be, but the same can be said for BC bud. It has a way of coming round and kicking you in the ass if you’re not paying attention.

Here’s what the problem was. Of some of the best herb in the world, Bubba knew where the best of the best was. He knew all the legendary growers on the main and surrounding islands. Old burnouts, just like him, and he always had stuff that should have been smoked in an opium den. I’d smoke this stuff, right, and be talking and having a great time, and all of a sudden, ‘Waaaaah!!!!’ It would catch me off guard and I’d be fighting just to be coherent.

Something stronger than yourself momentarily invades your mind and identity, and takes control. At first I used to lock up, and I was done for the night. There were times I was so stoned I couldn’t talk, which was fine with Bubba, because he’d talk to a post if it didn’t run away from him. Finally though, he noticed my catatonic routine, and sees it for what it is.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

‘Whenever you get to that place,’ he says. You have to understand, okay I took this to change my state of consciousness, and now I’m in this new space. You have to let it flow through you, because the stone is too much for your brain to control. For a while, it’s bigger than you and you have to let it flow, not try to contain it. Let it become an extension of your consciousness. Let it flow right out of you and into the cosmos. Become one with everything by letting your consciousness radiate through you and into the heavens’.

You know, I did that. I pretended I had a release valve at the top of my head whenever the pressure got to be too much to contain. I’d just release the valve and all my pent up energy would flow from my brain and out of me. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say I was communing with nature, but I definitely felt I was sending my personal vibration out into nature, and all that entails. At first all my brain activity was inside my head, now it was there, but out there too, and rather than feeling out of control, I felt part of a greater something.

Anyway, we spent a lot of time getting stoned and talking. Like I say, Bubba loves to talk. Something unusual for a self-professed hermit. On several occasions, he’s kept me up half the night extolling the virtues of a life of solitude and monastic silence. Back then, it had become our habit to sit out on the porch at night smoking, talking, and staying connected to the stars. Leita usually sat inside by the window listening to our conversation and sometimes commenting. That way she could still play on the computer.

‘Ah, the stars are out tonight,’ Bubba said, taking a hit off his bong.

‘Yep,’ I said, taking a hit off mine.

The one thing Bubba had lots of, were bongs. No money. No real home, just lots of bongs. He said it was all he needed, him being an old hippie and all. How that makes sense, only he can explain, but the long and short of it was we each had our own bong, and hit it at our discretion.

‘Did you know, one of those stars up there is a galaxy,’ Bubba says. ‘Imagine that. Another entire galaxy just like the one we live in with billions and billions of stars in it. It’s so far away, it just looks like another star, and it’s the closest galaxy to us. That’s what blows my mind’. He took another hit. ‘There’s billions and billions more galaxies too. It makes you wonder what it’s all about, doesn’t it’?

‘Wait till you find the alternative universe,’ I said, without thinking. See what I said about this bud? It’s very easy to say something unthinking that you wished you didn’t say.

Bubba looked at me sideways. Leita murmured ‘dumbass’, from the window.

‘What are you talking about, alternative universe?’ he pounced on right away.

It wasn’t my reply that set Bubba off. It was my delayed reaction to my statement that gave me away. You know how when you’re stoned and something happens, and it takes your brain about an hour to process it? Like you say something stupid, and you start to turn it over in your mind privately, but the realization that it was stupid doesn’t come to you until way after everyone else has caught it. That’s kind of what happened to me, and of course you just about jump out of your skin, when you finally realize what you just said. That’s exactly the moment Bubba was looking at me, and saw me caught in a lie.

‘I knew it!’ he shouts, jumping from his chair. ‘I knew there was something about you two. What the hell are you? Aliens! Are you Aliens’?

We had to tell him the truth, because right away he started looking at us like we were going to pull out ray guns or something. Bubba can get quite paranoid when you strike the right chord, which is anything which smacks of conspiracy. We had to tell him the truth, or things would have fallen apart between us. It turns out he’s completely cool with everything. Our future is pretty much what he expected due to his many years of self-exploration driven by a constant intake of pot, mushrooms and DMT.