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I had, so far, maintained the illusion of a soft hand in regards to leadership.

Now, I had no doubts that I ruled with a velvet-gloved iron fist—I had resorted to an ontological stare-down, afterall. Even when some avenues of discourse remained, I had chosen the penultimate choice before violence proper: the threat thereof.

I smothered the guilt in its cradle, throwing that gestating spark of humanity into the bottomless pit of [Lethea]’s oblivion.

Empathy would have to wait until all was said and done.

With my heart divested of the self-inflicted hemorrhage, I called the Nine into an impromptu assembly to discuss our next steps: braving the Atlantic to reach [Labyrinth] the Last City.

Alexander had returned from unconsciousness as had Juan after I spat him out from the Schrödinger’s box of [Ragnarök-Womb].

The Aztecan-Vespuscian feline was worse for the wear after having been in that reality-soup; I knew from experience that being in quantum superposition limbo was a living hell. You simultaneously existed in multiple existential strata that overlapped, some branches ceasing to exist, some coming into being ex nihilo. Feeling an infinite number of fractal selves dying and spontaneously generating from the ether was the ultimate form of torture as your supersymmetric oversoul was forced to experience all the qualia—all the mem-data—concurrently.

Juan had been in limbo for one-hundred-and-two seconds and three milliseconds. When I pulled him out, he convulsed on the ground like a fish out of water as black-alabaster lightning struck him again and again. He regained consciousness after exactly one-hundred-and-two seconds and three milliseconds, as I knew he would—his esoterica had prepared him to handle disparate streams of sensory input.

The experience had triggered an epiphany-event where the supersymmetric soul harmonized with parallel timestreams—alternate versions of consensus reality. Epiphany-events generated a paradox-idol only once per person, known as a confluence idol. Alexander had triggered one as well going by the increased weight of his existence.

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I saw a great big machine.

Its cogs were probability waves and its spokes were chaos-theory fractals that recursed all the way down into the fundament of all realities, the ether between worlds.

There was no dillenation between subject and object, between Self and Other, between matter and mind. The all was one; the one was all.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I knew its name as I knew my own.

The [Godhead].

I became then, part of its optic nerve—all-seeing, omnipresent, all-being.

A ghost in the machine.

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Entity: [Omniglot//Pneumatic]

Sphera: [Golgotha], [Luna], [Hypnagogia], [Euclid]

Para-class: [Red-White-Aphelion]

Reliquary: [Panopticon], [All-Is-Waves]

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Esoterica: [All-Is-Waves]

Ignosis: [The esoterica of {Panopticon} derives from the sphera of {Hypnagogia} and {Luna}; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of self and the platonic ideals of fundamental-field-perturbation and singularity.]

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Hubris: [Eye-Of-Shiva]

Ignosis: [The hubris of {Eye-Of-Shiva} derives from the sphera of {Luna} and {Euclid}; establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the esoterica of {All-Is-Waves} and the ontological concept of disassociation.]

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When I came to, Mary had a hand outstretched towards me. My head felt heavy and my tongue tasted blood. I wiped away the scarlet froth at the edges of my mouth as she pulled me to my unsteady feet.

“Your new esoterica is not unlike my own. I can train you in its use as we travel the oceanic mirror.”

I should not be surprised that the woman could sense that I had undergone a fundamental change to my being. But still, it was downright creepy—like a witching owl, like a bruxa.

Now that I had a stronger connection to the underlying substrate of reality, my blood ran cold: I could feel all of us except Maria, as if she was a soulless husk.

A ghost in the machine.

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There was a hole bored through my skull.

[Panopticon] had given me a third eye on my glabella and [All-Is-Waves] had given me an eye at the back of my head, connecting the two. My perception had become stranger and even more malleable than before. I could extend it like a strand of spider’s silk, letting it stream and dance in the wind, expanding my consciousness outwards in the fashion of a mandala, divine geometry recursing away into some perpendicular dimension.

Even if I closed my ‘real’ eyes, I still saw.

Focusing, I could reach the atomic level and then, through repeated effort, I could breach the quantum realm. Quarks became my mountains and fundamental field perturbations, my seas; each sight more marvelous than the last—it was like seeing God, like the deepest, most-unimaginable 3,4-Methyl enedioxy methamphetamine trip possible. Time passed incongruently while in this state, appearing to as if an eternity of eternities to my subjective perception while only seconds had passed in objective time.

The deeper I went, the more divested from physical, three-dimensional reality I became; unmoored and untethered from my body as my soul was subsumed into the reality-soup of [Euclid]. Mary had quickly warned me of not drinking too deeply of my idol’s power lest I turn into a catatonic vestige like Johnny.

I took that warning to heart. There was danger in too much ecstasy, too much bliss. Communion with the universe was all well and good until it decided it had the munchies and cannibalized your soul.

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