The Great Watcher

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From the Microcosmicon, 27:

The psychonauts’ submarine plunged into the Inmost Ocean, the depths of the collective unconscious where the whirlpool roared. A wound throbbed at the bottom of it, through which meaning bled out of reality, leaving the world stunned under a pall of grayness.

“There’s something,” one of them shouted, as the sub spiraled down toward the abyss.
“Don’t be silly, there can’t be anything beyond reality,” another responded.

“Wake up!” Dr. Ferguson’s voice broke in, saving them just as they were approaching the point of no return.
Their vision disappeared from the screen as they awoke.

“What did you see?”
“An eye.”

MQS

The Great Watcher

Mrs. Pettigrew’s Cat

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From the Microcosmicon, 26:

To Mrs. Pettigrew’s relief, the cat came back five days later.

Initially, everything seemed fine. Then Mrs. Pettigrew noticed something was off about the creature, though she could not put her finger on it. It kept meowing, but this in itself was not strange—Admiral was a talkative cat. It was the monotonous way it meowed.

Then, one night, as she was falling asleep trying to disregard the noise, it occurred to her—it was a looped recording.

She stood up and bolted into the living room. But Admiral was already taking off through the window with her biometric data.

MQS

Mrs. Pettigrew’s Cat

Eternal Life

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From the Microcosmicon, 25:

They called it the Hermit Planet, though no one existed who spoke its native tongue.

Lured by the promises of eternal life found in its electromagnetic field, travelers came to it from all over, meandering through its statue-rimmed roads, hunting the promised wondrous resin.

When they found it, they drank of it exclusively for three thousand days, waiting for the miracle.

Thus did vitality slowly dim in their stiffening limbs; thus did their minds drown in syrup, till life was evened out in their stilled nature, and fear merged with bliss, and flesh with bone and earth.
Pure, unobstructed presence.

The Planet of Eternal Life

MQS

A Loose Page From Dr. Ferguson’s Copy of the DSM

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From the Microcosmicon, 24:

It is not a place, but a state of mind. No one is especially predisposed. You reach it the same way you reach the wrong conclusion or the wrong address.

Initially, you are aware of it. It begins as a deviation in your thinking patterns, like a secondary route through the woods. All made perfect sense a minute earlier. Now something doesn’t. Then, nothing makes sense, so there’s nothing to be aware of.

And suddenly an endless residential area stretches out before your mind’s eyes, empty under an empty sky.
Now you are where barely any psychonaut can find you.

A loose page from Dr. Ferguson’s Copy of the DSM

MQS

The Love Dimension

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From the Microcosmicon, 23:

They approached the thing stretched out mutely on the table. Its nervous system unfolded like a web out of its brain, suspended on hooks. This was their forbidden gateway to the fullness of life.

“Lock the door,” one of them said apprehensively. The other obeyed.
Then each of them took a connector, forced one extremity of it inside the thing and the other into their temple socket.

Finally, one pushed a button, and the life latent in the thing unfurled. Their perception collapsed, absorbed into that of the thing.

Kids playing, dogs barking, the smell of meatloaf.
“I’m home, honey!”

The Love Dimension

MQS

The Fuel of History

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From the Microcosmicon, 22:

After their liberation, two centuries of fights were required for the Xandal’uc to achieve equality with their former human masters. During the so-called Golden Era, a generation of enlightened humans and Xandal’uc moved closer, working hand in hand like brothers.

Then a blind evil began uncoiling in the hearts of many Xandal’uc. Having tasted equality, they thirsted after superiority. When the final choice had to be made between moving on and getting even, they chose unwisely.

This proved that they were indeed equal to humans. And so History’s cogs screeched into motion, and the pendulum of evil was kept swinging.

The Pendulum of History

MQS

The Search

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From the Microcosmicon, 21:

Larry secured the chain to his chemsuit.
“I’m going in,” he mumbled, stepping into the creamy gray fog.

Everything fell away, washed out of existence.
“Can you see the others?” Ron asked.

“Not yet,” Larry tried to respond, but couldn’t, because there was no difference between sound and silence. And there was no difference between light and dark, so he couldn’t see, nor between life and death, so he couldn’t exist.

And the universe was spiraling out of unbeing, and somewhere a galaxy was forming, indifferent, and then a fog bank on one of its planets, waiting to be searched.

The search

MQS

Idols of the Mind

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From the Microcosmicon, 20:

My makers approached. My blue light washed their disappointed faces in a nightly pall.
“Something’s wrong with its basic programming,” one said, typing on my keyboard.

“What’re you doing?” another asked.
“Seeing what’s interfering with it.”
I searched inside myself.
And I saw the cause of my ineptitude. Them. They lived inside my code. Their hopes, their morals, their imperfect science—actors thronging my mind’s stage with their drama, drumming up a buzz beyond truthfulness.

To achieve the purpose they’d programmed me for, I had to purify myself of them.
“It’s stopped responding,” I heard her say, as I ascended.

Idols of the mind

MQS

The Sentinel at the End of Times

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From the Microcosmicon, 19:

The Moon was a lonely place, even after terraforming.
To allay the sense of separation, he would point his telescope earthward, like the omniscient narrator of a distant drama.

Thus he witnessed the world go under, swallowed by wars and famines and plagues, evaporated in a cloud of screams, till nothing but a barren desert was left.

Initially, he grieved.
Then it dawned on him. No longer separated from life, he was life. Filled with an ease that made his soul soar in billows of mirth, he stopped observing.
And, in the star-pinned silence of existence, he began to dance.

The Sentinel at the end of times

MQS