Author: CommonsGuy

Hello Commons, here is chapter 8 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 8
Interspecies Mingling

WHOOP

With his late-night meditation session coming to an abrupt end, Sam jolts awake on top of the boulder overlooking the smoking fire pit at his campsite, called The Hillside Commons by the way, the pit still slightly aglow from the slowly whispering embers of a once roaring fire. His butt kind of hurts, and tiny little pebble fragments deroot themselves from his bare ankles as he stands up without using any hands. Tyler’s still fast asleep, doubtlessly exhausted from today’s Acidic highking trip, but Sam’s having some trouble getting there. It’s not the visual snow or the slight ringing in his ears that couldn’t stay on pitch to save its life, nor is it the feeling of his brain being so exhausted it can’t stop arbitrarily firing neurons for the hell of it. Those things all contribute to tonight’s insomnia, sure, but what’s really keeping Sam awake is the WHOOP he heard in the distance shortly after Tyler hit the hay.

There’s an old story about the woods of Quarryville, and the details always shift around regardless of who you ask. The only part that stays true is this: where there is now the Skunksville Reservoir, there was once the village of Skunksville.

As one man’s version of the story goes, before the unsuspecting residents of Skunksville had their land forcibly bought out from under them to be flooded by the US Government in the 1980s, there was this little circus attraction of sorts that loved to set up shop in the sleepy valley. In the final days before the flood, in an attempt to squeeze the last specks of evaporated milk from the shriveled udder of Treering’s favorite heifer, the circus’s owner Mister Bahrleigh purchased a very expensive bipedal ape creature, named Tiny Tim of all things, from some rich dude who was somehow able to procure said ape creature back then. On the night before the flood, Tiny Tim is said to have escaped the circus, and according to the legend, still resides in the forests bordering the reservoirs to this very day.

The creature, which Sam always thought was Treering’s made up version of a bigfoot, is said to communicate with its kind by whooping, and if you were ever hiking around in Treering’s forests after dark and you heard a whoop, it meant you were being hunted by a tribe of bigfoots (bigfeet?). But, if only one specimen of this invasive species was introduced into the local environment, and said specimen was male, as beings named Tim often are, how would it reproduce? How would there be more than one bigfoot if there was no lady bigfoot for Tiny Tim to practice his multiplication with?

This plot hole hatched the frankly asinine bar top rumor of the forest bride; the bigfoot, feeling the urge to pay forward its genes and promote the survival of its species, would spend its time lurking around the shallower parts of Treering’s forests, constantly on the lookout for any female human it felt was capable of bearing the load, so to speak; this woman was usually abnormally tall, rotund, and very hairy, which is a coincidentally accurate description of the wife of the man who was telling the story the one night Sam snuck in to the local watering hole. Humans are monkeys, just like bigfi are, so it totally makes sense, right?

It certainly did to Mister Daniels anyway, so he kept on telling the story. Until, that is, Sam interrupted him to bring up the fact that the entire premise of the forest bride was idiotic and it would never work because if bigfoot, or, sorry, if Tiny Tim was real, and it came from a tropical island off somewhere in the Specific Ocean, then its genetic makeup would be waayyy too far off-center to splice with that of a human’s, and the baby would come out a wet lump of snot-looking stuff. If it came out at all.

Neither Mister Daniels, the crowd around him, nor the bartender took kindly to Sam’s thrashing of one of the town staple’s favorite drunken rants, so the suddenly underaged boy was immediately thrown out of the establishment, along with quite a few empty beer bottles, the sandy remnants from which are still scattered in the parking lot to this day. That night, Sam walked home through the woods, being too young to drive legally, and was very unsurprised when he wasn’t hunted down and eaten by any bigfoots, or their forest brides, or their trademarked whoops. From that night on, he made it a point to go night hiking at least once a week, just to see if he would ever run into the fabled Tiny Tim, but in the years since he’s started this tradition, he never has. He’s heard the yelping of coyotes, sure, but never a bona fide whoop. Never even heard so much as a wip.

Until, that is, hardly an hour before the transition from the night of April 21^st, 2020 to the morning of April 22^nd, 2020, after he had spent his day cortex-deep in an LSD trip, the same trip in which he encountered a band of insect-like alien creatures in the woods that his tripping buddy Tyler has no memory of seeing.

Yes, it’s undoubtedly a fear that’s keeping Sam awake on this most average of nights. Not the fear of being eaten, not the fear of being mistaken for a skinny female bigfoot because of the long, unkept hair sprouting from his head, arms, and legs, but the fear of plummeting into insanity.

Years ago when Sam was still young and trapped in high school, his Principal would hold an annual assembly detailing the risks of taking drugs; he especially warned of the dangers that lie in wait for users of hal-yew-cinnogins, also known as Psychedelics, with a capital P because Sam likes them so much. Sam was warned that ingesting this Universe’s version of his favorite author’s Moksha Medicines could cause schizophrenia time and time again, but he never listened. The disease is considered the worst-case scenario as far as the mental health industry’s professionals are concerned while, at the same time, being considered the best-case scenario as far as the pharmaceutical industry’s professionals are concerned. His entire family is pretty crazy at baseline, and it’s not like he’s never felt any of the symptoms; unshakeable paranoia, auditory and visual hallucinations, coming off as an asshole to everybody around him and being treated as such, insomnia… hell, he’s felt all of these symptoms in the past twelve hours! Could it be that his sporadic drug use over the past few years of his life has irreversibly changed how his brain works… forever?

WHOOP

Sam begins to cry, unsure if the tears spilling from his eyelids are real or not. Then, self-aware over the fact he’s standing alone, in the dark, in the middle of the woods, crying by-and-to himself whilst his unparanoid friend sleeps soundly in a tent, he crouches down in the fetal position and continues to cry, sobbing all over his favorite tie-dye shirt and dribbling snot all over his exposed knees that are stretching the frayed holes of his favorite pair of jeans just a little bit wider. He can hear the words of old Mister P in his head now, almost as clearly as they sounded back in his straightedge days at Hoffman High: ‘Your neurons will catch on fire and burn out if you try them even once, the resulting sizzling causing you to see and hear things that aren’t actually there!’ Well he definitely hears the WHOOPs, ‘Oh fuck, there it was again,’ and he definitely thinks they’re real. He also thinks those eyes looking directly at him from up the trail are real. Those glowing, yellow eyes, hovering about eight feet off the ground… wait… what?????’

WHOOP

Sam takes off sprinting down the side of the hill away from The Hillside Commons, light on his feet and gaining speed as heavy, unlabored footsteps begin to follow him. Meanwhile Tyler, sitting on the throne of a kingdom in his dreams, is explaining to a machine elf why his buddy Cassio was allowed to fly so close to the sun.

Sam hits a quad trail that was once used to transport logs via horse-drawn carriage and skids, drifting so hard his bare callused feet begin to bleed – he feels every second of it, too. It’s not like when he wears those five-fingered toe shoes that runners love to hate; he likes to say that running in those feels like running barefoot, but the truth is, even with the minimalistic design, there’s still a hearty layer of rubber sole and cotton toe-sock between the flesh of his feet and the unforgiving crust of the planet, the same rubber sole that isn’t here to protect Sam’s exposed feet from the jagged rocks, splintering twigs, and rusty horseshoe nails that jut out from the dirt that makes up the unforgiving crust our soon to be mental patient prays doesn’t give him lockjaw as he beats feet away from his pursuer. The very pursuer that, as Sam reminds himself over and over as his feet grow rawer and rawer, might not even be there.

Whether or not Tiny Tim is actually chasing him down right now, Sam knows beyond any reasonable doubt that the dismay in the pit of his stomach is real. He legitimately feels like he’s going to be captured, maimed, and likely roasted over the campfire at his campsite until Tyler wakes up and meets the same fate, and maybe that’s all that matters. Maybe the splashing of bipedal ape feet through the muddy stream that Sam just leapt over isn’t real, but the dread that’s inching up his chest in the shape of a beefy, callused hand just dying to rip the heart from his chest is real. There are two ways to face fear at the end of the day, and they’re both conveniently hardwired into the human brain: one can fight it, or one can take flight. And, facing the fact that there’s a very tiny (Tim) chance this towering ape creature actually is real and attempting to fight it would be the textbook definition of a fool’s gamble, Sam has one option: take flight.

He bites his bottom lip to distract himself from the foot pain and focuses, putting into action all the bodily control techniques he’s learned through his self-guided meditation practice. ‘See only with the third eye,’ Sam says in his mind, ‘let it all fade, see only with the third eye.’

These symbols, meaningless in ninety-nine percent of the other times Sam’s repeated them to himself, activates something inside him tonight; he feels a pressure, like someone was poking him in the forehead, and he senses what feels like a torrent of fluids rushing up his spinal column. The forest brightens just enough for him to see the log that’s fallen across the trail ahead of him before he trips on it – he hurdles the bastard, landing on his feet that suddenly don’t hurt anymore.

Sam picks up speed and the hot breath he felt on the back of his neck a moment ago backs off. The stomping doesn’t slow down, but it quiets, the distance between the two monkeys growing until Tiny Tim can hardly see the human who he’s just trying to have a simple conversation with.

Tim WHOOPs in succession three times, hoping to convey to the human boy that he’s an intelligent being and not a bloodthirsty cretin as he tears down the trail in hot pursuit. Tim leaps across a stream, not wanting to get more mud caked in his already matted leg fur, and mounts a hill just to be taken by gravity as he carries himself deeper into the forest. Eventually the old logging road delivers Tim to a graveyard, the relocated (as detailed by the nearby sign that he reads) graveyard of the family that founded the town which held that blasted circus attraction that stranded him here in the first place. Maybe stranded isn’t the right term – it’s not like this is a terrible exchange for the island home he can never return to on account of the indigenous fruit having trouble growing from charcoal – but the isolation is beginning to wear on him. One can only talk to coyotes so much before one feels that dire itch of mange.

Tiny Tim searches around the wall lining the graveyard and finds no signs of humanity. The trail ends here, where could humey possibly have gone? Gah – questioning himself has never gotten Tim anywhere, why should he start now?

Always a bit sketched out by graveyards, Tim-nah’tee does one more sweep of the perimeter before giving up and finding a suitable stick to carve a circle into the exposed dirt around him. He then sits down in that circle in the lotus position and starts throwing hand signs, ending with a loud clap that causes his entire hulking figure to be swallowed by a radiant orb of white light. The orb then floats off the ground and shoots into the sky over Bored Mountain, taking a sharp turn and flying over the forest until it lands on that strange mountain that Tim can only sometimes find when he’s exploring around back here.

Certainty

Back at the campsite, as he’s engulfed by the foul-smelling smoke that billows from the fire pit as he pisses on the embers that he figured Sam would have extinguished before he packed it in for the night, Tyler sees an orb flying through the sky and lets his dick dangle, rubbing his eyes and immediately regretting the decision when he feels a light drizzle on his feet.

The same orb that Dakota, sleeping alone in his bedroom as he does the entirety of his nights, confuses for a robot, giving him an excuse to late-night-text Isabelle.

The same orb that Isabelle sees from her bedroom window moments after ignoring yet another weirdly provocative text from Dakota, causing her to debate late-night-texting Jack. She wimps out and texts Tyler instead, asking if he convinced Sam to teach her some of his magic tricks yet.

Tyler doesn’t answer this text, just like Sam doesn’t answer Tyler’s Goodnight, asshole grumble as he crawls back into his tent. Sam would have clapped back with an equally grumbly Goodnight, holeass if he was half-sleeping in his tent, but he’s on the other side of the woods right now, peeking out from behind the metal tower marking the grave site of the late Mary Skunks who passed away at the young age of eighteen years, ten months, and eleven days back in the early 1900s.

Now, more than a century later, this little lady’s burial ground was used as a hiding place for a boy who isn’t even sure that he just witnessed an otherworldly orb rise into the sky, and she’s none too thrilled about it, either. Her family built their town from the ground up on one principle – certainty. Nobody else had the vision of her dad, saw the potential he saw, but nobody else needed to, a sentiment that Sam feels as it emanates from the dirt that fills the gashes in his feet as he walks over the decomposed casket that holds Mary’s bones on his way out of the graveyard.

On his walk back, this newfound yearning for certainty in his life inspires Sam – while he doesn’t know why his family is so broken, he decides right then and there that one thing is for certain: he doesn’t want it to be broken anymore. And what’s the one thing that his family feels separates them? His drug use, specifically the Cannabis. Don’t get him wrong, if Sam’s family knew about the LSD they wouldn’t exactly throw him a party, but he’s managed to keep those papers out of his mom’s filing cabinet that she uses as a bottle stash this long. Our lost wanderer takes out his cell phone and, after setting up an alarm to go off a half hour before the ass crack of dawn, he brings up Jack’s contact page. Sam formulates a text that he knows will get his brother’s attention, regardless of the fact that he’s sleeping up at Dakota’s house tonight.

A Minute Before Midnight

One period of time equal to the delay between the sender sending and the receiver receiving a text message, Jack walks out of the bathroom in Chuck’s skunky bedroom with his hands clenching his stomach. He feels his pocket buzzing and takes out his cell phone, the nausea kicking right back up when he reads Sam’s name on the screen. By the time the phone bounces against the carpet, Jack is heaving into the toilet once more, wishing his body would just finish cleaning itself of that nasty CBD shit that he didn’t mean to drink earlier so this dreadful rebound anxiety can stop.

Out in the office, Fleurna is keeping a very close eye on Chuck, still peacefully sat in his lotus position, showing no signs of having a bad trip. Ace and Sigmund enter through the office doors, the former walking and the latter waddling because their jaunt around the roof exhausted him so much. They’re engrossed in a very loud conversation, which at least one of the pair obviously wants the entire room to hear, about Ace’s lack of any fucking idea regarding a transmitter…

“…or whatever you called it. That’s not why we came here. If you looked up to and respected my species as much as you claim to, you would have listened earlier when I told Chuck that we came here specifically for him to trip on our space drugs.”

Sigmund’s proverbial tail is dunked between his legs and held there until it drowns. His plan of peer pressuring Ace to admit that they came here for Sigmund and not Chuck failed miserably.

“Well… whatever happened to it, then? Your satellite sent me coordinates, which I followed to the twentieth decimal point, may I add, and there was nothing there. I just don–”

“That’s not my problem, humey. If it weren’t for that hippie kid earlier, I swear to Energy I would be harboring a whole new disdain for your entire species. Ugh!” he ughs, slowly watching himself become the very thing he would hypothetically disdain. Catching himself before his frequency drops too far, Ace approaches Fleurna and sits on the opposite side of the circle to face her.

“How’s he doing?”

“Well, the building hasn’t collapsed, so that’s a good sign. When he commanded the Dee-eff-Zee-Tee with such ease earlier I thought he would go in and out, twenty-minute trip. But it’s literally a minute before midnight now and he’s still wading through it.”

“Wonderful. Well, at least the planet isn’t finna rumble again. That shit was… I mean, what the hell? What could that have been?”

“I don’t know…” Fleurna wonders, sensing Jack’s gastro-intestinal distress. “At least Jack’s back to his old self. I liked the Moksha version, but I suppose true enlightenment has to be earned.”

“That it does, that it do. Hey, at least he’s in some form aware that he doesn’t have to be so neurotic all the time.”

“Yeah… hey, maybe it–

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 7.75 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 7.75
Space Drugs II: The Afterglow

Jarius And Bill

When he comes to, the moon is halfway across the sky. It’s not quite midnight yet but it’s pretty damn close, close enough to warrant the generation of end of day reports in Apex’s shipping department, anyway. Having kept a sturdy lotus position throughout the duration of his strange hallucinatory experience, Sean Hymarc unfolds his legs and stands, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and intently picking out the one he flipped upside down when he first opened the little cardboard box.

As he lights his cigarette, Hymarc’s quite amused when he sees Edvard holding not just one, but both of the aliens at bay with his disintegration pistol, the formers looking none too thrilled about being stuck in this bullshit situation. All they were trying to do was carry out the will of their current Universe, and what do they get? A fucking weapon pointed at their heads.

“Doctor, lower your gun. What they said was true, their space drugs indeed sent me on a journey. I was alone in a forest, a clear path laid ahead of me. I ascended a mountain trail that led me to a wise old man who lived in a cabin, and he let me in on a little secret.”

Edvard, gun still trained on the unruly purple creatures that made multiple attempts at his life during the shockwaves resulting from all that commotion across town, asks his boss what secret that would be.

“My place in the Universe, my Good Doctor. The purpose of my life; who, or rather what, I truly am.”

Sean turns his attention to G1-Zm0, Ray, KingPig, and Wolf. They all have their individual weapons trained on both intruders’ various body parts.

“Boys, do any of you know when the girls will be back?”

“I can send out a return request,” G1-Zm0 clanks. “They could all be back here by tomorrow morning.”

The rest of the three grunt in agreement, not taking their eyes off their assigned alien limb that doesn’t have to stay attached to its purple body, necessarily.

“Good, do it,” as he turns towards the window, taking a surprised step backwards when the lack of daylight graces his brain. “Well, I didn’t realize it was night already. Wasn’t… didn’t I sit down in the afternoon? And, is that… what’s that smoke coming from my future base of operations? Is it on fire or something?”

“Yes, sihr, but you vere out for quite some tiem. I vas actually quite vorried, hence vhy I have zeese griftas under ze point of mine gun. Vhi–”

“Oh for god’s sake, just let me explain it,” Wolf groans, unable to deal with Doc Torpol’s Nazi-ass accent. “While you were tripping something happened across town boss, some kind of explosion or shockwave or something. Ray and I, and Gizmo and Kay-Pee, technically, although they didn’t have much of offer… anyway, we all discussed it thoroughly while you were entranced.”

“Okaaay,” Hymarc begins, now with two lit cigarettes hanging out of his mouth, one half burned and one lit just a moment ago. “And? Get to where you’re going or don’t get to going, Seven.”

“Well, the running theory around here is that the tower belongs to your prime competitor, whoever that may be, correct?”

Off in the corner of the room, hiding underneath window planter Alpha-Beta, Alvey Fratto begins to perspire, and without even a banana peel to wipe up the sweat. He knows that nobody told him to eat the peel, he doesn’t need to remind himself, but he gets very hungry when he’s stressed. And overworked. And tired. And cranky. And hungry.’

“Well, that said,” Wolf continues, actually unaware that Alvey is still in the room, “it would be logical to assume that, as the first major stockholder in this city, he is aware of the second major stockholder in this city, the latter being you. Now, follow with me here: maybe he’s planning something. Or she, maybe she’s planning something, something big. A weapon of some sort so he can buy up your acquisitions and assets to assert a more dominant grip on New Manhattan.”

“We don’t know what percentage he owns,” Ray adds, “but it can’t be much more than yours. That kind of wealth, even in this metropolis, it just doesn’t exist like that. You own eight percent, he probably owns ten or twelve, and if he can’t make that a flat twenty, he likely at least wants to get it to what was once the legal driving age.”

“Hah, you ‘member dat slop sheit? Forcin’ us to go tha Dee-Em-Vee ‘nd driave ‘round in circles wit’ sum creaky old lady, just hopin’ she’s in a good mood and she don’t fail us. Fuck it, fuck it all,” KingPig drawls.

Hymarc waits for the explanation to finish and, when he realizes it had, he lazily shakes his head and meanders over to the window to gaze at his next achievement. “So… why the smoke?”

“Oh, uh,” Wolf fumbles, “we don’t really know. It probably blew up in their faces, whatever they were planning. Or maybe it was unrelated, there’s really no way to be sure.”

“Okay,” Hymarc mumbles, his brain working overtime. “I have my plan.”

“Hold that thought, big man!” Bill shouts through the barrel of Torpol’s disintegration pistol, the trigger mechanism of which could have been better designed by a two-year-old back on Fuego. “Our job is complete, we need to go home.”

Sean looks at the aliens out of the corner of his eye, realizing that they never told him where they came from and not caring even a microscopic bit.

“No, no I don’t think so. You see,” he says, pulling out a blank sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolding it – the back, just for clarification, is blank too; Sean Hymarc just carries blank pieces of paper around with him, just in case he gets a little peckish – “I have a mission to do, a mission fueled by my newfound purpose and power in this Universe. I haven’t felt this woke in a long, long time. So, you won’t be going anywhere until you complete my commands, the list of which I may add to at any time.”

He takes a bite out of the piece of paper and puts it back in his pocket, commenting that it helps keep him regular when everybody gives him a weird look.

A platform then lowers from the ceiling, loaded with a notebook, a pencil, and two black collars with large blacker cubes sewn to the sides. KingPig and Ray each come over and take a collar, strapping them to both aliens’ necks. The aliens share a glance, their eyes bursting with laughter like the Onyx Moon when Moron detonated the less-than-faux explosive, sans the laughter. Then, the weapons are pointed at them again, which is getting so old.

“On this list, when it’s done, I will have a few com– I mean, and meant, demands. One: you will provide me with more of that… Doctor, what did they call the drug?”

“Zhey called et Tryptamine, to vhich I argued seeing how zhere are literally oodles of tryptamine compounds in zhe human brain, not to mention zheir likely inclusion in zhe neurochemical makeup of zhe aliens’ own brains. I do not trust zhem, sir, not vhun bit.”

As Hymarc speaks, he scribes along in his notebook. “Very well. One: you surrender your entire supply of the so-called Tryptamine to myself, The Good Doctor, KingPig, Gizmo, and-slash-or Ray,” leaving Wolf feeling more left out than Alvey, who still has yet to be acknowledged by his freshly woke boss. “Two: you will give me a detailed explanation of how the crystal changed, from solid form, into a gaseous powder and then into a perforated tab of paper similar to that which one would use to distribute and consume lysergic acid diethylamide, the only psychedelic drug acceptable for human use. For now. Thir– what the fuck?”

Jarius and Bill literally vanish, their collars landing on the tile floor with a cheap plastic clack. The shell of the collar once around Jarius’s neck cracks upon impact. The MERCs are embarrassed and, following Doctor Torpol’s lead, they all holster their weapons.

Hymarc gingerly approaches and looks around. He then stomps his foot on the floor where the prisoners were standing, hoping to find some sort of trap door or something that would have allowed such a daring escape before remembering that this is my goddamned building and if there was a trap door here I would damn well know about it. You’re an idiot Sean, you’re a goddamned fool.’

Across the city, over top of the building Sean sweats over daily, also known to a very select few (including you) as Cape Enterprises, Uncorporated, a drastically less visible than carbon monoxide silver flying disk floats about fifty feet skyward before adjusting its angle and shooting off into the stars, leaving no trail, causing no sound, and alerting nobody in the city, especially the two Zeroc that decided to stay behind in the Cape headquarters.

“This… does not make a difference,” Hymarc says, practicing the rage management techniques he acquired from the classes that he was made to star taking ten years ago. He only had to attend ten classes, the classes running five times a week, but he’s been showing up ever since. Not necessarily because he enjoys them, and certainly not every day, but because the classes offer a fantastic networking opportunity. Where else would he find humans stupid enough to accept a job as a research dummy to a large corporation they’ve never heard of? If they’re dumb enough to believe anger can be managed, they’ll believe anything!

“Ray, Wolf, you have a new mission as of tonight. You are to go to the warehouse,” turning his piercing daggers towards G1-Zm0, “the warehouse where we lost half a man and came out with two-thirds of a cyborg,” returning to Ray and Wolf, “and retrieve the extraterrestrial device we recovered from the crash. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to activate it. When KingPig and Rose originally brought the thing there I had them lock it in the trunk of one of my old cars for safety, so as long as you don’t open the trunk, you’ll have no problems. Clear?”

“Crystal!” they say in unison, one significantly more excited than the other.

“Excellent. Doctor, I need you to embark on a search. I don’t know where Fratto ran off to, but we must find him, I have a very special assignment brewing that only he can handle.”

“Oondahstood.”

Alvey almost gets up and spr– well, does his version of sprinting over to The Good Doctor and President Hymarc, but he is literally wedged beneath the planter, his body fat swollen from the stress of sitting in a crammed position for so long. Alvey Fratto is trapped in what nobody else in their right mind would describe as a crevice, with no idea how to get out.

“And KingPig, you are free to go wallow in your mud. After, I shall add, you prepare the common room and the girls’ bedroom for their return from their mission and-slash-or missions. Good?”

“I like ta wallow in da mud, ye!”

“Beautiful. Now, everybody get the fuck out of my sight, and more importantly, my office.”

All of Hymarc’s employees file into the elevator and ride it down to the various floors they need to be on. Even Alvey, who’s body was lubricated just enough to worm his way out of the crevice by a sudden hot-flash-induced sweatstorm, joins Doctor Torpol to look for Alvey Fratto The Coffee Man. Meaning The Good Doc doesn’t recognize him by face, by voice, or by smell. This is good for Alvey, at least that last part is.

President Hymarc, on the other hand, goes to his desk and picks up one of the novelty bottles of sand that he purchased from his last vacation to Hawaii with Doctor Torpol. He removes the crumbling cork stopper and, after digging through the part that gets stuck in the bottle with the secret pen he carries on him at all times, he spills the sand in a neat little circle next to the wall-windows that line his office. He then sits down in this circle, legs folded under him, and closes his eyes, sinking deep into meditation over the implications of what he learned during his spacey alien drug experience.

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 7.5 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 7.5
Chuck Refuses To Experiment With Space Drugs

What If

“Well, I suppose there’s only one thing we can do,” Fleurna says, looking towards the office’s entrance. “Go get Ace and force him off the roof.”

Just then, a muffled ding squeezes its way through the crack between the glass doors. A moment later in walks Ace, his hands clasped behind his back and closed around a sizeable Z,Z-DifZoral Tryptamine crystal that nobody else is aware of.

Before anyone has a chance to say anything, Ace singles out Chuck and backs him into a wall. “Hey there friend, it’s your turn.”

“What in the fuck did you just say? I’m not doing that shit, you hear me? Chuck refuses to experiment with space drugs. Refuses.”

“So, funny story: you actually are going to experiment wit–”

“Ace, no,” Fleurna chimes in. “It’s too dangerous, what if–”

“Who gives a fuck what if?” Ace scolds, then turns his attention back to Chuck. “Listen to me, human. I’ve been kicking around this starscape for millenia of millenia, you know what that means? I was born literally millions of years ago, as far as you know, and nothing like that has ever happened to anybody who’s taken this stuff. Never not once… do you concur, Fleurna?”

Fleurna says nothing, knowing Ace has a point but decidedly staying very averse to taking a risk with these psychotic monkey creatures.

“My point exactly. It was a fluke and I handled it. We handled it. It got a little dark, buh–”

“A little?” Jack pips. “Fuck you, alien, that wuh–”

“Before you finish that sentence, you pale-skinned hairless ape, you better decide whether you want to talk about the first three quarters of your trip or that last forty-two seconds you lack memory of. Because, for me, I focus on the good instead of wallowing in the low-frequency bullshit like a pathetic little Krathi who thinks big is stupid because I’m the size of a fuckin’ walnut. You crackin’ my egg here? Fryin’ my yolk?”

Jack genuinely debates arguing with the epochs-old being, but decides the attempt would be null. Especially when he can be tricked into doing that drug again.

“Fine… I don’t really want to admit it but… the first part of the, whatever you want to call it, the trip… it was beautiful. It made me understand things that I had never understood before, things that I completely forget now, by the way. What’s that all about?”

“That is the Universe doing what it does best: being smarter than you and doing what She needs to do. Through me. Everything that happens…” sigh “happens because it’s supposed to happen.” To Chuck, “And Fleurna and I came here to give you a trip, Chuck. Not Jack, not Sigmund, but you.”

“Then why dih–”

“When a choice opportunity to pop open an adolescent human’s tightly locked doors of perception came about, I seized the moment, carped the ass out of that diem. Unfortunately, it resulted in a neuro-electrical seizure, but we all got out okay. Not that many humans died, relatively speaking, and the ones that did die were supposed to pass, so says the Universe because, well, because it happened. So,” as he turns to Fleurna, who’s already uncorking the vial that contains the circle powder. “Wow, you’re way ahead of me. I love it!”

Ace backs off Chuck and hands him the DfZT crystal, returning to his position at Chuck’s desk, this time hovering lotus above it instead of sitting in his seat. Fleurna does that magical hand-waving that Chuck loves to watch and readies the circle, this time making it just big enough for one human to occupy. She then looks over at Chuck and winks, gesturing to the circle.

Chuck makes an audible gulp sound and slowly walks into the circle, causing himself an immense amount of pain by folding his legs overtop one another and forcing himself into the lotus position once more. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, the crystal dusting and reshaping itself into a small bong this time around, complete with a bowl full of Cape Cookies Redux: The Sexy Alien Edition. Slowly but surely he brings his ringed middle finger to the mouth of the packed bowl. A small flame flickers from beneath his fingernail.

Chuck looks back at Sigmund for confirmation. Sigmund gives Chuck a shrug, nonverbally telling him that he has no idea what the right move is, so Chuck looks at the back of Jack’s head and decides that he won’t get validation from there, either. Chuck then looks to Ace, who serves him up a platter of a more dramatic version of Sigmund’s reaction. Just as he’s about to extinguish the flame again, he feels a soft pair of lips kiss him on the cheek.

‘Greatness does not appear out of thin air, Chuck…’ Fleurna begins in his head, Ace finishing the sentence out loud with, “…it is forged in fire and pressure-cooked in the collision point between two rogue planets.”

Ace then turns to Fleurna, smiles, and says, “And I’m sorry that I forgot that.”

With his lungs filled with smoke milliseconds after the kiss lands on his cheek, Chuck falls into a deep trance, managing to keep his body upright for the duration of the trip while entirely missing that nonsense that Ace and Fleurna were going on about.

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 7.25 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 7.25
Let’s Jump Off The Roof

Perfect Harmony

“Hey buddy. How uh, how ya doin’?”

Ace says nothing, the being suspended in perfect stillness as he watches life happen around him in perfect harmony, a harmony that once made sense, that was once real; now, it’s nothing more than a veil, a shroud, an illusion to distract the fools oblivious enough to think they have a handle on it from the murky blackness that lies in wait underneath, salivating, hungry. ‘So voraciously, unstoppably hungry.’

“But you stopped it, though.”

Ace twitches. He does not like it when humans read his mind.

“Ace, listen to me. What happened in there… out here… it was real fucked up. I know because I watched it transpire, I sa–”

“You… what?” Ace mutters as he descends to the roof, his legs unfolding to catch his body on the ledge. He then spins and advances on Sam, clutching him by the throat and flying him across the roof, slamming him down on the opposite edge, the human’s curly brown locks dangling freely off the ledge.

“You insolent little fucking termite, you parasite! You watched all that transpire and you didn’t intervene?! The Zeroc are GODS to these lower creatures, you twit! You, you… I don’t even fucking know you!” as he lifts and bashes Sam’s skull against the concrete beneath him, causing the nanoconcrete ledge to crack. It repairs itself with a liquid haste. “But I can sense you, there’s a great power lying within you… an evidently fucking dormant power, but a power nonetheless, one that rivals my own, maybe even surpasses it… yet you dared to sit idly by on the sidelines, you befoul the strikethrough that separates you from the rest of these mere mortals and you have the audacity to come up here and say it to me?! To my fucking back no less?!”

Sam attempts to speak but his words come out as wet gargles, so Ace slightly loosens his grip. Slightly.

“You were facing away from me, how else co–” choking noises.

“My fucking point exactly.”

As he spits the word exactly, Ace raises his free hand towards the heavens and a dark cloud forms in the otherwise clear sky. From this cloud a bolt of lightning strikes, drawn to Ace’s open palm as if it was a lightning rod and leaving an impossibly sharp and jagged dagger in the place of a burn mark. He spins the weapon and grips it by the handle, bringing the tip down and resting it on the middle of Sam’s forehead, in the same spot that, on Fleurna’s head, a third eye opened.

“For all I know, you caused all this mayhem. Give me one reason I shouldn’t dig your pineal gland out and find out for myself what makes you tick, fiend. One fucking reason,” before loosening his stranglehold just enough for oxygen to pass through the human’s windpipe.

“Because… you… stopped it…”

Ace tightens his grip once more, scrutinizing the noises that he allowed passage through Sam’s mouth.

“What do you mean?”

When Ace loosens his grip again, Sam explains. “It wasn’t me Ace, I would never do something like that. Whatever it was inside Jack’s head that caused this Universe to tremble, you stopped it. It’s true, I sat on the sidelines and watched, but I was strapped into those sidelines. I was barred down, incapacitated, restrained by who even fucking knows what.”

‘A cold, dead hand.’

“I tried everything I know, everything you taught me, and more, to break in and save my little brother, whom I love more than he’s even capable of understanding, more than you’re even capable of understanding. But something stopped me. Something blocked me, and I don’t know what it was–”

‘That dreadful maw.’

“–but the thing knew I was coming, it expected me. Or, at least… something did. And that something was clearly on the side of… of… whatever you encountered in that most sacred dimension of reality.”

‘A golden, human-like face, gleaming in Jack’s light.’

The dagger disintegrates, mentally reduced to a fine dust before being swept away by a gust of wind on this otherwise still evening. Ace releases his grasp on Sam’s throat, leaving visible ligature marks on the kid’s neck.

Sam throws himself past Ace and lands in the middle of the roof where he begins to gasp for air, his lungs verbally berating him for allowing them to go so long without that goodgood. He thinks he hears Ace say something but it’s hard to be sure, what with all the struggling and flailing around he’s doing.

Finally, a few minutes later when he returns to balance, Sam croaks, “What?”

“You said that you tried everything I taught you. This has been a… strange day, to say the least, and I’ve seen my share of strange days through my wide-open doors of perception. What I’m trying to say is… well, frankly, some off-ish timeline nonsense already happened today so… I suppose it’s possible that you’ve met me, but I have yet to meet you. I suppose.”

Sam, wobbling to a stand, brings his hands together repeatedly for a slow cap that does not help his cause right now.

“Sorry, but from my point of view you’re just catching up. Yes Ace, you’ll be meeting me soon. We share some crazy experiences together, I think, and you’re the closest thing to a father I’ve ever had. You always looked out for me, even when you were blinded.”

‘Blinded?!’ as Ace puts on a shocked face, to which Sam replies, “Metaphorically speaking, sorry. But… yeah. You and I have a lot of shit to go through yet, said from your end of the table, and we aren’t going to be able to go through it if you don’t bring that shit to the table, or that table to the room that I assume the table is in, for that matter. Look Captain, something unexpected and impossible happened to my brother and you saved him; it may have caused a lot of damage to the city, but imagine if you didn’t intervene! That shit could have spread to more minds than just my brother’s… yanno, maybe. I’m not really sure how all this works, I just kind of appear and disappear to be honest. Everything I say just kind of pops into my head as I’m saying it, it’s sort of uncomfortable. What I do know, though, is that everything that happens happens because it’s supposed to happen, so why are we crying over spilled milk when a cat came and lapped it all up?”

“So what do I do then, Mister Guru?” Ace snaps. “The integrity of the Dee-eff-Zee-Tee dimension is compromised, it’s not safe to trip there anymore. That’s all we have… it’s a fucking bottomless well, sure, but it’s all we have.”

“What do you mean it’s compromised? If that were true then we’d both be nonexistent, and so would Fleurna. It was breached, maybe, or maybe there’s been something living inside of it for a long time. Who knows? And who cares? The threat’s gone, you saved the day. And as a reward for doing so, you… what, sit alone on a roof, doubting your purpose? Oh, Existence threw us a curveball, let’s jump off the roof, durr-hurr. Like, really? Questioning your own existence? Man give me a break, that’s the weakest shit I’ve ever heard. And I’ve heard Zaxus’s comedy.”

A shiver runs down Ace’s spine at the mention of those last two words that shall never be repeated. And then, somehow, he smiles. “Fine, but what do I do now?”

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 7 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 7
Space Drugs

Spacelady

ding

Chuck, Sigmund, and then Jack walk out the elevator and into the lobby, the formers having an in-depth discussion about whether or not aliens would care even a little bit if the humans called them aliens or extraterrestrials, Chuck arguing that, seeing how they’re capable of traveling through space, they’re clearly higher beings and they probably don’t give a shit about verbal labels used by lower lifeforms, and Sigmund countering with basic NewMann pronoun theory. Meanwhile, Jack can’t stop uncontrollably gagging over the smell of Sigmund’s flatulence mixed with Chuck’s favorite herbal air freshener. As they approach the panes of glass that door the Cape Enterprises, Uncorporated office, the conversation stops dead in its tracks, similarly to Chuck, Sigmund, and then Jack when he walks into their backsides. Young Monta watches the two adult men share a look before Chuck shoves Sigmund into the wall and damn near barges into his office, like he saw something captiva–

Before he even enters the office, Jack is utterly thunderstruck by the purple-skinned goddess sitting at the front desk.

She resonates there so effortlessly, not quite like she owns the place but as if she is the place, as if she’s the physical embodiment of the entire Universe herself. The creature’s likely voluptuous body is elegantly draped in an airy white cloak with purple gilding around the frays, and her silver hair shines through the smokescreen flowing fluidly from her lips like a babbling brook. Her strong yet delicate hands hold Chuck’s favorite bong, a repurposed bottle of absinthe shaped like Die Glocke equipped with a bowl that dwarfs that of the bongibus, and her eyes; they could bring the most sought-after death to any man lucky enough to be turned to stone by gazing into them. And they’re even two different colors, my word! Never has a human witnessed such beauty poured into a single living thing – her left iris a glimmering bluish-silver and the right a deep, mystical violet. Yes, Jack was right on the money; this being is surely a goddess, she must be! Her presence is enlightening, her stare intoxicating, her aura… wait, what are we talking about?

Oh yeah; the cosmic beauty looks up from her instrument and locks eyes with Chuck, then Sigmund, then Jack, and then again with Chuck. She smiles and closes her eyes before placing the bong down and folding her legs into the lotus position. She then gracefully floats over Karen’s desk to greet the humans. Said humans are one more spacey feat away from reverting into dogs and howling at whatever moon this spacelady came from.

She hovers a few feet off the ground in front of the humans and allows her legs to unfold. Once standing, the muse slowly opens her eyes and laughs in her mind when she realizes how short humans still are. Then she says, “Hello there. You must be Chuck, Jack, and Sigmund.”

Waiting for at least one of the humans to speak up and being let down, the being continues. “My name is Fleurna, and I have been tasked with sending one of you on a trip of sorts. Specifically…” as she points a finger at the ceiling, allowing anticipation to build before bringing it down in the direction of Chuck, “you, Mister Leary.”

“Please, for the love of Cannabis, call me Chuck. Mister Leary was my fa–”

Fleurna giggles, her voice light and fluffy as a pillow made of kitten fur, yet sharp enough to cut Chuck off mid-word. “No, he wasn’t. My captain wishes to speak to you three; please, right this way.”

She turns and they follow, two out of three of their jaws catching a case of carpet burn from scraping against the floor and the third jaw dangling haphazardly above the throne of the prince of hell, the chin hairs of his goatee tickling the top of Mephistopheles’s head. Around the corner, sitting at Chuck’s desk with his feet up while he waits for the humans to grasp the reality in front of them, is a purple man; not man in the human sense of the word, but man in the… well, man’s not the right word. Perhaps god is; as far as Jack is concerned, these aliens are gods.

Alien Gods

When he was younger, Jack would often find himself entranced by mythological tales from human cultures of the past; while many believe the gods of old were vague anthropomorphizations of forces of nature and whatnot, our TerryTeammate always knew deep down inside that the gods of the folklore of the past were early humanity’s misinterpretation of extraterrestrials that visited the young planet Earth and influenced the development of the human species. Golden chariots, a city in the clouds, flying machines; either ancient humans were constantly hallucinating, or they were struggling to understand what they saw. Having only his distant ancestor’s descriptions and crude cave-wall depictions to go off, Jack always wondered what these alien gods might have really looked like. Fleurna fits the bill wonderfully for the Athenas and the Aphrodities, but what of the Zeuses? What of the Horuses and the Ras?

As he rounds the corner, Jack’s curiosity is satiated.

Moksha Medicine

The being removes his feet from the desk and sits up straight with his hands folded. His flowing silver hair is longer than Fleurna’s. He’s wearing a jumpsuit similar in design to Fleurna’s cloak except more skintight (which should be the other way around as far as Chuck is concerned), with the addition of silver-rimmed aviator’s glasses with lenses that are black at the top and fade to a brilliant violet at the bottom. He removes these shades, much cooler than Chuck’s plain black square-ass sunglasses, and crushes them into dust in his hand as he stares down each of the humans, looking not at them but through them, past their eyes, past their souls, into the very frequency of the energy that composes the charmingly strange quarks that compose the building blocks of their entire Existence, let alone their bodies. Then he smiles, floating over the desk and landing on two feet to embrace first Sigmund, then Jack, and finally Chuck, in warm, loving hugs.

Chuck just now notices that the aliens are much taller than he is and, in the presence of Fleurna, feels a need to assert dominance.

“So you must be the captain Fleurna was talking about, then,” Chuck says, his words coming out entire tones lower than his normal speaking voice. “I too am a captain, not of a spaceship but of this entire tower. And the company housed within, and of the city in which the entire tower and the company held within resides. Cape Enterprises, Uncorporated, by the way.”

The being’s head, a full foot and a half higher off the floor than the top of Chuck’s fedora, smiles, saying nothing.

As he folds his arms and flexes in an attempt to puff himself up, Chuck tries, “In fact that’s my desk, and my chair. And I don’t really appreciate you sitting on them.”

The extraterrestrial tries to hold a straight face, he really does, but the man in the monkey suit’s mouth noises prove to be too much. He bursts out laughing, doubling over and slapping his thigh, really making a show out of it. Sigmund grins and nudges Jack, who shares his grin. The eyes in the back of Chuck’s head notice the shared grin, but fortunately they don’t actually exist, so Chuck isn’t bothered by it.

“FUCK was that rich! I like you already man, woo!”

Purple holds out a hand and Chuck, mouth agape, takes his glove off and gives the purple alien a firm handshake.

“The name’s Ace and, yes, I am the captain, of a spaceship that is capable of traveling through not only the Universe, not only the Multiverse, or the Omniverse, or the Gigaverse, or whatever silly mouth noises you use to denote the higher planes of reality, but through Existence itself. And we do this, my crew and I, by using what your kind calls Psychedelic drugs – which, by the way, are unusually abundant on this eerily familiar little rock you get the privilege of inhabiting. So, kudos.”

Chuck opens his mouth to speak, but Ace continues anyway.

“And why do we traverse Existence? To spread the good vibes of Psychedelia everywhere we go! Many lifeforms on a level similar to yours view our Psychedelics in a negative light, as a temptation from insert name of evil deity here to distract the masses from whatever agenda the ruling elites are pushing; that’s certainly how our species held them back when we called them drugs. But we’ve seen the light, metaphorically speaking, and we loved it so much that we’ve been carrying the torch around ever since. Some see us as harbingers, others see us as saviors or angels, but us? We see ourselves as simple messengers, some heretic Hermes clones with crystals on our shoes rather than wings.”

Ace shoots a purely coincidental wink at Jack, then, “We call ourselves… The Psychenauts!”

Ace waits for a round of applause, but gets none. Then he looks down and sees that his hand is still firmly locked into Chuck’s, and it continues to be so despite Ace’s attempts to free himself. Ace looks up to see Chuck sporting a sudden lack of sunglasses and studying him, taking in all his facial features, almost like he’s seen him before.

“Hold up. I know you…” Chuck almost growls, his eyes darting back and forth, mapping the layout of Ace’s face. “I mean, I didn’t know your name or the name of your little cult but… gah, fuck me I’m high. I can’t place it…”

“No, that simply can’t be,” Ace assures him, still struggling to get his hand back. “Prior to this, my crew and I were in an entirely different universe. It was in the Inner Rim of this one, given, but still, seeing how you’re a human and incapable of inter-universal travel, it’s qui–”

“AH HA!” Chuck accidentally shouts, his excitement over his suddenly functioning memory getting the best of him.

He finally lets go of Ace’s hand and spins around so he can point his own hand in Sigmund’s face, saying, “Told you! I told you it’s called inter-universal travel! Fuckin’, told you!”

“No, Chuck,” Sigmund corrects Chuck’s correction, “you told me it was pocket-universe, not pocket-dimension. But I see your point, you got me.”

“That I did, science man!” Chuck boasts before spinning back around to face a dumbfounded Ace.

“SO! Anyway, that’s how I know you! If you don’t believe me, check this fuckin’ shit out!”

Chuck holds up his gloveless right middle finger, now sporting a very interstellar-looking ring that wasn’t there a moment ago, and holds it inches from Ace’s eyes, which grow to the size of dinner plates upon seeing the jewelry.

“Where…” Ace says, his voice fading into a whisper before bouncing back, twice as serious. “Where did you get that ring?”

Chuck chortles and then says, “You sound almost as confused as you did last night, same word choice too. Ain’t that interesting?”

Ace looks over at Fleurna, who is equally bamboozled, if not more so. She shrugs, offering zilch in the way of help.

“I…” Ace bumbles, his head spinning on a skewed axis similar to Earth’s. “Hold on a tick.”

The captain of The Psychenauts walks over to the wall-sized window closest to Chuck’s desk and places his outstretched hand on it. The glass then turns into a cloud of fine dust before reshaping itself into a translucent jade smoking pipe, the bowl full of Cannabis sprinkled with tiny crystals that shine in a similar manner to the gemstone on Chuck’s ring. Ace then sits in the lotus position, or rather, brings his legs up and floats in the lotus position, hovering his way through the hole in the wall and sitting peacefully on the air, faced away from the building. He draws a smoky breath through the pipe, the rainbow-laced Cannabis igniting without any visible fire source, and closes his eyes, allowing his consciousness to drift off to somewhere else, unlike the smoke that he doesn’t exhale.

Seizing this apparent intermission by the balls, Chuck takes the opportunity to talk to the pretty Psychenaut. “So… you wanna know how I got these scars? Fuck, I mean… I didn’t mean scars, I don’t have any scars, it’s literally impossible for me to get scars. Ask Sigmund. I mean, don’t ask Sigmund, don’t even talk to Sigmund. Or the kid. I mean, they’re not even talking anyway. I, eh… fuck. Anyway, wanna know how I got this ring?”

Fleurna lightly bites her bottom lip and giggles in a way that, if it isn’t flirtatious, Chuck is literally a pissed off donkey with its head burnt off from a volcanic eruption. “Sure, I’d love to.”

“Well, he gave it to me, your captain over there, and I remember that he did, but he doesn’t.” Chuck pauses, giving that some time to settle. Then, “Then he tried to give it to me last night, but I already had it. I know him but he doesn’t know me. What do you think that means?” Chuck asks this last because he doesn’t know himself.

Fleurna giggles again, then, with a hand on Chuck’s shoulder, “I think it means you’re pretty special. You know, for a human.”

While Sigmund and Jack gag, Chuck smiles at that. ‘Challenge accepted.’

“And what challenge would that be, darling?” Fleurna zealously asks, winking her silver eye. Chuck would answer but he literally dies. Not literally, but literally.

Then, Ace floats back into the room. “I’ve returned, and… still, how do you have that ring? Why are you so convinced that we’ve met, for what reaso–”

Ace suddenly cuts himself off when his cheeks puff out, the dude overwhelmed with the urge to exhale a bowl’s worth of smoke. The smoke forms into a cloud that seems to have a form of sentience, evidenced by the fact that it flies circles around Ace multiple times. Then it takes the form of a human body, grows long brown hair, and finally dissipates to reveal a smiling Sam.

Ace takes a startled step back and, upon looking into this new uberhuman’s brain, eagerly asks, “And who are you, you beautiful miracle of Moksha Medicine?!”

Sam’s face goes from the expression of happiness that results from seeing a long-lost friend to the kind of disappointment when that friend doesn’t remember you or any of the experiences you’ve shared. Or, you know, something like that.

“You don’t remember me, Ace?” in a hurt voice. Then, turning to Fleurna, “Fleurna? No?”

She doesn’t answer, her gaze transfixed on Chuck.

“Wait,” Sam continues, checking his mental notes. “What day is it? Tuesday? Yeah, okay, this makes sense. No wonder I had to try so hard to find this moment, I shouldn’t even be here lahmayo.”

Jack rolls his eyes when his stupid magical brother says the word lmao and asks Sigmund if there’s a minifridge or something in here. Sig points Jack towards the opposite end of the office, warning him not to go into the closet next to the fridge because he won’t like what he sees. Jack looks in the closet anyway and is very perturbed by the gigantic mushroom caps sprawling from the spiderweb shit all over the floor, walls, and ceiling of the space. He decides that he’s going to start listening to these adults and opens the fridge, taking out what he assumes is a normal bottle of orange juice. Upon drinking it, a suspiciously subtle sensation of calm rests over him, but he doesn’t worry about it because he realizes that wasting mental energy on anxiety is stupid. When he returns to the Cape clique, Sam is gone.

“Hey,” Jack chimes in, finally contributing to the conversation. “Where’d my brother go?”

Ace looks at Jack with strangely empathetic eyes and smiles. “He had to move on to the next adventure, buddy. Don’t worry, you’ll see him again. It’ll all be okay, okay?”

Jack, feeling like the extraterrestrial is awkwardly trying to tell him something, sips his juice and averts his gaze. Sigmund takes over for him.

“So, Mister Ace, sir, you’re… you don’t remember meeting me last night, either?”

Ace shakes his head, offering, “No, unfortunately. Which means that it hasn’t technically happened yet, regarding my point of view. Spea–”

“Wait!” Sigmund interjects, cutting off the extraterrestrial that he’s been trying to talk with for the past four years of his life. “Your species is capable of traveling through space and time, too?! That’s, that’s incredible! Please, teach me! You must!”

“My crew is capable of everything your brain can conceive of and more, Sigmund, and here’s your first lesson: any time traveling, as you crudely mislabeled it, that was going to happen, has already happened. Speaking of which, we need to make a phone call real quick. Fleurna, hook that up, would ya? I need to prepare the circle.”

Fleurna asks Chuck for his communicator and he surrenders an archaic smart phone that his suit constructs for him without skipping a beat, hoping that she’s typing in whatever intergalactic code that it takes for them to keep in touch after this magical day they’re sure to spend together comes to an untimely but unavoidable end. Chuck is very disappointed when he sees that, rather than a blank contact page, she’s pulled up Karen’s contact page on the phone.

Chuck’s sunglass resume form in front of his eyes. “Ugh, her? Why?”

Fleurna rolls her eyes with a smile, pressing the call button. The phone rings for an exceptionally long time until Karen finally answers, saying, “Hello boss, how are we today?”

Fleurna answers, “Great Karen, absolutely fantastic, stupendous in ways you couldn’t even understand,” before proceeding to carry out an entire conversation with Karen in Chuck’s voice, matching his inflection, style of diction, and verbal mannerisms down to the inclusion of the word heh. After hanging up she thinks for a moment, then types out a text message. When Fleurna finally hands Chuck’s phone back to him, aroused doesn’t even begin to testify to how Chuck is feeling, the arousal quickly turning to embarrassment when his mind fumbles the formation of an explanation as to why he owns so many box sets of dominoes.

“All right, it’s complete!” Ace says triumphantly, saving Chuck from obliterating his chances with a lame excuse of an excuse for having so many domino sets. He approaches Chuck, grabs him by the arm and lifts him clear off the floor, proceeding to carry him to the circle as if he weighed nothing at all.

“Chuck, sit lotus in this circle,” Ace instructs, handing Chuck the smoking pipe.

Chuck sits lotus in the circle, his knees bellowing in pain.

“Good. Now,” as he holds his open hand out to Chuck, revealing what must be the mother of those rainbow crystals that he used to spike his bowl earlier, “I want you to close your eyes and focus very hard on thi– what the fuck?”

The crystal, glimmering with all the colors of the rainbow and then some, suddenly shatters into a trillion little pieces, the dust spewing everywhere. It then forms into a cohesive smog and swirls around the room, brushing the tip of Fleurna’s nose before collecting in a cloud over the empty green pipe. The cloud then recomposes itself into a freshly clipped nugget of Cannabis as tall as a paperback book.

The nug is so abundant in happycrystals that it looks like it’s coated in sugar, but these are no normal trichomes; this specific nug has been infused with the Ace’s space drugs, resulting in the creation of a heretofore undiscovered strain of Cannabis. Chuck calls it Cape Cookies Redux: The Sexy Alien Edition in his mind and, as the nug grinds itself up without a grinder, Fleurna giggles for what must be a totally unrelated reason. When the bowl is packed to the brim, Chuck finally opens his eyes and, after the sunglasses melt back into his fedora, then winks at the nonplussed Ace standing in front of him.

Ignoring Chuck’s triumphant smile, Ace says, “I don’t even… yo, thank god that you and I came to these guys Fleurna. Can you imagine if Zaxus was here right now?”

Fleurna laughs. “Yes, yes I can. That’s precisely why I voted to leave him on the ship.”

“So glad I didn’t veto that. Shit! Anyway, Master Charles, I’m sure you know what to do.”

“You’re a cheeky bastard Ace, you know that? I almost wish we could be friends.”

Chuck holds up his right middle finger and mentally commands his fingernail to combust. He holds the flame above the bowl and hesitates, asking, “Before I torch this bowl… what do you call this stuff? The rainbow crystals, I mean. I assume it’s the same nonsense that’s in my ring?”

“Wow, way to spoil it dude,” Ace says, shaking his head. “We call it… well, it doesn’t matter. But it’s not like the other Moksha Medicines, Chuck. It–”

“Other what?” Chuck demands, pocketing the packed bowl and extinguishing the flame on his fingertip. “Y’all keep calling it that, Moksha Medicine. What’s that mean?”

Ace begins to explain how one, they’ve only once referred to the Psychedelics as Moksha Medicine thus far and two, there used to be a magically psychoactive brew on their homeworld of Fuego called Mokahuashca, and the word Moksha was derived from it.

Then earthling Jack Monta, master of sobriety, swoops in from out of the sky, possibly wearing a cape, and says, “Hold on Ace, I got this.”

Jack walks over to Chuck and sits down in the circle with him, easily contorting his legs into the lotus position due to his proclivity to stretching before he runs, and starts explaining.

“It’s a term that this really prolific author who died in the sixties used in the last book he wrote. It was the name of his version of… I think it was magic mushrooms, I mean, magic mushroom pills, that helped his fictional island community develop into a perfect society. Yanno, until the one human on the island who didn’t want to take the meds ruined the entire thing. I think the word Moksha means release or something, but don’t quote me on that. Sam read the book like a million times and he,” nostalgic laugh “he literally tried to start a commune based off the community in the book, but nobody wanted to join. Our Mom thought he was becoming a cultist, it was actually really funny.”

Jack drains his orange juice, dangling the bottle over his mouth to savor every last drop. “So anyway, yeah, medicine probably isn’t the best word for it; according to Sam, the effects went faaar beyond the realm of being described as medicinal, but it was a different time back then, yanno? Before the pharmaceutical boom. You’d actually probably really like the author, Sam told me that a few hours before he died, he had his wife shoot him up with el-ess-dee. I hate to admit it, but I’ve always kind of found that interesting, like. I wonder what it was like, how it changed the death experience. Ya know what I mean?”

The room stays absolutely silent for more than four and a fifth consecutive seconds, not even a fart dares to disturb the peace. Amid this room-strangling silence, Jack gets up and grabs another bottle of juice, this one mango flavored, before returning to the circle with Chuck.

“Do you, like, read books?” Jack inquires, hoping to break the silence. “Chuck?”

After slapping himself so hard that he dislodges a few of his goatee hairs, Chuck snaps back to reality. “N-no, I uh, no I don’t usually read. I’ll have to check that out though…”

Chuck shoots Sigmund a bewildered look whilst mouthing the words what the fuck and gets a befuddled shrug in return, all the while the aliens are looking so much more than mildly intrigued from the sidelines.

“Kid, do you know what’s in those juices you keep drinking?”

“No. I mean, fruit, I think. Maybe some extra sugar?”

Chuck looks back at Sigmund and smiles with an open mouth, overcome with more excitement than he’s felt in years. “No, well yes, but it’s infused with Cannabidiol.”

The big word gets no reaction out of Jack.

“You know, Cee-Bee-Dee? Like, from the Cannabis plant?”

Jack starts feeling a bit panicked, but he calms down as soon as Chuck assures him that CBD’s not a psychoactive substance, rather a medicinal one.

“If there was a real-life Moksha Medicine, Cee-Bee-Dee would probably fit the bill. It’s not Mushroom-based, but…” he trails off.

“Huh,” Jack huhs, taking another drink to mull this over for a moment. “Well, normally… I think normally I would be freaking out right now, but… I’m okay. I feel okay, I feel good. Calm. I like this stuff. I’m probably going to freak out after it wears off but like, right now? I’m good right now.” Through a smile of punishment, “I’ve been released from the stress.”

“Chuck, stand up,” commands Ace, holding a loving regard for this new version of Jack, despite the pun.

“Huh? I thou–”

“Chuck, I implore you, please just stand the fuck up,” nudges Fleurna, taking Chuck’s hand and pulling him from the circle like a cloth off of a table.

Chuck, his hand in hers, decides that he’ll do whatever this living embodiment of space drugs tells him for the rest of eternity.

Jack, puzzled, looks around and wonders what’s going on. Ace crouches down to level with Jack and materializes another crystal in his hand. He holds it out for the boy to examine, and Jack does so with a newfound fascination.

“Jack, this is called Zee,Zee-DifZoral Tryptamine, or Dee-eff-Zee-Tee for short. It–”

‘Oh sure, you tell him what your space drugs are called,’ Chuck thinks to himself before getting poked in the back by Fleurna. ‘Okay, I get it, you can hear my thoughts. Can he too?’

‘Only when he wants to,’ Chuck hears in his head, distinctively in Fleurna’s voice. She then winks at him and he flurries, adding a thoughtful, ‘Cool,’ to the two-sided conversation going on in his head.

“–’s pretty much the Zerocian version of something called Dee-eM-Tee, a neurotransmitter your brain produces that allows your consciousness to experience and interface with the various levels of reality.”

Ace looks up, addressing the room. “Anybody asks, y’all didn’t hear that from me, kay?” before going back to Jack.

“It’s literally the most powerful known Psychedelic substance in the entirety of this Universe. It’s not like any normal drug, this substance knows you better than you know yourself. It knows all of us. Do you… would you be open to trying it?”

Jack looks deep into Ace’s eyes for a moment, weighing him. “What’s Zerocian mean?”

“What’s that?” Ace asks, not expecting the human to answer his question with a question.

“You said it’s the Zerocian version of our, like, consciousness chemical, right? What’s Zerocian mean?”

Ace holds a deadpan expression that evolves into a smile. “Oh, no, I said Zerocian. I guess the human version of our language hasn’t developed that sound yet… well, you know how you guys call your species humans? Like, you’re a human? Well, Fleurna and I, we’re Zeroc. We make the Dee-eff-Zee-Tee in our brains.”

“Oh… yeah, okay. I guess that makes sense.”

Jack lifts the crystal out of Ace’s hand, much to the surprise of Ace, and takes a closer look at it, turning it around and around in his fingers and actually considering the possibility of experimenting with the Psychedelic experience. Ace hasn’t kept such a strong hold on his breath in literally centuries. Fleurna and Chuck have stopped flirting, and Sigmund doesn’t know how to act, so he doesn’t.

“How do you like… do it? Do I have to inject it into my eyeballs or something?”

The hold on Ace’s breath wiggles into a hearty laugh. “No, you just have to decide you want to. Just focus on it, it’ll take care of the rest.”

Jack sits still for a moment, not sure what he should do. He’s never felt so calm before, so serene. So overcome with such a powerful feeling of tranquility. Normally the possibility wouldn’t even cross his mind; he’d be more likely to nail the thought to a cross and throw a crown of thorns on it before leaving it for dead than entertaining it, but knowing how that analogy would play out, he considers skipping the bramble and nails and heading straight for the resurrection.

The resurrection of what? He doesn’t know. He can almost hear his Mother’s voice uttering a defiant, ‘What? What do you think you’re doing, young man?’ but his head is totally silent. He flashes back to a cartoon that he would watch in his youth, the specific episode telling the story of a worm that lives in a library shaped like a book. Whenever anybody would talk to it, or more specifically question it, the worm would simply say, “Knowledge is power, power is pain; if you don’t understand I won’t try to explain,” before inching away and losing itself in this text or that.

‘Knowledge is power, power is pain…’

Jack knows that he won’t feel so open to trying new things like this again, and he can’t imagine what kind of pain could arise from exercising the power of free will, so… if all other options seem dull compared to the one at hand…

Suddenly, the crystal begins to vibrate. It floats out of Jack’s hand and begins to shrink down to the size of the head of a pin and keeps on shrinking down after that until it’s half the size of an atom. Then, it flies at the speed of a Zerocian Jettison ship into Jack’s head, impaling him in the forehead, the resulting tiny dot of blood making a triangle with his eyes. The crystal, currently the densest object in the Universe, effortlessly slides through the empty space in between the atoms that comprise Jack’s skull and brain until it reaches his pineal gland, the human third eye, where it explodes into a lustrous fire of rainbowic sparks.

To everyone else, Jack just falls backwards and passes out. To Jack, though, the entirety of reality melts away, and he finds himself floating alone in what would be a blinding white light if he currently had eyes to be blinded with.

Heavenly Celestial Bodies

Jack feels himself traveling at high speeds, faster than the speed of sound, eclipsing the speed of light, and surpassing the speed of rumors spread about his brother by his Mom. He sees something in the distance, a small dark sphere rapidly approaching, sucking in the light, consuming it. Transforming it. As the sphere grows larger and larger it begins to take on an internal glow; Jack can see things forming, heavenly celestial bodies, clouds of nebulous gasses exploding out from stars that are rapidly forming and collapsing in on themselves. He sees clusters of cosmic dust being born, and within them, galaxies start to appear, each of these wonderful constructs of pure love beaming past him until he finally sees it: the Milky Way, that very same spiral that houses the pale blue dot that gave him the body he currently inhabits. As he approaches the rock it begins to shine, so irradiant, so lucid, so welcoming. He’s home; for the first time in his entire life, Jack Monta feels at peace, at one with the infinite everything that provides him with his anything, all the while floating in nothing. He’s here.

Just as Jack’s consciousness begins to lower him to the surface of his planet, something grabs him. A cold, dead hand wraps its icy fingers around his suddenly existing body and forcefully rips Jack from his beautiful starscape. His being fills with unspeakable terror as he’s pulled from his cosmos, the heat of stars and molten planets scorching his unprotected soul as he’s carelessly dragged through Existence like a snitch chained to the back of a lowrider.

Then, darkness. Pure, undiluted, empty darkness, devoid of any and all love or feeling in general. Just this nagging pull, this snarl from deep within the recesses of his being. He sees something in the distance, an orb, just like before, but it’s not white or black this time. It’s shiny and metallic, it… it’s gold. As it draws closer, it sprouts features of a human face – two empty, glazed eyes, a nose, ears off to the sides. A golden human-like face, gleaming in Jack’s light. And… the mouth, that dreadful maw, twisted and morphed into a sinister, fiendish, diabolical smile, a malicious sneer that strikes fear into Jack’s very heart, burning the remaining traces of the moksha medicine, spiritual or otherwise, clear out of his system.

Jack screams. A horrific, cell-splitting, guttural caterwaul of a scream, a scream that would shake you past your bones, past your core, down to the dark matter that resonates in the empty space between the atoms that make up what you think is your body, if you’re even capable of conceiving of such a sound. A scream that will make you never want to hurt, love, or interact with any living thing in general, ever again; a scream that nobody, not even the ancient aliens in the room with Jack, have heard in all their time drifting through this malevolently benign macrocosm we all pretend to know and love, nor a scream they even knew was possible. A scream that delivers a very clear message to every human, animal, and inanimate object making their way home from work within an eight-hundred-meter radius of Cape Enterprises, Uncorporated: for every thing of beauty that shines in creation, there is a matching abomination just waiting to rear its grotesque head.

Something Is Wrong

“Jack!” Ace shouts, grabbing the zonked boy’s convulsing body and attempting to shake him awake. “JACK! WAKE UP!”

Chuck looks at Sigmund, who, for the first time in his life, has absolutely no idea what’s going on right now. And he’s wearing that description too, wearing it like a persona mask from an ancient Grecian get-together. Fleurna pushes past both of the humans and assists Ace, or rather, attempts to assist him, but there’s nothing they can do. Not by themselves.

“Chuck! Give me the fucking crystal!” Ace shouts, holding out his visibly trembling indigo palm.

Chuck’s utterly paralyzed, he couldn’t move if he wanted to.

“CHUCK!” Ace booms, the soundwave rocketing across the room and shattering half of the bongs on Karen’s desk. Sigmund goes to move but his legs give out from under him, the panic taking hold and refusing to let go.

‘CHUCK!’ Fleurna shouts in his mind, ‘You need to listen to me, something is wrong. This shouldn’t be happening, something went very askew inside Jack’s head! You need to snap out of it and give Ace the crystal back!’

Chuck reaches into his pocket and produces the bowl. “B-b-but it, it, it turned into a pipe and, and I-I… fuck, man! What do I do?!”

Ace rises to his feet and snatches the bowl from Chuck’s hand with enough force to send the human flying across the room and smashing into his desk. The solid wood craftsmanship responsible for the desk snaps Chuck’s spine in half, the impact decorating the majority of his bones with spiderwebs. As his body gets to work numbing and repairing itself, Ace kills the bowl in a millisecond and collapses, his spirit rising from his body and divebombing into Jack’s head.

Then, they both float clear off the floor.

Fleurna touches her middle finger to her forehead and smoothly drags it down to the bridge of her nose. An eye opens above the space between her other two eyes, this third optic skewed vertically with an iris that contains more colors than are present in Chuck’s alien ring. She then begins waving her hands in the air, the powder that once composed the circle rising from the floor and swirling around an unconscious Ace and Jack, imbuing them with its power. At first the latter stops convulsing, but then he starts seizing right back up, and terrifyingly enough, so does Ace. Steeling herself, Fleurna composes an orchestra of harmonious hand movements, the glistening white powder swarming and forming into two spinning tetrahedrons, one above the tripping titan and the innocent child he’s attempting to rescue, and one below. The tetrahedrons then crash into one another, forming a Merkabah around the pair and trapping them inside the central chamber.

The building begins to unravel at a molecular level, trillions of hemi-atomic nanobots get shaken loose from the shockwaves just to reposition themselves and repeatedly get dislodged again, the bots struggling to keep the structure together. Outside, scores of towers standing anywhere from ten to fifty-five stories tall begin to collapse in on themselves, the resulting infernal bedlam comparable to the aftermath of the September eleventh attacks on the World Trade Centers that tragically transpired almost nineteen years ago in what was then known as New York City. Fleurna nearly goes down but she holds her ground, the floor cracking beneath her as she supports the weight of multiple colliding realities on her back like the mighty Atlas whilst the Universe crumbles and burns to ash around her. There is none more accurate a way to describe it: all hell breaks loose on the streets of New Manhattan, the likes of which have never been suffered through by the human population of this, Earth’s most irresponsibly opulent city.

Then, stillness.

The Merkabah collapses, the powder dispersing and coating the limp, airborne bodies of Jack and Ace in a fine white soot, and Fleurna collapses with it. She almost hits the floor too, but Chuck, his backbone freshly realigned and his skeleton partially solidified, flies across the room to catch her. Two extra pairs of arms then sprout from Chuck’s torso, catching Ace and Jack before they harmlessly fall to the carpeted floor, Chuck cursing in pain as his weakened shinbones fracture under the load and he falls to his knees, the caps shattering upon impact.

Sigmund, who’s managed to regain control of his legs, is already heading for the secret elevator behind Karen’s desk. He travels down to a room that Chuck was never made aware of and sits in a more sophisticated version of the BioBot chair, this one sporting more wires, tubes and screens than could even fit in the room outside the TerryStudio. A strained look overtakes his face as he slumps over and no less than ten BioBots, each designed exactly the same as Chuck’s power armor, hatch from various cavities hidden beneath the mauve concrete exolayer of the Cape skyscraper. These droids, all simultaneously controlled by Sigmund’s agonizingly pulsating brain, quickly get to work cleaning up the turmoil on the street. Half the robots attain speeds that eclipse Mach 2 to catch and demolish the falling pieces of skyscraper before they scrape far more than the sky, the other half swooping up civilians and getting carpoolers out of harm’s way faster than they can towel themselves off. The gut-wrenching sounds of countless humans being pinned down, crushed, and brutally murdered by falling structures is enough to drive any man to the brink of madness, but Sigmund isn’t just any man. Chuck may own this city, he may fund it and keep it alive with the electrical shocks of his financial defibrillators, but Sigmund’s inventions built it from the seafloor up. This is his city too, and it will not fall. Not today.

Security Blanket

By the time the chaos settles down to the everyday NewMann levels, the sun is nearing the lip of the wall. Beautiful, sherbety oranges and pinks grace the city in their glow, basking the shaken populace in an entirely necessary security blanket of warmth. The injured are bedded in pop-up hospitals scattered on every street within a one-mile radius of Cape Enterprises. The dead are piled onto carts and loaded into the various skyscrapers that’ve been temporarily gutted and repurposed into reanimation clinics; the corpses that’ve been splattered to the point of unrecognizability are fitted with cybernetic prosthetics and, as for those who were reduced to liquid, well, a mass service will be held this Sunday, after all the victims of the incident are accounted for.

And, well, that’s it.

When the city stopped quaking, the humans of New Manhattan more or less just returned to their everyday lives. Gotta work, gotta make dollars, especially those who are rocking robotics in their arms and legs; that shit doesn’t come cheap. Indentured servitude is a strong turn of phrase but it’s repulsively accurate – humans may make the world go ‘round, but dollars oil the gears and keep the machine from grinding to an unproductive halt. And honestly? If it worked any other way, the irreversible death toll following today’s little psychephrenic mishap would be exponentially higher than the mere hundreds that were claimed. The cost may be high, sure, but you undoubtedly get the bang for your buck.

Punching Bags

Back at Cape Enterprises, Uncorporated, all members of the space drugs party are conscious and accounted for. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they’re okay; Ace is sitting lotus alone, hovering one foot off the top of the roof, staring through the sky into space, into that vast nothingness that, up to this point in his very, very long life, had been so full of meaning that it overflowed to the rest of his crew.

Up to this point.

Sigmund and Fleurna are racking their very unequal brains trying to hash out a plan to restore Ace’s shattered psyche, coming up with about as many results as you might imagine. When a god loses faith, where can one turn?

As for Jack, well, he hasn’t said a word. He’s okay, physically; he probably emerged from this in better shape than anyone. When he came to, he wasn’t even aware that the catastrophe happened, probably because Ace eradicated all traces of the experience from his memory when he entered the boy’s brain. In fact, when he woke, Jack didn’t even realize he had passed out; he just randomly found himself drenched in sweat with a tiny bit of blood dripping from his nose. And from his left ear, but Fleurna managed to spot that and whisk it away before Jack could notice.

As for Chuck, well, Chuck’s in the basement. The basement basement, the lowest floor in the building, one of the very few parts of the entire city of New Manhattan that can actually be described as subterranean; he’s hard at work viciously attacking punching bag after punching bag, ripping them to shreds by the closetful in an attempt to drown out the insatiable, blaring, high-pitched siren that’s going off in his head, the echo of Jack’s scream driving him past what he once thought was the brink of insanity. Chuck has never snapped before, not really; he’s nuts, but he’s not massacre nuts, although there’s nay a better word to describe the fate that’s befallen these poor, innocent punching bags.

Eventually, once he’s attained a shredding pace that’s faster than the sandbag generator can keep up with (which causes the machine to release dense clouds of smoke through the exhaust pipes, giving the Cape Tower the appearance of being on fire from a distance) Chuck takes a deep breath and exhales, attempting to release his pent-up tension with a surprising amount of success. The elevator ride to the forty-second floor is slow and tenuous, although on the bright side, the ringing in Chuck’s ears completely drowns out the claustrophobia he never admits to feeling while riding these tiny little coffin-boxes up or down his buildings. Fleurna’s voice in his head helps too, beckoning him to return so he can assist in talking Ace off the roof.

The Roof

Meanwhile, Sam has reappeared on the roof to do just that.

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 6.5 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 6.5
A Glass Elevator

President Hymarc

The elevator stops halfway up to the office and one more passenger boards, his weight causing the box to wince as it begins to rise.

“Hello Sir, sirs. I’m feeling great, by the way, all of my fractures and lacerations have healed to the fullest degree, thanks to you and your wonderful staff! I can’t thank you enough, so I will just thank you so much for the physical therapy, and all the medicine, and the happiest of endings at that spa session this morning, and and and…” he trolls on, sucking the air out of the room-sized elevator like a vacuum does to a vacuum chamber.

“That’s all very well and good Alvey, but nobody asked. You also told me all of that, ver batum, may I add, earlier today. And last night, after the procedures were complete. I’ve grown quite tired of your abysmal redundancy; just pipe down, will you? We have two intruders in the main office,” instructs Sean Hymarc, sipping his tobacco flavored nicotine-infused latte. He then exhales and pinches the bridge of his nose, lowering his closed-eye gaze to the floor. “This is becoming a recurring theme, I am not a fan.”

“Vorry not, zir,” says Doctor Torpol over his clipboard, “Zere iz no vay zhat zey can escape. I do not know who zey ahre or haow zhey ghot in, but, zhey cannot get out. Zhe building is in lockdown, zhe office iz completely seceur.”

“Wonderful, thank you Edvard. They can’t be much different than the other one, but this is no time to skip precautions. As for who they are specifically, well, we’re about to find out.”

Indeed we are. The glass elevator climbs up the exterior of the Apex Corporation’s building, the second tallest skyscraper in all of New Manhattan, and Sean Hymarc peers through the wall-windows around him. The sun is shining, the birds are likely chirping, and the eight percent of New Manhattan that he owns is bustling with the activity of his many adopted child companies bringing dollars in by the shovelful. He strokes his chinstrap in pace with his breathing, pondering over who could possibly attempt a hostile takeover of his company next. There are plenty with the motive to do so, sure; when Apex overtakes a weaker, more insignificant corporate body, all of the cretins previously known as employees are fired and replaced with Apex-approved worker drones who do their assigned task infinitely better than the erroneous humans that were once paid to do it.

That’s another thing – the drones don’t need to be paid. The only human employment opportunities that exist in Apex are in the physical fitness, science, and MERC divisions, but all the available positions were filled long ago. Hymarc hires his fitness gurus himself by outbidding whatever sorry excuse for a fitness emporium that once employed them; Torpol’s extended family covers the science division, save for the test subjects which are, for the most part, all homeless vagrants swooped off the street by the MERCs; and as for the MERCs, well… they were specially chosen for their roles, and no new positions will be opening any time soon.

Unless they do, but yanno, they won’t.

Speaking of which, Hymarc’s custom uPhone starts to buzz in his pocket. He presses the button on his earpiece, accepting the call.

“President Hymarc. KingPig and I have the intruders held at gunpoint, they do not appear frightened.”

“Well who’s fault is that, Gary? My word, shove your gun in their mouth if you have to. Strike them. Restrain them with barbed wire and bind them together! I shouldn’t have to explain this to you, your hardware was just updated. The Good Doctor’s installed his latest torture software into your brain, you insolent cyborg. We should have let you perish at the warehouse… gah, look at what you’ve done to me. Fucking… you fucking cunt. Just tell me what they’re doing.”

Without pause or hesitation, the robotic voice continues. “One is caressing the plaster plants in window planter Alpha-Omega and the other is… I don’t know how to describe it without offending you, sir.”

“Just do it, there’s nothing that can be done about it at this point.”

“He, if it is a he, is sitting at your desk. With… with his feet up.”

Hymarc removes his earpiece and whips it into the back wall of the elevator, shattering a gaping hole into the glass and inadvertently killing a consumer via pseudo-meteor strike, scaring the wits out of a woman who’s carrying no less than four boxes of cinnamon rolls down the street from that dreadful, tiny, insignificant little bakery. The elevator jolts to a stop and the door opens to allow a small robot, no taller than a human’s femur, to roll in and get to work on blowing a replacement piece of glass. Another small robot, this one holding a porcelain plate with an earpiece sat upon a velvety red pillow, rolls in behind it. Behind that one, a robot shaped like a blowtorch with wheels rolls in and lights the cigarillo that Sean pulled out of his pocket as the second robot entered. Around him, everybody is drenched in a most uncomfortable silence.

“We’ll be there shortly.”

“Should I call for backup?” G1-Zm0 drones into Hymarc’s ear. “The girls are currently off premises, but Ray and Wolf are surely dicking around the building somewhere.”

Instead of answering right away, Hymarc takes the time to chain smoke his cigarillo down to the bitter end. He then pops the ‘bacco roach into his mouth, chews it up a bit, and packs it between his gums and his bottom lip.

“If you really think it’s necessary, then yes. We gave you a brain more capable than the average human’s, you need to make decisions like these for yourself. Do what you need to keep the Zeroc at bay.”

A moment of pause for analysis. “Understood.”

click

 With the hole patched and all the extra drone weight removed from the equation, the elevator resumes rising, opposing magnetic forces sending the evidently very fragile glass cube up to the top floor of the skyscraper, the speed of ascension being calculated and optimized in mathematical language in real time on the Doctor’s electronic clipboard. The doors open and everyone walks out with their various weapons drawn, Alvey’s being a peeled banana that ends in a bite mark, slightly less intimidating than Doctor Torpol’s disintegration pistol.

Everyone besides Hymarc, that is. He’s locked in a gaze pointed across the cityscape, his eyes transfixed on the single tower in all of the city that’s taller than the Apex Corporation headquarters, so far away that it resembles a matchstick. He squints at it in a show of primordial dominance, not paying enough attention to notice the silver disk hovering above it when said disk flashes in and then immediately out of visibility.

Addressing the tower, ‘One day… you will be mine. Even if I have to burn this city to the ground.’

Hymarc is so distracted by the foreign manifestation of his self-image that the elevator doors close behind him. He descends two floors before impatiently inserting his manual override key and going back to his office. It’s a good thing he forgot his spit cup; with the way today is going, he’ll need as much extra nicotine as possible.

Fifty floors below, Ray and Wolf hold a puzzled stare towards the floor indicator that can’t seem to decide whether the elevator is moving up or down. Assuming it’s suffering a malfunction, they continue their game of chopsticks unbothered.

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 6 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 6
The Waiting Room

Bonzoblunt

“So what’s going down at Cape today, good buddy?” Chuck speaks into his phone, singlehandedly backpedaling your narrative timeline that has, thus far, been a continuous, uninterrupted stream. “Besides my sobriety and levels of unconsciousness, that is. Hey-ooooh!”

Chuck Leary is currently in the process of rolling a bonzoblunt, a beautiful Cannabic construct that consists of anywhere between half an ounce to one full ounce of ground herb bound in the leaves clipped from one of the many Cannabis plants living in one of his many sub-plasti’spa’junkean grow rooms… or maybe this Cannabis came from one of the above-ground grow rooms, it’s very hard to be sure. When it’s done though, the bastard will be two inches thick and ten inches long – dreams really do come true.

“Well, I just sent an elderly man who was dressed like a priest to the hospital, so there’s that. Not really at Cape, per say, but I feel pretty good about it.”

Chuck stops rolling for a second to take that in. Then he keeps rolling, commenting, “Wow dude, that’s uh. Kinda fucked up.”

“NAH!” Sigmund confidently shouts through the BioBotdy of Jackson Rainfort, an entirely fictional character of a man with more history than most men have fingernails and toenails combined. “He totally deserved it. Anyway, I just got fired, so the contest winner and I will be en route shortly. The other human child I abducted into the closet completed his work on the escape pods a few minutes ago so, as I said. We’ll be departing shortly.”

Chuck pauses his very important work again, for an entire four-point-two seconds this time, to let that one settle. Then, “Sih–” sigh “Sigmund, you realize how fucked up that sounds, don’t you? Like, your word choice and whatnot?”

The comms line takes on a dreadful lapse of words, not even a void of communicationless silence bridges the gap between our two polymorphic powerhouses this time. Chuck gives Sigmund a few choice moments to think about what he’s said, to come to the answer himself so he can actually learn from his mistakes, but Sigmund stays mute, seeing how he didn’t make a mistake in the first place.

“The whole abducted thing, I mean?”

Well clearly it wasn’t that fucked up, because Chuck’s back to preparing his happybaton as soon as he says The; no, definitely not that fucked up, just fucked up enough to comment on it.

“No, sir, I don’t know how fucked up my words sound once your brain perceives them. Honestly, even given my experience with it, I’m not sure what in the world goes on inside the bulbous mass of neurons inhabiting your cranial cavity in general, regardless of what it’s perceiving or if it’s perceiving anything at all. But! Whatever does conspire, it clearly results in your success. So, for that reason, I respect it. I won’t bend to conform to that strange, broken mold you want to pour the world into, but I respect the fact that you broke it. And that’s just what it is.”

As Sigmund begins to backtalk him, Chuck sighs, thinking, ‘Nobody gets me,’ but as his closest friend continues to speak, that frown turns upside down, Chuck’s thoughts swirling into a chemical reaction and combusting into a giddy, ‘Close enough!’ as his heart basks in the warm, fuzzy glow of Sigmund’s respect. Somehow, even though he can’t see it, Sigmund senses this smile and smiles back at his very different equal.

On two opposite ends of a long stretch of water between a bunch of walls, one much taller than the rest, two grown men are holding radioactive glass rectangles next to their brains and involuntarily flexing the muscles in the lower half of their heads.

“So yeah we’ll be there soon, the winner and I,” Sigmund says, dredging reality through their shared moment.

“What about the other kid? He seems kinda cool.”

A moment’s pause. “Why?”

“Well bec–”

“Why does he seem kinda cool, I mean,” the kinda cool said in a bad impression of Chuck’s voice, as if something Chuck said made Sigmund feel inadequate.

“Well, because he built a working escape pod system capable of transporting two living human bodies through land, sea and-or air from the mainland all the way to New Manhattan using only the materials available to him inside of a public high school’s custodial closet, all without alerting said school of said escape pod system. That’s fucking insane, like, you levels of insane. Well, not you levels of insane, per say, more like me levels of insane mixed with you levels of brilliance. It’s like he’s an alternate universe’s version of you and me put together except he’s not totally batshit evil. Because you know, if such an existential mishap were to exist, it would not be the type to get invited to my birthday party. C’mon, the fact that a human like that exists, well that’s just… that’s just incredible.”

“It wasn’t that hard, man!” a high and youthful voice chimes in through the background static, “I just, like, fabricated a bunch of stuff using my brain! I’m kind of gifted like that, I would explain but it would be spoilerific!”

“See? Listen to his vernacular, this kid’s the shit.”

Sigmund hangs up the phone, calls back a minute later, says, “See you soon,” in a very breathy voice, and then hangs up again. Chuck, amused by all this, snickers as the communicator melts back into his ear and he keeps on working on the bonzoblunt, his hands carefully massaging the herby flakes into their rightful place in the Universe.

Thus far today, Chuck’s rolled forty-two joints, thirty-nine of which he’s smoked already, one of which he’s smoking at a terribly slow pace at the present moment; a prototype of the bonzoblunt, the alpha version only half as large in every dimension as its soon to be successor; he’s packed every single bong/wet pipe in the entire building (which is a fucking lot of bongs/wet pipes); filled every single dry herb vaporizer that belongs to every member of the higher society of the city, you know, because one should do charity work every now and again; earlier today he busted in on a hash production factory and committed a gruesome hostile takeover, increasing the production of both the golden and the hand hash ten-fold, and… well, he doesn’t remember how else he’s conjured the spirit of the Holiblaze today, but he definitely might have done some other stuff.

Usually Chuck surrounds himself with the more creative crazies that inhabit this concrete jungle on the annual Holiblaze, but since yesterday was the actual holiday and the majority of the humans he smokes up every Holiblaze don’t own ninety percent of the city of New Manhattan like he does, they had to get right back to work when the festivities were through. As for the humans who have ascended to the status of Chief Executive Officer, well, like I said, yesterday was the actual holiday. Chuck thought they were all his friends, but it’s apparent now that they’re just some humans who don’t mind sharing a smoke with him when their given geographic locale allows for them to conveniently do so. Or maybe not; Chuck’s really deep into his own head right now, they probably just have shit to do.

The Fog Is Thick And The Air Is Thin

Like a rehabilitated turtle who successfully crossed a hot road without irreversibly charring her feet, after a quick nap, Chuck pops his head out of his shell and, joints in hand and the bonzoblunt up his sleeve, waltzes over to Karen’s desk to find his plucky secretary busy scrawling squiggly little symbols down in what appears to be a new notebook.

Karen evaporates into a terrified vaporous form when Chuck appears at her desk with the tip of his lighter cast ablaze. He startles the pencil right out of Karen’s cloud of a hand, can you imagine?

In a swift, uninterrupted motion, Karen returns to a more solid human form, sweeps her notebook off the desk, and reaches for one of the many hand-crafted bongs that keep her company in an inanimate way. She grabs a pipe that’s only a foot tall, making up for its vertical inadequacy with the inclusion of no less than three different styles of percolators (showerhead, honeycomb, and UFO if you’re curious) and brings the mouthpiece to her lips. Chuck lights it and Karen inhales for about a second and a half, the baby cloud of smoke bombarding her lungs in a way that makes her cough for a solid three minutes. Three to one, how’s that for a ratio?

When Karen stops hacking up whatever was once festering in the now diluted pores of her lungs, Chuck takes out his couple of joints and lights them, embarking on a blissfully calm tirade of talking to himself in a way that sounds like he’s having a back and forth about how humans never come through for him. He even does two different voices for what he sees as comedic effect and what Karen sees as the decline of a man who had never really ascended to the tallest of his potential heights in the first place. After a couple baby tokes, Chuck proceeds to kill both joints in one shot, moving on to the biggest freaking blunt Karen has ever been afraid to hit. CrazyPsychoLocoMan takes more hits of the thing than Karen can even bother herself with counting, and by the time he passes it to her, the entire office is a hotbox, more densely packed with smoke than the bonzoblunt is packed with pre-smoke.

The fog is thick and the air is thin, just how Chuck likes it. While Karen is busy attempting to figure out how to hit the blunt without actually hitting it all the while making Chuck think that she hit it because she’ll be damned if her boss thinks less of her because of an aversion to inhaling combusted plant matter, a watch forms under Chuck’s sleeve on his right wrist. The watch then vibrates, alerting Chuck that the pods he’s been expecting have entered the NewMann airspace. With absolutely no warning, the hoverpads that are now embedded in the very fibres of Chuck’s business suit’s being lift our Cannabic chieftain off the ground and, with the endoskeleton inside his business suit that provides support for the power armor making Chuck’s legs move as if they’re sprinting, carries him towards the laundry chute that Karen insisted on having installed so she didn’t have to use the elevator to do her laundry.

Chuck uncomfortably and painfully contorts his body to fit into the basketball-sized hole in the wall and raccoons his way through the darkness, a similar darkness the young Jack and the elder Jackson are facing inside their pods whilst they await acceptance by the Cape Enterprises, Uncorporated facilities.

NewMenn

<They get there.>

They sure do, a big round of applause for the very detailed pre-script notes. The arrival of Jack and Jackwithasuffix is unbogged by the large number of vicious mercenaries, strung out anonymous narcotic-fueled road warriors, and pinstripe-suit-wearing gangsters that constantly roam around the city’s underground in search of their next big score. None of these players would even dream of attacking a Cape brand piece of technology though, mostly due to the fact that their lives have led them to find themselves on Chuck’s payroll in one manner or another. They’re also all huddled together on a low rooftop right now smoking up the field of Cannabis Chuck planted for them this morning, so, realistically, they’re not even thinking about dollars.

Even still, realistic isn’t often found in the lexicon of NewMenn, and the many crowds of murderous marauding moneymakers keep their eyes trained on the skies as the jet-powered capsules blast through the air inside the titanium walls, their brains cast a’spin with depraved, overtly sexual daydreams of blood-lusty power rushes themed around overtaking an empire more solid than Rome’s after it was built in a day.

A Great Novel

As the pods approach the twenty-second floor of the building, two escape-pod-sized holes open up in what appears to the naked eye to be the concrete outer wall of the Cape Enterprises skyscraper. To the properly clothed eye, however, it is pristinely clear that the structure is composed of hemi-atomic nanobots capable of shifting so smoothly that whatever structure they create looks liquid once it starts reshaping itself, all the while remaining perfectly solid the entire time. This is actually some of the most advanced technology ever developed in all of New Manhattan; it took Sigmund thirty years of his life to bring it to fruition. The majority of these years were spent on conceptualization because of his starting at the very capable young age of two, but that’s beside the point.

Once this miraculous technology, easily capable of trillions of unique, paradigm-shifting applications, was bestowed the gift of realization, what did Sigmund’s boss make him use it for? The construction of a building… a flipping single building. Not an entire city, but a single, not even the tallest, building. Sure, now, in the present day, Sigmund totally understands Chuck’s logic; however, at the time, the decision came off as so abominably asinine and unthoughtful that Sigmund nearly broke off their newly formed partnership and started his own company. Now that’s a universe that would make for a great novel… anyway, back to this bullshit.

Jackson Rainfort

From within the building’s twin orifices, a pair of very delicate projectile airspeed sensors notice the pods slowing and making their final approach. Two robotic arms reminiscent of the invention of the Marvelous Comics character Doctor Kraken extend from the depths and intercept the friendly bogeys, cushioning the impact by melding with the exterior of the pods, the arms swallowing the pill-shaped metal coffins like a wild python swallows a fawn in the Floridian Everglades, drawing them into the veritable belly of the beast.

Jack feels his bodily orientation shift from laying face-down to standing up and he winces as the sound of alloys being ripped apart encases him. It was dark inside the pod, and now that the pod’s been removed from the equation, it’s still dark. Until, that is, a series of spotlights shine up from the floor in a straight line ahead of Jack, leading our school skipping anti-socialite down a narrow corridor to a room where he meets up with Jackson Rainfort, who’d at some point exchanged his custodial onesie for a very gratuitous speedo.

Before Rainfort can explain that he was holding a plank for the entire duration of the flight and he is sweaty for that, and only that reason, seven scaled down versions of the interceptor arms grow from the floor, walls and ceiling around him, the three-fingered hands closing into spires and impaling Jackson seven ways from Sunday before retracting and repeating the process seven more times. And today’s only Tuesday, sheesh! With an accepting smile on his face, Rainfort falls to the ground, his body laced with more puncture wounds than Julius We’reAllFriendsHere,Right? Caesar. Jack screams until his throat is so raw the action causes him physical pain, and then he passes out. If he hadn’t, he would be aware of not only the floor opening up beneath him, but also the platform that lowers him thirty or so stories, setting him comfortably down on the very desk that he had fallen asleep watching the night before. Behind the desk, sitting in his chair with his hands patiently folded, is the one and only Terry Telascopesaplenny.

Totally Terry

Eventually, Totally Terry grows tired of the tribulation of waiting for another human, and he shakes his guest out of unconsciousness, invoking the remainder of Jack’s ear-wrenching post-real-life-snuff-film-experience scream. The scream lulls itself into a dull, “Uhhhh,” when Jack realizes that he’s currently sitting at eye level with his hero, understatedly happy about finally meeting this marvelous man.

“Welcome, AlienFootPrint, to the TerryStudio,” Terry begins, decidedly not waiting for Jack to stop drooling over him. “It really is an honor to have you here, I did some research on your viewing statistics and I was quite humbled to learn that you’ve been watching since the beginning! I could think of nobody else who would be worthy to win this contest, young man, and I thank you for your participation in my work. Without creatures like you,” as he waves his hands around, showing off the walk-in-closet-sized studio, “none of this would be possible.”

Jack doesn’t even know what to say, so he says nothing, just keeps staring in awe at the Adonis of a critical thinker sitting in front of him. Then, the memory of the custodian getting penetrated in the absolute second or third worst of ways floods back into his brain in the place of the dopamine that, by all rights, should be flowing. Then, he starts screaming.

“AAAHHH!!!!!!” as Terry’s technically artificial blood curdles, “TERRY! W-WE AREN’T SAFE HERE! A JANITOR BROUGHT ME HERE AND HE JUST… I…” sob, sniffle “I JUST WATCHED HIM DIE, TERRY!” sob again “HE DIED OVER AND OVER AGAIN, I MEAN, HE… he was… he waS IMPALED! HE GOT KILLED TO DEATH TERRY WE GOTTA SAVE HIM!”

Jack is drowning himself in far too hysterical of an emotional state for Terry to even entertain the idea of entertaining him. He softly places a finger on Jack’s lips, shushing him like a mother does a child after he steps on his first toad.

“Come with me, my son; all will be revealed.”

Idiotically enough, this makes Jack stop crying.

Terry takes Jack’s hand and walks out of what would be the view of the camera if the studio was broadcasting and through the saloon-style doors that leads to the TerryChamber. Inside this chamber is a single blocky white chair with a whole inedible arrangement of wires, tubes and screens protruding out from and running through the room’s sole piece of husky furnishing. Terry takes a seat, smiling that same accepting smile that Jackson Rainfort contorted his face into a little while ago, and places his hands firmly on the arm rests before slumping over, giving Jack a certain look on his face that reflects his watching not just one, but two fully matured humans randomly die in front of him in the same day. And to think, just a couple chapters ago, he thought it could only go up.

When Jack passes out again and hits the floor, another platform materializes below him and raises our boy out of the TerryStudio. The lift ascends through the many layers of the shallower part of Cape Enterprises Uncorporated’s sub-plasti’spa’junk levels, landing him in a most extravagant, if not slightly smaller than your average American hotel elevator, elevator. Accompanying Jack in this tiny, unventilated room is a sweaty fortysomething wearing a transparent plastic lab coat over a pair of blue denim overalls, his armpits and bellybutton visually obscured by the body heat induced clouds of fog, similar to the ones Jack breathed onto the windows during his moody moment on the bus ride this morning.

Sigmund tries to say something but Jack doesn’t stir and, after a few light love taps to the rib cage, the world’s most brilliant and inventive scientist gives up, unable to wake a sleeping teenager. It’s a shame too, because on Sunday, after choosing the winner of the contest early, Sig went as far as reprogramming the elevator to play hardcore gangster rap music instead of the usual smooth, jazzy tunes that it normally melodicates for its passengers. As the elevator rises, the stupid fast flow of the number one independent rapper in the world T3ch Nin3 slices the air to pieces, leaving not a single molecule unvibrated. Now that he’s being forced to listen to this type of music, Sigmund begins to understand what rhythm is.

The elevator continues to rise through Cape Enterprises, Unc. Approximately nine floors before the elevator dings, Jack wakes up and is more than a little startled by his new elevator buddy.

The World’s Largest Raccoon

“Uh… wh-who are uh, who are you?” the boy mumbles after two floors of silence, trying to make himself disappear into the corner of the elevator nearest the door.

“I’m Sigmund, the head of Cape Enterprise’s science division. Also known as Jackson Rainfort, the greatest goddamned custodian this planet has ever known, and Terry Telascopesaplenny, the host of the hugely popular, extremely relevant, and totally ineclipsable VidTube channel TerryTeamTwenty, which I know you’re more than familiar with. Because you won the contest.”

“Ex… excuse me? That literally makes no um, no sense. Neither of those guys even liek, even look like you. They’re both… they’re both… they’re… I watched them die, Mister Sigmund, they’re dead. Un… unless… did you… kuh–…kuh–” Jack says with great trouble. Then, when his testicles drop from the safety of his body, “Did you kill them or something? Are you some kind of like, some kind of sick, twisted, sick serial killer guy that like, that dresses up in his victim’s clothing so he can like, feel like he’s in their shoes?”

Sigmund, without missing a beat, says, “Well, if that were true and I wanted to feel like I was in my so-called victims’ shoes, I would just put their shoes on. After I spilled their guts and gave the floor to my slaughterhouse a new paint job, that is. But no, those humans are not actually humans but rather an invention of mine called BioBots. I won’t get into specifics because your brain would have an aneurysm trying to understand what I would be saying to you, but they’re basically life-sized human dolls that I’m able to control remotely from the comfort of a chair that I would never keep in my living room.”

ding

Sigmund, legs aching from having to stand and walk more in the past twenty-four hours than he did the entire week prior, waddles into the waiting room with Jack in an apprehensive tow. It’s a posh little room, purple carpet with a few pieces of eggshell furniture and a tremendous bong with a few hoses leading out of the orbicular base which is sat upon a glass top coffee table. Sigmund plops down onto a couch with a permanent dent in the cushions and takes his shoes off so he can start massaging his feet. The unmistakable smell of hard work having been done hits him directly in the olfactory bulb, but he pretends it smells great, never being one to boycott his own brand.

One step out of the elevator and frozen with fear at the sight of the bongibus Maximus, Jack takes a few seconds to be all neurotic and then snaps back to reality. He gravitates to a chair across the room from Sigmund and sits down, his ass bypassing the chair in favor of his entire lower back. They sit in silence for a moment, that almost uncomfortable and certainly awkward silence that arises between two humans who don’t know each other at all but are put together by fate, a higher power, or otherwise, to accomplish a task. Think a group project in high school with one of the students being student-aged and the other student being a middle-aged man with exceptionally odious feet. Scratch that – think a group project in college. The silence is popped by the crackling noises that erupt from Sigmund’s steppers as his hands work their magic, grinding, snapping, and soothing the tired muscles and bones bound together inside his baby-soft foot skin. He goes as far as letting out a moan before Jack whips out his magic chalk and draws a line.

“OH-kay, can you please, like, stop that?”

Sigmund looks up, his hands perched mid-rub. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“Mostly the uh, mostly the smell. I, um… do you… can we wait somewhere else? Or can I, at least? You’re doing your… thing over there, and this room is just kinda…blegh. I mean, I uh… no offense, you have a really nice building here and all, Mister… uh…”

Sigmund lowers his feet to the floor.

“Oh, you’re afraid of the bong. Why didn’t you just say so, I can put that away.”

He gets up and wrangles all of the bongibus’s hoses together, stowing it away in a secret closet inside the wall. The cavity closes as soon as Sigmund walks away.

“There, no more bong.”

“Uh, thanks, buh–”

“And it’s Durham, Mister Durham. But you’re welcome to call me Sigmund, names are just unnecessary labels. I’ll know when you’re talking to me.”

“Oh, okay. But I, uh, I wasn–”

“And when you’re talking about me. Remember that.”

Jack makes a mental note to never speak of this man outside of his presence, which, suddenly, is taking on a very Terry-esque aura. “Yes, sir. I wasn’t afraid of it or anything. The uh, the big… pipe, thingy, I mean.”

Sigmund looks up from his excruciatingly sensitive feet, again, and scoffs. “Were so. Don’t worry, I am too; it overshadows my masculinity and manhood in ways that no woman could ever dream of doing. I completely understand. And this building isn’t mine; I just work here, live here, operate, and create everything that roams inside of it. And that includes assembling and programming the robots who maintain it, too. The building itself belongs to the Cee-eEe-Oh, Chuck. He also works and lives here.”

“Wait a second… you guys, like, live here? You live at work ?”

“Yes, we–”

A smile of sheer punishment stretches across Jack’s face, his brain channeling the spirit of Lonny Ghost AD. “I’ve heard of taking your work home with you, but this is ridiculous,” said as if he was a character in a shitty sitcom.

A pause accompanied with eye contact overflowing partially with disdain and partially with hatred.

“…Yes, we do, most of the companies in NewMann offer their employees some sort of living quarters arrangement, although usually it’s to shave a dollar or a thousand off the employee’s salary. Not me though.”

“No? You must do your day job pretty well, then.”

Sigmund’s eyes light up brighter than the exhaust flare of an old-timey space shuttle, the likes of which his third-grade crayon-scribed spacecraft designs had surpassed in terms of not only efficiency, but also practicality.

“Wow, well thanks there, Aye-eFf-Pee! I actually appreciate that a lot. Whenever Chuck compliments me – he’s my boss – it always feels entirely obligatory because, you know, he’s my boss and all, and there’s not really anyone else who’s aware of what I do. So, again, thank you!!1!”

“You’re… welcome?” Jack scratches the back of his head and slides down lower in his chair, wondering why Sigmund said the word one.

Suddenly, an orchestra of scratchy sounds erupts from within the walls. What sounds like the world’s largest raccoon seems to be squirming through a ventilation system that’s far too small for its girth, and Sigmund is very put off by this.

“Kid, stay in your seat. This could be one of two things, and I’m pretty sure I know which one it is…”

As he dramatically trails off, a gloved hand bursts through the sheetrock and disburses drywall crumbs all over the carpet that Sigmund’s cleaning robot just cleaned a couple days ago. Then, an adjacent gloved hand punches through and the hands clasp together, fingers interlocking. The owner of the hands then does two little practice pulls before attempting to pull his hands through the wall, as if he saw somebody do something similar and thought he could attempt the same feat. Thought being the operative term, of course, given the loud FUCK that escapes the holes when his hands don’t break through. The wall then melts away and a man wearing a torn and tattered business suit, fedora and all, cobwebs in his goatee and dust bunnies underneath his eyelids, falls from the wall and lands upside down on his neck. The Suited Man mulishly holds this incredibly comfortable position as the hole in the wall he hatched from melts back to solidity.

Before anyone has a chance to acknowledge whatever the hell that just was, the elevator dings and a respectfully dressed woman who radiates a plucky attitude steps out, taking in the scene of the waiting room with a look of perplexed apathy in her eyes. Without saying a word, she just walks out, everybody but the suited man’s eyes following her as she does.

Once the room belongs to him again and the armadillo that followed Karen out of the elevator walks through the wall opposite Sigmund’s couch, Chuck floats off the floor and lands standing upright, the hover pads in his suit melting into his shoes and turning the business clackers into uranium-powered vacuum cleaners that suck up every stray piece of wall debris that tangled its way into the violet carpet. These pieces are broken down to an atomic level and remade into business suit fibres that repair all the tears and other damages Chuck’s very defenseful suit suffered in the laundry chute. Then, he greets the familiar-looking pale child that Sigmund at one point had stashed in a dark closet.

“Sup kid, you must be the winner. Welcome to my city! If you touch anything, a laser pointer will shine down on your fingers. Except it’s not a laser pointer, per say, but an actual laser that will amputate the living fuck out of your piggly little digits,” Chuck says, demonstrating the consequences by pulling all the fingers off his right hand and holding them between the fingers of his left hand, as if they were stubby little claws. “Kind of like that, except you’ll bleed and die because you’re not as cool as me. We clear?”

Jack passes more silent but deadlies than he cares to admit. “Y-y-y-yeah I uh I–… I thh-think so, sss-sir…”

“Gravy. And you see this tie?” as he points to his purple tie, very contrasted against the white shirt underneath his black business suit. Sigmund rolls his eyes and continues to massage his feet, the scent suddenly taking a fecal turn that’s only sort of unpleasant.

Wait, what? Fuckin’ ew.

“Yeh-yeh-yeh–… I think so.”

Chuck peels the top layer off the tie to reveal a zipper. He unzips the zipper and opens the tie similarly to how the BS comics character Uber Man opens his shirt to reveal the big U logo, revealing to the waiting room a single red button. Underneath this button reads two words: HOLOCAUST and NUCLEAR, not in that order.

“I used to have more buttons on here, but I control the majority of my suit’s functions with my mind now. Not this one though; it’s too dangerous and I am far too tempted to use it. At all times. Don’t make me press this button,” his voice taking on a cold graveness, the likes of his father’s. Then, in the normal Chuck voice, “Cool?”

Jack faints in his seat, wakes up, and faints again. Then, and only then, does Chuck close his tie and go over to the hidden closet, taking the bongibus Maximus out from the solitary confinement that it would never deserve in a million years. He holds his palm above the bowl and out pours a ridiculous spout of Cannabis flakes – some scorched, some covered in partially activated THC, some fresh as the day is middle-aged – and packs them down until the bowl is full. He then hands a hose to Sigmund, who accepts it with a welcoming smile, before taking a hose for himself, lighting the bowl with a blowtorch-sized flame that shoots out of his weenus, of all places.

Inside Chuck’s head, a voice says, ‘Okay, they’re hitting the big bong. Well, the bong they think is big, anyway. That’s our cue; you two go see your man, we’ll see ours. Meet back here by tomorrow,’ followed by the sound of a four-way high five.

Chuck, happy his power armor’s computer made some friends, is completely undisturbed by this and sees no reason to mention the fact that foreign voices have been speaking in his head for a couple days now.

Bongibus Maximus

Jack doesn’t wake up to the sound of coughing, because nobody in the room is coughing. It’s not really the smell either, because his nose is stopped up from all the crying he was doing in his passed out dream. No, it’s the strange, light, euphoric buzzing that he suddenly feels. It’s very subtle and even more unfamiliar, but it kind of feels… good. It’s almost pleasant… actually, it’s exactly like a runner’s high, that magic rush of endorphins that Jack bathes in after crushing an opponent on the racecourse. Everything just feels so happy right now… that is, until Jack realizes that he’s caught a contact high from the secondhand smoke of the grown fucking men sharing the room with his underaged self.

Not that there’s a legal age for the consumption of substances in this city, but some traditions are just worth upholding as far as Jack Monta is concerned.

As he opens his eyes, Jack notices the walls are moving just a little bit. It’s nothing crazy, they don’t look like they’re dancing, necessarily, but they’re just kind of… breathing. Everything is, as a matter of fact; every inanimate object in the room, from the sofas to the paintings to the fedora on the scary man’s head is breathing, respiring, growing and shrinking in perfect time with the cyclical filling and emptying of Jack’s lungs. The bongibus Maximus has taken on an entirely new look as well – the hoses resemble tentacles, writhing and squirming and puffing out small streams of smoke; scratch the tentacles, they look like caterpillars, long, silver, lanky caterpillars, the same kind that are depicted in that weird old movie Allison Wunderland.

Up until this point, Jack has never really understood that movie; talking animals, a main character that eats and drinks whatever she possibly can just to see what happens next, a teleporting cat with hypnotic eyes, the smoking caterpillar that he sees several of right now, locking lips and exchanging lung-filler with the strange fat man wearing a transparent lab coat so he can show off his grotesque body and… the wombat with the cap of mush… oh my god, he’s been talking to me this entire time!’

It’s safe to say that Jack still doesn’t understand that old movie, nor what’s going on right now, but he’s getting a glimpse into it, a peek through the keyhole with his very own eyes that are plugged into his wonky brain, the very brain that’s having a very difficult time not enjoying itself right now.

“Woaahhh… uhhhh… guuuyyysss, what’s like… happening?” he says in the fastest pace he can possibly manage.

Sigmund and Chuck look at the random American teenager they both met today, then at each other to share a grin. Then, Sigmund offers his best attempt at a simple explanation.

“AlienFootPrint, what’s happening to you is an entirely natural process. The human body, which you are in possession of currently, is full of many systems. The skeletal system, which is the physical framework of your body; the nervous system, which allows your body to talk to itself without anyone else hearing; the immune system, the greatest healing mechanism known to man because, realistically, it’s the only one we know; the gastrointestinal system, which transmutes solid food into bioenergy; the respiratory system, which has allowed you to breathe in our less-potent-than-firsthand secondhand Cannabis smoke, and; the endocannabinoid system, which allows the body to use the TetraHydroCannabinol, as well as all of the many other cannabinoids present in the combusted gaseous form of the Cannabis you just inhaled into your body, to name a few. What’s literally happening is an alteration of the normal way you perceive consciousness, but there are lots of different viewpoints to what’s happening inside; as far as I am aware, you are experiencing a neurochemical reaction that alters the normal way you perceive consciousness. You see, when the innumerable number of receptors in your endocannabinoid system, one of the many systems in your body, some other examples including the skeletal system, which is more or less the framework of your physical being; the nervous system, whi–”

“Yo, winner, listen to me,” Chuck cuts in, noticing Sigmund had closed his eyes and wandered ass backwards into a thought loop. “You’re cruisin’ right now, your spirit’s getting a small glimpse into a different way of experiencing life. This may not be your first life, and it’s definitely not your last, but this is the first time you’re living. And you were petrified of this very moment happening, have been for years, so you’ve treaded very carefully over the frozen lake of constantly sober consciousness up to this point. But here’s some things: winter don’t last forever, and a state of consciousness doesn’t define who you are. Wherever I go, here I am, and that’s all you need to know. Wait, where are you going?”

Jack is panic-stricken, his heart is beating out of his chest as his finger smashes repeatedly into the elevator button. The insects that aren’t in the room are acting like Jack, and Jack is buggin’ right now. Or at least he thinks he’s bugging out; in reality, the Universe has possessed him in an attempt to move the plot forward. Get it, Chuck?

Chuck, staring at the boy, suddenly has an epiphany. He takes off his left shoe and pulls out a needle so miniscule that it doesn’t look like it has a point. Calmly he approaches the sweating boy and, after checking to make sure there are no open windows here on the ground floor of his building, he takes a deep breath. Chuck then jabs Jack in the back, injecting him with the sobriety fluid that he shared with his Stepmom all those years ago and hasn’t touched since.

Jack doesn’t even feel a pinch, everything just winds down; the walls stop breathing, the bong stops offering him a pipe, and his Mother’s voice in the back of his head stops screaming at him at the top of his neurological lungs. He turns around and looks up to a grinning Chuck, his savior, the only thing that ripped him from an ensuing life of drug addiction like that of his poor, doomed brother.

“Feel a little better?”

Jack nods, wanting to say something but finding that hypnotic-eyed cat from before wrapped around his tongue. Sigmund, who has since retired to the couch, is eating barrel after barrel of cheese balls, watching with a smug little grin as these two bipedal hairless apes share a moment.

“Good. So, I take it that was your first time smoking Cannabis? How was it?” Chuck asks, this being the first time in a long time he’s popped somebody’s Cannabic cherry.

Jack is about to unleash a torrent of reasons why it was the worst experience of his life, but then the elevator behind him dings and opens to reveal a cloud of smoke, out from which steps his brother, apparently, still wearing those ridiculous purple contact lenses.

“Are you freaking kidding me Jack, I missed your first time?!” Sam shouts like he owns the place. “I suppose I saw this coming.” Sam looks around, taking in the soft, closed-in environment the Universe chose to host Jack in as he dove into his first episode of reefer madness. “Waiting room, huh? Yeah, I could see it.”

“What are you doing here, Sam? And why do I keep having to ask you that question?!” Jack shouts, ushering Chuck and Sigmund into an uncomfortable silence.

“Well first, like I indirectly told you in Sigmund’s closet, it’s Sam now. Sam. I don’t go by Sam anymore. Secondly, I wanted to be here, so, naturally, here I am.”

Sam pats his brother on the head like he was comforting a scared puppy, and then turns his attention to Chuck and Sigmund, and then to the bongibus Maximus. He holds his stare on the bongibus for quite some time, then, without breaking eye contact with one of the hoses, “So uh. We gonna hit that thing or not?”

Chuck shoots upwards through the many floors of his building and explodes with the fiery flamboyance of a firework, leaving a Cannabis leaf of green fireballs to dissipate among the artificial clouds spawning out of one of Chuck’s child companies CloudCo, a child company of the lighting industry’s monopolizer The Illuminati Company, which Chuck also owns. Then, resuming his suited form, he says, “I thought you’d never ask, Hippieman. How do you make that sound though, that like… zuh noise.”

Sam takes a hose and points his finger at the bowl, a small flame emerging from his fingernail and lighting the plant. Chuck walks up and opens the hole in his palm again, continuously filling the bowl as Sam empties it. They lock eyes and the gauntlet is thrown down – Chuck keeps filling and Sam keeps burning, neither stopping until the innards and outtards of the bonzoblunt are firmly packed inside Sam’s lungs. He doesn’t exhale.

“You just kind of curve your tongue, it doesn’t matter. Look, y’all are great and I wish we could stay here and smoke forever with my little brother, but this thing is dragging on. You’re keeping them waiting.”

Chuck is confused, more so over the fact that Zham is still holding in that monster rip than he is regarding who they’re keeping waiting, but confused nonetheless. Jack’s returned to his seat on the chair furthest from all these psychotic drug addicts, and Sigmund, in the background, pipes in, hoping to fill the silence.

“Who are we keeping waiting, lackey?”

“Not your lackey. And the aliens, of course.”

All three of them ask, “Aliens?” in unison, giving Sam a reason to make the pfft noise.

“Yeah, the aliens that do Psychedelic drugs. They’re up in your office waiting for you with some space drugs right now, actually. Get a move on!”

Chuck is already in the elevator as Sigmund labors to get up out of his chair. He does a combination of sprinting and waddling to close the gap between himself and the box and, as soon as his bare and sweaty feet hit the velvet floor of the elevator, he wipes out, smacking his face against the back wall. Sam joins them, eager to see his friends again, and all three of the soon to be passengers look back at Jack, who hasn’t budged from his chair.

“You comin’ kid? You won the contest, let’s go get your prize,” Chuck offers as he holds a hand out like he was in a movie trying to save the last passenger on a sinking yacht before it’s consumed by the lake of lava.

“No, no that’s okay. I’ll just wait here guys, I don’t mind.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” all three of the elevator buddies say simultaneously, Chuck adding, “If that happens again, we’re chewing Mushrooms.”

“No, I’m not fucking kidding you. Sure, I wanted to meet the extraterrestrials, but like… I didn’t know they did drugs, I uh… I think I’ll pass, honestly. They don’t seem like very good, uh… very good creatures, I guess.”

Inside of his head, Jack hears the noise of a radio tuning. First there’s mostly static, but when the source finds the right channel, a voice comes through.

‘Get in the elevator Jack, or else you’ll hear voices for the rest of your life. We ain’t playing hombre, we’re the best of the best. You know what that means?’

Jack says, “What?” out loud, garnering strange contortions of facial muscles from the humans in the elevator.

“Who are you talking to, Jack?” Sam asks earnestly, although he’s pretty sure he already knows the answer.

‘That means,’ the voice in Jack’s head continues, ‘that we’re capable of the worst. Your mother’s voice in your head, the one that keeps you up at night? Maybe that’s us. Maybe we’re the voice in her head that makes her drink. Maybe we were the voice in your father’s head that told him to leave your mother… no, wait, that voice wasn’t in his head. Anyway, maybe we’re the voice that’s been talking to Chuck this whole time.’

“Wait, what?” Chuck chimes in, having heard that last bit. “I thought that was the voice of my power armor’s computer?”

“Your power armor doesn’t have a computer with a voice, boss,” Sigmund says, slapping his belly in a show of pride. “I designed it to interface directly with your mind, I thought you knew that.”

“I… I did, but… what the fuck?” Chuck takes off his hat and rubs his head, suddenly more mentally exhausted than he’s ever been in his demented kaleidoscope of a life.

Sam holds out his hand and a perfectly rolled Cannabis cigarette materializes in his palm, the end already lit. He hands it to Chuck, adding, “Here man, it’s all very confusing at first. You’ll get there.”

Chuck takes the lefty and tries to burn it down in one shot, but the ember does not grow. The tip barely even glows; even though his body is filled from his toes to his fingertips with smoke, the joint hasn’t shrunk. Chuck never believed in beings that are higher than himself on the consciousness spectrum, but at this point, he’s one regenerating Magic Mushroom away from getting down on the floor and kissing this beautiful hippie’s feet.

Jack, meanwhile, is at war with the voice in his head, and he’s losing. In a last-ditch attempt at securing the dub, he says, out loud, “Fine, do it. It’s not like my life can be any worse. Grow the brain tumor, I don’t even care anymore. My idol is a fat man who does drugs and works for a bigger psychopath than my brother, who also does drugs. And, toppin’ it all off now, my brother bought himself a pair of gay contacts and now he thinks he’s friends with aliens. Who also do drugs. I should’ve, just, fuckin’, I should’ve stayed in school.”

The voice pauses and contemplates the situation while everyone else in the room averts their eyes. ‘Okay Jack, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be threatening you. How about this: I won’t tell anybody else in the room with you right now that your full name is Jackson, just like that janitor, if you go along with the group. Also, more pertinently, you won’t be accidentally subjected to any drugs that you don’t want to do. Deal?’

Jack contemplates this for a moment, everyone else in the room watching him from the elevator. Chuck is growing tired of pressing the OPEN DOOR button every twenty seconds that Jack stalls them. Quite honestly, the narrator is getting tired of this too, and so was the original author, I have to imagine. This chapter’s easily about two thousand words too long at this point, the kid needs to get a move on.

Realizing only one of these three factors, Jack finally submits and joins the other three-quarters of the population of the room.

Sam exhales his hit into the waiting room through the closing elevator doors and his body flows out with the smoke, demoting the squad to a trio. As two of the Universe’s current main perspectives and one side perspective begin to ascend, Jack hears the changing of radio frequency in his head again, the tuner landing on his Mom’s favorite classic rock station, the one it was originally set to.

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 5.5 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 5.5
Karen Gets A Phone Call

Nonsense

“They never will come through though, they’re too entwined in their own silly nonsense. You could wave a homecooked brown sugar cinnamon coffee cake under their noses and they wouldn’t budge, these humans are just going right at it.”

Chuck inhales through the crutches of two joints, one pinched between the thumb and pointer fingers of each of his hands, burning the entirety of both Cannabic bodies and sucking the remains deep into his lungs.

“Of course, if you were to wave a cinnamon bun from the lovely That Mom And Pop Shop down the street from Cape under their noses, well, the result may be different. The difference, of course, lying in the preparation of the delectable desserts. The homecooked brown sugar cinnamon coffee cake may have been cooked at home, but it was made using powder bought in a box that was on sale at the local suburban grocery store. The cinnamon buns, however, were hand-crafted from scratch; the dough was made from freshly harvested grain that Pop sickled up in the field on the floor above the shop, the cinnamon bark was pulled from their trees ground up moments before the buns were dusted and placed into the hot oven by Mom, and the icing? You don’t even want to know where the icing comes from; if you found out, you would have a nagging, empty feeling in the pit of your chest for the rest of your life, like you’re missing something, something that you will never experience for yourself.”

Chuck pulls a massive blunt, two inches in diameter, out of his right sleeve and lights it with his left ring finger, taking no less than nineteen hits before passing the remaining nineteen-twentieths of the monster to Karen.

“That is a fantastic point, homecooked from a box is infinitely inferior to homemade with love, but the true superior, the one real übermacht? Homegrown and rolled in the leaves of the plant that the buds came off of, just like these puppies we’re all toking on today.”

‘Christ in a can of cranberry sauce Chuck, you grew this stuff yourself??’

“Well, technically no, a very experienced gardener grew it in the grow room on floor negative forty-four, but it’s that Cape Cookies, so you know it’s of tip-top-tier quality.”

Chuck turns to Karen and smiles as she passes him the blunt, a very apprehensive look cast unto her face. “What’s wrong Kar, is my potent too Cannabis for you?”

Karen, who sat in silence watching the man who doesn’t sign her digital paychecks speak these long-winded toils of nonsense out loud to himself, is… yeah, she’s a bit put off by that. He literally just started speaking out of nowhere, nothing provoked him. Like, what the hell? When Chuck didn’t go all out celebrating the Holiblaze yesterday, Karen was almost proud of him, fighting cultural norms and such. She probably should have assumed that he would just double down the next day but hey, when one assumes, they make an ass out of u and me, and I’m not even involved in the conversation.

Karen opens her mouth to try to excuse herself from the room, or at least what was a room; the office is probably still a room, given, but Karen can’t be sure because of the marshmallow-thick Cannabis smoke that’s currently manifesting every cubic inch of the space’s volume. As luck would have it, she doesn’t have to excuse herself because Chuck, out of nowhere, decides to float out of his seat, eat the bonzoblunt with the hole that opened up in the palm of his hand, and then sprint full speed through the air, never touching the ground once, towards the small laundry chute that Karen implored him to install so she could wash his clothes because he never does and their clients are starting to freaking notice. It’s not quite big enough to accommodate a full-grown Chuck, but he still manages to fit himself inside. With a squirm and a squeeze and a puff of his leaves, down the rabbit hole he goes.

The MushRoom

Located in the depths of Karen’s purse is a remote control that was built to remotely control the office’s ventilation systems and do nothing else. This doesn’t need an explanation but it’s getting one anyway: Chuck smokes an imperial fuckton of Cannabis on a daily basis; in fact, that daily basis baselines to a level that no daily basis should ever baseline at, even on the Holiblaze. Or in this case, the day after the Holiblaze, because poor wittle Chuck had to work.’

When the air is air again, Karen’s phone starts to ring, almost as if on cue. Her caller ID reads Poor Wittle Chuck. Oh joy, he must have gotten stuck in the laundry chute and forgotten that he’d just seen her. Agai– wait, no, this has never happened before. Huh. After watching her rectangular piece of glass jingle one ding short of voicemailitude, Karen answers.

“Hello boss, how are we today?”

“Great Karen, absolutely fantastic, stupendous in ways you couldn’t even understand. I need you to do something for me.”

“What else is new?”

“Me. Listen, I have a few box sets of dominoes stashed in the unused closet of the right wing of the office, next to the minifridge where I keep all my unlabeled Cee-Bee-Dee juices. Well, the closet was unused, before I started growing all my ‘Shroomies in it. Heh. Anyway, I need you to go into that closet, but try to step over the Mushrooms or else they’ll step over you and write about it jokingly in their collective mycelial diary. Okay, are you in the closet yet?”

Karen lowers her phone from her ear and just kind of looks at it for a minute. Then, “Uh, I… we’re gettin’ there, bossman.”

“Okay, I’ll just keep going as you walk. Grab one of the boxes of dominoes, any one that you’d like, there are literally trillions of boxes of dominoes stashed away in this building Karen, trillions of them! If we sold them all for half a cent each then I could retire tomorrow! Tomorrow Karen! And so could you, and your mom! But not Sigmund! Heh, hahaheh, no, Sigmund would keep working, he loves his– bahahahah, he loves his job here so much, ohhhhh SHIT! Anyway, do you have the dominoes yet?”

Karen, standing with her communicator caught in the crevice between her neck and her shoulder, stays silent as she takes the second from the top box of dominoes out from behind the four-foot-tall Psilocybin Cubensis Mushrooms growing in the closet. The top box seemed like it was dirty, like it had a bunch of spores on it or something, so she picked the next best alternative. She looks inside and it appears to be a regular set of dominoes.

‘No, that can’t be. There has to be something hidden in here.’

Following her incredibly accurate human intuition, Karen peels back layer upon layer of the domino set’s innards until she reaches the bottom of the tin. Son of a gun, it’s just a normal set of dominoes.

“Yeah I got ‘em.”

“Great. Listen, do NOT open the box under ANY circumstances, you’ll find out why in a bit. Go on back into the office, close the door to the mushRoom behind you.”

She closes first the lid to the tin, then the door to the mushroom room behind her. Chuck continues.

“Now, put the unopened box into the top right drawer of my desk. I can’t stress this enough, it’s very important that it goes into the right drawer. If, if you’re standing on the side opposite of where I sit, it looks like the top left drawer. If yo–”

“Okay okay, yeesh dude. I got it,” she cuts in before Chuck has the chance to explain her ear into a state of cauliflowerility.

… … …

“All right, it’s done.”

“Karen.”

“Yes Chuck?”

“Inside that box of dominoes is an advanced black box wireless hacking instrument.”

“…All righty, I’ll be taking the rest of the day off, then?”

“Yes, that would be lovely. Have a nice day, Karen.”

“You too, boss.” click “Ya freakin’ lunatic.” She sighs.

Karen gathers up all her notebooks and papers from her desk and stuffs them in her purse. The only thought that comes to her mind as she waits for the damn near comforting elevator to haul its way up to the forty-second floor is consumed by the uncertainty of whether or not she will get paid for today, or if she’ll be able to finish the unlabeled thing she may or may not have been writing all this time before the end of the week!

Karen can hear the elevator approaching when she feels her uPhone buzzing off the hook deep within the catacomb that is her purse. The phone requires a Montana Jones style archaeological dig to find, and it takes three times as long as it needs to, according to the dig site’s manager. Apparently, the lazy laborers (Karen’s hand) were forced to stop for a moment when the elevator doors opened. Excuses, excuses. Upon retrieving her artifact and unlocking its mysteries, Karen reads a text from Chuck saying:

if you see me, dont acknowledge the fact that this phone call happened. in fact, it didnt happen. you just hallucinated. hows that taste

Duly noted, and point proven.

The hip-hop/rap-accompanied elevator ride to the waiting room takes much longer than Karen feels like it needs to. Normally after work she would just go to her home on the tenth floor and relax with her cats, maybe watch a little bit of Webflicks, but not today. Today, she’s going to treat herself to one of the cinnamon buns that Chuck was raving about to himself earlier, and then she’s going to order one dozen to be sent to every animal shelter operating within one hundred miles of the city, and those operating within the city itself. With the company card. ‘It’s what Chuck would want.’

The elevator doors slide open to reveal the posh waiting room, decorated by none other than Karen herself. Someone has to bring some culture and class to this place, and it sure as heck isn’t going to be Chuck! Speaking of which, that’s exactly who she sees laying on the purple carpet of the waiting room – her boss, Chuck Leary, sprawled out upside down against the wall, covered with smudges and dust, tears ripped all over his poor, defenseless suit. And what’s worse, he’s accompanied by… Sigmund, and some teenage-looking kid for whatever reason. Suddenly, Karen desperately wants to not know what’s going down at Cape today.

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 5 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 5
Jack Monta

The Band Hallway

Jack, his belly full of pancakes he burnt because he was trying to do seventy things at once this morning, leaves a footprint in his muddy excuse for a lawn as he walks towards Quarryville Road. It must have rained last night, as the entire property is more of a sopping wet marsh than usual today; his feet sink another centimeter with every meter he travels. Growing up, Jack thought quicksand would be a problem that he would often encounter in life, but he was wrong – it’s the quickmud you’ve gotta look out for.

Quarryville used to be a very rocky, dry place, but with global warming and whatnot messing with the weather systems that the humans only started paying close attention to a relative handful of years ago, Jack’s pinprick of northern New Jersey has sogged into a swamp and a half. Following a tickling sensation on his arm, Jack splatters what was once his blood all over his palm and the planet loses another one of its deliverers of population control. The boy literally has to fight the urge to exclaim Get out of my swamp! at the vanquished corpse of his mosquitish foe, lest he come off as weird when he and Isabelle don’t speak at the bus stop.

Then again, it’s not just the weather that makes the Monta’s yard a quagmire – dude lives in a valley between a mountain and a lake.

The Wolffes, Jack Monta’s family, the Portmans, and that weird clan that communicates by clucking like turkeys at each other own the first four houses that the bus driver sees after driving her long metal tube over the Skunksville Dam. After she picks up the first round of the offspring of Treering’s boondocks, she forces the bus up a road that climbs a massive hill that volunteer policemen like to park on so they can involuntarily commit anybody who’s mentally unhinged enough to attempt running up it. The next bus stop is on top of the hill, and on this particular morning the windows are still fogged up from the boggy valley’s moisture. So fogged up, in fact, that the bus driver uses it as an excuse to close the door on the last kid attempting to board, annoyed that all the insects keep flitting in.

“Goddamn, woman! I don’t even want to go to school!” Dakota shouts as he struggles to free his leg from the closed door, the rubber flaps tearing his leg hairs from their follicles. After getting stabbed in the throat and then immediately resurrected by the gray-skinned bus driver’s advanced necromancy techniques, Dakota clumsily walks down the aisle of the moving bus, passes by Isabelle, who looks great this morning by the way, and sits next to Jack.

Jack, his face still imprinted with the pattern of the folds in his pillowcase, is a bit put off by how animated Dakota is so early in the day. The kid is nearly levitating out of his damn seat, it’s as if the extraterrestrial craft on Terry last night was trying to abduct him but the weight of all the track medals he wins is weighing him down. He has this expecting look on his face too, like he’s waiting for Jack to say something to him. Well too bad; sorry Dakota, but Jack missed the announcement of the winner of the contest last night, so you won’t be congratulated before you even tell me what I need to congratulate you on. Asshole. I’m tired.’

Dakota, still holding his smile, nudges Jack in the side.

“WHY DID YOU Do that?” Jack asks, perhaps a bit louder than he meant to. Then, “I’ve been looking at you this whole time. What is it? What do you want?”

Dakota snickers like he just ate a chocolate bar filled with peanuts, caramel, and that fluffy off-white stuff that kind of sounds like nugget. “Well good morning to you too, buddy. Sleep well last night? Dream about any good… footprints?”

Jack rolls his eyes and leans his head against the window like he’s an emo kid starring in the music video for a moody alternative song. ‘What, did he see me leave footprints in my yard from the top of his hill?’ he thinks to himself, saying, “What, did you see me leave footprints in my yard? We can’t all afford to live on top of Frick Hill, Dakota.”

Dakota’s smile evolves into a smirk that sits just below nefarious grimace. He doesn’t even shuffle in his seat.

“I know buddy, it’s just me up there. With Zoey, good ol’ Zane Bucknick, and… well, and the alien.”

Jack spins around so fast that his skin lags behind his skeleton a little bit. “Dude! You watch Terry too, you know that’s an offensive word. What the hell is your problem today, I feel like you’re going to appear in my bathroom mirror tonight. Like, shit.”

Dakota bursts out laughing, his smile finally facing the death it deserves. “Thems is fightin’ words bro, and coming from Mister AlienFootPrint, no less! Damn homie, why are you in such a funkin’ fuck this morning??”

“Why did you call me that,” Jack pouts, arms folded like a bad poker hand.

“Same reason Terry called you that last night, dude. You won!”

Upon hearing those words, Jack enters into something of a fugue state, remembering nothing between that remark and his departure from the bus at the high school. He’s in such a state of shock that Dakota has to carry our boy off the bus in a baby carrier; you see, predictably or not, Jack has never won anything in his life. The closest he’s come is fourth place in a Junior Varsity cross country race. He was in first for the majority of that race too, but then his foot felt like it snapped in half so he had to hobble through the last half mile of the run. He still got a medal because the first twentyish runners in an XC race get medals, it was bronze though. Just like everyone else’s. The weird part: when he finished, literally moments after he limped across the finish line with tears in his eyes, his foot felt fine as a fiddle and he could walk on his own.

But today, or rather last night, he won the single most greatest-est thing that anybody could ever win, ever – the chance to meet his idol. Between the contest, Isabelle going into his house, and the track championship this Saturday, this week is turning out to be the best week of his life. For the first time in his almost seventeen years, our boy feels like it can only go up from here! Oh, and did I mention that Saturday is Jack’s birthday, too?

The three other non-runner students in the entire school who also watch TerryTeam20 (all freshman band members by chance) swarm AlienFootPrint at his locker. He’s flooded with piranha-laced rapids of questions, the children nipping at his clothing as he tries to get away from them so he doesn’t have to visit Missus Logem again. Thankfully, Isabelle happens to walk up and the freshmen scatter, ostensibly terrified of any human with lumps of fat hanging from their chest, regardless of what may or may not be hanging between their legs. Jack is ecstatic to see her at first, but then he remembers why she left his house yesterday and almost wishes he was fish food.

“Hey dude,” Isabelle greets, nodding towards the escaping flotsam. “Why are those kids trying to take your pants off?”

“They’re uh, they’re not, I just, I–”

“And why did you suddenly get so weird yesterday?”

“Ohwellyouknow I just, I uh, I–”

“And why the heck wouldn’t your brother teach me that magic trick?!” feigning anger in a playful way.

“OhumwellI, I-I mean… I uh…” Jack stutters, waiting for her to cut him off again. She doesn’t, instead just looking at him with that little smile. Sheesh, this chick could make a murderer confess. Where the cops at?

“Uh… what? Why would there be cops here, Jack?”

Oh ghad, he said that out loud. That’s rough. Fortunately for Jack, Dakota rounds the corner before he can embarrass himself further.

“Yo Iz,” as the wingman in training leans against the lockers with one arm, attempting to come off as flirty. “How you doin’?” When Isabelle nods her head down, not up but down, at him, Dakota takes his L and turns his attention to Jack. “So dude, I meant to tell you on the bus but I got distracted when you started doing kick flips on that kid’s skateboard. Remember when Terry went offscreen last night? After the ads? No? Well, it was because he made contact, dude! You’re gonna meet the Eee-Tees too, ya lucky bastard!”

Jack’s face boils to a steamy simmer, he feels hotter than the pot of homemade marinara sauce that Coach Scoompa brought to the Cross Country Awards Banquet this past fall.

Isabelle’s eyebrows, meanwhile, ascend to heights heretofore unknown. “Wow, so you kick me out of your bedroom for saying I saw a robot, but you’re meeting aliens? Cool Mont’, real cool.”

Jack tries to say something, he really does, but he’s entirely too distracted by Isabelle’s walking in the opposite direction. So is Dakota, and the majority of the freshmen standing in the hall, boys, girls, and otherwise. Just kidding, there are only two “genders” here; with the government gone, humanity hasn’t been cattle prodded into that corral of mental illness. At least, not outside of New Manhattan; living inside a wall that big’ll make any human doubt their identity.

Oh, that’s not mental illness? And it has nothing to do with the government pushing an outdated mold on society that isn’t complex, creative, nor comprehensive enough to fit all the humans, leading some of us to question who we are at the most fundamental levels to the point of making some of us think we were actually born wrong, thus making some of us believe we need to be referred to using specific sounds in order to feel whole and legitimate?

Bullshit.

Jack and Dakota look at each other nervously, both of them biting their tongues. Finally, Dakota chomps down.

“So… Isabelle was at your house yesterday? In your bedroom? Aaaand you’ve let me talk about extraterrestrials this whole time becaaaaauuuuuse…?”

“No, she was in my kitchen. I don’t know why… why she… buuuhhhhh…”

“Jack? Jackattack, speak to me!”

He would, Dakota, but Jack suddenly feels a hint of queaziness. The hint morphs into a suggestion, then a cultural norm, then it’s drafted into a bill, carried up Capitol Hill, and passed into a law. Then, his head fuller with inapplicable political metaphors than his stomach is with prematurely hatched butterflies whose wings are still too gooey to fly, Jack throws up all over the floor in front of that tiny door that Billy used yesterday, causing a traffic jam the likes of which the band hallway has never seen.

This hallway is usually backed up worse than Treering Ave ever since those low-cost housing complexes were installed, stopped up with students publicly displaying their affection towards one another and similar early-morning high school antics, but there’s never been reason for a dead stop. Jack’s puddle is one hell of a reason though, and when Timmy Williamson and his girlfriend of seven minutes Suzie Queue come tromping down the hallway holding hands for all to see, they’re so distracted by each other’s palm sweat that they don’t even perceive the puke. With a slip and a fall, Janitor Rainfort gets a call that disastrously ruins his morning yoga routine.

Doctor Phanny Tasia

After he rolls up his purple mat, Rainfort changes back into his school-issued janitor onesie and throws his sweaty exercise plantain hammock into the laundry machine. He would take a shower before gracing the halls with his presence, but that hippie kid staying in the custodian’s closet with him used up all the hot water earlier this morning. With his cart still locked and loaded from the shell casing incident yesterday, Rainfort dusts off his shoulders and prepares to embark. But first…

“Yo kid, how’s the thing coming?”

The hippie, covered in grease, Cannabis flakes/stems/leaves, and microprocessors, pops out from a hole in the floor. “Coming along well, my friend. I ran o–”

He’s interrupted when the bell rings.

“I ran out of Cannabis last night, but then a kid I gave Acid to at the assembly yesterday slipped a few grams into my pocket this morning, so it’s all good.”

“Last night? Weren’t you… oh never mind. All you hippie types look the same to me, I swear. Anyway, did you fix my chair?”

“Heh,” the boy/man, depending on your age and the openness of your mind, snickers, his purple eyes shining in the dim light of the oil lantern that illuminates the closet. “Well, I definitely took a look at it. There’s not that much fixing I can do to it, it’s primitive human technology. I’ve seen what it can turn into, but that don’t mean I can bridge the gap, ya feel me?”

“Yeah, I suppose. Hey, are you gonna be here when I get back? You still have to teach me that magic trick.”

The hippie pauses at that, contemplating his next words. There’s really only one place he can go here, but there are multiple avenues that lead to said place. “Yeah, yeah man. I’ll show you how after lunch, say, then thirty?”

Rainfort excitedly nods. “Definitely! I can’t wait to show my boss, he’s gonna freak out. Dude’s deathly afraid of magic, he thinks it doesn’t exist. Hey, what’d you say your name was again? Zan?”

“Nah, it’s Sam. You were close though.”

The two do a secret handshake they made up yesterday and Rainfort exits, leaving Sam alone to tinker in the closet.

It’s hard to find good help these days, but Rainfort always has a way of beating the odds in the most self-fulfilling way. Once an employee now has a subordinate; a dude who never went to high school is now cleaning a high school, and with the help of a human who fits his father’s description of a waste of semen to the t – this is the American dream, a dream that turns into a nightmare the moment Rainfort comes upon the lukewarm pile of bile and banana-chunk pancake bits that was left for him in the band hallway. As he mops, Rainfort vows to figure out the identity of the vomit’s emitter so he can make that leaking sonuvabitch pay for his crimes. Or her crimes, technically.

Just then, Rainfort, his wet mop in mid-stroke, has his entire day ruined once more, and by a faculty member no less! Doctor Phanny Tasia, the one and only, struts out of the tiny door leading up to the projector box wearing not one, but two nametags which are rendered momentarily illegible when he slips and falls into the puddle of student vomit. Rainfort almost falls over laughing whilst keeping entirely silent. He offers his co-worker a gloved hand of assistance. Doctor Tasia takes it and, once he’s standing on his own two feet, begins verbally berating our self-confident sanitation engineer.

“What… what is the meaning of this, this, this hogwash? Or is it hogslop? Tell me mop man, did the pigs bathe in this pishposh? Or are you using it to soak the grime off the floor so you can feed them something tasty?”

Tasia defiantly puts a foot down, splashing the puke onto a once-clean section of floor.

Janitor Rainfort watches this all with twinkles in his turquoise eyes. “Listen pal, the only pig taking a bath right now is you. Hit the showers, you stink like stink smelled something and said Damn, that stinks.”

Phanny is flabbergasted. “How, how dare you! You un-thespian, melodramatic, underdeveloped, side-character of a man! You were just hired yesterday and you dare step to me, the backbone of this school?! You think that assembly yesterday could have happened without me? If I didn’t work here training the children on what to say when they need to be saying, well, well the whole school would be constantly under the influence of drugs!”

Rainfort, his face a wall of stone, grabs his mop above the hairs and presses the end of the handle against Tasia’s mouth, silencing him. “You seem traumatized, friend; you should have a talk with the school psychologist. I heard we just got a new one.”

Phanny smacks the broom away, watching with fire in his eyes as the entire length of the handle splashes in the puke. “I am the new school psychologist, thank you very little, and I think I’ll go see myself now!”

Doctor Tasia marches away down the hall, still covered in what was previously the contents of a student’s stomach, then takes the stairs which lead to the hallway which leads to the stairs which lead to The Addition. Tasia doesn’t have many friends in this school, but the math teacher clique always embraces him with open arms; he doesn’t even want to stay and chat either, he just needs to borrow a key to the elevator so he can wash off in the pool on the roof.

A Substitute Teacher

A greenish-brownish cloud of horrors follows Doctor Tasia as he traverses the locker-lined hallway. Doors slam shut as he makes his way towards his destination, teachers of all the various sciences protecting their students from the noxious cloud meandering past the entrances to their oversized cubby holes in the wall. All but one, that is; a substitute teacher, a proud man by the name of Sidney Halloway who’s filling in for the biology teacher that randomly decided to quit yesterday, decidedly leaves his classroom door open. The students implore him to have mercy, but he doesn’t believe them when they start to complain. He’s had a cold for months now and his sense of smell packed up and left shortly after the illness moved in; he knows how kids are, they’re just trying to take advantage of him. Even that pale, scrawny student in the back who plays the whole quiet kid act. Doesn’t he know that teachers always stay wary of the quiet ones? Like jeez kid, have some semblance of character.

Fortunately for Jack and the rest of his classmates, today is the clothespin anatomy lab. As the students all pin their noses shut, allow me to explain: due to flagrant budget cuts, rather than studying actual biology or fictional biology that was depicted in a popular movie a decade ago, the Harbingers of Hoffman High are examining biologically-based inanimate objects in order to get a grip on the fundamentals of bodily animation. The clothespin, being used as a model of a jaw, showcases how a mouth opens and closes in a way that isn’t as totally gross as using a mouth of a once living creature. There was some resistance to this idea when it was originally floated down the Administrative River Styx, but Mister Queue PrinciPal is far too progressive a thinker to let such a fantabulous idea go to waste.

Contrary to our substitute tyrant’s beliefs, schools in general, and especially public schools, exist for students to have a learning environment, not to provide lazy adult humans with occasional odd jobs during the non-summer months. Sewn into the fabric of this institution’s being is something of a self-correcting system: when a teacher is the worst, the students have the opportunity to redefine the very meaning of the worst.

In the front row, three members of the lacrosse club discreetly take out their mini sticks and load them with crumpled pieces of paper. The soccer goalie, still experiencing some ESP side effects from that hippie’s killer Acid yesterday, levitates a mass of pencil protectors and heats them, melting away the polyester fabric and leaving only the glowing metal rings and zipper heads. The one senior who’s still in biology class for some reason takes out the shiv he made from a broken pair of scissors that disappeared from the art classroom two years ago. One of the gray children reanimates a colony of ants that he brought for lunch today. Ponsy, who happens to be on hall monitor duty this morning, caught the vibe from afar and blocks the doorway with his body so nobody can escape. Each and every one of the other forty-two students in attendance today also brandish some form of resistance, but describing them all would be far too extra for such an inconsequential and transitional scene.

All at once the students fling their weapons and Sidney is stoned, battered, and impaled by more school and/or office supplies than are kept in stock by the local Stapled branch. Up to this point, Mister Halloway had been scraping his name onto the chalkboard with his one uncut fingernail, but as he feels foreign objects entering his back and neck, he turns around just in time for a single paper clip to bounce off his belt buckle, which, by the way, says his first name in gigantic gold letters.

He deadeyes that pale, scrawny kid that’s frozen in the follow-through position of tossing a paper clip. As Sidney’s mouth opens, strands of mucus and saliva form bridges between his pallet and tongue. They wiggle as he speaks. “Now, I know that I was just assaulted by every single student in this classroom, but guess what, fuckstick? Yeah you, Casper the Gimp back there. I saw you throw that paper clip.”

As he speaks, a small puddle of blood forms beneath Halloway’s feet, which is even more unsettling once you realize that it had to puddle up in his shoes before it spilled over onto the tile.

“So guess what? You, and you alone, are taking the fall for the entire classroom,” says the substitute teacher at the public American high school.

“Oh no he isn’t!” a gruff and confident voice calls out from the hallway. Mister Halloway, who seems to be having trouble standing up straight, turns to see a custodian, boots caked with crusty vomit, standing with his arms folded at the door. Ponsy is nowhere to be found.

“You, pale kid. You threw up in the band hallway this morning, right?”

Jack is totally silent. So many eyes are on him, so many peeping Toms and Tomanthas staring at this kid who they’ve never spoken to before in their lives, waiting to see what he’ll do. Is he going to cry? Throw up more? He’s whiter than the average polar bear, is he going to shoot up the school?

Rainfort takes his cape off and throws it on the floor of the classroom to reveal a truly disgusting print of a human’s bare foot, but it’s not dirt that’s imprinted into the cape. Not grime, not sand, not that mysterious green stuff that Mister PrinciPal produces in his gullet. No, the footprint isn’t composed of any substance that could possibly make this morning better for our poor, smelly sanitation engineer. The footprint was made with puke… well, it would have been, if Rainfort was wearing a cape in the first place. Don’t worry, it’ll come.

“I’ll take your silence as a yes. You’re coming with me.”

Jack weighs his options, finally deciding to go with the janitor rather than staying to take his substitute teacher’s nonsense. After Jack leaves, a wobbly Halloway turns on the projector linked up to the computer. He’s fading fast, refusing to acknowledge the multiple oozing holes in his back while the ooze continues to seep further into his tattered shirt. ‘I need to show these… these kids that I’m… that I’m cool.’ He brings up a Gooble Chromatic browser page and hits the options button, opening a SecretView page so the search history isn’t saved.

Meanwhile, in the IT closet, the one information technician who keeps tabs on all the current computer activity going on in the school sits in his chair, coffee cup balanced on his bulbous belly, and stares at the fifty screens in front of him. In the bottom right corner, on the screen representing the teacher’s computer in the biology classroom, the letters P, O and R get typed into the search bar.

Halloway falters. He slams into the ground, unconscious from the blood loss, and the shockwave is so small that neither Jack nor Rainfort feel it as they’re walking down the stairs.

A Dominance Struggle

Jack is petrified – he’s never been in trouble at school before this week. First the suspension, and now he’s getting escorted out of class? During first block?? Given, it’s a janitor that’s taken him out of class today, but still, he can practically hear his Mom’s words in his head. ‘“Jack, it’s okay honey, I’m sure you didn’t mean to do it. I’m not even disappointed, it’s not like you’re addicted to drugs like Sam.” And then I’ll say, “You’re right Mom, but this behavior isn’t acceptable. I’ll punish myself right away.”’

She’ll try to stop him, but Jack knows better than to fall into that trap. He doesn’t need to be standing over her deathbed in fifty years, tears in his eyes, and have her bring up how he was always so good until that one week in high school when he became a problem child.

On their way to the custodian’s closet, Jack and Rainfort pass none other than Mister Queue PrinciPal, tongue-deep in a whole pot of coffee, making his rounds and checking in on all the teachers and students. Well, all the male teachers, anyway; PrinciPal doesn’t dare look at the female teachers while they’re doing their job. No sexual harassment-fueled coups for Mister, thank you quite a bit.

PrinciPal shoots Rainfort a strange look which Rainfort returns to sender, Jack getting caught in the middle of a dominance struggle between the two most powerful alphas in the school. The old master, the king, the monarch on his throne against the traveling warlord and fix man, the one who’s inevitably called to clean up the messes the monarch makes. Again, if PrinciPal was still capable of getting a… never mind.

Jack and Rainfort walk down the hall. The one above all stands where he stands, watching them pass. Once they round the corner, PrinciPal begins his deft-footed approach.

Rainfort, slick with his keys, unlocks the custodian closet and shoves Jack inside before looking over both of his shoulders. Seeing that the coast is clear, he follows his young captive into the dark prison, locking the door behind him. A moment after the door clicks shut, PrinciPal does his geriatric version of a hop around the corner, looking everywhere but finding no young boy. He fears the worst, slowly creeping back out of sight of the closed custodial closet, just lurking there, waiting for something to happen. He takes out his flip phone and presses 7, the speed dial he’s assigned to the school’s SMAK team, and mulls over the screen for a moment. Then he slams his phone closed like a pissed girl at prom does her portable makeup mirror once she’s done fixing her face so she can steal her man back from that slutty tramp – today, this time, PrinciPal’s taking the prize.

The Most Awful Pain Imaginable

“Well congrats, kid. You’ve won the prize,” Rainfort grumbles as the unlikely pair stumbles through the dark, our former struggling to find a light switch. He won’t find one, of course, because the only light source inside the closet is a small oil lantern that ran out of oil minutes ago, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t try.

Jack thought the suspension booth yesterday was dark, but this closet? This is some higher level of darkness, or would it be a lower level? Because, like, darkness and stuff? Regardless, Jack can’t see shit, and Rainfort could very well slip a hand up his trousers at any second. He won’t, but he could, and that’s really the issue here, isn’t it? The perceived potentiality for pedophilia is greater than it is during the after-mass sessions held in the Serpentine Chapel at the Vatican; it’s not that anything would happen, it’s that it just might.

Jack Monta, his head spinning with the fear of being diddled, says nothing in reply, and the two purple lights shining through the shroud, lights which were probably turned on to set the mood, only do Jack’s deepest fears the worst kind of favors.

‘This is it,’ he thinks to himself, trying to steel his nerves. ‘This is where I go through the transition from boyhood to manhood, this is when I become a real-life superhero. Born through the most awful pain imaginable, I alone will save the world. Just gotta… well… just gotta get… oh god, I don’t want to be a hero!’

Just Laugh

Before I continue, allow me to speak directly to the reader. I know I done been speaking to the reader every now and then over the course of this printed fever dream, but at least I’m acknowledging it right now. Look, I know pedophilia is a terrible thing and that anybody in their right mind shouldn’t be joking about it, BUT, considering how pedophiles are publicly executed in the most gruesome way possible by whatever community they exist within in this anarchic variant of the now Untied States of America, I think a few jokes can be allowed to fly, similarly to how the fucked up decapitated heads fly from the bodies of the post-guillotine kid sniffers. Oh yeah, the guillotine isn’t just reserved for shitty kings of old. Besides, it’s not like the jokes are going to amount to anything; they’re jokes, just laugh.

The Jokes Amounted To Something

“Did you hear me, kid? You won! Alienfootprint is your VidTube tag, right? You’re the winner of my contest!”

As the most vile of anxiety-ridden future scenarios leave Jack’s clearly not very innocent mind, bright lights flash on and he’s faced by not only a smug Jackson Rainfort, but also by his older brother, who’s sporting that gay-looking pair of purple contacts that he wore at the assembly yesterday. In fact, he’s still wearing the exact same outfit he wore at the assembly, down to the lame-ass tie dye shirt and the ratty jeans with the holes torn in the knees.

Jack stumbles back and hits the door, sending a thump wave that not only travels through the door and into PrinciPal’s ears, but also knocks the empty oil lantern from the rusty hook in the ceiling to the floor, the ancient glass proving to be quite fall-resistant. This soundwave enters PrinciPal’s faded mind and tosses his imagination through a demented circus of repressed memories of his days as a choir boy in Vatican City.

Okay fine, the jokes amounted to something. I was as surprised writing it as you were reading it, so…

“How did… what the fuck?” Jack asks to nobody in particular. “What’s going on right now? I’m so confused.”

“I am too. When did you install these lights, kid?” asks Rainfort.

Sam walks over to Jack and hugs him tight, as if the bastard is so high that he thinks he hasn’t seen his brother in eons. “I’ve missed you man. How’s Mom doing?”

Jack pushes Sam away, redirecting his attention to Rainfort. “Can you please explain to me what’s going on? I thought I was in trouble, Mister Rainfort.”

“Please, Terry is fine. For now. I have other names, but we’ll get into those later. Listen, all you need to know is that you won the contest and I, along with my hippie employee, are here to escort you to the fabulous city of New Manhattan so you can claim your prize.”

At the mention of the word employee, Sam rolls his eyes harder than the Apex employee was rolling last night.

“The same prize, mind you, that has recently been expanded from just meeting the illustrious Terry to meeting the illustrious Terry and the extraterrestrials who visited him last night! If we can figure a way to summon them back, anyway. That might take a few weeks, we may have to abduct you again. But we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, coolio?”

Jack doesn’t even know what to say. He pulls out his phone and checks the time – ten o’clock. Wait… the fuck? “How long have we been in here, it’s third block already.”

“It’s almost third block,” Sam interjects, marveling over his own success in speeding up the passage of what humans call time. “I’ve installed something of a pocket-Universe generator using a reverse-engineered version of Sig– I mean, Ter– I mean… whatever, using that dude’s device that the Zeroc gave him last night. What you call time passes faster in this closet than it does once you walk out that door, so for all intents and purposes, you’re actually in a different Universe right now. Damn, this shit really is a Multiverse. Oof. Hey, speaking of walking out that door, don’t you need to go somewhere, Rainfort?”

Jackson, who wasn’t paying any attention to the noises escaping his subordinate’s mouth, continues whistling the tune he’s been whistling this whole time.

“Wait, the Zee-rock? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jack demands, stomping his foot in emphasis as he utters the word that.

“Ugh,” Sam ughs. “You’ll uh… you’ll get it eventually, brother. I don’t know that I’ll still be here when you do, but you’ll understand eventually.”

Sam looks over at the whistling Rainfort – dude’s leaned against a rack of sponges, snapping his finger to the tune of the air escaping between his lips. Sam is mildly irritated by the janitor’s attention-seeking.

“Dude. Go out in the hallway for two seconds, I need to talk to my brother.”

Rainfort just kind of looks at Sam, like he’s considering him for the first time. Or rather, like he’s considering squashing him like the tiny little insignificantly dime a dozen insect that he is, for the first time.

“Fine, I’ll go… for about five seconds. Then, I’m coming back. That should give you what… at least… at least a handful of minutes to have your little talk, right lackey?”

Sam deadpans Jackson Rainfort harder than Mister Deadpan would deadpan a rusty, dead pan. With a rapid shaking of his head, “Yeah, sure, whatever dude.”

After puffing his chest out and repeatedly punching it like a male silver back gorilla, Janitor Rainfort finally exits the custodial closet, leaving Sam and Jack alone to hopefully discuss their differences.

The ManHandler

Just about four and a half seconds after Rainfort walks into the hall, he is grabbed by the hairs on the back of his neck and thrown into the nearby water fountain by an enraged Mister, an enraged Mister who’s sporting that nasty-ass sweaty white priest’s outfit he donned during the shootout at yesterday’s dope DOPE assembly. See what I did there?

Rainfort, his remaining neck hairs spontaneously growing out and braiding themselves together into a cape, stands off against his nemesis. “What’s the meaning of this, boss? I thought I did a great job here, do we have a problem?”

PrinciPal takes out a black piece of fabric with two holes cut into it from inside his adult diaper and ties it across his eyes. With his mask on, he assumes the identity of The ManHandler, along with a surprisingly low-pitched and masculine inflection in his voice.

“You, The Closeted Custodian, have stolen your last victim. Inside that closet… and don’t even try to argue with me because I’ve caught you red-handed… or would it be white-handed? Disgusting. Irregardless, I’ve caught you in the act, ferrying young boys with velvet voices into your cave so you can have your way with them and then dispose of the bodies in the cleaning acids that my school supplies you with. But today is the last day – I hope you got your fill, you sick fuck, because you’re about to get ManHandled.”

Outside the school, a suicidal young turtle is attempting to cross the road that winds behind the buildings. Having grown tired of her life, she slowly steps across the searing hot asphalt, feeling all the pain in her feet until she feels none of it, the nerves quite literally burned to a crisp by the pavement’s absorbed heat. Fortunately, the shattered glass from the window The Closeted Custodian is thrown out of provides a cool alternative for Shelly to walk on, and the feeling slowly begins to return to her little turtle toes, giving her a whole new lease on life.

Shortly after striking the ground, The Closeted Custodian finds a dripping wet old man, I guess, coddled over him, his mouth breaths violating every law of boundaries that’s ever been passed in this solar system. Then, realizing his adversary weighs literally ninety pounds, The Closeted Custodian lifts The ManHandler up and tosses him back through the window, leaping back into the building after him. All of this is caught on the school’s security cameras by Tod, who immediately tells Todd, who immediately tells everyone else. Before they know it, the entire video surveillance class is huddled around Tod’s computer, waiting with bated breath for one of the superhero cosplayers to come crashing back out of the smashed window.

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~

Hello Commons, here is chapter 4.8 of The 2020 Event |The Main Event|, a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. Please enjoy. See the bottom of this post for more info.

---

Chapter 4.8
And The Winner Is…

You Don’t Know

After a long and action-packed brawl, Chuck’s managed to disarm his assailant and hold her at bay.

“Who the fuck are you, and who do yoU WORK FOR?!” Chuck says and then yells, the comically oversized barrel of the disarmed woman’s gun indenting a bullseye into her forehead.

Auntie Vigil grins and then spits at Chuck, the loogie landing on the toe of his right shoe. Inside his sock, Chuck’s toe grows eight silver spider-like arms and detaches itself from his foot before melting into a puddle and seeping, first through his sock, and then through his shoe, onto the dusty floor of the warehouse. The toe then reforms, spider legs and all, and the toenail lifts up to reveal an unsettlingly human-like mouth with dentures that aren’t glued in quite right. The toe then eats the loogie, audibly chewing in a bovine fashion for the room to hear, before melting again and rejoining Chuck’s body. At the sight of this, Auntie Vigil’s eyes grow larger than her hands.

“Yeah, see that? You don’t know what I am, lady. You should see what my pinky’s capable of.”

Broken from the trance, Auntie Vigil hocks another loogie and spits it between Chuck’s suited legs, the frothy green sludge gliding through the air like a metal paper airplane until it smears itself all over the far wall of the warehouse. She makes no further noises.

Chuck checks the watch digitally projected on the lenses of his sunglasses. “All right, it’s getting late and this is stupid. You win,” he tiredly says as he pulls the trigger and is immediately thrown into the front wall of the warehouse by the roided-up flashbang grenade that was evidently stuffed into the barrel of the gun.

A Tropical Island

Auntie Vigil  wakes up on the beach of a tropical island, her face set aglow by the streaks of sunlight that beam through the gaps between the arms and torsos of the multiple large, hairy, man-shaped, too tall to be human creatures she’s surrounded by (???).

Snot Rocket

When his eyes stop lagging and finally catch up with the rest of the Universe, Chuck is utterly astonished to find himself alone in the warehouse. He tries to move but can’t, his back is fastened to the wall by that nasty snot rocket the apparently superpowered lady shot between his legs. A single layer of the epidermis that makes up Chuck’s back pulls a big toe maneuver and our man is freed, for the time being. He walks to the spot where he was holding some strange woman hostage not even a minute ago and observes the odd lack of remnants.

Chuck asks the Universe, “What the fuh–” and is cut off when he vanishes from the warehouse.

Where Was I

“The heck? Boss? BOSS!” Karen shouts, startling Chuck back into consciousness.

Chuck leaps from his bed, both of his hands turning into a cross between a samurai sword and a chainsaw while he’s in the air, and lands in battle stance, ready to cook whoever the hell just activated his fight-or-fillet response. Then he realizes it’s just Karen and his hands return to hand form to pull out and light a joint in one swift motion. He takes a long pull of the happystick, burning it halfway to the crutch, and then hands it off to Karen, who accepts with a tired smile.

As he exhales, “Well hello Karen, please don’t tell me I was dreaming. That would be so fucking lame.”

After a short coughing fit, Karen hands the joint back to Chuck. He burns the rest of it in a single hit.

Almost impressed, Karen says, “No, probably not. I heard a thud so I came in and you were just kind of laying here. I think Sigmund needs you down in the lab.”

“Wonderful. Did the am–”

“Your new toy is safely stored away in one of the robinite vaults down below.”

“Swimming,” Chuck says as the floor around him opens up and he is lowered down on a platform.

Karen just shakes her head before returning to her desk and picking up her pencil. “Now, where was I…”

The Extraterrestrial

Chuck travels through the tube system Sigmund installed in the Cape tower until the platform finally brings him into Sigmund’s lab where he finds something of a little powwow going on. There’s Sigmund, sweaty as usual, standing across from… oh boy. This moment. He’s standing across from some vaguely familiar silver-haired, tall-ass let us call him a purple-painted human, accompanied by a slightly familiar-looking human who, for some untold fucking reason, is holding about ten kilos of brick LSD in his menacingly gloved hands.

“Chuck!” Sigmund exclaims, running over to Chuck. “Look! That’s an extraterrestrial! And so is that one, they’re both actual, extra-terrestrial extraterrestrials!”

Chuck looks at Sigmund, then at the purple dude, then at the bricks piled in the kid’s hands, then at the chinchilla sitting on top of Sigmund’s head, then at the kid, and then back to the body painter, making eye contact.

“They’re finally here! Remember, that one New Year’s bash you threw? The one with the domestic terrorist? When I accidentally contacted the extraterrestrial transmitter that was floating in our solar system? Well, it took them a while, but they finally came!”

Chuck, noticing the abnormally tall intruder rolling his eyes, scoffs, “Hah, bullllllllllshit. That’s totally the hippie from the closet before.”

“What?” says everybody in the room, even Chuck.

“Uh, nothing,” Chuck says, evidently feeling talkative. “I’m out, I gotta go somewhere… else.”

 The elevator platform begins to ascend back into the ceiling to take Chuck to a place in his tower where he can hopefully salvage what’s left of the Holiblaze, and then escape and not get eaten by a black hole. Then it shakes to a stop, Chuck opting to jump off before the device malfunctions and bursts into flames. This leaves him looking mildly annoyed.

Sigmund’s about to start monologuing about the transmitter again, but the suspected extraterrestrial holds up his four-fingered, one-thumbed hand and shushes him, not even giving him the chance.

Then, the extraterrestrial says, “Wait, before you start with that transmitter nonsense again, we aren’t staying here. I have gifts for both of you as thanks for sparing your eL-eSs-Dee. I know it will cost Cape Enterprises Uncorporated quite a bit of, how you say, dollars.”

Chuck begins to smile, but then, “Wait, how did you know the name of my–”

“You told me yourself, Chucky.”

“No I–”

“For you, Sigmund, this device.” Purple hands Sigmund a small black cube with a white ring on one of its sides. “That is a very special iteration-class device, use it wisely. And for you, Charles–”

“It’s Chuck.”

“That’s what I said, Charles,” says the “painted” dude, holding out his empty palm, “But for you, this… wait, what?”

Chuck is confused and mildly irritated – Sigmund gets a present but not him? Why did he even get teleported down here in the first place?!

Then, he has an ah-ha moment as some pre-black hole memories flood his system, leading him to remove his right glove.

“Wait, I thought I… how is this…” the purple-painted player mumbles perfectly, almost as if he rehearsed it. When he looks up, he sees that Chuck is flipping him off, his middle finger sporting a ring with a multicolored gemstone. The violet vindicator’s eyes grow into that of a giant squid. “Where…” a practiced pause. Then, “Where did you get that ring?”

“Well wouldn’t you like to know, fucko?”

The purple tallman(?) takes a moment to study the situation, a perfected look of contemplation heavy on his face, but ends with a smile. “Very well,” he says, turning to Sigmund. “You know what that does, don’t you Sigmund?”

“Uh, y-yes I… believe I do,” he nervously stutters. They say never meet your idols – they’re out of their flipping minds.

“And are you going to press that button?”

Sigmund looks at the device in his hand, studying the black hole inside the white ring. “No, I… I don’t think I will, sir. I think I have plans for it though, I’ll reverse engineer it.”

The purple nothuman smiles a smile that’s taken millennia to perfect. “Very well. Welp, our time was running short even before I decided to bestow this gift upon you. We must dip, the rift is closing. Thank you Sigmund.” Then, in an existentially sincere tone, “Thank you, Chuck.”

The purple being winks at Chuck and then disappears, along with the kid and the four bricks of crystal LSD.

“So uh… what the fuck was that, Sig?”

“Hm?” Sigmund says without looking up from his new device. “I’m not sure… thank you for coming though.”

“You teleported me here.”

“Still.”

Chuck stretches his arms towards the ceiling, yawning a mighty yawn. “Whatever, that went better than I expected. It–”

“I thought you never expected things?”

Not wanting to agitate Sigmund into destroying this Universe for the fourth fucking time in a row, “Hah, got me there. It’s damn near midnight though, Daddy’s fucking beat. I need to go smoke a pound and get some sleep. What is that thing, anyway?”

Sigmund quizzically smiles, still transfixed on his device. “I think… I think its a black hole generator. That extraterrestrial just gave me the most powerful, most devastating piece of technology in Existence. If I deconstruct it and reconstruct it right, I may be able to invent a pocket-dimension generator.”

“What? You mean pocket-universe, right?” Chuck asks, more piffed from Sigmund’s incorrect use of the word dimension than anything else.

“Well yeah, but pocket-dimension objectively sounds better, I think. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yeah sure, whatever man. I’m hittin’ the hay, goodnight good buddy.”

“Goodnight Chuck.”

The platform, still hanging lazily in the air, lowers to the floor for Chuck to step on. The suited man is then whisked back up to his bedroom and, after walking out into the office to hit each one of the bongs on Karen’s still for some reason occupied desk, he retreats back to his room to change into his silk sleeping business suit so he can comfortably fade into a DMT trip that the majority of humans on Earth still call a dream.

The Winner

Sigmund, meanwhile, places the extraterrestrial black hole device into his reverse engineering and analysis machine and spends the next hour or two trying to disassemble it so he can put it back together again. Frustrated with the lack of progress he’s made, he grumpily returns to the chamber with the chair contraption. When the secret door closes, he sits and slumps over; a moment later, about two hundred feet above him, Terry springs to life and runs back onto the set of his show. The feed is still live, cameras still rolling. It’s like he never left.

“Hello, TerryTeammates! My humblest apologies for the delay, I believe… I believe I just, officially, made the first physical contact with extraterrestrials in the history of humanity. But, I’ll save that scoop for another day. Unfortunately I’ll have to cut the show before I can show you the rest of the clips due to that little interruption, but before I go, I need to announce the winner of the contest!”

Terry picks up the folded slip of paper and smiles wide, looking directly into the camera. “And the winner is… the TerryTeammate named… AlienFootPrint…! How fitting, if not a little ironic given the offensivity of that word!”

As Terry speaks, the microphone rubs up against his lab coat, causing a bit of white noise to be broadcasted across America. Jack stirs in his deep, drooly slumber, but does not wake up. Terry, on his turned off computer screen, continues.

“Well, thank you so very much, TerryTeammates, for tuning into the tubular TerryTeamTwenty telecast tonight. We saw some footage, we picked a winner, AND I surprisingly made face-to-face contact with extraterrestrials, and for the first time in the history of humanity, no less! To that, I say goodnight, and offer a question that I will immediately answer for you: Was this a small step for man, or a giant leap for mankind? There’s only one way for us to know – by looking at the footprint.”

Terry ends the broadcast and returns to the BioBot room behind his studio, then slumps back over so Sigmund may come back to life. After changing into his rocketship footsie pajamas and brushing his teeth and all that, Sigmund crawls into his floating flying saucer bed and busts out his secret journal that nobody – not Chuck, not Karen, not his computers, not even Terry – knows about. It’s the only log he keeps that isn’t digitized, and for good reason: Sigmund writes his deepest, darkest secrets in this book, secrets which would undeniably tear a hole in his relationships with the humans in his life, similarly how that black hole generator would tear a hole in the fabric of the Universe if he were to press the button, which he won’t. He has no reason to; Chuck is alive and making his own decisions, and he doesn’t seem to suspect a thing.

Tonight’s entry in the journal goes as follows:

April 20^th, 2020
Hello journal. It’s me, Sigmund. I think… no, I know that something happened up in space yesterday after Chuck disappeared from comms. That big thing going towards him – I think that was an extraterrestrial spaceship, one piloted by the beings who originally sent out the transmitter I found at the party. When they found Chuck and saw that his brain had been injected with my hemibots, they must have sent him back to Earth and then tracked him so they could come meet the inventor of the technology. So they could meet me.
Actually… no, that would be silly. If they sent him back here, why would they need to track him? Besides,  the extraterrestrial I met tonight said the transmitter talk was nonsense. But, at the same time, he claimed to know Chuck. So… I don’t know.
Maybe nothing happened in space yesterday, maybe Chuck is just… maybe he just shut comms off and came back. Or maybe he’s from a different universe, hah! Or, even better, maybe he’s a version of Chuck from a past version of this universe, a version in which I pressed the button on the black hole device the extraterrestrials gave me tonight. Now that would be a plot twist… although, I’m not sure exactly how he would escape a black hole, if that were the case. He’s good, but I don’t know if he could accomplish the impossible.
Anywho, I finally met my extraterrestrials tonight, journal. Finally, at long last, I’ve met my extraterrestrials, and they gave me a device which I’m pretty sure creates black holes. And Chuck is still alive, and operating under his own free will, as far as I can tell, which means my conscious is totally clean. It’s like I never even put the hemibots in his brain, an observation which I am not exactly unhappy to make.
Oh, and, I get to meet the winner of the TerryTeam contest tomorrow. I’ve never met a fan before, I’m pretty excited! Things are looking good for ol’ Siggy, journal, yes they are.
Yes they are.
Goodnight, journal. This is Sigmund, signing off.

---

As I said above, The 2020 Event |The Main Event| is a satirical novel about aliens that do psychedelic drugs and the subjective nature of reality. It is also the fourth book of the First Spiral, a longer story called The Highest One Writing.

The Highest One Writing is a story about an author told through the books he wrote. It starts with a self-help book and ends with the destruction of Existence. Also, it may or may not take you to the depths of insanity and back.

|The Main Event| is available to read for free in its entirety on my website. Click here to check it out.

I’ve written a few other books, too. Click here to see the list.

If you like |The Main Event| and would like to help support my work, buy a copy of the book here.

Be well Commons~