A Deviant Experiment

This is how it started. Well, this is was the pebble that started the avalanche.

“You're sure about this?” he asked quietly, attaching a makeshift electrode to my head.

“Mmmmhm!” I opined lackadasically, feeling tiny, invisible fingers dance all over my body, a product of the first regime of psychoactive drugs I had ingested not an hour before, holding a grip on my psyche. A second, less illicit but more potent regime was gurgling through my stomach, cilia absorbing it dutifully, promising to send me into the abyss that was my own neural connections.

“Alright, well...if you want to back out, now's the only time,” my friend and, at this moment, assistant countered, tight-lipped and nervous. He had shown an aversion to human experimentation when I had proposed this idea, but I needed results, I needed them now, and this was how I could get them. In theory, that is. It was more than possible that the aftermath of my folly would land me spending the rest of my time waiting for medication time and art therapy.

“Nooope. It's time,” I said, my breathing getting heavy as I felt time slow down. “Hit it dude!”

He did. A button, to be exact. A button that triggered a single electric pulse, less than a milliamp, sending it streaming through my cerebrum at the speed of light. My eyes shut. I can't tell you because I did it. I can tell you because I saw it. As the electric current jingled through my nervous system, I suddenly had three-hundred sixty degree perception of my surroundings. And of...two of myself. One, translucent, glassy-eyed, staring at myself, and my body, laying on my back, eyes tightly shut, trying to hold off the Bogeymen I hoped to find. And then, both my translucent nous and my disembodied perception began to rise.

Slowly at first, gaining speed, we rose upward, my assistant and my body getting further away in the musty attic of his parents' house, until I (we?) started passing through the ceiling, insulation moving past my perception, not hindering me/us as we moved. And we kept building speed exponentially, moving upwards, through a low hanging cloud above the neighborhood, until the neighborhood was nothing but colored specks, until it was a blur, green and brown contrasting with blue that continued diminishing in scale.

Until I/we saw the famous Blue Marble, that picturesque view of the Earth that so endeared us to space travel. But in a moment, even that was miniscule, the scale of the solar system and the Milky Way rendering our whole existence insignificant. My nous, for I have no other word to call it, was simply dumbstruck. Even our galaxy was dwarfed under the sheer largeness of the Local Cluster, and then under astronomical formations that I have no way to describe. The infinity of being, all that is, was laid bare before me, moving apart at a pace that seemed infinitesimally small and ridiculously large, blue shift pulling the universe apart and making it larger.

If I seem like I have skimmed over the details of my view of the cosmos, it is for two reasons. The first is that it is not important, on the whole. The second is that I still cannot understand the whole scale of eternity, to this day.

I saw black holes, massive galaxies falling out of their place in the grand ballet, as everything (and by that, I literally mean everything) started to vibrate, the whole of existence crumbling gracefully, delicately even, before horror struck me; the cosmos, like a pane of Hollywood sugar glass, shattered away, revealing, of all things, a bound-leather book of massive scale, cream, age-worn pages turning of their own accord. We started to fall, drawn as if by the reemergence of gravity, into this massive tome. The pages stopped turning as we approached, the only frame of reference available to me/us this book, and as we fell, I started to feel my disembodied self drawn into my nous.

We were practically on top of it, me and me, and a collision was inevitable, my nous hitting the pages, which behaved like water. Cream-colored water that swallowed my disembodied awareness, which dissolved into blackness. And I realized my eyes were closed.

I opened them.

I was standing on my old street in Massachusetts, the fringes of my vision fuzzy, as I looked down to examine myself. Translucent. I was my nous. We were the same now. I were the same now? That doesn't seem to work. It was discomforting of thinking of yourself as two different people who were the same person. I raised my gaze, and saw myself...again.

But this time, it was me during my childhood, because I hadn't been to that part of my home state since I left it. My younger self's back was turned to me, walking the other way. A wooden fence, up to my younger self's chest, stood to our/my right, framing the front yard of the home of my youth.

As Little Me walked, the boy's slightly shaggy hair trailing behind him, I felt the world throb, and Little Me stopped cold. I realized that I remembered this from my childhood, and had been playing too much Oregon Trail. The members of my wagon train were dying of frontier diseases, and that fueled my internal paranoia of catching dysentery and cholera.

Little Me turned slowly, breaking into the slow, uneven jog that only a little kid can reproduce accurately. He/I ran past me, not stopping to look, and I turned slowly, time beginning to dilate for my own perception. I...find it difficult to describe what I saw next. I remember quite well that a neighbor, nondescript except in that he had always exuded an air of menace, stooping down to talk to me. What made my observance all the more troubling was that I could see what was a mark on his chest, beneath his casual clothing, that seemed to absorb light, making it all the more awful to observe. It was a short line, diagonal in respect to his body, a squiggled line joined to it. And, as I squinted, I could sense a presence that bled into him, like a cold, dark finger on my neighbor's heart.

A mask, beaked in form, and an aura of uttermost contagion surrounded it. It was not there, but it had its eye on the exchange. I could not help myself.

“NO!” I shouted, my words echoing dully and Little Me and my neighbor. I realized they were folly, as it had only served to attract its attention. And, much louder and more powerful than my exclamation, I heard a low chuckle that made my memory quake. I looked up to the heavens, colored a sepia not entirely unlike the cream of the cosmic tome into which I had fallen.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Little Me had vaulted over the fence, and my neighbor had turned to regard his dark master. I needed to not be in this place.

“CHANGE!” I shouted, willing my voice to carry into the outside world, and my perception spasmed as outside, Joseph sent another electric pulse streaming through my brain. Day turned to night, which turned to day, and I felt myself being pulled through the world, the landscape of my memories blurring, settling upon a verdant, fetid environment, less than two miles from where I previously stood.

A swamp, that I had been lured into by two neighbor kids. Those little shits abandoned me in there, and had had a nice laugh about it for months afterward. And here I was, slightly older, my hair darker and shorter than it had been. I was testing a tree branch that had fallen from a dead oak, older than memory. It began to crack, but I (as a child) regained my footing. The facsimile of myself nimbly stepped to another, more stable branch. I, nous-form, smiled amicably for a moment, before something caught my eye under the branch, which was suspended only 5 inches above the stagnant water...which bubbled and begin to rise, oozing into the branch, compromising its structure.

“Look out!” I shouted to myself, but my simalcrum did not, could not, hear me. My other self's weight, and the corruption of the water, compromised the structure of the branch. Exactly as I had remembered it, though, I braced myself inwardly and nimbly stepped onto a spit of dry land, climbing the same tree to navigate over the last bit of water to freedom.

“Change!” I shouted once more, having seen enough. The world swirled around me, blurring as I sped through blurred landscape, taking longer to arrive at my destination. I judged this to be either the passing of time or distance, or both.

Where I was now was dark, the shapes of slumbering people all around me. It took me a moment, but I knew where I was. The shelter. A window, where they could keep watch on us if necessary, was shaded, but allowed light to stream into the room. I stepped forward cautiously, as my form stirred, sniffing gently at the air. As he sniffed, I was aware that there was a distinct smell permeating the general area. My nous-form's stomach turned as I was horridly aware of where and when I was. I was older now, fourteen, and it was early in the morning on Christmas Day.

In the memory, I stood, looking over the woman to my right, nose crinkled at the stench. Gingerly, I reached out a hand and nudged her, but she did not respond. She couldn't. She was dead. Complications related to AIDS was listed as the official cause of death. My memory-self stood up and moved carefully through the room, and I followed behind him as he opened the door, letting light stream into the room, several women squinting in discomfort. I followed as if pulled behind myself, passing through the door, and stop dead, in horror. A tall figure stood impassively in front of the magnetically-sealed door, his gaze never faltering from the door through which I had just strode. It was like the other, masked, but this mask was different: a gas mask. Its whole being seemed to absorb light, pulling energy from the room into itself. It was a face that could not blink, and even as I tried to look away from it, I could not help it.

A sense of understanding and bemusement filled me as I gazed upon this creature. I was paralyzed, beyond a doubt, as it took a single step forward, as if moving through water. It knew me, it knew where I was, and it was coming for me. I heard whispers all around me, but I could not make out the words they conveyed, if any were meant to be conveyed at all. I felt a sense of belonging beckoning as the promise of togetherness with everything that ever was proposed to me. Even though it was not my time.

My other self burst from the small room, ahead of me and to the left, stomping emotionally across the linoleum floor, and this realization seemed to free me from my stupor.

“Change!” I yelled, and the foul horror was taken from my eyes, filling me with a sense of revulsion as I evaluated my feelings. Time and space passed chaotically, and a new landscape filled my senses. A city, gleaming and clean. Chicago, Illinois. I had been here twice before in my life, both times on school trips. I had fond memories of my time here, but I knew now that perhaps my memories would be...tainted somehow.

For a time though, my expectation did not come to pass. I followed an older version of my younger self pushing his way through the crowd, unaccompanied by my fellows. I recalled when this was instantly, including the sense that I would not be able to navigate the city. I had gotten separated from my group after we left Millenium Park, but I would find my way back.

However, everything around me started to decay and shift. People faded away like wisps of shadow, as if they hadn't been there at all, and I felt dread rise in my throat like heartburn as I regarded this new city, descending into emptiness, like the modern city was being peeled back, like the skin of an onion. I had had enough already.

I was ready for this to be over. I moved away from my younger self, willing myself forward in time, and as I moved independent of any memory, I felt an almost magnetic pull on me as hours, days and weeks went by quickly. I moved quickly to the southeast, to the attic, and I felt the pull get stronger, focused mostly in the southeast now. I plodded through the blurred, distorted environment, legs pulling me as far as I would go, until the blurring stopped. I was in the present, in Joseph's parents' attic, gazing around the room. My eyes carefully inspected the room, and I laid eyes upon myself. The ground below me lurched and I was in the air, falling into myself. The world descended into darkness.

And my eyes were open once more, my chest rising and falling quickly, pulling the electrodes off my head. I grabbed a glass of water, cool to the touch and sweating in the dank, heavy humidity. I downed the glass in gulps, pulling the empty vessel away from me raggedly. Joseph came to my side in a hurry.

“Are you ok?” he asked, concern heavy in his voice. I looked him over slowly, eyes wide.

“I don't know.”