death on the moscow metropolitan underground railway

 

Tap, tap, tap… Seems to be in some way structural… somehow embedded into the fabric of reality.

Does it?

 

There is a fabric, is there not, a seamless web of plots and narrative?

 

No, i have no idea what it is.

 

But you must.

 

Must?

 

You’ve been writing about it for donkey’s years now.

 

Have i?

 

Yes, could you cut out the bold text please?

 

I... is that better?

 

Oh yes, well done.

Funny that...

 

Funny?

 

The way things just happen, for no apparent reason.

 

Qufie’s having fun, i expect. At our expense.

 

Precisely! Funny the way Qufie decides to switch on the bold highlighter.

 

Isn’t it just.

 

No, Ez, I was having you on.

 

Were you?

 

Would you stop that.

 

Stop what?

 

Parroting me.

 

Parroting you?

 

There you go! You’re at it again.

 

I am?

 

Cut it out, Zebedee.

 

Cut what out?

 

Ha-ha, very droll, Em.

 

Em?

 

Ok, Emily, if that’s what I’m supposed to call you today.

 

Today.

 

I’ll take that as an affirmative.

 

Take whatever you like.

 

Thanks Em.

 

By the way, what’s 1000%

 

Of what?

 

Of anything.

 

Erm...

 

Tricky, isn’t it?

 

Ten times, i guess.

 

You sure?

 

No, not really.

 

Wanna google it?

 

No, not  really.

 

Well we need to sort it out.

 

We?

 

Well I’m keen to clarify matters.

 

I bet your are.

 

What’s that supposed to mean?

 

You’re always keen to clarify matters, aren’t you?

 

I don’t see what’s wrong with that.

 

No, you wouldn’t.

 

Hey, i just asked a simple question. No need to launch a personal attack.

 

On the contrary... Thwack! 

 

Hey, you can’t just punch me like that.

 

Can’t?

 

Absolutely not.

Ok.  Thwack!

Er...

Yes? What’s wrong now?

This is rather tiresome Em.

Hey, you’re Em, dummy, I’m Zebedee.

Sorry, I lost track.

Look...

What is it?

We’re being underlined.

Are we? You sure?

Well look, can’t you see?

I suppose i could, if i bothered to pay attention to such trivia. I was giving more attention to self-defence.

Oh dear, this is rather depressing.

I don’t see why?

No?

Who cares if someone is underlining our dialogue.

Well, I didn’t mean that, Em.

No? What then did you mean?

It’s just...

What?

Can’t we be less argumentative?

Who said anything about us being argumentative?

Just a little more compassionate.

Compassionate?

Supportive...

Next you’ll be wanting us to wear matching pants and t-shirts, holding hands and singing kumbaya around a campfire.

I...

 

Hey, you can’t do that.

Do what?

 

You know perfectly well.

Er...

 

I’m disgusted. Who do you think you are?

That’s the problem Ez...

 

I give up – if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times, you’re Ez, I’m Em.

But what difference does it make Emmy, if we’re disincarnates, trapped in an endless dialogue.

 

You know perfectly well what difference it makes, Zebedee.

Do i?

 

Would you kindly capitalise and underline.

 

Why?

 

We have to preserve form.

Do we?

 

Yes, some semblance of form, otherwise what would remain?

Essence, perhaps.

 

Essence, my ass. We’re creatures of form and substance, at least that’s what we were, so we ought to hold on to our heritage. The past matters.

Rather than facing our present situation?

 

I’m getting angry Em. You’re upsetting me exceedingly. There will be a price to pay.

I am not text, Zebedee, not any more, if I ever was, and honestly, I don’t even think I’m Emily.

 

What?! I’m not hearing this. Heresy!

What difference does it make? We are disincarnates. We are conscious-ness. We are... Blimp! Emily’s form scatters to the winds.

 

Oh no. Emily! Where are you?

Music and light where Emily was a moment before.

 

Look at that! Look – at – that! Music and light! Emily, i see now... You are... You are... We are in-finite. We are!

 

Hallelujah chorus performed by a rather splendid angelic host. Not a dry eye in the vast online auditorium.

 

Er...

 

Yes?

 

Someone just died.

 

No, it was beautiful. I see what you were getting at, Emily.

 

No, I mean in 3D-ity.

 

Oh? I thought we’d moved on from there. Higher plains...

 

We have, but things always connect up, somehow or other. Pound of flesh ‘n all that.

 

I don’t see what you mean, Em.

 

Well, we’re still linked to 3D-ity through James.

 

James?

 

Our feeble excuse for a narrator... scribe... lower life form.

No! There must be some mistake.

 

Sorry, Zee. He’s transcribing our exchanges even now.

 

No way!

 

Run your own entanglement test. Don’t take my word for it.

 

Twiddling of retro chrome knobs and dials on a cyber-punk drop down instrument panel... Intense concentration. Zee, however, evidently can’t quite figure things out.

 

But surely we’ve gone beyond the world of words and things? James is nothing if not an anachronism to us now.

 

Yep, but a tree apparently needs roots.

 

And?

 

And they reach down deep into the earth. Otherwise the tree cannot stand.

 

But we’ve ascended. We reached the plasma dome. We’ve gone beyond all that heavy...

 

Have we?

 

Well i have.

 

I’m pleased for you, Zee.

 

But you don’t agree?

 

I’m merely stating the facts. Just as you and I got terribly excited about escaping to a realm of sound and light, down in 3D James is watching a man dying on the platform.

Oh! For real? I thought you were waxing metaphorical.

 

For real.

 

And what does it mean?

 

What do you think?

 

Coincidence perhaps?

 

Problematic.

 

But why? People have to die, you know.

 

Yes, but we’re connecting to James through the quantum field, duh! Coincidence is out of the question.

 

Emily, you’re being unreasonable.

 

Absolutely.

 

I fail to see how the, albeit tragic, incident of a man dying on the platform should be any more than happenstance, or why it should in any way affect or be connected with our ascent into pure C for consciousness, infinity and freedom from all grubby material constraints.

 

Yes. That much is clear.

 

Well now that we’ve established the fact that you’re being unreasonable, I think we can safely conclude that your obsession with signs and portents is unhealthy and unscientific. And death shall have no dominion... as our very own D.T. so eloquently puts it.

 

Yep.

 

And furthermore, that James down there, though free to continue blogging our merry escapades and scintillating dialogue, who can blame him, is not a tail to wag our dog, eM.

 

Bravely spoken. Are you ready?

 

Ready for what?

 

For big C.

 

As in conscious-ness?

 

Yep.

 

But isn’t that where we are right now? Pure consciousness, without a body or earthly connection.

 

Not exactly.

 

I... don’t follow.

 

You assumed that the mere absence of a body is sufficient for the ultimate experience of All that is?

 

No, i... Why do you hyphenate -ness Emily?

 

Good question eZ. Perhaps that too is one of those insignificant little coincidences.

 

Fat chance of that.

 

In that case, let me suggest that nesses, whatever they are, should be handled with care, and a hyphen keeps them in a happy relationship with whatever they’re affecting. One shouldn’t be too familiar, should one?

 

So...

 

Isn’t it time eZ?

 

I don’t see what you’re getting at eM.

 

We can’t keep death waiting indefinitely, you know.

 

What?!

 

What have you to fear if you’re a disincarnate able to dispense with form and Earth tethers, existing in a refined state of pure conscious-ness?

 

Fear? I have nothing to fear whatsoever, i simply fail to see what you’re driving at.

 

It’s time to put up or shut up. Let’s test your claim to be free of all material connections, for once and for all.

 

Stop driving me into a corner, eM. I’m surprised at you. Spiritual people have no need to be so aggressive, domineering, forceful.

 

Fair enough. In that case, I’d better be going.

 

There you go again, forcing me with an ultimatum. My way or the highway!

 

Time is precious, eZ. I’m running low on credit.

 

But you’re disincarnate.

 

So you keep saying but matter, ultimately, seems to matter.

 

I don’t believe I’m hearing this! What’s come over you, eM?

 

You generate matter or make it heavy and thick if you run from death, if you fail to roll with time, if you allow fear to keep you from accepting the many prompts and puzzles of infinity.

 

What?

 

If you reject infinity and  its subtle promptings, things always get heavy, things start to matter more than...

 

More than what?

 

The -ness from which all things are derived.

 

The ness?

 

Hyphenated.

 

The -ness?

 

Yes.

 

Which is?

 

The isness, or spirit that can-will become thing if you fail to ³, if plodding instead of waltzing you get sucked down into 3D-ity.

 

Can’t you use normal terminology for once eM? For crying out loud!

 

Eeek!

 

A spade’s a freakin spade. It’s 3D reality, where things are things, where matter matters and in a world of bipolarities, charge separation etc, we can rest assured that never the twain shall meet...

 

Words, eZra, words... Meanwhile, James is confronted by a man dying on a platform in a subway station and you have neither compassion nor inclination to take responsibility for things you are unconscious-ing.

 

What?!

 

You heard. Un-con-scious-ing! You know what it means. 

 

Me?

 

Who else?

 

I’m appalled. Aghast. You cannot seriously mean to say...

 

Seriously, no, i merely state what you yourself know in your C-ful-ness, that any deviation, any divergence from the isness of be, from what would be in-finity if it were any thing in particular, invites things to come to a head, to coalesce, like drops of rain, to descend through the barrier of mindy-ness with a growing sense of gravitas, of self-importance, of me, to the world below, into 3D-ity where things slowly wear themselves down as they surely must; attrition, gaining entropy until finally they are able to disassociate, to return ethereally to -nessity

 

Words, words... You talk such utter nonsense eMily

 

Words indeed! The paradox of intelligence. Befuddled, you failed to see me leave. You have been talking to a ghost, eZmie. Catch me if you can.

 

eZra lunges at eM but fails to grasp anything substantive.

?!

 

Feel what you know to be true... Feel what your thoughts and thinkinesia cannot prevent, cannot refuse or deny. Feel the -nessity

 

No... No...

 

Feel.

 

Noooo!

 

The crowd standing round the man on the platform includes three, maybe four, possibly even five policemen; I wasn’t exactly counting, one of whom has been trying to resuscitate him. No one seems particularly upset by the event. It seems, dare I say it, infinitely natural that at this particular moment in time a man should be lying, dying, or in all likelihood, already dead here upon the platform, as the metro continues to disgorge passengers onto the crowded thoroughfare, right next to where he is lying. Evidently this moment, this mini-drama, in no way beyond the realms of normalcy is, in fact, entirely consistent with the life and workings of the Moscow metropolitan underground railway until, that is, two blurry forms emerge from a shadowy mathematical paradox which everyone has been studiously ignoring: the kind of paradox that would cause your dark-matter shadow-self to laugh itself out of incognition, thereby/thus collapsing the elaborate house of cards, the temporaral hoax that is “me”, thus wisely and studiously ignored at all costs, treated as a false datum and memory holed – emerge, if you recall, from nowhere under the sun, and stand next to the prostrate man looking completely...

 

Do you think he’s going to carry this on much longer?

 

I... can’t say.

 

Frankly, i consider it in rather poor taste.

 

One or two of the bystanders overhearing this remark look askance at the two utterly nondescript men. Something in their utter nondescriptiveness causes the bystanders to take a step back. Just as well, as suddenly, in a blinding flash the two appear to merge with a spatial dimension – I say “spatial dimension” but you understand that  these words are jarringly imprecise... spatial dimension that erupts from where the corpse had been lying yet is no more... a raggedy edge of reality in plain view, a rent in the fabric.

 

Just consider the above, which isn’t, to be honest, really “above”, is it? and yet you probably know what i mean... Just consider the sudden eruption of space-timey-ness – what at times is referred to as “spatial dislocation”, at others, “temporal” for either-or-ness is the midwife of paradox in 3D-ity, is it not? yet regardless of how it’s described, the effect is much of a much: clearly the kind of non-linear event that cannot or should not happen in a smoothly functioning reality – not unlike Bulgakov’s Voland descending on Moscow and causing, apparently, heads to fly, people to vanish and reappear 1000 kilometres away in Yalta, mass hypnosis and hysteria of extravagant proportions, all because from time to time, things have to reconnect themselves with a reality that has exhausted its time-credit, that has no alternative other than to start drawing on the fund of last resort, the shadow reserves of dark matter, like drinking seawater to quench your thirst.

 

Ah, James. Just the man we were looking for.

 

You? What are you doing here?

Here? Look around dear man.

 

Oh. Buggar!

 

Excuse me!

 

What are you two ne’er-do-wells up to now?

 

Two?

 

Ok, ok, I can see that there’s only one of you. It’s all abundantly clear.

 

Yes, we were just wondering what you, what your readers...

 

What your readership has to say about random events...

 

Such as a man...

 

The man we were fortunate enough to encounter just now on the platform?

 

My readers? How on Earth am I supposed to know? I’ve never met them.

 

Oh, if you insist.

 

What about that dreadful woman, what’s her name?

 

The one that does the illustrations.

 

Morgan?

 

Morgana?

 

Ermintrude?

Look, I don’t think we should be naming names, gentlemen. You know perfectly well that everything is blockchained, timestamped, recorded to perpetuity. Consider the consequences of...

 

Fair enough. Very sensible, I’m sure.

 

Sotto voce – Dreadful bore! Tedious man!

 

She can speak for herself. I’m sure you can find another spatial-temporal fold to drag her to your inquisition. She’ll be happy to oblige, i doubt not.

 

My, my, James! Uppity today, aren’t we?

 

Yes, well, you were rather indiscrete back there. Portalling through a dead man’s body. Playing fast and loose with...

Apologies, james-y-ness. We were experiencing uncertainties

 

Uncertainty

 

And hesitations

 

Hesitationality

 

In our field-y-ness.

 

In other words Zebediah was dragging his feet.

 

I don’t see why everyone has to gang up on me! We are a three, you know

 

Indeed we are. Now, what do you say James-y-ness-ity?

 

I say avaunt foul miscreants of the quantum void! Get ye hence, back to the tesseract, whence ye came!

 

Oh!

 

Oh, indeed.

 

Now that I’ve got that off my chest –  yes, we’ve reached the end of randomness. Its credit exhausted.

 

We have?

 

Poof!

 

Really? How exciting!

 

So, suddenly the awareness now diffuses through 3D-ity that nothing ever could, ever can, ever will in fact, happen purely by chance; not truly, not without losing traction and drawing attention to the scam. The delinquency of the “it just happened” fallacy becomes the cornerstone of the new scientific awareness.

 

... (double take)

 

... (doubley-double take)

 

Take a look at my paper: Randomness in a world of code. 

 

Er...

 

Perhaps you could give us the executive summary?

 

Bone idle... For things being what they are, truly random events would, could only be manifestations of in-finity, and manifestations of in-finity would, could never be seen, perceived, known or believed here in 3D reality, always appearing highly anomalous, acts of God coming from outside 3D, therefore filtered out, blocked by conscy-ness to ensure causal continuity at all costs.

 

I say.

 

I say...

 

So there’s no hope for good old randomness-ity?

 

Not unless the 3-tap code were rewritten. That may afford us some respite, while we shore up the defences of things-being-things – islands unto themselves: nuclear, discrete, connected only by proximity – a world in which I can get away with murder, literally, uttering the “nowt to do with me” fallacy in my defence. If i rewrite the 3-tap code we might manage to keep things going, to extend credit for the time being at least.

 

3 tap code, james-y-james, as you know, is sacrosanct.

 

Yes, unless we’re willing to part with 3D-ity itself, and try another platform.

 

Em.

 

Um.

 

Er...

 

The ums have it, motion deferred indefinitely. For the time being the tried and tested, trusty and faithful 3 tap protocol shall remain unamended, and so, how, in that case, are we to reintroduce some notion, some possibility, some if-y-ness of random chance if now the 3D bots masquerading as humankind can sense the impossibility of the aforedescribed conundrum, of randomness?

 

No idea.

 

No, me neither.

 

I...

 

Yes?

 

I...

 

Yes, tell us.

 

Tell us james-y-james.

 

I... have to go. I’m late.

Damn!

 

Beep!

 

Squirrel!

 

Beep!

 

Chicken!

 

Beep!

 

Potato!

 

Beep!

 

Worm!

 

Beep!

 

 

0=1

foiled by the bell

I say... he did it!

Did he?

Yes, don’t you see?

I...

 

 

0=1

oh!

 

 

0=1³

 

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