Chapter 16 - in which Mandelbrot's beetle collapses the matrix

“You can’t do that – you can’t.”

“Wanna bet?”

“No, really, stop messing around. This isn’t a joke you know. The lives of billions of people are at stake.”

“I already told you Josh, this is just a matrix – a computer generated hologram.”

“But that’s insanity. It’s real. I can see it. I can see people, houses, trees, buses..”

“Yep – you can see it all, so let’s see what happens when I switch it off.”

“Nooooo! You mustn’t Gill, I’m begging you.”

“I told you Josh – merge into Megan – become beetle – now what do you see.”

“I...”

“Yes?”

“I’m...” struggling for words... gasping... “I’m not ready.”

“To see the truth? Of course you are. Long since ready. Carry on like this and you’re going to cause Megan some haemorrhaging. If that’s the best you can do then it’s back to g-nome portal for you – mission aborted,” and that’s it – we’re flying back to g-nome portal.

Everything was going fine for the first day or two. Gill and I flew through the main sectors we cover – and the flight is awesome beyond words. If you think this is just a beetle flying round a room, you’re in for a big surprise. You see the beetle tunes in to the very fabric of reality and takes you backstage, into the stitching, under the car bonnet, into the boiler room.

The first thing that strikes you as you’re flying around is the complete disconnect between what our 3D vision sees and what the beetle sees. Ok – houses, trees, tables, fruitbowl – it’s all there except it looks kind of psychedelic, but there’s this flipside that our vision normally ignores completely, and the flipside is mathematical – it’s the hologram itself. Once you see that, it completely alters your perspective of the world as you knew it. You see how the table emerges from a zero point, as does the bed, the bookcase and the cuddly toy you so love. Awareness of the zero point makes it impossible to think of matter in the same way again – for all matter projection in our 3D reality has an equal and opposite dejection – a bit like the upside down image that forms on the back of a camera obscura. But if you think the inverted dejection is just an image and the projection is real – think again. As soon as you become aware of zero point, you sense how the two sides balance one another – that the sum total is 0. This means that any “thing” in our reality amounts to nought when taken as a whole – when both sides of the equation are considered. Our trick in normal life, is to ignore the other side, and to assume that this is all there is – that our muchness-of-is exists as a kind of positive materialisation – even though we can’t for the life of us say what our universe materialised from.

By contrast, beetles don’t have this psychological or mental problem. They simply see both sides of the equation – the 3D projection that we know and love, and the shadow on the other side of zero point – which is more than a shadow, for it can at any moment cancel out the whole of material reality – without a sound.

“So why doesn’t it?” You might ask... I did.

Gill plays for time...

“Why doesn’t what?”

“Come on Gill – why doesn’t this anti-matter cancel out everything on our side of the life-matter curve – why does matter seem to be so stable?”

“Oh Josh, surely you can see?”

I scratch my head for a moment, assuming I’m being in some way stupid and missing the obvious, but I can’t make it out – “Nope... I don’t get it.”

“How do you think you’re able to observe all this?” she asks.

“Because I’m inside a beetle called Megan with psychedelic vision.”

“Well yes, but you can see it even without Megan if you take the trouble to tune in – just by meditating. So, try again – how can you see all this?”

“Presumably because the observer is a part of the whole – both sides are one single isness or consciousness.”

“Very good. That’s more or less it. It means that the fact that you’re observing reality creates it and continues it.”

“What? You mean that the minute I stop observing it, reality just disappears.”

“Precisely!”

“But that’s preposterous.”

“Yes. Isn’t it.”

“Well then it can’t possibly be true.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because you yourself admitted it’s preposterous.”

“Listen Josh, the fact that something’s preposterous doesn’t for a moment stop it from being true. All it means is that your mind’s having a hard time accepting what doesn’t fit into its pocket scheme of things. But now that you’re here with Megan you can see for yourself what I’m telling you. You can test the hypothesis.”

“How? By collapsing reality?”

“Yes. Are you ready?”

“I...” and here’s where I had one of those “why didn’t I see this coming” moments. It was like I’d just walked straight into Gill's obvious trap – and hadn’t for some reason seen it coming.

Now, you might well be thinking “Big deal – what’s the problem? Just go ahead and collapse reality. Gill obviously knows what she’s talking about.”

I certainly would, reading this from the comfort of a leather armchair in g-nome portal’s upper reading room, particularly if Chumba Wumba was on temporary leave of absence.

Try to understand, that no matter how logical this all might seem, it’s almost impossible not to have a sense of belonging to this world, to this reality and universe, of being one with it. It goes deep, deep within, right to the very core of being. It’s biological – our very cells feel an affinity to all living matter. They have as much in common with the individual cells of surrounding life forms as they have with us, the trillion cell body, or even more. Besides which, Creation is more than just “matter” or “fact”. Present within it is either God, divinity, or a sacred life force from which we emerged. This world, this reality, this universe is IT, sacrosanct, inviolable. You can’t just go in there and mess around with it – switching it off willy nilly. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t.

It’s at this point I suddenly realise I’m screaming at Gill and sweating profusely. I have no idea how it happened but something has evidently snapped. I’m close to being a deranged maniac – that’s how bad the thought of collapsing reality is at the visceral, atavistic level of belonging to It.

“Funny the way “It”, the word you’re so attached to, is the same as the acronym for Information Technology, IT,” Gill remarks all innocently. “You’re emotionally attached to a construct that is all thing and no beating heart. As long as you feel loyalty to it, you’ll never get back to the essence, the isness, the divinity that you’re looking for. In any case, on a more mundane level, you’re not going to be able to work as one of us until you get beyond this rather trying psychological barrier.”

“But surely I’m already one of you,” I answer somewhat lamely.

“No g-nome operative can call himself “gnome” with a proper “g” until he’s faced the test of 0=1.”

“If I ask what that is, am I likely to regret it,” I inquire, keen to avoid any further traps.

“Come on Josh, stop playing around. You know exactly what it is. It’s staring you in the face.”

And she’s right. But I hadn’t seen it until Gill put a little steel in her voice and snapped me back to – er – reality, if that’s what it’s called.

0=1... the relationship between the two sides – our 3D projection on the one hand and the dejection, anti-matter, the nameless void on the other – though these terms are misleading, revealing perceptional bias. Ultimately, the other side of the equation, though opposite to matter, is no less real, no less material than this.

“Correct,” says Gill, reading my thoughts. “You’ve already been on the other side and told your dear readers about it.”

“I have?” Funny the way my mind’s always one step behind the curve, or the cart, whatever, behind the plot. Funny.

“Ah yes,” it suddenly dawns, “Goblin.”

Gill’s definitely enjoying this, even though I’m testing her patience to the limit. Probably she’s reliving her own induction to g-nome, and fond memories... who can blame her.

“Makes sense now, does it?”

“Yes...” though this still doesn’t help in practical terms, you see I’d gone to Goblin in my sleep. That’s different. It’s one thing passing through the zero point of space and time in dream mode, no matter how real this seemed, quite another to try to do so when fully awake – in my right mind, so to speak. My heart, it’s beating fast – it knows what lies ahead. Jelly – that’s something else, I’m feeling jelly in my legs, strange as I’m sitting.

“Look Josh, we don’t have all the time in the world. You’ve done this all before, just in a different context. There you were prepared to meet Spirit, and that made it easy for you to leap into the void. You had a deep emotional yearning for Spirit. You trusted it implicitly. You knew that even if you died – your life was as nothing – so you were ready to sail past your fears.”

Yes – I remember it well – though I can’t for the life of me say where it happened. My memory seems to be fragmented – jumping off a clifftop doesn’t fit into the life scheme of a middle aged employee at Boodle & Badwise Nobs, a highly respected bathroom fittings company. “I’ll deal with that later,” I tell myself, “there’s bound to be an explanation, but this... this...” and again I’m staring into the void, and strangely enough I see the form of a beetle.

“Mandelbrot set,” Gill butts in.

“Mandelbrot what?” my mind scrabbling to climb back onto the curve again.

“Oh come on – you’ve seen it already, on the internet. I got Roger to paste it into a webpage you were visiting – just to get you thinking about things.”

“You did?”

“Well, you were a little slow on the uptake, Josh. No disrespect.”

“Slow on the uptake – you mean you guys were waiting for me?”

“Look Josh, we don’t have time to go into all that now. You remember the fractal videos you started watching a year ago. That’s what I’m referring to.”

The penny drops. I’d spent a few days avidly gazing at fractal movies, the Mandelbrot set – no idea why – they seemed to speak to my mind.

“Of course they did. They help the mind to reconnect with the zero point, and by inference, to re-equalise.”

“Ah... So that’s where the beetle comes from.”

“Well yes, or put it the other way round – the beetle form is at the centre of the mathematics of reality – so it’s hardly surprising that Mandelbrot or some other mathematician should have stumbled on it and presented it to the world.”

“And we’ll never know which comes first – the chicken or the egg...”

“The cart or the horse,” Gill quips. “It’s all a case of perspective. As long as you were locked in 3D reality, it was appropriate for you to take sides – to operate under the aegis of I-mind/it matters.”

“You mean the 3D mind?”

“Yes, but I-mind/it matters is not just the 3D mind, but a divide and rule programme that compels you to see things from one side – effectively locking you into space-time and out of time-space. You would see everything in terms of duality – me and them. That worked fine up to a point.”

“Er... which point is that?”

“The zero point, of course, but in order to balance the equation – to re-equalise – you have to...” and Gill falls silent – looking at me searchingly.

“Look, Josh, I get the impression this is all a waste of time. You know all this already – you’re just pretending you don’t because you don’t want to face certain deeply ingrained biases and prejudices. Things that are woven into your deepest psyche – things connected with God and demons and the likes.”

Yes – I’ve no idea how she does it – but once again Gill hits the spot. I shudder involuntarily – that’s exactly what I’ve been feeling – though I couldn’t have articulated it. There’s this deep belief that our side is of God’s creation – and that everything on the other is of the devil – which in a sense is true – if you remember the hate mail I got after visiting Goblin. Our minds are programmed that way – and I’m evidently not immune, though intellectually I claim to be unbiased.

“This can’t be done any other way, Josh. Either you’re ready to bring the two sides together – to re-equalise – rebalancing the whole of creation within yourself – or you’re out.”

“Out? But that’s preposterous!”

“Amazing how often you use that word. You’re out Josh because this is only going to get harder if you don’t do it today, still fresh after entering g-nome, while the iron’s still hot. The last thing we need is a viper in our midst.”

“A viper? What are you saying?”

“With the best will in the world, if you don’t re-equalise you’ll be a danger to yourself and all of us. You’ll turn into what people in past would refer to as a necromancer – a dark sorcerer.”

“No I won’t.”

“Yes you will – because at the very heart of everything you’ll do will be this unresolved duality which always manifests as fear. That fear will drive you to ever greater evil – no matter how good your intentions may be. This is not conjecture – it’s mathematical certainty. Without re-equalising you’ll be compelled to rebalance by working with your shadow on the other side – pulling darkness into this realm of being. We can’t allow that. The great power that g-nome portal gives you requires complete oneness – harmony within yourself and the allness of is.”

“Are you saying Chumba Wumba is balanced and harmonious?”

Gill can’t help but smile for a moment, in spite of her seriousness – “Not exactly, but as trolls go – yes – he’s the picture of harmony. Look, Josh, you can still keep your personality and idiosyncrasies, but at the very core, you need to accept the equals sign – which for us, strange to say, looks rather like a beetle. You need to re-equate, the same way Chumba Wumba and all of us did. Otherwise, you’re a public liability.”

“Wait a moment Gill.” She ignores me. “I... I need to think about this.”

“Absolutely not the case... At this, the 27^th minute of the 27^th hour of the 27^th day, you need to act, or I’ll do it for you, and that’ll send you back to a world where none of this ever happened, nor will ever happen again.”

 Gill makes her move... before her beetle the zero point emerges from the fractal shadows – she’s willing it out – drawing it ever closer by coming into complete oneness and harmony with all that is. She’s about to crash the entire matrix – the whole of reality – returning all life and matter to the quantum state of neither here nor there.

Panic within me rises... we’re back to the start of the chapter:

“You can’t do that – you can’t,” I’m screaming – visions of apocalypse filling my mind.

“Wanna bet?”

But this time... as if I’m experiencing it again, from a minutely different perspective – ah – that’ll be one of Llys’ time loops... this time...

It’s different. I’ve broadened out like an eagle with wings on both sides of the equation 0=1. I flap them powerfully and feel the oneness, the wholeness, the isness of Be. And there’s Goblin on the left side in time-space, and our 3D reality over here on the right in space-time, and g-nome betwixt the two, where never the twain shall meet, and me...

I allow myself, will myself, to merge with Mandelbrot’s beetle, the dark heart at the centre of all, falling, flying, equalising – bringing the two sides of infinity together in the only way this can be done – Consciously with the capital C, as in SEE. And truly, I see.