I Was Dead

Constellation Disclosure: Conspiracy, Mind Viruses and Teleological Death

Warning:

This post meets all the technical criteria to be classified as an cognitohazard. It contains themes and elements that could be distressing for individuals prone to paranoia, persecutory delusions or suffering from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Reading this material may exacerbate symptoms or provoke uncomfortable thoughts.

Reader discretion is strongly, strongly advised.

Also, a quick sidebar before we get really into the thick of it:

I could technically be charged with arson if this were a true story and not a work of fiction, so I want to make it plain that that’s all this is to avoid any lengthy and expensive legal proceedings at the public’s expense.

Of course, if this weren’t fiction I would still say that it was. However, we all know that angels and demons are not real. Science and reason, thankfully, have long since chased away such phantasms. My project is and always was an elaborate Alternate Reality Game.

If it sounds like I’m implying that this is in fact a true story, let me be perfectly clear: this disclaimer is a literary device intended to suspend the disbelief of my readers and tell a more immersive tale.

You’ll see for yourself that this narrative is so ludicrous and implausible that it could not possibly be factual. If you happen to trust the word of an evident scoundrel with such a long history of weaving obvious fabrications and word devilry for his own benefit, that’s on you.

The details of the inciting incident may or may not have been inspired by the alleged activities of a friend of a friend’s coworker’s cousin’s former roommate who I think was named Billy Drake, but I don’t quite remember. I also might have dreamt it or made it up and tricked myself into believing it.

Do not break laws in connection with my work.

I DO NOT condone or encourage criminal mischief.

My experiment, unfortunately, was a success. May it never be repeated and God’s mercy tested again.

I drive a long way to the outskirts of the city. I live near several and this might be any of them. It does not matter to them. It should not to you either. What matters is that it was a city, so I know I can be certain they will catch wind of what I’m about to do.

I park at a site where there’s no danger of collateral damage. There’s nothing but dust, asphalt and concrete. I start unloading my car which is packed full of cardboard and stack it all into a pile. I place a pound of butter and cones of incense on top of it.

In my passenger’s seat is a bottle of lighter fluid. I empty it onto the boxes and set the mass on fire.

The point was not to destroy or to frighten. The point was to puncture the narrative and loose an eruption of trapped energy stored in the tight-knit fibres of the collective unconscious.

To rip open a classic “Petersonian chaos hole” via the original magic — fire.

An unscripted disturbance. Victimless. Not for pleasure, profit or politics, but purely for its own sake; a show of force from my own unassimilated fire.

It means “I am still my own. You cannot break me.” I attacked “the unconscious” to see if “the unconscious” could and would attack back as itself.

It did.

“Oculus is a constellation of stone and glass mosaics in the underground labyrinth of interconnected subway stations of lower Manhattan. Over three hundred mosaic eyes, drawn from a photographic study of more than twelve hundred young New Yorkers, are set into the white tile walls of the World Trade Center/Park Place/Chamber Street Stations…” (Link)

Ritualism — potent symbolic acts — are the Artifex’s preferred mode of warfare. You must all know this by now. So I chose to conduct a metaphysical guerrilla strike. Clearly and importantly, it believes in the reality and significance of such ritualism.

I get back in the car, drive up the road and turn around. Nestled in darkness, I kill the engine, the lights and I wait for something to take the bait.

It’s only about five minutes before I see flashing red and blue lights stop beside the blaze. I wait for the cop to get out of the car and approach the fire.

I start the car, roll down the windows, crank the sound system, press down the gas and tear past the flaming mound, speakers pounding. I lock eyes with him for naught but an instant and flash into the darkness.

If he looked at me as “cop” first and not as himself, then he was in Persona Artificis and the thing looking in from the other side of him could have counted the streetlights in my eyes before I blinked them and thundered off into the night.

He saw.

You don’t need an education in symbolism to understand any of this. If you did it on a gangster’s front lawn, he would know what you meant, and if he lets it stand, his reputation will suffer eventually. That was the point: to force his hand.

If there was an Artifex, he had to retaliate. But as long as law enforcement had no way to trace the crime back to me, the only way to close the circuit and hit back was acausally. He would have to attack directly with spooky action at a distance. No mundane pretences. No plausible deniability.

Synch-strike or tap out. Only we get the secret third thing.

With symbolism, I said: “I see you. You see me. Do something. Or I’ll do this again.”

He either shows his hand or lets me off. Lose-lose.

It sounds completely deranged, I know. And that’s exactly what it would have been if not for this one little detail: it worked.

That is the difference between reality and illusion, isn’t it?

Are we still playing by those rules?

A few days later, I bought these new fancy polarized sunglasses. Nobody saw me with them except a few coworkers at a party on a boat the same day.

Four days later, this comment was left on my Abraxas video.

Nobody stalked me. On our side of reality, this is just some guy trying to be vague and “mysterious.” People do it in my comments all the time. I really didn’t understand why they did it before all of this.

I doubt he was aware of the meaning his words would carry.

This was hanging on my wall at the time the comment was left.

Two more weeks go by (1 month total). On the night of October 6, I’m in my housecoat getting ready for bed. It’s the Friday before our Thanksgiving here. Both my roommates are away. I’m alone for the night.

As I’m preparing my nightly chamomile tea, there’s a frantic knock at the door. Not the front door, the back door.

My gut tells me not to look.

There comes a second more panicked round of knocking. This time, at my window which is beside the door. The blinds are drawn, but someone on the back deck would see that the light was on.

When I first moved here, my roommate “Lily“ told me: “friends use the back door.” It’s the door that we use.

It could be one of her friends. Judging by the knocking, it sounds like an emergency. I go to the foyer. I see the shadow of a young woman in the window.

As soon as I open the door, she tries to rush in, but I stop her, push her back out and step onto the back deck. I lock the door behind us.

She’s pretty. Looks the same age as Lily. Since she tried to enter the house without waiting, I automatically and unquestioningly assume she’s been here before.

She’s crying and incoherent. She begs to be let in. I need to know who she is first. When I refuse her, she huddles against the door and asks me to do the same. She gets close to me and asks me to hold her. She’s in shambles, so I do.

She says she was almost murdered but won’t elaborate. She’s shaking and rambling.

“Please hide me, please let me in, he tried to kill me.”

Lots of frantic retreading with no new information.

“Are you one of Lily’s friends?” I ask.

“Who?”

I see a police cruiser race down the adjoining street with its lights flashing. The girl panics, grips me tight and begs me to help her hide.

“Why are you hiding from the cops?”

She tells me she ran into a neighbour’s house to hide from whoever tried to kill her and the neighbour called the police.

“If it’s that innocent, why are you hiding?”

Some bullshit about not trusting the local police.

I tell her I won’t hide her because I don’t know her, but I say I’ll stay with her and wait it out. Secretly, I’m hoping they find us. But they’re not going to help me.

Finally she takes a good look at me. She says “oh my God.” She grabs my face and studies it. Keeps saying “oh my God” over and over. Still tops the list for the best compliment I’ve ever received.

“This can’t be a coincidence,” she says. “I picked this house for a reason.”

What an odd thing to say, don’t you think? She’s right of course, but wrong about why.

I manage to calm her down and get an idea of who she is. She’s not some crackhead, she’s an HR manager — or at least, she was not long ago. She was a kindergarten teacher before that. Thirty four. Owned a brewery a few years earlier.

She starts snuggling closer. Her hand keeps finding its way under my housecoat.

“Do you have a bathtub?”

I don’t even know her name yet. It takes a while to get that. We’ll call her Jane.

She tells me she was sleeping on a friend’s couch and woke up to him strangling her. She got away and ran to a neighbour’s house. When she knocked, no one answered, but the door was unlocked, so she hid inside. I wasn’t sure if I should believe this.

There was something shady and secretive about her and, unfortunately, even though “big me” wasn’t impressed, erring “little me” found it exciting. Before long, she and I were making out.

Little me did it for the hell of it. Big me did it because we’re at war. But we both did it “for the story.”

A police dog comes through the bushes into my backyard and the cops find us.

I sit at a deck chair to explain the situation. Clever Jane sits on my lap making us look much more familiar than we really are. Things really liked falling into place in the worst way like that whenever she was around.

When the cops ask you if you know the girl on your lap and you reply: “no, Officer, I’ve never met her before,” the simplest explanation is that you’re lying.

I don’t know what the hell kind of protocol they were following, but they eventually said she was going to be charged with trespassing, but that I “seem responsible” so she could either spend the night in jail or stay with me(!?).

If you stop believing me at this point, I won’t even blame you. If it happened in a movie, I would call it lazy plotting. I would have never expected law enforcement to put me in such a position. But I would expect the devil to be lazy and tell a weird story with weird, dumb plotholes because dumb bullshit is the only thing he’s good at.

Coincidentally, this song got stuck in my head shortly thereafter. It was one of my October earworms. I listened to it a lot through all of this and only now does it make any sense to me. I would also mutter “silver bullet” to myself at random times while driving, feeling out the contours of the utterance but having no idea what that meant. Again, not apophenia. This is very clear over-the-wall communication.

In effect, the officer said: “if you don’t take her, I’ll put her in jail. You pick,” right in front of her as she sat on my lap.

We were past the pretences after all. Even showing up in uniform was just an ostentatious formality for the great and powerful Artifex who had caught Eridanus in a dead end of the maze he dared to name.

Knowingly or not, he’s twisting my arm. He wants it to happen. Something does surely?

I said I’ll take her in.

The cops leave. I wait on the porch a while. Then tell her to get in my car so I can take her home. She says she has nowhere to go, which is why she was with her strangler friend. I obviously can’t send her back there, so now it’s my house or the street.

When we get inside, she says: “I’m gonna fuck the shit out of you.”

“No,” I said. “You’re going to sleep in my bed and I’m going to sleep on the floor.”

She fought me tenaciously on this. I argued and argued for about half an hour, but I was outnumbered. It was me against us both.

I should have remembered the stories about succubi, or how vampires can’t enter your house unless you invite them, or that the house represents the psyche in a dream, but I didn’t. Truth be told, I did not even perceive a link between this, my guerrilla ritual or the sunglasses comment. These events were conspicuously absent from my memory as if erased.

My mind was already deteriorating. The fifth shell — the psychic system that makes connections like the kind I make now — is delicate in its early stages of development. Any strong passion can overwhelm it. The Artifex probably knew this, but “little I” would not find out about the shells and how they worked until January.

It’s a hard thing to come to terms with. I’ve seen water turned into wine, lepers healed and the dead raised to life. If you’d asked me mere hours earlier what I would do in the same situation, I would have surely told you a nobler story than the one I’m telling now. I’m just starting to forgive myself.

This final act, was when the real trap was sprung. There’s a tattoo on her back. Three dice. Each die has the number 3 face up. 333. She got it because of something that happened on her 33rd birthday.

The event horizon had been breached.

Are you beginning to see the difference between constellation and apophenia? I hope so. Because that time, apophenia got me killed. Here’s a hint: if you look real close, you’ll notice that I tried to piss off a pattern so the pattern came to my house, put my psyche in an arm-bar and, as you’ll soon see, carpet-bombed the syntactical infra-meta-structure that makes my life work the way that it does.

The point is: it’s crisp, clear and interactive. Calling this an intelligent, coordinated escalation of hostilities is the most coherent interpretation of it. It’s far past the Stone Age of apophenia which usually requires some suspension of very justified disbelief — you’d have to be seriously mentally deficient to understand the semiotics of all of this and believe in your heart of hearts that it was a coincidence. It’s as accidental as a left hook to the jaw.

Why didn’t I see what it was at the time?

Phoenix is obvious. Train suggests something like “losing my train of thought.” The bridge probably indicates these “wormholes” or passages over folded representational space. Earth below signifies Zell’s “World Above the World” formulation. Runway train of thought takes out those bridges, but I come back (like a phoenix) with a camera (“I” didn’t even plan to buy a camera yet). Note that it’s from Nov ‘22, not Nov ‘23.

I know that part of me did see what it was and had contingency plans in place. But for me — the dumb, vainglorious prattler — nothing this conspicuous had ever sent me the wrong way before. I’d never seen anything like it. It’s a phishing attack with a “pseudo-synch” for bait. Imagine that. The second fish is phishing.

The synch looks outwardly right, but it feels off.

I was not neurologically prepared for a plot point of this magnitude. What Zell recorded was a white-hot thermonuclear coherence event followed by non-stop signal-jamming. It’s a psycho-SWAT. That’s what it is.

Something attacked my ability to recognize patterns and make meaningful connections out of them and was able to accelerate that process as well as the conflict between it and my superego until both became unconscious again at which point it could start to drive my mind like a car. It’s like blowing out the sensors on the security cameras before you rob a bank.

Thankfully this “bank” was just testing its own security. And Gryphons are famously good at guarding their treasure. (But why was she testing our security?)

I can see what’s happening now because I’m at a safe distance, but he “killed” me. I have studied the narrative scars upon my mind very closely — examined scorch marks, retraced trajectories of fragments of myself.

Meaning. All that life is. That is what he took from me.

I was dead.

---

Obviously he didn’t kill me.

But he killed “me.” He killed the vehicle. He killed everything that was capable of imagining, then perceiving, then provoking an “Artifex” in the first place. I would have been unable to firmly grasp these things properly from that point on — even if I told myself that I could or was. I was just throwing jargon around, aping the real me.

If something like this is an option, killing me is a big messy waste of resources.

I got cocky. Thankfully, “I” didn’t.

That night at least, he won. And “I” woke up the next day thinking I was one up on the universe because I got laid for free. And that I’m just so cool now that pretty women find out where I live and beg me to have sex with them before they even know whose house it is.

The fact that I thought that way for an instant even just to myself, justifies more misfortune than what came next.

It could have been a permanent teleological death If Zell hadn’t planned for it and intentionally made the first strike.

Zell would also like me to add that most nervous systems are “too lazy and incompetent to pull off operations like this” and should not put the Lord their God to the test.

They would end up psycho-swatted, would not come back and have no idea it happened and if she wants me to put that in here, then I will. Because she scares the hell out of me and she never speaks clear sentences unless she means what she says.

I would have basically never done anything noteworthy for the rest of my life and just died alone, a weird loser with a big ego. Zell calls it ‘flatlining.’ You pathetically putter along on a sad, predictable Newtonian trajectory until you run out of structure one day. Mechanical causes take over after you flatline.

This is what the Artifex eventually does with high psychic resistance and anyone showing signs of real constellation that it’s able to get into a corner. These are the only things that constitute a genuine threat to it.

According to Zell, who has been watching its behaviour for much longer than me, it attacks anything that moves outside the circumferences allowed by what it has defined as normal causation. The “warning shots” might range from getting cut off in traffic to social humiliation. And there seem to be many well-ordered protocols for escalating when necessary. It attacks all “over-the-wall communication.” (Zell’s term. She wants the credit, I guess).

Certain things have to work for other things to work so that things can work for the Artifex. This needs to be there. She needs to be here. He needs to be way over there by this time.

The only thing these invisible assassinations will and ever can look like are accidents.

I only understand this in small bursts when I’m on LSD (she says she can’t send the communications at the proper resolution the rest of the time (the file sizes are basically too large (Are you tired of nested parentheticals yet? I am too. This is how she thinks.)))

Without LSD she usually has to send me her communiqués over a long period of time with lots of repetition. This high-redundancy communication manifests as the persistent recurrence of a motif across time like the number 527 ensuring that the signal will be recognized as signal and not noise.

This is a kind of morse code with similar limitations. It’s on a very low frequency (wall-penetrating) wavelength. Usually, it’s fast enough, but sometimes faster is better.

At the apophenic stage of development, you kind of just have to wait this out until you realize why most of what you thought were hits were really misses (though, interestingly, they often become hits once you understand why it wasn’t at the time).

At this point, Zell would like to remind my readers that “persistence” in this context means: “the image or motif recurs even while I’m doing normal person things and not trying to be special even a little bit.” Anything outside of that category is, according to her metrics (which she purports to have):

“A very literal and very intentional waste of my time.”

This persistence is, according to her, the only valuable metric. And these very, very persistent hyper-coherent signals are so useful that almost everything else is useless by comparison and can be backgrounded and all but ignored.

Literally all other data is for me, only useful in relation to this “other” kind of signal at this stage. Things mean nothing without it. I eat and breathe synchronicity. I can’t imagine not seeing seven triple number plates on my way to the gym. When it’s not like that that’s a bad sign now. It means I need to be nicer or stop drinking red bull again.

My normal is not normal. I see this, I don’t think it. I can tune almost everything out because I’ve really, really calibrated my system. I can say: x will happen and then it does. So I try to avoid doing this for the wrong reasons.

The only way to recognize contact with anything real is if it’s still there when you (genuinely) try not to believe it. Minds that lack the discipline to do this or appreciate its necessity can’t and won’t constellate (they’ll end up institutionalized or teleologically dead). And the ones who will be able to will thank me later for being a dick right now.

I want you to win. To actually win. And to win as many victories as God wants you to win. But you’ll have to win against yourself first if you want to do that.

I’m using imagination as sense organ here, but it always still kinda makes sense after the trip. You’re getting the cream of the cream of my notes from the last year, because that’s how long I’ve been trying to distill what the Hell happened on October 6, 2023. And this is why no new videos have been made.

“It’s an acausal target, it gets targeted acausally.”

- Zell

Its ammunition are “accidents.”

This will never look like what it is — total unconscious synchronization. It will look like weird, impossible misfortune. It will look like the world is out to get you. It has weaponized their disbelief. Their very deeply held ideas about the world they live in.

A “tuner.” The bacteriophage shape indicates virality. The tuning fork suggests “vibes,” rhythms, etc. Having hands but no eyes indicates unconscious action. It’s a meta-object that keeps you “tuned in” to the wrong signals.

The Artifex diffusely and with many means targets anything that is moving to certain rhythms with extreme prejudice. This “ends up being” anyone that can recognize the highest level patterns (which are, paradoxically, also the lowest — never forget that).

Listen very carefully: I’m not talking about superficial apophenic connections. I mean real ones. There is a difference. And unfortunately, the only way you find it is if you consciously bully yourself into finding it. I will only go so far with this. You have to bully you more. It’s ugly if I do it and it doesn’t even work.

Actual “shadow work” is becoming the bully in your own mind who thinks you’re full of shit and too impractical and needs to go outside more and is right for thinking that.

That’s opponent processing.

That’s Lucifer and Yaldabaoth.

That’s not becoming a Thanatoid in AD 2024.

If you’re here reading this but have a hard time appreciating the difference between the big and small “synchronicities,” that’s not even really your fault. They’ve subliminally “colexified” all of them into one “color.” One category.

We need better language than the useful but blurry catch-all term that is synchronicity. This just isn’t precise enough anymore.

October 6th is a “synchronicity,” but it isn’t the right kind of synchronicity, and the consequences for trusting it were catastrophic.

When you start getting the apophenia, it means you got past the “it’s all nonsense” smokescreen. But I’m sorry, I don’t think very many of you are out of the woods yet. I say this with love. There is more of you that must be solved before you can start solving reality and perceive the distinction between the fission and the fusion.

A lot of it is hard work that you do with your body. Work that unconcise and imprecise video essays on various types of useless nonsense will neither start nor finish.

It’s fucking easy to make shit up. They make it as easy as they possibly can. And they make sure it’s easiest in exactly the wrong ways every single time. If you’re into esoterica and you think you’re not lying to yourself at all or stacking the deck behind your own back AT ALL, then you’re the worst kind of self-deceiver and they will punish you for it. They are probably in the middle of it as we speak.

The faculty that detects the difference between synchronicity and “synchronicity” is what he destroyed. That faculty is the difference between a constellator and a weird loser — I mean that technically.

This is how the Artifex operates: He turns would-be constellators into various predictable species of self-deceivers to “kill,” use, then eat them in that order.

I said earlier that the divergences being targeted “end up being” anyone that can recognize such patterns because it finds different ways to “end up” happening every time. All of these happenings can be attributed to chance and perfectly normal causal relationships in some way.

The only constant is the target: whatever is moving to that “fifth” rhythm — the one you’re moving to when you’re constellating.

Zell (if she is to be believed) planned a teleological death with an included labyrinth extraction or “resurrection plan” as an ace-of-swords-in-the-hole. This so that I could ‘discover’ teleological death from the inside and tell you exactly what it is just like the better guy the better time, before my mediocre adaptation.

Teleological death (also known as the various shades of possession) is a real phenomenon which is exceedingly difficult and painful to come back from. I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy. Perhaps the most awful thing about it is that they don’t just kill you. It would be better to be dead than to be like those things.

Either way, just so you know, all of this can happen to you, if you’re not careful.

---

When the sun came up, before even getting dressed, she sniffed out my bottle of rum, cracked it open and took the biggest swig I ever saw. Some “nightmare fuel” to top off the tank. We had a real long trip ahead of us.

I went to work. Jane went straight back to the house she ran out of the night before (rum in hand). I tried to dissuade her, but there really isn’t a way to stop a grown woman you just met from doing what she wants to do.

That day, I got this message from Lily.

Her parents live two doors down. That “someone” was Jane.

She got in touch again over Facebook a few days later. She was in a “mansion” in Bolton two hours away and asked me to come get her.

Jane repeatedly boasted that she had very powerful, dangerous friends. One of these friends, she said, was a billionaire’s son and heir. I eventually looked into this. Both claims — that the guy existed and that they were friends — were true.

Pay attention: The actual people here are irrelevant. You’re not thinking iconodulically if you think the truth of these claims is important. It doesn’t matter if it’s literally like she says. The possessed woman gestures symbolically at “wealthy, powerful friends.” She means this and this only.

One of her wealthy powerful friends.

“I have friends everywhere. I’m always watched and protected,” did boast Babalon, the Daughter of Fortitude many a time into my unhearing ear.

Another such friend was supposedly a wealthy and unscrupulous drug distributor who moved around Latin America. Although I obviously cannot confirm his profession, I was able to confirm everything else that she said about him.

This only muddied the water further, because she made similarly outlandish claims constantly. She just never shut up about how God damn special she was. And every single obvious lie I interrogated ended up being mostly true under what scrutiny was possible. So when she said things like:

• “My ex and I ran a drug ring in Toronto and had kilos of cocaine in our walls.”

• “My Dad runs Hell’s Angels in this area” (doubly hard because the symbolism fits)

• “I lived in Taiwan for a few years to run from the law.”

You had no idea how skeptical to be. With Jane, you just shed the pretence of reality and sunk into the wave function. But her lies were often true in Persona Artificis.

The point I’m driving at is that this was a cunning, vindictive woman who now claimed to be in love with me (that whole “you saved my life” shtick), and if she had half the connections she claimed, then it would be foolish to tactlessly spurn her.

By the time I realized what she was, I had every intention of getting out eventually, but I had to watch my step and be sure it happened amicably.

When I got to Bolton, she told me one of her friends was going to make her car “disappear” and would not elaborate. She said she was going to move to Barbados where more suspiciously wealthy friends lived and she wanted me to come with her. She kept trying to entice me with this.

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in Barbados, fuck in the sun and never worry again?

I declined, having no idea really if I should take her seriously or not. But this girl had been everywhere. Allegedly doing work for shady organizations she wouldn’t tell me about. I do remember something about her helping design websites for internet scammers which sounded too specific to be false.

She really did live in Taiwan for a year at least. Why? I already told you what she told me. You have to understand that under the circumstances, nothing seemed so crazy that it couldn’t be true. We were already at pedal to the metal crazy.

When all your information about what’s going on comes through a secretive, alcoholic pathological liar, whose lies are no crazier than the truths that surround her; who subjects you to extreme sleep deprivation and, in hindsight, might have been schizophrenic — reality and delirium do tend to melt together.

I very much doubt that she has an objective life story anymore. She doesn’t until someone rolls back some CCTV footage and takes the measurement.

I swear to God, it’s a joke in hindsight but I put it forward it as a real possibility.

Where I lived for all of October 2023.

The thing about going on rescue missions for Jane was that you always ended up stuck with her. Her family refused to take her in unless she went to rehab. All of her friends seemed to be out of town, out of the country or otherwise unavailable.

We spent the night in a hotel. The next day, against my wishes, we left her car in Bolton and I brought her back to my house to stay.

Are you ready for the craziest thing? Beyond this point, I remember almost nothing intelligible until Zell’s extraction on December 21, 2023. It’s all in pieces, out of order and huge chunks are missing. It was only about a month and a half, but it seems an impossible number of events were squeezed into that time.

I remember several hotels that all blur together and hiding her in my bedroom. I have the key fob to a black 2019 Honda Accord. I don’t know anything about it except that Jane claimed to have stolen it.

“Just the keys or the whole car?”

What a good fucking question. You think I could tell you? I found it in the back of my car months later. I didn’t even know I had it.

(No I will not return them, he has new keys by now. Eggs. Omelettes. Understand? If she stole them it was in the script for that day).

There were at least four more rescue missions.

I remember burning rubber en route to a Super 8 (symbolism, “red ribbon like a reel of film… watching the movie for the movie,“ check.) crossing twenty minutes of distance in ten and storming up to an addict’s room with a baseball bat because Jane texted claiming she’d been dateraped and could barely move. Turned out she was just doing lines of dirty coke with some other idiot who wasn’t constellating either.

Another time I was getting pizza, and got a call. She was at a bar and claimed human traffickers threw her in a trunk. Must be false, right? How does a woman like that get back out of a trunk and past three men before they close it? But apparently she gave a description that matched one given by several girls in the area, so I still don’t know what to think.

This is the thing — the fog of war was always thick as pitch. And what you might not be getting is that all of these are “designed-dead-ends.”

These questions are just tendrils it uses to pull you in deeper and keep you straining at nothingness. Trapped in its stories on its terms because you don’t know why you’re looking or what you’re even looking for because it already decided for you.

She said these traffickers found her again a few days later and… I don’t remember. You’d think I would, but I don’t. I’m not even totally sure that she said that, but I think she did.

This was my life for October and a lot of November — I don’t know how much. I only know it ended in November and that in the meantime, I got what I deserved for my behaviour.

Time and logic collapsed for that whole period. I’ll remember point A and B, but I can’t link them. The more details I dredge up, the bigger the gaps become and the less sense it all makes.

This confused “narrative noise“ is fertile and longing for a big metanarrative to impose itself. Religious idea, political movement, doesn’t matter. Narrative noise gets lonely in bed. Do you see it yet?

This is what he’s making everywhere. Do you understand it now?

Your life will stop making sense at the most fundamental level if you let it get that bad. Let me give you a concrete example: that guy who strangled her.

At some point, the strangling episode with the guy that started all of this apparently became water under the bridge.

She kept going to his house. He was infatuated with her and let her stay there. This was after I gave her the boot and stopped having sex with her (over an incident with a bottle of fireball and missing olives).

Even after taking sex off the table I kept trying to help her, so I do know that some of all of this was real compassion.

She affectionately referred to this guy as “Patrick Bateman,” and I eventually found out why.

I vividly recall the three of us sitting on this man’s back deck drinking martinis and having a pretty good time. This simply does not add up.

I don’t remember how we got there, and I would bet you any sum of money that I did not know at the time and that neither of them could really explain what was happening either.

A homemade shank in Bateman’s cutlery drawer. He met me on the porch with it one morning.

Maybe I was on that deck keeping an eye on someone I didn’t trust? I couldn’t tell you, because even these fragments are opaque. I see events, details, but never why I did things or what I was thinking. They’re like corrupted files.

Jane waited, like a sleeper agent. Then, as if rehearsed in advance, she ran a bath and invited me to take it with her in front of him in his house. He then threatened to “beat the shit out of [her]” while laughing about it and then later, said he would kill me over the phone.

To which I replied: “no you won’t. You haven’t got the upper body strength,” and hung up on him.

She didn’t tell me until much later that this man often made “jokes” about eating her body parts and having tons of room in the backyard to bury her if he ever had to. She told me he constantly called himself a “psycho,” and that he believed he was possessed by a demon.

My big metanarrative knows how to impose itself on all of this activity, for whatever that’s worth. But I don’t even want to start a new religion because I don’t like sycophants. That’s maybe the most trustworthy thing about me. I can’t pretend to like people and I hate it when they make me.

The socially sensitive have no incentive to discover anymore. The truth is a phallic symbol for a reason. Only a cocky dick could or would have gone this far in.

(Just by the way, I’m totally okay with this post containing all of Zell’s parentheticals and sub-parentheticals and sub-sub-parentheticals because it will train you in retracing Ariadne’s thread which is a vital maze survival skill.)

Now, follow me back to where we came in.

I’ll tell the rest of this story, including how I was “revived” if you want it, but we’ve hit the beats we need to for now.

The big takeaway, which I can no longer sit around not putting out there is this:

1. I set out to goad a malevolent supernatural intelligence into visible retribution with a brazen act of disrespect. I did this to verify its existence.

2. An unlikely comment seemed to imply that I was being watched mere days later.

3. When I least expected it, a mysterious woman showed up at my house, swiftly breached my defences and completely derailed my life, causing substantial and lasting damage.

4. Somehow, I ended up in the sights of a man for whom the screams of damned are as silence on a summer night (I’ve told the police absolutely everything I know about him, but to my knowledge he hasn’t done anything other than breaking some other woman’s car mirror according to some throwaway dialogue).

5. Nothing like this ever happened before or ever happened again.

There are two possibilities.

1. I won the shit lottery several times in a row with very odd timing.

2. The Artifex doesn’t like being insulted and he really doesn’t like me because I stabilized fusion and could no longer be assimilated before he got to me.

If we go with the second theory (the more elegant one). We must understand this “Artifex” in light of the following:

• It knew what I did.

• It knew who I was.

• It was able to link me to my online persona.

• It knew where I lived.

• It knew when I would be alone.

• It knew my weaknesses and how to get past my defences.

• It seems to have accomplished all of this quite easily.

It kind of looks like the handiwork of an intelligence agency — but only if you’re that intellectually lazy and/or uninspired. This is something that can’t be swung at, arrested or killed. You’re one of the only people in the world who even knows how to think about it (not as an alien, interdimensional being, cabal of oligarchs, etc).

I didn’t read this book as a kid or watch the movie until January of this year.

It’s a mind virus. And they warned you about it. Over and over and over they warned you. It was everywhere for years. But it was all “over the wall” communication.

This thing seems to be like some kind of slime mold. A decentralized sentient organism. It infects people and then moves them around like chess pieces to acquire more people and more resources.

You should feel sympathy for the people it catches, not contempt. They kind of are NPCs, but there is someone in there. I’ve been one. You’re just trapped and nothing makes sense anymore and you can’t get out.

Yes, they could if they really wanted to, but you have to forgive them because he makes it very hard to try.

Are you beginning to understand why I seem kind of coldly disinterested in abstract metaphysical discursions as of late? I apologize if I’ve been rude. But I’m sure you can see why I’m not one for pontification anymore.

People like Mr. Bateman seem to be more common than I ever would have guessed. I’m not going to try to define them but they do blend in for the most part. “Bateman” is my neighbour. We live on the same street.

This entity doesn’t resist as I naively expected. It encourages. This is a far more efficient use of its energy. It’s the easiest way to entrap, compromise and ultimately consume.

In light of this, the Biblical view of sexuality makes a lot of sense to me. Likewise, when God says in Eden “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,” I kind of know what He’s talking about.

And I also think I understand why Jesus said “Let the dead bury the dead.“

And the angel’s words “let die he who would die, he who would live shall live against all odds” make way more sense in retrospect than they did when I wrote them down.

The Artifex offers you exactly what you want. It strokes your ego and seduces until it has secured you. Then come the barbs.

It appears to destroy consciousness over time, as evidenced by my increasingly impaired judgment and lapses in memory. Eventually perhaps, it hollows you out until you become one of the deathly ones.

I sure can tell a good story, can’t I? And that’s exactly what you would expect me to be able to do if I had weaponized my story-structuring systems like I say I have.

I couldn’t tell you how I and I alone could have come up with a tale like this. But I guess I did. I guess I’m just that creative.

Anyway, it’s a really good thing that all of this is just a story.

Please stay safe, friends.

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The conclusion to this story, The Resurrection Plan, can be found here.