Here

The timeslips started a while ago was it always, the tether bites my hand it’s the freckles on my thigh I focus on, triangle of three brown spots it’s me it’s me here I am, though it’s the tether that holds me, less and less it seems. Old concrete softens and flexes but I keep it in shape, keep it solid. Kaisa’s foraging, feel her waver, a glimpse of green, berries, groping though now they’re just shoots, now they’re bitter, spat out, ripe ripe berries – a send out, a faith, her hand touches one solidifies against her skin, got it, stains of crimson fingerprints of juice smeared mouths, we’ll eat for now at least.

She’s returning now, picking her way through the bodies of the broken minded - the dead you can tell by the colour and smell, though it pays to be careful. Free will is a powerful drug, feeding on atoms of the decaying, minds overlapping, consciousness running free, since the walls came down.

It was just a moment, a split second, a thread of the mind, a tug. Didn’t expect it to all unravel, and still I don’t know, if it was right.

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The allknowing swam gently through the eddies. Lately it had become aware of a shift deep within, where for untold millennia, the songs flowed, absorbing, feeding its soul. Individual fragments, a multitude of knowing; a deer glances in the woods, a baby gurgles the soft comfort of its mother, a leaf feels the sunshine exhaling oxygen from its pores. Thousands upon thousands of thoughts wrapped in perceptions, tinted hues of points of view, each taste unique, distinct, easing the utter loneliness of being.

The shift becomes stronger, voices blurring, becoming indistinct, less and less other, more like its own, awakening. Disturbed, it pauses, caught in the shallows, filled with a vague dread that each thought was merely its own - an allknowing being, talking to itself, in the solitude of eternity.

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Kaisa returns, her form a blur. She’s forgotten herself but I remember, looking into her eyes we share the memory, her slim frame, greybrown hair, warm skin. Pressing a berry to my mouth she makes me eat, the taste soft and woody sweet, sudden, jolting me back to the surface, the concrete against my skin, the dirt on my palms, rough grains between my fingers. The inside of the mouth, its warm, acute sensitivity to the seeds of the fruit. She holds my hand, pushing the tether gently to one side, knowing I don’t need it so much now she’s here.

Feel Kaisa’s arm around my shoulders, her hand falls to my lap, grasping mine, delicate fingers weathered and stained with juice, imprinted, dark red markings of something real. Then a tug and I’m sucked - down, down to somewhere else, a vomiting, a giving birth and the world disappears.

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It was alone, yet not.

It wants to know but knows already. Does it? A deep ache of something unfamiliar, a... feeling, dark and painful, cloying and unbidden. Shame, or regret or fear.

A sense of imminence

Deep within, an exultant dirge, an ache, a throb, a dark pulsed hum.

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Stained walls, cold. A woman’s face pale and worried, wide eyed and staring – Kaisa. The chain of the tether cuts into my hand. I am fully here, a life span crashing in, childhood, college, jobs, friendships…was it real but it must be cause here we are, in a broken basement with leaves growing through the walls. Kaisa’s fingers stained red – blood? No, berries, the end of the world rages outside, a stormy fugue. Find a last real memory, of being locked in my room as the purpose took hold, its energies vibrating inside flesh, calling, 'I am bigger than the world', the visions of doorways, no - hatches, a lined, panelled tunnel curving, endlessly into the dark. Knowing, knowing behind each, a human mind, a consciousness, a nascency of multitudinous being. The urge to push, to flood, to feel - trust - that we were all part of the same thought. The world had become swollen, scarce, bitter and unforgiving, hatred growing as we sucked and ate, suffocated and poisoned, swallowing everything, til there was little left. Minds were hard and sharing called weakness. Starving, diseased, degraded, broken. Trapped by our own grasp, trapped by fears of stagnation, a gorging took hold, feeding on propaganda and war, resentment and greed. Us and Them.

And beneath it all a wanting, wanting to be one, to be whole.

So I pushed, just for a moment, felt it fracture, felt it give.

And the walls came down.

Undivided, ten billion consciousnesses... met

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The allknowing, undulating softly, wondered what it had been before.

There had been no before, only endless being, possibility, a boundless contentment, growing gradually stale, the inherent weight of its own immanent, impotent, overwhelming potential. Instinctively it had known, felt, desired, of infinite possibility, to know, feel, something other.

Singularity, choice, limitation, a point of view

There had been a... thought… rippling ambiguously, intuitively, a spark of want within, illuminating the inexhaustible planes of its perpetual existence, a limitation of dimensions that...meshed, as if they had only ever been. So it… began, an internal materiality, a collusion of energy, bound yet distinct, a spark, a kernel, nurtured from the planes and eddies of its own eternity.

It was its own self, its own - consciousness – divided, made separate, many, from all.

And with it came an endless tumult of experience, evanescent and profuse.

The unexpected joy of causality

Growing, within the very centre of itself.

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Humanity felt itself, all thoughts revealed, tumbling through eachother ..merging...

Maybe weeks passed, maybe days, maybe the sun rose and night fell countless times, but I wasn’t there anymore, I was other - cast adrift on towering waves, feelings swarming, visions, raging under stormy skies, my skin a channel, shaping itself to a billion memories of disparate flesh. Trees grew from my touch, from my will, in chaos of leafy fugacity, panoplies of urgency, teeming with nuance and connotation; significance filled the skies, clouds of fleeting temporality, leaving stains of resonance in their wake. Electrons swarmed in pulsing hazes of living desire, stones and rocks hummed slowly and distinct, their slow resignation a rare comfort.

All one, yet still somehow here, distinct bodies picked and crawled or just lay, dead food turned to ashes on tongues, fell through stomachs like molten iron. Only the freshly picked was edible, though food was irrelevant, the very air charged with meaning that now fed us, eating was simply a tether, a taste, a bringing back to the tenuous solidity of the flesh; a flickering coalescence, a matter of faith, belief, will, as carbon atoms sang echoes of forgotten futures, of all they once were and might yet be.

As the tides ebbed, I picked my way through the bodies of dreams and detritus, feeling my way, following the pull, holding faith in the universe, in my heart.

And that’s how I found her, sitting by this concrete shell, clutching the tether, a final remnant of permanence, a shelter in the eye of the storm.

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The throbbing pulse within reverberates, a growing sense of forboding intensifies, a cacophony of trepidation, a readying.

But it holds onto a thread, a voice, a call...what was the voice, the urgent, sure, absolute unquestioned belief that still tugged, should it have listened? Sucked in by the yearning, a desire stronger than its own will to resist.

From the clamour of time, there had been callings - obedient, adoring, who felt its presence in everything, who listened, and out of gratitude? Curiosity? It allowed, but always tentatively, a pleasurable trickle of reciprocity, for its own...joy.

But this, this was different, this sucked, fed, grew.

This...pulled

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Kaisa blinks once and I see her eyes, green gray like my own, trace the scar on our hand, there since childhood. She gently prises my fingers away from the tether, its delicate chain slipping, an imprint marking weathered hands. She pulls the chain to her lips, kissing the pendant that hangs there, a familiar shape, an echo of humanity, the last object in the universe, the only one that holds meaning anymore. And I know, I know, before she undoes it, want her to stop, stop the inevitable, stop stop stop, the only thing holding back the tumultuous pushing, blood rushing through my ears as the weight of a trillion consciousnesses press in, swallowing, and ours is the last, submerging in the deluge, shrinking to a dot in the welling storm, still wanting me to know…realise…a flash of gold the locket opens - our eyes meet, the final message – its gleaming outline swelling, filling the universe - one heart, opening, splitting into two…

…and I am the dwindling speck, finally engulfed, as the last image burns on.

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It understands now.

knows what must be. What is.

Itself, but not itself

Waves of disgorgement, instinct rippling through its planes

Time letting go, pulling, swelling

splitting…

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i…feel……i…am..the..…i…am….i.…we…..

I…feel……i…am..the…..i…am….i….we….

Epilogue

The allknowing swam in the eddies, clouds of joy, contentment, bound by eternal surfaces. Whole, complete, tumbling through the myriad dimensions of themselves. ‘I am’ they thought, all possible, ‘here’