South of Maya - Fifth Chapter

V

 

“Everything, from the intellect down to the gross physical body, is the effect of Maya. Understand that all these and Maya itself are not the [absolute] Self, and are therefore unreal, like a mirage in the desert.” 

Shankara

       Mann felt the technicians tightening and adjusting the device around his head.  He watched two young men in blue jeans and white coats hover, with a disturbingly agitated movement of their hands, over a bank of dials and switches.  The room was suffused with a low hum, barely audible.  He couldn’t determine if the sound was coming from the headset or the room itself.

       “Ready?” somebody asked behind him.

       He started to nod, but the hand held his head steady.

       “You’ve done this before, so you realize that there’s no pain involved.  But there IS some disorientation at first,” Westerly warned him.  “And I probably should have added that you have one small advantage down there that nobody else realizes they have.  Whenever you really need something, think your request into the interface with the computer.”

       “Think?”

       “Let your awareness find the interface.  Then make your request as clearly as possible.”

       “And what happens?”

       “Yes, well, we’re actually not altogether sure how this adaptation is going to work,” Westerly admitted, “since the computer has to interpret whatever simulated electronic impulses pass for thoughts in your simulated host.  The computer is very good at these simulations, but it is no genius when it comes to figuring out how best to help you,” he added with another dry chuckle.  “Call it a small advantage, and use it as little as possible. Your natural resourcefulness should be your primary ally.”

       “You really think I can do this,” Mann said, more to the ceiling than anybody in particular.  It was a strange feeling, this sudden wave of doubt and uncertainty.

       “All we’re asking for is a nudge here and there.  Prolong the simulation long enough for us to get what we want out of it, and then come home,” Westerly was telling him as the technicians made his final adjustments to the complicated skullcap, pulling it down low over his forehead.  “And meanwhile, bring back the specifications of their technologies as they emerge.”

       “That’s all?”

       From the side of the room, Witch favored him a long appraising look.  Mann had the impression that she was truly seeing him for the first time, and didn’t like what she saw.

       He took a long look at the computer sitting against the wall.

       “I’m going inside that?” he said.

       “Not literally,” Westerly said with what Mann determined to be a patronizing smile.  The engineer sat down at the console, examining a screen with a frown.  “Your brain will interface with the program, and your awareness will be projected into the simulated reality, actually inside of a simulated individual in that simulated reality who will suddenly discover that he is no longer in control of his little simulated life, and who will experience a far more interesting simulated existence.  It’s really quite a feeling.”

       “You’ve been down there?” Mann said.

       “Many times.”  Westerly gestured to a row of reclining seats, with headgear resting on the backs.  “You’ll lie there in a deep coma for no more than four hours, and when you come back, 40 years will have passed inside the box.”

       “40 years?”

       “And you’ll come back with exactly what we want,” Witch interjected impatiently.  “Why aren’t his boots already on the ground?  Do we have to explain everything?”

       Gandhi and Washington sat down on the chairs on either side of him. 

       “Remember that you’re not going in alone,” Washington said.  “We’ll be coming too.”

       “Think of us as your very helpful backup,” Gandhi added.

       “Once we’re in, there will be plenty of time for us to brief you on anything else you need to know.”

       Witch looked up at the clock. “Let’s get moving,” she said evenly.  “With any luck, we’ll all be out of here by midnight.”

       Mann lay back and kept his eyes open, wanting to fully experience the transition. 

       “How are you with heights?” an engineer asked, his eyes focused on the console.

       “I’m not afraid of heights,” Mann answered.

       “That’s good,” the engineer said.  “That’s very good,” he repeated softly, as his fingers made a definitive move across the control board.

       Like a techno-savvy Inanna teleporting past the seven gates directly into the netherworld, Mann watched his perceptual framework explode into fragments.  Then, just as suddenly, the universe reassembled itself into a terrifying confusion of sensory impulses.  Mann was somehow looking through thousands of eyes at once, hearing through thousands of ears, feeling the sensations, thoughts and emotions of what seemed like all people everywhere. 

       With an enormous effort of will, he managed to figure out which eyes out of the multitude were his eyes, and he looked through them, down--

       An involuntary yelp escaped his lips, a violent electrical rush of fear at the incomprehensible distance between his frail body and the ground, where tiny figures were lost in a haze as if he were staring from the top of a mountain at the far horizon. 

       Mann simultaneously tottered on the edge of a thick railing and on the ragged frontier of sanity. 

       A command from the brain he occupied but did not yet control tensed his leg muscles, and he sensed the intention to spring out in a long swan dive toward a ground that would take him minutes to collide with so violently that the people below would have trouble recognizing the spattered protoplasm as once-living tissue.

       Thousands of voices, thousands of awarenesses watched through the eyes of his host and applauded this existential act of nihilistic courage.  Mann felt endless variations of their support as he experienced them experiencing his last seconds of life in a roaring sensory tsunami that overloaded his interloping awareness and sent him reeling. 

       The mind that controlled this body gave the sensory command to leap.  With a fantastic effort, Mann pushed through the confusion and countermanded the order. 

       The leap became a spasm that disrupted the body’s precarious balance.  As the startled host’s mind wrestled with Mann, Mann sent a firm command to his new body, which arched backwards away from the edge of death.

       The fight for control ended abruptly.  Somehow, in a desperate lurch, as his feet slipped out from under him, Mann managed to twist in the air and grasp the railing with both hands.

       The hands of this body were weak, but with the rush of adrenalin they were sufficient to hold him in place as the storm in his mind turned to an icy calm, as thousands of observers who shared this mind halted in breathless anticipation.

       Mann closed his eyes for a long second and pushed away, one by one, the other awarenesses, move along, nothing to see here, move away, the show’s over, shutting them off with a monumental effort until only one was left.  He tried to push it away, too, and it favored him with the mental equivalent of a sardonic grin.

       Cool.

       “Pardon?”  Mann actually said the word aloud.

       I intended to visit the afterlife.  Instead, the afterlife came to me.  Who knew?

       “I’m not--” Mann started to say, and then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, realizing that he was speaking an unfamiliar language as fluently as if he had been born to it.  “Look,” he said after a moment; “I’m going to pull myself up.  I’m going to live.  This body is mine now.”

       You’re welcome to it.  Nothing but a hassle, it was.

       “I’m glad you understand.” 

       Slowly, still testing his control, Mann pulled himself up until he could throw a foot over the side of the ledge, and raise a young, blade-thin body to a shaky stand on the back side of the railing.

       Well, so long.

       “Where are you going?”

       The Synchroncity is my home now.

       Mann pulled one leg, then the other, over the railing, and kneeled down, closing his eyes in an attempt to regain his mental bearings. 

       “Synchronicity?”

       But the awareness was already gone, into the cacophony of other awarenesses that felt like a riot tugging at the periphery of his attention. 

       Still kneeling, his eyes still closed, Mann followed him in. 

       A thousand chaotic fragments of awareness...

       --He was inside what appeared to be a transportation vehicle... 

       --He lay in a dark room lit with candles, embracing another body in sexual urgency... 

       --He was drinking an unfamiliar beverage in an eatery... 

       --He was walking along an unfamiliar street with the sunset to the left... 

       --He was dreaming many dreams at once, seeing through many eyes, overhearing thoughts, experiencing emotions, and they all blended together into a composite chaos where he saw the sky and the ground and distant buildings and felt grass under his feet as he ran and the bitter chill of an arctic wind blowing through his coat.  He felt angry and calm, despairing and triumphant, and most of all comfortable in the not-aloneness of this discordant yet intimate connection.

       In the confusion, he somehow also managed to perceive what most of them were looking at: the ex-occupant of this body reunited with an unhappy teenage girlfriend who had committed her own suicide less than four hours ago.

       The Synchronicity.  Somehow, his host and thousands of others had connected their sensory mechanisms through... what? 

       The Synchonicity. 

       The what? 

       His mind conjured an ill-formed image of a communications/computer chip surgically implanted in his brain against his parents’ vehement wishes, a combination of the Internet and Skype and every kind of social media, all wrapped into a single implanted communication mechanism, shared by thousands of young people who had voluntarily joined their brains and enfolded their personalities into each other so they could share every experience with everyone else, losing themselves and gaining everyone...

       Mann, eyes still closed, watched the joyful reunion of the mind that once inhabited this body with his young love, two disembodied personalities held together by the group awareness, swirling together in a freedom that neither could have known in their crude flesh-and-blood existence...  True love!  Pure love!

       Pushing the image aside, Mann stood up and removed elaborate high-tech sunglasses that completely concealed his eyes"and took his first real look at the world inside the box.

       He was standing at the edge of a crush of pedestrians dressed in colorful tunics and flowing robes, walking in every direction at once through a massive glass atrium so large that in his reality it might have had its own zip code. 

       Waterfalls cascaded down from various corners of the atrium into pools the size of lakes, which were surrounded by green vegetation studded with colorful flowers.

       Beyond the glass walls, extending out to the horizon, he regarded a fantasy landscape of spidery towers surrounded by spiral ramps, projecting, in various directions high above the streets below, gleaming glass atria like the one he now occupied. 

       His eyes were distracted by a speedy soap bubble that darted past the near edge of the outer glass wall, and he realized that the air was full of these transportation vehicles. 

       Mann searched the disorderly files of his host mind for the name of his new home.

       Aurora.  Capitol city of the Western empire. 

       As he tentatively pushed his way into the flow of pedestrian traffic, Mann tasted the air, and allowed himself to fully experience a light breeze across his face.  The... reality of it was a surprise.  Somehow, as he walked, the computer’s synaptic electricity was creating and updating, instant by instant, the tight coordination of neural signals between his simulated mind and the simulated muscles in his legs as he walked, remembering, instant by instant, to have his simulated feet encounter a solid surface every time they touched the simulated flooring of this atrium, and to transmit the feeling of solid ground through the bottom of his feet back to his brain, all the while keeping track of his balance. 

       His ears caught the noise of the crowd faintly echoing against the glass dome, sounds that, in his real existence, would have been nothing remarkable.  But here, knowing the miracle of the computer tracking each and every vibration in the air, he found it intoxicating.

       Where were Gandhi and Washington?  If they occupied any of the entities in this crowd of pedestrians, they were making no visible effort to catch his attention. 

       Or were they?  His eyes came to rest on a person in a dark robe at the edge of the crowd, who was watching him intently with eyes that seemed to glow with a kind of fever that could have been anger or blissfully happiness.  Taking Mann’s returned gaze as permission, the stranger approached.

       “How are you, sir?  Are you having a blessed day?”

       “I was... just... looking for somebody,” Mann replied carefully.  “Are you, by chance--”

       “Brother, I can relate,” the other said before he could finish, a light of enthusiasm adding to the glow in his eyes.  “You can be sure that every single one of us is searching, with our empty hearts and unfulfilled minds, for that thing that we crave so mightily.  Brother, you won’t find it in this world.  This world is nothing but a shadow, an illusion, a pale imitation of the true reality beyond.”

       Mann’s eyes narrowed.  “Is that commonly known here?”

       “Only a few of us know the Truth, but we try to share it with all who will listen,” the other continued with growing enthusiasm.  “Brother, I can show you how to get to what’s real.  I can guide up out of the mists, to the place that IS real.”

       “I just arrived,” Mann said, lowering his voice, hoping the other would do the same.  “But I need to know, what did I do that gave it away that I’m not--”

       “The Lord God knows every secret, and He welcomes everyone,” the stranger assured Mann, putting a hand on his arm and drawing him closer.  His eyes burned into Mann’s.  “All you have to do is turn your heart over to the Almighty Creator, and experience the love that fills you up to overflowing in that place where the craving has been eating away at your soul.  He loves you more than your own mother ever did.  Have you ever stopped to consider that right now, the One who created this entire universe is watching you, right this very minute?”

       Mann regarded the other for a moment.  He pushed a rising tide of perspectives, views, synchronicity visions out of his mind with an impatient shake of his head.

       “Yes,” he said.  “As a matter of fact, I do know that.”

       Gently disengaging himself, Mann lost himself in the crowd, the strangest creature imaginable: a god with no special powers.