404 Documents Seven: Nova Heat Substance D

(More 404.) 

Memories flash back to me, layers of skin carefully peeled off, revealing pink machinery beneath. I began to feel as if I were having a certifiable schizophrenic episode. Was this work related stress? The missions, the drugs, a genuine preexisting mental condition unmasked by these factors...or something else entirely?

“You’re just on Substance D, man. You’re spun the fuck out,” the man calling himself Spoony explained. The fragmented identity structure called “Spoony” had yet to become “Chance Melborne,” a somewhat more resolved and serious young man concerned mainly with smuggling and trafficking in classified information and chasing tail. This transformation was to occur sometime later, or earlier, depending upon your place on the timeline. Of course, no one would remember it, in any event.

Nothing is remembered. All is lost.

“The Blue Brotherhood doesn’t exist. These journalists weren’t onto anything, the Monarch Mind Control lead is a dead end. And of course the Scientologists wanted to fuck over these dead journalists... The Scientologists want to destroy anyone remotely intelligent who isn’t a part of their fruity little club. You need to sleep. How many days has it been now?” He looked at his watch. The hands twitched their way around the face, little shivering cockroach legs.

Agent 888 pushed aside empty bottles of Dos Equix and various piles of debris, coughed asthmatically and fished for another mentholated cigarette from his shirt pocket. I was seeing inside the hole in my memory made by the benzos. Or was I just telling myself it was the drugs? Maybe something else was at work here.

“Oh yeah?” the Buyer replied. He was here? So he hadn’t left after all. “I thought that was a fictional name for ‘speed’ from a Philip K. Dick book. “

“No... It is who you are in general, man. Specifically you. Any drug. Any mind altering substance. Your life, living out investigations into things that don’t exist, and searching for answers, suspecting friend in enemy and enemy and friend. Your brain has detached and split into two different polarities: The left and right hemispheres, fighting for dominion over each other. What you need is balance. You are split man. There is a schism in your brain and you are fragmented. That is ‘Substance D.’ It’s not a drug, it is a state of mind. ...

“Did I happen to mention that I am your handler and that you are actually working for the CIA? I think you have potential if you stick with it. You have made it past at least 3 disinfo shells already, you’re hacking your way to the core of the syndicate and we are aware of who you are.... Just kidding man, I think you’re a fucking nutjob and I like to watch you grind your geeeears....”

“Maybe so,” the Buyer said. “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat. The mark within.”

I woke up in a cold sweat. Heart beating rapidly sweaty palms ache in jaw swallow down better soon. Who am I now? Endless corridors, twisted sheets, uneasy alliances, labyrinths, gargling in rat race choir drinking scotch playing ball with the men at the top... the top of... What? What was IT

I feel IT that means IT is there there, there is a there there there.... And so on and so on, perhaps forever.... IT reproduced ITself in the mind of the young and fed from our pain, nocturnal emissions and our tears.

Didn’t seem real; certainly most would discredit ITS existence. In fact, IT did not exist materially. IT existed as an idea. There is no There, There. Or is there a There, There? Something about a vortex... Like Schrodinger’s cat, but more.... Like it. Somehow. In universe B, Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan are alive, in universe B Scientologists never murdered them and I am not writing about a murder that never happened. In universe A, meanwhile, two options become apparent:

Suicide, or death by Scientology. Nova heat moving in...