The spirals again. Zach was back in a deprogramming room trying to recall the previous twenty four hours, the week, and the year. A thin rubber belt spun the red spiral in the glow of lights emanating from behind him. The walls were white and with the regulation textures of modern drywall, unlike the SCIDE installation in the reactor. There were other signs of middle-class Americana, too, like the shadow of a lamp Zach thought he had seen at Ikea. The spiral was the least interesting thing in the room and he tried to move, but was stopped by firm strapping on his arms, legs, and his forehead.

Not this again, he said loudly. The spirals don’t do anything.

Quiet, except for the faint hum of the motor powering the rotating infolded circles.

Is anyone here? he asked loudly, then yelled a haphazard help that emerged truncated because of his inability to stretch his neck as he raised his voice.

Aphrodite spoke from behind in the dark. Hey, hey, cool it, calm down, Zach. The spiral stopped and she walked into the light and pulled the Velcro holding his arms and head and legs loose with quick sawing noises. He rubbed his arms and asked her How long? How long have I been here?

Just a few hours, she responded. Let’s go meet everyone. Glad you’re back.

She led him into a common area that was more modern than the decrepit nuclear facility. The people were more polished, too, and older, ranging from the early teens to the twenties. Many were dressed in combat fatigues, but with distinctive SCIDE patches on their arms.

Is this place new? Zach asked after Aphrodite.… Read the rest

A spiral is an ancient symbol—a snake, an eye, a womb—and a hypnotic focus for mesmerizing the compliant into a hypnagogic state. A spiral is a flow into a singularity. A spiral is a whirlwind. The spiral before Zach’s eyes was generated by a light projector, he knew, and by a filter that was spinning before the projector. He focused and heard only a faint dripping. The fuzziness was falling away from him like he was shedding a cocoon, though, and he soon felt bindings of his arms behind him, metallic and cold, mirroring the cold of the room around him. The spiral was spinning gently, like a pinwheel in a breeze, and Zach found it comforting. It was a flow into a black hole, the negation of everything material, yet the lines of flow never altered or diminished, but extended into forever. A cold universe, empty of the luminous, yet beautiful in its existence, is still cold, he reasoned as he felt the chill rise out of the chair, into his damp back, and his arms. The spiral kept spinning with clockwork regularity.

He finally heard steel slide against steel and a light bloomed to his left, incandescently warm and yellow. A human shadow marched in and stood quietly before him. He didn’t speak at first, waiting to try to see who it was, though suspecting a female form from the subtle hints of hip and slender arm as the shadow moved around him. She slid into the light of the spiral and he recognized Aphrodite from the beach, her hair tamed slightly by a band compressing the afro into three cottontail puffs, above, left and right. She finally spoke, low and even, declaring him cleansed and purified.… Read the rest

What does one do when one is only living? What does one do when there is nothing to be done. Waking back to the abandoned reactor was already boring after only one night. It was late in the morning judging from the portals of light in the hall outside his cell. He was famished and athirst as he walked down to the central room. Only a few children milled between smoldering fires. He could smell food, though, and followed the scent. It was bacon, he thought, and his mouth began salivating. He hardly ever ate bacon, but he often craved it. He found older kids cooking in a functioning kitchen, though they had converted the sinks into fire pits and were toasting bread and frying bacon in iron skillets thrust into the hot coals. He waited in line for a helping and gobbled it down with his hands off the tin plate that they handed him. He looked behind the cooks and saw several large, blue coolers filled with milk cartons, eggs, and slabs of meat on top of mounds of ice. Zach thought that they must have brought that in this morning since there was no electricity at the facility.

A boy approached him as he leaned against a wall and drank deeply from the cup of milk that he had been given. You a hacker? the boy asked, stammering and averting his gaze just a bit as he spoke, then raising his eyes directly towards Zach until Zach returned the look. Yeah, I spose. Why? Oh, dunno. I’ve never touched a puter, he said, seeming proud of his accomplishment. Really? Zach asked. How long you been here? The boy grinned at him.… Read the rest