Dogleg Hinterland 7

When she awoke she saw someone new sat a distance off from her. She would not have recognised him if it were not for the blue lines etched deep under his eyes. He was watching her silently and she sensed that he was not moving so as not to alarm her.

‘What are you?’ she asked, sensing that to ask who he was would not be the right question.

‘A Water Element. This my place. I live in the heart of my brother, an Earth Element.’

‘Your brother is the desert?’

‘Yes, and my sister is the sky.’

‘So you are never lonely.’

‘You might say that.’

‘Is the joy here just the water?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

Mr. Magpie was sat there again. His arm was elbow deep inside his hat.

‘What do you have to tell me Mr. Magpie? Aren’t these visions that you sent me the message? Why do you keep popping in?’

‘Me? I’m a nosey varmint. I have always been told that I can’t leave well enough alone … but I can’t resist shiny things, and you are that. This is not a world where much shines anymore, and my flock that comes after will steal that shine.’

‘Are you trying to help me? Why? You’re from The Nest.’

‘Like your father said, nothing here is just one thing. When you steal something, do you not have it become part of you?’

‘So you’re a little bit wolf too?’

Mr. Magpie smiled, ‘You have not yet entered into the complexity that is your inheritance. I am a creature of black and white, or I was before I came here. Sime may look at this time and think that it is before, but I am not so sure that it isn’t the after.’

‘You seem scared. I never thought that anyone from The Nest would be scared.’

‘Why? You think of us as just one thing? We are many.’

‘Where is the joy in this Magpie? Where is the joy in this Water Element?’

‘All is not lost, is it, young Madrigal, if the birds can learn a different song?’

‘Cup your hands. I give you two handfuls forever after, and the water shall come from here.’

‘I don’t understand you and the Water Element.’

‘Do you need to?’

She cupped her hands, and there was a silver cup. And the oasis was gone.

Her journey began again.

Dogleg Hinterland 6

Heat haze led to heatgaze, that was what she was thinking. How far behind her Regrew felt now. You couldn’t back-track out of Cerebellum,the way the city fathers had designed it was so that all travellers were forced into going forward. Hindsight was not something they condoned — superstition had seeped into the architecture. This desert they called The Desert Of The Singing Sands, it was rumoured to give tongues to many wandering souls.

A man dressed in black and white appeared at the edge of her vision. He was wearing a top hat and fanning playing cards. He threw one at her and it felt like it bit into her like a blade. One for sorrow.

He sat there. Headdress made from the skin of a wolf. A ghost of a bonfire before him. He had a mouth-organ that he was blowing through; an old tune that she half remembered.

‘You?’

‘You recognise me? I was not sure my aspect would be the same.’

‘You look older, and there’s the wolf headdress.’

‘It’s who I’ve been running with of late, under the moonlight.’

‘You’re still alive?’

‘After a fashion. There are many gates into other worlds, and not all of them mean leaving the place. I exist in the hinterland; The Dogleg Hinterland.’

‘It’s the place of the wolf?’

‘For now. But there are Cuckoos abroad.’

‘The Nest?’

‘You know of The Nest already?’

‘Doesn’t everyone know of them?’

‘They didn’t used to know. Not when I walked in the skin of a man.’

‘Things change.’

‘Why no tears for me, Madrigal?’

‘The sorrow sits in me like a stone, father. How old do you think the grief is? You recognise me only because the magpie brought you here and told me it would be to speak to me. How does an emissary of The Nest summon someone from The Pack?’

‘You saw him — he manipulates the cards. They are shuffling everything.’

‘Are you Heatgaze, or are you here?’

‘I’m maybe a little of both. Things here were never one thing or the other, Madrigal. That is true of everything here; hinges in the meaning.’

‘Father, what is your name? I do not remember.’

‘I am Rondeau.’

‘Was there anything else you wished to say to me. You have been following me, as I walk, towards a spring. It is a spring in both senses: it is a source of water and it is coiled potential. Do you know of water that it can both flow around and it can pound it’s way through? It can split a stone. There is something you must learn here.’

‘I am just travelling home to get dream-spice for the trade I just made.’

‘That is one truth, Madrigal; another is that you are on a journey towards something and not just someplace.’

‘How do you know this? Are you dead and a wolf and my father and something else?’

‘You are starting to understand. The skin you wear is a signifier — a communication to those around you, and you can change it.’

‘I keep dreaming I am a wolf and wondering if I am a bird, but neither seems true.’

‘Madrigal, if you were ever taught that you are one thing or the other, if the binding lie of the binary stained your soul, then perhaps that is why I am here. This world woke into its superpositional state earlier than most.
‘The Whispergate Sentinel that first told the story of the worlds beyond the walls learned it when it stared into a mirror and punctured the surface.
‘Many of us learned it when the wings of the first emissaries of The Nest fluttered in our skies and stirred the clouds to storm, birthing The Whether Front …’

‘I am not sure you’re my father.’

‘I am what I need to be. The singer or the song being sung. How do you hear me? How do you see me? Look forward and see the water as it awakes.’

A spring in the desert. Here amidst the singing sands, suddenly she heard many voices. A vital mirror; a charm of magpies; the liquid throated wolves of mother moon; her own grief rising up from the heart of a shattered stone. She stood frozen. Her father next to her.

A golden eagle stood before her. It spread its arms in a gesture that said behold all of this. Nested tables. Matryoshka. Reality stacked within the hollow notion of reality.

‘Where do we lay our eggs, young Madrigal? In the fertile soil of young minds. We pollute the water of this place, and we are swallowed daily. This lone wolf, his pack — they are nothing to us. But you? You are something different. We are hungry for difference. We will meet you soon.’

The water spattered onto the thirsty sand, it splashed her and splashed through the ghostly form of her father. Where she had been awake, she suddenly crashed into the depths of sleep. An oasis sprang up around her. The world dreaming as her Heatgaze vision disappeared, and her father returned to the moon.

Dogleg Hinterland 5

A wolf runs beneath the moon. Pawprints filled with rain. Its snowy hide shining under the light of the skull above.

An eagle flies beneath the sun. The light makes it look as if it is dipped in the essence of stars.

You wonder if you are a wolf or bird. Are you perhaps neither? Sat here with a lizard, trafficking in the stuff of dreams, the question is, does it matter?

‘You look deep in thought, Madrigal.’

‘Sorry.’

‘One cannot help when one’s mind wanders, when the magnets that pull it exert such a strong force. Only with much practice have I managed to master Farsight. There are many things nearer that I find it much harder to look at.’

She smiled and she handed him the bag she had been worrying with. He smiled back at her, something she found a little disconcerting.

‘Where did you gather the ingredients for your dream-spice?’

‘In The Hushlands, from whence I hail.’

‘And there is plenty there?’

‘If you know where to look.’

He chuckled, ‘And I take it you do.’

‘I do.’

‘And you will bring me an endless amount of it in exchange for me giving you a way into the Mara-Mirror trade.’

Her poker face, such as it was, transitioned into her shocked face.

‘I have Farsight, and I have connections, and I know my business. Do not worry so, young girl. Just because I know all this, do not forget what I said earlier — that you are a rare breed these days. I need to trade with you.’

‘I take it you already have a fair price in mind.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then do we need to play through the pretense of bartering for this?’

‘You are so direct, young Madrigal. It almost takes the fun out of it. Do you not want to ask at least a little more for the danger of your travels?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Are not the wolf and the bird abroad?’

‘I do no think that the wolf is a threat to me.’

‘Ah, but The Nest may be, eh?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them.’

‘But the dreams, eh? You dream freely. Your tattoo is aflame.’

‘You know a lot about me and my kind.’

‘It is my business. Your father and I were friends; he told me much.’

‘So, what do you know of The Nest?’

‘Birds of a father flock to gather, as they say. Truth is a feather and honour is a mountain. Many things one hears about the birds. There are birds that sing and there are birds that repeat. There are birds that push people out of their nests.’

‘Do they trouble you here?’

‘Their shadows ink our byways and highways some days, but they have not yet found roost in these regions. We fear they may. It seems inevitable.
‘Look, feel the heft of this bag; this is the amount I will pay you for your regular supply. Once we are three deals deep I will tell you how the Mara-Mirror trade might be made.’

Madrigal felt like it might be rude to count the money there and then, and despite earlier misgivings, she was starting to trust this lizardkind. She had slept safely under his roof, and here he was giving her money in good faith, for she only had a sample on her.

‘How long until I see you again, business partner?’

‘This is enough for a few months at the price I was thinking. The price you knew I was thinking. It may take me that long to return home, but once I am there I can purchase a beast that will allow speedier travel. Is this something that would work?’

‘It surely would. I am receiving no dream-spice currently. Do you wish to stay another night, or do you wish to leave now?’

‘The first stage of our dealings is done. I see little sense in tarrying and indebting myself further by accepting your kind hospitality.’

‘As you will. One further hospitality I will gift you, however, is a full bag of rations to see you on your way.’

‘Thank you.’

They touched open palms, as was the custom here. Bartolph withdrew from the room, and one of his attendants came in and bowed before her, ushered her to the kitchen, where they prepared supplies for her and then set her on her way.

The first footstep outside the Inn Spire of Bartolph Regrew felt different.

Strangespace

Strangespace – some kind of exotic byproduct dimension made of stuff that started to foam around the drives which tore apart dimensional properties to get from A to B. The first time it blipped on anyone’s radar was when someone picked up a distortion clambering through the SOS frequencies that mirrored something they had been using in their distress beacons, but with something extra layered under it; almost like it was backmasked into there.

Calumn Storing was the man who named it – Strangespace. More incidents started to get reported, and suddenly you had someone pushing out a communication on a neutrino stream that claimed to be coming from the other side of a dimensional tear.

Calumn moneyed up and funded an expedition into the territory – the territory fought back – it was almost as if an intentional push into the space was antithetical to its very nature, and it therefore pushed back. Calumn coined the term spatio-temporal pollution, and from there came supra-dimensional fragmentation, and a whole philosophy built around the idea of not travelling in the way they were travelling.

Bearer Quinton came up with the notion that the space was being manipulated by a person, rather than any kind of interference from the destructive engines they used. He fingered Calumn as the kind of patient zero that had somehow infected the materials of the localspace he had been studying with destructive intentionality … it worked remotely too … apparently. Fingers were pointed.

When asked what had happened to Calumn Storing in the years after his disappearance, Bearer Quinton was said to have coyly remarked that perhaps his expedition into Strangespace had finally been successful.

Was it that people stopped reporting it thereafter, or is it that it actually dissipated as the engine designs improved. Or was Calumn Storing’s absent intention the reason it vanished?

A New Eden

Weedbed – he’d hacked in deep and left all the routes lying around. We’d bed down as the sun boiled the horizon orange, looking at half written scripts that unspooled into abstract matter. This was supposed to be a place for sunflowers – an abstraction bed, a metaphor chassis for running some larger system on.

Hackspace dug into the reality riptides, and hack-objects provided concrete interfaces through which one could manipulate the world. Some days after a hard day of trying to configure the space, ocular migraines misting at the edge of his perception, he’d activate the hack-plugs embedded in his own flesh, and he’d mess around with himself like he was a chemistry set.

Dandelions and ragwort, little seeds dusting the place, scent strangely strong, and for  moment he couldn’t remember the larger function they’d been assigned. Carlos was named as Chief Gardener, and he liked the littoral territory his job allowed him to occupy. A strange job for a strange man – all quantum entangled deep-ware – move it and write it on a larger scale. He could think with a garden; it was sometimes harder to think of a closely linked ideational space that would fructify with seeds for real world terraforming. It was like being God in denial.

The weeds tested the larger machinery for flaws, and as each diagnostic procedure was carried out, they had to be removed. Flowers were kept, separated off, and passed on to various diagnostic teams – this was harvest three, and with some of the tweaks and experiments he had been able to carry out, he was convinced that they had been able to build a very effective universal engine that they were going to be able to ship out to the edge of scripted space, and plug it in and start generating some deep beds for reality to grow in.

Carlos pressed the end cycle button on the mini-vironment, and watched on his screen as a reality was zipped down, and what physical matter couldn’t be zipped was ported out through the tesseract translation engines. It all looked so simple – building universes. Eden was a crucible – he believed that now; believed that they had developed something analogous to it. He was proud to be part of it.

Outlines

He was an Outline, some kind of reality glitch, where the continuum rejig hadn’t erased a non-person completely. Logically they shouldn’t have existed, but somehow there was residual data stored in the signalling part of some of the upper dimensional particles that had been quantum entangled with the individuals.

He could see others like him easily – he knew none of the non-Outlines could really do that, but where did that get him … unless there was some kind of quantum physicist genius who had been outlined as well, they weren’t going to be building any escape routes any time soon.

He knew his mother had christened him Christopher, but he felt that the fact he no longer technically had a mother meant his name seemed a little invalid too. Screw it, might as well call himself Christ – who was going to oppose it?

It was maybe his third year of trudging through this half-life. It seemed longer – relativity took hold of the experience and stretched it like taffy. It was depressing – reality was a vestigial limb of his perceptual apparatus that itched like hell, but which he couldn’t get in a position to scratch.

Christ sat down and wondered how this had come to pass – what thing had been bumped aside or erased from the continuum preceding his existence that had wiped him out? What if he could skirt back down the loop of infinity, through the eye of the needle singularity, and unstitch that event horizon slipslide drown into oblivion? There was something unphysical about him, so what if the logical constraints of the physical universe were not binding to him? He felt no concern about theoretical Hawking radiation or unilinear time. What did he care for the postulated universe of some quantum physicist? What if observer influence and intention had made the first time travel machine possible, and what if, here on the outskirts of the real, his own perceptual push could undo something … could unmake some newly minted absolute?

He had once listened to a cassette on the power of positive thought. He had once managed to get his foot behind his head after a particularly limber yoga class where he had spent over an hour sat in the vedic position doing circular breathing – so he could focus really hard … he was good at that shit. So he did it.

One man can make a change – he had been an author back before he was wiped out. He had ghost-written before, so he was used to working with outlines. He sat there and he reconfigured the localspace around him into a script, digging in down deep and dirty into the heart of reality, and he had started to fill in that outline. He sat there and smiled as he thought about how all works of art are, in some small way, a self portrait, and he wrote himself anew; he wrote himself back in.

He sat there writing, burying himself in the work, excavating himself from the shadow world he had slipped into, and when he felt the soft pressure of a hand on his shoulder, and when he smelt the familiar perfume that his mother always wore, he knew he had travelled back to reality … one he had put there, and he fell in love with his life and the world again. He knew it loved him back, because he was the one who was the beating heart at its center – he was the engine of this place, and as he drove it on it rewarded him back.

 

School Of Hard Knox

Johnno zipped up in his school-suit – he’d just been fitted for it. Kindergarten started tomorrow. The suit utilised nanotech to strengthen the kevlar base of the skin and it should stop most rounds, and even work to slow down anything specialised. Taser, pepper spray, all packed. The school encouraged defensive measures for everyone now – it was accepted that they couldn’t hope to control the issues around guns and psychiatric patients who wanted to kill children, so rather than feel hopeless they decided to do something. His mum had spared no expense with this thing – she wanted him to be safe. He hated wearing the hood and the face-plate but so many killers were just going for the headshot rather than the body because they wanted to kill and not injure.

All teachers had to be weapons-trained now. Doors were only ident-lockable by teachers. School secretaries had executive hack orders at their disposal – there was no kind of security that they couldn’t penetrate through. School caretakers were equipped with mind-linked puppet drones to dispose of bombs. It was hard-core working for the education system these days, but it paid well … it was equivalent to signing up for the army; most schools were warzones.

Johnno spent the first two weeks of school with no idea what anyone looked like. Until they had done extensive background checks on everyone, including full medical work-ups to make sure that they weren’t bio-bonded to any kind of weaponised disease or anything like that – only then could they have a lesson where they weren’t suited up. Freedom came at a high price, but it was a price tht most parents were willing to pay.

In his first three years of school nothing happened, but the self-replicating machinery in his suit meant that it kept pace with his rapid rate of growth. The suit looked as new as it had on the first day that he had put it on. It had been through several upgrades, and the school had intensified it’s security many times in the intervening years. That third year though someone, skirting the bleeding edge of technology, disgruntled because of lack of recognition of his genius, and gifted with endless supplies of money by his guilt-purchase parents, had got through the security system, and had come gunning for Johnno and his class.

The bullets that hit Johnno were painful, and he would need medical attention afterwards, but that was acceptable given that he survived the attack.

The attacker wasn’t so lucky. Whereas Johnno’s suit was defensive, it was perfectly acceptable, and backed by law, for someone to have an offensive suit, and that is what took care of the man. He was painted red with a laser and a whole series of bullets entered that point and opened a crater up in his back.

Outrage filled the airwaves for a while, but that died down like it always did. Apathy loaded every chamber and squeezed every trigger, and apathy kept that chamber spinning like it was rigged to the wheel of samsara and wanted to keep people rotating like Sisyphus, so fast that they might achieve some kind of escape velocity just by doing the sameold shit. It was madness.

the fourth of julie

Were the fireworks misplaced?

She liked to think not. What was a more fitting reason than the fourth reboot of her life? To be unfolded from the wreckage her body had been – a bloody car-crash, at her age? It seemed ridiculous, pointless … all those things one said when they were in disbelief. And all the protocols that were supposed to be in place to make sure that an agent intervened before her body was shipped from the morgue to the graveyard had failed, what did that say about the state of the organisation?

She looked over at Walker and he was sweating bullets.

‘Yeah,’ she said ‘You know you fucked up, and how.’

‘Sorry, ma’am.’

‘Ah, save that shit for someone who cares. Answer me a question.’

‘Sure, I mean, affirmative, ma’am.’

‘Did you get a trace on Betty?’

‘Betty?’

‘The bitch who just totalled my car. OK, well, from your dumbfounded expression I am going to guess not.’

She checked the read out as it booted up in her newly recovered left eye. Time to move on and close this operation down. Walker was a liability – one quick shot to the head with a metaboliser and he was twitching on the floor like an epileptic as his body broke down into its constituent parts.

Where had she been going in her car? Ah, yes – her Independence Date – the day her body mods  were paid off and she became a free woman … who would fuck with that? Someone funded Betty because she was a cheap bitch otherwise.

Hack the bank – trace it back, and there she was … her new job: Bruce The Robot. Jealousy wasn’t good – Bruce’s freedom was a way off. She was sure that the satellite she had just tasked from a weapons array she paid for a back door into last year was going to put a crimp in his day when it dropped that superheated carbon rod through the center of his villa and reduced him and it to molten slag. Try coming back from that one bitch.

Mr Shuffle

For Bram

The cold was biting, breath in the air, making him think of the cigarettes he had given up. The romance of the thought spiced his saliva with a wonderful analogue of nicotine – fuck the vapour from the electronic dick he had to suck to get his fix … it reminded of everything else that had gone south in his life. Synthetic alcohol that gave him a half-hour kick before the government sanctioned nano-purge rendered all that wonderful buzz generating drug out of his system. How long before even the vapour was kiboshed? You had to be a fucking miracle worker to tie one in Glasgow anymore.

Man, some people were dicks; some people were dicks in private; other people were private dicks. He was the latter, wondered lately with the nicotine cravings if he was being the second to his long suffering cohabit fuck-buddy, and feared he might be becoming the first just by default.

So, what was he digging into today? What pile of shit had his assistant floated across his desk this week? He breathed into the little tube on his hand-held and the screen flashed into life.

‘Fuck the Maskbook updates, skip the Shitter-feed, and just give me the work-notes.’

A face popped up – not the fresh-faced poppet he was expecting or wanting – nope, not even close … this dude looked like he’d sell crack to kindergarteners. Who the fuck wanted this bastard found? Everyone is someone’s dad always seemed such a lame cliche but if he didn’t find something to hook his interest on then he’d be about as much use as an e-cigarette to a nicotine addict. And there he went – reach in pocket, pull out Thomas The Tank Engine’s Tiny Inadequate Penis as he had come to think of it, and puffed on it. It wasn’t working properly. Shit, maybe gum was better after all, he’d looked like a freak wearing all the patches.

He clicked the tab that came in the document about old stony face and accepted the job, got a new message that told him the money had already dropped, then got a second one that gave him a meeting place for the contact. It wasn’t far to walk – a brisk walk … how fucking jolly.

He sat down in the snug and he waited. What sat down opposite him was not what he had been expecting. His hope for some kind of cute female presence in this story, of whatever kind, seemed to be on a hiding to nothing. A bloody artificial clunked itself down – some pre-war rust-bucket that he was surprised was still working. He didn’t like it – an old man as his quarry, a meeting with an artie piece of shit; didn’t bode well; made him tink that first money drop was a fluke and the rest of the case would be as dry as a nun’s snatch.

‘So, what’s this all about?’

‘I, Mr Shuffle, am Centurion, and my owner, Mr Clavicle has gone missing, as you might say, and his daughter provided me with the funding to ensure he is found. She loves him very much.’

‘I’m sure she does. What, if I may ask, does Mr Clavicle do? If you don’t mind me saying, your appearance, and his both lead me to believe he is not necessarily kosher.’

‘Hence coming to you, Mr Shuffle, with your not so sterling reputation. That aside – his business? The finest Cuban cigars, Marlboros, and whiskey.’

‘Now, I know you have to be kidding.’

‘I haven’t used my sense of humour since before the war. Here is more pertinent data that you might need.’

He was glad to bid goodbye to the hunk of rust, and then he dug into the file. Ten seconds of synthetic alcohol buzz, a puff or two of vapour, and a vague glimmer of interest. This case should not take too long to work out. Clavicle had to be discreet – there weren’t too many places where he could talk about his wares, let alone sell them. Narrow it down further by the fact that there were not that many people with the pocket change to buy any of it. Shuffle knew a doorman at the Hilton and it would get him in long enough to speak to someone before the inertia of a shit-heel being in a rarefied atmosphere crashed into him and some unfriendly fucker showed him the door.

Gary was glad of the funds. Shuffle was glad of the Irn Bru he decided to drink instead of wasting his time for once. It cost a bit but it tasted good; gave him faith in something at least. Shawn the barman didn’t give a fuck what he said or he said it to – he was gossiping in the ten minutes before Shuffle approached him. Shuffle showed him the picture of Clavicle.

‘Oh yeah, I seen him.’

‘In here?’

‘Yeah, two nights ago with some big cheese.’

‘You have 360 cams in this place?’

‘It’s a bar, what do you think?’

So, then, the question was, how does someone pull off a deal with contraband in even this place?’

‘Can you get me a print of this guy and his guests?’

‘Sure, it’ll cost you.’

‘Doesn’t it always?’

The print was one of those pictures that is worth way more than a thousand words. Clavicle looking uncomfortable, Government Contraband Enforcer Smythe looking unctious and eager to please the third man in the picture, and who was that? Why – none other than Belsley Tincture, E-Cigarette and synth-hol magnate. He smiled. What fucking use was this data? Who was going to prosecute these bastards? It was obvious Clavicle met a sticky end.

He scanned the picture into his hand-held, dictated a long illustrative piece which he attached to it, sent one copy to Centurion and his owner’s daughter, explaining what he was doing, and one copy to Bump his editor friend. Bump would run the story as a speculation dot-the-dot provocateur piece, and it would do what it needed to do – get the right people looking in the right direction. Shuffle hoped it might sink the whole synth-hol and E-Cigarette business too.

He reached in his pocket, pulled out his least favorite thing in the world, and launched it into the cold night. Know what he was going to do? Find a pack of real cigarettes and inhale deep.

Fred Bloggs

He had warned them not to operate on him – he had told them he was a systemic necessity manifested in the shape of an individual, but that he was not as he appeared. He was an avatar of something greater designed to act as an interface to facilitate communication between those who dwelled here on this plane where information translated itself into apparently three dimensional beings. They did not believe him.

The first pocket universe they encountered within him was a revision of the current universe they occupied – but because they were at the centre of the change they just unwittingly initiated, they could not see the scale of the damage they had done. They were a fixed point in a changed reality.

They kept digging. Fred Bloggs was a miracle disguised as a cliche. To look at him you would have guessed nothing of what he was. It was his supposed harmless outer shell that had allowed his initial approach to them to seem so innocuous. When he spoke to them of concepts that occupied the outer reaches of theoretical research and gave them practical solutions by which they might confirm their theories, and then suggested that within him, if they studied him, they might find untold secrets that they could unlock and elevate their planet with, they listened but they did not hear.

What they heard was that within him was the key to saving their planet – that meant they had to find out what was in him. That to them meant cutting into him. The cautionary tale of the golden goose, raised as a point by one of the more cautious scientists in the group, was wilfully ignored.

Stood around that table, rib-cage spread, looking inside a body that turned out only to be a very surface replica of a human body – they weren’t quite sure how to proceed. The next thing that they cut into though – it did something to them this time. The first scientist that changed to resemble Fred Bloggs, held at gunpoint, was soon looking out on a room full of people that looked just like him.

Staring at each other they suddenly understood that this was an invasion. That thought faded as their memories and thoughts became those of their invader. The underside of the informational system that was the universe had woken up, as it occasionally did, and had decided it needed to rewrite the code that shaped its manifestation in the four dimensional location that local inhabitants called the physical universe. This was the flood.