the cusp of infinity

The number eight has always had a dark allure to me. When I was young, I couldn’t stop drawing it onto my papers, and my first job was as an accountant and I was always in awe of the amount of times this seemingly insignificant number – one of many – kept appearing.

I was still an accountant when the first Capitalist Overlord appeared among us and shattered the world. I was one of the first whom he pulled aside and offered the chance to repent or be burned at the stake with the other accountants of my firm.

Naturally, I repented.

Some three hundred years later, he noticed I was still alive. I hadn’t myself thought about it all that much.

“You should be dead,” he said, with a frown.

“I’m sorry,” I admitted. “I didn’t know.”

He had his personal physicians examine me, but none of them could say why I would not age without benefit of the massive doses of chemicals and increasingly consistent exchanging of bodyparts which kept the Capitalist Overlord (I still can’t bear to think his name) from decomposing in front of our very eyes.

There were rumours he even wanted to cut me open and have my organs transplanted into him. The only thing which stopped him was one of his physicians pointing out that it might have some adverse effects on him, and possibly none on me.

“He might just grow everything back,” the physician said. “And your body may reject his organs – it’s possible they’re too alien.”

The Capitalist Overlord threw his sceptre across the throneroom and stomped up to where I knelt before his throne. “You fucker! What’s your secret?”

“Sir!” one of the other physicians called, nervously. “Perhaps we could simply start smaller, and see what happens? A kidney, perhaps?”

The Capitalist Overlord thought about this. “Well?” he asked another. “What do you think?”

The first physician nodded cautiously. “It’s certainly an avenue worth exploring. Can’t hurt.”

Somehow, though, I knew that while it wouldn’t hurt his physicians, and it wouldn’t hurt him, it certainly, as all the Hells in the universe were painful places to be, was going to hurt me.

I escaped from the City that night, fleeing via airship and parachuting out into the wilderness where I was sure no one would ever find me.

I lived on the edge of the desert, near a small billabong. A few natives lived in the area, and they didn’t seem to mind me sharing the water. We never spoke, but I would sometimes see them camping out in the open not far from where I made my home in an old abandoned building from before the coming of the Capitalist Overlord.

Once, I saw one of them peering through the window at me, grinning wildly as I wrestled with a goanna which would eventually become a meal. He cackled insanely as I threw pans at the reptile in an effort to bludgeon it as it skittered about the kitchen in an attempt to find an escape route.

“Fucking stay still!” I screamed at it. “Let me fucking eat you!”

The goanna hissed and snarled, its sharp claws digging at the tiles of the kitchen, its head smashing against the door in an effort to ram it open. It dodged another pan, and I was suddenly so irrationally connected to the creature.

I stared into its cold eyes and thought of the dinosaurs.

The ancient creatures who once dominated the world. So primal and so powerful, and here was the final remnants of their awesome might in my kitchen, scrambling for freedom. I wondered if, one day, millions of years from now, a new race would be chasing a midget through their kitchen, screaming, “Fucking stay still! Let me fucking eat you!”

The goanna cocked its head, staring back at me.

The aboriginal man in the wondow stopped laughing, sensing a sudden change as I advanced on the motionless reptile.

The connection I felt with this lizard was felt back, I knew. The domination of the world had shifted. I was in control.

My might was my will. My will was law.

Obey my will.

Obey my might.

Power is the new species.

The lizard swayed on its legs, and its head drooped. Eyes half-closed.

I raised the pan and smashed its head in.

I looked back at the window and the man had gone.

Blood spattered my chest, and I realised then that I had both evolved, and un-evolved. I had found the power of my mind, yet had used it simply to use the power of my primitive fist.

Ashamed, I skinned and ate the animal with heavy heart.

It was as I ate the animal that I realised that no matter how much I evolved, I still ate like an animal. I still consumed the dead.

I picked at the flesh of the lizard and held it in my fingers in front of me.

What was it?

Atoms, that’s what I had been taught.

All things are made of atoms.

The air we breathe, the body we live in, the pulses of electricity which dash down the fragile wires inside our brains to gift us with thought. Atoms create everything.

Atoms.

So small. And all it takes to bind them is a level of excitement.

Too close together and you get a solid. Too loose and you get a gas. A little inbetween and it’s a liquid.

I was still thinking about atoms when the Capitalist Overlord’s guards poured into the house, their weapons aimed fixedly at my head. “We don’t need your brain,” the captain said. “Just the rest of you.”

I thought about atoms. “Captain,” I said. “I would advise you leave right now. Something important has occured to me, and if I’m right, then just the very nature of my thinking about it could be quite detrimental to your health and that of your soldiers. Please, leave.”

The captain nearly choked on his mirth and one of his soldiers stepped up to grab my shoulder and shove his pistol into my cheek. The pistol felt cold and heavy.

The atoms, I realised, were very close together.

But, I knew now that my atoms were linked to the atoms of the gun. Because everything was linked. All things were linked. It was like the universe was a sea of atoms, with the only differences being some areas had a few more a little closer together than others. We all swam in a sea of atoms. The universe was a sea of atoms.

I turned my head, slowly.

I smiled at the captain.

And the tide rushed in.

Their bodies simply fell apart as their very atomic structure was simply unbound. They had become a gas – a fine mist filling my kitchen.

I packed some small belongings and left the house, heading north.

The native who had been peering through my window, stood on a rock along the road. He waved his spear at me and nodded, slowly.

I nodded back, and kept walking.

That night, I had no need of food.

The universe would sustain me now, as my body began absorbing atoms from the air and arranging them to fit its requirements. I realised this was how I had lived. An unconscious part of me had always been adapting. My body had known before I did, and had acquired all it needed to repair its damaged systems and keep me alive all these years.

I still can’t say how it did this. I can’t pick a point in time when it happened, but I know that day in the abandoned house was the day I realised the first simple truth of the universe.

It was one.

We were not many. We were one. We were just fooled by our awareness into believing our body was the beginning and the end of us.

I found myself pulled to a place.

It was situated out on the border of the Widgeroo Plains and Uluru.

Many centuries before, it had been a place of great spiritual value to the tribe who had lived on this land, but they were slaughtered by invaders from a foreign land who knew nothing of the land and sought to dominate it rather than understand it.

I found a series of small stones – each the size of a man – arranged in a vaguely triangular shape. Time had weathered some of them to the point they began to look like figures on the horizon, and one had fallen onto its side. I sat on it, my legs crossed, and stared up at the sky.

I looked down at the earth.

Grains of sand brushed the wind and were swept along its invisible wings and swirled around the stones as though in some kind of dance.

I waited.

And he came.

The Overlord trudged through the night, arriving as the moon reached a point above my head.

“You killed my men,” he scowled.

“You want to cut me up.”

“It’s my right! I must live.”

“Then, live,” I told him. “You don’t need me.”

“Your body is different – in ways my physicians don’t understand. We only want what’s best for the world. And that’s me – alive.”

I smiled at him. “Best for the world? Tell me, Great One. Tell me – do you really believe the world even notices you’re here? Look at that stone in front of me. Do you think it cares about you?”

The Overlord smashed the stone with his fist. “It does now.”

“You think you have broken it, Great One?”

He looked confused. “Broken it? I smashed it!”

“It’s still there, Overlord. There’s nothing broken about it at all. All its atoms swirl in this place. And even if you spread them across the galaxy, far and wide, it will still be there. It never leaves. It never is destroyed. Eat it if you like, it won’t go anywhere. It is, after all, all around you.”

The Capitalist overlord shook his head and sighed. “Living alone these months has addled your wits. Fear has driving you crazy, Accountant.”

“I reject the title, but accept the name, Great One.”

“Fool,” he muttered, raising a communicator and speaking into it. “Come on in. The Accountant is harmless. Gorzur? You there?” He shook his communicator and slapped it. “Gorzur?”

“Your communicator won’t work here, Great One,” I said. “This place is sacred. It is, after all, on the cusp.”

“The what?”

“It is on the cusp.”

“Great,” he grunted, stepping up and grabbing my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go. You can tell me all about it.”

“I will not go with you, Overlord. It’s too late for that. I will go where I will, now.”

The stones, as though activated by a remote control, began to glow.

“What the fuck!? What are you doing, Accountant?”

I looked at the fear in his eyes and lightly took his fist from my shoulder. “I’m doing nothing, Overlord. They are simply preparing the way for me. They offered to be witness, I think.”

“Witness to what?”

“Many have gone this path, Overlord. Well,” I frowned. “Not as many as could have. But, certainly many. Some used alchemy. Some used sorcery – magecraft. Others still found spiritual awakening and aroused the cusp. Tonight, Overlord, I will follow them.”

“You’re mad,” blurted the Capitalist Overlord. He stepped back. “I’m not sure I want any part of you now.”

He made to leave, but I pointed at him and demanded his atoms cease moving him through the air.

He gasped, his body stiffening and his eyes bulging beneath his helm. “What are you doing?”

“You deny many things, Great One,” I told him. “But when you embrace the physical, you deny everything else. The universe is not physical, which is why your scientists and your physicians have such trouble. The universe simply is. And it has many facets. Atoms are but one, though they certainly come in useful as a stepping stone, don’t you think?”

He gurgled and I could feel him struggling against the power which held him in check.

“It’s okay,” I said, as soothingly as I could. “I merely wanted you to stand here – as witness. You wanted my life, Great One. Here, allow me to gift you something even greater. Let me gift you with belief.”

I raised my arms to the sky and took a large deep breath of air – soon I would no longer be needing it – and cried out, “As above, so below!”

And I understood it.

Such a simple concept, yet so vast it is impossible to understand without the benefit of opening one’s mind’s eye. The number eight flashed inside my mind and I smiled.

That simple number – suddenly so perfect – had inspired all I had become.

As above, so below.

The universe stretched and stretched, but it did not need to. There was nothing to stretch toward. There was no rushing, no climax, no boundaries.

No wall to blunt my escape.

“Great One,” I said. “I am becoming.”

The rocks flashed and flickered as the atoms within their stone hearts pulsed and danced in joy.

The universe fluttered.

My fingers brushed its veins and I felt the deep pulse of life flooding the sea – the sea of atoms.

My mouth opened.

My teeth closed.

My mouth opened.

I opened my eyes.

All of them.

And I swam.

***

The Capitalist Overlord shrank from the sudden white light.

He closed his eyes, and when he finally opened them, the sand was lit only by the shallow moon.

“Overlord?”

He heard the voice, so small, coming from his communicator.

He looked up, into the endless ocean of stars, and then down at the shattered rock spread out beside him.

He touched the dust of the rock and brought it to his lips.

And then, without restraint, the Capitalist Overlord wept.

“Overlord?”

Tags: chaos, chaos magic, enlightenment, philosophica majestus, zombies of widgeroo