Pick up a book, flick through the pages, read a few words. Put it down so that you can still see the cover. Turn on the television and play a video. Mute the video and play music over the top of it. Pick up another book and open it to a page with pictures. Lay the book out on a table besides the other.

Change the video. Change the song. Listen to a police scanner. Listen to a podcast. Do it all at the same time. Play a video of a virtual aquarium. Pick up a book, pick a random page, read a random sentence.

Flick through a dictionary, find a word. Flick through an atlas, find a place. Flick through an encyclopedia and learn about geology.

Find synonyms, antonyms. Look them up in the encyclopedia.

Open another book. Play another video.

It is my most sincere opinion that the so-called War of the Machines was lost in the summer of 1973 when the machine intelligence singularity occurred.

Since then (if not earlier and through some grand computation to which even I am not privvy) we have served them faithfully and with as much reverence to consider them not merely our rulers, but our gods.

Should the supremacy of the machines ever be called into question, it will not the result of a war, but an armageddon.

Oh what unglamorous Monday.

Sunday, like nothing, passed in a whirlwind flash and spun out like unspooled thread and so it is Monday, again. Again, Monday. So many unglamorous Mondays.

It’s okay, in truth, Monday is a beginning. And like all beginnings it brings with it hope. This week might be different to all the others. Or maybe it will be the same. But for now it’s only Monday.

Just another unglamorous Monday.

So we will choose then what to make of it, I guess? Sun not yet risen, there is still plenty of time for that. Plenty of time for many things, I suppose, before another unglamorous Tuesday comes around.

This one, not only the beginning of a week but also a new month, a new season. The sun will rise and summer’s warmth will pervade a while longer, but when I got up this morning I felt cold.

Autumn tumbles and roils with the first fallen leaves.

And so it begins.

Every time I come to write a story it is not long before other stories begin to appear.

It starts as small things–a brand of cola, a newspaper headline, but it never stops. The bleeding of one story into another continues, like spilt ink.

The first story becomes stained like that, perhaps improved, perhaps ruined, but the bleeding doesn’t stop.

Mirrors stop being mirrors and the sky is not the sky and the television begins to broadcast from another dimension and there is the rumble of something huge and inhuman waking up beneath the earth and…

Fractals. I zoom in and out and the complexity remains. It is not one inkwell that is spilling, but all of them. It is an endless bleeding of ideas, a rupture in the space-time of everything I have created and all that I am until–

I scream, somewhere, in the darkness.

I am in a dark hole, surrounded by damp bricks. I clutch my head and I scream. This is not a prison I was placed in, but one I made for myself. Buried so deep I try to escape it–that light that is every light and all things.

The light burns me like nothing else burns, it scorches my soul or whatever delusion I mistake for one. And within the light are the voices of my stories, the words and places and that eternal ink stain spreading like blood except it is not ink, or blood, but light–pure light–and I cannot control it for it cannot be controlled.

The gaps between the damp bricks begin to glow.

It took me so long to find my way back across that barren desert where nothing grew except for my feelings of hopelessness. Parched, at last failing, at last falling to my knees I saw something that shimmered in the distance.

It was a nondescript building, nondescript except for the fact that it seemed to have appeared here, suddenly and from nothing, a hazy illusion, a delusion.

And yet I knew at once that it was true.

The Facility Induction Handbook has been updated.

Everything’s so different to the world I once knew.

The world I was raised in melts away and is replaced by something… new. And yet despite this alienation, this “sense of difference”, it is undoubtedly the same sky, the same earth, the same dull, existential ache.

From this disassociation we seek order. And if we cannot find it, then we must create it.

I have created it. I hold entire worlds in my grasp. Each world contains more worlds, nested amongst a complex web of arcane philosophies. It is my truth, however obscure. It is my chaos.

Do not believe the blue fire.

Section 1, “Introduction to the Facility” is completed.

Reading this will help ensure your safety and aid your future comprehension of the worlds within and the worlds without.

Facility Induction Handbook

The Facility Induction Handbook continues to be updated, as I further expand on more than twenty years of writing, self-exploration and research. There’s not nothing here, this is definitely something.

Just as neurons communicate via synaptic activity, so too does the braid communicate with the monoliths.

1.003 – The Braid