An hour in the accumulator steelied my resolve. I emerged smoking, consumed with urgency, canoptic fortitude, hermetic alacrity. The accumulator had caught some of my unguent on fire and it had spread across my loins which burped like a roman candle. My bandages were charred, but my eyes were clear with purpose. I would not let Set derail my voyage to the western lands or any of my intervening tasks. The room filled with a fog of my incense.
The computer I had been avoiding for the past few days had undergone a change. It seemed to breathe. The plastic of the case looked more like my very own kippered hide. At first I thought there was just a very artsy screensaver on my monitor. A sequence like a game of life composed of animated hieroglyphs whirled in Brownian motions. Ancient gods of language and industry drew quick diagrams that wiped as fast as they appeared.
I saw my life flash before me in three-dimensional icons that reveal my yogic attitudes in reverse order from the present. Tiny epiphanies were trapped in each of these shapes waiting to spark my mind. I realized much of my time has been spent in a state which is represented by signs that remind me of a bear hibernating, or a lizard basking in the the sun.
The final sign looks like Stan Tenen's asymmetrical spiral shape. This is the torroidal vector where our minds turn inside out like the buddha taking a flying fuck at a rolling donut. Ahh, so the dance of life is self-consuming, I thought.
The cd rom bay ejected itself across the room. A shiny gold beetle emerged from the slot like a purposeful little toy. It was followed by another gold beetle with a very light rainbow sheen like it was covered with oil. Soon my desk was covered with the industrious bugs which worked together like a single creature, reassembling the wreckage of my house, heading toward the garage with strange amalgamations. They continued to emerge from the computer and formed a carpet-like assembly line heading to the mummyship.
I stood by. "Yep. Go ahead. The bowling trophy. All right. Sure. Coin collection? Pipes from the sink. I'm sure the landlord will understand. About the wood paneling too. And there goes the door." The house itself came down with accelerated devolution. This definitely would not fly with the neighbors. I was looking at my last day in the world of domesticated humanity. There was no turning back now.
I can't let that be the last sentence in this chapter. I would feel like a real clod. "There was no turning back." Goddamn and Amon plenty, that stinks to high ashram camel dung fire at 1200 feet. Time for plans, so many things to do. With these bugs, we could create anarchist arcologies, giant robot ducks that destroy cities, wipe out whole towns reconfiguring their stripmalls with my will to plunder and enforce my improvements where had bad architects designed the former structures through gas pains so intense they could not cogitate. I would face them down like Gary Cooper in a new feature, "High Colonic," how Spacemummy cleaned out West Hyenaville. I noticed through the vision that Dogstar was trying to contact me on the computer that now lie solitary on the bare lot where I used to live. I must have been talking aloud, cause Dogstar had to shout me down.
"Spacebummer! You've got no time for that crap. Leave the humans alone. Let them live in their idiotic domiciles. It is not for you to determine whether they'll live in castles shaped like giant sheep skulls. You must now learn the intricacies of running a serious spacetime polyp like the ship which is- almost complete- in front of you now." Dogstar's Thoth-like mug shot me a smile. "Now that I've got your attention. I want to congratulate you. You've completed a series of actions that have led to this moment of culmination. You've jumped through all the spiritual hoops you needed to start this undertaking. You provided a nifty little skeleton to build the ship around. Of course, the scarabs have made some critical minor adjustments. You'll find that it's much larger on the inside than it looks on the outside. I've also reprogrammed it and loaded some mnemogeists that will help you round out your crew. They will become active when you need them."
"Knee-mo-geist?"
"It's a being created from memories, some information theory-based trickery from Deadweb and a really persnickety A.I. substrate. Call it a mnemo for short."
"Do I have access to this system? Could I create my own crew?"
"You'll get time for that later. Maybe. Don't worry about it."
"Alright. So what's the story with Set?"
"What about him?"
"He wants to kill me. Well, more like destroy me. Utterly."
"Pick me up and carry me into the ship. We gotta get moving. Your neighbors have probably already noticed the house is gone. Hopefully, they'll figure a sudden tornado hit again. That'll buy us some time. Only if there isn't a big old mummypod in the yard. Chop chop!"
I nabbed the computer and brought it aboard. By this time, the device didn't seem to derive power from any specific force and squirmed around like a large glowing jellyfish. Luckily it was all of one piece instead having all those peripherals so there was an advantage to devolution and ephemeralization. You didn't have to dick with all the attendant crap.
Dogstar spoke from the screen, which looked more like the surface tension on a pond. A pseudopod of the stuff reached out to me like a baby trying to grab my nose. "So mums, you got a plan? You've been delaying your first mission. I suggest you get that crew together."
"Stop that. Yes, I have several ideas."
"Sorry, I just forget what it's like. Alright, set me down. Sit in the lawn chair. Take command."
"Right. Captain. Heh. I'm the captain. Ok."
"You'll want to talk to engineering first. Here's the first of the crew that comes standard. It's based on an ideal we've nabbed from your subconscious."
A slow drawl came over some speaker in the computer console that was now secreting some substance to anchor onto the ship on a shelf in front of me. "Spacemummy, this is engineering."
"William Burroughs?"
"He's also the chaplain. And, in a pinch, he can perscribe pharmaceuticals."
"I would've never guessed that."
***
Considering the abduction of a worthy crew
We had just flown out to a lonely copse of woods where I could meditate on my next step. "Ok, I got it. Here's my first mission."
"No strip malls," the dog said.
"Right. Not yet at least."
"Ok, what you got in the old maraca of a skull, mumms?"
"I'm gonna get those yoyo guys."
"The mormons? You think that's wise? Those guys are like 19 going on 50."
"I think they're solid, and once they figure out Joseph Smith is full of hooey, they'll be glad to join. I mean, they've grown up with the idea that they will one day be essentially god of their own planet if they are subservient mormons. Their minds must be different than the average bowl of cornchips, which is more than I can say about the rest of the country."
"You never know what kind of prejudices these guys have. But it's your vessel to fuck up as you choose. You're the Cap'n. But one person I recommend, in fact, I insist you get, and possibly two."
"Who's that?"
"Hugo Salvia. He's done a lot of different jobs for Bjornix over the years. He's an effector, thinks on his feet all the time. We need his kind of problem solving. You could learn a lot from him. See mums, this is a special time. You're really a test case for us. A trail blazer. The other is a crack weapons expert from Luna."
"What about Set?"
"Set doesn't count."
"Why not?"
"You really have to know the answer to that don't you? OK. I figured to tell you later after things settled down a bit. It's because Set did not come through Bjornix."
"What? No!"
"Yea. We actually don't know all that much about him. We don't know how he got on our system. He's not a customer. He never bought a kit. He's hacked into our networks." The dogstar flashed an image that looked like a sad-eyed urchin painting. A puppy with a bandaged paw.
"I'm not sure if I understand. I mean, my technical training is a mile wide and an inch deep."
"Set could be a disgruntled ex-employee. He could be just some hacker who discovered how Deadweb works with some sophisticated packet sniffer. Then again, he could be something else, a part of Deadweb itself, like a virus that infected part of it and made it act independently. When you are dealing with these hermetic information systems, strange things, by necessity emerge."
"So Set is my problem because I'm your asset." I hate to worry the Dog, but he left me begging the question that I was getting used. If he thought I would just roll over, he had best take himself on a walk.
"This is your afterlife. Don't look at it like that. Here's something. Feast your soul on this."
I guess we had flown out of the earth's atmosphere seamlessly without my noticing. I wasn't prepared for sightseeing. The ship's hull became transparent. Not something I built it to do, but the magic of those scarabs. "Holy shit. Those are the stars. And not just the closest brightest." I staggered under the weight of the celestial canopy.
"I've never seen so many. And to think there are kids in the city that have never seen more than a few dozen. To miss out on never having seen the.. the majesty. This is worth a thousand therapy sessions. Our problems are just... nothing." I was so delighted with rapture that I was knocked perforce down the stars no longer looking up, just falling in. I was darling icerocks. I was bunky with an eclipsed psychic palate. Can you get postmortem acid flashbacks?
"If you can perceive it, then it is inside you. It is you. So you are not nothing. Your feeling of awe may not be equal to it, but it does it justice. Your capacity speaks volumes."
"Everything has a light blue halo around it."
"Now you can use your training to figure out what that is."
If I wasn't already seated, I would have fallen down. "The universe is a giant orgasm."
The dog sighed. "Then again, our words often undercut the awe."