10. The Training Wheels of Astral Projection


  

  I hung in my position orbiting the massive blue planet, like a cloud, barely moving at all. There, all notions of shock or fear seemed as meaningless as where I left my omni-pad, though I would like to check my missed calls and emails. My only thoughts were of the perfect synchronicity of the system, of the balance of mass and gravity, of light and heat. I sensed, for the first time, what Plop ‘ik would later call the ‘Reality Field’.

  I watched for a long time as the dark red sun radiated outwardly and at the same time pulled the other celestial bodies toward itself. I sensed the incredible gravity but I also could tell that it had no affect on me.

  There were three planetary giants revolving around the even larger sun, one green and brown, one as black as coal and barely visible except when it passed between myself and the sun, and a blue one. The largest of the three was the blue giant. I approached it, using my curiosity to propel me where I wanted to go. The more I focused on my target, the faster I went.

  I passed a number of living moons as I descended toward the planet’s surface, one I might have confused for Earth but for the position of the continents. Then I passed a thick layer of blue and white atmosphere. Nitrogen, I thought, and oxygen. There was water here, too. Actually it was all water, or what looked like water as far as I could tell. There wasn’t any landmass at all, not even a single atoll. I came in close and very fast but I could still make out perfectly the flora and fauna that populated the ocean planet.

  There were whales, perhaps distinct in more than the visible ways from Earth whales, but they surfaced and shot jets high into the air. I followed one pod of them until they met another larger group, and then that group merged with another until there were a herd of alien cetaceans covering an area larger than Australia. I let my mind join them under the water. It was as simple as letting myself fall into bed, except that the bed was something’s brain.

  I became it. It was amazing. I was whale. I was young and so I followed my mother whom I loved beyond all reason. I was hungry so I gulped in seawater until my jaws were filled with tiny krill-like insects. I swallowed and then blew a resounding note to communicate to the pod that I was glad. The flood of emotion coming from that one simple being caused me to lose focus and my connection to it faded. So strong and unrestrained. If I’d been in my own body I would be sobbing or laughing hysterically but in my current form it was like pure electrified pleasure. Then I heard the voice again. Myriad.

  “That went well, don’t you think?” It was snickering.

  “How did I...?”

  “Isaac, what did I tell you? Just watch and think. You don’t have a brain or a mouth so communication is going to be just a bunch of jumbled images and weird subconscious nonsense. Let me do the talking, dude.” I assented by calming my curiosity and forcing my mind into stillness. In a split second I was back in orbit, floating alongside the greenest of the nine moons.

  “So what do you think of the Small Magellanic Cloud? Do you come here often?” I didn’t try to respond. “Kidding! Sorry it’s just that I kind of have a human sense of humor so it gets a little boring only talking to Plop ‘ik all day. I love the dude but God is he literal.

  “Let’s just focus on what you’re seeing here. This is the Ueio system. You see Ueio that big red guy to your left, not that it matters but it’s about 300 times the size of your sun however it produces roughly the same amount of heat radiation. Blah blah blah, it’s a star, it’s hot, it’s bright. Boring!

  “Let’s move over here to this big ball of gas that the locals call “Mus”. What do you need? Chlorine? Oxygen? Methane? This baby is loaded with enough gas to fuel its own star. Still boring, I know. You humans only care about life, right? Well, a lot of the biological action in the system is located right below us. This lovely water giant is called Igz Nomex. Isn’t she a beaut?”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  We were in a slow orbit above a massive planet that swirled with white and aqua-marine. A spherical ocean where I couldn’t make out even a speck of land.

  “Over six billion species of mammals, fish, reptiles, insects, fungi, plants, whatever. There are twenty times more kingdoms and phyla here than on Earth. This little mama is like God’s aquarium. Here let me show you.”

  I lost all sense of control and before I had time to say “Jane, get me off this crazy thing” I was again flying above the oceans of Igz Nomex. I saw more whales, different in size and shape, some with horns like rhinos. I saw a pack of three headed sharks hunting an eel that looked like it was bigger than the Sear’s tower. The lead shark bit the thing’s tail and then exploded into micro-chunks when the eel emitted a targeted energy pulse from its skin.

  “You probably noticed that Igz Nomex has no land. That’s true, just a ball of ice and frozen methane surrounded by nothing but H-two-mothafuckin’-Oh. And if you remember anything from chemistry class you might be thinking to yourself that that doesn’t make sense. Neither does astral-projecting interdimensionally to other fucking galaxies but I’ll answer that, I guess.

  “The whole Ueio system is artificial, not just random rocks whipping through space like that shithole Sol system. Ha, ha, JK. But for real, there is a force at work here that make the Christian god look like Zeus’s rent-boy. This, let’s call it an interdimensional entity, is responsible for all life on Igz Nomex and on her nine moons. Well, there used to be life on all nine moons, anyway. It can manipulate gravity fields. It can create from nothing.” I was barely listening. My mind was racing through the ocean of an alien planet and I was loving every second of it.

  I saw a family of pink rays that surfaced to sing to each other with voices like the most perfect cellos. Their song was a thin reedy whistle under waves of sustained bright notes, vibrating slightly. They sang at intervals and in octaves, creating chords that I’d never heard on Earth. I was enrapt, completely lost in a storm of emotion, and I could feel myself being pulled further and further away. The feelings, like explosions of brilliant heat in my bodiless mind, again caused me to lose my grip. A sensation like nausea came over me.

  “Hold on, bud! You’re not quite ready for that yet.” I tried to communicate with emotion like before but was stumped by how to convey such a monumental sense of cerebral orgasm. “I know, I know. You just had your mind fucked by a cocktail of emotion that made the best feeling you ever had in your life seem like a punch in the testicles.

  “Think of it as the purest kind of shock that the human mind can endure. There is not one thing right now for your concept of reality to connect to. You’re just a ghost floating in a galaxy so far from earth that it takes light from that star centuries to get to your homeworld. You just visited a planet unlike any known on Earth and saw millions of alien life forms. Brother, you’re in shock.

  “Right now your subconscious is trying put your emotions into overdrive, trying to put stress on your brain to close the doors of perception. It’s saying: Fuck this! Let’s get the hell out of here! I want my motherfucking bottle and my blanket and my mommy! But here’s the trick, my new friend, you don’t have a brain! You are astral projecting. Just a mind floating on waves of subatomic radiation. Congratulations, you’re only the ninth human to do it without having their consciousness implode. But then again, you were genetically engineered to do it so, ya know, don’t give yourself too much credit.

  You don’t have to listen to biological impulse. You can say fuck you to billions of years of evolution and adaptation! You are free from from fear, free from the constricting influences of survival! You don’t have shit to worry about!”

  I centered my mind and tried not to lose the single shred of control over this form that I had so far attained. It was so difficult to pull myself away from the cascades of pleasure and blythe nothingness. Like looking into an abyss and wanting, in spite of all your fear, to jump in. I turned away from the music and focused on the red sun that dominated the clear sky.

  “There you go,” said Myriad. “It’s easiest to focus on one single object, something that doesn’t move. Like motion sickness. Except that instead of puking you will just lose yourself forever. So, ya know, don’t fuck up. So let’s go somewhere with a bit less traffic”.

  We blinked back into space this time closest to a small moon with no atmosphere. It resembled Earth’s moon but its dust was a sulfuric yellow. We got closer and I could see that the dust was covering something long and angular. A building. Spread out across the yellow plain were various mounds that had been dwellings or bases of some kind, all destroyed and covered with sulfuric dust.

  “This is the moon, Plos Lodril. Not a charming place, is it? A real fixer-upper, if you know how to clean up like a billion tonnes of sulfur and amonia. All this was done purposefully as well. You see this shithole right here? This was the capital, Plos Epop. This is Plop ‘ik’s hometown. Of course when he lived here it was like Athens or New York, total hub of knowledge and culture. Not to mention the nightlife. The Plos people did it right. Science all day and sex all night. Now? Nothing but a dusty rock and a reminder to anyone who gets in the Consortium’s way.

  “See, what I wanted to show you with this little trip was, well really a few things. They don’t call me Myriad for nothing, know what I’m sayin’?

  “First, that you can astral project, cool trick. Right now you kind of suck at it, but I see some real potential. Second, that you would see the Ueio system because when you need to get here on your own, once you’re strong enough, you’ll need to visualize it with some serious exactitude.

  Third, that you see what can happen to a world when It doesn’t get what It wants. And what It wants more than anything, what It lives on, is gold.”