> Chance in Plureality 5

Keane sat in the booth on the quiet side of the diner. With this layout it was almost as if the other side didn't even exist, which suited him fine. He didn't really want to talk with anyone at the moment anyway. The day had gotten off to a rotten start. Slept in, burnt his breakfast (which is why he was finally getting around to it now at 2 in the afternoon), topping that off with nearly getting sideswiped going by the off-ramp on Clergy Street earlier. 

Of course that wasn't anywhere near the end of the day either. By 11am he had been called into the boss' office and had been fired. Big show of things, too - his boss must have also had a rough morning, the way he went at him. On the other hand he just might have been the kind of boss who enjoyed firing people. Didn't help that Parsons, the douche-bag from near the water cooler, had to feign concern while Keane was cleaning out his desk. That kind of rising bile feeling, makes you wish you had super powers enough to knock a person through a wall. 

It would all be alright though, he thought. Once breakfast finally came. Breakfast, especially a diner breakfast, always made him feel better. Besides, he always felt that he was meant for something more than cube work. The waitress arrived with his meal. The whole shebang! Pancakes, hash browns, toast, eggs, and a massive pile of meat. Toss in a nice cuppa java and a tall glass of OJ. This is what his day was missing from the get-go. This would make it all better, and THIS would allow the whole day to settle and make sense. 

About 3 or 4 sips into his coffee, and a bite or two into the hash browns, a lithe woman with what appeared to be feathers in her hair slid into the booth across from him. 

"Uh... Excuse me?" Keane looked up. "Can I help you?" She just smiled and pulled some of the brown curls back and tucked them behind her ear, the feathers brushing across the table. 

"There's not much you could do to help us at the moment actually..." said a young man in a long coat (who wears one of those in this weather?) as he slid in beside the woman with feathers in her hair. A silver cross jangled on a chain around his neck. "'I always liked diner breakfasts too. Guess we have that in common... But you want a really good brekky? You gotta hit those little mom and pops... Just saying," the scruffy cross-bearer said. 

"Do you guys mind? I'm trying to eat here, and I think you've got me confused with someone else," Keane pleaded. He only wanted his breakfast, even if it was 2pm. 

"Oh I wouldn't dream of stopping you from eating - in fact you're gonna need it," the man in the long coat informed. 

"It's going to be a looong day," the smiling feathered woman said.

"Look... What do you mea-" Keane started. 

"Have you ever felt like you were meant for something more?" the young man smirked. 

Keane felt something odd about that look, like these two knew more then they were saying. "Go on..." he said, slowly picking up another mouthful of hash browns with his fork.

Quest #xx

Crow was sitting on the edge of the bed when Max woke up. "You looked restless. Your leg was kicking like you were dreaming of being trapped."

Max stretched.

"What's on your mind this morning?" Crow asked.

"One of the things Morganfokker and I used to talk about, in one of our histories, between sessions," Max said. "About how to find the gods hidden all around you. Sometime later The Professor would ask me, or I would imagine having a conversation with him in which he would ask me: why do you think that they are hidden?

"But they feel hidden to me, or maybe I just think they’re hidden, and that’s the point, and what’s the difference?" Max sat up and pulled on a t-shirt.

Crow shrugged. "I see the gods hidden among and within us when I wonder what our society would look like if we substituted compassion for self-interest. Every time I hear people use the language of capitalist economics to describe their relationships I think I see one of the hidden gods, shaping and directing and guiding and confining our lives. The way that the patterns of response in language of the person confronting the stigma of mental illness map onto the media’s portrayal of political discourse that maps onto the way we discuss it over coffee. Where real oppression lives and real freedom?

"Maybe in the way we respond to dreams," Crow continued. "The way we prioritize certain spectrums of continuity, waking consciousness, over discontinuous (or less continuous? dreams can recur), and what about when we remember a dream when we’re waking? Or any memory? What do we allow to dictate our response? Things from the past, or the future or that happen to us when we’re asleep? Or from others’ pasts – the lives of ancestors, their own questions and answers designing and growing the culture we participate in, other hidden gods controlling the whats and whys of our daily lives.

"Why you will wake up and get about of bed. Why you will sit in front of a computer. Eat what you will eat. Say what you will say, to yourself or your roommate or partner or family. Dream what you dream."

Max rubbed his eyes. "In one of the iterations of Cube I once wrote 'my arbitrary particulars seem vast' and 'all the things I will never get to be but I will get to be me'. I guess maybe The Professor contacted me for the latter and Morganfokker abducted me for the former."

Susanna Overhears

The cheerleader says, "I've been watching In Treatment, a nightly drama showing the weekly therapy sessions of a number of people, including the therapist. Watching the exchanges and seeing how there's the version of things the 'patient' (as the show refers to them) describes to the therapist, there's the version that the therapist perceives, the version that the therapist interprets, then the version that the therapist feeds back to the patient. There's the patient's interpretation of the therapist's expressed version, experienced based their own conditioning, bias, history. And then there's the implied hidden version that the patient is withholding, consciously or not, as well as a version that the therapist may be unconsciously experiencing based on their own conditioning, bias, history, so on.

"And I wonder, is the existence of all these versions the very basis for the therapy itself? Or is it the thing that prevents therapy from being effective? Or both and in what combination?"

The writer says, "The Professor once called it 'The Implicate Meaning Field' - the possibility that things can be other than they are, creating room for error, and for change, and for imagination, and for suffering."

The businessman says, "Tor Norretranders describes in The User Illusion a model of communication in which a massive tree of exformation is condensed within us into a tiny packet of information, which is transmitted from us to others who are listening and watching, wherein it grows a new tree of exformation. And I guess we hope that the two trees roughly correspond to each other."

The writer says, "Maybe without this there'd be no art, but sometimes it makes me feel like really sharing anything is impossible."

Tull

Tull

The Children of the Revolution (You Won't Fool)

Max lay back on the couch, feeling like a cliché. It reminded him of the Lab for a moment, a shiver, tried to steady his breathing.

"I guess it's always been a question of trying to figure out who is sending the transmissions," he said. "If it's Control or the Professor, or if it's Morganfokker. If it's an order, or an insight, or a delusion. Their voices often sound alike and the frequencies are always changing. So I try to listen and hope the only people that get hurt are people who need to get hurt.

"But lately I got one message, from one of them, The Professor I think: It's a question of trying to synchronize the inside of you with the outside of you with what's outside of you.

"I thought that if those were even each only a variable between say 1 and 10, the chances of having them all land on the same number at any given moment... I guess that's life as slot machine. But I figure it's closer to say a game of chess where only one combination of the 32 pieces is an accurate representation of how things are - the relationships between royalty and clergy and soldiers and such, be they desires and fears and drives, or whatever (Professor, Morganfokker, Control?) - and there's actually 3 boards you're playing on, against 3 different players. And you're supposed to get each board in sync, all 32 pieces in the same position, in the same move.

"And that's when it happens I guess. Has it happened to you?"

In The Shadow Of Fears Big and Little

FADE IN.

1. ON A WOMAN'S FACE

As the camera slowly pulls back we see LUCY MORNINGSTAR sitting at a table; she is dressed in a red dress, wearing a black cropped jacket. She is sipping coffee and looking at several sheets of paper on the table before her. A file report of MAX CUBE - ACTIVE (UNSTABLE) is open before her.

2. INT. COFFEE SHOP - MORNING
A quaint looking place, looking more of a cafe. LUCY is sitting at a table in front of a window. There are three other customers sitting about her at another table. The door opens and enters A TALL DARK MAN dressed in a three piece business suit carrying a business suitcase. He looks around the place in disgust like a man who is accustomed to the finer things in life. He sees LUCY and approaches.

TALL DARK MAN:
Lucy.

LUCY
Anubis. You're right on time.

ANUBIS
What's your fascination with this place? I do not understand it. Of all the places and all the worlds that were made and unmade you seem to be attracted to...

LUCY (interrupting)
Did you bring it?

ANUBIS (brings case to table)
That I have.

LUCY
I love to see a MAN respect the wager.

ANUBIS
Before we do this transaction. Would you like to go double or nothing?

LUCY
Another wager?

ANUBIS
Yes. But this time with a twist.

Roll Credits

Max closed his eyes. He drew a slow puff from the cigarette in his mouth. Inhaling the toxic fumes once again and savouring it.

"I'm scared," Suki said. "What's going to happen to us all?"

"We've been going in a loop non-stop for 15 years now," Frank stated. "It's time to take it to the next level."

"Like in a video game?" Suki inquired.

"See," Frank interjected. "She still calls them video games."

"I get the point," Goner said. "Yeah, I see it now, don't go all 'I told ya so' on us now!"

Frank cracked a smile for the first time in a long time.

"If we were movie characters what would be doing now?" Suki asked.

Max opened his eyes and tousled Suki's hair. "We strut."

Verse Chorus Verse Bridge Verse Chorus

It was a pure symphony.

Max was back to back with Maggie and they were moving in unison across the floor, bullets flying like angry wasps looking for whoever stirred up the hornets' nest. It felt like old times, yet to Max it was just the beginning. Never before had he encountered such a creature as Maggie.

She was more than human, but human in appearance. He presumed if he saw her true form his eyes would burn out and his brain would melt, much like butter on a hot plate. But he didn't mind if it did.

They were surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of goons.

Little robotic spider-like bots crawling across the floors, the walls and the ceiling just trying to get at them to tear their flesh from their bones.

"You okay, my love?" Maggie asked.

"Oh, I'm just Jim Dandy today!" he replied.

Block Busting

"What do you want to watch tonight?" Angst asked. She held up three movies: Dazed and Confused, Quantum of Solace, and The Killer Elite."

"Whoa," Dexter said. "Combine all those movies together and you will have our story."

"Should add The Wizard of Oz into the mix then," Suki stated.

"And don't forget that obscure Rutger Hauer movie, Crossworlds!" Frank chimed in.

"Well, if we are going to go that route," Maggie said. "You might as well add that movie with that actor who played in that movie with some strange stuff in it."

"Obscure much?" Suki stated.

And that's when everyone broke out in laughter. 

This Is a Throwdown

Max pulled the car over. Country road, sunny day. He had forgotten where he was going.

There was a duffel bag in the back seat. The car smelled like vinegar.

He felt nervous. He checked his cellphone. There was a text from Control, timestamp was 33 minutes ago. It said: KEEP DRIVING.

There was a link in the text:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_network

"Hm."

Max started driving again, turned on the radio, recognized the beginning of the song.

"Hm."