1 - Interview with [REDACTED]

 Elroy G. Biv and Kay Werty interview an incredible individual who does not have ESP, but who has an augmented hippocampus enabling him to make predictions about the future with extraordinary accuracy.

Transcript

[Radio scan, distorted voices in multiple languages that change as radio is tuned.]

Voice: “Did you know that you’re the OM?” [Reversed]

Female voice [in Spanish]: Visit our theme park!

Male voice: Novelty Forever!

“Human capital stock”

“--joining us, we’re now live on the air from our station in Plane 00023 Prime Alpha, and you are hearing us in your native language courtesy of Speedy Saraswati’s Telepathic Translation Services!

Infinity Hour is a weekly broadcast from your friends at the Infinity Corporation, bringing you sensational stories, cutting edge cosmic consciousness, metaphysical marketing morsels, and much more. Humanoid or invertebrate, flatlander or triple threat three dimensional personage, resident of Atlantis, Lemuria, or New Jersey, you’ll find something to plicate your perception! So turn on, tune in, and drop out while you’re at it - degrees from The Infinity Corporation’s School Of Hard Knocks Diploma Mill are only $35! 

Hello and welcome to Infinity Hour. I’m your host, Elroy, it’s a lovely yesterday, today, and tomorrow here in 00023 prime alpha, double sunshine with a pleasant turquoise wind, and we’ve got quite the exciting show in store for you. We’ll be joined by not one, but two special guests - a precognitive government test subject, and an extraordinary extra-dimensional entity - for a discussion about what’s really going on out there. But first, let’s kick things off with the latest news in this week’s Reality Report!

[Reality Report music]

Our first bulletin comes from the Talby system at the frontline of the Alliance-Feroxi conflict. Tragically, Feroxi forces penetrated Alliance defenses at Dolus, landing and sweeping across the planet as they mercilessly devoured every adult, juvenile and larval Dolusian in their path. However, Feroxi intelligence (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) failed to inform the troops that Dolusian flesh contains highly corrosive compounds, resulting in fatal cases of indigestion for almost the entire invasion force. Talk about just desserts!

Closer to home, a spacetime altering drug sweeping Earth in the 2030s is opening up a window to a neighboring dimension in the prime-beta manifold and awakening some very unhappy campers. From 2034 to 2036, Earthlings can expect an uptick in mental breakdowns, earthquakes, and absolutely massive tentacles levelling cities. Hey, for any of you Earthlings listening who’ll be around for this, consider yourselves lucky - you know what they say about an interdimensional monstrosity with a big tentacle, right? Right?

Finally, the weather. An oscillation warning is in effect for the Prime Gamma cluster due to unstable beam connections, effective immediately and extending until the foundations of spacetime are no longer shaking.

Up next, we have a special guest for you- but first, let's talk a little about our sponsor

Our first guest is here all the way from, uh -- (off mic: where’d you say you were from?) (muffled response) He doesn’t want to tell us. OK. That’s alright. Well, his name is [REDACTED] and he’s a government test subject with precognition, also known as ESP-- (muffled voice in background) What’s that? (muffled voice) Right. Sorry. A government test subject without precognition or ESP, but sporting a highly augmented hippocampus giving him the ability to make extremely accurate predictions about future events purely through brain power (off mic: How was that?) (vague muffled assent).

Elroy: So, [REDACTED]- how are you doing tonight?

[REDACTED]: Tonight? Are you saying it’s night here? You trying to reveal what timezone we’re in? Do you want to give away my location?

E: No, not at all, I’m just trying to make conversation.

R: A conversation? You want to have a conversation? Alright then, let me ask you a question, Elroy. Have you ever lain awake at night, staring at the ceiling with your thoughts racing, certain that while everything seems, on the surface, perfectly normal, tranquil, calm, and orderly, that it’s all just a little bit too perfectly normal, tranquil, calm, and orderly? That something twisted, horrible, horrifying, is about to happen? That just below the perfectly normal, tranquil, calm, and orderly surface are mind-shattering truths, truths that would shatter your very mind, if you were to learn of them?! Have you ever lain awake at night staring at the ceiling with your thoughts racing, wondering that?

E: I--

R: No need to answer; it’s a rhetorical question. I know you have. I can see it. I’m a Seer, after all. I see more than most. 

E: So what is a Seer, exactly?

R: You said it yourself. A subject. A guinea pig. A lab rat. They opened up my skull and poked and prodded and electrocuted and rearranged. They added implants. They turned my brain into a prediction machine, an oracle. And now I can extract an encyclopedia of data from a light breeze, a single blade of grass, or the sound of a car’s engine. A falling leaf might tell me about an earthquake next week in Japan. A dropped quarter at the vending machine could be a warning about an assassination attempt on the president. And like you mentioned to your listeners, I’m valuable government property. Supposed to be at least. That’s a story for another time.

E: In your correspondence with us, you said you had valuable information, that you wanted to “blow the whistle” about what’s happening behind the scenes on, uh… *shuffles papers* ...Earth.

R: That’s right. I’m here to tell you and your listeners, to spread the word, that those thoughts you think while you lay awake at night staring at the ceiling with your thoughts racing? They’re right. They’re accurate. A lot of ‘em at least, maybe even most of ‘em. They tried to tell me that they were just hallucinations, side effects of having my grey matter scrambled like an egg, but I know better.

Let me tell you what they’re doing --

E: They? Who’s they?

R: They. You know… “them.” That they.

E: The government?

R: Hah!

E: The Illuminati?

R: Mere puppets

E: Then who--

R: Stop getting bogged down in unimportant details, Roy! THEY are destroying us! One by one, they’re working their way through every person on Earth, annihilating them into perfect oblivion with their Total Obliteration Ray! It’s totally instant, totally painless. You’re there one second and gone the next, before you even know what’s happening. It’s terrifying. And then, do you know what they’re doing next? The very same second, practically the very same instant they destroy you? They rebuild you, memories and all, with their totally painless, totally instant, Total Biosynthesis Device. It’s incredible. Memories and all. So the new you, the copy of you, doesn’t even know it was only born seconds earlier, it doesn’t know that it’s a copy of a dead person, that it’s probably even breathing in microscopic particles of that person’s evaporated corpse. It thinks things like “oh, that’s right, I was planning on going to the bank today,” totally clueless that it never planned on doing anything of the sort until right then!

I’m sure you’re thinking, “look man, just tell me what I want to know. How can I tell if they’ve done it to me? How do I know if I’m the copy?”

E: Took the words right out of my mouth. 

R: You don’t. You can’t. I mean, I can, but I can’t tell that to someone. It’s one of those mind-shattering truths that would shatter your mind. I can’t be responsible for that. And anyway, sometimes they screw up and hit one of the copies instead of a new target. Some people out there, some of your listeners even, are copies of copies, maybe even copies of copies of copies, depending on whether the operator was having a rough day and hittin’ the bottle a bit behind the control panel. And even though the Total Biosynthesis device is pretty damn impressive, the copies start to lose a little bit of fidelity after two or three rounds. I’m sure you know someone who seems just a little dumber than they used to be, and maybe started making some really questionable decisions somewhere along the line. I mean, some people get dumber as they age. No question about that. But with others… there are less innocent explanations.

That’s not all, though. You know what else they’re doing? The ‘they’ that’s always watching, that’s always doing whatever it is ‘they’re’ doing? Remember, that ‘they’? They’re stopping time, too. Freezing it. Happens every day. They freeze us all in place and go and do who knows what. All I know is they put everything back where they found it before they unfreeze us. They try to, at least. Sometimes they forget about some loose change in your pocket, or the keys on the counter. You know how it is when you’re looking for something and you swore that you left it right there, but it’s not there and you can’t find it anywhere and then eventually you pull up the couch cushions and there it is, even though you’re pretty sure you weren’t sitting on the couch at all that day. It all makes perfect sense now.

That reminds me, so, I told this guy about it on the bus about it once, y’know, I says to him “they’re freezing time, man. It’s happening every day.” And you know what he says? “How long do they freeze time for, when they do it?” And I just kind of look at him for a second. “Really? How LONG are they freezing time for? How long of a TIME are they freezing TIME for? Just think it over. I’ll wait.”

That’s why I don’t even usually bother telling people this stuff. They don’t believe it, and even if they believe it, they don’t understand it, and even if they understand it, they don’t care! Like this one lady at the bar the other night. So I tell her about the destroying, and rebuilding people thing. I say, y’know, “they’re destroying people. Completely. They’re destroying us and replacing us with perfect copies.” And she says, “so?” And so I tell her, y’know, “you could be the copy!” And she says, “Okay, so? Why should I care? If I don’t know the difference, and I feel like myself, why does it matter?”

Can you believe that? It’s the principle of the thing, obviously! They’re goin’ around, copying us, freezing us, not even having the decency to tell us about it.

So I tell her off. I kinda give her a piece of my mind. And she says, “if we don’t even notice when we get destroyed, when we die, maybe we never even really were there at all.”

Whatever. She’s crazy. Look, the only thing I can do is tell you what I know. What you do with that information is up to you. Not that there’s anything you really can do, I guess. They’re unstoppable. I mean, they, the “they” that’s always watching, etc., they control every government, every corporation, every charitable organization, hell, they’re probably pulling strings on the city council and the PTA at your kids’ school. So there’s really not a goddamn thing to do. Just try to forget that time is meaningless and you might not be yourself. Drinking helps. I recommend drinking.

In fact… (off mic) what do you have back there in the green room? (Further away)

Elroy (off mic): Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. Not the left one - that’s liquid nitrogen. 

R: Let’s see. Antimatter, kanarr, Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters… don’t you have any Jameson? 

(Sounds of a drink being poured)

E: So, [REDACTED], I’m told you brought along a friend, who happens to also be our next guest. Would you like to show them in now?

R: Oh, they’re already here. I’m sorry, I’ve been so rude. (Drinks) You just can’t see them, because they don’t have a form. Let me introduce them - their name is the Nameless, Formless Being From The Space Between Worlds. They’re going to have to borrow my mouth from time to time since the whole “not having a form” thing also includes lungs. I mean, who needs lungs when you can directly manipulate the electro-chemical compositions of simple three-dimensional lifeforms’ neurosystems, am I right?

Okay, Nameless Formless Being from the Space Between worlds, say Hello!

Hello.

E: Alright. This might get confusing. Maybe you should do a voice or something so they know when it’s you talking.

Can’t I just implant the knowledge of who is speaking directly into their minds?

E: I mean, I’d really rather you not alter the brains of our audience, but I’m also not sure that I could stop you, so I guess you can go ahead.

So, Nameless Formless Being from the Space Between Worlds, why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about how you and [REDACTED] met?

N: Well, the way I remember it-- which is to say with perfect accuracy, since whole solar systems and galaxies have been used to store my most insignificant memories -- he was wandering through a nested super-spacetime fractal meta-structure, which would be the last place I’d have expected to bump into a human, if I had not already been to that point in the meta-structure and re-lived that moment an infinite number of times.

R: That’s more or less how I remember it too. And as for how I ended up there, it’s actually kind of a funny story. I’m sure you know how it goes, though. Tale as old as time-- you need to pay the bills, you’ve already given up on making money by following your dreams, you sign up for a mysterious clinical research trial testing an experimental drug, you ignore the red flags that it’s being funded by the CIA in an attempt to transcend space and time for intelligence gathering purposes... One thing kind of leads to another, and next thing you know, you’re stranded on the wrong side of consensus reality, in a place made of fractals, being chatted up by a being made of fractals, that speaks by rearranging the fractals that you are also made of.

Thankfully, Nameless, Formless Being from the Space Between Worlds here was quite the gentleman-- er, gentle-entity. This is getting kind of tedious, honestly-- can I just call you Nameless?           

N: Call me whatever you like. You’re the one who needs to label yourself in order to not be confused with other members of your species.

R: Right. Anyway, Nameless saw me alone, and rather than shattering my mind with unfathomable, all-encompassing paradoxes, they decided to help me get back to my dimension of origin. 

E: Really? Can you tell us how you managed to do that, Nameless? I’m sure our listeners would love to know.

N: I simply altered his neural chemistry to re-impose the three-point-five dimension limit on his perception.

E: 3.5? We live in 3 dimensions, Nameless.

N: Are you questioning me?

E: No, of course not. It’s just--

N: Little clumps of dust and carbon like you almost live in 4 dimensions. You do experience time, though it's almost unrecognizably different from my experience of it. You have no choice, no navigation, no agency. Once you've been to a moment, you can't visit it again... ever! I remember how incredulous I was when I first looked out from behind the eyes of one of you primitive little monkeys. I - an eternal being of infinite energy - actually felt claustrophobia! So, I'll I’ll grant you the 3 spatial dimensions, but you get half of the temporal, at maximum.

E: So... next question for you, here... how many dimensions are there, actually? 

N: None.

E: None?! But you were just talking about dimensions.

N: You asked me, Elroy, how many are there 'actually.' And, actually, there are none. The question is nonsense. It's like asking how many wrinkles there ‘actually’ are on your shirt.

E: Ok, well, what is there actually, then?

N: Just me.

E: You?!

N: Correct, just me. I'm fairly certain, at least. I keep having these recurring dreams about races of different beings that develop themselves into collective minds. And each collective mind eventually connects with all the others. The humans connect with the Floxians, the Floxian-human mind connects with the Rangos, the Rango-Floxian-Human mind connects with the Talpans, and so on. Each time a new race joins, the collective mind gains all the experiences and memories of that race. Eventually all of the races in the Universe get connected, and I wake up. Actually... I believe I am having such a dream right at this very moment.

E: Alright then. Thank you very much for your time, Nameless Formless Being From The Space Between Worlds, and give my regards as well to your fleshy body buddy [REDACTED], whatever psychic void he's floating in now! We'll see you next week folks.