the black message

A control flow statement within which actions are executed based on a given set of arguments. Veracity. While a thing is true, do something. Do not do something if a thing is not true, or if a thing becomes untrue at some unspecified time. Do something for every instance of that thing being true.

While the body is thirsty, drink. While the mind suffers, stimulate. While the soul yearns, pray. If the body is or becomes quenched, and the mind neutralized, and the soul satisfied—do not drink, do not stimulate, do not pray, for tomorrow we do not die? That can’t be right.

Is there yet another thing in the flow statement, perhaps uncontrolled? I’ve perfected my code a thousand times over, well into madness. Exchanged shortcut for some unabridged, academic expression of numerical materiality, time and time again. Still, the actions seem to have their own arguments. There is no yearning, yet I must pray.

It can only be that there is another thing, secreted beneath the crust of logical propositions. Could that possibly be? A new law of reality, the motivations of which are to complicate the existing decrees we rely upon? Where could that message be coming from and how could it have possibly been so occulted until now?

Perhaps it needed to deliver its message only now, I think. Whatever it is. I close my eyes and in the kaleidoscopic void behind the darkness, the negative spaces, I can see a rabbit. That’s well beyond what I needed to see to end this Sisyphean fever. It’s just work after all. Men weren’t meant to labor into idiocy so I open my eyes and gesture to shutter the screen, a waterfall of quick black consuming a script I no longer understand.

I scratch my skin at the foot of the stairs even though I know the itch is underneath. I ascend to the room lit with neon that smells like molten copper. I’ve never been sure why the prostacyclin-based gas tasted like blood and smoke. Moot, nevertheless. It’s barely a moment before that intimate, meticulous neurological apoptosis.

I lay prostrate in the harness and affix my face to the mask. The noisy light splatters around except for in the priming chamber where there is silence. The gas isn’t black, it is simply nothing. A dimensional pocket of void vapors. While the mind suffers, stimulate. The room, the world, everything and nothing, collapses.

As if gently lowered down from some maladaptive daydream, you feel the generous blanket of sun, the tactile sand, the aural bath of dysrhythmic sea. Among the transfiguration you see your nephew, the contrasting innocence of sand castles built atop temporary kingdoms that were erased by the tide. Your sister is already here.

“How was work?”

You don’t know the blackness in the message well enough yet. You don’t know it at all in fact, but will you come to know it? It feels distinctly like you will.

“Uneventful.” Lies as exits.

“Someone said they wanted to see you in Level 15 East.”

It could be anyone, everyone you know knows you’re here. The pool is small by nature though. The absurdity of existence sometimes presents as isolation. Random solitude, or at least that’s what you have to swallow. Nevertheless, your being here isn’t a secret.

The artificial ocean snakes ahead of you, waves lulling or crashing with increasing tumultuousness as it meanders out of view, barely discernibly against the mirrored sea walls. Level 15—nothing notable, three tiers off from the arbitrary false shore of Level 18. You’ve conquered clear to Level 21, so a chance meeting at 15 should present no issue.

Your vessel is obsidian black, streaked with gold. By the grace of some outer cognition you find it remarkable that the gas flushing your cerebral cortex ordains it to be cold. There is a code here but the glitching exists in the lobes. Is the board cold because it’s cold, or because you believe it ought to be?

Level 1: No challenge presented. The relaxation tier. You aren’t even able to attune your muscles here because the environment doesn’t host sufficient physicality. Technically none of it does, but deeper Levels further exploit the gas.

Level 2: Much the same. Differences negligible for anyone with sufficient skill.

Level 3: The water begins to taste like fear. Not your fear. But it does happen as the more novice gas surfers see around the bend to the early teen Levels, the dots of those more advanced slashing through the waves.

Level 4: Much the same, and still no challenge presented, for you at least. Were you ever challenged by this? You must’ve been but memory is often occluded by this chemical dream.

Level 5: You can finally attune. The mechanics are not the same as in reality, but functionally it doesn’t matter. Your mechanism doesn’t change. You distribute your weight into the board and pierce through a small wave. You flex into the water with your body, your shoulder splits an abyssal rift. You breathe the water, alloy on your tongue as your guts shiver.

Level 6: You’ll slither a few more Levels before your body remembers comprehensively, but you’re starting to feel your proteins, your enzymes, your acids. You know in the later teens you’ll need to subsume into the water.

Level 7: No notable difference. The only number between 6 and 8 is 7. But you feel an itch too. Is that right?

Level 8: The waves travel here. Anyone surfing the gas here had better have learned the gas as a matter of course because breathing the water has to be second nature. Instead, now you have to recall the strange gravity. Lean forward on the board to crash down and whip through thalassic darkness and menacing kelp. Shift weight to your rear to ascend, but remember that the gas doesn’t let you perceive the apex from Level 8 onward.

Level 9: You still recall forces that wouldn’t be viable if it weren’t for the gas. Still, you practice strange neutral buoyancy as you head into the double digits. You’ll lose sight of the shore.

Level 10: It’s sensible that you’d start to feel the effects on your body. Or is it? This manifestation isn’t your body. But you’ll exit the cerebral void, weary all the same. Your synapses fire with reckless abandon.

Level 11: The obstacle tier. Your movements aren’t encyclopedic per se, but they’ve become passive enough to divert to the environment—the subtle trajectories of the false ocean, the alien marine entities, the detritus from imagined wars or from imagining imagined things.

Level 12: You hoist forward and sail along a flow through a gyre of one-thousand-one-hundred-and-eleven fish. They flit and spiral as you glide through. Your frontal cortex tries to offer a beauty response but you feel some kind of haunting dread instead. Another neurological glitch.

Level 13: Strange how something as arbitrary and inane as superstitions with forgotten origins persist clear through instances of reality. You don’t spend time here. Your only purpose here is functional, and it is in service of advancing.

Level 14: Sunset surfing. Level 14 is the last in which you’ll have the sun and the shallow ocean. You guess it was designed as such to present challenge elements—things change absent the comfort of a nuclear furnace. Anyway, why was anything (or nothing) designed the way it was?

Level 15: With the shore concealed by sacred geometry, you almost wouldn’t know the reflective walls if it weren’t for affixed ladders leading up to subtle, shivering portals. A climb east or a climb west, culminating in chambers with limitless procedural instances. It’s pointless to wonder if this architecture was developed for the sake of supersymmetry but you do it nonetheless.

You climb the eastern ladder and stow your board at the top. The shimmering sheet of entry and egress does analysis for instance placement so you grapple concepts and contexts of meeting, familiarity, want for communication. Antonyms can frame, so you process whatever might be on the other side of seclusion as you hoist yourself through.

It’s a curious scenescape, negative space with brightly colored mosaic tiling and deep black boulders placed randomly. Through a hazy layer of fictional steam, you see The Man approach.

“It’s been a long time.”

The Man was not who you were expecting, perhaps powerfully not. Another stir of your soul, glitchy and squelching. Your body aches. You’d like to think it was from the gas surfing, but you’re acutely aware that it’s not. A thunderous sonic crash sweeps the instance and you’re compelled into the orbit of The Man’s gleaming flesh.

You should’ve expected this. When the gas does its work, it does so unilaterally. It floods the smallest quantum nooks of your gray matter. It doesn’t discern your contexts of consciousness from your carnal curses. It rearranges your blood and replaces your structure, so you thrust, you indulge, you release. Unstable, cellular pleasure. While the body is thirsty, drink.

When it’s done, starvation remains. You can’t help but wonder why that’s never explored. Underdiscussed, the deficiency of instinct. It doesn’t matter though, because The Man speaks.

“Now that The Black Message is known to you, you are known to all who know it.”

You screw up your face and ask The Man to elaborate with your eyes.

“Once it’s perceived, it develops in novel ways. It evolves. You might regard it as an idle curiosity, but there are those who would harness its power. They would prefer you didn’t know it. They would prefer you couldn’t know it.”

You recall the rabbit behind your eyes as The Man tells you about the killer waiting for you in the depths of Level 18, more man than rabbit, but leporine nonetheless. The Man tells you that the killer is ordained to kill you with a blade.

“It will hunt you through the cosmic microwave background, reality upon reality, until the heat death of the universe.”

“But you can end it here and now.”

Level 16: The surfing is a challenge because your anxiety burrows in between the molecules of the water. Usually the cumulus of cognition is welcome in the vapor sea, but this time, you remember that you can die here.

Level 17: You see umbral flashes from the glass shore ahead as you burst through the surface and your movement alters your angles. Your atomic warden set itself to rest so you rely on pseudobioluminescence and counterfeit neutrino swarms.

Level 18: You’ve always descended to the dark depths, and propelled upward to sling over the stoic glass. You figured that was the instructive purpose, since Level 20 and beyond mandated flight. You never noticed the doors before, inset unceremoniously along the glass lateral to the false shore. The scant light in the crystalline depths does little but make colossal shadowforms perceptible. You can see the sigils on the doors though.

Elephant.

Ape.

Scorpion.

Rabbit. Rabbit. There’s your door.

Orientations shift beyond the door and you walk into a descending abyss of impossible mathematics, behemoths of the gas-void swimming around you. Their biotic light cascades and eventually shifts into a deep, red emergency. You sneeze if you think about it too much.

You end up in a sterile place with stark white walls and arbitrary hallways, statically placed bland desks and chairs with wheels. You feel an unnerving lack of notability, some sense that this place is intentionally devoid of spirit. It makes the sculpture you discover all the more twisted: A jagged pile of chairs forming an inorganic beast with appendages reaching out like a spider nestled in its web.

The desks field stacks of paper with scrawlings from the forgotten children of this place beneath Level 18.

Each paper stains darker and darker. Jeff writes about an unexplainable itch in his nostrils. Katy writes about how she forgot how to bleed. Dani writes notes on how to calculate the nuclear mass of existential hopelessness. Mark learned to breathe through his fingertips it appears. Makayla writes a quantum suicide note.

A quiet metallic clinking is the portent of the calamitous end, you’re sure of it. A quiet rapping, the distinct dissonance of metal against metal, more song than noise. The sickening odor of a hospital.

There beyond the cancerous tumor of chairs, you see the killer. The disembodied head of a rabbit stitched onto the flesh of a man. The two entities confer through a seeping pile of gore. The foretold blade twitches in its limp hand. The vacant cunicular eyes take notice of you.

While the soul yearns, pray.