#alephpreview

note: from the upcoming novel WOLF GRIMOIRE

It was an accident, which is not unusual throughout the history of revolutionary technologies. A study in quantum activity at the serotonergic recepter sites resulted in a series of now famous discoveries regarding psilocybin and psychedelic cactus. At first, the public had no way of making up or down out of the data filtering out to the press. It seemed there was overwhelming evidence that the compounds sparked nonlocal action with an inexplicable level of coherence, something previously observed solely in the electromagnetic signals generated by new biotechnologies. But another team of biochemists out of Texas happened to get ahold of this data, and realized they were looking at nearly identical electromagnetic activity in their own studies on an anomolous molecule recently discovered in the brains of twelve Haitian children. More and more, the data compiled. New discoveries. Until one day, it was finally revealed to the public:

            Psychedelic plants, when ingested, hijack the brain’s experiential signals and seems to be sending them back to a kind of nervous system in the plant and, in some cases, somewhere else. In fact, it was quickly established that an entirely new ecosystem of once invisible organisms and signals began to emerge, in which a totally new system of the sciences seemed necessary to comprehend.

            Eventually it happened, but only because we were so far ahead of them. About four thousand years, actually.

            We thought we could keep it under control, even make a little more cash while doing so. It was virtually impossible to keep the world from realizing what was always right under their noses. Behind their noses, I suppose. That was the point of funding those intitial tests. The molecule in Texas had already been discovered and we were tracking a lab in China that appeared to have got their hands on some—it was a matter of time before the whole thing started spilling out in a weird fucking avalanche.

            It was disappointing. Made you even more disheartened at your species. By the time the world properly understood they had discovered alien life, it had already been commodified, was the Aleph machine.

            We couldn’t help but feel the weight of the irony. That this greater world of gods and demons and alien being was there every night, that every one of us spends a great deal of our lives in our own corner of that world. I learned the truth about our dreams when I was a child, having made something of a hobby out of lucid dreaming. It was clear to me that certain elements of my dreams could not be manipulated by my own whims, and that experiments with time had illustrated a limit of the dreamstate. One night, as I explored deeper into that unreality, I was approached by a amiable balding figure in a grey three piece suit with a briefcase at his side. He smiled warmly at me. When he spoke, my life was changed.

            The limits of the dream are the limits of the subconscious. In that vast ocean of timeless automata, out of which the waking ego emerges, there is a pearl. Within the pearl is the Dream of Aleph, and the pearl contains all that was and shall be.

            But here in the waking world, that subconscious is now another ecosystem to be pillaged, mined, and colonized. The seven of us still around try to slow the tide as best we can. In a decade the boundary between subconscious and conscious, self and other, all of it will be erased in a slurry of capitalism. Maybe sooner, even.