R³ Read online

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  O

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  DREAMS & ILLUSION

  R³

  3.14

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER O: DARKNESS

  CHAPTER 1: HAVE YOU DREAMT BEFORE?

  CHAPTER 2: HER NAME IS NINA, SHE SAYS

  CHAPTER 2.5: I SHOULD’VE BROUGHT SOMETHING TO READ

  CHAPTER 3: HOW DOES ONE GRASP SUCH NONSENSICAL REALITY?

  CHAPTER 4: RUSSIAN DOLLS

  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF INTELLIGENCE

  CHAPTER 5: ALL INFINITE POSSIBLE POTENTIALS AND OUTCOMES IN ONE

  CHAPTER 5.5: AN UNRELIABLE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 6: YOU ARE DEAD, RIGHT?

  CHAPTER 7: THERE’S A SYNCOPATION IN REALITY

  CHAPTER 8: REUSE. REDREAM. RECYLE.

  CHAPTER 9: I DIED, BUT THEN I WAS REBORN

  CHAPTER 9.5: I MUST NOT LET MY MIND DECEIVE ME

  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF INTELLIGENCE

  CHAPTER 10: THEY’RE LOOKING FOR YOU

  CHAPTER 10.5: THE POSTER GIRL FOR DREAMING

  CHAPTER 11: UNUS MUNDUS

  CHAPTER 12: OUR REALITY IS SLOWLY COLLAPSING

  CHAPTER 13: GREGOR SAMSA

  CHAPTER 14: HAS SOMEBODY ELSE BEEN LIVING MY LIFE ALL THIS TIME?

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 14.5: WHERE DID HER DREAMS GO?

  CHAPTER 15: BILL

  CHAPTER 16: NOT SAFE OUTSIDE. STAY INSIDE. INSIDE. INSIDE. SAFE INSIDE.

  CHAPTER 16.5: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TIME?

  CHAPTER 17: CAN YOU BRING BACK MR. NORMAL?

  CHAPTER 18: A UNIVERSAL JOKE

  ROSE’S DATE

  CHAPTER 18.5: THE WELL RAN DRY

  CHAPTER 19: HIS BRAIN HAS TURNED TO MUSH

  CHAPTER 20: THE CRYSTAL FIELD

  CHAPTER 21: EVERYTHING FALLS IN THIS REALITY

  CHAPTER 22: IT’S TIME, ISN’T IT?

  CHAPTER 23: JOHN

  CHAPTER 24: THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE

  CHAPTER 25: TIME TO BECOME ONE AGAIN

  3.14

  CHAPTER O: NON-SPACE & NON-TIME ENVIRONMENT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Lola and Pudger, for their relentless moral support in the shape of licks and snuggles; Chris ONeill, for reading my manuscript over and over again and for putting together a sexy cover; Shani Vellvé, for being the closest thing possible to an editor (without whom this entire book would be a maze of confusion); and LeeAnna Neumeyer, for showing me how to say “fuck you”.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2013 by Jorge Enrique Ponce

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Goo Factory, LLC, in Los Angeles, in 2013.

  First Edition.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Goo Factory ISBN: 978-0-9912974-1-2

  Cover by Chris ONeill

  www.goofactory.tv

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dreams & Illusion

  All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

  –Edgar Allan Poe

  You live in illusion and the appearance of things.

  There is a reality, but you do not know this.

  When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing.

  And being nothing, you are everything.

  That is all.

  –Kalu Rinpoche

  R³

  3.14

  March 14th, 1592

  It was gone, as fast as it’d appeared. No longer to be seen, devoured by the void. It was everything and anything all at once. It was beautiful. I saw it all, the end through the beginning. As a mathematician, my initial reaction was to examine, to deconstruct, but even as numbers, the knowledge was ungraspable. I was ecstatic, filled with joy as tears swelled my eyes. Yet all I did was smile. It was the absolute, the first and the last, infinity within the water drop. All infinite potentials and outcomes in one.

  Nothing in my life had ever prepared me for this experience. Millions of thoughts flooded my mind, instantly doubting what my every sense was experiencing. I blamed it on my lack of water; dehydrated for days. The scorching sun overpowered my weak limbs, but I knew I had a grip on my wits. This was real. Real as real can get. Tangible as tangible gets. It wasn’t my tired mind playing tricks on me because I was not the only one there. Yet, I was the only one left. The thought of poison did cross my mind. A strong hallucinogen, perhaps? But I hadn’t ingested anything other than what was in my pack. Another disproving option, discarded. What struck me the most, however, was what followed.

  A sequence of infinite numbers flashed before me. Then merged into one. Next, lives flickered past me. They also merged into one. Past, present, future; all radiated through the one eye, the source. And that’s when I knew—this was the answer.

  The answer to everything, to every single question. The secret to all life and the universe.

  We are all born to d—

  PART ONE

  Chapter 0: Darkness.

  DARKNESS

  I remember the dream. The vacuum.

  There is no sound here, except for distinct crackles at no specific interim; sounds resembling the crushing of a paper bag or soda can.

  Light-flares radiate. A pulsating aurora borealis is interweaved with a phosphorescent hexagonal grid; a path on a black canvas. Flickering firefly pixels fling endlessly, creating swarms of scintillating stardust—a fluid constant. Rapidly shifting perspective waves in and out, interlocking with each other, dissolving and falling back into place. The environment is alive, moving, breathing on its own rhythm.

  A slender, shimmering, silvery object slices through the prismatic environment, shattering through the grid, leaving a trail of ripples and splintering rhombi behind. But this is not “space”. This is something else. And like every journey measured with the hand of time, the metallic object passes through, unleashing chaos, yet its stay in this environment is transitory.

  Everything falls…

  Chapter 1: Have you dreamt before?

  Have you dreamt before?

  THE YEAR OF THE NOW

  I was lucky it was empty.

  What’s this place anyway? How did I get here?

  As I scan through the numbers embedded on the wall of narrow doors, I realize the dilapidated storage facility could easily be a collection of PO Boxes. Unkempt, dim-lit. But it isn’t. It looks more like a locker room at a correction facility.

  I finally stop in front of a locker, not sure why – the number reads “314”. I guess this is the one. I look around once more, but I’m still alone. All alone. Even if I weren’t, who’d recognize me? I’ve never been here before, probably will never come back. I’m simply one more guy with a non-memorable face, which easily explains why I was doomed to a mediocre existence from the get go. Non-memorable face with an equally dull personality, bound to an average life with the bunch. I don’t complain. It is what it is. It's not like I was planning on becoming President or seeking an equally pretentious celebrity status in what some people (not sure who) call (for some reason) "the biz". I consider myself attractive, in an interesting type of way, enough for a drunken fuck with a sloppy college student or the occasional hottie, but nothing long-term. That’s usually how it goes and I’m content with that.

  The combination came to me as easy as it was to find the right locke
r. I was simply (yet unexplainably) led to it. Inside sat a lonely, medium-sized, black duffel bag. There was no need to look at the contents. I already knew what was inside. How? Not really sure. I just did.

  Bill kept pulling out more and more bottles out of his bag, choking the life out of the tiny coffee table in my tiny apartment. He’s a cool guy, but I don’t really know where he gets all this stuff, most of which I’ve never seen in my life. Perhaps that’s why he’s a dealer—though he would never really strike you as one, with his long, grayish hair, his pruney Chinese face and the collection of New Age necklaces and scarves wrapped around his neck and head. Shiny beads cover his bionic left arm, which you’d think would only make it look more state-of-the-art, but bionic prosthetics are as common as overweight diabetics in America. He lost his arm years ago; he avoids the subject all together. Apparently the surgery was botched, which killed most of his nerve endings.

  I grab a bottle that reads Aspirin. “Acetylsalicylic acid?”

  “The main component in Aspirin,” he shoots back with a smile.

  There’s a hammer at arm’s reach, framed by Bill’s pharmaceuticals. I’ve never seen it before. “Is this your hammer?”

  “No,” he says without interrupting his pill organization.

  “What does it do?” I ask while crushing the white pill with the hammer.

  “Pain reliever. Very popular before the incident... Until they developed the snowflake, that is.”

  As if on cue, a snowflake commercial takes over my small telly. These occurrences seem to happen a lot. Random. Or luck. When do they stop being random and start becoming a pattern?

  A young woman grabs her head feebly, signaling, “oh, I have a headache” in an obviously pathetic way – poor her. She pops in a snowflake pill and cut to: a backyard suffocated with sunshine, contrasted only by her overly fake smile. The next vignette is just as trite. A man lies in bed with his eyes wide open. Flustered, he pops a snowflake pill, and closes his eyes, smiling peacefully. The logo dissolves and a tagline is revealed:

  Snowflakes—release your worries on your path to serenity.

  That’s the world we live in, the world of the miscellaneous pill. Got a headache? Depressed? Can’t sleep? Pop a pill! It will do wonders. It makes me want to vomit—but I don’t actually vomit. The smell would stay in my apartment for days. It’s small, but it works for me. My mother thinks it’s a shit-hole, but who cares what she thinks…

  Most of the sheep out there take it—the snowflake, but just because they’re told to. I’ve never had to. Then again, I’m one of the few that can actually sleep with their eyes closed. Since the incident, I mean. It happened years ago, before I was even born, back when Bill was probably a teenager. One day, for no apparent reason—one of these random events, you could say—every single human being on this planet collapsed on the spot. You could’ve been driving, eating, taking a shower—it didn’t matter, everyone hit the floor like a rag doll at the same exact moment and stayed there for about five solid hours, as if a sudden narcolepsy epidemic had taken over. More concerned with the “why”, no one noticed the effects of the event until later that night. In addition, no one seemed to want to talk about it. They felt it was a “hush-hush” matter that was better left untouched since it couldn’t be explained.

  After the incident, no one was able to fall asleep with his or her eyes closed. Sleeping became an unsettling sight for whoever was awake. The sleeper suddenly became something resembling a mannequin that never blinked. But that wasn’t the only pitiful aftermath, which also involved sleeping. Human beings all over the world had inexplicably lost the ability to dream.

  I rub my eyes with both hands. “Haven’t been able to get decent shut-eye in a week.”

  “Legend says when you can’t sleep at night, it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream,” says Bill followed by a light-hearted scoff. “Yet I don’t think that’s the case.”

  Dreams. Dreaming. The myth. The fantasy.

  “Look what I got,” I say as I open my mini fridge and remove a soda can. A secret soda can, with an equally secret lid, manufactured to hide your favorite secret stash. The small, royal-blue bottle fits perfectly. The simple, white label reads R³.

  His eyes widen. “Where did you get it?” he asks. “John?”

  I shrug. I really can’t remember.

  “Have you dreamt before?”

  “No. Maybe,” I reply playing with the dreamy bottle.

  “You don’t remember?” asks Bill, squinting his tiny eyes, making them somehow even smaller.

  “Don’t you ever get that feeling where you can’t tell if something is a memory or if it’s something you dreamed?”

  “So you dreamt?”

  I shrug again. “Perhaps. But I’ve always slept with my eyes closed. No snowflakes for me.”

  My front door bangs loudly, promising to burst off its hinges. “Hammond! I know you’re in there!” the voice outside shrieks. “Where’s my rent you little fuck?! HAMMOND!!” The banging continues for another few seconds until the ape gives up and walks away, dragging his feet like it’s his business. This happens almost every day.

  I bounce the blue bottle from hand to hand. I love the swishing sound its contents make when swirled inside the glass.

  “You should put all this stuff away,” Bill says motioning towards the pharmaceuticals. “You don’t want that kind of trouble. They’ll put you away for carrying these.”

  I’m too distracted with the blue bottle. It’s a true beauty. “Why did they make these?”

  “What is dreaming but a desire to change reality? To make the world better? Without dreaming you become helpless to your reality. Which is why the snowflake was developed after the incident. With it, you sleep a dream-less sleep. The engorged void. It numbs down your brain. You know how no two snowflakes look alike?” Bill places a handful of beautiful ‘snowflake’ pills on the table. “All of these look exactly the same. In the end, we are all born to *.”

  What did he say?

  “Then why did they recall it?” I ask.

  “They didn’t. The well ran dry.” Bill jerks his head towards the blue bottle. “Where did you get it?”

  “Will it make me dream?”

  “It’s a prepackaged dream based on recycled memories. The same dream over and over. They used to sell them when you were a kid.”

  I can’t wait any longer. I open the bottle and gulp down its contents instantly.

  “No expiration date?” he asks.

  I scan the bottom of the bottle. It’s scratched out. A bit too late anyway.

  “How did you know where to find it?”

  I shrug. Again.

  I really don’t.

  Chapter 2: Her name is Nina, she says.

  Her name is Nina, she says.

  Lights pulsate.

  I bounce up and down, covered in sweat. Or at least what I think is sweat. My sweat? I hold a water bottle in my hand. I look down, there’s no water bottle. It happens.

  The wall feels good against my back, supporting my dead weight, as my eyes get lost in the waving sea of neon.

  Everyone convulses to the beat, merging into a giant blob, a creature with a single heartbeat. This makes me smile, I don’t know why. My eyes slowly drift inward. I can hear my own heart pounding. More so, I can feel it has relocated—it’s not buried deep in my chest, but wrapped around my head, one half on each ear.

  Tiny specks of light flicker over my closed eyelids. The specks are fluid, cell-like, floating around other smaller and larger microorganisms—must be the R³. There’s one main cell; it pulsates to the beat. Something suddenly perforates the membrane, quickly intertwining with the cell’s contents. Invasive. Intruding. Raping.

  My eyes snap open.

  A girl with red hair stands in the middle of the bouncing crowd, so still. Why isn’t she bouncing? Her eyes glimmer under the strobe lights, so much beauty, slender and supple, immaculate angelic, unearthly grace. The pounding in my ch
est suddenly grows louder, awoken, alive. She smiles a smile I’ve seen somewhere before, but for the life of me I can’t figure out where or on whom. Who is she? She walks away. Away from me. I have to see her. I can’t let her go. I don’t know why.

  I follow her striking hair. Through the crowd.

  Outside the club. Large plasma screens selling me everything and anything.

  Down a dark alley. Bricks holding secrets that will forever remain mysteries.

  Into the darkness. Devouring everyone and anyone with no filter.

  We are covered in purple and green. The neon lights from the convenience store next door bleed in through the blinds on my bedroom window. The girl wraps around me, or under me, or next to me, not sure where’s up and where’s down—she becomes an extension of myself.

  Her name is Nina, she says. I get lost in her eyes—so many different colors and shapes, constantly moving and shifting like tectonic plates. Her kaleidoscope eyes reel me into unknown territory, like a great whirlpool of fate sucking me in.

  My entire body vibrates. A strange electric current grips my muscles as she kisses my neck gently. Electrons spark whenever our skins touch. There is no pain; only pleasure. Skin on skin contact is purely orgasmic. Life flows out of me, into her, and back. I feel so high, so… alive.