Test Two

Yeah!

Test

Test

Today Nothing Can Go Wrong

Nothing paced about the small waiting room that belonged to the offices of the Commission. Today he did not notice the stale brown vinyl seating, that seemed on the surface immensely inviting, yet hid, under their concealing outer bellies a snare of twisted springs so uncomfortable, that they could scarcely stand to contain them. He also did not notice how small the room actually was, and he had no way of knowing that the Commission had been reducing the size of the room over the past 300 years in order to save money. He was never involved in matters of money in relation to the Commission.

Nothing, was more of a snitch.

He was a spy, or informant if you would like to say it more pleasantly, and he was very good.

The reason that Nothing was such a good spy, is that people did not seem to think he actually existed. For a brief example, take this conversation between a man named Frank, and his son Frank.

Frank: "Son look out the window and tell me what you see there"
Frank: "Nothing"
Frank: "You see nothing out the window?"
Frank: "Yeah paw, I see nothing."

Now, the way this conversation sounds you would think that Frank did believe that Nothing existed, by the very fact that he was able to see him, however, in all actuality when Frank was saying he had seen Nothing, he hadn't seen anything at all. Well, technically he had seen the absence of anything he felt important to note, but he certainly was not seeing Nothing due to the fact that Nothing had been vacationing off the coast of Brazil that evening and even has the receipts to prove it.

No, it is not often that any human being believes in Nothing, for their hearts are too often selfish and they never want to believe in an existence where they were not playing at least some small part. A place where Nothing exists doesn't include their fragile being, obsessed with their futile hopes and dreams, or in other cases their self-defeating rules and regulations.

Due to his very nature Nothing was the best spy that ever existed, and the Commission took advantage of this fact on a regular basis.

I want to make it clear that Nothing knew full well that the Commission was taking advantage of his unique nature and even some of his gifts and talents, but Nothing was o.k. with this. Nothing was in love, and Nothing could not stop being in love. It made Everything that much more meaningful, and allowed him to rationalize the protions of his life that he counted trivial, down to a minor annoyance.

Everything was pleased at the love Nothing had for Someone, and Everything danced the day Someone realized that she loved Nothing more than she loved anything.

Today Nothing would think only of Someone while the Commission grilled him for the information he had gathered about their latest "project" -- Igo the Dead.

Nothing has Nothing better to do.

Nothing was never on time. He was late for every event he could recall being intent to make it on time for. Nothing had never been one to keep a very good handle on, or even pay much attention to time's wrangling effort on his existence. Today, Nothing was going to be on time, and he knew that this would mean that nothing was right with anything.

Nothing had known for a while about the man Zebulon, and about his place in the galaxy, and more importantly the end of it, but Nothing was never on time for the meetings that the Commission called to discuss the matters, so he mostly considered himself merely an observer.

Nonsense...

I will loom over you with promises of gills. I will pass the mic in fashions underexposed to the darkness of modernity. I will return to the senate and breathe a majestic note of fortitude into the effervescent haggle of the din of responsibility. Please remove all items from your feathered lungs. Please, replace all organs with exact replicas indistinguishable from their distant cousins. We will be arriving at arlonong in a matter of yellow limpers. Please do not regard yourself as a first rate citizen of the conglomerate elbows. We will be pushing your levels to a new type of destination. This place will be full of letters that are read to you through miniscule pleasantries. You will decide whether or not to believe in anything, yet you won't believe what you have decided. Your arm will turn into a lever and fling the cosmos into a recession that will outlast your favorite dogs and your favorite lesions.

You are a man of ill respite. You will never again be required to shave your knuckles, at least in the fashion you believe is correct. Please, lie down on the lesson, it is never going to be replaced, it is never going to ding a bell, and it is never going to bless the pharmacy.

This is a message of going nothing. Nothing is going to help you, he has nothing else to do.

Zebulon stuck in a bubble

Suddenly, Zebulon found himself frozen in the sky. Not frozen in a sense of temperature, but in a sense that everything around him and even every system in his own body that was supposed to be moving or performing some kind of action, had completely stopped. If it had been visible to anyone observing Zebulon's free-fall, just exactly what he looked like at this time, it is my estimation that they would've had a very good laugh, because the form in which his body (and his face particularly) had frozen was one of sheer insanity. His eyelids were flapping violently in the wind by this point of the free-fall and accompanying their pervasive undulation were his cheeks.

Again I say if it had been something observable, it would have been quite a sight, but we must remember that when things happen in this story, they are never quite how we expect them to be. Zebulon was simultaneously and instantaneously a occupant of 2 distinct realms of existence , and because he believed this was the first time something of that nature had ever happened to him, he was having a very hard time reconciling the events that were taking place. In actuality this sort of thing had been happening to Zebulon for quite some time now, but that is another matter. Rationally speaking, Zebulon was highly disoriented, and it is the cause for this disorientation that I will try to convey to you now.

"Please keep in line with tell tale toes. Please, remove all illigitimate verbs from your lodgings, they will only cause a lick of trouncing nelly-weathers to file your hat in their globulous torrents."

Zebulon tried warily to produce a single yet poignant response. It was difficult to form words, seeing as he didn't believe his mouth to currently exist, so the first thing he had to do was convince himself that he must have a mouth, which later crossed his mind as the single-most interesting thing that taken place that day. He tried to remind himself that he had seen his mouth before in holos or even reflective displays, but it made it difficult that his mouth would have nothing to do with the conversation, until Zebulon threatened never to speak again for the rest of his life. It was a dirty trick, but Zebulon's mouth so loved speaking, it was what it was good at, and it found great pleasure in deceiving others into believing Zebulon was one of the greatest of contemporary minds. The mouth had then agreed to entertain the idea that it did truly exist which was just enough a shred of probability that it sprung into existence and spwewed forth...

"what?"

"Please remove your hat"

"I'm not wearing a hat" thought Zebulon determined not to speak again unless he deemed it completely necessary in order to try and elude the grueling process he had so recently undertaken for so little a return.

"Yes you are." came a reply, entirely inside of his own thoughts. You see while Zebulon "felt" that he still occupied a "place" in the universe, and seemingly therefore existed, he was unable to see himself or anything around him. Not that it was dark, it just wasn't anything. While the thought had crossed his mind, to try and manifest his eyes in the same manner he had gone about speaking, all of his attempts in the last few minutes had failed. He was comforted by the fact that his mind itself seemed to still function and he could even have thoughts along the lines of remebering the body parts he used to have. Although, it was a small consolation.

"Well how am I supposed to remove a hat if I don't even know if I have any hands?" He thought with a manner of indignance that rivaled a 3 year old child.

All his thoughts blurred for a moment into a scrawling soundscape of distorted tones. The tones seemed to be such a great decible to him that had his head existed it would most likely have caused some form of brain damage to his delicate mind. It was a pervasive sound, a relentless sound... It pounded and pulsed, and rented his every thought, until it was the only thing in existence that he knew.

Then things began to turn strange.

The Death of Igo.

Igo lowered himself into The Death by means of a rudimentary rope and pulley system with a small plank attached at the bottom, just big enough for him to sit on. He used this wonderful invention to hoist himself low into The Death in order to explore that which his eyes could not see. While in the canyon his only means for sensory input were his hands.

He groped around for hours with one hand holding his weight via the weight displacement of the pulley system and one had swinging widely into the persistent and unflinching darkness.

Most days he felt nothing. Some days he hurt his hand slamming it into the wall of the canyon. This day he felt something... different.

His hand swung around and landed firmly upon a solid object. His first thought of the object were that it was firm, yet malleable, slightly cold to the touch. However, he did not have much longer to think of anything. He had fallen fast asleep.

Ebon Bears

The Bears of the forest gathered together at the first break of spring. They had just woken from their long winter's hibernation, and by most standards were rejuvinated and alert. A certian buzz of energy could be felt surrounding their great herd as they made their way past the mountain's peaks and toward the mystery that lay on the other side.

These particular bears communicated with one another in a very curious manner. If a bear wished to convey an idea it would begin to eat objects around it that reflected qualities of the idea it wished to convey. For instance, if a bear were to eat a red leaf, followed by a small woodland creature, then finish with a light repast of flat stones, one might gather that the bear had "read a small book", or that the light was growing dim, or something else entirely un-related to the objects eaten. You see in the Ebon Bears way of communicating, the importance was not placed on whether the communication was understood, rather it was most important that you were confident in what you were trying to say. You might imagine that this would bring about a great deal of headache and trouble, but that is an entirely human way of thinking about the whole situation, and goes to show that often times humans could communicate a lot more clearly if they would only stop talking. No, this mode of communication suited the Bears lives very well and they were very content simply to have filled their bellies, if no great soliloquy were ever conveyed.

Often, the Ebon Bears would forgo communication altogether and simply travel in great herds across vast expanses walking during the day and then bunking down for the long nights swarming together for warmth and comfort. These great exoduses were usually undertaken on impulses that they had collectively received from the Snaddling.

We have labelled the time that bears retreat into their winter caves as hibernation. The word Hibernation itself implies a retreat toward seclusion, as a means to pass a harsh season by slumbering or remaining dormant. It may be that in this case, by labelling the act these bears undertook, that we couldn't have been further from the truth. These particular bears had labelled this time as the Snaddling, and if you understand anything about the way the Ebon Bears go about labelling time periods, you will understand why, however, that discussion is left for another book and another time. The Snaddling was a time of great mystery even to the Ebon Bears.

The Post-Prologue Side Story

There was a tribe of people that lived on the edge of a deep canyon. Either side of this canyon was bordered by a wide flat mountain range infected with an evergreen virus. The canyon itself stretched deep into the planet into a black nothing, which the tribe had lovingly named "The Death". At night "The Death" would often creep invasively close to the canyon's edge, threatening to engulf any passers-by. Venturous members of the tribe could sometimes be seen sitting on the edge of the canyon and dangling their feet into it's enveloping darkness. The tribe and "The Death" co-existed peacefully.

The other half of the tribes interaction with the world around them dealt with the bears of the enveloping mountains. Each day a tribe representative would sit in a designated holy place outside the village and wait. After time had seemed to lapse into irrelevance, they would be surrounded by a multitude of ebony cloaked bears. 3 times the size of any bear you may be imaginging now, these giant Centurions would circle around the villager in a complex dance of alien design. An outside viewer might look upon this gathering and think it strange to see so many creatures in one place, but they wouldn't think any further on it, and they would miss the most important element. The bears were singing. They were singing the song of "The Death" and calling it to themselves. They wanted to feel it's emptiness and freedom once again.

The villagers had lived so near death for so long that they were in many ways dead themselves, and they had no real implication as to why this was important, but to many of the contemporary minds of their world, this was a most important fact indeed, but we will talk again of that later. Now, we must discuss a particular member of the village named Igo.

Igo was tall and whimsically skinny even for a member of the canyon-villagers who were themselves elegantly slender creatures. He was not particularly the brightest of the villagers, but he was particularly more dead than the rest of them. He had spent a majority of the darkest nights of his life venturing far and deep into "The Death" against the objections of his family and the village council, and while he had found nothing, nothing had also found him. Nothing held a deep clutch on Igo's soul and would eventually be the catalyst for a great change throughout time and space.

The Post-Prologue

Zebulon was a master inventor. He had invented the lexon wiggler, the back-sided pink, the 1000 miggie-pinner, as well as countless other less useful, yet highly regarded items most sentient beings took for granted in everyday life. His head was like the pickle of remorse. The vinegar that preserved it was also that which made it sour to the taste. While he had once been a brilliant intellect, he could now only remember 5 things. 1) He was sitting in a puddle of milk. 2) His mother had never let him jump on a bed of forks. 3) Left was always right except when it was wrong. 4) Math and 5) that he was destined to rule the universe. Life was getting more and more simple for him as time went on, although time was getting more and more complex, and he looked onward into the time when he would only remember 4 things, and even then just 1. He tried to think back on the days when he could count time in a standard progressive fashion. He would start the day in the morning and finish it in the evening just like the other Plorgs on Duskingville, his home planet. However, after one fateful day everything changed.

"Fateful is quite an interesting word. Full of Fate it implies. That day was full of fate. What made that day more full of fate than any other? What fills our days with fate and when do our days become full? Many humans feel as if their days lack any fate what-so-ever, leaving them with days wrenched of fate like a dish rag hap-hazardly thrown over a stainless steel faucet after a hard days washing. Fate brings many questions and it also jumps higher than any living insect. Fate (we shall discover) is the glue of human afternoons. It reverberates it's message every hour on the hour. "You must keep your hairpins tied", "You must dig a hole in your house", "You must break a stick and shove it's bits into a washing machine" What does fate's message say to you?"

Our friend Zebulon had no recollection of those thoughts as he began to fall from the sky. The only thing he could think of was the sound of the wind piercing his eyelids and tearing them back from his face, and the 5 things.

"Framing a window is your only hope for survival. Please keep your fingers pressed into the mud at all times. We have to reach the melting facility. You will remember every word that is said and yet every word that is said will be a remnant from a distant television program. Each program will consist of 5 people walking around the world and placing things into a cup. At the end of each program the sky will open up and put rocks onto a pedestal that will destroy everything. These are the words of Igo. Do not forget them."

Prologue

Zebulon, crouched upon the cusp of a rotating platinum disc wedged like a splinter in the middle of the pulpy thermosphere of the most blue planet he had ever seen. He gazed down expecting to see the firework bursts of parasitic modern cities lit by millions of artificial cinders. Instead, he saw Nothing and he saw Everything. He clasped the world in his thunderous hand for a holy moment and shook the last evidence of what could be considered normal out of the universe.

It is 1983. You are an 8 year old boy dressed in brown courduroy pants and a long sleeved striped velour shirt with a collar that could poke out an eye and draped in the colors of an ailing autumn. It is your grandfather's birthday and you are at a celebration of this event. You hear the dull reverberations of adults throwing their heads back with copiuos mirth in response to sentences made up of enigmatic words you feel you may never comprehend fully. At the same time you notice an odoriferous collection of perfumes and coffee wafting into your olfactory lobe. The smell is stale and throttling. You anxiously glance around the room and see alien's flesh shrouded in flower patterned fabric, throbbing with laughter and humid breath. You feel surrounded by towering masses constantly brushing against your shoulders like the threat of jagged rocks when running aground in the fog.  The immensity of these sensory stimuli causes you to seek escape. You grasp tight the half deflated balloon recently handed to you by a man referred to as "Uncle Elroy" (who seemed to know you infinitely better than you knew anything of his whiskered rotund face, although the fabric of his pants and the feeling of his 3 day old whiskers rang with a distant familiarity) and vacate the celebration hall. You quickly stride across the cheap brown tile that is more cracked than not, held in place only by gravity and the idea that it has no better purpose, and then pass into an even more cheaply carpeted foyer emblazoned with light from a dying chandelier. You pass a group of former comrades in arms, one time objects of fleeting affections and other unknown colleagues-- all now co-conspirators in your planned demise at the hand of some cruel joke or game not yet disclosed. None of this matters, you only want to quickly get away from everything you've left behind. Un-beknownst to you at your current age this will be a pattern you follow for the better part of your life. Finally, you reach a cavernous sanctuary paneled in oak boards, lightly stained. The pews adorned in wine red uniforms, stationed as regiments poised to march on the podium during every Sunday sermon. While you had hoped that the sanctity of your new environment would alleviate your previous discomfort, you reel in disdain as you notice the cacophonous sounds seeping in through the woodwork, attacking you and your pew battalions. They violently gouge every last bit of life as blood explodes and splatters in a turbulent raspberry geyser. It covers you completely. It ruins you completely. You see now why the pews are clothed in red.

You untie the knot in the balloon, your last line of defense.

This is the start of a bleeding balloon. As the wrongly imprisoned air escapes through a tightened sphincter it will first pierce your eardrum as if uninvited. It will remember the injustice of its sentence and demand repayment on those who served judgment, in this case, humanity. As it builds in intensity and density it will rip through your aural nerve like a love-sick banshee, seeing the world through eyes that, for the first time see only the beauty in all things. It will blind you with radiance through synaesthesia, but realize that it means you no malicious harm. It only wishes to atomize your perdition by splitting each hydrogen molecule in your body and releasing their energy back to the sky showing you the peaceful existence in burning alive... in infinite gravity.

In return for it's freedom it wishes to set you free.

Upon regaining your eyesight, you will notice that the sound has not subsided, but it has become bearable and dulled. It will never leave you. It will be with you always; cleansing you of the effects of your audibly thronged existence. It will greet you every morning with a reminder that escape doesn't exist. It is only a prolonging of the inevitable. Everything ends, but everything must travel to reach its end, and the reaching of the end is also the very means for never reaching it.

Please, do not refer to your handbook in hopes to review images illustrating this meaningless statement. The handbook will not help you now. We have begun a descent into the leveraged weight of all mindless excursion.

A man stands with a list of items that he reads, memorizes and then repeats aloud, fifteen times. The list is not a list, but it is the knowledge of a forgotten star contained within the repetition of words that mean nothing without the context of a distant science currently unknown to the man.

It is always assumed that distant galaxies and stars behave the same way as the ones we can see with our own eyes. This assumption could very well be wrong as we'll never be able to view our own star from another with our own eyes, but there is only one way to know if they actually do or not, and that one way of knowing is contained within the man's list and no one knows what it means. In all probability, another being who is nearly identical to you is reading a book that is nearly identical to this book on a nearly identical planet third from their nearly identical sun. They also will never be able to see their sun from our planet, just as we can never see our sun from theirs. The point of this is that we can never assume that our science is the same as distant science for the sake of writing a book that makes sense to everyone here.

The second point is that this distant star's sole purpose in the grand scheme of what we call "things" is that it sings the songs of tiny animals who cannot sing their own songs.

Tiny animals have a system in which they climb trees, grab leaves, chew on them, collect food, copulate, reproduce, rend, tear, and die. They believe this is how to create music; to sing the songs that they hear larger creatures singing. They are not wrong. Every song is sung with the belief that it is what a song should be, and every song is what it should be. And every song can have a meaning to you if you will only let it.

There is a beautiful bear with silver hair who sings the songs of destruction. He drives the workers to toil and snare and create a numinous construction. It is a shiny new portal in the woods. The song would sound familiar if you could understand it, but it is difficult for your kind. The tiny animals also never quite understand it. They continue to climb their trees and sing their songs to the universe, to the distant star, and to Zebulon; The one who signifies the end of eveything.