© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der.
Rood Der — Episode Seven: In or Out, or On the Fence
Rood Der on Kindle at Amazon
Rood Der on Nook at Barnes and Noble
Rood Der on iPhone at Apple iBooks
Rood Der for e-Readers on Kobo Books
Rood Der for e-Readers on Lulu
Rood Der for Smartphones on Google Play
Rood Der on Nook at Barnes and Noble
Rood Der on iPhone at Apple iBooks
Rood Der for e-Readers on Kobo Books
Rood Der for e-Readers on Lulu
Rood Der for Smartphones on Google Play
Rodney
was late to their late dinner at this restaurant he had never been to before,
and that’s the real reason he was late—actually, he was always late, wherever
he went—but today the GPS kept leading him right past this place, and he had
ended up circling the block three times. It was John Galt, he was the guy who
chose this place that apparently wasn’t even on a map, and what about the name
of the place—why in the world would a place be called New Jerusalem, I mean, was it some kind of joke? Some New Age
Christian place, most likely, where the ice cubes would be in the shape of the
lopped-off head of John the Baptist, and they would serve things like
Armageddon Chocolate Cake, and the wine of the day would be strawberry-banana Kool Aid. If there was absolutely anything like that, Rodney was going to
leave in protest, that would show Kool and the Gang.
Rodney checked his yarmulke, a black velvet
piece tonight, the kind of material you wore with a tuxedo. He figured his
over-sized black hoodie, faded baggy jeans, and Crocs didn’t qualify as a tuxedo, but he felt like dressing up
tonight, because things were getting truly loco
in Rand town, and that was putting it lightly.
Rodney had not accepted any facts concerning
simulations, as had most of the others, apparently. Barney was a holdout, too,
except things with Barney weren’t looking all that good. Rodney didn’t think
that Barney was actually reduced to a brain swimming like a jellyfish in a fish
aquarium, but he felt that ole Barn was most likely dead, and that message sent
to them over the television, it had all been meant to freak them out, drive
them toward something.
What they were being driven to, oh, but that
was not clear, not clear at all.
No, Rodney didn’t believe they were living in
a computer simulation, but that the Red Door, their Rood—what a stupid name,
Rood, and Cross House, too, Rodney felt that was a little religiously biased,
because come on, none of the guys were actually even Christian, except for
possibly Frederic—Rodney believed that the Red Door was a portal, to somewhere,
and maybe to a whole different somewhere else. He could buy into the
Multiverse, that there were countless other realities and existences and worlds
and universes, and that they could all be layered one on top of the other, and
perhaps every now and then they could all jostle, a few bumping edges here and
there, like a stack of papers with various media, typed pages from a typewriter,
smeary print from an old newspaper, cartoons and comics, and just due to the
friction of all that combined weight, things could sometimes transfer from one
page to the next, even if one thing didn’t have anything to do with the other
thing. Things just got pressed together, that’s all. Some mixing went on, there
was nothing magical or directed about
it.
There was no reason to believe that there was
some kind of program—the Abyss—calling the shots, choosing them, singling them
out, no, Rodney felt the guys were way over the top, they were tiptoeing around
La La Land. The System, now that was
all Hank, he had started that. Sometimes the System was the shadowy Illuminati,
sometimes it was bigger than that, an overriding program, a universal Abyss.
But it was all paranoia and borderline schizophrenia. Of course, the movie
trilogy The Matrix had screwed them
up, and royally. Because in many ways it had struck gold with all the things
they had been discussing for years.
They didn’t believe, any of them, that evil
machines or aliens were holding them in prison, nothing dramatic like that, but
all of them felt that what they saw and lived as reality, oh but that was not
real, it was all some kind of fabricated puppet show. Rodney could accept that.
Wow, that was kind of another sign of Rodney’s
many failings, because he had been involved with Hank and the Viking Simulation
Society for years and years, what was it? Since he was just a little kid,
thirteen years of age? They had known each other seventeen years now, Hank and
at least a few of the guys, babbling and gibbering this rubbish? What did that
do to your noodle?
Not that Rodney had much to lose in this
world. Because come on, he was the failure in the family. He had dropped out of
college more than five years ago, and he kept telling his parents he would go
back, and soon, and finish things off. But look at him, he was the guy still
living in his childhood home, in the same bedroom with his chess club trophies
on a little shelf his Pop had built especially for the little statues—Pop
called them the shiny golden calves. He still lived in a little boy’s room; his
folks wouldn’t even let him have the basement, like most failures received
their consignment in their own private hell.
Of course, things were looking up for Rodney,
at least they had been for the last several months, just in the money department,
and Rodney was being very careful, not to make anyone suspicious. Of course,
Uncle Chaim was highly suspicious, but he was hungry for more of the New Gold.
With all the money rolling in through the Red Door. Who wouldn’t go a little
crazy?
Rodney had channeled most of the gold coins through
his Uncle Chaim, his mother’s brother. Uncle Chaim knew people, the shady
people on the other side of the tracks, and his chain of jewelry stores were
the perfect way to move the gold quietly, across the country, out of the
country, where it could be moved into private collections, quietly, except that
some of those shady folks had begun to ask questions, such as, why is this gold
so pure? Authentic sure, but who in the world were the faces on the coins? And
why did the stuff shine so much? It was better than gold, they had begun
calling it New Gold, and they wanted more, some of the shadier people were
demanding more of the stuff, lots more, and Uncle Chaim, a clever, careful man,
wasn’t sure what to do. He was growing more than a little nervous, as was
Rodney.
Hank still had stacks of the New Gold, in
coins and little bricks, piled inside a safe right next to the Red Door. They
also had big nuggets, the size of your fist, that they had found just lying
around in that other world—apparently gold was no big deal over there.
Rodney sighed. He supposed he should go into
the New Jerusalem, the guys were
probably getting angry with him. But they were always angry with him, because
he was the guy who was always late. He was hungry. So he would go in, and
listen to their circus of madness. Apparently it was Joss that had called this
dinner meeting, and he had something to show them, and John Galt had set things
up—John always went through some elaborate charade of randomly picking a
restaurant, finding out if there was an available private room, and then
collecting about four of these restaurants and assigning them a number, and
then he would call each of the guys on their cell phones, ask them for a number
between one and seven, and then John picked the restaurant through
mathematics—he would never fully explain how he picked the restaurant, but it
all seemed highly arcane and almost occultic. Today, John had texted them,
going for extra stealth, oh boy, big whoop. Still, Rodney was hungry.
He got out of his mother’s stationwagon—believe
it or not, it was an ancient woody from the 1970s, Rodney remembers vacations
to Jackson Hole in this monster—and adjusted his yarmulke. Glancing across the
parking lot, he caught a glimpse of Jethro Mouch, trailing a stream of pipe
smoke, heading toward the New Jerusalem.
“Yo, Jethro!” Rodney called out, waving
extravagantly above his head with both arms. Jethro glanced at him and gave him
the thumbs up and they headed toward each other, angling so that they would
meet before they got to the doors of the restaurant.
“You are so late, brother,” Jethro said,
giving Rodney a hug. Rodney always went stiff in such exchanges. He enjoyed
them, sure, because most of the guys were demonstrative in their good-natured
affection, hugging and punching and firm handshakes, always making Rodney feel
like he belonged in the group. He liked all of them, except for maybe Barney,
and he wasn’t sure yet about Chen. How could you trust a guy named Joss?
“I got here the same time as you, apparently,”
Rodney said, always a little angered by the ribbing they gave him on his
tardiness.
“I got here half an hour ago, you know, early?” Jethro said. “John and Joss
wanted me to walk around the block, smoke my pipe, check out the cars.”
“They sent you out to see if anyone is
spying?” Rodney giggled. With all the elaborate measures to keep their meeting
place random, how in the world could anyone spy on them?
“Yeah, wanted me to see if there were any
telephone vans, groups of dark figures sitting in long dark cars, that kind of
thing. Strange silhouettes leaning against telephone poles, smoking unfiltered
cigarettes.”
“Anything?”
“Nope. But I’m lucky I didn’t get mugged.
Ever notice all the hoodlums out and about these days?”
Rodney snorted. “Hoodlums? Like gang members harmonizing
doo-wop, or the Jets and the Sharks?”
“Yeah, exactly that, very weird, I almost
wanted to stay and watch,” Jethro said around his pipe. His tobacco smelled
especially good. But you could never tell when Jethro was joking. He might tell
you that he had passed a velociraptor riding a Harley, and you might take him
seriously, his face changed so little, even when telling the most outrageous
lie. But you always knew the lies were meant to be funny, never deceptive or
misleading, so you had to trust Jethro, as strange as he was.
“Weird stuff, today?” Rodney asked, because
he certainly had some weird stuff to share at dinner.
“You know, the weird stuff is getting so
regular, it’s hardly weird. What would be really weird is if I suddenly had a
boring, normal day, with absolutely nothing bizarre to report, that would
certainly be weird,” Rodney said, upending his pipe and giving it a spanking,
showering ash and sparks to the pavement.
“Let’s go in, I don’t want anyone to suffer
an embolism,” Rodney said, “everyone here?”
“Yeah, except Barney, Hank, and Frederic.
Joss brought the Dell projector, apparently he has a little movie to share with
the boys.”
“I don’t know why we always have to have Joss
along,” Rodney said, “it’s not like he is one of us, he’s just a guy that Hank
hired.”
“Oh, he’s one of us, all right,” Jethro said,
biting his empty pipe stem between his teeth. “He’s been through.”
“What kind of food do they serve here,
anyway?” Rodney asked.
“Exactly what you would expect,” Jethro
replied.
“What’s that supposed to mean, I have no idea
what kind of crazy stuff a place called New
Jerusalem offers, and if they feature Kool Aid, I’m leaving,” Rodney
snapped.
“John picked it. Should be good. I’m
surprised I’ve never heard of this place before, can’t be many like it in these
parts. I glanced at the menu, Middle-Eastern stuff, you know, hummus, pita
bread, sautéed squash, lots of kabobs, falafels, grape leaves, stuff like that,
good stuff,” Jethro said, pulling open the right side of the glass doors, and
motioning to the right. There seemed to be a bustling crowd inside. It sounded
like sitar music, but that couldn’t be right. “We’re back this way in a little
meeting room.”
It was noisy in the place and there seemed to
be belly dancers moving between crowded tables, people dressed in costumes and
turbans, but Jethro skirted about all this and ducked into a dim hallway, led
them past the restrooms where a line was formed for the women’s side. There was
something off about the women in the line, but Rodney couldn’t figure out what
was bothering him. What was it? They were too diverse, a little blonde all
dressed in sexy red, a very thin woman covered by a chador—this must be the
other side of Jerusalem—but then there were two Goth lesbians all over each
other, and a little brunette that looked like a Baptist’s wife, checking her
face in a little gold mirror. At the end of the hall Jethro opened the door and
stepped aside for Rodney to enter before him, and then he closed the door
behind them.
“Okay, I think we are all here,” John Galt
said from the head of the table on the far side of the smallish room. There was
enough room for servers to move around the table, but not much more room than
that.
Ronald Rand half rose and motioned to the
center of the table where an assortment of dishes butted against one another,
and said: “we’ve got some appetizer’s here, this one is meat kabobs, I think
lamb, and this is the vegetarian version of the same thing on this plate, and
this is spicy hummus, this is regular hummus, you dip these little pieces of
bread into the hummus. And then use your imagination, Rodney.”
“I know how food works,” Rodney said,
unzipping his hoodie. He had an I Want to
Believe, X-files t-shirt on underneath, complete with little flying saucer.
“Good to have you, Rodney, thanks for showing
up. Anything, Jethro?” John said.
“Just some very weird dancing gangbangers,
and a doo-wop group at the corner, they were very good, but nothing, you
know...suspicious,” Jethro said,
straight-faced, moving his pipe from the right side of his mouth to the left.
“Good, good,” John said.
“You don’t think what he just said is...weird?”
Rodney queried, seizing a bit of pita bread and swiping it through the spicy hummus.
“I’ve gotta tell you,” John Galt said, “I
think we might be in a very unusual place, and so nothing tonight is going to
sound even a bit weird. Try the lamb kabob, it is amazing.”
“I’ve got this set up, anytime you want me to
turn it on,” Joss Chen said, kneeling before the Dell projector, fiddling with
his super-boosted Microsoft Surface Pro 5.
“We can do some eating first, touch base on
what we are all experiencing,” John said. “Anything anyone can tell me about
this place, anything that stands out?”
“I had to go around the block three times
before I knew where it was,” Ronald Rand said, “the GPS kept moving the final
flag around on me. I had to get out of the car to even find the place.”
“Same here,” said Jethro.
“Yeah, wow,” Rodney said, “I seriously had to
go around the block three times, and every time it looked different, all the
stores and shops, very disorienting.”
“Can I get a show of hands?” John asked. “How
many of us had to drive around the block three times?”
It was unanimous, as all five of them raised
their hands.
“Was anyone not using their GPS to get here?” John asked.
Joss Chen raised his hand. “I thought I knew
this neighborhood, so I just drove down, and I kept going around the block. I
agree with Rodney, it was very disorienting, as if I woke up in a city that I
do not know.”
“So whatever is affecting this area, or
affecting us in this area, it’s more
than just technology,” John said. “And I won’t supply the details, but this restaurant
was chosen randomly, and per vote, which each of us participated in, by
choosing a number. I used the new disposable phone and each of you responded
via text message. Independently, all of us chose this restaurant. And what I’ve
had of it thus far, the food is good, and some of it is very good, and I don’t
particularly like finger foods. Has anyone been to this place before?”
“Blah blah blah,” muttered Rodney.
Everyone voted no, but since the food in the dishes was rapidly vanishing,
apparently everyone agreed with John’s opinion as to the quality of the food.
The waitress entered quietly from behind a
curtain across the room from the only door. She was a tall woman, with
dyed-black hair and big, luminescent green eyes. The skin of her cheeks was
quite pocked, which was probably the first thing you noticed about her, except
for the eyes—the size, large, and the disturbing greenness of her irises—and
the cheekbones, incredibly sharp and high, too sharp to be considered
attractive. She came around the table, stopping first at Joss Chen. She stared
at him.
“Oh,” he said after a moment, as he had
provided her a small space to speak, because he didn’t know if she was here for
drink orders, or for the dinner order. “I guess I’ll have the vegetable
platter, with stuffed grape leaves.”
She continued to stare at him.
“And hot tea,” Joss concluded, looking at her
as if he might have flunked her test. “Oolong tea? If you don’t have it, any
hot tea is fine.”
She nodded to him and moved on to Rodney, who
ordered lamb kabobs and a glass of red wine. The waitress never spoke, but she
stared at each of them in turn with those strange, green eyes. She really did
stare into their eyes, with command. She had the eyes of a cat, fascinating and
strangely colored, although each man could not hold her odd stare for long. She
held a pad and a pen but never seemed to use them.
“What’s with the waitress, she got a problem,
or what?” Rodney blurted, as soon as the curtain stopped moving with her
departure.
“Something, but it’s the first I’ve seen of
her,” John said. “I did notice that her name is Phoebe.”
“It’s a bird, and a beetle,” Jethro said. “Phoebe,
plus the only character on Friends
that I liked.”
“I was thinking of the Titan, Phoebe,” Joss
Chen said.
“I was thinking of the moon,” said John Galt.
“The moon is not named Phoebe,” said Rodney.
“The moon is
named Phoebe, if it journeying around the Planet Saturn,” John Galt returned.
“Thought that was Titan,” said Rodney.
“That is another moon of Saturn,” Ronald Rand
said, “along with Enseladus, and Janus, and, and, well, that’s about all the
moons of Saturn I can think of, never big on astronomy, unfortunately.”
Jethro fidgeted with his pipe, but he glanced
at the red no-smoking sign, and continued to chew on the nib, his hands
fretting with the silverware on the deep red tablecloth.
“She was nice about letting me hang the white
tablecloth on the wall,” Joss Chen said, indicating the wall where he had
draped the large cloth, which would provide a screen for the movie projector.
“Well of course she’d be nice to you,” Rodney sneered, rolling his eyes
in exaggeration, with just a little too much emphasis on the last word. Joss merely
glanced at him, but John Galt stared.
“Something bugging you?” John Galt asked, “I
sense a little negativity rolling off you, Rodney, and I mean more than your
usual negative self.”
“I’m not negative,” Rodney said, but even he
thought he said it in a whine.
“That was pretty negative, right there,” Ron
said, grinning, but it didn’t piss off Rodney, because at twenty-five years of
age Ron was the baby of the group, and whenever he said anything like that, it
was generally good-natured, he was a teaser, and a genius—for an engineer, that
is, something like Steve Wozniak, only in bifocals.
“Disagreeing is not being negative,” Rodney
snipped at him.
“Oops, negative again,” Ron said, now smiling
hugely, his big-ass bifocal glasses reflecting the lights of the room like
mirrors.
Rodney pushed up his own big glasses with his
middle finger.
“Today,” he said, “I’ve been noticing a whole
lot of repetition going on. My Mom came into my room and asked me if I had any
laundry, and I told her I do my own laundry. I was playing Xbox, The Walking Dead,
and about two minutes later she came in and asked me the exact same question,
in exactly the same way.”
“It’s not just senility?” Ron asked.
Rodney gave him the dagger eyes.
“Oh,” Ron said, realizing how it might have
sounded, “no, Rodney, I just meant, you know, mothers can do that, ask you the
same thing over and over again, especially when they’re getting up there in
age.”
“My mother is only in her fifties,” Rodney
said, “and she’s not getting bad with her memory. Or maybe she’s only sixty, I
can’t remember. No, this was weird, because I’ve been doing my own laundry
since I was fifteen years old, and I can’t remember the last time she offered
to do my laundry. Plus, in The Walking
Dead game, I’m pretty sure Barney showed up as a zombie, trying to
communicate or something.”
“Well, that would certainly go along with the
brain in a vat movie yesterday,” John Galt said. “We all witnessed that, so
this could be more of the same thing.”
“I was going through this neighborhood and
there was, like, nothing, the big zilch, and then I saw this red Trans Am, or
maybe it was a Dodge Duster, I can’t keep them straight, but it was a big
bright muscle car, red, just the kind of stupid car you-know-who likes, and
there he was Barney, behind the wheel, looking very ripe, struggling and
moaning and still recognizable, and remember those girls in the beauty pageant
swimsuits and sashes? One was seat-belted in the passenger seat, and there were
two more in the backseat, so come on, that was the same thing. I doubt I’ll
ever play that game again, well, maybe that game, just not in that area.”
“And that’s it?” John asked.
“That’s it? What do you mean, that’s it?
There was a whole bunch of that stuff going on, all day today,” Rodney said. “It’s
getting ridiculous. Tomorrow I might not even be able to get out of bed!”
They compared notes, going around the table,
and all of them had some odd episodes where it felt like they were living
things over again, or having flashbacks to their childhood, all the usual
coincidences and moments of eerie déjà vu they had been experiencing for years,
but were now experiencing at an alarming rate and frequency and volume—it was
getting ridiculous, as Rodney said—and they had just gotten around the table to
Joss Chen and his movie.
“How long is it, the video you compiled?”
John Galt asked.
“Not very long. What I have to show, what I
recorded earlier today, is only about three minutes long. I edited to show the
pertinent parts, and even then, I do not have any answers for you, but this
will certainly open up more questions.”
Joss Chen turned on the projector, juggled it
a bit to center the image on the white tablecloth hanging suspended between two
light fixtures. Then he tapped his expensive laptop and an image of a bright
window appeared, with strange shapes cracking into the glass, with splinters of
shattering glass appearing, and then the camera zoomed in to show, close-up,
strange reflective creatures. Little bees, distinctively bees, but smaller than
common houseflies, they were the size of ladybugs, but looked just like
miniature bumblebees, with yellow and black markings on furry bodies. These
were not creatures of nature, but little machines, constructed to look like
bees, but they were just a little too shiny, and they moved far too quickly,
trekking all over the glass, making little circles and shapes, performing.
Standing in the restaurant, now, Joss Chen
was suffused with horror, because the other guys were watching, they saw what
he had seen, and almost terribly, this was no hallucination, it was all real.
And the words it had spelled out to him, those words.
Suddenly the nanobot bumblebees moved into a
flowing shape, streaking along the glass, all of the miniature machines forming
into an infinity symbol, flowing. The mecha-insects flowed into a Moebius strip,
crossing over itself, but still making the sign of infinity. Then the nanobees
seemed to double on the screen and while the Moebius strip continued to flow,
it shrunk in on itself as a rectangle formed around the sign of infinity, and
then it looked like a door formed on the window, with the infinity symbol
inside, and then the Moebius strip changed with a circle forming about it, and
then weirdly, it took on the shape of the Planet Saturn with its big ring—except
that the ring was still the infinity symbol, a door that leads to infinity, and
the Planet Saturn, and then upon the glass the door turned red—it was a red
door with that symbol, and it was all moving, shimmering, and then the door began
to open—
—Joss switched off the projector, and closed
his laptop.
“Hey, why?” began several of the guys, but
they noticed where Joss was looking. There stood the waitress, returned with a rolling
tray, and all their meals and drinks. Her strange eyes continued to stare at
the white tablecloth on the wall. The guys sat back, silent as the waitress
began moving about them, setting their food and drinks before them, with
flawless inerrancy.
“Thank you, Phoebe,” John Galt said,
surprising the other guys, as he was the last of them to consider flirting with
a waitress, ever.
“Thank you, John Galt, but can anyone tell me—who is John Galt?” the waitress said,
making the old joke that anyone made when they learned his name. The only thing
was, he doubted that he had ever told the waitress his name.
“That’s what we want to know,” said Rodney,
attempting to be cheeky. The waitress turned her green cat’s eyes upon him.
Rodney gulped and looked down.
“And who are you, Rodney Weinstein? Why the
headgear? Are you yearning to return to something you have never known? You
feel like a failure, and yet, how could you have failed anything, when you have
never exerted yourself toward anything other than computer games, and monster
movies? You are not a failure, and you have unlimited vistas before you, if you
can only but find the courage within yourself to set out.”
It was dead silence in the room, they couldn’t
even hear the music through the walls—that was strange, because only moments
before, you could hear a whole crowd just outside of this room, but now, they
could just as easily be on the moon, it was that quiet.
“Do you have something to say to us, Phoebe?”
Joss Chen asked, both his hands on the table, his head down, watching her
through the very tops of his eyes. He looked like a hunting dog, coiled to
spring, very, very still, but about to pounce forward upon his prey. Or, more
likely, he was about to spring backward, and flee this aggressively strange
woman with the green cat’s eyes.
“That depends, Joss Chen, are you in, or are
you out? You cannot remain sitting on the fence, not much longer. This is not a
game. I am certain that all of you are beginning to understand this. You have
not stumbled upon a little secret to aid you in increasing wealth. You have
received the signs, and you are all inadvertently drawing the attention of
various parties that will deal with you in very different ways, once they are
truly aware of what you are doing.
“You mentioned some of the interested
parties. Enseladus, if he stood where I am standing, right at this moment,
there would be no talking. He and his clones would escort you from this room,
and from this world. Thankfully, for you, he is rather preoccupied at the
moment. He does not know of you, of that I am quite certain. This...world of yours, it is rather transitory,
and pathetic, if I might say. I do not wish to hurt any of you, or make you
feel bad, and I realize that this world is all that you have ever had, or
known, until very recently.
“I am certain that your friend Bernard has
met with one above me, Mr. Kronoss, and perhaps one much higher than him. You
will probably not see your friend again, at least not in this world.”
And she seemed to be finished speaking to
them. She began withdrawing, walking backward, her strange eyes watching them,
and she drew the serving cart along with her, although her hands were at her
sides, nowhere near the cart.
“Excuse me, Phoebe,” Joss Chen said, “but you
alluded to a hierarchy, can I inquire as to your position, in the grand scheme
of things?”
She smiled then, cocking her head, pausing
just before the curtain that led from the room.
“Hierarchy? Very good, Joss Chen. I would be
considered one of the lesser moons of Saturn, an outlier, if you will, the
patron saint of outliers, such as those in this room. I do not amount to much,
not in the...grand scheme of things, as you say, and neither do my chosen.”
She was gone.
“There was another thing,” Joss Chen said, “a
word the nanobots spelled out, just before attacking the window. I went back
later for my binoculars, but they crumpled in my fingers, somehow made brittle,
they turned to dust. But I saw a final word that they spelled, one that I did
not know, but have since looked up. TEOTWAWKI.”
John Galt snorted, and then he and Rodney
said, in unison: “The End of the World as We Know It.”
© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der.
Rood Der — Episode Seven: In or Out, or On the Fence
If you like Rood Der, try
Vestigial Surreality online free:
Vestigial Surreality online free:
© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der. All Rights Reserved by the Author, Douglas Christian Larsen. No part of this serial fiction may be reproduced (except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews) or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher, Wolftales UNlimited, but please feel free to share the story with anyone, only not for sale or resale. This work is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental (wink, wink).
Douglas Christian Larsen FREE Short Fiction
Read FREE Sample Chapters of the Douglas Christian Larsen Novel:
Read FREE Sample Chapters of the Rodolphus Novels:
DCLWolf Links:
related terms, ideas, works:
ancestor simulation, digital ark, salvation of humanity,
vestigial surreality, manda project, rocket to saturn,
the singularity, the butterfly effect, simulated reality, matrix,
virtual reality, otherland, the matrix, 1q84, haruki murakami,
hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world, dreaming,
the dream place, waking from a dream, ready player one,
hologram, holodeck, saturn, saturnalia, cycles of time,
simulacron-3, daniel f. galouye, counterfeit world,
tad williams, science fantasy, science fiction,
Victor Frankenstein, Nikola Tesla, genius
do we live in a computer simulation?
mystery, thriller, horror, techno thriller,
signs and wonders, vestigial surreality,
william gibson, neal stephenson, serial,
cyberpunk, dystopian future, apocalypse,
scifi, mmorpg, online video game world,
end times, apocalypse, armageddon,
digital universe, hologram universe,
sunday sci-fi fantasy serial fiction,
virtual reality, augmented reality
the unknown writer blog
are we living in a simulation?
puppets, puppetry, punch & judy
elon musk, Tesla, VR, mmorpg
simulated world, data is data
simulation hypothesis
simulation argument
nick bostrom
No comments:
Post a Comment