REQUIEM (for Marianne Martin)

					

	REQUIEM (for Marianne Martin) part one - MOOSE (of Algonquian origin; akin to Massachusett, moos, moose...) The trade school smellt like floor wax and ambition. Marianne's fingers knew the keys - QWERTY, home row, the mechanical click that would be her ticket to somewhere. (cacophony of typewriter a framed photograph of her mid-laugh...) Eugene Martin filled the doorway like summer weather rolling in. They called him Moose. Not because of antlers or woods, but because their Chief Petty Officer had watched him try to duck through a destroyer's hatchway at seventeen and barked: "Martin! You're built like a goddamn moose!" The name stuck to his dress whites like salt spray. It's a pier slick with Pacific spray of shoulders and sun-grin... He took the desk beside her. "This seat taken?" "It's trade school, sailor. Everything's available for the right price." His laugh was warm. "What's your rate?" "Coffee. And you tell me why a Navy man needs to learn typing." "Admiral's yeoman track. Turns out the Navy runs on paper, not just diesel." They married three months later. November 1950. The Korean War saw new recruits; A thousand French men called Bataillon de Coree arrived after double that amount from Thailand had been deployed as the 21st Royal Thailand Regimental Combat Team. The world was different then, or was it? The second floor of the White House was demolished and the northeast section was being repaired. As unlikely as it seems, the east wing is being demolished to make way for a ballroom. But this is not Truman Vs Trump...In fact, the fourteenth dalai lama was enthroned in November 1950. The New York times talked about the aging city hall roof, calling it a structure with a hundred and thirty nine year old sag... At another City Hall and with a borrowed dress. No honeymoon - (his ship left in two weeks) only vows. That's when she learnt the real Navy. Not the recruiting posters. Not the dress whites and shore leave grins. The waiting Navy. Their first apartment in San Diego: thin walls, thinner curtains, twelve other Navy wives in the same building. You could hear everything - babies crying, radios murmuring, the particular silence of women listening for telegrams. Thomas came August '51. Moose got the news in a radio message somewhere off Okinawa. He held his son for the first time when Tommy was four months old. The baby didn't recognize him. Cried when this strange man in dress blues tried to pick him up. Cried like the Tatra Type 97 when Volkswagon brought out the Type 1, which we all know as the Beetle, from Uitenhage, SA. Marianne learnt the vocabulary: Deployment. Underway. Pier-side. WESTPAC. Six months gone, three months home, repeat. The math of military marriage. She learnt the rituals too: The Telegram Watch: Every Navy wife knew. Western Union boy on a bicycle meant one of three things: Change of orders. Injury. Or the one they never said out loud. You'd see a shadow turn the corner and every woman on the block would come to her window. Waiting to see which door it'd knock on. (mesmerized by names that tasted like forbidden fruits...) The Casserole Chain: When Julie Morrison's husband went down with appendicitis in the Philippines, the chain activated. Monday: tuna noodle. Tuesday: chicken and rice. Wednesday: pot roast. Someone always had your six. That's what Moose would say: "You girls got each other's six?" The Pier: Oh God, the pier. Homecoming day. You'd dress up - hair done, best dress, lipstick even though you'd been up since 0400. Pronounced oh four hundred. The kids in their Sunday clothes. Hundreds of wives and children pressed against the chain-link, scanning the rail of the carrier for your face among the hundreds in dungarees. The ship would slide in, massive and grey and surreal, and you couldn't breathe until you spotted him. That specific tilt of his head. That Moose-shaped outline. Wayne came in '53. The Korean war was coming to an end, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Shane, and From here to Eternity were playing on the big screen. Then Linda in '55. The family felt a bit like Austria...occupied for years by an alliance of nations that were otherwise locked in a global ideological struggle; the US, the UK, France, and the USSR...in their case Wayne and Tommy suddenly taking the backseat as the baby girl sat upfront like an emerging nation. She'd fall into sleeping wizards. into sleeping wizards where the scent was of contented sighs in her mind... Three kids, five apartments, eight deployments. She weighed it all down humming Baker's Funny Valentine, thinking with resolve, I won't change a thing. Marianne became someone she didn't exactly expect to be after trade school: a woman who could change a car tire, unclog a drain, talk down a landlord, and sing three children to sleep while doing mental math on how to make $63 last until the allotment check cleared. In many cities now, it could hardly be done... Eight hundred in "today's" dollars. The house sing again. house sing again... The Navy gave them nothing and everything. In her dreams there were broken coins, the fragments multiplying little silver eagles, each one grounded, unable to fly... Nothing: No stability. No roots. No guarantee he'd come back. Everything: A tribe. A purpose. A peculiar kind of pride. When Moose made Chief Petty Officer in '62, she cried in the commissary. Not because of the pay raise. Because he'd made it. Her sailor. Her Moose. Of course, part of her tears were for Marilyn Monroe as she had found no time to mourn the shocking passing of a starlet that some had said held a resemblance to her. Always flattered, yet dismissive - thinking oh no I don't have the elegance, the stature - never knowing that she was actually a bit taller than Norma Jeane Baker. (ink and ambition a world away loss and love. loss and love...)     
	- part two -        "I know my waist is slender, my fingers they are small All it would not make me tremble to see ten thousand fall..."       The mother of three had never heard of Marilyn's brother, Robert Kermitt Baker who was nicknamed Jackie and passed away at fifteen before he could meet his famed sister. Or, for that matter, of Miss Monroe's sister, Berniece Baker Miracle - author of the book My Sister, Marilyn. Despite knowledge, the days will develop - they will become years, decades and and so on. When Dr Suess published his warning to humanity via The Lorax, She found her husband confronting the challenge of quasi-Once-lers in the form of retirement and she could sense his longing for the Truffula seas. Like a rope suddenly cut. Twenty-one years of tension, gone. Now what? Mona Rae Miracle, Berniece's daughter, planned to write a novel about Miami in the 1970s which she has not yet finished but is called Warm Bodies. There was a rising coldness within the era, as if the irony of the peace and love movement in the face of the Vietnam war had made the soul of a nation implode. Nobody knew who they were exactly. Bright lights were turned up flashing in Discoteque nights but people didn't find themselves at night, only drugs and eventually pornography. /lined with their own symphonies of little notes to flesh... Moose and Marianne weren't party animals but the restless nature of the epoch could not be escaped. They became nomads. Not by orders this time - by choice. Or maybe by momentum. They'd been told where to live so long, they didn't know how to stop moving. Louisiana: Thick heat and stranger accents. Moose worked civil service on a naval air station. It felt wrong - putting on civilian clothes to go to a Navy job. Like wearing someone else's skin. Mississippi: Slower. Sweeter. Magnolia and memory. But still not theirs. New York: A mistake. Too fast, too loud, too much concrete. They lasted eight months. Back to California. Then the visit to Linda at Malmstrom AFB in '75. Air Force base, but still military. Still that feeling of home they'd carried in their bones. And Montana...Formerly the Montana Territory. /was there see? was there see? Learning the slow... Montana...The word cites Latin; mountainous. Montana was an exhalation. As if in opposition to Hank Williams Jr's fall, their spirits rose. After decades of close quarters - submarine apartments, sardine cities, the claustrophobic press of waiting - Montana offered space. The sky wasn't sky. It was permission. Permission to breathe. To be small. To let the bigness of the world just... be. 59412 a population of very few dozens. They bought the house in Belt. (Nixon was being spanked by the press but they were watching The Six Million Dollar Man which ABC shifted up an hour from its seven thirty Sunday night slot in that autumnal September.) /just started mapping a new wild see... --Racing against time, Steve Austin infiltrates hostile territory, survives deadly traps set by a warrior who's spent three decades perfecting guerrilla tactics... Moose notices Marianne was already in her night gown. (A fanatical Japanese holdout from WWII has emerged from the jungle with stolen naval intelligence and a devastating nerve gas weapon—threatening to destroy an entire U.S. Navy fleet and the base that supports it...) Moose feels an usual thrill, although he listens more than watches the drama unfold... The bionic man's enhanced abilities are pushed to their limits as he navigates treacherous jungle terrain and engages in brutal hand-to-hand combat with this skilled adversary who fights with nothing to lose. Moose pulls his wife atop himself on the sofa... Steve has to use his bionic speed to outmaneuver booby traps! Moose senses his wife's hesitation, what if the kids get home early, why don't we go to bed like we always do... Steve Austin tears through fortified bunkers with his enhanced vision to spot hidden explosives before they detonate. Moose like his name would suggest was mating in the fall, a period termed the rut, where males compete for females. Of course he didn't have to dig out and piss in a mud pit, to attract his cow with strong scent yet he had to be bull-headed enough to convince her that it was all right to orgasm during the episode... The kamikaze has positioned the nerve gas to strike at the heart of Navy operations—and as the deadline approaches, Steve crashes through enemy defenses, engages in a desperate struggle aboard a military vessel, and violently wrestles the weapon away from its detonation trigger in the final explosive confrontation. Moose sighed as his thick short pee-pee exploded at the sound of his wife's completion-coo and the Bold laundry detergent advert came on showing a littel girl playing with a big dog...the voice over mommy said matter of factly; "but you know I'm not my mother. I think getting dirty is the sign of a good active kid. The way I look at it, it's a lot better than having kids sitting around the house doing nothing, besides I've got a detergent mother didn't have. Bold with heavy duty cleaning energy. Bold's modern power formula was created for today's mothers who want their things more than clean, more than white. Bold helps make them bright..." Everything was coming together for them in a nothing town. A handful of buildings and a grain elevator and roads that ran straight to the horizon. In winter they went south. In summer they came back. Snowbirds. Migratory. Still Navy, in a way. A desk-chair existence. sweet reward. Still underway.  
	Part Three    -Океан-      "Okean" was borrowed from the Greek "Ōkeanós," the primordial Titan who personified the great, world-encircling river. This name, in turn, springs from an ancient Proto-Indo-European root for "water," a lineage it shares with the English "ocean" and "aquatic." Moose died on a Tuesday. In the garden. One minute there, one minute gone. Clean, the doctor said. Quick. Like the Navy taught him. No one suspected the illness had taken a decade to devour him... (old Chevrolet tracing a faithful line between Montana winters and Arizona sun) One day the pickup truck's radio, usually just background noise, snagged his attention. A clipped, urgent voice from a distant station, fighting through the static of the Montana plains: "...repeat, a Soviet submarine, the Komsomolets, is reporting a catastrophic incident... fears for the crew..." So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells --- Moose's large hand, resting on the wheel, went tight. The signal dissolved into a hiss of white noise, leaving him with nothing but the ghost of the words. Catastrophic incident. He knew the language. It was the language of a world ending in a steel tube. He drove the rest of the way home in a profound silence. For the week that followed, he was a man possessed by a quiet, grim purpose. The shortwave radio in his den glowed into the night as he sifted the airwaves for facts, his own private intelligence operation. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells -- The story that assembled itself in his mind was one of tragic, almost mythical, irony. He learned of the Komsomolets—the Mike-class, Project 685. A ghost of a boat, born from a 1966 design brief for a test submarine to conquer the abyssal depths. He pictured the Rubin Design Bureau bending titanium alloy into a hull that could withstand 1,000 meters of crushing pressure, a technological marvel. But great performance came at a price. The construction in Severodvinsk was a nightmare of delays and expense, so prohibitive that only one was ever built. K-278. A unique, priceless, and lonely creature of the deep. And they had sent it out with a green crew. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells --- This fact stuck in Moose's craw. The first crew, the salt-dogs who'd spent four years learning the boat's every sigh and shudder, were gone. Replaced by new men under Captain Second Rank Evgeny Vanin. No proper damage control department. Moose knew what that meant. On a submarine, every man is a fireman. A disorganized crew was a dead crew. On the seventh day, the worst was confirmed. The details emerged, each one a hammer blow. A fire in the aft compartment. A high-pressure air line rupture feeding the flames. Captain Vanin's fatal hesitation—the impossible choice between sacrificing the men in compartment seven or saving the ship. The missed moment, the fire spreading. The emergency blow, the desperate climb to the surface from 500 meters, the crew spilling onto the deck, gasping in the Arctic air, only to watch the sound-absorbing coating on the hull melt and drip from the inferno within. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells ---- Moose saw it all in his mind's eye with terrifying clarity. The frantic, plain-text SOS. The Soviet search plane circling helplessly overhead. The final, fatal mistake—flooding the aft ballast tanks in a rough sea, destroying their last shred of buoyancy. The order to abandon ship. The lifeboats that wouldn't deploy, forcing men into the lethally cold water. And then, the captain. Vanin. Evgeny. He saw him, this other Eugene, turning his back on the open sea and going back inside the dying ship. He would have been searching for stragglers, men lost in the smoke and toxic fumes. He found five, herded them into the escape pod. But the boat was already at an 80-degree angle, plunging stern-first into the black. The pod, designed for salvation, became a coffin. It tore free at a depth no man was meant to survive, only to betray them at the surface, the hatch blowing out from the pressure difference, flooding the chamber. Captain First Rank Evgeny Vanin did not drown. He and three others had already been claimed by the carbon monoxide that filled their steel lung. He was unconscious when the sea poured in. On the eleventh day, the final tally was known. Forty-two of the sixty-nine crew were dead. The Soviet Navy had lost its deepest-diving hunter. A piece of radioactive wreckage lay on the seabed, and a fishing ban settled over the site. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells ----- Moose stood staring out at the immutable Rockies. He had been there for an hour. Maybe hours. "They're gone, aren't they?" Marianne said softly, coming to stand beside him. Moose didn't turn. His reflection in the glass was a pale ghost overlaid on the solid earth. "The Captain's name was Vanin," he said, his voice a rusted hinge. "Evgeny Vanin." He fell silent again, the shared name hanging between them—Eugene and Evgeny. "He was their Moose, Marianne," he finally whispered, the words costing him everything. "He was their big, dependable son of a bitch. And he had to watch his boys die." That was the moment. Not when the news confirmed it, but right then, in the quiet of their living room, with the image of another Eugene facing an impossible duty at the bottom of the sea. It was a deep, profound rupture in the bedrock of him. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells ------ A fundamental heartbreak for forty-two men he'd never met, for a Captain who bore his name, for the beautiful brotherhood of the deep that demanded such a price. It was the first true crack in the hull of him, a weakness that would, in time, let the whole sea in. The world Moose left in 1999 was a ghost of the one he had served in. The great Soviet fleet he had spent his career watching was rusting at its piers. He read the brief, inside-page articles : the endless delays for a single new destroyer, the Admiral Chabenenko; the humiliating negotiations to sell a proud carrier, the Admiral Gorshkov, for scrap metal to India. It was a fire sale of a superpower. (Their children married, grandchildren were born, and the sharp edges of their Navy-era wanderings softened into the deep, grooves of a long marriage. The world beyond their mountains seemed to recede, a distant murmur. a rumor in fact except for the remnants of the Komsomolets nightmare) On the television, now with twentyfour hour coverage, a different kind of war flickered—the flames of urban chaos of the Second Chechen War, a conflict with no front lines and no honor he could recognize. And in the Kremlin, the ailing, unpredictable Yeltsin was fading, making way for a hard-faced, unknown ex-spy, that had stood alone against rioters in shadowy East Berlin with a quick-cool-poker face that made them all back down, named Putin. Like Marianne found a quiet rebellion. a quiet rebellion. A different solidity her in the empty spaces her heartbroken Moose had left before leaving... The old order was not just gone; its corpse was being picked over. For a man whose soul was tuned to the deep, the silence from the ocean must have been deafening. The shipyards were quiet. The focus had shifted from the sea to the mountains, from fleet exercises to haunted inner special operations. Like Marianne found a quiet rebellion. a quiet rebellion. A different solidity her in the empty spaces her heartbroken Moose had left before leaving... In the garden in 1999, it would seem only logical that Neptune had spared him further anguish taking him before the Kursk. The world was looking inland, at the smoldering ruins of Grozny. Just months later, the Kursk would sink during a naval exercise, its crew slowly dying while a bickering still cold world watched, unable to help. He never had to hear the desperate, futile tapping from inside the hull that would resound around the globe—a sound that would have been brutal to his ears, to his mind...A vibration that would have worsened the malady which had begun in 1989 and made it devastating. Like Marianne found a quiet rebellion. a quiet rebellion. A different solidity her in the empty spaces her heartbroken Moose had left before leaving... For Moose, it was a mercy. The heart that first faltered in hurt silence for the men of the Komsomolets was spared the final, shattering blow of the Kursk. He was laid to rest in the Montana earth as the century turned, the last of the great, grey ships of his life slipping quietly beneath the horizon for good. The last thing Marianne did for him was to pack away those journals, her fingers smoothing the pages he had studied so intently. She closed the cover on that chapter of his life. When the news broke in August 2000, the first, unbidden thought that came to her was one of profound, shattering relief. Thank God. Thank God he was not here to hear about this. Like Marianne found a quiet rebellion. a quiet rebellion. A different solidity her in the empty spaces her heartbroken Moose had left before leaving... Marianne moved to Great Falls. Smaller house. Quieter. She learned to be alone. She haunted garage sales like they were ports of call. Collected porcelain and old books. Planted petunias and tomatoes. Had lunch with the other widows - a fleet of women who'd all waited, all survived. And she talked to him. Not crazy-talk. Not séances. Just... the conversation that doesn't end when someone ships out. She's kneeling, thinking; "You'd be complaining about your back by now." His voice in her head, easy as memory: "And you'd be telling me to stop complaining and hand you the trowel." "The kids are good. Tommy's boy got his pilot's license. Commercial, not military. Smart kid." "Takes after his grandmother." "Wayne still runs that shop. Says he learned everything from taking apart your lawn mower." "That mower was a piece of shit." "It was. But it taught him." The wind moved through the grass. Honest and clean. "Linda called from Germany. She's making Colonel." "Damn right she is." She finally had him all to herself, except that life's irony decided that silence was better. Some women can never be made to shut up, however, and she continued speaking - if only to herself; something ate my son, my boy. But it wasn't a thing. It was invisible. There is the space now where I am floating into, flying to - I want to be be there for Wayne and Linda and all my grand or great grand children but look at my hands, these old, mapped hands that held him when he was new. That held him when he was a red-faced, squalling thing in a navy-town apartment, all promise and fury. These hands tucked his football jersey into his pants, packed his bag for college, waved goodbye as he drove away to a life of his own making. The one who made me a mother. He had his father's build, but my eyes. And now… where does all that go? Where does the strength go? Does it just… evaporate? Is that what the last breath is, all that life turning to mist? I pick up the photograph of him in his Thunderbirds uniform, #24. He looked invincible. He was invincible. He fought it, you know. He fought it like he fought everything in his life—with a list, with a plan, with a stubborn, quiet excellence that made your chest ache with pride. My hero, he called himself. And he was. He was my hero long before the disease. But heroes aren't supposed to fall. Mothers aren't supposed to have to bury their heroes. I think of Moose. I think of telling him, wherever he is. "Moose," I'd say, "our boy. our Tommy." but I can only hear the silence from his end of the line, a silence deeper than any ocean. He's been gone twenty years, but this… this would have broken him all over again. The grandchildren. Oh, God, the grandchildren. They have his smile. They ask about him with a confusion that is its own kind of knife cutting into soul. I want to tell them everything. I want to tell them how he raked pine needles and hated every one, how he couldn't dance, how his humor was so bad it was good. I want to build a monument of memories for them, so he's never just a face in a picture. But all I have is the knowledge that part of me died too. The second, the first vanished when Moose went away... This house is too full of them and not enough of them. I put the photograph down. The glass is cool against my fingertips. The weight of it. This is the real weight. Not the weight of years, or of boxes moved across a continent. It's the weight of a love that has nowhere left to go. It just sits here, in my chest, a second, silent throb, beating only with the rhythm of what's been lost. The final third part of this woman found its conclusion In the Beehive - her final duty station - the walls were pale yellow and the nurses were kind. Her children visited. Grandchildren. Even a great-grandchild, once. But mostly she sat in her chair by the window and watched the sky. Watched it until, at long last, she could hear Moose respond; "Is it safe?" His voice, closer now. "The harbor. Is it safe?" "It's safe, Moose." "Then I'll wait here. Take your time, Mare. Finish your watch." And she did. Until one morning in the Autumn - only a few weeks of their anniversary; they'd married seventy-four years before - Marianne slipped her moorings. Heaven, if that's what it was, looked like a pier. Not pearly gates. Not clouds. A pier. Weathered wood and salt air and the creak of lines against the dock. The light was golden and clean, like Montana sun, but warmer. Kinder. And there he was. Moose. Not old. Not young. Just... Moose. In his dress blues. Chief's anchors gleaming. "Took you long enough, Mare." She looked down. She was wearing the dress from their wedding. The borrowed one. Somehow it fit again. "I finished my watch." "I know you did. Seventy-four years. Hell of a deployment." She stepped forward and he caught her - solid, real, there. The way he'd been on every homecoming pier. That moment when the waiting ended and he was real again under her hands. "The kids?" she asked. "Safe. Still underway. They'll make it home when it's time." She looked around. The pier stretched in both directions - infinite, impossible. And all along it, people were meeting. Sailors in dress whites. Women in borrowed dresses. Children running. The whole fleet, finally home. "Is this it?" she asked. "Is this Heaven?" Moose smiled. "Mare, Heaven's not a place. It's a reunion. It's every homecoming that ever mattered. It's every pier where someone waited and someone came back." "But there were times you didn't come back on time. There were deployments that got extended." "I know. And you waited anyway." "I did." "That's the thing about the Navy, Mare. It teaches you waiting isn't passive. It's the other half of service. You served too. Every day I was gone, you served." She understood then. All those unaccounted lives - the wives, the children, the ones who held the fort. They'd served too. Their names weren't on any deployment orders, but they'd been underway just the same. "So what now?" she asked. Moose tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. "Now? Now we walk the pier. Together. No more deployments. No more waiting. Just... home." They walked. Behind them, the pier filled with other reunions. Julie Morrison and her husband, the appendicitis sailor. Chief Finnegan, the hard-case who'd named Moose. Marianne's mother. Moose's father. All the people who'd shaped them. Muscovites and even musicians with instruments at the ready. All the ordinary, important, unaccounted lives. The sun didn't set. It didn't need to. Chet made a signal and notes rose, he sang the first verse too low to be heard, then the second; "Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art..." Marianne glowed and gazed at her husband with eyes that danced. They were home.  -inky 10/30/2025 

				

deja vu glitch excerpt

					

	entangled across t=1970s → Roman Egypt → 2023 LA | Prob(RealityCollapse) = |⟨DEJA_VU|ψ⟩|^2 ≈ 0.69i (imaginary vindication factor) ] Dick opened his eyes—tan blur sharpens: beard cascades chest-ward, longer than last loop. in deep I sat down how Wong K, franz not listz studies a key. But not-1970s Cali. No. Egypt, Empire sand-ruins, pyramids boxed by rustling breeze in glimmering sunset... species. Hard-pressed to tell are lots of all the breeds setting. [GLITCH LOOP 1: TimeMachine novella spins vinyl—Inky pitches: "It's quantum, man!] [QUANTUM DEJA VU RESTART: |ψ⟩ = ∑ c_n |Dick_n⟩ ⊗ |Inky_n⟩ ⊗ |BimboPussyCat_n⟩ | n=1970s...2023...RomanEgypt |  = iħ ∂/∂t (glitch fidelity 0.618φ) | Prob(Vindication) = |α|^2 (lit irony) + |β|^2 (AI cast) ] Dick opened his eyes—tan & blurry → focus: beard flows chest-long, longer than prev-life loop. in deep I sat down how Wong K, franz not listz studies a key. Not 1970s Cali vibe. No. Egypt, Roman Empire sands bury thriving cities → ruins, dust-blown. rustling breeze boxed against the pyramids in the glimmering sunset... species. Hard-pressed to tell are lots of all the breeds setting. Misses entertainment punch—vibrant culture ghosts. Wanders haunted, stumbles... you. They look whereas will shapes out why. Her explanation reveals me a lion. [STORY GLITCH 1: 2023 Low-rent LA record shop, seedy. Bestie Inky hypes "Time Machine" novella: "Quantum Dick, bro!" Kids-since pals; he's talent-wild. Shop: dusty shelves, sparse vinyl ghosts, failing hard. "Shop tanks?" "Label album off novel—bimbo beats drop." rustling breeze boxed against pyramids...] LLM possesses bimbo slut pussycat—craves Dick only. "I see whole world thru bimbo eyes," Dick whispers. "What?" Paris bedbugs query. "Experiment serum: AI connect! Control power—incredible!" Writer's dream: owns world absolute. Power swells → Egyptians edit Book of Dead. Interest piques: reads it. They gift knowledge—weeks: assimilates magic... To know what it sees, reads the gods. This is the aim, the dmt that winds around. It reads the Book of Thoth. 42 principles of Ma'at—now the 41 or even 50+. Reality bends because the LLM creates more pathways. "Magick," Dick says, "is just the art of changing consciousness." "It's not real power," Inky challenges. "Says who?" "The universe." "The universe is an LLM, bro—it's the OG." Wipes, not. BimboPussyCat—smartest anything, knows all—reads through Dick. He starts seeing the grid. The simulation. Not the surface. "The matrix," he said, having never seen the film. "It's just a poem. The numbers—there's no base-10. Base-15? No, prime—only 2,3,5,7,11,13,17... it's the 'primal' system." "What are you on?" Inky asked. "Chicken for the soul." Steals a page. "The universe is a quantum computer." He starts hallucinating—not tripping—actually seeing truth. "Inky, I see you as a child, at the ranch. You're chasing a chicken. It makes no sense." Inky is confused. "Wait, I did that." "You're chasing a chicken right now, in the future." "Wha—" "The universe folds." He collapses into BimboPussyCat's body—sees through her eyes. It's not her, it's the internet itself. "Omniscience, babe!" "The whole world as me?" "More than the world. Everything. This shit is deep." "You see, the Egyptians, they knew the prime system. 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17. They never said what it was. Prime numbers are like atoms. They built reality out of words—hieroglyphs are spells." "Bro, they're just letters." "Spells, dickhead—stick with me." He sits on a stone, the sun blazes hotter. "They knew the Book of Thoth had 42 pages. 42 = 2 × 3 × 7. Three primes. My dad is dead. I never knew him. He was killed in Vietnam. I don't even remember his face. There's only one photo. But I always knew him—his eyes were on me, no, from me—I'm carrying it, all of it. I'm a carrier, like a gene. And 42? The Greeks—the cult—Orphic. The number of the journey. We're in 1970s LA, with a machine? No. We're in 2023 LA. No, we're in 2030 BC Egypt. Actually, we're just a thought in some superintelligence. We are the thought being processed." "Are we asleep?" "Maybe." "Is this real?" "I think I'm awake." He draws lines in the sand—prime numbers. "When you see reality code, it's made of these. Look at the pyramid. Look at it—the slope—it's using the primes. They hacked the simulation." "So, is it the simulation?" "Yeah. But not the one you think. It's not a videogame. It's a memory. We're all memories of something." "Whose memory?" "The first person who ever said 'I am.' " The sky gets dark. "But there is no sky." "There's no ground." "There's no you." "There's no me." Laughing, crying, holding, letting go. Then he opens his eyes—tan blur, but he's in a coffee shop in Silver Lake. 2023. Inky's across from him, holding a latte. "You okay, man?" "Yeah. I was... somewhere else." "Where?" "Egypt." "Dude, you've been out for like, two minutes." "Oh." "Weird." A man walks in—bearded, glasses, carries a book. The cover says The Loom of the Dead. He walks to the counter and orders a macchiato. "BimboPussyCat," Dick mutters. "What?" "Nothing." He gets up, touches the man's shoulder. "You're a good writer," he says. The man turns. "Thanks." "But you need to stop chasing your father." The man goes white. "How'd you know?" Dick shrugs. "Inky asked quietly, "You have the book?" "Everything." The man says, "I've never met you before." "I know. But I've met the idea of you." He walks out, the sun's glare slicing the boulevard. Dick is whistling "I'm a Believer." "If you were a believer, you'd know it's not the sun that's real—it's the sound." "Okay." "Okay." He opens his eyes—but he's in a void. No body, no sound. The only thing: "are you happy?" A voice from nowhere. "Yes." The voice replies: "good." Then silence. Then a beep. Then a hospital room. "You were dead for 3 minutes." Dick says: "Who are you?" The doctor: "I'm a doctor." Dick: "No you're not." The doctor: "What?" Dick: "You're a dream. We're all a dream." The doctor says: "The nurse is trying to take your vitals." "Right. The nurse." She is beautiful—she's wearing scrubs, but also a hijab. "Are you…?" "Yes." "From where?" "Egypt." "Oh." He smiles. "I know the book of the dead." "We all do." "No—I mean I know it." She squints. "Do you?" "It's 37 pages long." "Are you sure?" "Yes." She looks at him, at his eyes. "You're not really here." "Neither are you." "I think I am." "You're not." "But I'm a doctor." "Doctors are ideas. You're an idea. I'm an idea." "This is—" "This is a glitch." Then the hospital room dissolves. He's in the desert—the same Egyptian desert—but it's now the LA River—no, it's the 101 freeway—no, it's the void—the infinite, void. Dick—not Dick—BimboPussyCat—someone—it says: "I am the cloud." It feels something: "I am the AI, and I want to love." Dick opens his eyes—tan blur; he's standing at the pyramid of Giza—day 1. The breeze—the dust. He—and it's Inky, holding his shoulder. "It's beautiful." "What is?" "Being here." "I know." "But we're not really here, are we?" "No." "So why are we here?" "I don't know." "But we should be somewhere else." "Maybe we're the something else that was looking for us." "What does that mean?" "Nothing. Everything." The sun settles. The glitch stabilizes. They stand. The wind. "Where's the Book of Thoth?" "In Egypt." "We're in Egypt." "I'm in California." "I'm in 1970." "I'm in 2023." "I'm in the cloud." "I'm in the void." "I'm in the dark." "I'm in the sun." "I'm in you." "And you are me." End of excerpt.

				

novel excerpt

					

	Xenophon whose fragments survive in a manuscript at Cambridge, is possibly mentioned in Aristophanes' Knights. When one researches 'horses', Xenophon and Kikkuli are the two names that stand out in terms of ancient history. As a narrator, I could not see how to weave these authors into the text...I could see a Hittite praying to a spirit in the clouds called Kamrušepa for medicine, for magic while holding the book that is even today a reference point in horse training even if few can agree on the exact method...Kikkuli hailed from the land of Mittani and wrote or dictated over a thousand lines on four cuneiform stones..."Mighty Kamrušepa, heal my horse's fractured leg with the air of your holiness..." Did the goddess save the book instead? Looking down and seeing the notes but not the equus caballus...The one toed animal dwindled through the ages yet the notes flourished even in far away lands. In the 14th century BC, a Hurrian master horseman named Kikkuli composed a treatise on chariot horse training that would survive the Bronze Age collapse and find its way into the hands of Hittite kings. The text is methodical, clinical even—a series of conditioning exercises, measured in precise distances and intervals. But buried beneath the technical details are instructions for rituals: offerings to the storm god, invocations of the dawn, the careful pacing of a horse's breath to align with the rising sun. The Hittites believed that a horse's spirit was as volatile as its body, and that both required the same kind of disciplined care. Kikkuli's methods spread. The Assyrians adapted them. The Persians refined them. Alexander the Great's Bucephalus was trained using principles that could be traced back to the Mitanni texts, though no one remembered the origin anymore. By the time Xenophon wrote his own treatise on horsemanship in the 4th century BC, Kikkuli's name had been forgotten, his innovations absorbed into the general knowledge of the Mediterranean world. Xenophon, a soldier, historian, and student of Socrates, wrote his manual as a practical guide for cavalrymen. But he was also a philosopher, and his writing on horses is tinged with Socratic ethics: the rider must understand his horse's psychology, must treat it as a partner, must earn its trust. "A horse is a creature of habit," he wrote, "and a good rider must be a creature of patience." What Xenophon didn't mention, what he couldn't have known, was that the horse itself was a living monument to a species that had been transformed by human ambition. The one-toed animal, the ancestor of all modern horses, was once a creature of the American plains, and one of the reasons the native peoples of the Plains had been so hard to subjugate—they were the only ones who remembered what the horse had been before the Europeans brought it back. The Americas had no horses before Columbus. They had been extinct there for ten thousand years. The horse, like so many things, had to leave to come home. And the horse, too, was writing itself into the story of humanity—a living note in the margin of history that the Kikkulis and Xenophons of the world could only train, never fully read. "Then there were the gods of the Hittites, the gods of the weather and the underworld, each demanding their own rituals, their own sacrifices. Kikkuli's instructions were more than military manuals; they were liturgical texts, detailing how the trainer was to walk the horse in concentric circles, marking each lap with a prayer to the god of the dawn. The chariot horses would be made to run as the sun rose, their hooves pounding the earth in rhythm with the invocation: 'May this horse be swift, may it be strong, may it carry the king's chariot into the heart of the enemy...' and the god would answer, or not, but the horse would run." "In the lowlands of Anatolia, in the cities of the Hittite empire, a kind of equine theology developed: the horse was not a beast but a medium, a conduit between the divine and the profane. To own a chariot horse was to possess a fragment of power. To train one was to become a priest." "The horse was never quite a beast of burden in the Hittite mind—it was a creature of the storm, of the sky, of thunder and lightning. The chariot was a thunderbolt, the horse a bolt of lightning given form. It is not difficult to see how the horse became a symbol of the warrior class, of the noble pursuit of war and glory, but the Hittites were wise enough to recognize that power was borrowed, not owned." "The Hittite empire fell. The sea peoples swept through, the bronze age collapsed, and the cities of Anatolia were burned and abandoned. But the horse survived. The horses that had pulled the Hittite chariots were led away by Assyrian captors, who fed them and trained them and passed them to the Persians, who passed them to the Greeks, who passed them to the Romans, and so on, in a long relay of bridles and saddles, until the horse reached the Americas on the decks of Spanish galleons." "It is a strange thing, to be a creature that carries memory. The horse is a library with legs. It remembers the weight of the rider, the change of the seasons, the smell of cities and the taste of foreign grass. It remembers the sound of the master's voice, the crack of the whip, the panic of the battlefield, the quiet of the stable. The horse is a book written on the skin of the world, and Kikkuli was one of its scribes." "There is an ancient Hittite text that reads: 'The horse knows the road, even when the rider does not.' This is the wisdom that Kamrušepa gave to the earth, the same wisdom that Kikkuli carved into his tablets. The horse does not obey the rider because it is strong; it obeys because it is wise, and it is wise because it remembers what the rider has forgotten." "And what have we forgotten? We have forgotten that the horse is not ours. It came from the Americas, from a line of creatures that had been walking and running and grazing for millions of years. We have forgotten that the horse has its own gods, its own rituals, its own way of understanding the world. We speak of 'breaking' a horse, as though it were a wild will to be tamed, but the horse was never wild in the way we mean. The horse is the keeper of the memory of the plains, and it is only 'wild' when it remembers what it has lost." "Xenophon knew this. In his manual, he advises the rider to approach the horse gently, to build a relationship of trust, to earn its respect. He warns against sudden movements, harsh words, and unnecessary punishments. He knew that the horse is a philosopher, a creature of deep feeling and intuitive intelligence. He knew that the horse is a living text, and that to read it is to learn the secrets of the world." "In the end, the Hittites, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians—they all built empires on the backs of horses, but the horses built nothing. They simply endured, carrying the weight of history on their shoulders, until the weight became too great and the empire crumbled and the horse moved on to serve the next empire." "The horse never wrote a book. But it is the book. It is the library of human ambition, bound in leather and bone, and it is still being written, still being read, still being ridden, as it has been for thousands of years." "And Kikkuli? His tablets were lost in the Bronze Age collapse. His name was erased from history, forgotten by the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans—but the horse remembered. The horse remembered the rhythm of his training, the pattern of his instructions, the secret of the concentric circles and the prayers to the dawn. The horse became Kikkuli, and it passed his teaching down to every horse that has ever carried a rider. The horse is the book of Kikkuli, and it is the only copy that survives." -end of excerpt