ACCUMULATOR (3)

3.1: Sphere and Tetrahedron

So exquisite.

So comforting and thrilling, at the same time...this... Beautiful...Sanctum.

Lying on his back on the soft, warm spongiform liquid mattress, his eyes stare up into the bright, bright, globe...and its mass of pattern-woven glowing cords.

+///...chords...///+

Glazed as if sightless, yet anything but...his wide eyes take in the spectacle positioned above him, that he has stretched himself out underneath...in order to most advantageously...

Absorb it.

All the points of it fitting together and interlocking perfectly with each other point...Each sector in the most ideal setting possible in relation to its adjacent sectors. And to the entirety of it all: the Whole. The Gestalt.

The Websphere: the Accumulator.

It is all strung together in a three-dimensional kaleidoscopic mandala-design: a globe filled to bursting with little alive lights...each point representing a mind-core, each connected - either knowingly or unknowingly - to selected others that offset its particular emanations and vibrations most effectively.

It is a pattern so perfect it could only be divine doing. But who would expect less from the hands of a god?

He has created this thing all by himself. Every last vector, sector and connector has been conceived of, measured, scaled, inlaid and installed...and then - of course! activated! by his own hand. And mind. Plus a few other parts of him as well, at times.

It is so utterly, wholly, completely beautiful it makes his head spin every time he gazes up into it. But...it's a nice kind of headspin. The kind that you get when you are falling in love or having a perfect drug experience.

Or when you've just faced off against a difficult situation - and have emerged with it firmly and solidly under control: that being, of course, your own.

He has always considered it a part of himself. And essentially, the true active parts of it are exactly that: the Websphere dwells inside of Ferron Orgone's own mind: whether he has imagined it, or somehow figured out how to "grow" some sort of actuality representing it inside his neural-net...that's exactly where it is.

Through the magic of the roundscreened immersivator - a jimmied-together projection system that he has set up with the help of the only friend he has ever had in the outside world, the Websphere can be externalised: he meditates upon it, using the biofeedback machine to tell the immersivator to produce a specific effect: a 360-degree panoramic-surrounding technographic lightshow. It serves as an anchor upon which he can lash his concentration... to focus upon it is to make the complex thing easier to comprehend.

And also, to manipulate.

Thusly, the Websphere inside him is transmogrified into a perfect three-dimensional projection - that which he is now staring up into, a large, expansive swelling of rotating light that seems to be huge enough to absorb him completely within itself.

Of course, though, in actuality - though the lines dividing "actuality" and "fantasy" are pretty fuzzy in this zone - it is Ferron's mind that surrounds the Websphere.

Many, many invisible tethers reach out from selected spots in his own neural-net...the lines are not just invisible: it's as if they're not even there at all...but instead are more like assigned bandwidth paths for an outbound signal to follow...one that has to be specifically tuned to each individual receiver.

And these "unline" lines warp and weft out and away from him, zinging off through the aethyr, some to areas close by, others stretching for many, many miles...with each one ending tied to one of those little connectors that Ferron has previously threaded into a person's mind-core.

Always, of course, during a special, protracted ritual: an act of carefully orchestrated and meticulously enacted sexual invasion.

Just like his most recent interlude with that pretty, busty, dark-haired woman, the history teacher: Maya. The one with two lives: one which is dormant, almost extinct...the other, the active one, listless and lustless, becoming slowly eroded by boredom...boredom, and the stress of hanging too tightly onto a thinly-conceived - and for the most part, useless - notion of "sanity".

But all that is going to change now. It always does, once someone becomes one of the Accumulated.

Contritely, he recalls the moment he released himself upon her, like a wildfire over a field of weeds...thinking that perhaps he had been a bit too harsh with her. Quite a bit.

Her psi index had turned out to be quite high, actually, a lot higher than he'd expected. He'd been frenzied into a manic sort of evil when he'd finally taken her - what, precisely, had set that damned Oranur side of himself off?

Part of it was that he'd suddenly found himself lacking a challenge - this had all gotten to be just too easy, what with his power growing more and more every day, it seems that no one has the will to resist him at all anymore.

But part of it was also that one of his subconscious psionic data-collectors had sensed that she'd actually wanted it that way.

...

Why he is able to do all of this...this business of keeping the Websphere...of reading data in minds and sometimes, controlling it...this is something he has not the slightest clue about.

Until he befriended Zikzak about a year and a half ago, he had always just assumed that it was something other people did, too. When he'd discovered that such a staggering array of his talents were his alone, the mania that always accompanies one's actualization into great power - whether delusionary or based on measurable fact - had increased, day by day.

Along with the power itself, which is also increasing with every node he adds to his Accumulator...and naturally, when the power goes higher, the mania gets pulled up yet another notch along with it. He is not altogether sure why, but some nagging voice in his mind continually reminds him that somehow, this vicious and fun cycle has to be kept in some sort of check. But how?

Ferron odd soul has had no guidance at all for the latter half of his life...and the former half is a blank spot: mysteriously, inexplicably unrememberable.

Blessing with deep respect the dear boy, Zikzak - friend and fellow orphaned "brother", the genius who brought him the gift of technology - he mesmerises himself with the pseudo-hallucination hovering above him...that humming, thrumming mandala floating overhead, alive with hundreds of minds.

Clad tightly in a shiny silver bodysuit that zips clear down below waistlevel, he sprawls lazily and provocatively beneath it...stretching his arms and legs out as far as they can go. As if to catch every last little bit of the rain falling gently down....the rain that is not rain.

For the Websphere in Ferron's mind is not the whole of the Accumulator. There's an outer level as well, which serves to "physicalise" the powers dwelling within.

This outer structure has been fashioned in the shape of an enormous tetrahedron: a three-sided pyramid-like shape consisting of triangular walls that all come together at an apex point above him...and above the projection of the Websphere. Three walls of solid iron, welded together perfectly.

He had not known at all where to find the iron or how to weld it, but it did not take him very long to pore through his collection of minds and find one belonging to an engineer who'd worked as a planner at construction sites. He coaxed the information out of him slowly and carefully, feeling around for the pleasure spots and giving them just the right motivations...a tweak here, a push there... Ferron had appeared to him in the guise of the central figure in a deeply private homosexual fantasy that this man has harboured within himself for many years, which has always gone unreleased, unfulfilled. Until the master of Orgone had come to him...and then, of course, it had been released.

Just as had the information Ferron had needed: and it came as fluidly as the one giving it had come.

And when that knowledge had been assimilated, he had then set about the task of building his Accumulator's outer layers properly. It seems there is nothing he cannot find somewhere here, when he needs it.

He's following the guide left by the original Orgonomist: an early twentieth-century psychoanalyst and scientist named Wilhelm Reich. The way to make it properly, he had written, was to build it using inorganic matter wrapped inside of a layer of organic matter...which would serve to concentrate and reflect the life-energy that he had named "Orgone".

The iron is perfect for the inner non-organic layer. The directive regarding an outer organic layer had also been lovingly attended to: on the outside of the metal tetrahedron, a scattering of padded green layers of moss had been attached, and had slowly grown , nurtured by a sunbeam reflector and the seemingly never-ending rain. Within the patches of moss, the little ropy rootlike tendrils of epiphyte plants have been growing, weaving their way around and around the upper half of the tetrahedral chamber, wrapping it in wreaths of snaky green and white.

The epiphytes had been Zikzak's idea. He'd once said - wistfully - that his mother used to like them.

Some logistical matters had to be attended to: primarily, the addition of screened ventilator holes in all of the panels, and the installation of a high=powered refrigetation unit - it can get very uncomfortable lying for hours in an iron chamber

It is the most perfect Orgone Accumulator that anyone has ever built.

Whether or not the outer tetrahedron itself actually contributes anything to the functioning potential of the Websphere is not something anyone - even Ferron, its creator, master and resident, really knows for sure. Orgone is not a measurable power by the standards that other kinds of physical energy are measured; or at least, it seems, it has never been adequately proven to be such. Because of this essential lack of proof of the existence of the Orgone energy in a form that conventional science can measure, and thus accept as valid, there was a scandal surrounding Wilhelm Reich and his orgone experiments that brought on an unusually high degree of repression from the United States government at the time of his work. Reich was declared a quack when he claimed that his orgone boxes could treat cancer...and as a result, he was thrown in jail, and his books and lab equipment were ordered to be destroyed.

Ferron had been curious about that ever since reading about it. Just what the hell was it that he was onto, into...that the government didn't want anyone to see? From all accounts, Reich was an egotistical man, who would never allow anyone to suggest that he was - or could be - mistaken about anything. But, isn't that the way real geniuses - and, for that matter, gods! - always have been?

When Ferron first began to realise his godhood, around the age of fourteen or so, he had read about this as part of his quest to discover the what, why and how of who he was. And what he was. He knew that he...played with, gathered, generated, manipulated...some sort of wild, thrilling, enthralling power, inside of himself...and soon, he could see with amazement, outside, too. In other people. He could control it. And...control them with it. Effortlessly.

It had something to do with sex...or "sexual-type feelings" That much was immediately apparent. But it went beyond the feeling of wanting to .

He thinks maybe Reich had possibly had the right idea about at least some of this orgone stuff, because so far, the Accumulator has done everything exactly as it was made to do.

It collects and transmutes power. Generous helpings of it. On such a keen and interesting variety of wavelengths and levels.

Of course, most of it is generated by the the Websphere - but maybe, just maybe, the outer Accumulator facilitates the liveliness of what goes on inside. Or maybe Ferron simply believes that it does. Whatever the case, it works.

When he lies spreadeagled inside the Accumulator, as he does now, he feels it rain down on him in those zizzy little "droplets". On some days, the delightful drizzle of power is more like a steady rain; on others, it's more like a delicate, thin vapour mist, barely felt as a tingle to his sweetly smooth skin. Each has its own particular appeal to his manifold senses.

He takes the gift of it into his body and mind...soaking it in right into and through his slick, waiting body. Sometimes, he could swear it makes him glow visibly with a soft luminescence...a bluish sort of inner light feeling both cool and warm at the same time, defying - as orgone phenomena always seems to, in one way or another - the sensibilities of physics.

When he realised his dream, he went with it. Fully. Gave himself over to it. Conjoined with it: in name, and in spirit. Became it.

And no one has ever seemed to disagree: It...becomes him as well.

...

The Accumulator sits in the right-hand half of the backyard of the little stucco house on the right side of a building once easily recognizable as a 7-11 market. It has been abandoned for years, as have all of them; the once-ubiquitous convenience store chain fell from grace following a scandal revolving around the actual contents of some of its microwave food products.

The old house is an artifact left over from when every suburban town in California was being packed with phony Spanish homes in tracts full of streets with phony Spanish names. It is the last house on this little cul-de-sac that's still standing. Behind it, a lone old palm tree towers at least fifty feet into the air, its spiny fronds reaching up like a claw trying to scratch a gash into the sky. The front yard is rangy and unkempt, full of tall weeds and bugs.

It has been home for him, since he was just a little boy of about ten or eleven or so. Of the time before that, his memories are completely gone.

He only knows that he has a permanent credit line that has been providing for his care for the past...ten, eleven, how many years has it been?

He does not know who his parents are, or where they live. He has no other relatives or guardians. Years ago, someone - or more than one someone - had brought him here...and left him alone, with money and clothes and computer. Ferron has tried so hard over the years to remember that day and everything occurring before it, it has driven him mad at times.

He has been living by himself for his entire memorable life...a life without guidance. And yet, somehow, he has retained his intellect - has done so much more than merely retain it. He has developed his own mind. Educated himself, using the undernet and the conventional GAIA net, the Lattice, to show himself the world around him.

He has come to assume that his parents - whoever they are - have been his benefactors in hiding. Who had wanted him provided for, but...

+/// ...But did not want me to have to be around them...just could not...manage...to have me be near. Because of this...this god part of me ...///+

That has to have been it. He was...must have been...Too Much To Handle...even as a child.

3.2: Synchronopticon

Right now, Ferron does not feel like reminiscing about how it all came to be. That takes too much mind space; he needs it all...

To Interface. To add the latest thread to the great mandala of the Websphere.

Technically, he can do this anywhere, any time, any place, since it actually exists in his own neurostructure, but thinking of it as a part of his own mind makes him get vertiginous. Once, before it had grown so large, he could, but now...now it is just too much to hang onto. He doesn't want to carry it around everywhere he goes, like a tired Atlas carrying an invisible planet on his shoulders.

Somehow, instinct instructs him to only Interface via the Synchronopticon: the biofeedback-triggered immersivator, which also responds to voice commands and gestures. A truly elegant synthesis...and synthetic elegance.

It's time to say hello to his latest denizen. Maybe visit a few of the others as well. It's been a while since he's seen some of the first ones he brought back with him. He's been so busy lately, gathering new nets of nerves to attach.

He feels the flashing strobes pulse across his body as he lies spread out on the soft diamond of the spongiform. The zipper of his bodysuit is open all the way so that the light can play across his chest. At the place where the split of the zipper ends, a tiny tangle of pubes pokes its way out, as if daring what lay beneath to do the same.

"Increase flashrate, lower delay time" With machinelike calm, he softly gives his orders to the entangled devices, which comply instantaneously. "Chromatic red: hue UP by factor plus-one, value DOWN by factor minus-two, saturation UP to maximum..." Waves his left arm in a circle and juts arm back, completing the command. The machine's "eye" can read these gesticulations as simple "macro" commands - it is a feature recently added: an embellishment that was not really necessary, but oddly appealing to him.

"Chromatic "green", hue DOWN minus-three. Stabilise."

He can feel the light turning purple now. Purple is a good colour for a welcoming. Seems to have always served well for the purpose.

He commands the device - and that which it reflects, deep within his own expansive mind - further now:

"Focus attention Quadrant D...Sector: Inner. X-index 5, Y-index 9...Node 32. Name: Maya Volkovna. Gender: Female. Approximate outer directional matrix: North, northwest. Mode: Observation. Interactivity level: none."

Right now, he just wants to watch. See where she is, what she's doing. See if she's with other people, or alone. See what sort of state her mind's in.

He tries, after all, to be fair about this. She gave him her mind, body, and soul. The least he could do is give her a little common decency and respect. Enough not to strike up a full-on, two-way interface while she is in the middle of entertaining guests at some sort of dullness hell known as a dinner party. Or entertaining her husband, in the bedroom.

Though - come to think of it - that actually might be sort of interesting...it leads to all sorts of rather evil little possibilities. And Ferron just can't resist thinking about those.

But none of that now...Maybe later. After she's a little more used to having her Accumulated status be a part of her life...after she has come to be more understanding. More...accommodating.

Which she will: there's no doubt of that.

He concentrates on the lower right area of the Sphere and feels himself slip into the subjective totally-controllable reality parameters of his own little world, which is actually a Great Big World, no less his own, of course. The little slice of it aligning to the X and Y coordinates he specified glows brightly with a greenish sort of illuminator as he hones in on it. It vectors into a larger thing, larger, larger: turning to a big green box with one big window looking into it.

An observation deck.

+/// She's having an argument with her husband. He's answering her in short, staccato bursts of unfriendly language: drunken, apparently. He's not a very nice person. Wearing a sweatshirt with a sports franchise logo on it. Seems to be very preoccupied with something Maya is finding it very stressful to think about. The thought's not coming through... ///+

Ferron again feels a pang of regret about the harsh turn he had taken with her upon first connection. He'd gotten...carried away again.

Not him, exactly. It was the Oranur. But the Oranur lives in him, is a part of him, usually hidden. The hiding makes it build up pressure. And when it gets out, the pressure explodes.

Sometimes Ferron - who has a deep affinity for the sheer variety of ways that all forms of power can manifest according to time, place and circumstance - , cannot deny that he likes the sensation of riding on that pressure explosion...it is a very strong force and takes him into dizzying places. Somehow, though he knows not why, he understands that Oranur is dangerous: could somehow cause the Accumulator itself to become damaged. He tries to always be very careful with it. Ferron would not deliberately hurt someone just because he could...but Oranur might. Probably would, if given free reign to do exactly as pleased.

His understanding of what the people of the world call "right" and "wrong" is very sketchy. He doesn't really have any moral structures in his mind beyond knowing that which helps him is good, and that which thwarts him is bad.

But he's aware - if dimly - of a definite schism between his regular self and the part of him that he only feels once in a while. In his regular self, he might act all smug and arrogant, but on the whole, he actually enjoys it most when his Accumulated ones appreciate how much he loves them all...when they feel that their being a part of this massive, wild experiment makes them Special, and sets parts of them free to enjoy themselves in ways they never dared to before - or dreamed possible. In his regular self, he is in control of his actions.

But the Oranur self - that only comes up through him occasionally, does not think of these things, and when it rises up from its depths and takes center stage, Ferron is not in control of his actions - Oranur is...and it cannot be counted on to either know or care enough to stop doing whatever it is doing when it reaches the point of being Too Much. It is a stripped-down, soulless thing that gets off on causing fear.

This is a kind of power, too. It just doesn't seem to be as - as...

[...sustaining ...]

as...comfortable to him...as the other kinds of power, and other ways of getting what he wants.

Still, there are times for Oranur and also times when it does not belong.

He'd gotten all peevish with Maya because she had not resisted him much. But why would she have? He'd spent nearly two whole months priming her...getting enrolled in the school she taught at by carefully tweaking a few of the administrators' heads...and using those weeks to absorb as much useful information as he could about her, while at the same time, letting her own desire build slowly enough to be impossible to shake at the last minute. Of course she had not provided a challenge. But Oranur had broken free anyway, and in the end, it had proved too much for him to control. So he had just gone with it.

Ferron does not think it is a good idea to lose control this way. Even to another side of himself. Especially Oranur...which, while quite useful an aspect of himself to have around at some times, is essentially a threat to the purpose of this whole thing. That being, simply: To bring as many minds to his Accumulator as he could, and have each one completely willing to offer him anything he wants.

Sometimes, it's just the rain of orgone energy, which he has been soaking in.

To get this, a miniscule bit of the power from each Accumulated One is siphoned off into a sort of "centrifuge"...and the during the spinning of the Websphere itself, the centrifuge throws all the useable wavelengths to him. He knows if he does this for too long, all his Accumulated ones will get very worn-out and tired, and they will feel bad, and be of no further use to him. So he's always careful about that. And also determined to continue adding new cores, so that each one need give a little less of itself to him when it was time to...to assimilate them.

They all must be completely willing to offer him anything he wants, in the clear and clean way that can only happen if it's exactly what they themselves are wanting.

Sometimes, it's more than just the rain...

Reaching the point of satiation, he tells Synchronopticon to cease the sprinkling of zizzlets...and gestures for the spinning of the Websphere to slow down to a near-stop. It still turns, but very slowly, like the rate of a planet turning: the rate of real-time.

Checking Maya's "window" again shows her this time by herself, and in a prone position. Lying in bed, her husband nowhere to be seen. A good time to make his appearance.

Using only his ability to visualise, it takes him a few minutes to create a construct-space - a fabricated room, with corridors, lights, objects. Something to sit on: a large, comfortable looking pillowchair. And a sliding door by which he shall enter.

They always think they're having a dream. It usually takes him a bit of time to actually convince them that they're not - at least not the normal sort of dream. This is a dream that is not hers, but Ferron's. She just happens to have been pulled inside of it...

"Engage interactive mode. Induce sensation in nodebearer: displacement. Expunge sensation in nodebearer: fear, anxiety. Project selfawareness into construct-space. Sonic set number 2154. Loop endless."

He starts to feel his heart beating faster.

"Subsonics: start upon self-manifestation in construct-space. Commence connection!"

3.3: Maya Dreams

.//...I've been asleep for centuries...//.

Like when she'd come out of that fog - or fugue! - at the school, the week before--at four in the morning! She had lost twelve whole hours. And still doesn't know what happened. Maybe a stroke. At her age? Can that happen? Maybe. Probably heatstroke though. She was okay. Scared, but okay...

Her husband, Dan, sure wasn't, though. He had to call the paramedics who picked her up before he'd even believe what she had told him. The doctor at the hospital had kept asking her if she was on any medications. Or drugs that weren't medications.

.// All drugs are medications; life in this society is a disease. That's what Untied State of Everything used to say...//.

Sometimes she thinks if she could only get them, she'd probably take more of them.

.// Actually, maybe I have gotten something somewhere. What the? This--this...room? Never here...before been...//.

This soft thing is...Not her bed. And the ceiling is...way up there. With a round window in it, full of stars. And...

.// The walls! What the...? They change colour! They're...internally lit somehow, but not just by bulbs behind them or shining on them. The material they're made of, it glows...//.

(Gets up, runs to wall. Sheet falls off from around shoulders; she bends to pick it up and wrap around self again. Somehow knowing that she's...)

"...not dreaming this."

.// Hey, where did that come from? This has to be a dream. The detail's too rich for a drug; with a drug it would be moving and shifting all over. This is all still and real feeling but the walls are glowing and changing their colour through the seven spectral bands, one slowly fading out of the other. Everything else is completely unrippled. //.

(Walks around room...Pushes her hair back from around her face, a nervous gesture of questioning. Turns corner down corridor, and begins to move down into it.)

.// I am...walking like normal walking. In a dream I would feel floaty, like my feet weren't quite touching the ground. Maybe I am in a coma - or in cryonic storage. Or...dead? Oh lord, I am dead, I am dead, and I'm in a fucking waiting room instead of walking into the white light tunnel. I don't even want to think about what this waiting room is for. It must mean I'm...unprocessed. //.

(Panic starts to strike and she dizzily leans against a wall...)

Watching this, the Orgone God can see that it's time to make his appearance.

At the end of the hallway, a sliding door opens. He stands there, in the open gate, doors still slowly sliding their way into their wallsockets. In the shiny silver bodysuit he looks like animated light. Stray beams bounce off him and reflect onto the floor, walls, ceiling... and onto her.

"Greetings, Maya."

Eyes look up away from wall. Mute horror registers but fades quickly into surprise, disbelief.

.// Angel of Death? //.

"No, Maya. You're not dead. You're very alive. And as far as I can tell, and if I have anything at all to do with it, you're going to stay that way. I rather like the life in you." His smile is innocent - for real, this time - and radiates beatific truth.

Flashing her head from side to side, trying to process the fight-flight response and getting nowhere. She's gibbering.

"What...did you do to me? Where is this at...and can I get out of being at here? I feel so strange! I don't know who I am, where I am, and as for you, I have no fucking CLUE what YOU are, and I don't even know what I--"

Stepping closer to her and reaching out a hand - from which she instantly recoils like a scared small animal - Ferron tells her, "Relax. You are not stuck here. You will be free to go in a moment. See?"

Suddenly one of the hallway walls quits doing the colour-fading thing, and instead shows a sort of self-visualised picture. She's in her bed, lying in a trance. She can see her chest rise and fall with her breathing.

For some reason he's having a difficult time pushing her visual cortex to project this image. But he perseveres.

"You're alive, you are at your home. But...you are also in mine, too."

"I...don't get this."

"Remember? When I told you that our little afterschool tryst was only the beginning? I told you that with a transmission, I could bring you down to my world. Well, want to hazard a guess where you might be right now? Of course, there's a lot more to it than this room. You'll be seeing a lot more of it soon."

"Where exactly is...where am I right this second?"

"In two places at the same time. Your physical form lies sleeping at peace, in your home. Whatever peace there is at this time, which I can see is not much, alas. You are escaping an unpleasant situation. Those are the best times to call you here. That way, maybe a few more pleasant ones can get underway."

As if hit by a soft hammer, her head flashes with stars; her consciousness brings forth the past Wednesday and its strange sexual events.

"Oh, God. You. Again! No!"

She collapses to the "floor" of the "room", feeling too dizzy to stand up.

.// This is completely, utterly, absolutely insane. I've finally over-edged, for real. I am going to check into a hospital, tomorrow! because this is the part of the Anomie when people completely lose it, when shit like this starts happening. When you can't tell real from not real. Or maybe it's just that all those drugs I took in college melted some part of my--//.

"No, no, no. It's got nothing to do with any drugs, Maya. None from back then, and none from now. And it's most assuredly not the condition you call "the Anomie" either. Not even. Couldn't be further from it, actually..." He beams, sustaining the accent on the truth of his words with his eyes.

"I am the destroyer of Anomie. I can elucidate...elabourate...if you will only allow me to..."

He takes the liberty of moving a few steps closer to her, with a collected and yet expansive demeanour.

"Going to a hospital? Do you really want to do that? They're not very nice places. And it wouldn't change anything. You'd go, but you'd still be here when I called you....See? You're right inside this thing here..."

She looks at him standing there and for a moment a crazy collision of hundred-year-old pop culture icons passes through her mind: what she sees resembles a blonde hippie flower-child crossed with a slithery-silver glam-rocker -- and he's making like a Harlem Globetrotter. But instead of a basketball, he's spinning a glowing sphere of colourshifting light on the end of his finger.

"Look at this! You're right inside here. And I made sure you ended up with a prime piece of real estate, too...Look how close you are to the center! I arrange them - you - by...well... intensity potential...and here's your Node. Right here!"

The sphere on his finger starts to expand...and then with a snap of sound (yes, that did make a sound, she absently perceives) it vectors out until it fills the whole room with its crisscrossing concatenations of wiring and attaching. The quadrants light up first, with one showing brightly selected...then, within that, a sector, and an X line and Y line that cross, and hone into focus and blink on a point.

"That's my WHAT?"

"Node. Address. Habitat. Domicile. Where you will stay when we visit one another. And so close to center. This placement is an honour." He gives her an almost pleading look.

"You have an amazing mind, Maya. You just don't see very much of it these days...because it's been all blocked up. I have unblocked you."

The Websphere vectors back down to basketball-size again. He holds the glowing ball, the symbolic simulation of it, with both hands, lifting it up to his heart, seeming to caress it with a deep and true affection.

This is such an incongruency with what she has seen of this...this...

(The noise in her soul...loud like TV static at max volume)

"Don't you understand? I have come to free you! To free all of you from your deathly small worlds of boredom..."

"Yes...F-Ferron, I know that...but...there's something not adding up here..."

(She remembers! The last thing he had said before she'd plunged into darkness...that little piece of advice regarding trust...)

"LET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!"

"Okay. Okay. For a while. When you come back, just follow the line that runs out from you. You'll see it when you're ready to." Then, in a half-whisper, with one last deep stare, he opts to point something out to her.

"You always have free will with me. It's just that your free will WANTS Accumulation. You forget...Your mind holds no secrets from me anymore...I look inside and see the truth. You know what the alternative to coming back to me is. You could spend your night tossing, turning and worrying while your husband offers you moral support in the form of racking up a high score in some dumb "chase the bimbo" game, and racking up a huge credit debit doing it. I'll be seeing you soon, when you come back...because it's what you want, and we both know that.

"And when you do...oh!" The beatific look comes over him again. "...I have such...amazing things...to show you..."

She opens her mouth to say something--

"..."

and-- Opens her eyes and--

--the weird room with the coloured walls is gone and she's lying in her bed in Half Moon Bay again....alone. Her idiot husband in the den jerking off to immersive porn...and the curvy wallscreen of the bedroom Lattice unit on the wall across the floor: it's on, but with the sound turned way down.

Some sort of interruption in regular programming is happening...Some emergency news coverage...

But her half-awake mind does not really see the pictures on the screen, or hear the muted voices that clamour over the reports of some very strange events that have been occurring all over California - in different, isolated incidents - that day.

She has her own strange events to clamour over.

She will go to sleep again, and again, she will half-awaken into hypnagogue - the state between sleep and wakefulness - and again she will meet the wild one in his sanctum. And this time, she will go to him of her own accord.

Maya has been no stranger to offbeat realities in the course of her life.

It's just that it's been so long since any have crossed her path that she'd forgotten how to pick them up and use them.

It comes to a point where accepting whatever may come its way is so much easier than fighting it. Especially when it's so beautifully compelling.

And so...compellingly beautiful.

3.4: Surrender to Innerspace

And there are such good reasons to accept it, and perfectly lousy ones to fight it, when it comes right down to the rigid and burning root of the matter: that sex with Ferron - who or WHATever the hell he actually IS - is better than anything she's ever known in her entire life. Point blank.

Point unblank!

When she returns to him, he naturally acts nonchalantly uninterested at first, just being his snide, arrogant self for no other reason than that he can. This time she's ready for that, though, and she glibly reflects the attitude back at him.

.// You don't need me? Fine, be that way, I'll just go back where I came from. //.

"Oh...that will not be neccessary." He smiles, and they're on the same page, so to speak, at last.

He slides down to her as she lays in a field of soft folds...a fabric that is not fabric but more like clouds. But solid. Movement is effortless. She feels that she can almost--that she can! Fly.

Except for a tiny white slip, she is naked. When he touches her between the legs it's...hardly at all. For moments at a time, actually NOT at all: he lets the power flowing from the fingers do the touching. The rush is too incredible to fathom: a burst of red warmth at the periphery of her epicenter...expanding outwards slowly, wonderfully...

He tells her to sink deep and fly! And forget about fathoming it.

At first, they lie side by side and twist around one another, hands reaching up and under the white gauzelike netty-stuff to grasp onto the familiar points of reference...growing more pointed with every passing second...

She figures she could always just think of it as a dream. A dream in which she just throws caution to the wind...and throws her control to someone who can sure as hell do a lot more with it than she ever seems to be able to.

It feels like flying through a canyon on a hang-glider, but with all the simultaneous attendant blissful physical sensations that can only come from getting fucked by a hot young dynamo who really knows what he is doing. And knows it, too.

.// Wheeeeeee! Doesn't get much better than this...you you...whatever-it-is-that-you-are! //.

+/// Oh...but it does! You've seen...nothing yet! ///+

The Orgone God laughs, echoing everywhere. Twists himself around to kneel behind her...reach his arms down under her hair, over her shoulders and down, down...to end up grasping her waist, taking her from behind...and lifting her Upwards with him...

+/// My world likes you! Do you like it? ///+

She doesn't even need to think an answer to communicate the answer...the rhythm of her motions with his own says so much more.

She realises that she can change shape here. She finds herself in her seventeen year old body from all those years ago, and feeling just as light, lighter!

And then, after the novelty of that wears off, she experiments furtherly, playing with seeing herself as various other people, then amalgams of those different people. She'd always wondered what it would feel like to be a tall blonde girl in soft suede thigh high boots, and for a moment, is exactly that. Then, a petite redhead with little curls and tiny pointed breasts. Oscillating between younger and older selves, mixing and matching parts of minds and bodies, seeing what fit with what best.

Finally ending up with something - an avatar - that seems to be the most utterly ideal representation of who she is, a reflection of essence...Her younger self, combined with her more experienced older mind, with a black felt hat and sunshades, ruddy hair spilling over her shoulders.

Ferron tells her she looks adorable.

+/// Ain't this a scream?" ///+

More of a statement than a question. Maya nods her head and laughs.

.// "Once I got over wanting to scream...well, yeah. It is! I don't know how you do it, but I don't care anymore..." //.

It seems to never end. She changes her density to something dissipated, like a gas or fog, and feels a dense beam of something moving through that fog....realising immediately that it is him - his thing - doing that. It feels completely indescribable. As if her clit-sense is all the way through her whole being, not just one small part of it. That his hard-on is the same way - it has spread up and out, into his own Everythingness. And when they touch...Even slightly brush against one another...!

Ferron's outer form is changing, too. Becoming some sort of only partially human-bodied thing, with flame-like petals rippling and fountaining all around his head...quick, jabbing flares of light coming from off the tips of his fingers...looping filigrees of tendrils gathering around his head and fanning out into rays. He's an angelic Gorgon demonic sunchild. A crazy mesh of love and evil all wrapped up together into a singular intensity.

His eyes turn into empty holes - sucking her toward them...and she flies into the centers of them and then back out again, zapping into her own, richocheting like a ploinged rubberband.

The wild psiont cackles at her wonderment. And also his own: after so many experiences in here, with so many initiates, he still feels as alive and excited as if it was also his own first encounter inside this thing.

.//Absolutely astonishing! The variety of sensation here!//.

She realises that this is what people had dreamed of years ago - the subculture that called themselves cyberpunks... They had dreamed of "cyberspace" as some kind of brain-jacked virtual reality. The twenty-first century had never brought this, of course...not the real thing.

What the hordes of entertainment-seekers, always hungry for new things, ended up with instead of actual virtual reality, was the immersive. It has always been marketed as if it were actual VR, but all it is, really, is only a sort of combination of a movie and a video game - a movie that is projected onto screens that seem to surround you, which has an alterable course depending on the audience's keyed-in contributions. At the big public Immersivariums some of them can be fun - especially if the audience is crazy enough to actually vote interesting choices into it. The home units on the Lattice aren't as effective - the curved screens don't "immerse" quite as well as the multi-mirror based public ones...and portables don't even do that. Just surround your eyes with peripheral vision-based movements to produce an illusion.

It's all rather pitiful: the shadow of VR as it had been envisioned.

This here, this wild free-form sex in Ferron's Accumulator - is not the shadow. It is the substance. Whatever it is, it has made her unbored for the first time in years.

He takes her into great flights of ecstasy...but never too high.

He has to make sure that her physical climax is never absolutely complete. He has to do that, to make sure she will desire even more to return to him. That she will not only want to come back...but, on some level, she will feel a NEED to come back.

It's a vital part of the whole initiating sequence: a foundation for all the rest: Inducing the desire to return.

3.5. Premonition

After the lovely, all-too-short hour or so spent with his new initiate, Ferron zaps himself off into another node, and plays with its assigned resident...this one a bit more out towards the edges, without quite as much mental substance as Maya.

A twenty-five year old software designer, male. Kind of cute, but has marks on his face that testify to his being stepped on by way too many people, way too much so-called Reality.

At first, when he'd been brought into the Accumulator, it had to be under the guise of an illusion: Ferron had projected himself to him as a woman, something straight out of the media's wet dreams.

He'd been very easy to initiate. But presented a bit more of a challenge when Ferron revealed his true form to him. That had taken a while for him to get used to.

It always seems to go this same way with guys who are gay or bi, but do not know how to deal with it. The ones who try to make themselves attract to women. The software designer was like that. Had been like that.

Now, having been in the Accumulator's thrall for weeks, he is an enthusiastic slave to Ferron's every whim. Enthusiastic, particularly, in the depraved sorts of ways that the Oranur in him likes...

He pushes this envelope further here, because here, that sort of pushing works. It is good, for people with desires like this - self-effacing masochists, essentially - help keep Oranur from breaking out of its flimsy bonds in other places, other minds. Places where it might be bad if Oranur were to surface.

He wears black here, something like a military uniform. Snaps commands at the sniveling young man, punishes the slightest imaginary offense with a sharp electric shock delivered via an ultrathin whiplike tendril. Deep in his captive's mind, the idea that Ferron must be an alien of some sort still lurks, though Ferron has stated otherwise frequently. He has come to realise that the notion excites the slave, on a deeper level than he allows himself to remain conscious of.

+/// So let him think that is what I am. Maybe he's right. ///+

And descends the anal staircase... Carefully allowing Oranur to rise, just a little but not too high; doesn't want to mindblast the poor weak creature under him...or else he'd be useless. It is a slow ride through the lower fire, another sort of mind candy. One with which he tries to never gorge himself too completely.

When he has finished all of his assimilations and manipulations, Ferron tells the Synchronopticon to dim the lights. Then, disconnects his consciousness from construct and visualization. It always makes a sound/feeling like a suction cup being pulled off of a smooth surface like glass

Darkness. Quiet.

Breathing deeply of the negative-ionized air inside the three-sided chamber.

It makes him feel so sweetly alive. All of it.

So in control of so many minds. All of them.

The power is thrumming through him with a perfect pitch and Ferron Orgone is utterly pleased with himself.

But: there is a streak down the middle of it. A concern, and a concern that must be addressed.

As sure as he is that nothing will be able to stop him at this point, he still finds himself fastening a small device to the door of the Accumulator. Attaches a few wires to it that lead to the Synchronopticon's electrical generator.

He's always just left the circular sliding doorway unlocked before, but something in the air of the night feels odd to his meta-senses.

A discomforting feeling that makes him want to protect it, hide it away. The device he's attached to it will give a moderately strong electric shock to anyone trying to open it without his permission. If it happens while he is inside, it will certainly cause an intruder to make enough noise to awaken him - and thus, it will give the dweller within time to collect his ultrasonic mental defenses into formation.

It has been the only defensive measure he's ever needed to employ: he can project a screechingly high ultrasound, felt and not exactly heard - that no one can ever withstand more than about a second or two of experiencing before falling to the ground with hands pressed against the ears as if to crunch them - and the horrible noise - as hard as it is crunching the unfortunate victim's brain. It isn't even coming through the eardrum and cochlea...that's the irony of it. It doesn't kill, but it does a fine job of keeping people away when he wants them kept away.

Having set the electric-shock tripswitch, he allows himself sleep...but it comes slowly, as he cannot seem to ignore the unexplainable sensation that the Accumulator - as well as Ferron himself - are being heard by other ears, somewhere.

And that those ears are not merely hearing...but listening.