The world should have ended thirty years ago. That didn't stop The Shepherds from arriving: strange political radicals with the powers to bend the world to their wills. Chaos rose up, as the first Shepherd, claiming superiority and demanding total obedience. Polar and his "recruits," Zero, Scrap, Psy-Kick, and Twister, stopped his potential reign of terror. But, that only proved what humans (or Flat Scans) feared: Shepherds would control the forward motion of the world. If they wanted to change something, they had the ability to do so. The United Nations formed the A.R.A., the Anomaly Reaction Agency. The A.R.A. started to develop weapons specifically geared towards the Shepherds. With every Bang, the incursion and maturation of new Shepherds, the A.R.A deployed new tactics. The sentient nano-technological virus Slaughter wiped away every Shepherd but Zero. Zero managed to take out the Slaughter Prime germ, but in the process unleashed the Pale Riders, a psycho-terrestrial race bent on subjugating Earth and breeding a super-powered new species to fight in their war sieges. The U.N., thinking Zero was dead, relented. When Zero re-emerged with new powers, the A.R.A. sent out The Crash. Crash was an ever fluxing being made of psychic energy. Where The Crash failed in taking down Zero, now able to manipulate energy, One succeeded. One, the super intelligent assassin, learned Zero's weakness to cold and exploited it. With Zero cryogenically held in a secret prison, it seems the threat posed by the Shepherds has abated, but what will happen when the next Bang comes, or when the A.R.A. realize their attack satellite, Brother-84, has targeted humans as the greatest threat to the planet? This is an excerpt from page 7 from the notebook found in the wreckage of Daniel Allen's car crash. The club, The Meat Hook Hang, was chaos. The air was damp with sweat and the dance floor surged with bodies, convulsing to the throbbing, hammering bass beats of Neo-Dance. He walked past a dark corner where the new youth culture was bastardizing the I-Ching with facial piercings and large magnets. The pinging of lip and eyebrow rings hitting the floor was muted against the music. It was the metallic complaining of the hinges and the slam of the door behind him that announced his arrival to the empty back room. He sat down in the Lotus position; legs crossed, and closed his eyes. His breathing became even and shallow as he entered the trace. His guts shivered with fear and cold. Physical reality pressed down on him like a plank of stones at a Salem witch trial. A thin sweat broke out all over his body as his arms tensed, trying to fend off the awful weight. He could feel the ethereal wall break down around him. The boundaries between dimensions were soft against his back. Gnostic Christians have a theory that the universe is a hologram created from the overlapping of two other "macro-universes." In the quiet back room of the Meat Hook Hang, the hologram was folding in on itself. He started moving in a direction that he had never even thought of before. It was like quantum origami on a cosmic level and something had to give. The known world ripped open as he fell through the fracture and into one of the two worlds rarely seen. He fell into alternating currents of matter and anti-matter, buffeted by waves of timelessness. The Gnostic Christians believe in the Hologram Theory. If you extend the curves of the Pisces, you have a Venn diagram. The overlap is the prime universe created by the meeting of Universe A and Universe B. He finds himself in Universe A. A healthy universe where the forces of chaos trains its soldiers. This is where anarchists, shamans and madmen come from. He slowly walks towards the only landmark. The House of Eyes is where chaos makes its home. He sees an alter as he opens the doors of The House and kneels down. That is where he becomes charged with his mission. The Thought Clouds slowly lowered and ignited electric pops and synaptic sparks in his head. An Idea Storm raged around him, lightening bolts of epiphany split and surged as the voices of the First rang and pealed. In moments that stretched out into years, he learned everything he needed to know. Time in Universe A made the speed of light look slow and sticky. He was introduced to Zanguin, god of assassins, and right-hand deity of Baron Samedeh, Voodoo Death Loa. He was trained to master physical and ontological warfare. As the storm diminished, with cool drops of thought drying on his skin, he walked to the armory. The House's reflection, its shadow, is the Zero Church. Order is the name of the game for the conspiracy of conformity. It is a decaying universe, ready to invade and advance into the collective psyche of the hologram. Its darkness will spread like a cancer. He is not going to stop any of their pre-emptive strikes in the overlap. He will stop the advancement. They have already subtly touched us. The implanted microchips under our skin, parents' fear of imagined threats towards their children, and hate as an internationally recognized language were just some of the Zero Church's influences. He is the thorn in Church's side that will poison and bring cold finality. He is freedom from thinking their thoughts. He folds the air to mime the Hand of Single Light, the only arcane key left in the overlap that can weaken the bonds and bridge the gap between the two superimposed universes, and bends time and space. He walks through a door that is not a door or a jar. He walks into the Zero Church. Steel mandibles of the surgeonfish crash and chime. The peals are known to shatter spines and break faith. The razor bones click incessantly between the Nothing Nuns' legs. The noxious ooze trickles down from their robes and leaves pockmarks on the filthy street behind them like a twisted breadcrumb trail. Everyone here is a number; they have begged and betrayed to become binary. Everything is black and white; everything is what they say it is. You would slit your mother's throat to please the Reign of Terror here. They rule completely and with absolute authority. They are the strength and the weakness of the Oppression. The King-Of-Saints'-Falls sits accompanied by his queen, the Abortion Mother. The throne is made of the bones and blood from countless crib deaths. Their careful movements have taken such time that empires have risen and fallen and gods have lived and died. They have, at their fingertips, the touch of calculated entropy. They know he has arrived here and they very much look forward to his demise, whether at their hands or their followers'. The Cipher Men's four-dimensional insectoid armor does not save them from his gun, screaming bullets of converted erotic thoughts. Their protective shells splinter and crack and fracture. His ammunition is round after round of old Playboys with Marilyn Monroe's centerfold. He's killing them with love. The encephalic abortions wail in the Rapery Hall. Behind his mirrored sunglasses are eyes of cold joy. His stare is colder than cool; it is absolute zero, able to stop movement on a molecular level. The bodies are starting to stack up around him. He's coming up on overkill. He'll start questioning his already dubious morals. He wants to trip like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Lots of acid in a graveyard. One day, which seems like a relative forever away, he'll put down his gun and beat his proverbial sword into a plowshare. Some dark sticky steel box in the back of his head wants to find a nice girl to settle down in the suburbs with. White picket fence, blossoming cherry tree, the whole cliché. Enough of the softness, he thinks. The constantly bleeding door to the throne room stands before him, surging in fleshy anguish, made of the bodies of those that have failed before him. His mind is nothing but a razor sharp blackness; it has to be. He will not become a warning to those after him. He knows that if he falls, They win. No one will follow in his footprints. He falls, the world does too. He shrugs that weight off his shoulders. He's not Jesus, no need to carry a cross. Not that a cross would do any good in this place any way. Jesus was one of theirs. The door gave away with a weak scream. The undulating walls of the Great Hall absorbed the echo of it. The surroundings raised, lowered, and swelled as if it were breathing. The walls glistened with a sickly sheen and smelled like rotting meat and rain season. The heli-sects buzzed and whirled about, their razor blade wings collecting the secretions for the Cipher Men tanks, where They quick grow the Zero Church's workforces and army units. He walked cautiously through the hall, his steps soft and wet on the permeable floor. His breathing was slow and steady but his heart raced in his chest like a stampede. He came to the doors that led to the Sanctuary. The door was heavy looking and made of anti-metal, a metal dense enough to pull free of natural physics and sink into other dimensions. The King and Queen stand ready to reap the nightmares of his childhood and force them down his brain. They were going to wrench open his skull, tear the still vivid dreams of unabashed terror from him, re-imagine them even worse and cruelly replace them in his mind. It wouldn't kill him, but he would wish he were dead. He could feel their cold fingers reaching into his mind; he allowed it. He thought hard and pulled them in. The bodies of the King and Queen followed their fingers into his psyche. They walked around his childhood; amplifying the crushing pain from the moments he lost pieces of his innocence. They wandered his adolescence and soured his every joy and tastes of love and affection. They came to his adulthood, marching on and grinding the skeletal remains of his triumphs. Somewhere outside of this place, he cried and screamed and fell to his knees. But he did not weaken. As his eyes ran with salty tears and coppery blood, he leads Them deeper in himself. They come to a wooden door laid down, the handle broken off. This is where he would keep his darkest secrets, his stickiest fantasies and his inexcusable urges. They dig their hands into the malleable surroundings and pull at the door. He whimpers as it yields. They descend into the cellar door of his mind, navigating the darkness like it was light. He shuts the trapdoor and hefts the gun to his head. The trigger gets pulled. It's like an alien abduction. The bright blast of light blinds him, taking a minute for his eyes to adjust. He's surrounded by the abstract stereotypes of extraterrestrial beings. They talked in emotional aggregates, words that don't describe things but are things. They use all 37 letters of the alphabet. This is when he wakes up to the future. There's a redhead with a nano-tech bracelet, it hums and buzzes mechanically around her wrist, and a psychic enhancing implant that gives her seizures that follow with the visions of 16 distinct futures. She is holding his hand. He's been made into a videogame so that no one believes what he did was real. Maybe it never was. Everything's the same as before except that the End of the World is a week away. Seven days seems like a short time when the world's weight is barreling downhill towards oblivion. Barbelith, mankind's collective unconscious placenta, is ready to die when we evolve on December 12, 2012. It will shed itself and whither and die in the Dreamscape. The number 23 is appearing more and more. 23 is the number of chaos, entropy, and death. Death, read in tarot, is not the typical view of death but the coming of change and rebirth. He thinks they have won, the forces of Freedom conquered the conspiracy for Control but the truth is there never was a war. The Empire is defined by the Rebels and vice versa. Sometimes, they are one and the same. Who is he when he did not have anything to fight for or against? He was a freedom fighter, a rebel, a murderer, a memory, and then no one. Were there revolutions before the wheel? This is an excerpt from page 76 from the notebook found in the wreckage of Daniel Allen's car crash. To You-Know-Who, I can't take it anymore. I can't live with the voices and I can't live without you. Things drove us apart, I drove us apart, but I know with time and patience and love, we could have survived. But they wouldn't let us. They scream and snarl and curse at me in the mirror no matter how many pills I've taken and shots I've swallowed. Just writing this I know I shouldn't drive but I will. I have to see you. I have to see your face one more time. Your face not behind the bathroom door crying, or behind the slammed front door yelling. I don't care if this will be the last time for us. With all the shit inside of me, all of the poisons, it'll be the last time for anything at all for me. I hope in time you forgive me. I'll never forgive myself. It'll be too bad when you can't hear me from where I'll be in Hell and you in Heaven. I've written so much about us in my private writings that you would scarcely realize the scared boy you met and emboldened man I am now. In death I hope to know the greatest ending to a lackluster story I began decades ago with birth. I love you, will always, will forever. Know that as I leave you. Daniel Allen This is an excerpt from page 77 from the notebook found in the wreckage of Daniel Allen's car crash.