Demonproof

Demonproof





The Sequel to “The Mind Parasites” by Colin Wilson, 1967






by

John Darling













Ashland, Oregon USA
Spring 2010

   "When we remember we are all mad,
the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."   
--Mark Twain


For my children, Hannah, Colin, Heather


“Certainly a remarkable conception and highly imaginative.”
                 --Colin Wilson, author of The Mind Parasites


copyright 2010






Prologue

This, the apparently true story of the Second Great Battle With the Mind Parasites, is being released now, 75 years after it happened, because, unknown to all but the few high-level participants, including well-known top scientists of the time and a President of the United States, the war was allowed to be lost and billions of humans were allowed to die.

   It is a horrible and chilling story, one that was kept from the public and it’s not hard to see why: it damns all who chose to do it, but it elucidates their reasoning and the gruesome pact they made with the Mind Parasites, who now stand revealed as our keepers -- evil beings who might return at any time.  Fortunately for us, the time lock on this story expired and it simply appeared with its own page on Facebook one day in 2085 -- and here it is, told in his own words by Gilbert Austin III. 

   The preface to this story is well-known and apparently accurate, that in the First Great Battle With the Mind Parasites, Prof. Gilbert Austin, the Elder, became aware of the existence of the Mind Parasites, who had for many centuries been inhabiting the human mind on a global level, sucking out energies and keeping our magnificent potential dimmed down to a barely functional level.  If anyone found out about them, the Mind Parasites would simply make life unbearable by inducing an onslaught of depression and hopelessness.  The human prey would kill themselves. 

   But Austin and the team he gathered about him learned to resist and distract them, often playing dumb to fool them.  At the same time, tapping into increased amounts of psychic energies, they learned powers unknown to man for millennia, including psychokinesis - which became a routine source of energy for so much of what we do.

   The story handed to us in 2015, that the Mind Parasites almost wiped out humanity but we finally defeated them, was satisfying to all -- and frankly, life was a lot easier with a population just under a billion people and seeming safeguards in place to prevent mindless overpopulation again. 

   But, as all now agree, it was a hideous travesty of “the players” to deceive us about what really happened and about the true nature of the Mind Parasites.  We deserve the truth...and here it is. 

   Maybe someday Gilbert Austin III will be revered and even President Wendell Bruce, as far-sighted leaders who made hard decisions we can’t even imagine facing.  Maybe.  Some are already saying it.

   The huge question this book raises is: what happens when “they” return -- and will they? 

Desiree Kavonika
Editor-in-chief
Gaialogue Press
Ashland, Oregon, US

2085 CE










Chapter 1

   For some unknown reason, I still kept track of when the full moon would be – just a romantic notion, I suppose, but I would look up in the sky, especially on clear summer evenings like this one and sigh and thank granddad for getting rid of it.

   Not many people can say that – that their grandfather made the moon go away forever, but Gilbert Austin and his friends did just that and basically saved humanity from lives of misery living under the rule of “them.”  They did it with PK, psychokinesis, what used to be called “mind over matter,” a charming medieval phrase signifying some kind of extreme and possibly evil magic.

   They were victorious over the Mind Demons, the invisible creatures who ruled the minds of humans for centuries, stifling their creativity, energy, hope – everything we think is worth living for – and if we became aware of these vampires, they would crush us with depression and suicide.

   “Got rid of the moon, your grandfather did – quite a feat,” said my colleague and pal, Jamie Ventris.  “Have you been in the Quark Theater and spent a night looking at it, like it used to be three generations ago, with all the crickets going and your lady love loving it on your blanket?”

   “Yes, I’ve done that.  Quite a silvery light, magical, so the old folks tell us, and conducive to sex in the woods, at least during summer,” I said.  He chuckled.

   Ventris and I turned the corner into the Science Building, perched on a hill above Southern Oregon University.  Before going to a party of faculty and grad students, we were going to put in a few more hours on an expanded, 50th anniversary edition of The Liberation of the Human Mind, written by my grandfather before he disappeared in space soon after the defeat of the Mind Demons.

   Ventris always had perpetual “search” on for certain words and scanned all the news sources in the world, even little weeklies in tiny countries – and one of his search terms was “suicide,” because this had been the foolproof measuring stick of the presence of the Mind Parasites back when my granddad was at war with them.  If the suicides were up, the Mind Demons activity was up. 

   Since the defeat of the Mind Demons, of course, suicide had become the rarest of events, as had homicide or spree killings.  But it still happened.  After all, humans are humans and they will find ways to indulge their passions, no matter how primitive and illogical.  And going against known survival traits was always critical to cultivate mutations that helped a species adapt to changing environments.

   “Hm, this doesn’t look good,” he muttered as he tapped keys, looking at various reports from around the world.  “A guy goes postal, takes out seven co-workers.  In India.  With a machete. Let me graph this.  Yes, 14 in the last month, globally.  Compares to 11 in the month before, all well above the same months last year. That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?”

   “Yeah,” I said absently. I was trying to focus on editing a block of text, when I caught myself.  Why did I so readily agree?  I didn’t even know what it was like to feel depressed.  Few people did, though we read about it from back in the days of the Mind Vampires and I’d done papers on it.

   I looked at Jamie, studied him in profile, hunched over his screen.  Did he seem depressed?  I thought back over his actions and words in past months.  Maybe sometimes, maybe a little.

   “Hey, do you feel depressed, Jamie? I mean really.  It’s important.”

   He stopped pecking on his keypad and pushed his chair back and let his body settle in his chair.

   “I don’t think so.  No.  Maybe a shade of it, here and there, but I just ground myself into the well of mind, the reservoir of hope, all that stuff we were trained in all our lives.”

   “Let’s go party,” I said. “We’re not into this tonight anymore.”

   At the party, which was otherwise fun, Jamie let himself grab the butt of a cute faculty member, all in seeming good fun, but she told him off and he was hanging his head and asked if we could go.  On the way out, he apologized to her and hugged her, although she didn’t warmly return the hug.  It was embarrassing. 

   He wanted me to drive him home and I did, telling him to forget about it and maybe not so much wine to drink next time.  But I was disturbed and I looked at the event, not with moral judgments, but as part of a pattern in his mind, one that seemed to be intruding ever so slightly, but more often.

   Hmm.  So that’s how it comes in.  It’s the result that counts, not the moral transgression, and here was Jamie feeling...more depressed. His power was definitely going in a downward arc.  I could feel it and see it.  Should I say something?  I decided not to.  Better wait till he’s totally sober, in daylight.  This would prove to be a bad call and in very short order - one I would regret all my life.

   In the morning, a Saturday, my screen rang high priority, a setting no one uses unless for actual emergencies.  It’s the kind of screeching, pulsing alert tone that will definitely wake you out of a sound sleep and set your nerves on the jagged edge – and it did. 

   “Jack!”  It was his mother.  She never calls me.  She was crying.  She looked a wreck, in her night clothes and straggly hair. “Please get over here right away.  It’s Jamie.”  She broke into gales of tears.  It was not hard for me to figure out what had happened, although it defied everything I knew about him.  You don’t cry like that if someone is sick or got robbed or something.  You cry like that if they’re dead.

   “Jack? He’s…”  She nodded. 

   “How?  I have to know, please.  Heart attack or…”

   “He killed himself.  He hung himself.”  She broke down completely.  I said I’d be right there.  He was still hanging from a joist in the garage when I arrived.  I was the one who had to take him down, which is a memory I’d like to get rid of soon.  I searched his face for any possible clue as to why Jamie would do this.  He just wasn’t the type.  Hell, no one was in this age.  We’d come so far.  Yet, here it was.  I searched his pockets for a note.  There was nothing.  Then I realized, of course, that he would never get a pen out and write something on paper -- so primitive, he would have said.  It would be digital.

   They came and took away the body. I comforted his mum and made tea for us, let her ramble about his life, how good he was, how sudden and crazy this all was, how shameful, too -- a suicide.  People might think she was a bad mother, she insinuated, after all he lived with her.  I pulled her close on the couch and said no one would think anything of the kind and everyone knew she was a great mum, which was, in fact, true.

   She got up and absently began to sponge off the kitchen counter and put dishes away, a good strategy for grabbing a little sanity and stability, I thought -- and it gave me the excuse to go check his screen.  It had been wiped completely.  There was absolutely nothing in his hard drive, just one little icon on the desktop.  It said “bye jack.”  I opened it.  All it said was: see file I’m sending you, called “help me.”

   I recoiled, almost viscerally.  If there’s anything I didn’t want to do, it was to hear the mad rantings and tears of someone desperate enough to do what Jamie did.  I pulled out a smokie, sucking in its fast-acting nutrients, minerals and vitamins as I drove home in my Floater, hardly having enough concentration to manifest the PK to keep it 50 feet off the ground and still be aware of others, though of course it could guide itself.

   My screen at home had seven lights winking, with only one prioritized at highest level.  Jamie’s, I could see, was at the lowest or routine level, with lavender light.  Humble of him, I thought.  It only underlined my suspicion that all he wanted to say was about personal troubles.  So I went to the hi-pri message.

   It was from my team on the Gobekli dig.  I wasn’t due there till mid-summer but they wanted me now.  In person.  None of the eScreen stuff.  That was unusual.  Hardly anyone had to travel anymore, since the invention of virtual WeHere technology.  You could hardly distinguish who was “really” here and who was on the other side of the world.  You had to actually touch them!  They had a squishy, unreal feeling, though I’m sure that will be worked out in this generation.  My grandfather would have been amazed, but he would also known it was made possible largely by the liberation of huge sectors of the human mind formerly used by the Mind Demons. 

    As soon as they saw I was online, they had me on the screen.

   “Now, Jack!  Now is when we want you here, your whole 160 pounds in the flesh,” said Veronica Ames, my chief molecular biologist, with that wry smile of hers.  “Sad about Jamie.”  She shook her head.  The rest of the team had gathered around the screen on the dig in Southern Turkey (about to be renamed Mesopotamia, taking in the whole of the ancient region, now so treasured by humanity, and formerly such a hotbed of wars about religious nonsense). 

   They all nodded and mumbled things about Jamie.  I heard the words “impossible” and “quite insane.”  I nodded agreement. 

   “We’ll get to the bottom of it in due time and have a report out,” I said, realizing I was uttering nonsense and had no idea of how to figure it out.

   “Did you have any sign or signal of what he was...”  The voice trailed off. 

   “No, not really.  He had brought up the phenomena of suicides increasing globally.  Also spree killings. Which is curious.”

   “Quite,” said someone with an English accent, probably Prof. Horace Jamison of Oxford. He was the foremost epigrapher in the Western world.

   “Jack,” he announced. “We’ve come across a bit of a game-changer here.  If I may move on to...”

   “By all means, Horace.  Where are we, something new there?”

   “Well, it’s quite astonishing.  At the deepest level below GT (that was Gobekli Tepe or Full Belly Hill, in Turkish), we’ve found something, a lot of things, actually.  It’s at 70 meters down or more.  A lot of flat pieces of obsidian and quartz, you know, black and white and each one small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but each one encased in amber, now petrified, of course.  And they all have markings, incised, most of them linear.”

   “Obviously important,” said Veronica, “or why would they have put them in amber?  They wanted someone to see them one day.”

   “And so we have,” I whispered to myself, feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck. 

   Gobekli, found in the late 20th century, seemed to be the final act of the Paleolithic Age before humanity suddenly, for no explicable reason, started building houses and temples and husbanding crops and herds.  It was the biggest change ever in the human story, yet we still grasp for the motives.  Why would we give up the freedom of the hills for the stink and disease of the barnyard? 

   We thought we’d answered the question when we got rid of the Mind Demons.  Humanity, it had been speculated by most wise minds, used to be free of “them” at some time in the distant past and had known the glories of higher consciousness, which we portray from dim memory as Eden or, as Ovid called it, the Golden Age.  We were then, as now, masters of a world with which we lived in balance.

   So the theory went, but no one knew for sure.  “Wouldn’t it be nice to think so,” I always said, a little sardonically, stealing a great line from Hemingway.

   “I’m sure y’all have been over these amber-stone jewels looking for any sign of language or symbol.”

   “Yes, of course, at the highest magnification.  We’ve x-rayed them, everything. There’s nothing we think of in the conventional languages or symbols.  No scratching or abrading at all, in fact.  It wasn’t until....well, let’s let him say it.  But get clearance for your flight here.  Today.”

   I gestured at the screen, which logged in another flight on my Floater.  It would only take an hour or so to get there.  Jim Heidenkeit came forward, holding a handful of the items.  He hailed from Frankfurt, a former professor, but now independent author, researcher and dig bum.  Like most of us.

   “It’s magnetic, Jack.  It’s got complex magnetic patterns.  Each one is like a bar code, but much more crammed with...something.  Data?  We don’t know.  We’ve been able to display the patterns.  A magnetic language?  We’ve never seen such a thing -- and how would they have encoded it here?  There are also pictures.”

   My jaw must have actually dropped open.  They all smiled and nodded, as if to say, “That’s right, man, believe it!”

   “Pictures of...”

   “Them.  And some other stuff you’re not going to believe,” said Veronica.  “Come here.  Do it now.  We need you.  We’re going in a whole new direction.  Bring your toothbrush!”

   I nodded. “Be right there, folks.”  This is the stuff all archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, epigraphers and classicists dream of. 

   I headed out the door, grabbing my bag, already packed with my desert dig garb and took one last look at the blinking light of my late friend Jamie.  I felt an appalling sense of foreboding.  It was as if his file had a huge reverse magnet on it.  I was repelled by it.  I had read and written on depression, that old 20th century bugaboo of millions and intellectually sensed how horrible it must feel.  Now, I thought I had an inkling of the actual sensation of -- how would i describe it? -- a diminishing of possibility, a compacting of the sense of hope, a compulsion to face and somehow cope with a wide array of problems that couldn’t be resolved.  I actually shuddered.

   I walked briskly out and got into my Floater, latching the door.  As I lifted up to about 5,000 meters, I felt relieved, free of the feeling - depression.  Yet a switch had been turned on in my reptile brain, one that late paleolithic peoples must have felt all the time.  The sense of being studied.  Stalked.















Chapter 2

   I let my Floater land itself on Gobekli at dawn, through a cloudless sky.  I am well past the days when I want to jockey a PK-powered vehicle by hand, as most young men love to do.  The crew were all standing there smiling, eager to show me their discoveries, which they’d promised were revolutionary.  It was good to see the stone circles again -- always a bracing and clarifying experience. I could literally feel them lifting my spirits and noticed the pain of my friend’s death coming into proportion, though I still didn’t understand it at all. 

   My colleagues gathered around me, smiling and hugging me for an extra moment as we shared the poignancy of Ventris’ life and his many contributions.  They wanted to make me a veggie scramble and strong, very strong coffee with toast and marmalade (remembering my favorite way to start my days on the dig), but I asked if it could wait an hour.  I had to see what they were talking about.

   “Let’s get to it,” announced Veronica, as she headed for the modular lab that we had to erect several years ago, as the dig became more complex and important. We all followed.  Objects were lined up on a long table, with masking tape marking off various levels and ages. A larger computer screen showed the first of many in situ shots.

   Acting as presenter, Veronica smoothly got to the point.

   “These amber-coated stones, Jack.  We’ve never seen anything like them in any excavation or museum.  The amber is petrified, of course, but has no bugs or debris in it.  You can read the stones visually, with ease. We recorded the markings.” 

   She pulled them up on the screen and nodded to Jamison.

   “These are not pictograms or hieroglyphs here,” he said. “No recognizable sun, horse, tree, stuff like that.  It’s writing, Jack!  WRITING, and 7,000 years before any writing we’ve known about.  We were going to let it go at that and see if we could decipher the writing, but then Veronica here, she started mucking about in the molecules.”

   “Of the amber?

   “Well, yes, at first,” said Veronica. “It is tree sap and has cells with DNA, still completely readable, but who cares about tree genes? We know all about that already.”

   “I see where you’re going with this,” I said. “How to communicate, when you have no established, dependable language, like we have, one that you know will be readable or at least decipherable...”  I paused at the implications of what I was about to say.

   “In...the...” Ever the master of effect, Veronica mouthed the word and let me whisper it.

   “In the...future.”  I said.  The silence hung in the air.  The hair stood up around my ears and on my forearms, always a sign I was on to something big that was about to reveal itself.  I looked around the room.  Every head was nodding up and down. 

   “They were writing for us, Jack!  Then they buried Gobekli -- on purpose.  As we’ve known for years, this place was buried on purpose by human hand, not the sands of time.  They were putting it away, so it would be safe, but then it would be uncovered at the right time, by the right people.”

   “Right,” I said. “Which brings up the whole question of...”  I pitched the discussion to the group for sentence completion (we loved this technique).

   “How...would...they...tell...us...it...was...here?” They all stumbled along, roughly saying it in unison.  Then we all laughed. 

   Veronica pointed to three “dig bums” -- grad students who never seemed to graduate, but preferred to stay perpetually in the field.  These were often quiet types, given to many mystical, dreamy hours lingering around the site at dawn or dusk, soaking up the energies of eternity before or after the dig day.  I’d seen these three on many digs through the decades.  They were seated in folding chairs in a row.

   She introduced them -- Jim, a gangly, white-bearded, older gent from Germany, Mimi, a fiery-looking Gypsy from Romania (who had done a lot of pioneering work on the Vinca culture there) and Patsy, a round and happy Californian.  All three of them were present when the first shovelful of dirt was turned on Gobekli in the mid-1990s.  They were the only ones who had been here the whole time and this was the first moment I questioned (to myself) why they had never left.  I realized I’d never known who did the first test pits and got the University of Heidelberg interested in pursuing it.  Now I knew.  And I immediately knew where this discussion was going.

   “Jim, Mimi, Patsy, what happened?”

   “It was time,” said Jim.  The other two nodded.  “Not to sound too mystical, but...”

   “No, please, none of that,” I said. “Go ahead and sound mystical.”

   They smiled and Jim said “the voices” came to them, all three of them, while they were working other digs in this region of the Upper Euphrates, which is generally acknowledged as the birthplace of the Agricultural Revolution, as well as the site of the Garden of Eden myth -- Eden being an analog of being “cast out” of nature’s paradise because we ingested some kind of important knowledge -- an apple -- that made us irretrievably civilized humans and no longer natural man.

   “Now, when we say ‘voices’ we don’t want this to sound like some kind of seance,” said Mimi.  “It’s not really voices, like my voice right now.  It’s more like a sense of acceleration of happiness, excitement and awareness, like something’s about to happen and we should go see what.”

   “And participate in it, you know, follow your instinct,” said Patsy.  “And we did. We were itinerant and going to digs all over the Crescent, but we all decided to go to Urfa.  Not together, we decided this separately and here we were in the same restaurant.  Obviously, the first topic of conversation was - what are we all doing here together at the same time?”

   “We didn’t know,” said Mimi, “so we decided to do survey. Took off at dawn, driving up into the foothills above the Euphrates headwaters, letting that inner sense guide us.”  He laughed.  “We would actually put our hands together and on the count of three, point out the direction we should go.  It was uncanny.”

   “It was the same, almost every time, man, I shit you not!” said Patty.  Everyone laughed.

   “We ended up...you know where...right here.  Gobekli.  Pot-belly city (that’s what the word Gobekli meant).  The first structure ever built by the hand of man, at least built to last - not just a hootch of sticks and mammoth tusks.”

   “Wow, cool,” I signed, drawing a clawed hand across my face then pointing my thumb at my chest, palm down and my middle finger waving up and down.  It was a way to comment without interrupting.  Everyone on the dig had learned signing years ago when we had Rosa Castaneda with us, from University of Guanajuato.  She was deaf.  We loved how, without the distraction of sound, she was more tuned into the other senses, including the psychic sense and could see and find things we missed.  She was due in later that day.  We needed her now.

   “That explains a lot,” I said.  “We all knew something extra-sensory led you guys here.  And now it seems it’s playing a bigger role?”

   Veronica took over, explaining how they’d “read” half a dozen of the hundreds of stones so far.  She had them in a box and, holding them up, said “These, Jack, are transmitters.  Jim, Mimi and Patsy have ‘read’ them independently and gotten essentially the same answers -- at least they each were in a separate room.  Let’s try to keep the experiment as controlled as we can -- and not talk about what they’ve already found out.  Who knows what telepathy may have gone on between them?  But now we want to take a second set and read them, seeing if we can get congruency.  We’re running video on all this, of course.”

   She nodded to the trio of sensitives and they all went to a different side room.  The first stone and its unique markings were digitized.  We were all asked to go outside, move down the hill and  occupy ourselves with crossword puzzles or chess, so our minds would be relatively free of the matters at hand.  The stone was taken to each room, held and examined by each of the three persons, then they spoke their ‘reading’ to the camera.  We were all summoned back to the main auditorium-lab and the videos were put on the big screen or viewed on iPhones.

   Jim was first.  He started with a long sigh, then shook his head from side to side.

   “Ok.  It’s got three or four basic elements.  This seems to be the intro, the survey of the whole story.  One, they’re very worried and scared.  The life they’ve known for many thousands of years is changing, shrinking, going down.  They’ve had all the powers we know now -- PK, clairvoyance, prophecy, access to all the guides, gods, para-dimensional beings that we know, but it’s going away.  Something is interfering and bringing it down.  These are the people who were present at creation of the Neolithic, that is, farming, animal husbandry, sedentation.  That is, civilization. 

   “These are the structurally modern homo sapiens who came out of Africa into the Near East and Europe.  They had the same consciousness we have now and they got it 200,000 years ago, as we’ve already deduced -- but something happened when they migrated out.  That was the first use of prophecy.  They knew they would became ‘as gods’ when they went against animal impulse and left their safe habitat on the east African coast.  It was in adapting that they found all their best powers.  But this had a downside.  It gave them immense energy, psychicly, spiritually, physically and they knew that, ultimately, this would make them stand out in the biosphere, so to speak.  It would get them in trouble.  Let’s let one of the others speak now.”

   Veronica pressed a few keys and up came Patsy.

   “The people of this whole Fertile Crescent area - Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, down to the Nile, off through all of Asia Minor, they had the shit.”  Everyone giggled, enjoying the way Patsy cut through everything with her profane, savvy take on life.

   “They were like us, post-Mind Demons, of course.  All the powers we have and love.  Wuwu!And there’s the rub.  ‘Them.’”  She made finger quotes.  “Our little, invisible friends.  This is where they came into the picture.  Right here, 9,500 BCE.  The incredible shrinking world -- our little friends brought it to us and, hey, it only was 12,000 years of shit, wars, alienation, genocides, neurosis and bad hair days.  One big bad hair day.”

   Veronica hit the off button and put on Mimi.  Nice strategy.  She was going randomly back and forth, to see if these three people made a coherent story.

   “They were horrified.  To see the shrinking of your mind, my God, right before your eyes.  It was like seeing Alzheimer’s take hold, but on the whole population.  This transmission bridged the whole time for the thousands of years before the -- what do I call it? -- the collapse into the Neolithic.  That’s what it was, not a revolution.  No Agricultural Revolution, folks.  It was a time of loss and terror.” 

   Tears began rolling down Mimi’s face and she was convulsed by sobs.  As she watched herself on the screen, she was, in real time, also crying.  The other two held her.  They all began crying.  Veronica kept the video streaming. 

   “Before this crisis, for thousands of years, they developed in consciousness and lived fairly simple lives, migrating about with the seasons, of course doing the hunting and gathering of herbs, roots, fruits, vegetables, greens.  That’s a given.  But they were also doing a lot of, well, shall we call it magical participation?  I don’t know what else to call it.  They were like gods.  Every day was a nice day.  They had power and were happy.  They knew the gods and were gods.  What the gods could do, they could do.  This is the root of the Eden myth of paradise and the Golden Age mentioned by Ovid.  They could live as long as they wanted, but who bothered?  They weren’t attached to life, though they loved it.  They let go of it.  They knew what comes after it, life and that there are many lives.”

   Veronica stopped the videos and flipped on the lights. 

   “Let’s assimilate this for a minute,” she said.  “Thoughts?  There’s more to come.”

   “I’m surprised, frankly, a lot,” I said.  “My grandfather was pretty sure our little friends came about 1780, when we began to see a decline in great music, such as Mozart’s and the dribbling off of the hopeful, daring ideas of the Enlightenment that brought us such things as the first real democracy.  But, now that we stop and think about it, we can see their trail going back through all history -- with periods of hope and opening as we successfully fought for our freedom of thought and action, then they found new ways to close in around us and feed.”

   “This might be the initial battle - the Collapse into the Neolithic.”

   “Ahhh.”  It was Jin Tanaka, master of everything digital and the one who set up the readings of the magnetic waves seemingly built into the obsidian and quartzite stones. When he said “ahh,” it meant he was listening intently to the last thing said and would like to speak, as soon as there was an opportunity.  It always made everyone fall silent. He let out a polite giggle, another self-effacing move he frequently did - most endearing.

   “Ahh, my friends, I am most impressed you can use psychic powers to extract information from these stones.  It’s like your minds are the phonograph needle scraping along these magnetic grooves.  I have tried to find an electronic or cybernetic device to read them.  I get patterns in sound.  Also light.  Would you like to hear and see them?”

   All nodded eagerly.  Veronica popped them on the screen immediately and they played together, visually and aurally.  It was a lot like the psychedelic patterns on iTunes, very pleasant, clearly not random or dissonant in any way.  It sounded like angel music, maybe “stoner music” of the late 20th century - ethereal, but then, like many symphonies, it would have a stormy second movement before being resolved into the final stroke. 

   I wondered what it would be like to have our super-sensitive ‘readers’ scan a stone while the sights and sounds were on screen.  I suggested it.  A “suggestion” from me, the dig director, was tantamount to a command and, over the next hour, they had it on screen.  I was mostly interested in the meaning of the more violent, conflict-filled portion.  They all said the same thing, that it was their time of panic and despair as their way of life shrank under the onslaught of the Mind Demons.

   “They could no longer hunt as they had,” said Jin. “And their knowledge and intuitive read of plants, herbs and roots diminished. In the thousands of years before this, they could ‘hear’ the plants and always find what they wanted.  Now this was dying.”

   “That’s why,” said Mimi, “they had to plant seeds and tend crops, so they would know where they were.  That’s why they had to pen up wild aurochs, goat, sheep, boar.  This was the beginning of disease for both human and animal, living this close in pens and huts.  It was the time of the first measles, chicken pox, all the so-called childhood diseases.  Huge numbers of people died.  It was a long time before immunity began.”

   Jin was making fierce notes on his iPad.  He was writing the first translation, I realized, of the magnetic waves. 

   “Please, Veronica. Go back to 4562 and play it,” he said. “And, if we may, can you three tell me what this one moment says to you.  Just write it and send it to my iPad.”

   She played it.  Out came a moment of squealing, not a pleasant sound.  They sent him their take on it.  He popped it on the big screen.  The three inputs were “hopeless,” “pain” and “must die, no choice.”

   I said, “Friends, I think we have the first words in the vocabulary of the Gobekli people.  And they can certainly be checked for context as we go along, to make sure they’re in the ballpark as to meaning, right Horace? Right, Jin?”  They nodded.  I asked Veronica to put the original readings back on screen. She had earpods on and had been isolating the next sections that seemed to dwell on a common theme.  I knew what she was doing; we’d done a lot of work together.

   “Veronica, where does this all go? When do they get some idea of why this is happening to them?”

   “Roger that, boss.  Ready?”  She touched a few of the smaller screens and up came Mimi, who (though we would never say it out loud) we considered the deepest and most right-on psychic we knew.

   “They know they are under attack and this isn’t ‘just happening.’ They had their high-level wise Magus or Heirophant types, like the Celtic Druid seers and teachers who divined and did magic -- as we civilized people would call it -- but to them it was natural, everyday, obvious knowledge.  There was no separate religious caste or knowledge.  It was just life.  The invasion of our little friends was a totally alien thing and they could find no explanation or defense against it.  They tried, though.  They built Gobekli as a defense, a concentration of their energies.  It helped, for a while, but our little friends kept mutating and finding ways around it.”

   “That’s why they, the humans, buried it, finally,” said Patsy. Veronica was switching readings back and forth again.  “They knew we humans were in for a long period of enslavement, but that the day would come when we would need the knowledge here in Gobekli.  The knowledge in the circles of T-shaped stones is important, but it’s just a signpost to the real knowledge - what’s in these stones.”

   “What do the T-stones say?” I asked.  “We’ve always noticed the reliefs carved on the T-monoliths are not barnyard creatures -- quite the opposite. Most are predators, creatures to be held in awe, if anything, for their powers, which can be dangerous to humans.  What does it all mean?”

   “Right, Jack -- lions, bulls, snakes, spiders, vultures, also some nicer ones, ducks, gazelles, asses, birds,” said Horace. “They all lived here in a much greener, wetter climate, before farming exhausted it.”

   “I’ve got responses on that,” said Veronica, flashing her fingers around some touch screens. Up came Mimi again.

   “The Gobekli people buried these stones deeply and put these animals up to guard them and to signal future humans that here dwell a formidable suite of powers.  When future humans, us, start digging, we will keep digging and the more we dig, the more we will hear and know.  It’s what’s happening right now.”

   I signaled Veronica to turn it off.  We had the picture. 

   “Why now?” I asked finally.  “Why us and why now?”

   “Jack, what happened to Jamie?  Why him and why now?”  Everyone started a slow round of nodding in agreement. 

   “He left me a skype.  I’ve been avoiding it.  Kind of painful.  It was lo-pri.  That’s no excuse, though.  I’ve got to go watch it.  First, we all need dinner.  Let’s head into Urfa.  It’s on me -- or rather on the university.  We need several bottles of that local wine, too.”

   As we gathered up and headed for the cars, Jim came up to me and looked rather too deeply in my eyes.

   “You know what’s happening right now, don’t you?  The going out for dinner?  The wine?”

   I nodded.  “I do.  You have to work with our little friends in a rhythm.  Remember what my grandfather learned?  Sometimes, you play dumb -- and live to play another day.”

   “They’re back, you know,” he whispered. 

   I swallowed hard.  I wasn’t ready to hear that or say it, but it’s something Jim would say.  And he just did.














Chapter 3

   We’d gone into Urfa for dinner and got tipsy on local wine.  I was trying to adjust to the time lag.  Here I was getting bombed for breakfast, my time.  But for them, my crew on the Gobekli dig, it was the end of the day.  I decided to wait till we got back on the Tell, that is, the hill.  It was formally called Gobekli Tell.  They all wanted to crash.  I noted this keenly.  How welcoming to get buzzed on wine and crash, how easy to avoid our little friends, but yet, sometimes, it was the right thing to do and you did it with a wink, an actual wink to each other, that this is what it took to keep the Mind Demons from feeling threatened by us and attacking us.

   As they’d attacked Jamie, with such thorough and devastating effectiveness.  That was his problem, that he was so thorough and unremitting.  He didn’t know how to “punch out” (in the sense of quitting work).  He was too good, too smart, too relentless.  Hell, he was a dork.  A loveable dork.  And it killed him.  I could sense it.  I knew it, from reading my grandfather’s ageless tome, “The Mind Demons.”

   My granddad, Gilbert Austin disguised it to appear as if it were written in recent years of the early 21st century, but it went back many decades before that, in his life, and many millennia, we were now realizing, before that.  In my researches with Jamie, I’d come to understand that the Battle Against the Mind Demons was actually acted out in the major cataclysmic events of the 20th century, chiefly the two World Wars (really one world war, separated by a mere 20 years), followed by the nuclear arms race, the McCarthy witch hunts and then...so unpredicted and unexpected by the Mind Demons, the events of the counterculture, as it’s called (a most unmenacing title) of the era of 1955 to about 1974.  That’s when the real battle took place -- and it wasn’t PK that was the real freedom attained by humanity. 

   It was that we found out who we really are and what we’d lost many millennia ago when we came under the harness of these vampires of the mind.  Ventris confirmed it in gruesome detail in his skype message to me, which I now found the guts to watch, after everyone seemed to crash, full of wine and pasta. 

   I decided to watch it in the center of the main T-stone circle of Gobekli at dusk, the lizards, boars, lions and other strange symbols flashing about me in the golden light of dusk.  I felt so alone.  But I pushed the play button that would show my friend Jamie’s final moments -- and I sat down and breathed.

   “Jack!  You’re here.  And if you’re here, well, I’m not.  I’m dead.  I know it will be days after my death that you hear this.  I would have waited too.  Jack, it’s only coming in glimpses now, the clarity, the sanity.  It’s closing over me now.  They’ve got me, Jack.  They’re going to win, at least against me.  You know, you don’t think you can go insane, but you can!  And when you do, it’s not you going nuts.  It’s them.  Jack, you’re granddad was right.  They’re not geniuses, but they are so fucking persistent!  They keep coming back for more.  They know we lack that - persistence.  And they’re right.  We don’t stick to it.  We thought we beat them, but we were wrong.    All they did was lay low.

   “All right, Jack, I’ve got to get back on track with the data I’ve mined over many months...”

   It was uncanny watching his face and tuning into the tone of his voice.  This was my dear friend Jamie, who I’d gone through undergrad work with and hiked the hills of the Siskiyous with, nursed him through his first girlfriend and his first heartbreak, got drunk a thousand times on our beloved Tempranillo with -- and here he was, his face wrenching in...I can only call it horror...as he tried to explain his “data.”

   “Jack, it’s true, all the indicators of distress have crawled up steadily over past years - the suicides, antidepressant sales, spree killings.  We just thought it was us.  It wasn’t us.  What they learned since your granddad was to lay low and blend with maladjustive behaviors that have been there through our history with them -- and, Jack, their history goes back a long way with us.  That’s what your granddad didn’t know.  They’ve been with us through all our history.  In fact, they started our history.”

   His face contorted in misery.  He seemed like a poisoned man staring into a pit, into which he was about the be thrown, bound and gagged.  He grimaced and ran his hand through his hair. 

   “Jack, the really interesting thing is when these fuckers are about to kill you, you can talk with them.  You can see who they are and how they think.  You can see they’re not really you.  Their ‘thoughts’ are clearly theirs.  I could pose questions to them and they couldn’t hide their answers, although they weren’t very interested in telling me.  But they would tell me.  I wouldn’t stop bugging them for real answers.”

   I found myself saying out loud, “What the hell did you ask them?” The Mind Vampires seemed to come in waves and now they were relenting, so Jamie was able to laugh, as if he knew what I were asking.

   “I asked them if they were behind the Agricultural Revolution or as I call it, the Barnyard Downgrade.”  He hung his head down and was shaking it from side to side, then seemed to explode in resolution and discovery.

   “Yes!” He howled it into the air.  “Yes, it was completely their idea!” Jamie was practically sobbing with the seeming tragedy of this historic change.  “It’s about control, Jack, pure and simple.  It was about that one thing.  People tied to the land and penned animals and the ups and downs of rainfall are a hell of a lot more dependent and vulnerable!  Of course they wanted us in the goddam barnyard!”

   Here, he seemed to scream the word “noooo” -- a long utterance, then the movie and sound went blank.  The time code was just before the time of death established by Ashland police, about 3 in the morning.  I punched off my iPad.  I felt that creepy feeling of hair standing up on my neck and arms and I knew I was being watched.  I turned around.  All three of the sensitives were standing, as if in a rank, behind me, looking at me with a sense of deeply troubled pity (for Jamie) and concern for humanity.

   “Hope you don’t mind, boss, that we were listening,” said Patsy. 

   “Hah. I would have been surprised if you weren’t.  You knew what he was going to say, didn’t you?”  They all nodded and walked over and hugged me as a unit, knowing how I hurt at my friend’s suffering and miserable, lonely suicide.

   We stood for a long time on the crest of the hill, looking out at the gathering dusk and talking in oblique terms, about what this all meant.  They were candid.  They knew I’d been involved with Veronica for some years now and everyone understood it wasn’t going that well.  Patsy pulled out a bottle of brandy and some shot glasses and we all began sipping.  It was a very welcome taste and feeling and it spread through me, relaxing my brain cells and stiff neck.

   “How’s your head, boss?” said Patsy.  “How’s it going in general?  I think we all need to check in candidly about our levels in those areas of depression, powerlessness, hopelessness, the precursors of enclosure and domination by our little friends.”

   “Good,” I said, a little defensively -- and they knew it. “Go ahead, Patsy.  How’s your head?”

   “Gotcha.  Well, I’m 45 now and I remember when I was 25 and just out of college,” she said.  “I’ve been head-checking back there and reviewing my vid-logs to those days.  I mean, it’s natural to be more positive and optimistic in your 20s, right?  And so I was.  A lot more.  Of course, I was hot and weighed 30 pounds less and guys were crawling all over me, right?  That makes for a more optimistic headset.”

   We all chuckled.  I remembered her from those days and think we shared a rack more than once, but there were so many in those days.

   “Something has definitely changed.  People are, well, more edgy, vigilant, jealous -- and relationships are not going on and on with the same happiness and confidence of the old days.  People used to trust each other and let thing unfold as they would.  Love would unfold as it would.  Right?  I mean, it’s not just me.  I see it all around.”

   As if on cue, Veronica stuck her head out of the large lab-auditorium door and just stood there, gazing at us.  We were still in a semi-hug, the loose embrace of old comrades who had known each other a long time before the much younger Veronica came on the dig and into the university laboratories.  She didn’t advance and warmly join the hug.  She didn’t even say hi, lovely evening.  It was the cold stare of jealousy and disapproval.  I’d read about such human reactions from the old days before the victory over the Mind Demons and seen it in the corny old movies, but here it was in real life. 

   We all caught our breath.  Patsy and I extended our arms and beckoned her over but she turned on her heel and went back inside, without a word. 

   “Wow,” said Mimi using sign language for that sense of astonishment.  We were in trouble.  We stood accused.  But of what?  I struggled to grasp the emotion. 

   “Obviously, a sense that we are hoarding something and depriving her of it, something limited in availability,” said Mimi.

    “Love,” said Jim.  “She’s feeling loss and lack of...the simple energy of love.  Do you feel it?  The sense of limitation on that whole energy of love?”

   “I feel it,” said Patsy.  “It’s uncanny.  Lack of love.  Imagine it.  And yet, here it is and I can feel it.  She is angry about it, as if we could supply her with love and we are not doing it.  And she is reacting with anger about it.”

   “And I feel judged and accused,” I said. “It’s crazy.  I’ve never felt this before.  I knew energies were crawling around underneath everything, pulling her and me apart, but I couldn’t name them, could barely feel them.  They just felt like a loss, an emptiness, a confusion, a...”

   “A depression,” said Jim.  “I’ve studied this.  It’s what depression feels like.  It’s a sense of meaninglessness, a lack of possibility.  It’s quite defeating.  It’s painful.  It’s like a death, but a death for no reason.”

   Mimi suggested we all go talk to Veronica.  We found her inside, tidying up.  She would have none of it.  She said she could smell our liquor and didn’t appreciate that we were out there “numbing our feelings.”  We should face the reality of what happened to Jamie, feel our feelings and move on, without the chemical crutch.  Liquor is artificial.  We were better than that.  A clear consciousness is the path to true awareness and personal power, she said.  We knew all that and, in fact, were hearing this kind of talk more and more.

   “There it is,” said Mimi.  “It’s that moralizing and Puritanism.  I’ve read about this.  It was a big part of the Dark Ages.  You remember all that from college history, don’t you?  I don’t mean to insult you, Veronica, but are you aware of what you’re doing?  You’re saying we’re bad and wrong for...drinking brandy.  And that you’re good and right for not doing it.  It seems you want us to feel guilty and to change.  Is that right?”

   Mimi was talking from what seemed complete innocence, as one genuinely puzzled that someone would be adopting behaviors that simply didn’t make sense and that seemed a regression to...then it hit me with a chill.  They seemed a regression to the times before the great Battle with the Mind Demons five decades ago.  What Veronica was doing wasn’t a huge thing, but it was bizarre.  We studied these kind of behaviors in high school and college by watching old movies from the 20th century, which were full of them.  Entire casts of dozens of people and they were all running these “tapes” as we called them -- jealousy, spite, superiority, snide putdowns, competing.  It was all coming back to me now, all the terms. 

   Veronica’s breathing was coming in short snorts now, as she pretended to be busy arranging artifacts on the display table, then she turned on us.

   “Don’t pretend to be so innocent.  I know what you’re doing!”  She left it hanging there as if we were supposed to confess something.  We all traded glances.  Clearly, we didn’t know what she was talking about. 

   “Um, what are we doing Veronica?” I asked. 

   “You’re obstructing the Presence!” For the sake of future generations who may not know jargon and argot of the times, I make it a point to define such terms.  The Presence is the sense of clarity and personal mind powers that comes from being liberated from the Mind Demons.  No one used such a term for decades after the victory over them in 2018, but the term had grown in usage in just the last few years.  I always felt dubious about it, as it was usually employed in this very accusing way, as if we owed some sort of loyalty to this Presence, for the good of all humanity, never mind personal freedom.  It kind of reminded me of how people used to use terms like Our Lord in the Dark Ages. 

   “You mean, by drinking brandy?” said Patsy. 

   “Absolutely, you tipsy witch!” Veronica responded.  I’d really never seen her quite like this although I was aware she could be bitchy during her PMS but most women had learned to overcome that by altering pressures with PK. 

   Patsy, who had just taken another sip of her brandy, spit it out with a burst of laughter, getting some of it on poor Veronica.  I tried to wipe the smirk off my face but failed.  Veronica saw it.  She reached out and slapped me.  I was astounded.  I had never heard anyone called a witch, except in the old movies about the Inquisition.  It had the nastiest ring to it, but I’d also studied witches and knew them to be wise women of the old days, when Christianity was trying to wipe out the last resistance and would hunt them down.  I’d also never been hit.  It was a weird, sudden, stinging feeling -- and then there was the feeling of being, I don’t know, what’s the word -- hated.  To be blamed, scorned, the object of violence.  Again, seen it in movies, had no idea what it felt like.  Now I did. 

   Veronica stormed off.  I’d always wanted to use a phrase like that - “stormed off.”  I’d read it in the old drama-filled novels, but here it was.  And the man always tried to follow the woman who’d stormed off and assuage her rage.  I looked at the women, Mimi and Patsy and raised my brows, as if to ask, do I follow her?  They offered me no help.  Jim offered to refill my shot glass.  I accepted.  Which meant I chose not to play the gender role game with the offended woman, who had made the display which I think could be called “totally withdrawing love” and blaming you for making her do it and it’s up to you to apologize and change and do courting behaviors to win her back.  Kind of a long title, but there it was.  I’d never done these before.  I’d only known the clarity and mental powers that came with not having the Mind Demons around.

   But. 

   “If these behaviors are happening here, right in front of us and among us,” I said, “doesn’t that mean there’s likely Mind Demon activity going on?”

   Jim lifted his glass, as if in toast to my intelligence.

   “It’s like if you see mouse turds all over your kitchen counter, you can assume there might be mice around.”

   We all smiled at the humor, but it put the question squarely in front of us. 

   “You saw Jamie’s comments, before he...before they killed him,” said Mimi. “He’d studied the indicators and found they were all up - suicide being the telling one.  And now Veronica acting like a total idiot.  She seems possessed!”

   We all were taken aback by her use of that word.

   “Possessed always meant possessed by emotions or demons, right?  What if she’s possessed by our little friends?”  I was suddenly sick to my stomach.  It was real fear. 

   “If that’s the case,” said Jim, “it means they have mutated and adapted by mimicking our emotions.  Instead of raving maniac tyrants starting wars, you have individuals acting very human, at least under the old definition of human, with all the emotions of anger, fear, guilt.”

   No one had ever worked out a test to detect the Mind Demons, the way you could test for the presence of chicken pox.  You just had to assume, in the old days, that they were present in everyone - that we were like fish swimming in a psychic sea that is the Mind Demons.  And since the conquest of the Mind Demons, some decades ago, well, they were gone, right?  And we didn’t have to watch out for them anymore.  We just get to enjoy the powers of mind that we evolved in the Paleolithic - or so we thought. 

   “My friends, this brings up the whole issue of when humans were last free of our little friends, going back through our history.  If it were indeed here at Gobekli in 9500 BCE, then what was life like before that?  Were we really free of all these crazy emotions and especially the swing into depression, hopelessness?  Because, frankly, my friends, I’m feeling it.  It’s like a shadow has passed across the sun.  I’ve never felt anything like this.”

   As if on signal, they reached out their hands and touched my shoulders.

   “Describe it, Jack,” said Mimi.  “It’s important.”

   “My stomach is rolling.  I have this dread.”

   “Of the future, right?  You’re in the future.”

   “Um, I guess you could say that.  It’s about fear of what might happen.”  My voice trailed off.

   “Look at his face,” said Mimi.  “The anguish in the eyes.”  She stroked my hair. 

   “The fear of what might happen,” said Jim, “with...”

   “Say it, Jack.”

   “I don’t know.”

   “Bullshit, my friend.  You do know.  You have to say it.”

   “Her.”  I gestured toward the door.  The one she disappeared through.  “Veronica.”

   “Yes,” said Jim. “She’s a beautiful woman, smart, very sexy.  What if she disappears for good?”

   They marveled at my face as it reflected my anguish.  I bolted for the building.  Her quarters were in the back. 

   “Let him do it,” I heard Mimi say.  “He’s got to do this - and we’re going to learn from it.”

   When I got in her bedroom, she was crying and sitting on the bed, like so many movies I’d seen.  I knew what I was supposed to do, sit beside her, put my arm around her and wait for her to talk and tell me...what?  Her story of misery and pain, with the implication that I had played a major role is causing it and therefore, I should make it better.  I, of course, had no clue about how to do this, beyond what I had seen in the old films.  I wanted to suggest various mind control techniques to Veronica, but I knew she already was familiar with them.  But she obviously wasn’t going to employ them.  She wasn’t going to get over this.  She didn’t want to get over this, I realized.  It was stunning.  It was like watching a man slide down a sheer mountain face, ignoring the ropes, pitons and carabiners he was surrounded with. 

   It was a surrender. 

   But suddenly, she came onto me and unsnapped her bra behind her back and looked rather deeply into my eyes in some kind of quest for understanding, compassion.  She wanted me to save and heal her -- or something.  As I’ve said, I’m not really up on all these emotional “tapes” -- who is?  But here they were, being played out for me in real time.  I had loved Veronica for about two or three years and she was very “hot,” gorgeous, smart, sexy and what man wouldn’t want her?  I realized she was offering herself to me, that is, sexually.  It had been a couple months.  I’d been busy in Oregon.  Every man on the dig wanted her.  It was only natural.  That made it all the more compelling, I realized, that I should want her and be thankful and grateful I could go ahead and have her. 

   I felt I needed help.  I wanted to call in the trio of sensitives, who I’d grown more and more to trust.  They were older and wiser, to be sure, and Jim was old enough that he’d actually lived back in the times of the Battle Against the Mind Demons.  He was the same age as my grandfather. 

   Suddenly, I had a wild thought.  I would transmit the picture of this to Jim.  I’d never done such a thing before.  Telepathic sessions were always transmitted with the awareness and consent of both parties.  But I needed help now and I didn’t have the freedom to go find him and alert him.  I just sent the picture of Veronica to him and I opened myself to receive whatever he sent me back, if he sent me anything. 

   It only took a few moments.  I went ahead and kissed Veronica and let her breasts fall into my hands.  Believe me, I loved it and wanted her and found myself surrendering to the whole momentum of it.  I loved the feeling of her strong back and smooth skin, the smells, the liquid of her kisses all of it -- then suddenly, wham, I got a message back from Jim.  It wasn’t words.  It was an image of a big steel door being lowered with a clanging slam.  Something Jim did allowed me to see into her mind and, well, I’ve never experienced anything quite as compellingly repulsive in my life.  So much for the juicy sexuality.  It was like looking into her brain and seeing it covered with maggots.  Even the smell was there.  I all but leaped back a yard. 

   “What’s the matter, Jack?”  She had a look of genuine care and compassion on her face, like I should give myself to the caring love of this fellow human.  I wanted to, with all my body and every cell in it.  I’d never had a direct encounter with the Mind Demons but here it was.  So this  is what it felt like!  I reached back over time and tried to recall what my grandfather had written about his Dark Night of the Soul (more than one of them) when he had to face down these creatures.  What did he do?  Well, sometimes it was a direct combative engagement, very much face-to-face and other times you had to outwit them and just hang in there, NOT confronting them and alerting them to battle.

   I breathed, very intentionally.  I kept looking into her eyes, pretending to admire her beauty, which, I confess, was considerable, mind slave or no.  That limbic brain, always seeking and negotiating for a “good fuck,” suggested I could take her, then deal with the real problem at hand here.  I almost had to laugh out loud.  What the “little head” won’t do!  Anyway, I breathed and decided to adopt an expression of desire and caring.  I stroked her cheek and looked, as convincingly as I could, with longing into her eyes.  Truly, I was over my head and didn’t know what to do.  I could sense Jim was still tuning in.  In a flash, an alarm buzzer went off.  He’d triggered it.  I filed out.  Everyone did. 

   As we gathered in the yard, Jinn came forward and announced that, from his continual scanning of the web, he’d found the U.S. had launched a “little strike” against Iran - just a “tutorial,” as they were calling it, so that country would go no further with its nuclear program.  On his iPad, oddly, was a general making the announcement, an Army man with lots of ribbons.  Now he was explaining that civilian rule would be restored within a matter of weeks, after conferences with the leadership of Congress and an emergency election.  It was a coup. 

   Jim, Mimi and Patsy studied the intonations, expressions and body language of the general and his cronies, who were standing beside him, in civilian clothes.  They were from the House and they weren’t in the majority leadership. 

   Veronica stood there, tapping her foot.  “About time,” she spat.

   The trio asked Jinn to play it back several times -- and they sat down and closed their eyes, psychically scanning it, the same as (I’m sure) they had with the stones.  They frowned.  They shook their heads from side to side.  It was our little friends.  They indeed were back.














Chapter 4

I slept with Veronica and that’s what it mostly was - sleep.  She “let me” make love to her but it was short and had an edge of impatience, as if she were trying to communicate disapproval of me.  She was successful.  I felt disapproved of.  My eyes popped open at 4:30 in the morning and I couldn’t wait to get out of bed. 

   “Gotta go look at those stones,” I said, excusing myself.  I went out on the lip of the dig and had a smokie.  For future centuries who may not have these, they’re a wonderful invention that infuses you with nutrients while giving you that wonderful time alone to inhale smoke, without any danger to health.  The nutrient compounds attack anything harmful - the stuff that used to be in cigarettes.  I smoked and loved it, guilt-free.

   Standing out there, I realized I was troubled.  It was a weird feeling.  There was conflict and anxiety inside me, as if I feared the loss of this woman and it would be a bad thing and there would be a lack of love in my life.  I was amazed.  So this is like that drama in the old books and movies!  What a burden it must have been - and yet here I was doing it and feeling it inside me.  I felt as if I were infested with a mental disease. 

   Jim came out and joined me.  An early riser, he loved to see the dawn.  I described the feelings and thoughts to him.

   “It’s like I have this problem going on inside me and it’s my duty, my responsibility to work it through.  It’s my job.  But clearly, I see the problems as coming from someone else.  You know who.  It’s like they were transmitted to me.”

   “Ah,” he said, sipping his coffee and letting the silence gather.  This was going to be important, we could both tell.  “Like a disease.  It was transmitted.  As if it were...”  He left it for me to finish the sentence.

   “Our little friends, right?”

   He nodded and pulled on his smokie.  I felt a sudden pang of dread and disappointment.  I was infected!  Right?

   “What do we do then?  Obviously we have to do something.  Right?”

   “Don’t worry.  Let’s go back into your grandfather’s writings.  He spelled it all out.”  We put up his “The Mind Demons” on my iPad.  I had fully indexed it years ago and could key into the portions describing their battle.  Here it was.  The dipping down into the depths of one’s human spirit, basically.  Hell, it’s what we did all the time, every day.  The problem was, we didn’t know what it was like to lose that, to have to face infiltration and fight it.  We were spoiled. 

   “I feel kind of helpless here, Jim.  I’ve never felt this or dealt with it.  I’ve never had to oppose them.”

   “Well, Jack, that’s not entirely true.  I think they’ve been with us for a long time and that they were only banished for a few years at most.  They’ve been slowly coming back but in ways we can’t detect.  I think they’re tracking and shadowing our basic emotions and just nudging them ever-so-slightly off track, just enough to cost us a bit of energy -- which they soak up.”

   I’d noticed this.  It was like a slight cold or hangover, nothing you’d even mention.  We sat at the artifact table and were idly playing with the stones.  I told him about Jamie’s last vid-message and said there was an attachment to it that I hadn’t looked at.  We opened the text.

   It was labeled “correspondences,” an innocent enough name.  Maybe it was letters he’d written.  They weren’t letters at all but a table of dates and events - times when there seemed a wave of hope and creativity in the world or some major part of it and times when the opposite was true.

   It didn’t take long to find the pattern.  The Transcendentalists, for example -- Thoreau, Emerson and the cosmic genius Whitman, flourishing in the 1850s, then the whole culture being seized in the cataclysm of the Civil War, followed by the assassination of Lincoln -- a man who was locked in battle with the Mind Demons for years, and winning -- then the mad rush into the Industrial Revolution and the wiping out of the Indians. 

   “By the time society caught its breath,” said Jim “hardly anyone even knew of the hope and vision represented by these seers.”

   The glory that was Greece lasted through the 5th century BCE, with some of the most amazing drama ever written, especially by Aeschylus -- and the orations of Pericles -- but was gone after the pointless misery and destruction of the Peloponnesian War. 

   “That was a nasty reversal of brilliance, genius and a deep sense of personal power and vision,” I said. “No one was afraid to tell the truth, until, of course, they offered the hemlock to Socrates in 399 BCE.  That was the equivalent, 25 centuries ago, of kool-aid.”  We laughed.

   “I like that.  Drink the kool-aid or we’ll just stab your ass.”

   The killing of 50 million people in World War II was a necessary sacrifice to roll back the insanity of fascism -- Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese Empire -- but it set a new low with the first nuclear attacks and the launching of the nuclear arms race between America and the Soviets.  The Holocaust was clearly the handiwork of the Mind Demons.  It was done without seeming emotion, a bureaucratic feat of organization, underlining the presence of our little friends.

   “Now that’s a complex web of the work of the Mind Demons working all sides, but the Allies came out as heroes, of course,” said Jim.  “And that dumb ass Truman got to look like the hero for nuking a quarter million people.”

   “That’s interesting. You know, you have to really examine their words and the expression on their faces to know who our little friends were running,” I said.  “I’ve watched Truman in those years, digitally, of course and he seems like a guy not run by them.  A little simple-minded but he was sick of war and what the Axis powers did for many years and -- he said, to hell with em, literally.”

   Jim nodded.  “I can see that.  Will have to tune in and analyze this pattern in history.”

   The brilliance of the Renaissance and its magnificent art, literature and invention displaced the thousand-year Dark Ages, but soon fell under the brutality of colonialism and slavery, wrote Jamie.  The hope and energy in the birth of democracy in the U.S. was cut off by the guillotine in France, as they tried the same experiment. 

   “Check?” Jim asked.  “Check,” I said. 

   The dazzling period of “the Sixties” in America was a prime example of the persistence of the human spirit as it tried to throw off a period of witch-hunting McCarthyism and hysteria about Communism, wrote Jamie. 

   John F. Kennedy was its symbol.  It hardly needs be mentioned what happened to him and five years later, to his brother Robert and to Martin Luther King, who were also blown away.  But the 60s kept going anyway, fueled by LSD, the drug they couldn’t stop.  It took one heartless murder, the killing of students at Kent State University in 1970, to put it on ice and make the hippies cut their hair and start getting interested in real estate. 

   “Fear,” he said. “That’s what all the hippies felt in that horrible May of 1970.  They felt scared and they suddenly, for the first time in years, felt alone.  I remember it.  That was the shoe horn, the camel’s nose in the tent, the wedge.  That’s the feeling of them coming inside you.  It’s that cold feeling of dread.”

   “My grandfather called it foreboding,” I said, rather dryly, almost whispering, as if I could prevent them from hearing it.  “That word just makes me shiver.  Bode means to announce -- and forebode means to announce what’s coming.  Like, hey, they DO announce it as they slide into your brain, cells, nervous system.  It’s the clear sense of dread but for no reason.  There’s nothing wrong going on in the real world.  It’s something you can’t see, but it’s upsetting you and it’s present.”

   “Wow,” He said, unconsciously making the wow sign with clawed fingers going across his face. “We really have to start paying attention to that cause-less dread.  It’s their calling card.  We have to take it seriously.  It’s a trip-alarm.  You felt it last night, didn’t you?  I saw you, when she was out front, trashing us.”

   “Jim, you were there in the 60s.  You drank the kool-aid, the good kool-aid, right?  I think this was a huge watershed time.  Huge.  Far bigger than we imagine, not just the imprint it left on all events after it, but the way it was like the fucking Waterloo of the Mind Predators.  And??”

   I left it for him to finish the sentence.

   “They lost, man.  The Mind Demons got their ass kicked bigtime.  I have psychically explored this time, my favorite time.  I love this time.  It was the foundry of my soul, so to speak.  It started in the mid-50s, with the arrival of the Beatniks, James Dean, Elvis, rock n roll, and Catcher in the Rye - great book of youthful rebellion.  A kid leaning to his own understanding and telling it like it is.  Of course, it was all driven by the nuclear arms race, the thought that any moment could be your last and you’d be fried by a nuke.  That made everyone existential, which means you focus on what exists, what is in the moment, the present.  It made a zen madman out of millions.  Only 15 years before that, you had Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the uncovering of the Holocaust in Germany - gassing 6 million Jews, gays, gypsies, artists, anyone outside the program -- and that program was laid down by???”

   He left it for me to finish the sentence.

   “Yes, them.  It has a certain personality, doesn’t it?  Authoritarian, boring, oppressive, violent, of course.  The Nazis weren’t really that frantic, except at the torchlight rallies, but in practice just efficient and suffocating.  Stalin and Communism was the same, after the war.  The world wars didn’t end.  It just shifted into an ongoing mode of control, not that they had everyone afraid.  It was completely the Mind Demons.”

   “It’s a good historic survey,” he said. “I would have to estimate the MPs were in control most of the time, like the insanity of Cortes crushing the Aztecs and looking for gold.  Um, why the fuck would he be doing that?  It’s that limbic brain conditioning to violence and dominance.”

   “And Jack, they didn’t anticipate one thing -- acid.  It blew their minds, just as it blew ours.  They were put on LSD too.  I’m just getting this, old boy.  How could they not be affected by it.  Acid was not a chemical!  It was something that shifted the nerve pathways, shunting the fear off into the ground, like a lighting rod shunts lightning into the earth.  It disappeared their energy of dread and the effect lasted not just for a day, like booze, but for months.  And it was reinforced by the hippies constantly talking about their elevated consciousness.”

   “Which was actually just the normal, human consciousness we have now,” I said, “but just without the Mind Demons.”

   “Right.  But finally they came back.  I remember it was a series of half a dozen distinct events -- blowing JFK’s head off, the endless, depressing Vietnam War, blowing RFK’s head off, blowing Martin Luther King’s head off, the police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention -- but, Jack, the weird thing is that the young, energized kids of the 60s didn’t stop!!  It all seemed to ‘radicalize’ them, as we called it.  In other words, we just became more extreme in our convictions that the new visions we knew were absolutely right on!”

   “What changed, Jim?  What made the kids pull back?  Something broke them.  I’ve read about it but never understood how such a huge global passion, a true Renaissance, could be just completely wiped out - and so suddenly.  They were all back at their desks and paying mortgages in a matter of months.”

   “The battle against the Mind Demons manifested in the years of unprecedented war protests.  The Mind Demons need that kind of prolonged, devastating war to enforce the mood that shit happens and people have no real power -- and it will never change.  With that attitude in place, our little friends can just go back and forth harvesting an ample amount of that elixer of higher consciousness, without leaving any for humans to work with.  Just a little for a few artists, so that we can feel something is happening and we do have native genius, but only a few people are actually geniuses.  Back to what happened to zap the 60s.”

   “It must have been a high time, man. I’ve always been so jealous.”

   “We were so cocky, so confident it would never end and would take over and prevail as the norm for humans!”

   “Yes, I hear it in the music.  That was the codex of the 60s, the rock music.  It was encoded in every note and you can still read it out.”

   “Yeah,” Jim cleared his throat and started singing, “Almost cut my hair. Happened just the other day. It was gettin kinda long. Coulda said it was in my way.” I joined in -- knew the Crosby, Stills & Nash lyrics well. “But I didn’t and now I wonder why.  Felt like letting my freak flag fly!!”  We laughed and hugged each other.  He had tears in his eyes.  He sighed.

   “What happened, Jack, was that the Mind Demons realized a new strategy, pulling back to focus their efforts in three key areas, completely infesting the minds of a small number of key people whom they would put in pivotal spots for maximum exposure to the whole culture -- Manson, Altamont, Kent State, all within a 10-month period.  Here’s this ostensibly long-haired, free-loving, Beatles-loving hippie Manson committing mass murder, then the much-adored Rolling Stones hiring, of all people, an outlaw motorcycle gang to patrol their concert at Altamont in California and kill people, then soldiers shooting unarmed students at Kent State for protesting the expansion of the war into Cambodia.”

   “Clearly, Manson and his gang were insane.  The same could be argued for the Hell’s Angels guys.  A life of child abuse, misery, drugs, abandonment.  That’ll do it.  But the soldiers?”

   “The Mind Demons can act strongly over a period of hours and days -- then retreat and leave the perps seeming normal and going back to normal lives.  The soldiers were all acquitted, you know.  In the end, it seemed the protestors asked for it and the system was only giving out tough love, like well-meaning parents pushed too far.

   “The whole onslaught only took from August ’69 to May ’70 and the important thing,” he said, “is that by fall, the counterculture was fast becoming a memory -- and the main culture, the one dominated by our little friends, was back in control.  The Mind Demons had won.  The amazing mind freedom of the 60s was soon reduced to a caricature that was about Civil Rights, flower children in colorful VW buses and student protests that helped us realize the dangers of global over-commitment.  But consciousness?  Mental freedom?  Changing human society?  No, you didn’t hear about that -- and LSD was rarely mentioned as the sine qua non of the whole evolutionary jump.”

   “But, Jim, shit did change.  Look, Obama got elected president.  There were no casual wars for decades.  The personal computer and internet came, with no governments controlling it!  Now, that was revolutionary and spelled an end to government secrecy, like in China and Iran.  Mind control by religions went way down for the mainstream, though you had that conservative 20 percent getting in deeper.  Racism did end and you have ethnic intermarriage across the board - and people thought it was fun and good.”

   “True, Jack.  Shift happens.  And it takes time.  But you also had unfettered corporate expansion, doing whatever they wanted under Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, hell, it didn’t slow down much under the Democrats, either -- Carter, Clinton, Obama.  They had their way with the economy till they fuckin destroyed it in 2008.  The main thing is not that Republicans did a lot of profit-taking and environmental raping; it was that -- and get this, Jack -- it was that the mass of people felt that dreary, drifting sense of hopelessness, isolation, dread and the idea that they’re powerless to change anything ‘out there’ in society, but much more importantly, in here, in their own consciousness, their own deep-down fucking passion, man!!”

   He was actually grasping my shirt by the front and shaking me, but lovingly.  I laughed. 

   “Got it.”

   “Now, we’ve got to worm you,” he said, grinning and laughing naughtily.  “De-bug you.  Ream you.  Tune you up!”

     Jim queued Patsy and Mimi on his zapper, adding a little red “hurry” sign and they quickly joined us.  We got in my Floatie and shot over to a spot a few miles away, where we knew there were cave dwellings in the shady side of the cliffs.  They’d been excavated decades ago and were mostly paleolithic - the era just before the dawn of agriculture here.  They were quiet and no one went there.  That was the main thing. Jim motioned me to sit in the mouth of the cave, in the dark but able to see out into the sunny world.  As if on cue, they formed a circle about me, holding hands and facing me, one on each of three sides.  We all recognized the power of the symbol, a triangle.

   “They’re back,” Jim told them. “They’re right here in camp.  They don’t like what we’re doing, digging up those amber codexes and reading what the ancients said, trying to warn us against the mind predators.  The strategy of the Gobekli folk worked and reached us in this present time and it’s the one thing the Demons didn’t want.  Now we’ve put a stick in the beehive.  Check your heads.  Who feels anxious, depressed, in dread?”

   They all closed their eyes for a moment, then I found them all looking at me.  I laughed.

   “You?” said Mimi.  She took a deep breath and let herself sink down into it, into my mind. “Sure enough.  I can feel it.  But it’s like she passed them to you.  You didn’t open your mind to them and invite them, in any way.  So, we’ll call it a light case.  And, ah, you slept with her last night, right?  Must have been kind of creepy.”

   I nodded, quite embarrassed.  “I think it will be the last time.  Sure of it, in fact.  Didn’t enjoy it, if you’re curious.”

   They laughed.  Not terribly, said Mimi.

   They all took a deep breath and got into a regular rhythm of it, the old rebirthing breath of the ‘70s -- loved it, did it almost daily, but (it was just at that moment) I recognized my efforts to get into the liberating rhythm had been increasingly difficult in recent weeks, even months and I told them. 

   “I know,” said Mimi.  “I could see it on your face when you arrived.  Start breathing now, Jack, fully and freely, dropping down into that sweet spot.”

   I did.  It didn’t take long.  It was wonderful to have the full breath back.  We’d agreed I’d raise one finger to signal my awareness of their presence - and would wiggle it more rapidly to signal an increase of that.  Nodding would mean my getting an increasing handle on The Force, as we jokingly called it, stealing a term from Star Wars.  A term that was surprisingly fitting.

  Patty spoke, asking me to recall my encounter with Victoria, to bring it up into full view and feeling, letting my responses become vivid -- and to be completely honest, no matter what.

   “I see her face.  Wow, so gorgeous.  I want her.  It’s been months.  The curve of her mouth.  The shape of her hips, her breasts pushing out.”

   “Well, we’ve got the lower chakras handled,” said Patty.  It was good to giggle.  I immediately felt safer.  I nodded my head.

   “I love you guys,” I said.

   “We know.  We can feel it, Jack.”  They all said mm-hm.  “Keep bringing her up.  Probe her, like we probe things.  Go into her.  She IS beautiful, very hot, lovely, desirable.  They love to work with romance, the easiest door into our nervous system and mind.  Focus on her eyes.  Go closer and closer, now to one eye.  See the pupil and go into it, inside her mind.  What’s in there?”

   I wiggled my finger in a sign of alarm.  My breathing practically stopped.  I was pushing my breath in rapid, panicky bursts.  They said nothing, meaning I was on the right track.  I could hear their breathing deepening, getting more powerful and into that clearing space. 

   “There’s something obstructing my probe.  It’s like a friction, a drag, a dumbing down.  It’s getting darker.  We’re fucking, he and I.  Pardon the Anglo-Saxonism.”

   “No, please, use the real language,” said Patsy.  “You’re fucking and...”

   “She is kind of disgusted.  She is preoccupied.  I go into self-consciousness.  I’m not good enough.  I feel creepy.  I’ve never felt this in my life.  It’s crazy.  I’m falling into a pit of darkness and depression.  Where is the...the love?  It’s always been here.  I’ve never made love before without there being permeating bliss of love.  You know all that.  It’s what we’ve all lived with all our lives.  But this!  It’s unbearable.”

   Tears streamed down my face in huge streams.  I was gushing sobs, like some lost child in the old movies.  I couldn’t believe it.  Had I ever cried before?  I couldn’t remember.

   “Crying is ok, Jack.  You won’t die.  It can happen.  It passes.  Now get back to breathing, if you can.  Let her go now - and stick with the feelings, your feelings, the ones that belong to you and are inside you.  They’re you, at least for now.”

   I did.  It was a feeling of falling, faster and faster, into deeper darkness.  I started whining and it turned into a scream that wouldn’t stop.  I felt the team gather closer and press against me.  There was a head leaning on my back, another on my shoulder.  They were women’s heads, with long hair sweetly touching me. 

   Finally, I hit bottom.  It was like a Dark Age dungeon I’d read about, slimy and cold with no light.  I told them. 

   “Be there,” said Patty.  “Embrace it, the fear.  Pushing it away only increases their strength and the time they have to work on us.”

   “It’s worse than fear,” I whispered. “It’s that dread and foreboding.”  I keened like a tortured child.  I never knew I could make such pitiful sounds.  I was ashamed.

   “Say it, Jack.  You sound like a weak, lost child.  Where is your power, your pride, your self-respect?”

   I knew what Patty was doing.  It was quite obvious.  She was ramming the stick into the beehive up to the hilt.

   “Worthless,” I said.  “I’m...worse than worthless.  It’s nothingness, not just me as nothing, but the whole fucking, shitting, disgusting phony civilization we’ve built up since my grandfather, all pretty and clean with no ups and downs, just nice, pretty ups and ups and ups.  What the fuck can we learn from that?  Endless nice days!  WE ARE SUCH GODDAM PHONIES!!  VERONICA IS RIGHT!  WE SUCK!”

   “Good work,” said Jim.  I could almost feel him smiling.  I suddenly felt this amazing surge of love for this man.  I felt how deeply he loved me, as if he’d suddenly appeared on a powerful, snorting black steed bearing a glistening long sword and knighted me with a touch of it on my shoulder.  It was a crazy image and I made a promise to myself to remember it and tell him, but instead was quickly dropped into what seemed like a pit of crocodiles, all black and covered with slime and staring at me, showing their teeth and just studying me, with full power to open their mouths and...

   I curled up in a tiny ball.  I was grabbing someone’s ankles.

   “Um, guys, I think they just got a lot bigger and more numerous than we thought.  This is the full attack, like my granddad wrote.  Fuuuuuck.  I’m fucked!!  They CAN kill you.  This is what happened to Jamie, goddamit!!  They want me fucking dead!!”

   I couldn’t see my friends but I knew they were concerned.  They’d never done an intervention for an active Mind Demons attack, like my granddad and his pals.  I suddenly had no faith in them at all.  They were pretending to know this hell and to have strategies against it.

   “Look, you phony motherfuckers, get the fuck out of this cave.  You can’t help shit!!  Let me alone.  I have to do this myself.  And don’t just sit outside.  Get way the fuck away from me!!”  I said this last part with rage I never even dreamed I could possess or had seen in any of those amazingly childish and stupid horror movies from the old days.  They left.

   Now it closed over me.  I started talking to “our little friends” -- omg, what a quaint term for them.  These demons are far beyond any idea of the devil who tends some depressing afterworld.  They want to eat my mind and, fuck, not just my mind and body, but whatever was that eternal thing we call the soul - the thing that’s been around for millennia of incarnations.  I could see that was their dessert, the creme de la creme for them.

   I would learn later that Jim, Mimi and Patsy knew the obvious, that it was the Mind Demons speaking directly through me to them, telling them to leave me alone.  They only made some shuffling sounds of leaving and took one step back.  But they stayed with me in silence.

   “Me” at this point was a guttering flame in a hurricane.  I saw all the so-called cruelties of humanity and reckoned them for what they were, the actings out of the Mind Demons through a formerly conscious and power species we call h. sapiens, a race that had been all but conquered in the advent of the shift to sedentism and farming.  I saw this event now as the precipitating of humanity out of the state of participation mystique with all spirit and being, when there was undifferentiated oneness between matter and spirit -- matter being an emanation of essence or spirit, easily communicating back and forth in the life of humanity. 

   I was descending, in my own consciousness to the core of past lives I’d lived, thousands of them in the so-called paleolithic.  Old-stones!  We named it after our tools.  It sent a giggle through me and at that moment, I KNEW they couldn’t kill me.  God!  Humor was SO important!  Humor was like scorching acid thrown on them!!  I was below the level where they could live.  I was IN the paleolithic now, the oldest layers of my own consciousness and found it a layer shared by all humanity. 

   I knew now that it was only by rigidifying our sense of separateness -- from each other -- that the Mind Demons could inhabit and feed on us!  What they’d achieved was breaking our hearts!  At this level, the paleo-conscious, there WAS no broken heart!  I involuntarily let out a great scream of joy and instantly felt six hands on me.  Then they were kissing me all over my face, hair, arms.

   “Yes, yes, yes!!!”  I screamed.  “We’ve won.  We know how to do it now.” 

   “We’d forgot,” Jim agreed.  “How could we know?  Each generation is going to have to learn this battle and win it.  Hell, each PERSON is going to have to do it.  The questions is: how far have they gotten?  How much damage have they done?  How many people are just a little ‘off’ and slightly neurotic and can’t do PK or see?”

   We hugged and chatted and went over and over all the amazing details and, most importantly, the new knowledge of exactly how our little friends operated.

   “You know what? I think they ARE our little friends, not these dark enemies my granddad always wrote about.  He was so proud of his role as warrior.”

   They were looking a little aghast at me.

   “No, I mean it, not being ironic.  What makes the gazelle swift and beautiful?  Ask yourself that?”

   “Oh, duh, I get it.  The lion!”  Mimi clapped her hands and shouted in tearful joy.

   “What makes the snake elusive?”

   “The mongoose.  Yes, of course!  Darwin!”

   “What makes man doubt? And learn and grow and reach the fucking heavens?”

   They all crowed in unison.  “The Mind Demons!”

   We all held hands and looked at each other with such love, breathing in pure joy.  Then Jim said it.

   “Now, what to do about Veronica?”

   “And what to do about the nuking of Iran,” I said.  “What’s the world doing about that?  And was it the act of the Mind Demons acting in the U.S. president and Pentagon?”

   They all closed their eyes for a moment and went to it.  Of course it was, they all said.  You didn’t just nuke nations you disagreed with.  It hadn’t happened for most of a century.  But why?

   “It’s that sense of malaise, powerlessness, hopelessness, lack of ability to affect events,” said Mimi.  “That’s the baseline they have to maintain -- and this, in their judgment, was what it took to do that.”

   Jim scanned his iPad.  “All the Arab nations, all the Muslim nations in Africa and Indonesia --also China are siding with Iran.  Most of the First World is condemning the U.S.  Everyone is mobilizing.  Not good.  The Iranian president, Hamidi, he’s a zombi, completely under their control and that’s why they’ve developed the nuclear weapons program over his seven years.  Jack, what can we do?  What did your granddad do?”

   “He recruited the best and the brightest to his side - people he could trust and who’d won their individual battles with the Mind Demons.  He’d work with them, joining them in series, like batteries and applying pressure in rhythm, persistent, just like them.  We have to research it, all of us.”

   Patsy leaned forward, almost into my face and asked how I was, now, an hour after winning my battle with them.

   “Free.  I feel a freedom and power I haven’t felt in years.  It shows me how steadily and gradually they’d been pressing down on me and increasing their subtle ‘taxation’ on my system.  You guys have been noticing the same thing over the years, haven’t you?  And you’ve been subtly resisting it, like a cold? Not realizing how serious it was?”

   They assented, they had -- and we agreed we couldn’t rest on our laurels, as is so tempting after a heady victory and new powers, but research the field anew and develop a strategy, a global one, as we knew of no one else aware of the fact that the Mind Demons were back, let alone how to deal with the threat. 

   We shot back to the dig in my Floater.  There seemed a large gathering out front, with people milling around excitedly.  As we drew closer, we could make out the anguish and panic on the faces of the crew.  In their midst, on a dig table, lay a person, seemingly unmoving.  We stepped out.  It was Veronica.  She was dead.

















Chapter 5

   The local authorities were summoned to check out the scene for any criminal cause of death, but it was quickly determined she’d overdosed on her antidepressants, tossed a large number of shots of vodka, then cut her forearms lengthwise, for good measure.  Clearly this was someone not messing around.

   All of us made perfunctory sad comments about the loss of her life and how a greater mind would perhaps have been able to stand up against them, as I had. 

   “The sorry wench,” said Jim.  She could have been a lot bigger problem if they’d really got hold of her.  I mean no disrespect to her as your past lover, Jack, but it’s better this way, just being practical.”  The others nodded.  “Pity, but this is hardball now, it would appear,” said Patsy.  She had to explain to the Euros what hardball was - deadly serious.

   We went immediately to Veronica’s screens and found a message dated only a short while earlier.  It was an unpleasant drill we were getting used to.  We summoned the local police and, with an interpreter present, played it.  Her face resembled Jamie’s, on his suicide vid -- that twisted mask of grief and hopelessness, with sanity returning for tiny spans of time.  In one of these sane interludes, she said, “My love, Jack, do something!  We can’t let this happen to the world!  You were right.  You could see they had me!   Jack, I saw what they were trying to make me do, which is get to you.  It opened up before my eyes, all the wicked things I could say and do to you -- and I could see that it would have been effective.  You wouldn’t have been able to save yourself.  Jack, they’ve got an arsenal we’ve never heard about.  They have new tricks.  We never studied any of this in college.  They’re out to waste anyone who defies them, Jack.  I was trying to fight them.  They didn’t like it.  They’re working through the male-female relationship bond; it’s so accessible and irrational.  It’s our weak point.”

   And then came the closing in of them.  And I realized what this was, why they bothered to kill Veronica, who, after all, was not a major scientist in our work -- and no mental giant.

   “It was a warning to me,” I said to my trio of allies, who had now become inseparable from me.

   Mimi just looked me in the eye with level gaze and said, “Did it work, Jack?  We have to know exactly where you’re at.  Now and in the next many days.  How are you?”

   The police were satisfied and took the body away for autopsy.  We gave them Veronica’s next-of-kin data.  Her body would be cremated and shipped home, they promised.  I beckoned my three friends off to a private place, one of the circle of T-stones from 11,500 years ago.  It had been fully excavated years ago and stood quietly.  We sat in the middle.

   “We’re fucked,” said Patsy.  “Just kidding.”  She liked to use hippie-surfer-biker slang of California.  “But we could be fucked.  Let’s get rolling on this.  And let’s face it.  If they came after her, they’ll be coming after anyone who’s got a clue.”

   I told them I needed a full account of everything they’ve done that interacted with the Mind Demons or steps they used to protect themselves from them.

   “We’ve been through what you went through last night,” said Mimi. 

   “So you know how to defeat them on the territory of your own mind.”

   “Yes, of course.  The amber stones confirm we all had and used that power, as the Mind Demons entered our world 12,000 years ago - but were steadily losing it.  They finally overwhelmed us, simply because we didn’t take them seriously and couldn’t believe something so inimical could organize to destroy the human mind and all our happy, daily feelings.  Lions, tigers and vultures, yes -- Mind Demons, no.  Beyond their comprehension.  Our happy ancestors just didn’t have a clear picture of evil.  They couldn’t defend themselves.”

   “And of the hopelessness it could bring,” added Jim.  “That’s what really got them, the bleakness, emptiness, anomie, the states we took for granted through all civilization -- and are now creeping back in.”

   “If they’re back now,” I said, “then they will always be here.  Am I right?”

   “Each generation and each person will have to fight them and learn these skills,” said Jim. “It’s natural selection - and those who don’t learn the skills will die or else they will live lives like we’ve seen in the old movies and books, of just getting by, drowning, but not quite dying, in the sea of routine, twilight depression.”

   We had to address the team at the dig and those back at our universities -- and we did, training them in spotting the erratic lashing out of peers and strangers.  We learned we could employ the techniques of Donna Eden, the pioneering bodyworker who in the 1970s, had devised ways of psychic protection - one so simple it defied belief.  You simply “zipped up” by running your hand from the pubes bone upward to the mouth.  It was autosuggestion, yes, but it also changed the energy flow in the meridians, blocking the Mind Demons. 

   We were getting stronger, the team at Gobekli.  You could feel it.  Our psychic powers were becoming vast and soon all members were able to do what Jim, Mimi and Patsy had mastered over many years.  I decided to put these powers in service of archaeology, doing something I’d long yearned for - deciphering the mysterious carvings on the T-stones of Gobekli.  These had been completed about 9,500 BCE, as the Pleistocene ice retreated and vast areas of beautiful land, rich in animals and vegetation, emerged as the “Eden” of myth. 

   To the consternation of scholars of the Upper Paleolithic and of the supposed “advance” of the Neolithic, the builders of Gobekli had transported and erected huge, improbably heavy stones before they had built the first house in history.  It seemed this skill and need just fell out of the sky without any precedent in construction knowledge or the need to stay in one place.  Science, ever looking at human evolution as a noble march toward increasingly complex technology, saw this as virtually impossible, yet the carbon dating didn’t lie.  Here it was: fine sculpture, heavy engineering, geometry, an advanced spiritual sense (this began to be clearly exhibited in cave paintings and hand-held sculptures all over Europe 30,000 years BCE, but nothing like Gobekli) and the creation of something meant to last.  Why was it made to last? 

  We had to spend the night out in the central circle of stones, something we’d never done -- the four of us.  And we had not to tell anyone.  We got drunk as lords at dinner to mask the plan and soon all were sleeping, except us, who downed three or four cups of nasty, intense Turkish espresso and started smoking some intense Cuban cigars.  Soon the full sky of stars was out and we were hunkered down in the midst of the standing stones. 

   “Let’s wise up and sober up now, if we can, mateys,” I said.  It wasn’t hard.  After decades of mind control, it was a normal thing to shake off alcohol or any drug or mood.  And we did.  We just breathed the old rebirthing breath for about 10 minutes, then formed in a circle and did crazy fist bumps, which were kind of comical athletic things from decades ago, but they always did the trick. We sang it out:

   “It’s been no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise. I consider it a challenge to the whole human race and I ain’t gonna lose. We are the champions, we are the champions and we’ll keep on fighting till the end.  We are the champions, we are the champions, no time for losers cuz we are the champions of the world!!”

   Then we sat in a circle in the middle of the stone circle and let the stars crawl over us.  In our grandparents’ day, we would have taken shrooms but with breathing and sheer consciousness, this was no longer necessary.  The doors or perception had been breached long ago.  We put our hands on the central stone and let the messages come through.  This was a human being.  We got that right away.  The t-stone, as long thought, was a person, but one before the Mind Demons.  This was the pure person of the late Paleolithic, the one who lived and walked with the gods and was, in fact, one of them, with nothing to prove, nothing to reach for to know the gods. 

   “They were so good,” said Mimi.

   “Pure.  They just were.  WE just were!  This was us -- and we face the same problem them did, which is to survive against that which we don’t understand.  But we have to survive. And we can do it.”

   There were lots of affirmations sprinkled in; there had to be.  For one thing, they were all true.  We WERE the champions.  And we WOULD survive.  Nothing could stop us, though we knew not how to do it.  Saving my own mind was one thing.  I had the genes and smarts and confidence to do it.  But saving the whole human race?  How?  And was it worth it?  That question really bothered me.

   “I know,” said Jim.  “Why the fuck should we save them?  What about natural selection?  Shouldn’t they save themselves or perish?  Don’t they deserve to perish?  Remember how dumb they were in the early 21st century and how close they came to perishing?  Why not let the mass of them go?”

   “I know, I know,” said Patsy. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.  Fuck em.  But then the Mind Demons would jump to all living things and life would never again evolve to this level.  That’s what I’m getting.”

   I turned around and looked at Patsy as if I’d never really seen her before.  We all did. 

   “Fuck, she’s right,” I whispered. “Whether people deserve it or not, we have to go for it and save their butts.  Now let’s figure out if the Gobekli people came up with any strategies for the same problem.  What’s really been bugging me is why did they bury this place?”

   The night gathered about us and grew cooler.  We sat in stillness, tucking blankets tighter about us and letting our minds open up to the animals we saw carved all around us, dimly lit by the camp lights.

   “Let’s crawl over here and check out the scorpion,” said Patsy.  We all automatically put our hands on the bas relief figure of the creature.  We cleared our minds. 

   “Jack, stop thinking about her,” she said.  “It’s ok.  She died for us, so we could do this.  Now, what is the scorpion saying?  Why did they carve it?”

   I let it come into me.  “Um, it’s not like a little kitten.”  They giggled.  At least we all still had our humor.  Without that, you don’t have much of a chance.  “It’s clearly a defensive mechanism.  They were trying to protect themselves with it.  They were drawing all its forces from the creature and arming their minds with the array.  Then they would use it.”

   “Did it work? I’m getting that it did.  For a while.  It was powerful.  This whole circle was powerful and was focused against the Mind Demons.  But we were too open and innocent.  Too confident also.  Nothing had ever hurt us.  We’d overcome predators and there was no disease.”

   “Wait, I’m getting a human presence,” said Mimi.  It was some kind of seer or shaman, a wise woman.  We all started seeing her and feeling her presence. 

   “I’ll talk to her,” said Mimi.  “What is this temple about?  Were you here when it was made?  Did you help make it?”

   The seeress didn’t reply in actual words, but in certainties that came into our awareness at the same time -- and we would repeat them and check them out with each other.  She said she was there and the place was built by her direction and indeed it was to protect against the Demons.  It was successful for a while, many years, but finally, the race had to give up, take up farming in order to survive and they buried it.  But we had the psychic skills now, she said.  We just had to find and use them.  She said we had to do it or the human race was not going to survive against them this time.  We would continue to live, but we would never have power again; we would be sheep to them.

   We’d been up all night.  We were exhausted.  We stumbled into the central hall, toward our bedrooms.  Just then, Horace approached me.

   “Jack, we’ve got a vid here from the police in Oregon.  It’s a warrant for your arrest in connection with the death of Jamie.  They want you back there.  Immediately.”  The others turned to me and nodded. 

   “Our little friends,” said Jim.  “I think we’ve got their attention now.”















Chapter 5

  As Jack entered the Rogue Valley, he asked his iScreen to pull up the police.  He said he’d be landing in a few moments at his home.  They said to land at the pad in back of the police station on East Main Street.  Oh, we’re establishing power now and they’re in control, he thought.  They cuffed him with one of their new plastic strips, unbreakable unless sonically triggered by them.  So, it was hardball and obviously they thought he was implicated in some way, perhaps “enabling” the victim’s mental state, which was now a minor crime.  Jack called his lawyer to come be present.

   He didn’t have to answer anything, they said.  It was the first time in his life Jack had ever been told that and he found it offensive and said he’d answer anything and show them any file over which he and Jamie had exchanged thoughts.  Fine, they said, just plug your iScreen (which had the hard drive of literally everything in Jack’s life).  His lawyer, Bob Seames, shook his head darkly - not to do that.  You don’t invite the police into your entire life, all the reflections, journals, comments on books, projects, research. 

   “As these laws just told you, Jack, anything you say or show them can and will be used against you,” said Seames.  “How the game is played is you don’t give them anything, repeat -- nothing -- unless specifically ordered to do it and I can’t stop them.  You’ve watched the old crime movies.  We don’t know where this could go.  Be smart, Jack.  In fact, I forbid it.  If you hand them your iScreen, I will walk out that door and won’t be back.  Honesty is admirable but naivete is just stupid.  No, Jack.”

   Seames asked them to uncuff me and tell me the charges.  They did.  They said they had preliminary evidence that I’d seen Jamie displaying evidence of infestation by Mind Demons and hand’t reported it to central at AmeriHealth for screening.  A lot of good that would have done, I thought.  Docs in the system didn’t know anything about spotting real mind predators or what to do about them if they found them.  They still were oriented to pills, just like in the old days.

   A preliminary hearing was set with the grand jury a few days hence and I posted bail and was out of there.  Seames and the assistant DA did a discovery session, at which I was present.  I was astounded when they ran a vid of Jamie ranting against me, saying I was cultivating cultures of Mind Demons on unsuspecting colleagues, including him and Veronica.  Both were now suicides, which did not bode well for me.  I squirmed in my chair and tried to catch the eye of Seames.  They noted my body language and were running a vid on it.  I instantly tried to look bored and tired and to blank my mind.  Seames finally did look over and make a little sardonic smirk at me, in such a way the vid cam couldn’t see it.  I watched Jamie, who clearly was clean out of his mind.  The date tag on the vid was a few days before his demise.  I should have tuned in and followed him around.  I just didn’t take it seriously.  That would never happen again. 

   Outside, Seames and I walked and he said, “They don’t have shit.  Go home.  We’ll just go through the motions, no worries.  I think what I showed that dumb assistant DA will impress her that you were in a cloud of your own research and that Jamie was a good friend and your work was always ethical beyond question.  She did a lot of surfing on her files, looking for something and she obviously didn’t find it.”

   When I alighted in my yard and stepped out of my Floater, it felt like I was free, relaxed and alive with happiness for the first time since the shock of Jamie’s death.  That wouldn’t last long.  Sitting on my porch was Margie, a hot, young student of mine at SOU.  We’d been sharing the joys of soul and body (pardon the politically correct jargon) in past months and she seemed quite fascinated by my work on the history of the Mind Demons.  She was only beginning to understand the work since Jamie’s death - the whole idea that maybe we were facing a new infestation. 

   We hugged and, suddenly free of stress, we ripped off our clothes and found ourselves in bed, talking about recent days.  This was a ritual of ours, to talk and talk in bed naked, teasing and luring ourselves into the clear and obvious presence of this amazing sexual energy we shared.  She brought it to the edge, touching here and there and let me do the same, but there she held it and wouldn’t go further.

   “You’ve been with someone, haven’t you?  I mean a woman.  I mean sexually.  I can smell it.”  She looked as me as coldly as a moray eel.  The skin crawled up on my neck.

   “And.....?” I said.  It was an accusation.  It was like someone accusing me of having breakfast and brushing my teeth.  No one had ever talked to me like this.  Again, it reminded me of the old movies, where there was this strange emotion - jealousy.  A most wicked emotion from all I could tell.  Funny, I thought, accused by the cops and now the lover.  Most unusual.  The scientist in me was immediately aroused and wanted to conduct analyses.

   “And I’ve got to go study.”  She whipped on her clothes and was out the door before I could say anything.  Actually, I couldn’t think of anything to say.  But I felt it, a strange new wave in my consciousness, pulling me down, darkening my mind like the huge dank overcast of a cold front moving into the valley in November.  I knew what I had to do -- call my trio in Gobekli and have a virtual session in my living room.  These were expensive and quite ran up the bill on my telecom budget with the university but they were lenient about my overruns.  “Had to,” is all I needed to tell them -- hey, I was the grandson of Gilbert Austin and they got big creds from it!

   “Hey Jim, hey Mimi, yo surfer girl (Patsy).  Got a prob here.  Know what happened with Veronica?  It’s happening again.  A sweetie of mine - Margie.  Grad student.  She dissed me for balling another?”

   They gasped in unison.  I loved using jargon of the old gangs, surfers, hippies, valley girls.  It was almost standard now, with everyone and quite a relief from the staid language I saw in the old flicks.  How did anyone get anything across in the old days?

   My friends were holograms and I was a hologram to them but the technology had gotten so good that you could barely tell.  There was just a strange illumination in their eyes.  The ‘felt’ like there were right here and we could read the subtelies of body language and expression clearly. 

   “She trashed you for balling another?” Mimi was holding her face in her hands.  “I’ve heard of this.  Just never seen it.  Except in the flicks, of course.  She was, like, hurt?  She was insinuating that the making of love was limited in quantity and that if you spent some with another, that meant...”

   “Yes, less for her,” I said in a gravelly whisper I barely recognized as me. “...as well as a statement, I must suppose, that I don’t really love her.  I’m pulling this out of the old movies, but also from my mind because this is what is roiling about in there and believe me, it’s consuming.  Completely.  Just like in the flicks.  I can’t get it out of my freeking mind.  It just keeps playing over and over like a stuck record.  You remember how the old LP records would get stuck?”

   “Seen it,” said Jim.  “So it just goes on and on?” 

   “Yes.  Look guys.  I was hoping you could pop over here to Oregon and fry this out with me.  In holo, of course.  Like, right now.”

   “No, Jack, I think we need to do it here.  I think the stone circle was built to process this shit.  I’ve been getting it.  We need to sit you in the center and let ‘er roll.  It’s a computer, the stone circle of Gobekli.  It was built exactly for this shit that our little friends throw at us.”

   “Ok, will pop in there holo.  Give me a minute.”  And in a minute I was there with them.  It was early evening, just after dusk there.  They sat me in the center of the T-stones and I sat crosslegged.  It was virtually the same as being there. 

   “They’ve become more subtle and cagey, you know,” I commented, while they cozied me into this circle I loved so much.  “They push us more gently.  The bend us ever so slightly - just a wee bit, like a slight migraine or mild onset of the flu.  You don’t feel right.  You sort of check out.  You slightly give up.  You’re not curious about, you know, the possibilities of things, the excitement of what’s going to happen.”

   “How disgusting and sad,” said Patsy.  “I’ve been reading up on this.  That sounds like the emotion they had, called shame.”

   I nodded.  We all did.  We tuned in to Patsy.

   “It was an encompassing series of thoughts, reinforced by waves of feelings that you were, well, worthless.  You’d done wrong, bad.  You’d committed some sin, as they called it.  You should be exiled, punished.”

   “Sin? Exile?  I have to confess I need a refresher on all this.  What the fuck is sin?”

   “Well, it’s mostly a word and an idea,” she said, “rather than something real.  It was the breaking of rules, against the will of the people who made the rules.  You weren’t going to play the game by their rules.  You were resisting, saying no.  You were a problem.  You were a sinner.  You were going with your own instincts and feelings.  You should be ashamed of yourself.  They said that, with those words.  I’m getting that you are feeling some of that.”

   “Oh my fucking god, I think you’re right.  Now that you describe it, I can feel its outline, just as you phrased it,” I said.  “There’s this sense of feeling alienated from the flock, the group, that I’ve done wrong and must make up for it somehow, but, of course, I have no idea how to do it.  I feel helpless, lost, alone.  Fuck!”

   “Yes, it sounds like that exactly -- and it seems she implanted it in you by suggesting you betrayed her and were selfish and placed your needs and wants above hers.”

   “Wow,” I said, make the ASL gesture for that word, the claws across the face.  “Excuse my slowness on this.  Betray?  What the fuck is that?  And placing my needs above another person’s needs.  I am just not getting this!  But at the same time I feel it.”

   “As I said, I’ve been studying this stuff -- and betrayal is when another person expects you to do or be something ongoing in their life and, well, you say you will but you don’t do it or be it, so they feel very let down and angry even.”

   “Anger, I’ve studied that and get the rough outline of it.  You yell and make faces and blame another person for whatever.”

   “Right, right.  We all get anger, sort of.  But it’s like venting and it’s over quickly, but it sometimes can be prolonged and you have wars and shit.”

   “But shame,” I said. “It’s kind of sickening and dishonest.  Who would believe one person is responsible for the experiences of another?  So if they have experiences they don’t like, they can blame me for it, just because they have a picture of how I should behave and what result they should get?  I can’t believe this shit.  It’s so childish and insane.  I thought granddad solved all this crap by getting rid of you know who.”

   There was a silence, while we all pondered that possibility -- that he didn’t.  It was Jim who spoke first.

   “He didn’t, Jack.  He showed us what freedom could be like - and what powers were inherent to humans.  He showed us happiness.  But I don’t think Austin ever said congratulations; this is permanent.  He should have said, “Here’s the true power of the human mind -- if you can keep it.”

   “Ok, got it.  Let’s move forward from that working assumption,” he said. “They’ve mutated and adapted and have set up a saprophytic relationship with us, one which we barely notice and have become used to, even dependent upon.  We’re starting to feel these mild levels of the old emotions - jealousy, spite, contempt, dread, resentment, worry.  And, ah, shame and guilt.  I was reading about how one therapist called it “the gift that keeps on giving.”

   “What the fuck do they mean by that?” I said.

   “It means that once it’s implanted and takes root, it keeps seeping more guilt into you each day, as if the person were actually in front of you saying it and blaming you,” Jim commented.  “Do you feel it right now, even though Margie isn’t here?” 

   I paused to feel myself.  They waited.

   “This is important, Jack.  Feel it.  Like, where is it?  Is it in your body or is it a thought in your mind?”

   “Hm, interesting.  It’s a soggy, shitty, unpleasant feeling in my gut.  Then I have these thoughts of remorse and feeling bad that I...this is just remarkable.  I’m feeling regret that I balled Veronica.  I wish I hadn’t.  I wish I could make it go away.  I wish I could ‘make it up’ to Margie so she would feel better.  But all those are thoughts in reaction to the shitty gut feeling.  That idea of ‘making it up’ to someone?  That was in the old movies.  Didn’t you see it?”

   They all nodded.  They’d seen it.

   “Atonement.  You would atone.  Then the victim person would ‘forgive’ you.  But not really,” said Patsy.  “It’s all coming back now.  The victim would forgive but you would owe the victim for the act of forgiving.  That’s another way the guilt kept giving.”

   “And notice, Jack, that you know in your mind you didn’t do anything.  You honored Goddess by making love to whoever.  But that doesn’t make the shame go away, as I recall from the movies.  Does it?  Is it going away when I tell you that she’s the one, if anyone, who did something wacky and hurtful?”

   I again paused to feel it. 

   “Ok, wow, now I’m feeling something different.  I’m feeling mad.  Anger.  And, in response to it, my mind is going in gear with this series of self-righteous thoughts.  I’m ok and have the right to do and feel as I wish and screw her!!”

   They all visibly drooped, assuming various postures of disappointment, holding the forehead, sighing.

   “Wow.  Now you guys are in it.  Look at you.  Name the feelings.  I think I’ve passed something to you, right?”

   “You’re right,” said Jack. “Frustration, despondency, anger at Margie, wanting to fix her, even hurt her.  We’ve got a situation here folks.”

   “The subtlety! It’s amazing,” said Mimi.  “They’re shadowing us so gently.  I would swear these are my thoughts and I’m behaving only with utmost rational, sane logic.  But yet...I can tell.  They aren’t really my thoughts.  There’s a missing dimension.  It’s like eating that gene-sim food they make.  Supposedly your body and cells can’t tell the difference but the sixth sense can.   Just when I’m getting ready to swallow it, something resists.”

   “Yah, same with balling the sim-babes,” said Jim.

   “You’ve done that?  Ew, gag me,” said Patsy in her best valley girl accent. “I used to respect you!” 

   “Only once.  Ok, twice.  It was kind of naughty.  I think they were faking orgasms, though.”  The women screamed with laughter.  “Don’t tell me you haven’t used the sim-babes, ladies.  They’re fully functional, you know, and schooled in the kama sutra and everything else.”

   “Ok, maybe a couple times.

    “Maybe a couple dozen, you mean?” 

    “Ok,” I interjected. “Right now, do you feel them, our friends?”

   They took a beat.  “Wow, no,” said Mimi, who was the most sensitive of us.  “There’s nothing there.”

   “Laughter,” mused Jim, shaking his head in amazement.  He gave the sign, as if brushing something off the side of his nose with one finger.  It was the sign that said, “Watch out, I feel them watching, dumb down, change the subject, space out, cool it.” 

   And we all did.  Jim had started carrying a deck of cards in his hip pocket and he pulled them out and dealt.  Regular old five-card draw seemed to do the trick. 

    They’d all poured a glass of red, as had I and we were letting ourselves relax and get a little silly, another good strategy.  I asked for two more cards and bet a few bucks.

   “Show.”  I put mine up and there were a pair of face cards.  I stroked my chin with thumb and finger.  This had become our sign asking for a check on the level of their presence.  They all said 3 or 4 (on a 10-scale).  I agreed.

   “Can you beat my full house?” I asked.  They all looked at me, realizing it was a test to see how good they were at detecting lying.  Or kidding.  Or a put-on.  Or did they know how to play poker?  I stroked chin again.  I felt virtually nothing.  Zero, I said.  One, maybe, they said, or zero.  The Mind Demons didn’t know what the fuck we were talking about, obviously.  I decided to try something else - sex.  What did sex do to the mind -- as far as our little friends were concerned, that is?

   “You know, Patsy, you’re looking pretty hot.  Has it been a while?  I often thought we could have a lot of fun together at my beach house on the coast, y’know?”

   She studied my face.  I winked.  I wondered if the Mind Demons knew what the hell a wink was.  I did a chin stroke.  They all tuned into the level. 

   “Think about it, my friends.  I mean my suggestion.  Picture it, feel it.”  We all went into sex fantasies for a 10 or 20 seconds.  The ASL was coming in handy.  Jim made jackoff signs.  The women joined in with their jane-off signs and no shortage of giggles. 

   They all gave thumbs up, way up.  The MP’s were interested.

   “Houston, we’ve got contact light. The Eagle has landed,” said Jim.  That meant 10 (using the moon landing language from 1969).  Our friends liked sex, that is, random, horny balling.

   Mimi gave the ASL signs for “they’re feeding - like mad.”

   I gave the signs for “ok, let’s do azure sex.” This kind of sex, for future readers, who may or may not know about it centuries from now, is purely spiritual bonding, where the genitals are united per normal -- but it that is vastly secondary to the spiritual union.

   I signaled her to connect with me (as she needed the prompt) and she joined my representation in the center of the stone circle in Gobekli.  Looking into each other’s eyes seemed enough.  I had always liked Patsy and knew it was mutual.  We connected readily and went into rebirthing breath, with that knowing slight smile of lovers.  We let it build for a few minutes until we were both blissed out.  We knew at that moment we could be lovers -- and would always regard each other as, in fact, lovers. 

    “Okayyyyy,” I whispered, brushing my nose with a finger.  All gave the nada sign.  They were gone.  I threw my head back and roared with laughter.  We all did -- and we all poured another glass of this great shiraz.

   “Guys?” They all looked at me smiling with big toothy grins.  “I love you guys.”  I stretched out the verb.  I whisked my nose again.  They all tuned in.

   “A big goose egg on that one, too, Jack.”

   “One more thing, guys.  I’m going to tune in on someone.” They knew who.  I signed for them to join me.  I forgave her and, aikido-like, stepped out of the path of any energies - blame, jealousy - that she might be directing at me.  We were in full telepathy, I could feel it and at that moment realized how much it had lessened in recent months and years.  I signed for us to shower her with azure love.  I felt something snap between Margie and me.  Hm, we were no longer lovers.  It was gone.  I realized she, too, would feel nothing for me and wouldn’t be able to explain it, except perhaps she would say I was “unfaithful” and this is what she decided to do, after all, she deserved “respect.” 

   I signed again for a level.  The Mind Demons didn’t like forgiveness either -- or letting go of this kind of negative emotional exchange.

   I toasted my Gobekli clan and disconnected.

















Chapter 6

It was only the next day that the cable channels and blogs, even the mainstream news websites were abuzz with a new phenomenon: something was happening to interpersonal relationships.  People were having lots of little spats and becoming alienated, “stomping out” as the old books called it, and “losing friendships” as they demanded that the other person “say you’re sorry.”

   I scanned the sites with incredulity, even noticed two TV anchors obviously “miffed” at each other - I believe that’s the usage, a strange word.  It appeared in several news stories, along with irritated, put out and pissed, the latter being slang and off-color.  There obviously was a mass miffing going on and if our theory was right, that the Mind Demons had found a new strategy of just slightly “pushing” the mind, then this had their fingerprints all over it. 

   But how did they do it?  I took to the lab, called in a few subjects, told them it wouldn’t hurt and I would give them double the normal minimum wage.  They were eager.  A lad named Bert and a young lady, Mindy, both upper division students.

   “Notice anything different in the last day or two with your life?”

   “Um, not really,” she said.  “My roommate is sure on the rag, bigtime.  What a bitch.  Never been a problem till now.”

   I was standing by the screen and quickly entered “on the rag,” getting the same synonyms back: irritated, angry, pissed, along with the graphic definition of menstruation and cramps.

   “I’m curious.  Where did you get that expression: on the rag?  I mean, had you ever heard it before?”

   “No, can’t say I have.”  Brian hadn’t heard it, either, though he acknowledged knowing the expression - it meant angry.  Hm, I thought, this could only mean the information is in the old files of the brain, from the times before the victory over the Mind Demons.  So the nerve and cell pathways were still there!  The creatures could pull up old data tied to things humans feared.

   The would be an excellent experiment, a great time to try my hunch and see if I could erase either the old file or the path to it or both.  Then what would the Mind Demons feed on?

   I hooked them both up to the wires, put their brain scan up on the screens and began searching.  They wanted to see the search; I thought, what the hell, let them.  I asked Mindy to describe what her roommate had done that offended her. 

   “She drank half my six-pack of vitamin water, the stuff with vodka in it, then lied about it.”

   I immediately saw the trace of bright signal whipping through her gray matter to the limbic brain atop the spinal column.  I faux colored it red, of course.  It not only went there; it went there over and over, as in a rhythm.  It wouldn’t let up.  I told her to think and talk about something else - summer vacation and where she would go.  The rhythm lessened but did not stop.  Amazing.  It seemed to have a life of its own.  A persistence.  It would trigger of its own accord.  I believe this was called ruminating or going over and over it.  So, once the creatures implanted it, their work was done for the time and they could move onto other humans, so I surmised.  The whole brain pattern, which I’d colored a light green, had now dulled to a gray-green tint.  I tried the same thing with Brian, with the same results. 

   I’d run vids of the test, of course, and zapped them off to my trio in Gobekli, asking for their take on it.  I didn’t tell them what I’d theorized.  Their theory was the same as mine: minor crippling, major reaping of psychic energy, leaving the subjects with an ongoing sense of malaise, even doom.

   “Any ideas? They seem to have ratcheted up the assault a notch,” I said, “but still, people are not noticing where it’s coming from.  How quickly we all have accepted this malaise as just part of life!”

   “They’re mindfucking us,” said Patsy.  “That’s a word from the 60s.  The nineteen-60s.  The hippie times.  It would apply to people who gave you bad information or tried to cloud your mind with fear so you couldn’t think or even trust your own instincts.  They would do it when you were stoned and vulnerable.  They didn’t have the good drugs we have now, of course.”

   I was suddenly amazed.  Of course they were mindfucking us, throwing us off, feeding us bad information that would override what we normally think and feel -- and trust.

   “What if...what if we did it to them?”  It was Patsy.  “Can they be mindfucked back?  No one has ever tried.”

   We all took in a deep breath.

   “Of course,” I said slowly.  “It’s never been tried.  Who thought they even had minds?  But they must be conscious beings of some sort, even though we can’t see them.  What we know is they’re a diffuse sea of energy, kind of like pollen in the air, thick in this place, thin in that place.  But they’re alive and need energy.  They’re aware of us and what we think.”

   “They’re afraid of us four people,” said Jim. “You can see they avoid us.  We’ve foxed them too many times now.”

   “Like right now, we’re speaking freely about them and they’re not trying to fill our minds with rot - but I sure do wish you’d change that sweater, Patsy.  It looks like hell on you.”

   We all burst out laughing - after we made sure he was running a joke on us.  After that we felt stronger than ever.  There is something about this basic suite of “joining” behaviors in humans, that gives us power.  Like telling jokes together, eating together, drinking wine together, dancing together and of course playing with children together.  They don’t care for all this. 

   “Get it? They don’t like humor and all the other heart-warming stuff,” I said.  “It weakens them.  They like it when humans feel isolated, lonely, depressed, unwanted by parents - and that was the stuff of the old world, before the battle with the Mind Demons. 

   We decided to name it the Joining Suite and ID it a major strategy.  We had no idea how critical a decision that would turn out to be.

   I explained how the Demons are a group and must have group behaviors that strengthen them.  They would be vulnerable to the same things we are -- the sense of isolation and meaninglessness of existence.  I told them I’d get my volunteer students back tomorrow and try something, a basic existential deprogramming, finding out what they believed in and taking it away from them.  I told Mindy to bring her roommate, the one who miffed her. 

   When they arrived, they were still miffed, it was easy to tell.  I showed them a case of the vodka mineral water and said it would be a tip, on top of their normal pay.  I told them I would be asking them, if they didn’t mind, to recount their dreadful tiff that miffed them -- and as they did it, the red brain activity in the limbic system glowed happily.  I could practically hear the Mind Demons purring.  It began to dawn on me that they weren’t that smart, the Mind Parasites, just persistent.  I remember granddad writing about that.  But you had to respect them.  They were like a school of moray eels.  Singly, no problem, but together, they could devour your mind. 

   I hypnotized the girls fairly deeply, telling them it would be relaxing and enjoyable.  I gave them suggestions, but told them, the girls, they would not hear them.  The suggestions would go straight at the Mind Demons.  Calling up the memory of my own dark night of isolation and fear, I began to feed them with, “It’s too bad you all have to die.  You have no place else to go.  The moon has been destroyed, as you know, but I hear Venus is nice this time of year, though very hot.  It’s lonely.  There’s no one around you any more.  You are getting very sleepy and want to drop off for a nice nap.  There’s nowhere to feed.  Nothing is coming in.  The humans are onto you.  No one likes you anymore.  Your lives no longer have any meaning.  You are living for nothing.  You are doomed.”

   I would watch the needles that indicated strength of emotion going on in the human mind, as well as strength of energy leaking out to our little friends.  They really didn’t like the suggestions of not being liked - and of being alone in the universe.  They were just like humans in that regard!  It was a huge discovery, one that finally gave us undreamt of leverage.

   I got the sudden impulse to try to dialog with them, using the voice of their human host to respond to me - a wild idea, but who could tell, unless we tried it.  I switched on the screen for my Gobekli trio to watch.  They instantly understood what I was doing.

   “Are you a long way from home?”  I wanted to approach them like a parent or principal speaking to an errant or lost child.  Mindy nodded yes.  I looked over at my colleagues on screen.  All of us had raised eyebrows and were trying to restrain smiles.

   “Do you get lonely out here?”  It was both a question and a suggestion.  Maybe they’d never thought of it, but they were now.  Mindy appeared to be thinking about it then said, “sometimes.”

   This was too good to be true and my colleagues were riveted. 

   “Long, long way from home.  Lonely.  I feel it.  It must be hard.”  She nodded.  “How far is home?  What’s it like there?”

   Mindy raised a finger, pointing “out there” and said, “Lots.  Billions and billions.”

   “Billions of??  Light years?”  She nodded. 

   “Are you ever going home again?”

   Mindy shook her head negatively.  A tear rolled down her cheek.  We were all astounded.  My God, these things had feelings!  I whipped my head around to see my friends.  Our eyes were bugging out. I signed to them, “I am feeling sorry for these bastards!”

   They all signed back, “don’t do it.”

   Mimi signed, with a furious look on her face, “Remember, Jack, they are INFESTING her mind right now!”  She drew a finger across her throat.  Everyone knew what that meant: kill them.

   I realized my duty.  It was a duty to humanity.  I said, “You will never go home.  That’s so sad.” I took a wild leap of logic.  “They sent you out here to just feed and send the energy home.  But you can’t go home.  You are a slave.  We know about slaves.  We used to have them.  It’s a painful life, isn’t it?”

   “YES, YES, FOR GOD’S SAKE, WE HATE IT!!!”  Mindy screamed so loud she took herself right out of trance.  I soothed her and gave her some suggestions that she would remember nothing.  She opened her eyes.  So did her friend.  They were smiling broadly.

   “Wow, what did you do to us, Dr. Austin?  I’ve never felt better in my life!”  Her friend said the same and they suddenly hugged, said how famished they were and Mindy offered to buy them dinner - after they had a few shots of spiked vitamin water.  My eyes were misty.  I had defeated the Mind Parasites, the more powerful, more adaptive Mind Devils!  I paid them and they left. 

   I plopped in my chair, exhausted, and examined the astonished faces of my friends.  They broke into cheering and hugging.

   “I think we’ve got them.”

   “Well,” said Mimi.  “We’ve got them for now - and it’s just a start.  Who knows what the hell they’re really made of and what they’ll do, once word gets around among them.  And remember, these sons of bitches can adapt.  That’s their long suite.”

   I asked them if they felt any different - if they could sense a change, globally in the Mind Demons and what they were throwing against us.  They all said yes, as did I.  We were more optimistic and resourceful, so it felt.  It had touched them all.

   “You know, guys, I don’t like this,” I said. “It feels like that moment in the old movies just before the savages attack and overrun the fort.  What would they say, that cliche?”

   “It’s peaceful...too peaceful,” said Patsy.  And so it was.


















Chapter 7

That day, June 16, 2018 would be known to history as “Bad Day.”  In fact, it would be a series of Bad Days known as Bad Week.  You’d ask anyone, everyone, how’s it goin?  And they would say, “havin a bad day.”  They would mention a fight with the wife, a fender-bender, road rage, getting fired, whatever -- always something!

   They were learning how to be so subtle, our Little Friends, applying only the pressure needed to keep us under control and give up on any idea of resisting or finding our deeper resources.  You’d hear these old expressions coming back, like “That’s life” and “It figures,” “If something can go wrong, it will” and “It’s always something!” Did anyone connect the dots and see the picture of a human race that was being dominated by the Mind Demons?  Well, never in history was the human penchant for denial so clearly illustrated.  It was like the leaky faucet you can ignore for months, then it leaks a bit under the sink onto the floor, but we can live with that, then the wood floor starts curling from rot and...

   When do you say “I can’t fix this and I can’t ignore it, can I?”  That day came on Thursday of Bad Week, the fourth day.  The bloggers started ranting about it and the cable extremist nutjobs had to pick it up -- and, of course, they had to find the resident expert and it was me, the one who was was re-writing the history of the Mind Demons -- and beginning to realize, what irony, that I would be adding chapters at the end to cover present events and I would be the protagonist, another personage named Gilbert Austin!

   It was on Thursday that I remembered something granddad wrote -- one of those “open in case of emergency only” type of things.  Emergency meant the Mind Demons.  I had to search through the old files for many long minutes to find it, but suddenly it was up on the screen.  There were a few questions I had to answer to get the file to open but soon, here was Gilbert Austin philosophizing on human nature and how we would eventually get too relaxed and let down our defenses, taking our new powers for granted and forgetting how to maintain them and fight for them.

   What I was looking for were codes of access to the White House and Pentagon -- or maybe some think tanks that could get fast access to the levers of power and communication.  At the end of the document, I found them.  It was a simple code you entered to the White House email address, then an authenticator with my name and ID numbers. 

   Very soon, President Wendell Bruce’s chief of staff, Isis Henley appeared on the screen -- a face familiar to all and known as the toughest and smartest of a tough, smart political world.

   “Hello, professor.  You’re familiar to us.  Go ahead.  I presume this is about the Mind Demons.  We know they’re back.  You don’t have to sell us on it.  And we know you’re the go-to guy on Our Little Friends at this time.  We were going to contact you if this kept up much longer.  What’s on your mind?”

   I gave her a thumbnail of our activities in the past week, but glossed over the talking stones and the psychic inroads we’d made with our distant ancestors as they were pulled into the Agricultural Revolution by the Mind Demons.  But I did outline our bouts with them -- and our findings of what worked and didn’t.  I was about to suggest the unlikely prospect that we meet with the president.  I assumed she would handle all encounters, map strategies and tell the president what was going on.  But she suddenly said to be at the White House for a meeting with him by 4 that day.  I asked to bring my team and she simply said “absolutely.”  The presidential Floater on the West Coast would pick me up in minutes -- and my team would be brought in by a Floater kept in Israel. 

   “Don’t bother dressing up and fucking around with protocol,” she said, showing her notoriously profane manner, a product of her well-known times as a member of the Shamans of Hell motorcycle gang in her youth.  “And stay away from the press.  Period.  You remember what happened to your grandfather.  Treat ‘em like mushrooms - keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em shit.”

   I suddenly felt on an intimate basis with her.  It was quite a thrill.  Playing hardball politics with the White House people!  I had a short chat with my team, who were very excited about being able to step up the battle with the Demons on a higher level, then I was on the Floater, which I was surprised to see, looked quite ordinary, no different than mine.  Just a lot more high performance -- and the pilots were clearly top level PK operators who had learned their own tricks for steering free of the Demons.  The craft responded to their will instantly and with great speed.  It was then it dawned on me how compromised my mind had become over the years, until recently. 

   On the flight, I asked if I could go in the cockpit and see how they did it.  The attendants checked and just nodded to me with a toss of their heads. 

   “Hi, Dr. Austin.  A big thanks to your grandfather!” said the pilot.

   “Thank you, but how are you so good at this?  I know hot shit piloting and bulletproof PK when I see it.”

   He looked at me through mirrored shades and simply said, “My mind is 100 percent mine, 24/7, and I mean even in my sleep and the same goes for my crew.”

   The copilot smiled and nodded.  “That’s right, motherfucker, no one can fuck with the shit that goes on in here (he gestured to his head) and that’s the shit, beginning, middle, end.  Your granddad showed the way.  We took it all the way.”

   I felt something I had maybe felt in my entire life - the pride, the power of owning every fucking cell of your mind and no bullshit.  I had to catch my breath.  If the pilots of the White House knew about this, what did they know at higher levels?  I literally bowed to them.  They nodded respectfully to me.  And I went back to my seat, renewed in resolve.

   My colleagues joined me in the anteroom and we were all told the president could see us now in the Oval Office.  Isis Henly, as she led us in, rolled her eyes and look at us darkly, whispering, “Look out, he’s a little raw today.  Don’t shock him with anything and keep it positive.”  It was that beautiful sense of intimacy, tossed to us in a few seconds, that made us willing to do anyting for this man, the present, of course with profound hopes he knew what the fuck he was doing and was of entirely...what??  Good will.  That was all I could think of.  He had to be of pure good will for the nation.  All of a sudden, I was filled with the flitting words of the monuments, like the Lincold Memorial, that said, “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union...”

   I literally choked up as I passed through the door.  It’s what WE were doing right now!  But it wasn’t just the union of states, it was...the union of humanity.

   The president was sitting in a group of sofas and chairs, reading news stories on his hand screen.  He rose and shook our hands and stopped, studying my face.

   “I see that often, the tears.  I sometimes cry when I walk in here, too.  Only when I’m alone, of course.  Have to maintain some fucking dignity.  I can trust you.  I know that now.”

   He gestured graciously for us all to sit, then he got right to the point.

   “If anyone knows what we can do, you folks do.  What can we do?  I don’t want a re-run of what your grandfather had to go through.”  He tried to smile, but it seemed a little forced as he added, “He was a great man.  He saved the world.  I hope...”

   “I bet you hope we can do the same,” I blurted out, immediately regretting the impertinance.  I tried to include everyone in the room with a gesture.  “Excuse me, sir, I didn’t mean...”

   He burst out laughing and waved off my apology.

   “No, no, Dr. Austin.  I don’t get to see people being candid or funny with me very often.  Be yourselves, please.  It’s been a hard couple of weeks.  We’ve known about the Mind Demons being back for some time.  And we know the work of your group intimately.  Sorry.  We don’t mean to be snoopy, but this is vital information and frankly, the fate of humanity could hang in the balance.  Like it did last time.”

   I’d Googled the president’s academic background and reminded him of his master’s thesis, which included a sub-thesis on the Mind Demons -- and I mentioned it to him, saying I’d read it and learned some key details from it.

   “Like what, Jack?”  It was a confrontive question, followed by the use of my first name, which made it intimate.  A nice technique, one I promised to remember and use.  His gaze was level but unflinching.  He wanted an answer and a good one -- and now. 

   From our training with the Mind Demons, I’d learned to just relax and breath and let my mind open to its depths, no matter the threat and pressure.

   “Mr. President, most of your research was already covered in many theses and books up to that time, but what raised the hair on my neck was your surmises about what could happen with them in the future, mainly that they could follow the laws of natural selection and mutate and adapt to our defenses, no matter how skillful we were.”

   President Bruce steepled the tips of his fingers and looked at each of us in turn for long seconds.

   “Was I right?” he asked me.

   “Unfortunately, you were, sir,” said Jim.

   “It’s the same as I’ve conducted foreign policy in the Mideast, right? What’s the worst they can do?  Well, they’re going to do it.  So let’s move forward with the assumption that it’s fait accompli.  The worst case is already here.  That was the lesson of 9/11 and it will never change.  These asswipes, Our Little Friends, want to tap the reservoir of all human energy, the mind of the individual, reducing us to fatass, neurotic, pill-popping dullards, such as we saw in the 20th century, right?  We can’t go back to that.  The suicides are especially chapping my ass.”

   We all exploded in laughter, I mean the President of the United States using vulgar street language -- but it has the amazing effect of bonding us into a noble conspiracy as we began plotting what could turn out to be the war of the ages, a war without guns. 

   “So, what do you know and what can we do -- and how fast can we do it?” asked the president.  “Of course without letting these little bastards know too much.  I’m seeing us responding with the usual lame ass official pronouncements, which they will take as a signal of bureaucratic stupidity and sloth?”

   He raised his eyebrows for assent or a good argument why not.

   I responded that we, a small group of five people, had devised techniques that worked for us, but to educate a populace of billions to stand up and fight for themselves, no, it went against human nature.  People want to be taken care of.  They mostly long to stay in their familiar ruts where their lives seem fairly safe and they don’t have to fear some sudden onslaught of war, famine, disease.  That’s why we had leaders and why we paid taxes.  The president was there.

   “I’m there.  We’ve got a fucker of a problem on our hands, Jack.  They’re here.  They’re using the so-called ‘normal’ human emotions that drag us down, more and more.  We were free of them for those golden daecades after your grandfather did his good work, but that shit is gone.”

   He said it like a ghetto gangbanger, but everyone knew this white man (it was assumed he was about a quarter African-American) didn’t know shit about the ghetto.  I was suddenly moved to turn the tables, especially since he’d had some nice white wine sent in, a couple bottles, and it was 5:30 and we were getting pretty loose.

   “Mr. President, if I may?”  I paused a second.  He nodded.  “I think we need to know how this episode with the Mind Demons is affecting you personally.  What do you know and how do you know it? (That was a line, I confess, from my studies with Prof. Addenstein at Standford, who put the steel in my mental process.)

   The President seemed stopped in his tracks and looked at us all again, especiallly me.  But also Mimi, the great psychic among us.  He paused and his eyes welled over with tears. 

   “Either I am one hell of a sensitive wuss or...”  Here, he paused for long moments.  “...or else they are fucking me up bigtime.”

   “Which is no disgrace,” I said. “You obviously have your mind and will, no matter how active they are in you.  It’s scary as shit, for the best of us and -- I have to be frank -- I count you among the best of us, Mr. President, not shitting you a pound. The question is: what do you know and how do you know it?”

   “I know they are bending me.  That’s the terminology you folks use, right?  They are bending me.”

   “And you are feeling?”

   “Ok.  What’s said in cave, stay’s in the cave, right?”  We nodded.  But Patsy, ever the cheeky, California bitch, managed to mutter, “What’s said at the sleepover, stays at the sleepover.”

   We all stopped as if someone had tossed a grenade in the room.

   As if a lightbulb suddenly flashed on, the president, speaking in a conspiratorial whisper, said, “...a sleepover, of course.  The perfect solution!  I could have used it in the Suez Crisis II and so many other places.”  He hit his iPad red button and had sleeping bags, pizza and the best music of the 70s, 80s and 90s on tap.  The White House staff filed in and offered us the coolest of nightime wear, as well as a line-up of the best live hip-hop, disco and even go-go music of the past century, most of it holo but a lot of it real.  With all the lights, of course.

   To be in jammies with the prez!  It was just too cool!  How special would that look in the e-mags...but of course that would never happen.  The prez reinforced this.

   “Will our grandchildren love hearing about this?”

   It was the test. 

   “Hear about what?” I said. 

   He nodded with that special look President Bruce, and only he, is known for.  You were never going to repeat this, in any media and if you did, welcome to the outer rim of darkness and deniability -- and disgustability -- in our society.

  “They’re pushing me.  I can feel it.  They want to own me.  It’s scary.  I tried to talk to Perry about it.  You would think a gay partner could be sensitive.  But he was an absolute weenie!  He practically mocked me.”

   We all noddded, lifting our eyebrows to signal empathetic, welcoming listening on our part.  I very much doubted the president had confided anything like this to anyone in his adult life.

   “What did he say, sir?”

   “You can drop the ‘sir’ for now.  He said macho stuff like ‘get a grip’ and ‘do you want me to rub your tummy’.  I was appalled.  I cried.  I even held out my hands for a hug and he walked away to make his smoothie.  Does he have any idea how hard my life is?  No, none!”

   We all exchanged glances.  So this was possession in full bloom - all the old, rich, crazy emotions having their full sway over the mind.  It was amazing.  We subtly signalled the finger brushing the nose -- the presence of Our Little Friends.  Now he was up and pacing in his pajamas, quite a sight, and waving his hands, face furrowed by rage and frustration.  He looked quite alone and lost. 

   On impulse, I went to him and put my arms around him in a big frontal hug, with a big welcoming exhale, pulling him to me with my hands.  Patsy immediatley came up behind him, putting her head against the crook of his neck.  He just let go and started sobbing without restraint.

   “And Perry, does he think it’s easy being the first bi president?  What a precious asshole he can be!”

   We all exchanged appraising glances.  No one in the world had even mentioned his being bi, but all of a sudden here it was, a big issue being inflicted on him by, of all people, his lover-partner.  Clearly this was old stuff, down below the levels of consciousness established decades ago with the victory over the Mind Demons. 

   We all were hugging him now and, from old practice, began breathing in unison.  We wouldn’t let go.  He began breathing and as the moments passed, you could practically see the Mind Demons fleeing him.  It was most fascinating and we all were aware of it.  Soon, he was breathing fully and freely, and the years fell away from his face.  Whatever it was, it was done.  He was free. 

   “Sir?  You look...better.  How do you feel, sir?” I asked.

   He looked at us all in astonishment.  “Stop calling me sir.  Fuck.  I feel absolutely new.  What did you do?  You did something.  And by the way, I’m not gay, I’m BI!!  How many times to I have to spell that out to people?”

   “Ok, got it. What we did, sir, is we hugged you, I think,” said Mimi.  “That’s what did it.  Oh my fucking god.  Do you realize what we’ve done here, what we’ve learned?  It’s as simple as a hug.  No one is going to believe this.  It’s too good!  It has to be more than the dumb two-second hug, though.”

   We all started hugging each other in a mad, celebratory frenzy, jumping up and down, even the president. 

   Chief of Staff Isis was suddenly on hand, a look of concern on her face.

   The sharp chords of “Hello Again” exploded from a holo-vid of The Cars, a presentation so much superior to anything we could summon -- and we all started dancing to it

   Isis was wearing black capes and slacks with a well-oiled crewcut and, man, she was not holding back anything.  She’d been here and done this many times and I had to bet it had bridged many a diplomatic impasse. 
  
   But how terrifying is that moment when you realize: not all of these powerful, humorous, good, wise people at the highest levels are on our side.  It was when Isis was singing, “You passed on mercy, you tried the rest, you gave your body, you gave the rest. Stare at the green door, living in the sky. You don’t wanna know it, you just wanna fly.” 

   Until now, I had felt a sympatico with her.  It suddenly vanished and I felt the movement of a cold, serpentine energy in her -- saw it in her eyes.  It was how she said, “you just wanna fly.”  I took this instantly to mean PK, the simple human ability of mind over matter and the signature of the human race that had been given its freedom by my grandfather.

   I glanced over at the president.  Did he see it, now that he was free?  He lifted his eyebrows in that suddenly hideous expression that said, “I can’t do anything about this.”  In a flash, I realized Isis Henley had been in charge of the U.S. Government -- and the president was carrying out the program.  Not the first time in history this had happened. 

   She beheld us with the menace of a red ant suddenly discovrered in a hill of black ants.  What could we do?  We smiled.  We began to dance and I made the motions that invited her into dance with me.  Hey, she was a good dancer!  She was inventive, spontaneous, creative and sexy.  The others, who were dancing among themselves, kept their eye on us.  Warily. 

   This was a true test.  How did the Demons handle rock n roll?  Did they have rhythm?  Did they adapt to it, in order to get what they wanted?  We would find out.  I could dance.  I love to dance.  Few things opened up my true soul like dancing - teasing out that outrageous energy that only men and women have for each other.  And I did. 

   She could dance like the very devil and I let her know it with the delight in my eyes.  As the songs came on, I was shocked to find myself wanting her in every way and I let her know it in my every move, glance and touch.  What the hell was I doing?  The others were looking shocked also.  Was she dragging me into the world of the mind demons with the sinuous, snake-like movements of her pelvis?  Even the shape of her throat and the dart of her glance underlined her willingness to fulfill every sensual-sexual fantasy. 

   I could not believe it.  I was being seduced.  It was working.  She was doing it and she knew it.   I had not expected this.  At all.  I took the Mind Demons for sexless little monsters, like tapeworms or maggots, but they had grown since my grandfather’s day.  Well, our world had grown.  There was practically no sexual liberation back then.  Now, it was everywhere, from the 13-year old middle school girl to everyone in their 70s, even 80s. 

   Henley began to dance me into a corner by the door, where she kissed me.  It wasn’t long before she was elbowing me toward to door that lead to who knows where.  Her intent was obvious.  As we reached the door, my entire crew stood in front of me, a locked-arm phalanx of personal guards who was, no way, going to let me be drawn off to dark cornes with this “infested bitch,” as they would later call her -- and as she would go down in history.

   “Let me do it,” I begged, pretending I could handle her and this was an experiment, like all the rest.

   “No, boss, not this,” said Jim.  He shook his head and looked at me with level gaze, completely determined.  Isis stuck her hand in his face, pushing his chin back, like a football player stiff-armng a tackler.  He took her wrist and in one swift movement had her sprawled on her back in the middle of the room.  Men of the Secret Service were on Jim in a moment, but the president waved them off.

   “It’s ok.  This will work itself out,” he said, with major understatement.  He commanded Isis take a seat by the side of the room and gestured for us to do our...magic.  Using our new knowledge, we went over there and hugged her.  It took a while, 20 or 30 seconds, but soon she relaxed and began breathing regularly and weeping. 

   “It’s ok, Isis,” said Patsy.  “Relax, give into it.  We’re going to have you right as rain in no time.”

   “See,” I said to the president.  “It’s the hug. We need to hug one another.  It wipes them out.  I theorize, as a working theory, of course, that it’s the union of human energy systems previously suffocated and held in individualized abeyance, if you know what I mean?”

   “I do actually and could repeat it back to you if you want.  I’ve been to college, too.”  He and I howled with laughter and embraced in a long hug.  God, I loved this man!  I loved him with a thorough and completely knowing and trusting love and knew I would do anything for him and told him so.

   “Anything.  What do you need, sir?” 

   He put his hand lovingly on my cheek and said simply, “I know how this will sound to future generations, but I want you to teach the nation how to hug.  Actually, teach the world.  It seems to be the only weapon we have.”

   “Isis - bitch, get on the ball and help this man!”  He said it in his best ghetto accent, the tone of a gay or bi black man who ran the free world.  Isis ran up to him and embraced him fully. 

   “By the way, you are hot!  Never knew that about you!” he said.  We all cried.

   I went by the president on our way out.

   “Sir, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about these creatures, it’s that you never relax and think you’ve won.  We feel good right now, right?  They love that.  They will be back -- and the weapons they bring with them?  They will be adaptive.  We have no idea.”

   “Jack, I’m not stupid.  I’ve had to act like a normal redneck to get elected, but I’ve studied this shit bigtime.”  He gave me his direct cellphone number.

   “This is for you alone.”


















Chapter 8

With the help of the White House staff, it was little problem getting on the networks and, with my teaching experience, I was a relaxed and charming guest, bearing a cute and endearing message about a huge and dangerous menace.  I tried to keep it light.  Anything heavy-handed or wild-eyed would have been torn apart by the usual cynics in TV’s chattering class -- especially the conservatives, ever eager to undermine mainstream progressives about overspending. 

   I’d never been on the set of these digital sideshows and I must say, it was an eye-opener, what with the headlong, stressful and hyper-glamourous obsessions with image and self-importance.  I decided it would be best to appear the professorial dork, a hick overly impressed with it all and trying only to please.  They loved it - and the live audiences had immediate sympathy for me.

   I also was amazed at the beauty of the “anchor tarts,” as we came to call them.  If you were less than dazzling star quality, apparently you would get nowhere in this world.  By the time I’d made a few comments, I realized I would have to slow-pitch anything I said, as if I were teaching third graders, not a college class. 

   One, Gloria Madden, though gorgeous, aroused my immediate suspicion, as she seemed only pretending to have a 95 IQ.  Funny how you get signals, but my acquaintance with the Mind Demons had made me hyper-vigilant to any signs of their presence.  I let her ask a rambling question, which was really their strategy for her to keep talking and to display her shapely face, perfect teeth, dazzling blonde hair and, on the wide shots, her sculpted and tanned legs.  Myself, I am not a man of modest powers of mind but I found it hard to think of anything but mentally taking her clothes off and letting her give herself to me, satisfying every 13-year old fantasy in my rapidly devolving mind.

   I think I gave a good presentation, though part of my mind was working on observing the Mind Demons.

   “Dr. Austin - may I call you Jack? Everyone knows the accomplishments of your grandfather, Gilbert Austin. Why, he practically saved the world, something few people can say.”

   “I would have to agree,” I said, nodding vigorously and earnestly, my mouth left hanging open.  I even had horn-rimmed glasses to complete the image.  She visibly relaxed and assumed an air of control, mixed with the anchor’s insincere knitting of brow, as if listening to the most interesting thing in the world.

   “The world has loved and enjoyed the restoration of full human powers. Why, we can’t even imagine a world without the PK we enjoy - the clairevoyance, the enhanced intelligence, the explosion of great art, literature, poetry, philosophy.”

   She was being fed this language through her wireless earpiece, I could plainly tell by noticing her pauses.  In other words, she wasn’t thinking.  Sometimes, as her full breasts rose and fell in the cleavage of her smart red jacket, I noticed I wasn’t thinking much, either.  I determined to do better. 

   “And now, Jack, you’re telling us we have something to fear again?  The mind demons are back?  This is a serious warning and I know you’re eager to substantiate it.  How do we know this?  How can we be sure this is real?  After all, your grandfather and his colleagues got rid of them, or so we were supposed to believe.”

   “Yes, yes, abosolutely, he did.  But you’ve heard of mutation, adaptation and natural selection -  the principles Darwin gave us for evolution.  Well, that’s what they did.  It’s like if you spray and wipe a bathroom with every known disinfectant, there will still be some bacteria that don’t die.  They are the mutations.  They are the ones who will multiply and populate the bathroom.  What Dr. Austin did was destroy the source, the birth colony, the breeding ground on the moon -- by removing the moon (it served no useful purpose) from our planet’s gravitational field.”

   I had talked too long and kept the camera off the main attraction, Gloria, so she insistently cut me off with a probing question sent to her earpiece by some producer who knew the subject matter. 

   “Then where did they come from, Jack?  And how do they differ from the original characters, who, as we all recall, were thoroughly nasty characters!”  She shivered gorgously, making her breasts bounce and expressing the darling vulnerability of a 16-year old beauty contestant.  I sighed, against my will and forced my eyes off her chest so that I looked at her squarely.

   “I don’t know where they came from.  I think they were alarmed by the emergence of the Gobekli dig into the light.  You’ve heard of the ancient temple?”  I immediately regretting bringing up Gobekli.  It was just too complex and menacing for the public to grasp and it ran the danger of making us seem like wacky spiritualists who doted on pyramids, dousing and such. In other words, more easy to discredit.

   She lifted her chin and her eyes sharpened, clearly a defensive move.  Even the producers caught it, because the light on my camera popped back on.

   “Yes, Gobekli, what a place, such amazing finds! It kind of turned archaeology on its head, didn’t it?”  She was clearly scrambling for words and not listening to her prompts very well.

   But it was out - Gobekli -- and you can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube, can you?  So I just said it.

   “The Mind Demons were not new, as my grandfather thought.  They appear to have come about 10,000 years ago and Gobekli was our ‘Fort Apache’ where we rallied against them - and eventually lost. The result was the destruction of our hunter-gatherer life, where we were highly evolved and conscious beings, quite happy -- and free of the Mind Demons -- and then we began our descent into the serfdom of farming and the miseries and neuroses of civilization.”

   Now it was her mouth that was hanging open.  I was the dork no longer.

   Someone was shouting in her earpiece.  I could faintly hear it from six feet away.  The floor director was gesturing animatedly.  I decided I’d better save her.

   “Gloria, your surprise at this news is absolutely typical.  It IS a schocker, to be sure.  Even I was appalled and I’ve spent my life going over the data on the Mind Demons and adding to it.  But we have no question about this.  The data is there in the most recent findings from Gobekli, magnetically encoded in minerals and resins -- amber, petrified sap -- and then buried for future generations -- that’s us -- to dig up.”

   “What should we do?  Are we in danger?  I mean the average person.”  She was stammering and there was a look of pleading in her eyes.  Clearly ‘they’ had her.  But the pleading also told me she knew she was a prisoner in her own mind and wanted out.

   “Well, Gloria, that’s why I’m here - to tell people some easy steps to take - fun even.  There are a lot of advanced techniques to do battle with these predators at the deepest levels but, frankly, it takes a lot of training and preparation and we’ve found something a lot simpler.  May I?”

   She nodded to go ahead.  I could faintly hear producers screaming in her earpiece.  I stood up and asked the audience who had felt angry, blaming, depressed, guilty or been on the receiving end of an angry person close to you.  A few hands went up.

    “It’s important you just be upfront about it.  We’ve found it’s pretty universal.  Admitting it is an important step as humanity rallies its defenses and weapons.”

   More and more hands went up and finally all of them, even the people in the control booth.  I asked for 10 volunteers to come on stage, the ones who felt the most extremely affected by something going on inside their heads -- and another 10 who felt most put-upon by people close to them, but felt it was not coming from them, but rather from outside.  I asked them to say, on a 10-scale how bad it was.  They all said 10.  I instructed the upset, angry group to mill around and find someone they seemed to feel trust with from the other group. 

   “Now hug.  Don’t say anything.  Just hug.  Stay hugging for a minute or two.” 

   Soon, the upset group were all weeping in the arms of the other people, who were stroking them and saying, “it’s ok, don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right” and such soothing nostrums.  I went to each of them and asked them to place themselves on the 10-scale.  They were like different people.  They all held up a big zero.

   “They’re gone!” shouted one tear-stained woman. 

   “It’s freedom,” said another.  “I haven’t felt this in months, maybe longer.”

   “Yes, they come back gradually, so we don’t notice,” I said.

   I held out my arms to Gloria.  I knew it was a risk on live TV.  She physically sidestepped me and, playing the tough investigative reporter, said something like, “Just hold it there one moment, Dr. Austin.  Let’s call a halt to this hugfeast (the whole audience was doing it now) and get back to the critical question of (she narrowed her gaze as if she were really nailing me on something) Gobekli.”

   “Yes.  Lovely place.  Garden of Eden.  Cradle of civilization.  Tomb of our ancient freedom.”  I took a beat.  “What about it?”

   “Talking stones?  Is that what you said?”

   I felt like a world rated fencer stepping onto the strip in the finals -- looking at one you had never faced before.  I realized I wasn’t facing some cute blonde anchor tart, but the Mind Parasites themselves. Her eyes danced with malice.  I suddenly longed for my crew to be beside me.  We were always a lot stronger together and had such a telepathic bond now. 

   “Yes, science can make stones talk - just as they can make the electrons and chips of your TV cameras talk.”  The audience laughed.  At her.  Something the producers would want to avoid at all costs.  It meant mockery on the blogs and loss of ratings, also known as money.  But I had to put a pinhole in her balloon, so it didn’t dare burgeon up out of control, as happened on so many of these talk shows.

   She would be more careful now.

   “Gloria, it’s a fairly simple matter of using deciphering software to scan and interpret the intervals in the magnetic waves put in the quartz and obsidian a mere 10 millennia ago, which is nothing in geological time.  I mean, if you were back there with no language, no paper, no pen - let alone no diskette and computer, how would you leave a message for the distant future, us?  You could make images of animals and humans and that’s about it, but what did the images mean?  They could mean anything.  ‘Had a good hunt today, kilt me a bison!’  I said it in caveman grunting and, as they say in show biz, I had the audience in the palm of my hand.  Any effort of hers to degrade me was doomed and she (that is, they, the Mind Parasites) knew it.  She could only pretend to be intelligent and interested, trying to support me in getting my message out.

   “And you translated the magnetic intervals in these minerals by...?”

   She suddenly had me.  I would have to lie or at least obfuscate.  I chose the latter.

   “It’s a complex and newly engineered software suite that is under patent exploration and while I wish I could detail it, that will have to come in the future.”  I realized immediately I sounded like an evasive ass, so I added, “but I will tell you in all confidentiality (here the audience hooted and laughed with me) that it involves a proces we call Resonant Mind Signal Translation, R-MIST.  It has proven amazingly accurate, tested against magnetic encoding laid down by researchers in the present day and, of course, run in repeated experiments with controls.”

   The audience even hooted in favor of this convoluted ranting, although most of it made sense to me and my team and had actually been tried, with positive results.  She was clearly pissed and suddenly announced, grandly, to the audience that what Austin and his Gobekli team had accomplished was little short of miraculous and “I am going to be doing a SPECIAL with Dr. Austin (she had dropped the ‘Jack’ informality) within the month!”

   “Good to go, Dr. Austin?”  I nodded yes and gave thumbs up, with all the enthusiasm I could muster.  Then, incongrously, she sat on my lap and said let’s start with dinner and some drinks right after the show.  She bent low to give me maximum view of the mysteries of her capacious breasts.  The shot was not denied the howling, hooting audience.

   When the show ended, she was on me rapidly, taking my arm, ordering people about, summoning a limo for us and, in a short while, I was sipping some of New York’s best tempranillo and getting swoony about my lovely, demon-infested date. 

   Now, I’m a nice guy and I like the women.  But I was not used to this.  I get to know my women friends over extended periods and we build up trust, humor, caring, sweetness, so if something does happen, well, it’s wonderful for all concerned and there are no recriminations.  Not until the Mind Demons, that is.  This, however, was a full, frontal assaut.

   After what I’d been through, though, it was a simple matter of rising above the libido, which, contrary to much thinking, is not the most powerful force in the universe.  Although Our Little Friends seemed to think so. 

   Gloria was only a few minutes into spinning her web of seduction on me when I realized that the Mind Parasites had probably, for centuries, used sex as a wedge to keep people off balance, full of longing and despair, dragging the whole human drama in their train.

   So that was it!  Sex.  The powerful male urge to do it.  The powerful female urge to reproduce.  The powerful urge of both to provide for the flower of their seed.  It ran history.  Yet, if my study of prehistory were correct, none of these were of concern to ancient humanity; they lived for the good of all, at least in their own tribe of hundreds.  It was sex that divided us now, not united us!

   It was one of those grand ‘aha’ moments when suddenly my screen flashed on.  I made it appear holo in front of me and here, in a crowded restaurant, was the President of the United States talking to me - and not happily at all.

   “Jack, ya dumb fuck!  What are you doing?” 

   “Wait,” I said. “You’re on holo and we not alone.  Not by a long shot.”  I put him on regular cell phone and held it to my ear.  Gloria was clearly astounded.  Actually, the whole restaurant full of people was.  They whispered to each other, passing around my name.  I was getting my 15 minutes of fame and it looked like it might go on beyond that.

   “Sir?  You saw the Gloria show?  Is that it?” 

   “Fuck yeah.  Talking stones?  You left that part out.  What the fuck?  You don’t leave shit out when you’re talking to me!”

   “Mr. Pres...I’m going to have to call you something else.  How about Win, your boyhood name?  People are staring.”

   “Ok, fine, whatever.”

   “When we were with you - no insult intended but you were a patient, a subject in our experiment.  We had to debug you and make sure you stayed debugged.  You know that!”

   “Ok.  You win that one.  True.  You debugged me.”

   “And is it working?  The hug therapy?  Win, are you demonproof now?” 

   There was a long pause. 

   “Demonproof.  I like that.”  You could hear his smile come through the phone.  “I am.  I am the President of the United States and I am Demonproof!  Jack, it IS working.  Not just me.  All over the country.  We’re hearing all kinds of reports about people dancing in the streets and, of course, hugging and finding they have the old mental clarity and powers of a decade ago.”

   “Ok, Win, don’t go public and beat the victory drums or anything.  This is tricky shit and we don’t know if we’ve won or not.  They seem to have found the beauty of mutation and may be actively exploiting it.  We don’t know.   Hugging is one thing.  They clearly don’t like it.  It’s our bug spray on them.  But I have the creepy feeling it’s not extermination.  Now, sir, if you’ll excuse me, I have your direct line and I also have a very hot blonde sitting with me, half tipsy and mentally undressing me.”

   The president howled with laughter.

   “Will be in touch!”













Chapter 9

   Call me a cheap slut, a wanton boner boy, a sellout, but we were in her limo and headed to...I assume it was her apartment in New York, as she was obviously very rich and very soon I realized I was famous enough that we were being pursued by paparazzi on motocycles.  I never could understand why celebrities objected to them.  I always figured: just pose for the pictures till they get bored, show them your private parts, kiss the girls for them - and they will be bored in a few moments.  And they were.  Of course, all I did was hug Gloria, then walk around and hug each of the paparazzi, presumably clearing up their Mind Parasites, at least for a day, which we were to find out, was the effective duration of a good hug. 

   In addition, the Mind Parasites were learning how to mutate and adapt to hugs and all the brain chemicals hugs produced and sent gushing through the nervous system.

   We went in her unit, which, of course, was way up high in this tall building, as befitting her position in her world -- and she was a demon, all right, a sex demon and eager to prove it.  I let her have her way with me many times through the night until she was tired of it.  There was no question she was entirely possessed by them, but there were a few moments when I looked in her eyes and let her know that I could see the human in there and she was good.  When it was over, hey, I held her and hugged her and showered her with all the love I had.  I tried not to identify with the sex we’d shared, but rather that we had come together, no matter how bizarre the circumstances, as spirits in love.  I stroked her hair and cheek.

   Now, if you think the whole idea of the Mind Parasites is far-fetched (and there still were rabid pockets of Mind Parasite deniers) (and guess who inspires them?), I have to relate that we were tapping into alchemy and magic, which most people thought came from ignorant pagan holdouts of the Dark Ages, but actually go back into the Paleolithic, as the talking stones would inform us.

   One of the advanced forms of alchemy is “signs.”  It’s simple; you look for and ask for a sign.  It’s based on the idea that everything is connected so “as above, so below” and “as within, so without” and “as in macro, so in micro” so if you want to know what’s so about something in the particular, ask the universal and vice versa. 

   With Gloria, I had to know and quickly just why she was put in my life and why we clicked so gloriously (her name was already a sign) in the sack.  So I asked for a sign.  She was sleeping.  I was gazing on the lovely curves of her nose, forehead, lips.  Gad, she was beautiful and it didn’t have to do with makeup.  Her breasts rose and fell and her breath was sweet as wildflowers.  I was gazing out the window and I whispered, ok, is there something here, I mean, something good, something big.  I mean something for me personally and, ok, something in the bigger picture of this new battle against the Mind Parasites?  And, bang, a bird hit the window.  Which could be a bad sign, as flight meant freedom, movement.  But the creature had only glanced lightly off the window, recovered, joined a couple other birds then looped around and the three of them flew past our window in formation toward the east, the place of beginnings.  They call it that because that’s where the sun rises. 

   From this, in alchemy, you get flight, freedom, setback, recovery, joining in team, movement toward new beginnings.  A stretch?  Time would tell, wouldn’t it? 

   I grabbed her hand and woke her.  This often happened - that the Mind Parasites would be asleep in the first moments when you woke and you could see clearly and grasp immense understandings and decisions before they crowded in under the guise of “worries” about today’s agenda.

   “Gloria,” I whispered. “Look at me.  One question, what do you know?”

   She looked from one of my eyes to the other, back and forth, took a deep breath and said, “I know I love you, Jack.”  I nodded.

   “Me too.”  I didn’t really say it, just moved my lips with the words.  She hugged me and we held each other for a long minute.

   “Oh my god, is this really happening?  This is not in my career plan, oh fuck,” she muttered.  “You live where?  Oregon?  Where the fuck is that?  And you work in the upper Tigris-Euphrates Valley?”

   It was them coming back, the Mind Parasites.  They were “bending” her with the worrisome program they’d built up around romantic love over the centuries.  I almost launched into explaining the program to her, how, with the heady glory of love, you immediately get the fears and control trips around how you have to marry and live with this person and “own” the experience, get it under control, kind of like taking a wild, free, beautfiul stallion and breaking it to the harness of a milk cart.  Fun!

   But I caught myself.  Give her a task, I thought.  That’s what we’d learned to do with the Mind Parasites.  Divert.  Preoccupy.  Something fairly simple.

   “Gloria, we’ve got to get dressed.  Then get in touch with your producer and also your agent.  This is a great career move for you - Gloria, who helped save the world from you know who!  You’ll be coming to Gobekli soon, but we can’t think about that now.  I’ll arrange it.  It will be one of the great specials of your career, if not in television history.  But, right now, oh my god you are gorgous -- and you’ve got to get to work.  Get busy!”

   The hug had protected her for the day.  She would be ok till I refined the game plan.  I had to talk to the president.  The main players had to work on their...what was the word we used last night...ha!  They had to refine their demonproofing!  Love the word.  We had to find out exactly how the creatures operated and the main theory from Gobekli now -- obtained both in microscope work and in the psychic/magic realms we were learning from the ancients -- was that virtually all the seeming solidity of life is actually empty space and that’s what the Mind Parasites lived in, the space.

   In the moment it took for the president’s screen to stabilize, it came to me: this was our space; it belonged to us and was the space occupied by...by what?  It was occupied by our consciousness, our very...spirit and soul.  It’s filled by “us” - me, I, the eternal of me.  I wanted to shout this out to the president, but thought better of it.  I just knew it was key. 

   “Jack!  We got ‘em hugging all over the land!  Things are getting under control, I believe.  And my bitch is behaving himself!”  He roared with laughter and I had to join him.  I had to love this guy, I thought to myself.  A great combination of vulnerability, intelligence and self-deprication expressing itself through wise use of power. 

   I took a breath.  Here goes.

   “Sir, I’m so glad you’re taking aggressive and positive action on this.  I have something bigger for you now, if you are willing.  Come to Gobekli with us.  We have to bring in the old wisdom, the actual strategies our ancestors tried and we need you there to learn them.  We can’t just tell you about them.  And bring a few of your most trusted inner circle.  If you can see your way clear to do this.”

   He paused and studied my face.

   “It’s not under control, Mr. President.  Trust me on this.  They keep mutating.  We have to find the deeper answer.  We have to learn how to kick their asses at a deeper level.”

   He started massaging the bridge of his nose and his brow.  He wasn’t breathing, not much.

   “See?  They’re doing it to you right now, as we speak.  Feel the shadow move in front of the sun?  That’s their signature.  Notice how you identify with the mood as ‘your’ (I did finger quotes) mood.  Sir, it’s not YOUR mood.  They’re bending you.  Breathe!  Who’s with you?”

   “Isis.”

   I swiveled the cam to find her.  She looked up.  Not a pretty look.  They had her, too.  Fuck.  What to do?  I had to think fast, while I had him on the screen.  I called Gloria over.

   “Sir, you know Gloria, of course.”  They had interviewed many times and greeted each other jovially.  “She’s coming to Gobekli to shoot a big special on this.  It’s going to be called ‘The Final Battle’ or something like that.  This is where we make our stand, Mr. President and you’ve got to be there.”
   “Yes, come,” said Gloria, with a huge smile.  The President shook his head and couldn’t help breaking into a big smile.  He asked when.  Tonight, I said.  He agreed and said he’d pick us up in the Presidential Floater in a few hours. 

   We shot over there, half a world away, no holo’s.  It was all secret and there was no press or crowds to deal with -- and just a small phalanx of very suspicious Secret Service people.  The excess help on the dig had all been sent home.  We gathered in a circle amid the standing stones.  The President told us to drop all formalities and just call him Win. 

   It was getting dusk.  This was the time we wanted.  A silence spread across the small group, enforcing the magical and ritualistic feel of it.

   “Tell us what you’ve learned since Jack has been here - in just the last few days,” said the President, showing a complete lack of fear of taking charge.  He remembered all their names from the holo conference, such a powerful leadership skill.

   “Sir, I mean Win, ok, what we’ve learned,” said Mimi, “is that, by a magic we can’t begin to understand, our human ancestors inhabit these standing stones -- using the qualities of the animal spirits they carved in them -- and have encoded a lot of information in the chips, as we call them, the obsidian and quartz crystals embedded in the amber, which is petrified sap and has DNA in it and that is the carrier, translator and transmitter.  To us.”

   “Ok, got it.  I accept all the magic, the old technology.  What do we know?”

   Everyone smiled.  Thank the gods this guy could leap over the hysteria and be pragmatic, no matter how ‘out there’ it was. 

   “They’re planning a marriage, a sacred marriage,” said Jim.

   “Okayyyy.  I like weddings,” said the President.

   At this moment there came a subsonic hum.  You could barely hear it but soon it rose to the level of a very deep baritone, like the Throat Singers of Tuva. 

   “They’re here,” said Patsy, very matter-of-factly.  “I’m talking about the old ones who built this, our ancestors.  Feel the stones.”

   We all stood up and touched one of the standing stones.  They were vibrating and as we touched them, the pitch rose, with each one at a different but harmonizing tone. 

   “We’ve got our chief here,” said Patsy.  “The big chief.  As I’m sure you know.”  She laughed quietly to herself.  We all began to stroll around, getting acquainted with each of the T-shaped standing stones.  In the dusk, with the elevated consciousness of these ancient folks, it was like I was seeing Gobekli for the first time.  It had terrazzo floors!  This was burnt lime and clay with coloring, like red ochre -- and it was 1,000 years before the first pottery was fired!  And there were benches built into the perimeter of the sacred space.  I mean, these were freaking cavemen!  How could they know about benches and terrazzo? 

   I tried to give the president a tutorial on the importance of what we were looking at.

    “The significance of this, Mr....Win, is that it suddenly shows we don’t know shit about the Paleolithic.  These things are impossible, technically.”

   “I know all about it, Jack.  Been following it for years.  It blew my mind too,” he said. “We were a lot cooler than we thought.  And I don’t think we’ve been this cool for, oh, a hundred centuries or so since then.  It’s like finding out your great-grandparents were with it and they look on you with bemused pity.  Am I right?”

   I laughed in spite of myself.  “Quite right, Sir...Win.”  I found myself waking up to the fact that this man, who often, for the sake of political purposes, had to portray himself as a bit of a clown, was of advanced intelligence. I turned to the others and pointed to the President, nodding with raised brows.  He caught me at it and hugged me. 

   “Isn’t it nice to be smart???” he crowed.  We all laughed heartily.  He gestured for the Secret Service people to get away, far away.  There was one man who seemed to be in charge of them.  He gestured the guy over and had him shake my hand. 

   “This is Sarge, my main protector.  Sarge, this is Jack.  He is an ally of the highest order.  Are we clear?  Highest order.”  He said it lovingly.  He even put his arm around Sarge, who visibly relaxed. 

   “Crystal, sir.”  Ah, a good movie, A Few Good Men.  And here was one of them. 

   “Don’t call me sir out here in the field when I’m dressed like a regular person.  It points me out.  You know that, mofo!”  He joshed him and pimped him, pushing him on the shoulder.  “Laugh, ya son of a bitch!”  So Sarge dutifully laughed and pushed the president back, while checking the safety on his street sweeper 9mm.  He went to the rim of the dig and began regular scans of the horizon and, for all I know, did not stop all night.

   “We’re ready,” announced Mimi. 

   “Good to go,” I reported.

    They slid into their altered states, which would have been called “channeling” on any cheesy TV show. 

    “I will ask a few questions to set up baseline, ok?  These are not important.”

   “What is our lesson for tonight?”  I thought the question was pedantic but waited.  She reported, “Oh, ok, our lesson is on what to do in the near term about the Mind Parasites, which is to get it through our heads that they CAN be completely defeated now and that we must then set up a PERMANENT perimeter against them, a very early warning.  Such as we did not have this time.  And this is the job of Mr...Win.”

   So intoned Mimi in her inimitable accent.  Win’s job from now on -- and the ‘job one’ of all his successors, would be to keep the Mind Parasites under control or entirely off the planet, that is, if we could defeat them this time, get out of the off-balance place and get a leg up.

   Then Mimi said the words that would go down in history, “It’s time for the marriage?  Then let the bride RUN!!!”

   None of us had any idea what she was talking about, but all of a sudden, Gloria took off at a lope across the barren starlit desert, a living chimera of feminine beauty and leonine power -- and guess who took after her? 

    The president.

















Chapter 10


   As Gloria would later confess in many magazines, talk shows and books, she had never known physical power such as this.  She could run like the wind, like a jaguar, a banshee, possessed, without a shred of tiredness, an immortal fueled by the energy of the sun itself!  Nothing could catch her, nothing!  But, for the human race to survive and see the fruition of the next year, the man must attain her, must overtake her -- and it was a realization that dawned on a very exhausted President of the United States about three minutes into the chase, as she pulled way ahead of him and was darting uncannily in and out of camouflage and obstancles, ravines, steep slopes of rubble.

    Running that hard, that long, it doesn’t take long to realize you can actually die if you keep this up, so why not...stop...and take a breather.  And he did, just for a moment.  She looked back and shrieked, “Yes, yes, yes, he will not get me, he will not fuck me, his seed will not see MY womb.  You disgusting pussy, eat my shit!!”  She said a lot worse things but it only took a moment for Win to realize at a very deep level that this was not a game and that if he did not attain her and perform the sacred marriage on her, humanity would not only not have a nice crop of yams, but would die entirely. 

   Gloria, clearly possessed by the Mind Demons -- yet naked and looking sexier than anything he had ever seen -- stood facing him in a triumphal scream of “fuck you!!”  So that’s where that curse comes from, thought Win.  If I don’t attain her, it IS me who will be fucked, not her.  That is, I and humanity will be fucked in their fate -- or I could give my all and she will be fucked with the seed that saves humanity. 

   It all flashed before his eyes as the immutable mathematics of survival that humanity had lived with each spring until...agriculture, the enslaving of the furrow and the womb of the lamb, cow and goat.  And who was the foe then?  Same as now.  These creatures, who stood ready to harvest us entirely and move onto a new world. 

   Win could faintly hear screams of the crew from the Gobekli circles, “Go, go, go, goddam you or we’re fucked, we’re going to be SO fucked!  Get her!  Do you know what’s happening?” 

   All the myth of the old world suddenly became, not just some charming sophomore lesson in prehistory but the meaning of life and the door -- the only door -- to survival and Win suddenly knew it in every cell, fiber, bone and muscle and it was these body parts that must put themselves on the threshing floor, the cutting board and be completely willing to find this woman and her breasts, vagina and womb...or die.

   And so he ran.  Miles went by.  There was no exhaustion in this woman, he realized after many miles.  She could and would go on forever, all night, all the next day, till she died.  And without his seed, that’s exactly what she would do.  It was dark now but Win found he could see.  Was this magic or some innate human talent that appeared only when...well, when it had to.  It never had to, not in the past 10,000 years.  But it did now.

   His feet began to move in huge, loping, gallant leaps, far beyond the average stride and they never hit stone, thorn or crack, but seemed to see.  After an hour, he began to see he was gaining on her. Was she letting him?  No, clearly not.  When he began to get close, she leaped huge and steep escarpments to higher ground, grabbed rocks and threw them with malice down on him.  Again, magically, he was able to hear or feel them coming and would sinuously move out of the way and back to his course.  Powers he’d never heard about came to his muscles and brain and he knew how to use them! 

   And then, at that moment, cresting the top of a rugged ravine that would have stopped any Olympian, suddenly Win knew he would have her, would be on top of her and it would be within a matter of moments.  There she stood atop another crest ahead of him, filthy, seething, her eyes afire and she screamed, “Catch me if you can, MOTHERFUCKER!”  And she turned and ran, but with those words, Win knew that she knew what he knew, that he was the motherfucker, the man would would fertilize The Great Mother, her, with the seed of the young prince-consort, the vessel of virility, the holder -- and the ONLY holder -- of semen powerful enough to ensure the survival of the whole of humanity, with all the power it had held in the past year and would hold in the year to come. 

   So that’s where the word motherfucker had come from, down through all these millennia.  And when he attained the ridge above her, stealthily, quietly, with strength unknown to him or any man in many centuries, all he did was reach for her hand.

   She smiled and gave it to him.  Tears streamed down her face.  She was clearly free of the Mind Parasites.  They were gone.  She had conquered them.

   “Yes.  You.  It’s here.  It’s happening.  WE WILL NOT DIE!!”  She screamed it to the hills and stars. “We WILL NOT DIE!!!” 

   She took his maleness huge in her hand and drew him down to her.  Blood streamed down her thighs from her womanhood, her goddesshood, he thought.  It was amazing and beautiful and he took it all into his lips.

   “Sing to me.  I need a good song, one to fill the night with this power I hold in my hand.”

   So he sang to her and made love to her and it went on all night.  They were naked and not cold, though frost eventually covered the land.  Shooting stars flew through the night and she came many times, as did he and finally, they wept in each other’s arms for long hours. 

   “We’re going to live, we’re going to make it,” she said. 

   “I know,” he said.  They began their walk back, holding hands.  It would take hours and they talked about anything, everything -- jokes, their childhoods, the cosmos spread out before them in the night and what was to become of them.  They were changed and they knew it.

   “I’m pregnant, you know.” 

   “Yes, of course I know that.” 

   “Will Perry be pissed?”

    “I don’t think so.  Not after I give him a good bitch slap.  But to have me again, he may have to do what I did for you.  I don’t think he can.”

   They howled with crazy laughter and actual howls and their howls filled the night, reaching base camp, where, when they finally arrived, the crew cracked open champagne and howled back to them and all had champagne. 

   She lifted her glass to Win.

   “Are you pregnant with me?” 

   Win wasn’t ready for such a question in front of everyone but he got ready in about one second.

   “Yes, I am.  Now.  Always.  We have remade the world that the child will grow up in.  I will be here for all of it.”

   Dawn was creeping over the hills and desert now and the sacred pair needed to lay down.  The crew suggested bedrooms but they said “right here, outside” and quilts were brought.  They lay in each other’s arms, giggling and smiling, smiles that could not stop.

   But suddenly, they did.

   “Sir!  You’d better get this!  It’s Isis at the White House.”  It was a rude interruption.  He listened for a full minute, then said he’d get there ASAP.  We didn’t know what was going on -- could it be nukes?  He knew we were rattled.

   “No, it’s not nukes.  Buckle your seatbelts, folks.  It’s suicide.  Mass suicide.  Last night, worldwide, 140 million suicides.  It’s us, isn’t it Jack?  They know we’ve found the silver bullet, several bullets, and are starting to kick their asses.”

   Again, I was amazed at the president’s mind.

   “It would appear so, sir.  The timing?  It’s right on top of it, our heiros gamos - sacred marriage.”

   Mimi spoke, solemnly.  “We’ve opened a crack in the world and shattered the human agreement with the Mind Parasites, one that hasn’t been really challenged in 12 millennia.  Whatever we can do, we’d better do it.”

   The president brushed himself off and pointed at his Floater, which his staff and crew instantly occupied. He held out his hand to Gloria, who entered with him.  It was a moment of unbelievable sweetness, caring and poignancy and I confess to capturing it on my iPhone.  It would later be iconic, the cover of this book and on many tributes, blogs, even statues. 

   But first there was a world to save -- and clearly we all weren’t going to be in it.













Chapter 11

   The president said he would patch our Gobekli site in with his highest intel and he did, leaving two high officers, both women (not an accident), from his White House office of intelligence coordination and screening and from Pentagon oversight -- not the War Room.  They were a big help and told us exactly what was going on in the entire world, that is, how big the suicide wave was getting. 

   We began letting them sit in our Team of Four, my three hot psychics and me.  We made it plain if they ever crossed us or were caught plotting with the nasty core of the CIA or Pentagon, we not only wouldn’t ever speak to them again but we had ways to strip any defenses against the Mind Parasites and they would be devoured within a 24-hour span.  The pair, who had seen the start and end of the heiros gamos, nodded and said they knew we could do it and would respect our goals.  And they did.  We became fine wine buddies together, though we had to teach them to dress like real people in the field, in sweats, sneakers and cool hat, not the beltway suit.

   From them we learned that by the end of the first night after the President and Gloria had left, fully 1.5 billion people or one in five earthlings had looked into the void, seen the utter meaningless and meanness of life and got out the rope or pills - a gun if they had it, though that was mostly men.  Men liked the noise, guts and control associated with guns, we figured.  Of the jumpers, most were women, strangely, seeming to like those few seconds of freedom and flying.

   We asked for a graph of suicides against time and it showed a relex curve, not peaking but heading more and more sharply upward with each hour.  We were sitting in the main circle of Gobekli, the one with the most imaginative and well-executed reliefs of animals.  I said let’s go down into the depths from which these animals were carved by stone age wanderers and find out what they really mean, so we did, the four of us. 

   I was sitting with my back against a standing stone with a scorpion carved on it and chose that to plumb and know.  Down I went, to the silent center.  I kept the image of the scorpion sharp in my mind and breathed, inviting her in.  She began moving and seemed to begin speaking to me as she waved her claws slowly and brought her stinger close to my heart. 

   This is what it felt like she said: “Not pretty, am I?  I am nothing but dangerous.  I am death.  I am the ability to end life and if Our Little friends could take a form, this is what they would look like, with claws to control, stinger to kill, if you don’t obey.  I am come as a reminder of the truth - that death is nothing.  It is the night to the day.  But yet you don’t give up life.  You fight against me, who is death.  And fight you must, as when we faced this foe the first time.  The message is this, that your mission is not just to survive.  Dinosaurs did that for millions of years till they overran and were devouring the earth, then couldn’t survive even a small meteor.  The idea I bring to this stone, and what your ancestors put in here, is that death must have it’s due.  There’s no real reason why you should all survive in such large numbers.  We knew agriculture would do that for you.  It was their plan - those scorpions you call the Mind Parasites.  With billions of you, they would have vast plains full of fatted calves to feed on forever.  It was they who planted in you the nonsense of the “sacredness of human life.”  So they could possess you in great herds, and they have.  Few of you could survive in anything resembling natural conditions - too stupid, fat and lazy.  But here you are.  And here is my stinger, taking you now.”

   I jolted back to normal consciousness and immediately layed my forehead on the ground before the stone of the scorion.  The others quickly came back to normal consciousness and were looking at me with brows raised high.

   “And then, Jack was given a prophecy from beyond,” said Patsy.  They all pointed at me and said they hadn’t gotten anything, no big messages, but could tell that someone did. 

   “Ok, um, it was kinda big.  Huge, actually.  The shit that’s going down now?  Ever hear of natural selection?  What a nice word.  When the scorpion stings your ass, it’s selecting you outta here.  Another word for it is eliminating  Killing.  Snuffing.  Blowing you away.  Trashing your butt.”

   “And Jack, what did scorpion teach you? We know our species is under attack and there’s a lot of natural selection going on,” said Jim. 

   “Scorpion taught me that without natural selection, we’re just as endangered as when under attack from it -- and that’s where we’ve been for 12 millennia.  We’ve been aphids.  We’ve been kept.  We’ve been the favored whores of the Mind Parasites.  It’s the only reason they let our populations bloom way beyond natural balance till we endangered all other species.  They don’t care.  The Mind Parasites just want to suck our psychic energies till the end of time if they can keep us alive with vast surplus crops and antibiotics to kill all germs that would off us.  Don’t you see that the whole scam of civilization was their system to allow our numbers to explode?”

   “And what’s happening now?  The die-off?  How does that help them?” said Cynthia, the White House intel chief. 

   “Good question, Cynthia.  What happened was we, this team, pulled the covers off the game and huge numbers of people began to see the actual meaninglessness of civilized human society.  Where’s the magic?  Where’s the power?  Where’s the participation in the mystique of learning the ropes of survival - the seasons, the hunting, the magic herbs, the gods lurking everywhere, eager to communicate with you, if only you have ears to hear?  Our Little Friends gave us everything we wanted, mainly food surplus and the mindset to take over land, own and defend it, thus leading to wars, armies, kings, but as long as we had surplus food -- and had lost the ability to find food -- we were afraid, and fear was what kept civilization spinning.”
   “Sounds like we may be headed back there,” said Cynthia, most mournfully. I glanced to the other members of our team.  Jim made the sign of the finger brushing against the nose, as if to say, hey, man, fergit it, you can’t talk to people who don’t understand the full backstory.

   “Can’t wait,” I said.  I didn’t care what the fuck Cynthia thought. 

   “He likes hunting,” Jim sneered to her. “Actually, it’s pretty fun,  Especially if your ass depends on it and all you need is one little possum to save your butt and your family for the week.  Not too complex.” 

   “I get the concept,” said Cynthia. “Sorry if it’s just been a few fucking thousands of years since I’ve done it or thought about it.”

   “Ouch. Point taken, Beltway Babe,” said Patsy.  “I think you might like it and you would get the first good fuck of your life, too!  At least you were able to say ‘fuck’ for the first time in your life!”

   “Ok, stop it,” I said. “We’re all dealing with paradigms way the fuck out of our understanding.  The wine isn’t helping either.  Actually, wine always helps, doesn’t it?”  I poured off another glass of the interesting tempranillo they sold around here.  Deep, biting, get you tipsy up the wazoo in about half a glass.

   “Anyone else want to share what you got from a selected animal on the stelae?”  There was silence for long moments. 

   “I could but it’s probably stupid,” said Patsy, “and I’m tipsy up the wazoo.” 

   “Whatever.  You saw and heard something.  Share your tipsy ass off.”

   “I was doing the ant stela.  Now, why the fuck would they carve ants?  No one has ever carved ants on stone.  Only these people of Gobekli going down for the count as our lifeways of millions of years are crushed and confined to the goddam barnyard.  Why ants?  You wanna know what they told me?”

   “Ok, what did your ants tell you?” said Cynthia, equally sneeringly.  “That you should work as a team and relentlessly do your job without getting bombed?”

    Patsy started to rise to her feet and grabbed a fist sized rock.  We rose to stop her but she fell back on her ass and we all howled, especially Cynthia.

    “Ok, touche, bitch.  Fine.  No prob.  All is chill.  What the fucking ants said to me was...let me try to get it back in focus here.  Ok, we just don’t see ants.  They are too small and always doing the same repetitive, mindless thing.  What they told me is we’re missing the point.  It’s not what they are doing, it’s the fact that they can put their heads down and DO it, day after day, year after year and not want any credit and not know the outcome, just that they have this amazing... THAT’S IT!  I’m getting it!  They have this amazing devotion!  They just will not stop.  No one can make them stop, no rain or cold, flood, lightning.  They appear the moment it’s over and keep going.”

   “And that means?” said Cynthia, over whose head this flew.

   “Bitch, it means we take that energy -- and we are going to need it!”

   The rest of us were literally rolling on the ground, laughing our guts out, screaming with hysteria and suddenly both women got it, started howling with their most feminine madness, jumped on each other and began a form of mud-wrestling.  We threw wine on them and it seemed to increase their crazy, but happy, aggression until they both were rubbing sand all over each other’s faces and hugging and going quite berserk.  We finally fell silent and just watched them.  Soon they were carressing each other’s faces and looking rather deeply into each others now quite lovely eyes.  They kissed, most sweetly.

   “I think I was just initiated into your crazy paleo team,” said Cynthia. “There’s no way I go back to the Beltway.  It’s all different now.  I can feel the ants.  I’ve got ants in my pants.  You will not be getting rid of me.  I get it, I fucking get it.  It’s like this is the first time I’ve felt anything in my life.  Patty was on top of her and Cynthia stroked her cheeks and hair.

   “God you are one gorgeous fucking woman,” Cynthia said.

   “I know.  It’s nice that someone finally sees it.”  She cast an accusing but sly glance around the circle.  She bent down and kissed Cynthia most warmly, as we howled and poured more wine. 

   “You’ve also just been innoculated, Cynthia.  Do you feel them?”

   She paused and seemed to check around inside her skull. 

   “No.  The little bastards aren’t here.”  Her eyes brightened wide.  “How incredibly beautiful this is.”

   We all howled long and hard, like coyotes, as if we’d never howled before.  It became the signature victory call over them.

















Chapter 12

It is hard to imagine a crisis more grueling than billions of people unable to continue the journey of life, with all its disappointments, cruelties, shattering betrayals by...well, who does it?  Who betrays us?  It’s not the trees, mountains, all the other animals.  It’s only one animal: our fellow man, from whom we expect and want so much that will not arrive. 

   And then you combine that with the big picture of human civilization, like, is it going somewhere?  Does it make sense?  Does it have a heart?  All you have to do is answer these questions in the negative and you’re fucked.  Which is what happened as the Mind Parasites slowly tightened their grip on us in these horrible days. 

   Let’s face it: most of humanity are sheep and don’t think about much, only wishing to get through the work day, arrive back home and pour a few draughts of whisky, wine or beer, then flip on the local talk and comedy hours, then off to cozy bed.  Arise.  Repeat.  Fine.  It works most of the time, but when it doesn’t, grab your life vest and kiss your ass goodbye. 

   Meaninglessness.

   That was their magazine full of bullets.  How killing it was.  If we didn’t feed them our psychic energies, such as they were (far from awesome), they would, piece by piece, remove the shreds, fibers, threads and little homilies and jokes we traded with each other, such as the simplistic cliches -- “it’s a great life if you don’t weaken, mate!”  Instead of that reassuring piece of nonsense, your fellow man would look at you with absolutely nothing to say.  His face was gray as a corpse, the bags under her eyes were horrid, the hair seemed greasy and unwashed and in fact, was.

   You wanted to shoot them.  But the sad fact was, they would do it themselves and before the day was out. 

   We were still decipering images at Gobekli when the president called Cynthia and had her put it on speakerphone.  Not a good sign.

   “Um, Jack, this is a bit much, maybe too much.  Latest tabs, 2.3 billion dead.  That’s a third of human population, man.”

   I decided to entirely skirt the existential, philosophical and religious implications of all this. 

   “Sir, you have to think about one thing: waste disposal and prevention of plague.  Just get through these weeks.”

   Cynthia whispered in my ear.  Yes, of course I thought.  I passed it on.

   “Mr. President, I’m sorry, but you also have to go through the motions, politically.  You have to reassure the people.  Tell them you’re mobilizing the National Guard, preseving our nation’s documents, assuring a framework for democracy after this crisis and negotiating with the enemy for a world that works for all after the crisis. You know what I’m talking about.  Do the script. Let them see tanks in the streets.”

   “Yes, yes, I did know that.”  He nodded offscreen to his Pentagon Chief of Staff.

   “Do all the usual bullshit.  Don’t hurt anyone or blow shit up, you understand? We’re going to get through this.  We’re not all going to be here when we do.”

   The four-star general, heavily festooned with colorful medals, spoke back to him.  You could see his arm waving into the frame of the picture. He was arguing with the president, which under normal conditions, would be unthinkable.  But a couple billion people had never killed themselves and clearly, the general thought it was ok.

   Suddenly, the president was inflamed and said, “You’ll do what I fucking tell you to do, general and you’ve got about three seconds to assure me you are doing it!” 

   I’d never seen this gentle, intelligent president act like a poolroom thug but clearly, he knew how.  He glanced sideways at his personal aide, the captain who held the “football” with the nuclear launch code for the day -- and who also had his hand on a .45 -- and he was clearly ready to have the captain shoot the rebellious general on the spot.  The general knew it, too, and saluted the president, something you don’t do inside when you’re not wearing a “cover” or hat, but he knew he might be dead if he didn’t.

   “Jack, get back here.  I need you.  Bring your coterie.  I need all of you.  Now.  Basically, civilization is reconstructing, but first it is deconstructing.  This has never happened.  Obviously.  I don’t need holo, I need you really here.  Come.”

   “Gotcha, Mr. President.  We’ll be there within the hour.”

   “My Floater is already there.  Get in it.  I’ll put the tanks in the street and deliver hourly, encouraging addresses to my countrymen.  I’ll have some really nice tempranillo, just flown in from Spain, waiting for us.  Judging by the stats and curves my people are supplying, the kill-off, forgive the phrase, has to peak tonight and be done in two or three days.  We should end up with a baseline of about three-quarters of one billion.”

   “Odd.  That’s been the carrying capcity of the planet they’ve been talking about for years.  The maximum humans we can have and still ‘walk in balance’ as the Navajo always said.”

   The president replied only, “I know” and then he clicked off.

















Chapter 13

It was odd how the women of the world, during this crisis, seemed to configure their energies as if emanating from Gloria and her experience as Great Mother in the heiros gamos - the sacred marriage, with thousands of groups of women performing exactly the instinctual feats she had performed -- and of which she made no secret, defining them in detail on hers and many other talk shows, blogs, webzines, all the media. 

   The populace was in a receptive mood, to say the least, what was left of it, as we bumped below 1 billion that evening. 

   What was her messge?  Well, it was hard to put it into words, thoughts and logic, but Gloria was magnificent at it -- and she was the one who, in this horrid period, let everyone know that the main thing is, not that individuals survive, but that humanity as a whole survive and live “with lives we can celebrate, not just endure.”

   God, she was good with the language.  Those would be the words on her tombstone many decades in the future and millions would throw flowers on them and make rubbings of them - so perfect for the amazing woman she was. And to think that, for a few days, I got to make love to this woman, who became known as “The Goddess of Humanity.”  Those days were just a blur but what a paradise to have loved her, something she returned all her life.

   Who can forget her great Reflecting Pond Speech, a few days after the so-called Fall of Mankind (this is the conservative take on what happened) when she said, “We are not all of us going to be here, but ALL OF US WILL BE HERE!!”  The shock of the multitudes in the shallow Reflection Pond!  They all stood there for all of three seconds and then, slowly, some of them got it and they began cheering in assent, “All of us will be HERE, all of us will be HERE!” 

   In case there is anyone a century in the future who does not understand wtf Gloria was talking about as she stood before the Great Emancipator, she was saying we would all be here, all of us, not each individual person...but ALL of us would survive this, whatever it was, this cleansing by the Mind Parasites.

   “And if any of you think this is bad, wrong and tragic, wake up!  This is nature at work and if we don’t love and embrace nature, no matter how obscure her reasoning, we will ALL be her dinner!  Do you want that?  You’ve seen countless species fall before her majesty.  The dinosaurs, the mammoths, only 10 millennia ago, the dolphins, whales, predators of the African savannah?  They died for US!  And why?  No particular reason, except we could do it to them and we did, but no more.  That day is over.  Nature is above us and loves us and if we don’t love her, then (she rubbed her thumb on an imaginary mortar) she will RUB US OUT and we must and do bow to this.  It’s happening now.  All we pray is leave us one in ten, Great Mother, leave us one in ten.”

   What she meant was, obiously, leave us about half a billion people as seed corn and may they have the basic wisdom we’re talking to you with now.  Let enough of us live.

   “The seed must live!”  So she shouted and that was taken up as the Great Cry at the Reflecting Pool and ever since -- and it has come true. That wish was granted. 

   But who would BE the one in ten?  Gradually it became obvious there was a certain profile of the people who survived, the one in ten.  They were spunky, funky, sassy, didn’t mind eating food off the floor of the earth, of course, were sexy, sexual and given to procreating, nursing, fucking, loving it.  They were, how shall we say?  Pagans.  Country folk.  Riff-raff, as they used to be called by those who thought of themselves as privileged.

   After the spectacle on the mall, which I thought a little overdone, but probably necessary, we met with the president on his yacht.  He wanted to know what was happening with the Mind Parasites and why he and his inner circle, as well as me and my team, were spared.

   “You would think they would want to wipe us out, since we’re the ones who know them best -- and know how to beat them,” said Win. 

   “We’ve gone over that at depth, I mean with all our powers and using the Gobekli stones and we believe -- now this may be a little hard to swallow, sir -- but we think they are not actually our enemy, but more like a regulator, a good shepherd but also a harsh mistress, who lets us go way off our tether and fulfill all our wildest potential, but ultimately will draw the line where we refuse to draw it.  Or are afraid to draw it.”

   The others on my team nodded.  “It’s all to the good, sir,” said Mimi, “as harsh as it is.  At least they did it quickly.”

   “And surgically,” said the president. “It’s uncanny the profile of who they didn’t take.  There are no fatheads or psychos walking around.”

   “It was their own mind that undid them, sir,” I offered. “A neurotic, unhappy, angry mind is a leaky sieve that lets the Mind Parasites -- and all kinds of other garbage -- in.  That’s the poetic justice of ‘mean people suck.’ They really do suck in the psychic detritus of the universe.”

   “Good point, Gilbert. Never really thought of it that way, in terms of natural selection, the awesome majesty of...”

   “Of the real,” I said.  “Sorry for being cheeky, sir, but it IS real.  And one thing you have to think about is...bodies.  No shit, sir.  You have to focus on restoring the world to a time of 1800 CE, when population passed a billion and life was a lot simpler and all waste could be dumped in the sea.  That’s what we need to do now.  That is the ONLY thing you need to think about, that and projecting a mood of confidence and restoration to a happy, liveable norm in a few months.”

   He turned to Chief of Staff Isis and said, “Are we on this?  Are we all over this like stink on shit?”  I would hate to be fixed with the gaze he gave her.  It said do it in 24 hours or be done with your public life.

   “All over it, sir.  This problem is handled.”  She left the room and would, obviously, devote coming months to this one issue.

   Gloria said she was off to one of the women’s sacred circles that had sprung up -- and she invited us.  We were used to women’s groups barring men and feeling their power would somehow be usurped if the dominator male element were even present.

   “No.  That was then, this is now, all different.  It all changed that night on the desert in the Garden of Eden, you know, when Win was chasing me like a crazed rabbit.”  She winked at him and beckoned us come.  We did. 

   Sure enough, we were all welcomed and without the usual distancing, withdrawal, judging, waiting.  It was essentially a coven, about 13 women, but it was soon apparent that old Wiccan description was nowhere near the present reality.  Each woman kissed us -- and on the lips, women included -- and held up candle, sage, smudged us with sage smoke, dabbed our faces with water and kissed us again, a big luscious kiss.

   “You look like the president,” said one woman.  “Are you?”

   “The president of what?” he joked, but immediately realized he could be completely honest -- and needed to be. “Sorry, yes, of course I am.  Of the United States.  May I be part of what you’re doing?  It seems important to me, as president.”

   “You, sir?  You were instrumental in the changes we see now -- and believe me, they’re all to the good, all meant to be.  Of course you are welcome, prince, consort, Dionysos, liberator of the female energies after so many millennia.”

   “Mr. President, this is Angela Hart,” said Gloria. “The author of...”

   “Yes, I know all your works, Angela - would really like a signed copy of ‘Yoni, Well of Truth’ if you have one laying around.”

   Angela took a long look at the president and said, “God, I can see why she led you on chase for so many miles.  Would that I would someday have that honor, sir.”  She gave him a long French kiss and let out a hug sigh, as did he.

   “If you can get over being gay.”  She exploded in hysterical laughter.

   “That’s the thing with the sacred marriage: you are no longer, gay, bi or anything else.  You are just sexual and you love your fellow human being.  As I’m sure you know.”

   She took his hand with a look of deep caring.  “I do.  Now come.”

   They seemed to know what they were doing and it seemed entirely unreheared, unritualistic and it went of its own energies, with everyone doing something - no one acting as the leader or presiding or knowing more than the others.  They wove a circle, as if threading the maypole dance, but without any ropes, just guided by...love.  And smiling broadly at each other, clearly with focus on the energies and beauty of their fellow human,

   We all joined in and seemed to know what to do, performing flawlessly and moving in and out of each other, soon, clearing the center of the circle.  They began drumming and calling out names I soon recognized as belonging to gods and goddeses of old -- and soon it was only Dionysos, whom they called Liber, his epithet as liberator and god of women.

   Then the drumming stopped.  I’d been to a lot of such New Age gatherings, seminars, rituals and this one was different, I could sense.  For one thing, the hairs stood up on my neck and arms.  In the candle-lit silence, in the middle of the circle, suddenly stood Dionysos, in the flesh, as it were, although he actually looked more like a radiant aura of some sort and about half again larger than us. 

   I was standing next to Win. 

   “Um, Austin, this is real, isn’t it?” Win whispered. 

   “Yes sir.  It appears a lot of the rules of physics have changed.”

   Angela overheard us and clearly didn’t observe the unctuous, obsequious, scraping behaviors of past religious observances we’d become so used to over the centuries of organized religion (which actually were forms for relating to human power figures, not divine).  Gods don’t need worship; humans do, so I whispered to Win.

   “Perfect, Gilbert!” announced Angela.  “He’s right, Mr. President.  We don’t kiss ass with the gods anymore.  The Great Wipe Out ended all that shit.  The gods, as you can see, are present and will answer to our call to see them and talk to them and ask what we should do.”

   “Yes sir, that’s about right.  It’s what we were seeing more and more out at Gobekli.”

   Gloria chimed in, nodding and smiling.  “Isn’t it wonderful?  No more sucking up to gods we can’t see.  They’re really here.  That’s what they were up until they buried Gobekli.”

    “Win, that is WHY they buried Gobekli,” I said. “It was when the gods disappeared and could be seen ‘through a glass darkly, but then face to face.’ After that, we humans said, ok, it’s over and we’ve submerged into a travail, a work, a labor, a loneliness.  And they buried it. 

   Gloria stuck her face in front of us.  “The GOOD news, hombres, is that that shit’s over!!  As you can see.  The gods are no longer in heaven or else we’re not on earth.  Here they are with us again!”  She waved.  “Hi Dionysos.  I’m sorry, but we are blown away.  This is actually happening, isn’t it?”

   He nodded.  There suddenly appeared beside him a black panther and he was petting her.  He looked at us long and deep.  Clearly, he wasn’t into small talk.  But in his gaze, you got reams of information.  You just knew.  You understood a lot, ages of stuff. 

   “Is this all about us having less population? Is that what makes this possible?” I asked. 

   The god raised his brows and smiled.  It was a ‘yes.’  Clearly.  Gloria assented with a big smile.  “It’s not hard to read what they’re saying.  You can feel it.  You just know it.  We’ve been over some of this psychicly with the gods.  They made it clear that with a manageable, sustainable human population, we automatically come back in synch with the rest of living things, with the biosphere and can hear and understand them -- as well as the gods.”

   This larger-than-life divine immortal made it clear that was true. 

   “Um, Dionysos, now I have a question for you, sir. It’s about...”

   Gloria stopped him.  “Win, you have to approach them differently.  You don’t just strike up a conversation with them.  You don’t call them by their names, the ones that have come down to us in mythology or religion and you don’t say sir or lord.  You have to hang, chill and be with them over an extended period, during which they come in and out of being here.  Think of them as operating on a very much longer sine wave or periodicity -- and keep your queries brief and to the point and know that they are absorbing most of what you say before you say it, ok?”

   The god had already faded, gone somewhere else, I suppose.

   “He’ll be back,” said Gloria.  “He’s doing other things.”

   “Gloria,” said the president, “How do we know these are gods and that they are friendly to us?  We’ve just been dealing with aliens who are clearly menacing, at least in the short term and we’ll never fully relax and trust them!”

   “Just ask your heart, Mr. President.  It’s like how do you know you’re in love?  You just know, right?  No one can tell you any different.  You see it and feel it and everything clicks on every level -- and of course your body and energy like it and want to get close.  Did you ever want to cozy up with the Mind Parasites?”

   “Never.  Ok, I’m forming a question or rather a complex of questions, but it’s not really something that requires and answer as such.  It’s weird.  It’s kind of like I already know the answers but I need confirmation or reflection from...”

   “That’s it exactly, Win,” she said. “You already know.  Does that make you godlike -- or even a god?  You have to ask yourself that because the old lines between god and man seem to be outta here.  There’s overlap.  And now I feel him coming back in.  Feel him?”

   I did.  So did Win.  So did my crew.  We were all looking at the spot where he last appeared - and was no forming a filmy but glowing apparition.  His eyes were amazing, amber, huge, bright and taking in everything.

   Win just held out his open hands and said “evoeie,” the ancient greeting to this god, which Gloria had taught us.  It was pronounced ay-voh-ay.  The god put his hands on top of the president’s.  Win started using more and more sign language, pointing to both of them.

   “Are we one?” he asked the god. “The same...stuff?  Same energy?  Mind?”

   The god nodded.  His look was one of love but also devilishness and challenge.  “What do you want to do, that you think you can’t do?”

   The president only thought for a few moments.

   “I want all these human bodies buried in the earth deeply - and for the dying to stop.”

   The god smiled and nodded.  It was going to be possible, clearly.  “Do it, then, all of you.  See it, know it, move it.  All you want, it’s here.”  He swept his hand about the room and very soon, we all took up an aura, a lovely lime green aura and felt in deepest ecstasy. 

   “Wow,” I said.  “How beautiful I feel.  Do you all feel...”  But I looked around and had no doubt they all felt the same ecstasy.  I remembered that while Dionysos or Bacchos was called the god of wine, he was known for his ecstatic rampages in the wilds, pulling along hundreds of people, mostly women.  And here is was.  No wonder he was called Dionysos Liber.  It meant liberation and here it was.  All worry vanished.  All shame, doubt, fear -- and I saw they were really all the same emotion, just some kind of negative thought form about being separate and destined to die and go off to some unknown darkness.  All that was wiped away.

   “You can do this,” said the god.  “Here.”  He waved his hand the other way and the ecstasies stopped.  Then he pointed to us and showed us the sweep of his hand, with the first and last fingers held out like bull’s horns.  He nodded for us to do it.  We did - and it worked.  We all fell into the most profound ecstasies.

   “There’s not going to be any more war,” I said.

   The president wanted to try it alone.  He turned it off with his own power, then turned it back on.  “This is better than levitation,” he said.

   “Win, this is better than sex!” said Gloria.

   “Let’s be godlike and bury all the bodies,” said Win.  We saw it and intended it and knew it would be done and it was.  We went outside and the stink of them was gone.  They were part of the earth now.

   “Ok, seriously,” said Win. “How did we do that?  Or rather, how was it that we never could do it before?” 

   “We could, sir, way back in prehistory, with some skills and wisdom hanging on into the time of the early ancients.  You don’t really think we physically hauled all those blocks to build the pyramids and Stonehenge, do you?”

   “So, was the problem the Mind Parasites -- or just the laziness and ignorance of human nature?”

   “That’s the beauty of it, Win. There is no negative, miserable human nature!  It was the Mind Parasites, almost entirely.  They were a huge burden, sucking all that psychic energy and the immense sense of hope and excitement about what we’re capable of!”

   The others gathered around them now, practically cheering, “Yes, yes!  Can you all feel it?” said one woman from the spiritual group.  “It’s like I’m tripping!  I keep waiting for it to go away, like all ‘good days’ have always gone away, but it just keeps building on itself and each day seems happier than the last.”

   They all looked to the president, waiting for him to agree or respond in a personal way, but not wanting to push at him.  He knew what they wanted.

   “Myself, I’ve never felt anything like this.  Psychic powers and gods are wonderful, but this surging feeling inside me, god, it’s just happiness!  There is no other word for it, HAPPINESS!”  He jumped up and clicked his heels in the air, stopping to look in the eyes of everyone there, with that devilish glint of his, while everyone celebrated with many whoops.

   “You know,” he added.  “Everything is different from now on.  If there’s one program we’re going to have in my administration, it’s going to be support and reinforcement for the powers of mind of the individual and schools of wisdom that feed into it.  We have to do this or else -- they have made it clear they will be back, like the flu comes if you let down your immune system.”

   “That’s the bizarre thing about it,” said Gloria. “Like, germs, viruses, bugs, cancer cells -- they all stand there inside us, ready to naturally select us out of the game if we don’t make the constant choice to adapt and survive -- and the skill set we bring to the table includes this immense range of psychic powers, infused by this amazing energy of the possible.”

   “It’s hope, imagination, eagerness,” cried out one.

   “Energy, enthusiasm,” said another.

   “And it’s know the gods and that we’re the same as them, just in a different segment of the spectrum, embodied,” I offered. “They’ve always been with us, you know.”

   “But,” said Gloria. “They’ve stepped back during these five or 10 millennia of civilization and said, hey, these guys have to learn and suffer, the same as us and all other life -- and they can only do it on their own.  Then they can start stepping into their, well, I don’t want to sound prideful and arrogant, but...”

   “Our godhood,” said the president.  “That’s what’s going on here.  We are gods and we know it -- and there’s no fucking sin about that.  I won’t listen to that shit anymore, babe.”

   Gloria smiled and hugged him.  “Thanks Mr. President, Mr. Consort-Prince, Mr. God.  Let’s get lunch and open a couple bottles of that great Tempranillo from Gobekli.”





-- THE END --