If yer into listening to music while you read, may I suggest the prescribed background music for this piece, Cosmic Interment Camps and Allegiance. (played one after the other). These mp3s can be found free at http://techra.elephantus.com.

I think that if you weigh the many options, you’re going to just love your time at the local cosmic internment camp. There’s one on every corner, for every persuasion of man, woman, and child—and you can choose from a myriad of concentrations to ease your monkey brain. Thrill as the monotony of life rips your pudding mind into shards of icantdothat, falling to modules of sweet—oh—my—darling, clementime. There are lines being drawn, and it’s either on the sidewalk, subject to the mystery we must shirk or destroy, or on a fast elevator to the top floor going up, up, up.

Surrender now, or our precious way of life may forever be in peril. Without the drive to succeed, the motivation for upward mobility—the entire system is in ruin, the world imperfect and not to the standards of the Consortium.

I too came here seeking gainful employment when I was only a Lad; the Interaction Corps not being my inclination, I knew I had to do something socially penetrating. Be someone. I couldn’t find a way to define that someone myself, so I molded my life in the image of our camp’s founder, Edible Lawrence—I read the mythologies, how the President sat beneath the plastic gangrene trees on an Empire State Building waiting room sofa. Drinking a whole pot of coffee, stirring it with his butterscotch biscotti. The lights went dim and he was confronted by a pulsating soundsnake, kaleidoscopic in portents of aural indiscretion, giving him three weighted options: confirm his belief and dedication to the high cocolorum of the shady trees above him ("But it’s plastic" he forgot to think) -- following its humanistic path to the end of all dreams, and all nightmares -- to create a life in its artificial image. Option #2: Without trepidation, without reluctance allow the snake to puncture him, forever sanctioning himself drowned in an archaic network of pulsation and tangential correlation—full release from the world at command. Or, option #3: "Install a local cosmic internment camp, offering these three options to every asshole that walks in, recruiting as many followers of venture creed as possible."

Well, as I said, I wanted to follow in the President’s mighty light- filled footsteps. So I hooked my self in as a recruiter, spreading the message. They call us Unselective Devotion Outputs—and we can’t spread ourselves too thin.

You’ve been prepped by your schoolings of the shattered bell that rings for everyone—and that trajectory has led you to this place. So what’s it going to be? You’ve got to make a decision. It’s either on the sidewalk, or off the sidewalk.

"What about the 2nd option?"

"The 2nd option?—"

"Yeah," said Bobby Masters, the blue boy wonder, hoodie pulled over his doe-stuttered eyes, "the middle path. To shits with the cosmic interment camps, I want to find my place amongst the cosmos!"

"I fear I do not understand that as a valid option. Try again, Bobby Masters."

"You said you wanted to follow in the footsteps of your president. You said he was confronted with the opportunity to make a choice between three options: a) homogenization, b) severance, and c) incorporation. He made a choice."

"He made the only choice. There were no other options," the recruiter blabbered.

"—for you. Step aside, granddaddy and let Bobby Masters show you how it’s really done."

Bobby Masters pulled back the delicate fabrics of consensus Reality that muddied his blue hood, previously obstructing his face. Bobby was a boy, bowl-cut. His eyes alternating between violets and emeralds in tandem with the twist and hum of the machinery that made the camps possible, he continued "there’s a choice, and they are not limited to those three options."

"Honestly, Mr. Masters!"

"Honestly, Dick. I mean it."

The mystery was not his alone, and he felt no impedance upon sharing it with others. "You can’t copyright a particular version of the world, offering it in busted cans and packages. And though I personally have nothing against the concept of a logo or emblem, you can’t imprison the lifeblood of a thousand wandering sheep, thinking their shepherds inside a well-advertised package of mass murder and lemmingism. Categorization and configuration into menageries and compartments will capsize your collective interests. Reflect chaos, and you reflect the will of unobstructed nature. I refuse to stand here idle and allow the Cosmic Internment Camps to continue."

And with that, Bobby Masters walked through me slowly, like a virus passing from one membrane to the next--leaving the way he came in. I like my job. It brings me comfort knowing that I spread the joys of marketeering to the world, transaction by transaction, iota by iota. We claim to hold court for every persuasion of man, woman, and child. I’m sure we’ll have a place for Bobby Masters as well.

__________________________

Bobby Masters lived in the basement of his parent’s home, in a suburb of a placeless place. His house made of stuttered bricks and ectoplasmic forces, which dripped settling on his amplified-data brain while sleeping—dreaming dreams that belonged to long since past fishermen, artists, and foremen. Down the street from his house, a watch factory exhumed the oily odor of time, which crept into the lethargy-filled lives of every suffering inhabitant.

Bobby plugged himself into his hifi, sat down in front of the TV – popped in the home-console edition of the Episodic Vibrations of Techra, and let his mind wander. Had he parents watching out for him, looking from the top of the staircase leading into the basement, they would have seen his image flicker as he passed from one world to the next. All the while his chapped hands grasping a black rubber joystick- -orange guidelines pointing every which way to heaven and back.

And didn’t the episodic vibrations flutter? The Triangular Dissids approach and retract, growing like spongy membranes of emotional spuncake sourcesauce ,8,1– the flitters, the jitters. Infinite-pixel-width grid-based reality modification devices and willful manipulation of mindsilence ingrained outgained headache tomato punch. ,8,1 Pull out the threads from your worn sweaters, envision a secluded place, that far off place inside your mind that you may have never seen but have always known is there—put yourself there, in the Waiting Room, and look out to the scary world through prismed windows, trembling. Further. Deeper. More towards the owl’s eye, you encounter the marblic encasing of the previously exclusive baby glasses vision -- thought island tangents of insurmountable passages, language reengineering, spreading uniquely. Bobby Masters. The video game trajectory legend. His name in bubble letters ground to a metallic plate that-- oozing in bits and data—narratives and regress, each letter vibrantly moving in motion to the kinetic hifi. Slowly pulses a story about a story about a story that’s been going on all along. The story’s the same. ,8,1 Bobby Masters, always along for the ride. Bobby Masters. Closer. Penetrating closer. To as it is, what it is and other phrases. If you hate the words, but want to act like you love them.

From one place to another. From one story to the next.

EPISODIC VIBRATIONS
Reality Modification Device Operating System
Command? LOAD “*”,8,1

Nine years old, plugged in, searching through the labyrinths of knowledge and information. Which, always wanting to be free—floats through multiple minds hooked onto the vast network that makes up the Dissid. LAN parties of Commodores and sea captains—Tommy Tutor and VIC-20, tinkling wine glasses and taking tokes together in the corner. Classic but reborn. A sensual atlas gives way to an intangible flame beneath pop culture’s mess of icons and itemization, a core of a purple skied world emerges over a pulsating island of language.

The roar in his stomach. The concatenation in his head. A reality formed in SQL statements and closed-source operating systems teeter-tottering transparently while no one noticed. Those who did had not the energy to put forward to alter the imprisonment ,8,1.

And then, a dinner table. The sentating spiral galaxies sitting in the head chair, plate of aqua-colored thundercat underroos being eaten with a fork. His voice is strong and commanding while Bobby Masters feels like he himself is a water fountain, water pouring through his metallic mouth to a young boy’s waiting intestinal passages. "It’s your life!" the angry giant seemed to tell him, the room turning to shards and pieces of what accounted for vision and ocularity, clarity to Bobby Masters in infinite repetition.

And as he got closer to the very *.* and ,8,1 of it all, as the crystal punctured the muscularity of language and static waves of visual hemorrhaging decapitated to a tonal inebriation—he saw each single worry and purpose drop before his eyes, the secret of living revealed: Though the world unfortunately has no ultimate meaning and purpose, you’ve got to pretend like it does—like hey man, for reals though.

I could almost see the faint torque in my mind as I realized why we give children the choice—why the Consortium formed laws stating that every mentally adept child of nine must be given the opportunity to opt out in the activities of our particular vision of reality. I've been trained time and again to identify those we could consider of unsound mind, those criteria designed by the Consortium in response to authentic recessive eras—But Bobby Masters doesn’t work that way. I can name a dozen attributable criteria, but I confess that I do not find Mr. Masters of unsound mind.

Bobby Masters awoke to the waiting room. I woke with him.

Bobby screamed. I screamed with him.

He’s been here all along, beneath the plastic trees and the tangerine papered walls, a hot sun burning as if a cobweb in the corner, the steady sound of fax and copy machines in a symphony of torment and insanity, expulsive pollution buzz of computers and ham radios, refrigerators and phones, buyers and sellers, condiments and fries, the smell of money and the erection of capital, museums of wounded victims in his fight for societal difference. And he, Bobby Masters, boy wonder and tender footed champion of the Techran forces, in search always of the Triangular Dissids of Issid, wherever, whatever, whoever they’d be – made a choice, and I could understand why. I always do.

He’d always feared no one would be there when he’d done something right. But when he finally had to go it alone, Bobby smiled. He didn’t care he was alone. But he decided to act as if he did.

Bobby Masters pledged an allegiance. He did not offer his piece to a misspelled nametag and a leather portfolio. He forfeited not a single right or freedom. He did not trade a forest for a fireplace, a life for a dinner. Bobby, as usual, he just played it cool.

He disappeared. And I almost forgot all about him.

I like my job. I sit in my office ,8,1. When I sleep, I see what Bobby sees, I can’t help it. I’m not sure of what to make of this world anymore; I’m scared that I may fall to pieces, losing my job. Losing who I am. I fear the dreams will stop, and I’ll confuse myself for being the Cosmic Internment Camps again. I take comfort in my buildings. My television and car. According to the Consortium I was found unfit at nine to make the Choice. The Choice was made for me. I still don’t know what judgments gave me this life. And I don’t know whether I like it, but I’m going to pretend as if I do.

In every culture there’s the story about the man who went to heaven, sat amongst the godstars and fallacies, cut through the bullshit and saw it all for what it really was. Always when they come back the world taunts, reams and destroys them. Calls the truthinsanity, dementia, falsified claims of untestifiable nature. They spade the fuckers. Delete *.*, insert shit_reason here, lonesomeness there. Sweet clementime and the pledge of allegiance to cover it all up.

I hope, for his sake, Bobby Masters doesn’t come back. He deserves his place amongst the cosmos.

Imploding clouds surround me. My mind it splits like an atom – When worlds merge, there is oscillation. And we’re just its episodic Vibrations, phasing between man, ape, and microorganism. The formality of actually occurring, my body lilted and transparent--I float away in a mess of words, my entire sentence, sedated.

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