‘Your perceptions and beliefs become introjects within this world, everyone has a place like this, it is often overrun with menial nonsense and false misrepresentations of reality; yours however, is now wiped clean. You are not weighed down. Your memories remain, but they have not been tethered to anything else. You may now begin truly seeing what is, taking note of how the mind lies, and managing your senses with greater clarity. Do you have any questions before we continue?’

I thought for a moment, watching the sprout slowly grow in front of me, far faster than plants in the other world. Though the plants there seemed rather strange as well. ‘What is this butterfly here, and why did you burn me so terribly before?’ My face unable to resist pouting as I looked at my subtly transparent hand, is this even the same hand?

‘It took me several lifetimes to cultivate this talant, but very soon im going to die again, well soon for me. That’s relative. I am very old haha! Ahem, on this death I’ll shed my aura and move on to a higher octave, don’t pester me with terms quite yet and just keep them in mind for now, I’ll get you up to speed as we go along… unless I forget! There is a lot, you’ll see.’

She hummed in thought floating in the sky, devoid even of color, grey earth and empty black air, a solitary eye still watching us… my butterfly flew up toward her, ‘ah! Yes, butterfly. You may change the name, but this is “The Morphic Butterfly”, I made this for my descendant, originally for your mother…’ She frowned. ‘Your mother was a good girl, but I was too kind on her… I waited too long, I wanted to treat her like,’ she paused, ‘a free person.’

‘Are we not free people, grandmother?’ I glared at her wide eyed in hopes she’d say more about mom.

‘Does she look free from where she is? In that coffin.’ A lick of purple light flickered about her silhouette, only for a moment. A defeated expression came about her, ‘what’s done is done, I’m not to blame for the mist’s actions.’ We both sat in silence for a while. I began floating off the ground, I had been thinking about it since we got here and I saw Rosa doing it. She smiled again, ‘what a bright young girl you are. I know im a bit of a recluse… but you’ve become like a daughter to me in your mothers absence. I’ve birthed our little family in a temporal rift, so im not quite sure how old any of us are… but you're looking,’ she looked me up and down, ‘old enough.’

I flushed under her scrutiny, ‘hush. What do you mean a temporal rift?’

‘I mean we aren't really from this place, which is why I need us prepared to leave very soon. We age extremely slow here, your mother and I did anyways, you've had time for slight metabolic adjustment so i’ve been kinda… editing you to be the right age.’ Her eyes flashed when she said edited, as if she took great pride or excitement in what she was doing.

‘I never really felt from here, I do feel kind of odd.’

‘Odd is what im hoping for, darling.

…

We floated around the landscape talking, hours, days went by, I have no idea how long. She explained the morphic butterfly chip she gave me, she explained what a chip was, and general computation… very little of this makes any sense at all. Talance would sometimes form within animals or objects in our world…

…

Man, fuck this. Koan leans back in his chair and stares up at the ceiling where a fan silently whum, whum, whums away. ‘Writing is too hard, already becoming a bootleg Ri clone!’ A blue line flashes over a black screen and gold text, beckoning in a come hither motion to continue typing. ‘Ri without the lead is just a joke of a world like any other… I don’t even want to write, not really, I just want cool things to happen in my real life…’ looking at the notebook beside him and a doodle of the morphic butterfly, wondering why he can’t just focus and do anything well. Some illusory standard lines his trashcan with ideas not good enough to persist in.

Fire and prometheus, death and rebirth, aliens, ghosts, god, and Atlantis… Nothing in our world makes any sense and we just keep on working like a rodent on the wheel. Why are all the cool things gated by corruption and feigned ignorance. Complain, complain. What can you or I do anyway, we know nothing, we are nothing, we are just enough to be aware of our own depravity. Our governments control all data, intelligence agencies throw out a hundred contradictory “allowed” belief systems, propaganda you don’t understand and hardly see rules the lives of most people we encounter… Using fiction to develop shitty little ideas I sit in isolation without reason to exist and without reason to commit suicide, are you content with your reality?

The ninth.. 12:12 AM. I hate this month…

Conspiracies are fun, huh? They're like cults, and the mainstream views are like the major “religions” upheld by central loci of control, claiming to be real like every other fucking cult. Until a daoist immortal manifests inside my ass I’ll probably remain incompetent like everyone else… just at the whim of my slavers intent. This world is not what it seems, how it’s contrived by the majority, but what are we doing here really? Random chance or bound by fate, within the anything of being it could very well be any and all possible variance occurring unbound by meager trifles like limitation; we play like little children in a fantasy.

Our kind reVere insanity.