Into The Tall Grass

A/N: This website is determined to eat all of my page breaks and the stories keep branching out into more and more obscure movies and bizarre concepts. This chapter focuses on the characters means of travel through the Null (inspired by The Room) and how it relates to the hunting strategy for the grass. Yes, it's a hunting strategy.


Confidential Written Log of Doctor Patience Woods

Dimension G2374, 2375, 2373, 2377, Amalgamous Non-Space

First, a preponderance on the subject of Proprietary Probability Pull, postulated by myself, as the definitive natural propensity of like to call to like; a form of convergent evolution across time and space that exhibits an attractive linking force.

In observation of a number of ecosystems, it is inevitable that the observer come to notice the extraordinary phenomena that multiple physically unconnected environments are home to a number of irreconcilably different species that have seemingly developed all but identical adaptations. Now, taking this observation out of our minuscule experience, like that of say the Galapagos Islands compared to the Central American mainland and into a comparison of similar traits found in multiple planes of existence, we can observe these similarities from a much greater height of understanding. Species likenesses are derived via a matter of physics and evolution over a given time frame, and both time and physics too is subject to its own evolution. All of these elements still do converge and similarities are glaring. These similarities are items of potent pull across multitudinous boundaries both physical and otherwise.

Take the idea of the higher power; time and again sapient organisms seek to define their environment and in this effort create thoughts and ideas to explain and manipulate their circumstances no matter the breed or culture. Hell, we write books about it. Combine that with a theory that is gaining great consideration from myself, the idea that stories are windows into other worlds as witnessed by the writer, and you realize that these patterns are connected irrevocably. Somewhere out there, someone else could be writing something very similar to my diaries at this very moment, that esoteric leap bridging the distance between me and wherever it is I end up next. Not a higher power, but it would be easy to assume. A disturbing thought, I will have to make yet another leap soon, the dark in these corridors saps a strength my suit cannot replenish.


Consider the human eye, an adaptation seen over countless species barriers and once pointed to by the greatly self-important all over as an example of biological perfection that proved the existence of a higher power, as how could mere happenstance result in something so intrinsic to human life. Then Darwin came along and ruined everything for them. Make no mistake, while there are guiding forces, there is no guiding hand, at least not one so supreme. True, there are those with the power to cultivate the expressions of their given environment, not unlike a gardener does his flower bed, but no single entity sits squarely at the top. This macrocosm of probability is the realm of small gods, and the gods that eat them. Was that not the focus of the human ego? Are we not the gods of our world? So says the frog as he surveys his kingdom before he meets the heron.

These events and formations no matter how separated by the gulf of probability and being, are never truly unconnected, and it is these connections by which one may find the threads. The nothing of the Null, the space between spaces that makes room for everything, is a yawning void where the smallest kernels of expression may be formed. From this boundless primordial ooze of possibility forms the multiplanar surface wherein a plane will form, each with their own set of separate means and aggregates. Thus forms the multiverse, the universe, the big bang as we know it, and our world as we know it, ever distilled into timelines. These spaces are actually quite fluid, held together and associating with one another in that same strange habit of similar but different. It is the similarities, the probability scenarios that work, from which these threads of mana may be found and followed. In a way, those barbarian alchemists of my time and place were far closer to the truth than they ever could have imagined. Discovering these relationships is the easy part, utilizing them is the hard part, and understanding them is the insane part. That way lays madness, and a string of very poor decisions which led me to the wheres whens and hows of my current predicament.

In this case, it all goes back to the sapient eye, the fluid dynamics of is and was, and the bull headed determination to understand what cannot be described without a science entirely unhinged from the sane and conventional.

Simply put, pulling the right strings, information removed from the constraints of physicality becomes boundless probability. With the right preparations using my Null Force Generator, I may walk into that darkness, into a 'quantum' doorway, and walk upon the edges of potentiation, and traipse through memory. I have done so before. Human thought, sapient thought, is a driving force behind mana aggregates after all.

Standing in the endless dark, I remember a faded blue door at an institution of learning I visited when I was five years old, I remember the river nearby, and fall through depths of mists and raindrops about five feet before my armored boots touch the solid ground of the riverbed. I walk across a shore to a library door whose blue wooden planks stand beside a faded blue road sign, and I find myself somewhere so much the same yet different with nothing but the scent of grass and paper filling my senses and the blue sky above. The connections between these chasms are informational, found in myself, and a natural progression of patterns and repeating elements. I walked into a schoolhouse, and I walked out of a dilapidated wooden church into a small ring of cars were the road runs like a river of concrete.

Checking my devices, I am disappointed to have made a wrong turn… again. This place is not home.

Damn.

At least now I stand a better chance at collecting myself in the light than I do in the dark. Now you know the crux of the issue: never screw with things when you aren't prepared for the consequences.


The space I have found myself in now is but a soap bubble suspended in the ether between universes and timelines, drawing in and eating the flesh borne on waves of possibility found only in the dying of 'could be' that just didn't quite make it into 'is' as is natural over the birthing processes of alternate universes. Ever wake up one morning and decide to go to work without a cup of coffee? This event, and the many that coincide with it generally do not have the power of potential needed to create the alternative timelines as seen in the more fateful decisions like whether or not to believe your computers are accurate and launch your nuclear counterstrike. There are times one should be glad of the Russians, thank you Mr. Stanislav Petrov. This is a space that I like to refer to as 'quantum' and it is so named in memory of a gentleman who first postulated the theory to me with the aid of a rather nonplussed feline, though I doubt the enormity of his ideas will ever surmount the metaphor. Simply put, not all timelines survive the birthing process to become established alternate universes or individual timelines themselves; and where there is death, there are those that feed on it.

This world is a place of grassy planes that stretch as far as the eye can see, which is the point of it. The skies are blue and thick with fluffy white clouds; little takes to the air save bugs and a single crow. This little bubble of quantum 'isn't' tangles into the cracks and crevices of what is and draws in the worlds around it into its own little microcosm, stimulating ever more loops of nonsense to form not unlike an oxpecker prying into an open wound, digging for ticks and fleas and blood. It is something of a parasite, bleeding the timelines caught in it's reach. Only it does not simply draw on precious red drops of life, but on the ever tangling probability, mana, of the life-stream of a timeline. It is difficult to describe but can be imagined more easily as an ecosystem with its own set of creatures. This too retains the convergent evolution of predator and prey. Still, quite difficult to understand.

Looking around, I find myself at great advantage, a matter of the combined height of myself and my suit; the tips of the innumerable emerald green blades only just brush the bottoms of my red optic lenses and I am able to survey my surroundings with only the smallest inconvenience. With my head above the leaves I am able to 'quantum lock' the plains more unstable pathways and forge a solid path, where I to lose sight of my surroundings I have no doubt that the whole area would writhe and shift into a new arrangement in the obscurity. The earth beneath my armored boots is sodden with recent rains, water is thick in the air, it must be cycling in the environment like a rainforest would, perpetually evaporating and falling over and over again. The soil is rich with nutriment, dark and loamy and well maintained, there are bones peeking through and the grass sways around countless bodies living and dead.

It's trying to trip me.


Opting for more solid ground I am able to locate the flat roofed frame of an old building, a better vantage point to survey the distance and locate an exit point. I have come to surmise that the outgrowths of the field, stitching itself into the surrounding reality, has consumed a large swath of countryside where it overlaps with the world it is feeding off of. I find the skeletons of other buildings subsumed by rain and rot littered throughout the soil. This field has taken great pains to look like just another field and not the roving beast it is. I imagine it moves across the plains not unlike the sand dunes of a desert, swallowing all in its wake.

I must tread carefully though, not for fear of unstable footing though, there are people here. Hiding in the shadows left behind by the signs of an old bowling alley, on the roof, the enormity of the grassland becomes apparent. Though I need not fear contamination from so unstable and makeshift a pocket dimension, the more I linger the more I risk connecting myself to it by means of associated proprietary probability pull. Rivulets of disturbed grass forms veins and pathways that burrow incessantly throughout the field, each one a man or woman lost, and also a child here and there. They call for one another constantly, caught in loops that drive them ever onward to an unseen center. Drawing inward, first from the outer most edges picking up as many creatures as possible, them spiraling and crawling and crying as circumstances drive them to mad murderous stumbling. Not just once to one group, but hundreds to the same. This kind of quantum mess of meat and desperation… it's quite queer a sight from here, like a living kaleidoscope. This is how the field flourishes, on the bodies of desperate iterations.


Here we must discuss the topic of plants. When we imagine plant life we think of harmless accumulations of cellulose and chlorophyl, often accompanied by whether or not we think we could get away with eating it. Seldom in such understanding do we imagine a plant eating us. When we think of plants we do not think of the pitcher plants, the Venus flytraps, or the sundew. The idea of plants exhibiting predatory behaviors defies our expectations of the imagined evolutionary chasm between plant and animal. This plant, this field and its ecosystem, are a predatory creature, subsisting on the lured meat it draws in, using confounding spatial distortions to drive its prey to exhaustion, then scattering these corpses to enrich the soil and feed its girth. An interesting creature, though banal, the real prize is at the center.

At the middle most point of the field in a small clearing I find myself face to face with the source of the distortion, its form is an anchor, skewering itself into the universal plane and its many branching timelines not unlike a leech on the hide of a beast. Probability is particularly dense here and spasms with the writhing fields, innumerable bodies choke the ground here. The living lured in here are the eyes that sustain this coil, the flesh feeds the grass, the grass feeds the rock, the 'rock' feeds.

So we have come full circle.


Watching these people and their countless copies as their multitudinous decisions play out time and again, I can all but see the threads of mana play about the grasses. These threads are those convergent probabilities that connect them all together; each group is composed of mainly humans, each connected to a child, each coming to know each other as timelines intertwine and tangle, each chased by madness, all of them lost in the tall grass. This area has become a whirlpool of meat and blood and grass.

The weight of this rock is a problem. Yes, I can dislodge it, but there is absolutely no reliable means to predict what consequences may come of it without several years of study and testing that I have no time for and a wide margin of error I cannot afford. I prefer to remain isolated, hidden as I am between the folds of the spatial warps the grass creates. To find another way out I must make use of the threads and the blind spots in the grasses themselves, a lead out of this pocket dimension comprised of adjacent conveniences and follow it like a mountaineer his tether. This, again, brings up the subject of proprietary probability pull, the pull of like to like. Following that pull and prying my way through, I know I will find something similar but different on the other side.