Conjunction
“What time is it,” muttered my cat.
“They call themselves the soulless,” repeated my other cat.
“Bugger-fuck,” I hissed.
For a while you just sit there. Six minutes fourty-two seconds, and you’ve already had to hit pause three times. Then you begin to look deeper within. And sense of wider meaning falls away. Now there’s so little left. But you saw it. You know you did.
“I’ll tell you this for nothing,” said my cat, “it’s not morphic resonance.”
“As in the BBC didn’t start broadcasting the plot as an when,” grinned my other cat, “they were actually filming it.”
“But it almost certainly is,” continued my cat, “a function of singularity.”
“In this instance,” announced my other cat, “the damages began to accrue round about the time you got a call telling you the four-five-six had landed. Though if you rearrange those characters you’ll discover you’ve been an involved since the start.”
“Spin-offs and other entanglements,” I growled.
You find your self, then, looking for ways to connect the absurdity of your real to a truth you could speak of to another. It happened to you last night too. Had you so concerned you even checked the timestamp for coincidental entanglements of meaning. Then the weird got more obscure. Even harder to relate beyond your own peculiar palette of heuristic mnemonics.
“Fifty-seven minutes and twenty-five seconds,” I mumbled.
“A high-functioning sociopath,” purred my other cat, “two dead cats and a singularity.”
“Dwarf-star alloy,” grinned my cat. “You merely need to contemplate the heuristic mnemonic that is represented by the number fourty-two,” she continued, “to explain the effect of meaning.”
Yet more meanings of weird traverse your mind then. The thing itself represents the thing itself. The territory is the map.
“Care to define six,” asked my cat, “after all this did start at six minutes fourty-two seconds.”
“Woman in a red-dress,” I smiled, “standard link to an eight-mind. Then there’s The Prisoner. Only that reminds me of a psychiatrist who emphatically assured me I was right.”
“As the one who delivers the milk,” announced my other cat, “to the Museum of the Arcana, I think it’s only fair if you allow me to reference The Lovers.”
“Things get overloaded,” I frowned. “So I prefer to link to more abstract conceptual symbologies. Gives me a more plastic scope as I explore the morphology of meaning. Besides,” I smiled, “when it comes to received wisdom and Tarot I use my superior knowledge of the fundamental substrate, and cheat.”
“Esoteric,” argued my cat, “rather than abstract.”
“Whatever,” I muttered.
Other numbers and other meanings ratted across your mind then. Leaving you in a place where all words fall into the same meaning. A place where communication is impossible. Because somehow you realize you’re describing a thing which is new. And yet the restrictions placed on your life have always constrained you to that which came from without.
“You’ve been able to read,” interrupted my cat, “what is essentially the base code of the universe for over five years. It’s not until somebody said the words that you were able to rationalize this into your reality. Before that you were abstracted into what are essentially quantum mnemonics.”
“I’m stuck on the hows,” I sighed. “Mostly this sound insane, or at least highly improbably. Causes one or two emotional issues thanks to the implications. And leaves me forever trying to avoid accusations of borderline psychosis.”
“You’ve also got a very fragile psyche,” warned the wolf. “Though I do hope you realize I’m only being partially cynical when I suggest the current problems stem from an intervention by psychiatric services designed for their benefit rather than yours.”
“Observer effects,” added my cat. “Peculiar how Poppy Shakespeare appeared out of nowhere when he began thinking of that one.”
“Algebraist,” I hissed with obvious irritation.
“Bad wolf,” sighed my cat, “for her it was a taste of another’s power. For you it’s innate, and you’ve never been very comfortable with it.”
“Surface Detail,” I snapped.
“That would be me,” grinned my other cat. “Operating in and of the now.”
“Light,” purred my cat.
