Grand highways of protoplasmic pneumatic tubes weave interdimensionally and across spacetime in the multiverse. Some astronauts have witnessed them and describe them as wormholes. The human eye can only capture them in the vacuum of space; in the glint of a star in frightening proximity.
These tubes act almost exactly as those installed in drive-thru bank teller stations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thumpff! Something arrives.
They carry souls around, amongst, and betwixt the vastness of the multiverse so incomprehensible to the human mind. But in death, in the liminal space between it and reincarnation or birth, it is imperative to give you a glimpse.
You can’t know where you’re going, if you don’t know where you’re from.
The mantra remains true, yet the gods felt it important you also know a bit about where you are going, before you get there. Consider it a teaser or a press packet to gain some insight as to the life that is to follow this Limbo. The one dissenting god was, of course, Osiris.
~
Thumpff! Something arrives. Spit into a conference room; grey, with corners that disappear.
You are what has arrived. A bipedal form approaches you. It has a head that looks like a repeating reflection of many faces; all the choirs of angels in one to bring you the message. “You are here to meet your selves, before you go onto the next iteration of yourself,” say the angels. They gesture their hand at…the conference room.
It is filled with yous, or maybe You. You, collectively (y/You, maybe?) share a name, but y/You are not all “Eva” or “Teodros” or “Yukio” or “Mahmoud” or “Chad.” No, you share a pan-dimensional name. Think of it as an “un-utterable,” the way no mortal can truly name Raven or Yahweh. Dr. Dave Bowman and HAL 9000 are in the conference room to ground you in even a shred of familiarity. Though, the other versions of y/You see something else familiar to them.
As a member of our universe, HAL’s voice is also a balm. A liminal ASMR whisper course from a homicidal Artificial Intelligence.
So anyway, in the conference room. It’s like the first day of a new school or Step One in Alcoholics Anonymous; very few of y/You are champing at the bit to speak up first. Finally, someone does. Most of y/You are still knuckling the confusion and weariness out of your third eyes. Naturally you all start to socialize, what it’s like to share the extensions of a larger soul. Stories come out from behind curtains of reticence.
~
And just as you are seeing a bit of one another, the other parts of y/You? Thumpff! Something arrives. In the next conference room. The angels return, begin ushering you towards suddenly apparent portals back into those tubes. “We can’t have you corrupting the next group of t/Them.” Ooooouuuchp! Something departs. You are back in your tube, traveling to the next iteration of yourself…presumably. In this liminal waystation for souls, y/You have a sort of interconnectedness that comic books liken to telepathy or being psychic. y/You are thinking o/Outloud within y/Your collective head, “Does this place look like a jellyfish made of Möbius Strips to e/Everybody else?”
The tubes never leave or travel beyond this protoplasmic feedback loop. y/You are reincarnated, reborn, reimagined, and reiterated [over and over again]. You forget the impending sense of doom you had when seeing the Weave.loop.
And there’s a reason for that. The pattern, the ripples, they continue forever bouncing between one surface and another in an enclosed system. Now, that system is truly massive, but your soul, your essence, never truly leaves. Sure, maybe you go to different panes of the multiverse, but you are caught in an infinite system feeding back on itself. If it made a sound, it would just be g/God’s unending scream of horror that they entertained c/Creation at all. But there’s no undoing it now; it’s such a lucrative industry.
Life itself is Purgatory.
…
Thumpff! s/Something arrives.
Gabe Bogart lives in Seattle, Washington, where he patiently awaits the return of the Seattle Supersonics. He learned to love words in his senior year high school creative writing class and from his sister and mother. It’s been a long time since he took a major road trip and he’d like to do it next in a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport. His work has appeared in Pareidolia Lit, Hencroft Hub, Collective Realms, TERSE. Journal, Fahmidan Journal, acloserlisten.com, and thesianetwork.com.