I start to feel sick. A requiem is out, from a rational angle, yet my eyes start to well up. I say it again and again, so more tears would come. Minutes later, it feels different, and my trip reverses to horror. It is literally in my face and threatening to wallop me. Its fangs are speeding up, from holes in its fingers that pop up randomly, menacingly, towards my eyes.
My seat rocks back and forth and then sideways, an evasive move that only seems to aggravate the situation. It morphs and it herds monster rats, itself hidden from view momentarily as my eyes retract into an orbit behind a solid lid whose slender aperture barely allows the sporadic light entry, the rattles that suddenly torment my heels hardly reprieve for a deliberate venture at roller-coaster purgation.
It is time to escape. With the glass floor a mile above the streets, my phobic instincts play out unabashed in the open, and screens off a horrendous prospect the certain immolation of my being consequent upon which squeamish hardly well portrays, given my faith in self-preservation being in essence immutable. The transition to opacity helps somewhat, and the blast of air from behind me cushions a picturesque intergalactic flight in which fellow sojourners also seem to revel, their contorted mien though blurring the varieties of their being.
As my balloon closes enveloping me in a meshwork of multicoloured airstreams from different directions, it is easier to say a command, even if the feeling of bliss immersed in safety is rather transient as water sprinkles on my face at first, then all over me, drenching my soul as my ethereal bubble bursts, and soon enough, my foes are again in hot pursuit, this time though, my choice is different, a humanoid that forever tickles me running amok.
Back at another level now able to feel someone next to me, the ambient sound is deafening, even as the minutiae looms, as if to stress the point about being hybrid being special, some parts really noisy, others, muted. Everyone seems to have some tie to the manifest inelegance, some laughing, joking, screaming, even crying, seeing, supposedly, the tenacity of the bionic, the mauled battering likewise, the beings emergent unscathed moments later.
For an hour now, it has been fun, somewhat. The frenetic pace of events the thrill, as much as the immersion in diversity. It is easy to marvel at the depth of the show, the pithy simulation of an entirety the notion of which spins perplexity into a way of life, which for me necessitates the purgation, the flight into my mind the exposure affords as exculpation for ineptness, even ignorance, on my perpetual angst.
Yet, it is not that readily explicable given my tendency to reject guilt for my innocence, a vexation, albeit that may be counterproductive to an understanding that is legitimate, sought under such circumstances rather than wither moaning, lost and gone for ever, a mere caricature, aimlessly perambulating much like those around invisible to many who from where, anyone’s guess. So, the next thing I say would take me there something tells me even if not what to say. With no time to ponder, lest the trip stays the same, one’s vulnerabilities increasingly enhanced, the gear switches, once again, towards peace, a milieu akin to my preference for the wisdom I seek.
That this takes me to another level is puzzling though, more so as the folks there are just a shade different from the bionics. They do not do physical damage. Rather, they probe in a manner that boggles, with the result being an exposure worse than being strip-searched in public. For once, my trip is cerebral. Questions, not spiky fingers poke at me, and into me, like never before, the protagonists of my spiritual inquest in chorus propelled mysteriously into a frenzy of piercing self-examination.
Almost retching at some point, being gently rocked into a hypnotic state the perception of a lush garden with soil incredibly soft and caressing my soles, the freshness of dew an olfactory nirvana, my physiologic state meshes into an anomalous complement on a celestial trip but it is soon forced to align, the result, a sense of wellness that the magnetic shield vivid in my mind heightens sucking ill out of me. That seems to change everything, a confirmation of the nature of the bionics, their intention apparently consonant with mine, our truth voyage in earnest.
Before adjusting my goggles as instructed by the conductor, one of the few times a human voice intervenes, my command, to intensify the experience lands me elsewhere, my co-inhabitants of a truth planet all gone, apparently in search of truth further afield. The interjection offers me a chance to change gear once again, to revel in my trip for now, and look for truth later.
That it sounds strange to me that my commands now have a pattern that prompts human intervention to fix my goggles warrants no apologies given my naivety on matters no one now even terms cutting-edge, their defiance of ontology the new way to progress in an ever fluid conundrum. However, that it reinforces the temporary abortion of my search for truth is disturbing, the perception inherent in me of the cryptic array of obstacles to my freedom being again operational instantaneously driving me back into my erstwhile querulous mode.
Now, though, my bionic friends are gone. Another command takes me to the lowest level, where my recognition by its inhabitants is a relief, in some sense, given that they are indescribable in my world, animals veiled as people, yet capable of speech, in my tongue, sharing their experiences with me that they say upset them that my people cannot see despite that we share a common destiny.
My emergence from the theatre after almost three hours fills me with trepidation. It is as if the show should never stop, my eyes tired though, my mind weary of the future my catharsis bears. Maybe it is the start of a chain of emotional entreaties whose end is the revelation of the truth that something deep inside tells me will continue to evade as much as it intrigues, to perplex, just as it reliefs, and only in the end to emerge in transcendence yonder.
