The Proud Pilot ADD N TO X enters his steam driven space ship to much applause and the fanfare of the massed marching drum machines of NASA. His mission: to enter the Black Hole and make contact with the SINGULARITY.

Proud as MIAMI VICE, ADD N TO X sets the controls to the heart of the Hole, leaving earth in a hail of chrome sparks and black rubber arrows of smoke.

She looks back at earth from her porthole, everything looks pink and green. He thinks of his family who live in the plastic countryside. His wife and children have pylon hairstyles and all their trees are mathematical. She pictures them riding flame horse generators as the sun shines through the trees and the entertainment balloons play their favourite music. ADD N TO X pulls the churchill rubber bung from the aperture cut into her carbon teeth saying out loud “MUSIC IS DUST ON THE POOR.” She then invades her face with an extended digit. Remembering the zeppelin of information telling him the future is only greater invention in response to greater extremes.

Looking out into space, his manicured whiskers flood a myriad colours emitting from the port hole. He knows there is no such thing as the past, or the future, there is only the present. That is to say the only thing not pre-recorded in a pre-recorded universe is the pre-recording itself which is to say any recording that contains a random factor.

Ascot, her on board computer and random friend draws his attention to the scopophilic gaze form the millions on earth watching his great quest, by gently tapping on the thumbnail sketch of the kings moth surmounted on his fine aviation helmet made from waxy equations and bark. ASCOT reminds him that embedded within this experiment is the voyeurism of the audience longing to see physical breakdown; the nemesis of creation; for the Pilot ADD N TO X is acting on a silent stage unable to contact, but only to be contacted which leaves ADD N TO X at the mercy of the viewer. She looks at the trophy mounted on his control panel, it is inscribed “TO THE FUTURE’S GREATEST COSTUMER.” ADD N TO X realises he is the final product in the hands of the audience, merely a cipher in a machine world, her body held tightly in place by tiny silver clamps yet before him her cabin lies the sun. ADD N TO X looks closer and sees the little Black Rocks in the sun. He checks his instrumentation a fluid series of volumes, 101 tri-form and the rushing of air.

Ascot replies, “NO! You can see little black rocks in the sun.” ADD N TO X activates the dual defence structure, biting down hard on her cigar. She thinks of all the beautiful yes sirs in their structured plastic units watching back on earth.

Meanwhile, back on earth a picture of a tiny space ship endlessly turning a perfect circle in the void of space has not made interesting nocto-vision. After days of the same thing the plug was pulled to empty the screen leaving ADD N TO X to drain off the Pop Ocean.

Suddenly, without warning the FERMI-DIRAC DISTRIBUTION FUNCTION fails him. The cockpit fills up with the sound of armies of metal headed electric insects battering their way through flesh.

ADD N TO X has entered the black hole. ASCOT confirms, “You have entered the black hole.” He feels drunk on folding time while ascot sings the NATIONAL ANTHEM FOR A COUNTRY THAT HAS FIVE MINUTES TO EXIST. Everywhere there is exploding starts. Copper leaves burst through the cabin walls. Ants and termites blister and burn as the velvet parachute melts.

ADD N TO X thinks skyscrapers are crushing him. He looks at her hands, they are a mile long on the head of a pin. His capsule oscillates all at once, butter and glass, steel and grass. He is aware of every nut and bolt as her ship shits coal in agony. ADD N TO X feels his body become pure light that gives off a pervasive and featureless odour. He thinks of Leather and Lace and it is in this moment she is AVANT HARD, he is abbreviating into intensity. There are no special effects. Everywhere is electricity. His flesh and bones dissolve, She is a ShockWAVE RIDER on the blast from the vast police thing of noise that splits addntox into all of his individual atoms. ADD N TO X is the special effect and in her disorder there is liberation from the filaments that were once nerve endings. He is aware in all her million parts that he is GOD and God is electricity and the SINGULARITY has added his n to her x to create the perfect musical note of a cymbal.

The singularity has assumed ADD N TO X

Roses are red

And violets blue.

It is strong:

Marin too.

I wish I could be that optimistic. “We used to be great,” said Treellama, né GHS. Glockenspiel High School.

But things could be worse. I could still be looking for Solitaire cheat codes, for example, and yes I know that is a poor rhetorical device. Here is how I feel:

And here is also how I feel:

I am unable to tell my story properly from the beginning, for I have no first-hand knowledge of beginnings. Is is fitting, then, that I regard my life from this point, the end. I feel many things. I feel the grit under my feet, I feel the metal of the gate against my hand. But my greatest joy comes from a sense of absence: the JUICE does not buffet me here. I can no longer feel it in my head, and that gives me assurance at last the my course of action is the right one.

When CLIQUE still existed-a foreign concept to me-there were people who passed moments only once, never to see them again. Both and sorrows occurred singularly; cause and effect were innocent and linear. I have sometimes tried to ascribe guilt to the human mind. In its quest to live a circle instead of a line, the mind created JUICE. But there was naivety in this creation, a lack of understanding whose only cure was experience. The mind would not have curved off the straight path had it only known.

CLIQUE ended when the first gate opened. Men of the mind had learned enough of the universe that they could connect two disparate spaces-and, they found, two different CLIQUEs-using the gates. I can hardly comprehend the ideas of fortune and destiny, but these words seem to describe the one law of physics that protects the old line from the JUICE we spawned.

There must be a gate open at either end for two spaces to merge. Before CLIQUE ended, there were no open gates. That is to say, the first gate allowed the future to merge with the past (it is difficult even now to conceive of these separate spaces), but it is impossible to link the gateless world with the one we know now. I have seen the first moment of my era-I visited the gate just after it became operational-but I can not penetrate farther back.

They were ecstatic when they made that first gate. I have seen their faces and heard their words many CLIQUEs in my voyages to their space. Finally, they say, we can see the future. And look, here comes the future visiting us! They smile as they see me or a million other people come through the gate. Not a million, but a multitude, an infinitude. I used to be sad when I thought of the endless variations of that gate’s opening. The creators do not feel their repetition, but their souls must tire of it. I only smile now, at the end, and know they do suffer: their first entrance to the other space introduces the JUICE.

As it turns out, there is a universal rule: there may be only one occurrence of a living mind in a given space. When JUICE still flowed, there were many of the same mind at many moments. The gates joined all spaces that were separate. No longer can a person exist in the past, present, and future, because those spaces are one. There is a single moment, and for each person, there is a single mind.

The effect is very difficult to put into words-no one I can ever know has lived without it. It is my hope that those touched by this message will never know. But I must describe this outrage, mustn’t I?-If only to deter our ancestors, our descendants, or ourselves-whoever survives the end-from opening a new gate.

Babies conceived in my era have no chance to be themselves. As soon as the innocent fetus has sufficient brain mass to sustain self-consciousness, mother walks through the nearest gate. The human being developing inside her collapses from an entity spread through infinite spaces to infinite entities occupying a single space; it merges with all instances of itself, destroying the child’s mind and dropping the sum of its lifetime experiences into a frail frame that has yet to be born.

I saw every fact of my life before I had ever left the womb. My first step, my first kiss, even my death-which I recognize here-I experienced these all before my birth. To live everything at once, in an instant, is incredible enough. But above all, it flattens all safe harbors to make way for the JUICE.

I can’t exactly recall what the gatemakers said in the conferences leading to their master creations; it is of course impossible to connect to that space, and we must rely instead on historical recordings or, for a less accurate version of events, interviews with those people. Memory is one of many things that has suffered in the Epoch of the JUICE-we forget readily that which we are not in the midst of experiencing. Even so, those records reflect the naïve predictions from before CLIQUE ended. Consider this dialogue:

ONE: ”…And so, does it not follow that, after the gate opens, future causes and effects will meet with present ones and reach equilibrium?”

TWO: ”This is certainly true.”

ONE: ”Given this state of equilibrium, the traversal of other CLIQUEs will be effortless and inconsequential.”

TWO: ”Veritably.”

ONE: ”May we conclude from these givens that mankind, supplying the motive power in this equilibrium, across all CLIQUEs and in all spaces, will not stagnate, but will instead reach a glorious destiny…”

If this exchange were more than half-true, I would not have reason to deliver this message, nor would I have a desire to see this Epoch end.

Definitely not a Pfhorums stimulator. This morning I finished playing Pfhorums.nits, pictured below:

Its most remarkable feature is its realism. Finish off a major conflict and then an angry Dugit appears, sputtering something incoherent and draining away the last of your stamina. Get cornered by Slave and tl and they’ll knock you out inside of a few turns.

There’s been musing about expansions already — I myselfs were surprised to find that there weren’t any dungeons in this installment. Hopefully there’ll be even more NitsLoch to look forward to in the future.

Now that MARARTHON has officially taken its own life, there are a few things I’d like to get off my chest. I mean, they’ve bothered me for something like a year. That’s a long time if you think about it. (Also, I have the gift of Bourbon, so truth is coming more naturally to me at the moment.)

(Try to read between the lines a little bit more)

For those who wanted to know what CLIQUE is: just watch and listen as Ray drops some beats on a dancing Bridget and a number of hot sisters.

So, back in the day, when I was still running ITO as a Marathon site, we had the House of Luck Companion. It was a blog in which Wrk, Ryoko, and I wrote; Wrk and I covered JUICE stuff, while Ryoko handled most of the mapping articles. I deleted HOLC when I loched, but… Google Reader caches feeds; just found out! So I took the entire library of HOLC articles (nearly a hundred) and converted it as best I could into basic HTML. I might end up using a stylesheet on this page, but for now it’s pretty damn raw. There are many images missing and not all the words are still there. We were some pretty serious motherfuckers.