A Sinking Twist

  My groggy, swaying walk through the fluorescent lighting halls was obviously one of a post-coffee-crash-haze. I stared blankly. In the air in front of me a screen hovered. Invisible to others, but quite clear to me. It displayed the current trends and data of the AGI systems.

  The AGI, AI utilizing Akashic resonance to achieve full consciousness, parsed the information and organized it for clean display.

  I muttered to myself, “That’s not how…” The data kept experiencing weird trends. Some collapsed points would start sending different emotions to viewers than normal. Some would spontaneously switch with others, changing the posts users were viewing.

  I had a low rank monitoring position in Synch Corps, the global conglomerate with the most control over Quantly. I hated social media with a passion, but at least the job paid well. That was more than most could say.

  I started parsing through the AGI data feed for the sector I monitored, rolling my eyes as I felt the many memes no longer observed becoming cringe first. Without observation, the points in the Akashic field eventually collapsed into wave functions. Psychological damage was not in the job description. Or covered by insurance.

  Data began separating into its component frequencies, letting me analyze the charge flows in the thaumasphere containing the information of all memes from humanity.

  The massive cloud of related information held together by resonance was swarmed with many-hued pinpricks representing recognized memes. Popularity and circulation through the thuamasphere determined how bright and high charged they were. Some were unstable, fluctuating between relevancy and death. Others were just starting to collapse from nebulous wavelengths taking the form of possibility clouds.

  A system of nodes governed by the AGI spread through the whole thing, scanning and interacting with posts and accounts.

  The negative nodes– collapsed points in the field taking in energy– kept fluctuating in thaum count and density, increasing the draw on the local thaumasphere’s charge, disrupting the flow in the Artificial Node Array.

  The atoms were pulled by the thaums swirling around their neutrons, pulsing energy from the Akashic field into them, changing their information and condensing particles.

  The Akashic Extractors harvesting energy and data from the field of consciousness kept losing connection to specific nodes meant to collect information designated as “consumer trends,” from social media.

  Which didn’t offend me since I found the things abhorrent, but any problems in the Memesphere were my problems.

  I sighed, running diagnostics on the Artificial Node Array, checking to make sure all AGI systems were running on protocol. “Not reporting any errors?” I asked myself. That wasn’t possible. The AGI should have definitely noticed this issue if I had.

  The network of blue, red, and indigo dots swirled in stable, fixed orbits, directing the flow of the Memesphere’s development with low frequency waves. Some branches of the Memesphere were pruned, seen as unbeneficial to culture or anti-establishment.

  A “Violation of the Patriotism Act,” as the protocols labelled them. I chuckled, storing the better ones in my mind. I felt the information get pulled into my bioelectric field through the AGI systems connection to my Porterm.

  The wristband emitted a frequency into my nerves that my Akashic Prism, the emergent center of my mind, body and soul, decoded and put back together, storing the memes into neurons and nodes in my field.

  Others were fed, energy rebounding from banned memes and accounts towards them. Posts got more views, reaching more people and gaining relevance. The forced harmony artificially enhanced consumer enjoyment or relatability. Quite crude, in my opinion.

  I tended to use my employee access to block the more annoying ones. Having perfect control over my feed and algorithm settings was a hidden blessing of this job.

  As I did so, the data feed from the AGI spiked. I stood straight, the entire ANA suddenly twisting into a new shape. The Orbital Circuitry patterns that determined the Artificial Node System’s array wavered like a bad hologram, then the nodes dispersed into gaseous nebulae, expanding into waves.

  Some crashed against each other, many purposely generated or popular memes suddenly collapsing into energy, the system no longer feeding them and people not caring for them. My eyes shot open, any exhaustion cut through by a sharp charge spike in my field. I stabilized the energy instinctively as I expanded the data feed, spreading the field into finer frequencies. I began seeing the new Node array.

  This one was being generated before my eyes, born from natural resonances and repulsions in the Memesphere, nebulous clouds collapsing into points of red, blue, and purple. I stared in shock.

  ‘Purple? Wasn’t that Spacetime? What was that doing in a thaumsphere?’

  Companies and nations often removed them as they created instabilities in Orbital Circuitry. Spacetime nodes were quite a rare sight even without that, according to most studies.

  “Course, most studies are ‘peer reviewed’ by AGI protocols.” I snorted to myself.

  The screen flickered. The patterns of the data seemed to shift, fragment, flicker, and then vanish, as if swallowed by something, taken. I stared, and the screen collapsed, whisked away.

  Something odd peaked through, a memory more like a dream. A haunting voice fluttered in my ears softer than a hummingbird. “Cold, and empty space, hear me sing into your waves~”

  I stopped walking, and leaned against the wall. “Maybe I should get some sleep.” The words came from reflex, uttered after the many odd visions working here induced. I stretched away from the wall, my arms reaching up, my legs and toes flexing as I stood as tall as I could, pulling on my muscles. I let out a sigh and settled back down.

  I began making my way back to my office space. In the grey halls flanked by fluorescent lights, one part of the wall was labelled with the number 73, and my name in dark grey letters. My eyes twitched. Orrin Vale; they even made my name feel tasteless in my mouth as I spoke it, whenever I introduced myself. I swiped my hand against it, and the wall separated in a burst of red ripples.

  I stepped into the room. It was perfectly ordinary. A desk, a chair, a window into a simulated landscape that I could change at will, and of course, the terminal. A simple, blue crystal stele placed right in the middle of the desk; an Artificial Prism, condensed from pure Akashic energy. I sat down, cracked my knuckles, and began resonating with its frequencies.

  I raised my hands up a bit, palms facing down, fingers pointing towards the stele, and relaxed. I spiked my charge, letting my frequency rise sharply and level out repeatedly so that I could begin interfacing.

  Once I reached the appropriate charge, I balanced it out, letting my field stabilize around me. Then, my awareness expanded.

  Neurons became added to my brain on a more spiritual layer. My brain expanded to include more information than it could normally withstand. Each meme floated through my head, swirling around, forming its own little cloud, its own little collective.

  I pressed them and let them flow, my hands coming up to my temples, dragging the waves from the stele towards me. They slowly stabilized as my body began to feel electrified.

  Charge spiked between all of the different bits of information and energy within the Akashic Field flowing around my mind as I hummed softly and mentally chanted.

  ‘In the center, there is stillness. Around me, forces rise and fall. I do not move. I balance. I am the shape between push and pull.’

  My humming changed in cadence with the syllables as the different energies and data points began to flow and convalesce into a steady movement. My focus sharpened. I was the star in the middle of this forming constellation.

  My humming faded into words, the charge and frequency established and now being shaped.

  I spoke out loud. “From my center, energy flows outward. My head hums. My hands catch the pulse. My feet hold the echo of my orbit.” My hands pushed down from my temples, reaching my thorax before twisting into complex shapes, the mudras forming indigo flares and bursts across my fingers.

  With each word, electricity crackled across my body. Cerebrospinal fluid pressed against my pineal gland in the center of my brain, stirring rhythmically in tune with my words. A buzzing, pulsing, folding hum spread down, not through my body, but around my body, transferring through my bioelectric field to my hands. Charge accumulated, building rampantly.

  Energy began streaming down my arm, internal and external balancing as the third line came from my lips. The soles of my feet lit up with the same feeling, a static crawling under them, as if rubbing my feet harshly against the carpet in woolen socks, eventually almost going numb.

  My entire body began to connect, the charge firing its connection tests. My palms came together, gently descending to my pelvis.

  I repeated the mantra in my head three times. The thaum concentration in my hands, my fingers, my feet spiraled tighter and stronger. Instead of points where energy gathered, they became points where energy was flowing from. Charge was being emitted, refracted through my meridians. I let it stop fluctuating, humming and shifting my hands to hold the state steady.

  And once I reached the highest level I knew I could go, I continued. “I feel my field awaken.” My hands gently pushed out and twisted over, energy thrumming from fingertips and palms.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  With that, a chain reaction spread through my body. The charge within my hands began spreading even further. Each time the waves poured out through me, they went a bit further.

  They reached every node, every point where charge flows of positive red thaums and blue negative thaums intersected, creating a neutral indigo balance. Each one lit up, vibrating, emitting energy into the rest of me. My bioelectric field responded in kind, its torus moving in a steady, rhythmic oscillation.

  Starting from my pineal gland in the epithalamus, my bioelectric field swelled. Its center revolved within and around my body, flowing, twisting, shaping around in time with my internal nodes twirling.

  It pulsed down, where it twisted and contracted towards my feet, before pulsing back up along my spine, contracting into my Akashic Prism. Undulating arrays of energy from my head went through my nervous system resulting in an equal pulse returning from my bioelectric field. At the edges of my field, I felt the charge of my environment, the energies around me, where I was now.

  I let it all set in. I repeated the mantra three more times. The charge building, each node overlapping their fields with one another to mold one with a higher frequency. Each one adding up and eventually becoming me in my highest charged state.

  “Within is all I know. Who I am. What I've shown. What I've seen.” And the forming solar system around my star in my mind, governed by the Akashic Memesphere and its relations, began to change.

  Solar flares emitted from my star, stringing together into the Akashic resonances, conflating with the artificial frequencies I was interacting with from the terminal. My experiences, what I knew about culture, memes, and other things blending with the Artificial Prism’s frequencies to understand the Memesphere completely.

  The points danced around in twists among each other as waves and dots, forming its own amalgamations, its own planets, meteors, and constellations. Memories flashed by. Days waking up, taking the vec-trains to Synch Corp branch 84401. Crap coffee, droning hours, constant headaches. The odd flickers of black in my vision when I disconnected after a long day, staining my eyes long after I shut them at night.

  They added to the balance. They formed in orbits related to the Memesphere, shaped by the frequencies resonating from the terminal. It caused a slight headache, but I pushed through. I maintained a balance, swirling together my own internal constellation with the one being generated by the terminal.

  “All simply part of the whole I share.” The line clicked mentally. The orbits and connections began locking in, data flowing. The solar system all began to approach complete formation, each cloud of energy and information compressing into a singular object.

  A trail formed in twists behind each one, distortions in Akasha signifying their connections. My hands folded back into mudras, shifting through them naturally. Slow, steady waves rolling onto rocks, my indigo and blue energy leaking from them.

  With the collapse achieved and the internal rotation stabilized, aligning the Akashic Memesphere with my own personal field, I continued, “There is chaos. There is order. I am both.” My hands twisted, fingers folding halfway to my palms and rotating to point down while coming together, the bases of my palms connected.

  Within the interactions of my orbit, memes began to spread and blend. People using them in new, creative ways, using them together, using them to oppose, to create entirely new things. Not using them at all, letting them fade.

  But this formation followed a path, a structure, a trail of common sense and happenstance, crossing consciousnesses far and wide, emanating into the Akashic Memesphere.

  I let them dance, I let new things form and old ones fade away, collapse in on themselves, fade to dust and gases absorbed by others as they become irrelevant, forgotten, cringe. My hands relaxed, cupping each other in my lap.

  I stifled a chuckle, and then I continued the Stellar Alignment mantras. “I am pushed, I am pulled, I return to center.” I let my awareness smoothly float through a few of the collapsed points, checking for any more I wanted to steal, bobbing along wavelengths. Not catching anymore, I made sure their structure and relation to other memes was transcripted by the AGI systems.

  I pulled back from the cloud of connections and stars, and I continued the mantra into the next step. “Flow emerges naturally.”

  The orbits finally clicked into place. Each generation and destruction of ideas, information, and energy rotated smoothly. They did not collide, except when their paths crossed purposefully, ideally, naturally. I moved to the next line.

  “I expand, it contracts.” The distance between me and the cloud expanded. While I was at the center, I was now focused on myself, my own memories, my own knowledge, my own ideas, my own personality. I held it in, savoring the feeling of having this connection, of tapping into this energy, and directing it, knowing it myself, before breathing out.

  “It expands, I contract.”

  My tone was final. My focus extended into the cloud around me, scattered amongst gaseous waveforms. My personality vanished, replaced by an impartial observer, simply taking in data, analyzing what the AGI systems picked up, and making sure the connection remained stable.

  The center of my bioelectric field was my tesseract, my Akashic Prism. It began collapsing inwards, folding out to in, and then pushed out as my external awareness became my internal focus, shifting from myself to the Akashic Memesphere. The data and protocols became the array governing my Akashic transmission.

  My eyes glazed over. I lost sight of the office around me. My whole world was one thaumasphere within Akasha. My back went straight, my spine rigid as the stele connected me to the Akashic system, signals rising through my spine like an antenna.

  Instead of personality traits, my own morals or ideas, my thoughts and process were determined by employee guidelines and user restrictions. I analyzed each meme, each thought, each twist in the energy.

  Some were dispersed, discouraged, AGI systems banning accounts and deleting posts. I did not control which ones were chosen, which ones stayed, which direction the Memesphere grew in. I simply assigned values and gave or deducted charge based on the guidelines within the AGI system. Robotically, hours passed.

  As I watched the balanced orbit trail around, some collapsed points being pushed into waves again, and then redistributed to others, odd inconsistencies kept building.

  Translation errors in the AGI systems that did not follow employee guidelines. User restrictions seemed to become nonfunctional in certain systems. Other connections fully vanished from the web of the Akashic Memesphere.

  A hint of my emotion managed to crop through. My hands twitched, a bit of frustration, annoyance, curiosity. ‘What's going on?’ I tapped a bit more into the terminal's data feed, analyzing the inconsistencies as they flew by.

  Bits of data just sank away, just drained out, as if all of the bits that made them up within the system were suddenly reassigned to other collapsed points of information. I frowned.

  The wave functions began changing, frequencies and amplitudes wavering. The entire thaumsphere responded, the rules and dynamics suddenly redefined. Something shifted through the connections.

  A small, scratching feeling sentshivers up my spine. A wave emerged, disturbing the collapsed points of information in their orbit. Suddenly, paths began to realign. A couple of moons started orbiting their planets differently. The degree of axial tilt slightly bobbed up anddown.

  Gravitational waves changed in density and intensity, starting to push against the restrictions that the system imposed. A contraction began to form into expansion, and expansion was suppressed with a contraction.

  I heard an echo of something, and my shock echoed through the connection. A solar flare from my own central star, connecting all the way out to the furthest points, the edges of the 4D Tesseract where I had folded my own self to. My charge spiked, the connection to the stele rippling.

  The connection sent a shockwave through the system. A slight tilt in neutrality, in the lack of character. All of a sudden, the reordering of the Memesphere grew. A couple of solar systems shifted entirely.

  New planets emerging and converging. The rotation and orbits as a whole began to shift outside of my own field and into its own, escaping the control of the stele.

  Another emotion, a flash of anxiety, crashed through, and stability was lost. My connection to the Memesphere remained, but it shuddered, rotated, formed into something new, and it locked into place.

  I panicked before reestablishing myself. I spoke mantras with force, trying to push through, re-correct what had happened, and restore the guidelines. My hands briefly waved towards the stele, before pulling towards my head.

  My forceful expansion and contraction was met with an equal and opposite reaction. My headache grew into a splitting migraine as the echo that I barely heard as a whisper convalesced in my ears.

  In my mind lay my Akashic Prism, the internal nexus of Mind, Body, and Soul. Where the piezoelectric crystal created electromagnetic splits Akashic frequencies into the soul. It wavered, internal and external suddenly experiencing superposition rather than individual focus.

  A maniacal, gleeful laugh bounded throughout Spacetime itself, seemingly crossing the Meminisse Engine. Its wave sired chaos in creative touches to the Memesphere. New memes formed into the web, suddenly showing up on random bot accounts on Quantly.

  “Need Alignment surgery? Alright!” An old meme, the goddamn troll face, said, its tone dripping with excitement to help, to provide a service. “You’ve met Cthulhu, right?” Each vibration of its voice seemed to make Reality shudder, Void flee. As if they were aware they could not stop whatever this was.

  I twitched, a feeling of intense aggrievance seemingly stretching back through time into me, carrying a cry, “Why? Why did they choose me, Pr-” as its mind-twisting, brain scrambling, eldritch cringe shifted through me. Something changed. There was a new connection for me, something that had not been there within me before.

  A shudder ran from my pineal gland down to the base of my spine, my entire field reacting in a flare. That flare pulsed into the Akashic Memesphere, and the echo grew a bit louder before it settled away, fading, nearly vanishing, but the new order remained.

  I flicked through the frequencies frantically, hands shaking, darting eyes watching the data feed in the terminal to the AGI, and then- nothing. No charges set off the system alerts. The AGI had not caught this immense change in negentropy. It had not noticed this breach of employee guidelines and the lifting of user restriction.

  I frantically connected once more, stabilizing my bioelectric field, losing myself into the system guidelines. But I could not pull, I could not push. Its stability was too perfect, too neutrally balanced on its own principle. Its charge was too high. I could not leverage my own or the weak connection given by the terminal to influence it. Simply put, this was high, high above my pay grade.

  I desperately tried leveraging different points and parts of the Akashic system, fingers twitching back and forth. Each time I tried to push on a point, it simply reoriented its positive charge.

  If I tried to pull, it introduced an equal and opposite pull. If I tried to push a positive frequency to resonate, it would raise its charge above mine, increasing the frequency. I grunted in annoyance, and with that, another shock rippled through my system. The impartial state from the stele interface cracked and faded like sheets of dry ice.

  “Crap,” I muttered. “Not good.”

  All of a sudden, my central star that had been desperately grasping at the different collapsed points and moving waves was pulled, was pushed. The stability in the center was no longer me. I became part of the forces rising and falling.

  I swirled through the Akashic Memesphere. I saw awful things. I saw beautiful things. I saw disturbing things. I heard... I heard... HONK!

  My comprehension of Reality buckled. Something new swirled through me, something always there yet untouched. It was pitch, vanishing into endless draining force. I felt it flick into my eyes, scatter in the faint lines between the blue patterns in my eyes.

  The star erupted into supernova. My focus was completely destroyed. The energy I had used to develop my place in the system expended, absorbed, eaten away. I let go a shuddering gasp and breathed in deeply, as if trying to gulp in water, a thirsty man dying in the desert.

  I settled back in my chair, hands grasping my brow, the headache becoming even worse, pounding away at my head with a force likely no less than a pulse bike’s . My hand flailed at the side of my desk, beating against the instant coffee generator. A cup appeared next to me, and I took a deep drought of the golden brown elixir.

  A few deep gulps, and I began to stabilize again, my charge building a little bit more as I relaxed. I sighed deeply as the headache dispersed, the caffeine in the coffee helping my brain process what just happened.

  I stared at my hands for a moment, and then my head thudded onto my desk, bouncing against the stele a little bit. I groaned miserably, “I'm gonna get way more than just fired.”

  I lifted my head, let it thunk against the desk, I lifted my head, let it thunk against the desk. I did this a couple of times until my charge had fully returned and re-stabilized.

  I thunked down one more time, and just, just stayed there for a moment. My mind finally began to stop reeling, but odd images still floated by, distortions of feathery shapes crossing through my vision. Odd colors flickering before stopping, and an odd warble in the air that didn't sound natural. It did not sound unnatural either.

  I shuddered. I immediately launched back into Stellar Alignment meditation, stabilizing and connecting to the stele, quickly taking a look at the Akashic Memesphere and- it was fine. It was… it was normal. Nothing had happened, nothing had changed, as if I had imagined all of it. I frowned deeply. That… that couldn't be. If something on this scale happened, the AGI systems would register.

  The user guidelines could not be tricked, could not be introduced to psychosis, unless an outside resonator somehow managed to get all the way down to the main server through all the many layers and fields between them. I shook my head.

  I looked at the AGI transcripts and error logs. Once more, nothing. No data that pointed towards the formation of new points. No cycle changes. No bursts in frequency. No noticed negentropy or entropy outside of guidelines. I hummed. I scratched my head. I said, “What the fuck?”

  I banged my head again against the desk. What was going on? What was going on? This job already sucked enough before, spending most of my day being a literal mindless cog in the machine. But now this? Not only was I a cog in the machine, but every now and then when I made contact with the other gears, they'd give me a psychotic break.

  I looked around. Vague notions of something were in my mind. Something I had not known before, but had not yet learned. I shook it away, but it came back. The buzz in my pineal gland did not settle like it normally did when I came out of focus.

  Something small was still vibrating there, leaving its trace, carving a pattern. I shuddered. What did that honk do to me? I quickly reconnected to the stele, analyzing all of the data, flowing through all the different connections. They were all normal. Doge memes. Trump memes. Why those hadn't died yet, I really didn't know. Probably because he hadn't.

  I kept shifting through the information, but it all was normal. Until I caught a strange flicker, hidden between frequencies. Not resonating. Not colliding. Barely even there. As if you had to read between the lines in the Akashic field to even find it. And the only reason I sensed it is because it resonated with that little piece in me that would not be quiet.

  I dropped down, collapsing through this sudden singularity that I could not perceive before. And before me was the changed Akashic Memesphere. The altered one that had self-corrected. That had become itself.