[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 40

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Part 39}

“What are you running from?” a womanly voice boomed. The tree woman’s face formed out of the bushes before me. I screamed, scared out of my wits. “Oh don’t start with that again” she complained. “How would you like it if I screamed at you? AAAHHHHHHH!!! There, that’s what you sound like.”

I got up to flee. “Your ship’s that way” the eye-searingly beautiful face insisted, forming a hand out of a nearby branch to point with. “You haven’t even been running in the right direction.” I don’t know why I believed her, but I did end up running in the direction she pointed me in.

I set to crying, despite my every effort not to. I already felt uncomfortably small and vulnerable, I didn’t need these tears now gushing from my eyes to reinforce it. I tripped on another root, but on account of exhaustion I wasn’t moving quickly enough this time to hurt myself.

Instead, when I looked up, there was the aircraft wreckage. Moonlight glinted off the crumpled hull, and the dimly glowing emergency lights from the interior seeped out around the edges of the entry flap I’d fashioned from the carpet.

Once inside, I did my best to curl up beneath the woefully insufficient airline style blanket and pinned my wary eyes on the entry flap. I don’t know what I expected to happen. The interior walls of the aircraft cabin swirled and flowed in a predictable fashion, fear rendering it less impressive.

“How the fuck am I supposed to sleep like this” I wondered. In the end I didn’t manage to nod off until just after the sun came up. The combination of mild wind chill during the night, and the lingering concern that some otherworldly she-monster might still intrude kept me wide awake, tightly gripping that shitty little blanket. What asshole made them this small?

I didn’t sleep for long, either. When I next awoke it was just about noon. Wiping the crust out of my eyes and opening them fully revealed that the effects of the tea had finally worn off. The walls remained more or less still no matter how long I stared at them.

What a wild fucking night that was. Reflecting on it, I couldn’t be sure how much of it was real, and how much was part of the trip. It seemed in all ways more likely that I’d hallucinated the plant technology and pleasantly proportioned chieftess along with the gigantic, mind-rending tree woman.

DMT then, for sure. But how did it get into my system? It comes from a vine, doesn’t it? I couldn’t remember trying to eat one, but I must’ve. That would explain last night’s escapades in the only way that made any logical sense.

Still groggy and nursing a splitting headache, I brushed aside the entry flap and climbed out of the craft. My foot sank a few inches into the mud. I guess it rained at some point while I was asleep? Damn it all, I meant to catch some of that for washing myself.

Right then I badly needed to piss though, so rather than do it into the same stream I drink out of, I ambled a ways into the jungle. There I heaved out a contented sigh as I unleashed the steaming torrent onto another particularly unlucky flower.

“For a diurnal mammal, you sure sleep in.” I bolted upright and spun this way and that in search of the source of the voice. When that familiar face formed out of the foliage before me, I at first refused to believe it. The tea wore off, didn’t it?

“You’re not real!” I shouted, stumbling backwards. “You’re a fever dream! A figment of my imagination.” She frowned. “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a narcissist?” It couldn’t be happening. Nothing else around me looked distorted.

Every other element of the hallucinatory storm from last night had long since vanished. But there she was, in all her glory, indifferent to my understanding of what ought to be possible. “What are you!?” I demanded. She grew visibly frustrated with me.

“You’re all demands and accusations, you know that? How about a simple thank you, for helping you find your shelter last night? Didn’t your mother teach you any manners? Or didn’t you have a mother.” In spite of my confusion and fear, I blushed.

It was rude of me, whether or not any of this was actually happening. I somberly apologized, but then asked her why I could still see her even though every other effect of the tea had worn off since last night.

“I’m not one of the effects of the sacrament. All it does is expand your perception to include the layers of reality which the metal world does everything in its power to hide from you.” I couldn’t accept it, and said so.

“I don’t buy into any of that hippie garbage. I’m still tripping, that’s all this is. The visuals must only be the first stage or something. You’ll be gone before tomorrow.” But she wasn’t. I spent the rest of the day relocating the InterNourish crate and stocking up on those foul mealbars, then returning as many as I could carry to the shelter.

“You really shouldn’t eat those” she said, concern in her voice. “We really need to talk about your diet.” I laughed. “What are you, my mother?” She mulled it over. “Yes, in a manner of speaking. It takes a man and a woman to make a baby. Did you honestly think a male elohim could seed life on your world all by his lonesome?”

I replied that none of that made even the smallest shred of sense to me, but that I had better things to do than argue with a hallucination anyways. She grew irate. “When are you going to get over yourself? Reality is not all in your head, that’s just what you use to interpret it. I am not a hallucination.”

I turned around to face her. “What are you then? Hm? An alien? A ghost? I don’t believe in any of that. Tell me what you are, and I’ll listen. Make me understand.” She closed her eyes and sighed, choosing her next words with care.

“I don’t know whether you’ve developed to the point where you know about this yet, but you aren’t the individual you believe yourself to be. Up close, you’re actually about thirty seven trillion micro-organisms, working together in order to-”

I interrupted, assuring her that we’d already discovered single celled organisms and that I knew I’m comprised of them. “Good! Then you know that the bandwidth and fidelity of communication between your constituent cells is exceeded many times over by the communication that occurs between human beings.”

I processed that, soon working out on my own what she meant for me to conclude. “So...wait. In the same way that my cells communicate and cooperate as a network in order to produce the gestalt being talking to you now…”

I trailed off, so she filled in the rest. “Individual human organisms repeat that pattern on a larger scale. Cooperating, communicating and networking as a superorganism that you call civilization.” It seemed like the just-so stoner logic I overheard entirely too much of at college parties.

But the more I considered the idea, the more it made sense. In the same way that cells are assigned specialized jobs and grouped together into organs with other cells performing the same job, humans also organize their labor, with different institutions in society performing roles analogous to the various organs in the human body.

The government directs and coordinates society as the brain does for the body. Sanitation serves a purpose analogous to the liver and kidneys. The police and immigration department serve a purpose analogous to the immune system, and so on.

Somehow human society self-organized into a large scale reflection of the structure of our own bodies without anybody consciously intending it. I felt as if I was just now grasping some immutable law of nature, where patterns fundamental to living processes repeat themselves on every scale you examine from.

“As above, so below” the enormous, beautiful face gently cooed. “Yes! That’s it!” I cried. “I’ve read that before, but I never understood it until now. I think I saw it written beneath the flower of life, a large circle made of countless interconnected smaller ones. Like everything is one giant fractal, the same pattern repeating no matter how close up or far away you examine it from, each set ensconced within the same structure on a larger scale.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 41}