Black Jack

by Rani Manicka

  ‘There,’ Green continued, ‘are many moves afoot to sabotage the energy so that as many possibilities as possible remain unrealized. Your action, minute as it will be, is one of those random variables that may tip the odds in favor of humanity. Are you ready to begin?’

  Black did not take his eyes off the waiting expectant forms, some of them so bright they hurt his eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Before we move to a place better suited for our needs, I have to ask. Would you like to remain in your bedclothes or shall we find something more appropriate?’

  Black looked down at his clothes. He had often wondered where his mother went to buy clothes with children’s motifs in his sizes. ‘Can I choose anything I want?’

  Green nodded.

  As soon as he thought of it, he was dressed in blue jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots, and an open-necked tan shirt.

  ‘Very nice. Ready?’

  Black nodded.

  ‘Hold on,’ Green said, and they were deposited on a bare, sun-torn landscape.

  No man ever steps in the same river twice,

  for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

  - Heraclitus

  Black looked around him in wonderment. ‘This is amazing. All my life I have dreamed of standing in a desert.’

  ‘Glad to please. Look to the west. We are not alone.’

  On a sand dune in the distance a lonely figure stood motionless beside his seated camel. He had lived in that furnace all his life and knew both the terrain and its inhabitants intimately. But always it had new secrets to share - a boy who appeared out of nowhere. He left his camel and began walking toward the boy, his robes billowing around him, the slip-face of the dune singing under his feet.

  ‘Can he see us?’

  ‘No one can see me, but you will be tangible to the rare adept. The ones who see even that which casts no shadow.’

  The man came to a stop six feet away from Black. He had a savagely beautiful face; deep-set, coal-black eyes and skin of pure leather. ‘On the way to somewhere else?’ he asked in a tribal dialect that Black shouldn’t have understood, but did.

  ‘I’m looking for an oasis,’ Black replied in English.

  The man pointed to the east. ‘Half an hour on foot.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The man shaded his eyes against the blazing sun and said nothing. A small lizard moved on the hot sand. Black hesitated, feeling strangely reluctant to leave the desert wanderer. He had the strong sensation of wanting to touch him, in some way show kinship.

  ‘Your hand will go right through him,’ cautioned Green.

  ‘Will you tell me something important about the desert?’ Black asked instead.

  The man shrugged, his old face creasing. The flurry of lines brought forth a deeply mysterious smile; it encompassed his camel, the white bones buried under the sand, the oceans he had never seen, and the stars he knew not the names of. ‘She is unknowable. She could be Death wrapped in beauty or a goddess come as a dog.’

  Black nodded. Yes. Some part of him knew that. In another life when his camels were his dearest friends, and a woman and five children lived in a tent with him. He turned away and began walking in the direction the man had pointed to.

  The man’s eyes remained fixed on the departing boy. He had left no footprints, but he knew the boy was not a jinn. Perhaps he was a fairy child. He watched him until he disappeared behind the shifting sands. He made a sound and his camel grumbled upright and made its way toward him.

  ‘How come I could understand him?’ Black asked.

  ‘I delved into his mind, learned his language and translated it for you.’

  ‘Did you do the same for him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Undisturbed by any sensation of heat Black found the empty vastness of the desert beautiful beyond description.

  ‘Green?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you teach me how to get out of my body on my own?’

  Green stopped and turned toward him. His emerald lashes swept down and his head shook sorrowfully. ‘I was warned you would ask. I’m so sorry, I wish I could, but it is not part of the deal.’

  ‘Don’t worry, really it’s OK,’ Black said, and rested his hand on Green’s arm. It hurt him to see his friend look pained.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want to, but if you travel without me you could come to great harm. You have many enemies. There is a much safer way for you to leave your body though. It is stored in your memory banks as lucid dreaming.’

  Black frowned. ‘But I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘It was in a documentary you watched two years ago, but it is no longer in your conscious memory.’

  ‘What is lucid dreaming?’

  ‘It is a method of waking up inside your dream, so you are conscious you are dreaming. In this way you can enter rich and detailed fantasy worlds where you can feel the sun on your skin, eat in the best restaurants, attend concerts, compose your own music, go anywhere you please, and meet anyone you want. And since physical laws need not apply anything you can conceive of you can do and be. You can even fly. It’s quite fun, I believe.’

  ‘Can I meet you there?’

  ‘Yes. In this world you can also meet dream characters, who are other lucid dreamers. As you get better at it you will even be able to enter other people’s dreams.’

  ‘Tell me how it is done.’

  ‘The first step will be to plan your dream in the greatest detail. Once you have done that, before you fall asleep, set your mental alarm clock to wake up after a few hours - you have used it before to catch late-night programs. When you awaken, firmly intend to wake up in your dream, and go back to sleep while hanging on to the thinnest strand of consciousness. To determine if indeed you are awake in your dream simply try doing something you would be unable to do while awake. In your case try to move your limbs or talk. If you can, you are lucid dreaming.’

  A half-crumbling stone tower heralded the oasis. Here life began again: trees, children, men watering their beasts at the well, and women going about their business in thick, black robes. Their chipped nail polish gave Black a secret pleasure. A group of young boys were eating watermelon. Wistfully Black watched them throw the rinds to the camels, lick the juices off their dusty hands and run off to play. Green led them through a grove and they sat beneath a date palm.

  ‘Ready?’ Green asked.

  ‘Yes, but I am really troubled about something. May we discuss it first?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That incredible audience you showed me are waiting for an outcome that is so much greater than myself. How can I possibly be of any use in such an enormous galactic plan.’

  ‘You are the door with the small open. Through you much can come. Like a cattle stampede that starts out only as a “stir”. A few heads or even just one that agitates others in the surrounding to move, but that then goes further and further until the entire herd is moving in frenzy. You have been selected with great care. Put your mind to rest. You are not expected to fail. We must begin now. Soon the girl will find you.’

  ‘The girl?’

  ‘She is a bright shaman who has been turned, and is now a tool of the dark hierarchy. Beautiful, but badly damaged, she represents great danger to you.’

  ‘Who are the dark hierarchy?’

  ‘They are the ancient ones, inorganic, immeasurably powerful inter-dimensional entities. Unseen they come, unseen they go, for they exist not in the spaces you know of, but between them. They are the real rulers of your world. Their governance of humanity is from behind the scenes and solely by proxy, but it would be a grave mistake to think their grip is less than total and absolute. There is not a single step the human race makes that is unwatched by them. Their greatest desire is to enslave the souls of men, but men in their ignorance call them gods and prostrate themselves before them in exchange for Earthly power and material gain.’

  ‘If they are so powerful, why do they h
ave to hide? Why not rule openly?’

  ‘Logic is successfully applied when one knows the real agenda. Earthlings don’t. There is a very good reason why they remain hidden, and we will get to that very soon, but first we must lay the foundation stones of your understanding, as human beings have been lied to on a grand scale. You are only fourteen years old, and a lot of what I am going to tell you will be distressing to say the least, but your mastery of these matters is vital, so I urge you to pay the greatest attention and refrain from making any judgments until I have finished. Will you do that?’’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Earth scientists have been forced to conclude that on a quantum level matter doesn’t actually exist. The real substance to your reality is created by a force that first brings to incredible vibration the particles of an atom and then holds that minute solar system in place for its lifetime. And atoms, by the way, are not objects or things either, but fluctuations of energy and information that exist as potentialities or possibilities. Do you understand so far?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Cutting-edge science has also had to admit that the human brain is but a narrow band hologram generator. What would be the natural deduction from both these discoveries?’

  Black shook his head. He felt overwhelmed and unable to think properly.

  ‘If your brain is a hologram generator, then despite its apparent materiality, the universe you are living in is a sophisticated 3-D projection or a virtual reality. Your entire world is an illusion that is decided by the way your brain has been programmed to interpret the hologram. For instance, the human eye can decode or perceive nothing beyond a certain band of frequencies called visible light: a tiger, a tree in which it will be possible to hide from the tiger, and afterwards a river to drink from. All others, an infinite band of frequency ranges, are screened out. That is why the world that you see, hear, and experience is totally different from the one that dogs, bats, snakes or insects do, even though you are all in the same sea of energy.’

  ‘But I’m not a hologram; I’m real and so is the world around me. And even though I can’t feel it when people touch me, I know they can,’ Black protested.

  ‘Imagine a fan that is going so fast the blades appear to be a solid metal plate. If one threw a ball at it, it would bounce back. To a man who has never seen a fan in that kind of motion wouldn’t that be irrefutable proof? You are a swarm of atoms, but your senses are too unrefined for you to perceive it. You were wishing just now for a taste of the watermelon the boys were eating, weren’t you?’

  Black nodded.

  ‘Would you like a bite?’

  Instantly Black’s mouth filled with deliciously cool, sweet flesh. The juice welled up between his tongue and teeth and ran in a cold trickle down his throat. The sensation was incredibly real until it was abruptly over.

  ‘Everything you experience starts off as an electric signal in your brain, which your brain then decodes into taste, smell, sound, sight, and touch. Whether it is the blue sky, the birds in it, the food you are eating, the time on your clock face, or the languages you use to communicate, it is all a constructed fiction.’

  Black had seen a documentary about holograms. For a hologram to be maintained the broadcast had to be continuous or the image would disappear. Who…?

  Green smiled. ‘Well done. I cannot find a word in your mind to adequately describe it. For now, suffice it to say that you live in a simulated construction controlled by, let’s call it… Ah! your favorite movie, The Matrix.’

  Green paused to let the idea sink in.

  ‘The Matrix is a perfectly well-oiled, unimaginably immense, vastly complex, and incredibly intricate program that weaves the web you live in. It is held in place and controlled by mathematical codes. In this field of information absolutely everything has been thought of and catered for. The maintenance, modifications, and necessary adjustments to it are most impressive. It is deceptive on a scale you cannot imagine, and so pervasive that there is no sanctuary from it. At every level the machine fools you. And it is run to forever perpetuate this deception. Always there will be the cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and death for the poor souls trapped in it. There is no escape for the ordinary human being from this time loop. Every turn they make brings them back to square one.’

  Black was appalled. If those words had not come from a glowing inter-dimensional being he would have laughed at the ridiculous idea that he was trapped inside a grand cosmic deception. As they had he floundered, like a turtle on its back. ‘Are you trying to tell me that Earth is a prison?’

  ‘It is, but only on one level. It is also a farm and a - ’

  ‘A farm?’

  ‘That would bring us neatly back to your earlier question. Why the controllers don’t show themselves? I know you will find this distressing, perhaps even horrifying, but the truth will be your shield. Humans are not at the top of the food chain.’

  ‘We aren’t?’ Black blinked uncertainly. This was no country that he knew. Too absurd.

  ‘For eons man has been shown stories and literature themed on the meme that humans are fodder for other beings, but he has never “got” it. It would seem the best way to hide an unpalatable truth is in fiction.’

  ‘They eat humans?’ Black stared at Green, aghast.

  ‘Humans are not eaten, not on this planet anyway, but are harvested energetically for their electromagnetic frequencies, a much valued food in other dimensions. Humans have to eat food to gain energy, “they” have to eat energy from humans to gain form.’

  ‘What is it exactly that they are eating?’

  ‘The carbon-oxygen equation of every living thing on Earth naturally vibrates to produce this substance - there is no word for it in your vocabulary so I will refer to it as the resource. Animals, during their relentless fight for survival, when protecting their young, during courtship conflicts, and at the termination of their lifespan produce the resource, but humans are the unrivaled providers, in both quantity and quality. The resource is freely emanated by all humans when they experience love, friendship, greed, hate, pain, guilt, pity, disease, pride, ambition, ownership, possession, sacrifice - and on a much larger scale by wars, famine, religion, industry, nationalism, racism, trade, natural disasters, and so on.’

  ‘That is terrible,’ cried Black.

  ‘Is it really? Every day you produce carbon dioxide as a waste material. Do you resent the trees and plants that use it to live? What will you do with it if the trees will not use it? You have no use for the resource; what if someone else has need for it and extracts it without harming you?’

  Black shook his head. He felt lost and confused. ‘It’s still wrong to take without asking,’ he insisted.

  ‘You must get over this, quickly. There is worse to come. Here is what the resource feels and looks like to them.’

  In his mind Black heard the sound of a train speeding toward him. It exploded in a heady rush, dense with impressions of musical cords, patterns, and color graduations, all the way from a thick red sludge to a milky white light. The sensations they roused inside him ranged from a feeling of great superiority and unlimited physical power to an intense euphoria that was impossible to describe. He felt an incredible craving for more when the high was suddenly over. He turned to Green with desperate eyes.

  ‘No addiction for you,’ Green said, and magically the all-consuming need was gone.

  ‘Wow, so that is what we are being farmed for.’

  ‘Yes, but it is not the finest grade that is most sought after by your present controllers, but the red sludge caused by fear and suffering.’

  Black had a thought.

  ‘Sorry, but your mother is included in “every living thing”. Although the type of resource she produces is totally different from the type you do.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Yours is a result of loneliness and yearning; hers comes from the highest emotion possible, tremendous love. The purest, most refined form.’


  Black wanted Green to be wrong, but years of observing the world on his TV screen, had secretly led him to the inevitable conclusion that Earth was an eat or be eaten jungle. That the first law of the system, the immutable rule, the underlying drive behind every action in the animal world, and even human existence, was survival at any cost. The true horror of survival meant that if the lion entertained any notions of honor, empathy or mercy, it must starve to death.

  The entire system was set up in such a way that all creatures, plants and animals lived at the expense of each other. No life form was totally safe. Every species had at least one carefully chosen predator - except man. Now it seemed man had a very carefully chosen predator too. A parasite!

  ‘That’s right, Black. You enter this matrix either by choice or by trick, but once you are in it you must consume or be consumed. Parasitic patterns are an intrinsic design of the weave. Every participant is a predator and the process cannot be altered or changed as long as the Earth life is to continue.’

  ‘Then why are all those beings waiting around Earth so eagerly? Do they want this horrible process to continue?’

  ‘I understand that you are shocked and angry, but since we do not have much time please try to suspend any judgment until the end of our discourse, when it might be possible for you to see this in its proper perspective. Earth was never meant to be a prison or the factory farm it is today.

  ‘It was a garden that all manner of souls came willingly to experiment, experience, express, and evolve. It was, and despite all they have done to it still is, a school beyond compare. For the crucible of human experience can confer an imitable greatness. Some of the brightest glowing beings you saw gathered around Earth were once human. But now it is time for you to return; your mother is back.’ He paused to smile encouragingly at Black. ‘And she has a surprise for you.’

  If you wish to enjoy a grander view,