These are the forth and the fifth of the eight chapters I'll be posting this week, that together make up the sort story Ethereal Pixie rings Of Mercy. If you didn't read the first three chapters yet, the first chapter is available here. Oh, a heads up, after the last installment of EPROM, I'll be organizing a little review lottery. Not sure of the price yet, but it should be at least $10, so if you enjoy this story, stay tuned, possibly more if these my EPROM posts bring in more. In any case, I'll be converting any rewards I gather from these chapters to STD and use them towards the upcoming story review lottery.
Contemplation
After granddad taught David about thought privacy and explained to him that his consciousness had been assimilated into the grid after his body was buried, David felt there were still many more questions than answers. What was this grid that Granddad spoke about? Why were so few people saved in the grid while most people, including his mother and brothers, were all lost? Had David been just as wrong about God as he was about the afterlife? Was there a God after all? Why was everything always pitch black in the grid? Why were there no sounds other than the occasional thought broadcasts of newly dead people learning thought privacy? Granddad had returned to where he came from. David did not know where, the only thing he knew was that somehow the grid was divided up into sections. David’s last hospital was located in the Netherlands, and judging from the languages broadcasted by the newly dead, David could only conclude that somehow his local grid was strangely bound to a geographic region that included parts of Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Poland. Funny thing, while David recognized the languages by the sounds, David did not actually know any Danish or Polish. Yet somehow David understood all the thoughts being transmitted by the new ones.
David’s afterlife experiences seemed to in no way be related to the popular notions of afterlife that he was exposed to during his life.
Just prior to his departure, Granddad had announced that David’s old friend Vincent would be coming to continue David’s ‘education’. David was a bit stressed out by this announcement. Partly for the reason that David himself was an accomplished professor, while his old friend Vincent had never finished any school. Not that David was a snob. Far from it. But how could Vincent be expected to educate him in any useful way? David and Vincent had been school friends at a time which David had grown to be rather embarrassed about. A time that David often chose to omit when talking about his past. Vincent and David had often gotten drunk together and tried about any drug available, from cannabis to LSD and from magic mushrooms to XTC and coke. For David doing drugs and getting drunk was just a phase that he soon grew out of. Vincent though, had gotten stuck in this phase. Vincent did not have David’s extraordinary intelligence, but he had many talents and could have easily made something of his life. While David grew out of his drugs and alcohol phase, Vincent remained stuck there. So much so that a few years after David and Vincent had lost contact, Vincent died due to a drug overdose.
David remembered the day that Vincent's sister had called him to tell him about Vincent’s passing. Vincent had had so much going for him but he had dropped out of school despite being quite smart. Vincent was multi-talented.
Vincent had a great talent for language and music and was intelligent enough to always get good grades. After drugs and alcohol entered David and Vincent’s life, things had been fun for a while. The fun lasted for two years for the two of them and had delayed David’s studies by one year. David managed to pick up his life again without too many hassles. Vincent, though, went the other way. He gave up on his studies, gave up his gorgeous and intelligent girlfriend, and gave up his friends and family in favor of new and more intense drug-induced experiences. Experiences that David could no longer relate to. How could a dropout dope-head like Vincent be expected to now teach him anything. And worse, how could he and even Vincent have been saved while Mom, Fred and Johan had all been lost? There was no fairness in any of this. David knew he himself had been a complete asshole and an inconsiderate bastard for much of his life, but he had not been half as bad as what Vincent had become. Where Naila was the embodiment of everything that David could have been in the positive sense and had failed to live up to, Vincent had been the embodiment of what David knew he could have turned into if he had not clung to his discipline.
David had not wasted his talents or abandoned his loved ones to the extent that Vincent had. Or had he? David remembered speaking at Vincent’s funeral, and he remembered how hard it had been for him to speak positively about Vincent even though he and Vincent had shared so much amazing things.
How could he speak positively about two years of his life that he was in fact ashamed of? Vincent was now going to be his new teacher and David felt very uncomfortable about that fact for so many reasons.
New Horizons
Vincent’s lessons were quite different from what David had expected. The local grid apparently was not limited to the dead, or as Vincent so distastefully put it “the disembodied”. Some living animals and even some humans were reachable from within the grid. Vincent taught David how to reach his mind out into grid-connected living creatures. David’s first experience had been amazing. He had reached out into a squirrel and for the first time since the death of his body, David was able to ‘see’. David did not know exactly how long he had spent in pitch black darkness, but being able to get a glimpse of the world was absolutely amazing. He still had no clue how all of this was possible. Vincent had turned out to be an amazing teacher, making David feel even more sad about his own shortcomings.
David had to reassess his opinion about Vincent, and through that he had to also reassess his opinion about himself and how he acted throughout his life in a major way. Without Vincent's perceived failure in life to contrast against his successes, his own successes seemed that much bleaker, and his own failures so much deeper.
Then there were those things that David had felt ashamed of, those experiences with drugs that David had tried so hard to forget about.
Vincent had hinted that David and Vincent’s shared experiences with drugs were in fact what had saved them, and some of his human vision experiences had confirmed a link with drugs might indeed be involved. Many of the people David saw in his “out-of-grid visions”, as Vincent referred to them, had shown people that clearly were intoxicated by some drug. But somehow Vincent’s statements regarding the grid seemed to make no scientific or religious sense to David. How could the grid be both in outer space and on earth under the ground? Heaven and hell are the same, Vincent had said to him jokingly. How could this grid be so closely tied to the general region where David died and yet also be worldwide, at the center of the galaxy, and even span the whole multiverse? And what was this multiverse anyway?
While David had learned amazing things from Vincent, every lesson David learned actually led to more new questions than that it provided answers to old ones. The most astonishing and mind blowing thing that Vincent told David was that the grid was the sentient multiverse and both the beginning and architect of life.
Things weren’t adding up for David.
In any case, David felt humbled by the experience of Vincent teaching him about the grid.
This Vincent was not the dope-head David remembered. This Vincent was an amazing teacher and David had no doubt that Vincent had a deep and profound understanding of this afterlife thing. An afterlife that David started to finally appreciate for the amazing wonder that it was, even though he felt he still had a whole lot to learn.
Continue to Chapter 6