These are the 6th and the 7th 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 five chapters yet, the first chapter is available here.
Ritual
It took quite some time for David to understand why the message that Angelique had used magic mushrooms was good news. David, after one year of being ‘disembodied’ was still stuck in his role as a worldly father concerned about his young daughter experimenting with drugs. Vincent had gotten slightly annoyed by David’s apparent ignorance and had asked David if he understood anything about “the body of the Son”. David, thinking back to his Christian upbringing, now reached the peak of his confusion. Had his atheism been so wrong, and was his old religion, that in no way seemed to match his afterlife experiences, right after all?
The ‘Son’ as Vincent explained was the sentient grid on our planet, the architect of all other life forms of this planet. And yes, many of the things the Scriptures had taught David had in fact been correct. Essentially though, in passing down the knowledge surrounding rituals, the line had been broken and form had received precedence over content many centuries ago. The magic mushrooms that Vincent and David took while they were experimenting with drugs in their youth were in fact the body of the Son that scripture spoke about as the holy body of Christ, and they were in fact an updated version of the earlier Manna.
An update that granted eternal life, in a way, to those that ate it during their life and were buried with their brains intact in any part of the world where an active sub grid was present. There were two ingredients to eternal life, Vincent explained: consuming the body of the Son was the first one. Being buried on holy ground the second. While these words had been part of David’s life for so many years, the idea that both these things were actually about mushrooms was a concept David found hard to accept.
The ‘local’ grid, as it turned out was a collection of clusters of interconnected fungi and mushrooms connected through large, subterranean brain-like networks. Eating the magic mushrooms or, in other words, the body of the son, Vincent explained, led to changes in the human brain that made it compatible with the local grid, the holy ground where a network of interconnected subterranean mushrooms lived that worked like the neurons of one giant worldwide subterranean brain. This holy ground allowed for the brain patterns of the recently deceased to be assimilated by the grid after a body was buried. It took David a bit of time to come to terms with these new revelations, but once he understood his daughter was safe, that she, too, would reach this afterlife and that he could meet her again after the disease inadvertently killed her body prematurely, David was overcome with joy.
Angelique, like himself, would live forever in the grid. A grid David had only just started to understand, but a grid filled with amazing wonders.
Reunion
Angelique lived for 15 more years before the disease got to her and she joined her father in the grid. David got to be her first guide and there were so many wonders to tell her and show her. In the 15 years since his original body died, David had traveled through the grid to some of the most amazing places the multiverse had to offer. He had visited foreign planets, looked through the eyes of real life dragons flying over the wondrous landscapes. He had communicated with former members of numerous alien civilizations. As the Scriptures had stated, access to the Father went through the Son.
All the fungi and mushrooms in the world formed one single large brain, a brain so enormous that besides to its main intelligence, the Son, the same high intelligence that was known intimately by the ancients, many other sentient beings could continue to exist in the spirit inside this massive brain. After the Son had explored the world of man by becoming man himself, the Son had given a great gift to humanity: eternal life as parasitic consciousness inside of the brain of the Son. The teachings had been shrouded, though; the knowledge about the true body of the Son had been lost to the dismay of the Son who truly loved ‘his’ mankind. So many were lost now, and the second coming had recently been attempted, but anti-fungal medicine had prevented immaculate conception from taking place this time around.
Through the Son, the Father could be reached, and what a marvel that disclosed. The Son grid was connected through a wide array of billions of pico-wormholes to a much larger inter-universal fungi brain: the Father. Our universe turned out to be just one of many universes in existence.
Universes that were continually being created. Once a universe was sufficiently mature, and singularities had formed at the center of galaxies, these singularities would become the center for supernodes in what itself was the superstructure of a multiverse-wide brain. Spores would be sent from other universes through wormholes sprouting from these singularities into the new galaxies to seed barren planets with new life. The Father consciousness encompassed an unimaginable brain spanning billions of universes, each with billions of galaxy singularities, each connected to millions of worlds, each with a massive fungi brain just like the one called the Son here on earth. If it was hard, even for David, to grasp the capacity and power of the Son brain, the Father brain was beyond human comprehension.
Through the Son consciousness, David had traversed through the Father, visiting planets in many universes, and seeing through the eyes of the most exotic of life forms, he had witnessed wonders beyond belief.
He had been so wrong about his atheism, God was real and more grand than even the most devout believer could ever have imagined. Yet at the same time, on the small scale of David's life and that of his family, this loving God that was great beyond comprehension had been powerless to do anything about the suffering of disconnected people. At least for Angelique the suffering was now over and David, with the help of the Son, would show her the unbelievable wonders of the multiverse that this afterlife had to offer.
Continue to the Final Chapter