Now, as a result of these two mistakes, not only had he not managed to complete his work, he had denied his wife and daughter, and himself, the possibility of sharing the precious last months of his life as a true family.
Chapter 3
*Bright Darkness*
David could not immediately make out the voice of the person calling out to him from the dark. It was a familiar voice, a voice that immediately filled him with a sense of comfort and security. David could not make out anything. His room was pitch dark without even a hint of light. The voice was more than just familiar. David knew this voice like he knew the voice of his own wife, but it was as if his own mind refused to recognise who this voice belonged to. Why was it so dark anyway in his room? Weren't hospitals supposed to have emergency generators? David tried to focus on these questions, but his mind seemed even more out of focus than usual. Rather than the usual chaos, however, his thoughts kept jumping to the talk he had had with Sarah. Sarah had told David she would not be present when he received the lethal injection that would end his life. Despite his efforts in the last few weeks, it was all too late. Sarah had told him that she had already lost him years ago. She had lost him to his obsessions and she could not cope with his dying bed reprioritization of his love for her. The idea of embracing this thing she longed for so much only to lose him once more, was beyond Sarah’s emotional capacity. How could he have so blind regarding the emotional needs of his wife for all those years?
But now David needed to focus on the situation at hand. The pitch-dark room and that strangely familiar voice. What was happening? Who’s voice was this?
David tried hard to remember, but somehow his mind placed barriers as if it knew who this voice belonged to but somehow rejected that knowledge.
Then, as if injected into his mind, a memory that was so vivid that it left David completely off balance: As if David had just taken a sip, the sudden sensation of the taste of lemon brandy in his mouth completely overcame him and tore down the mental barrier David’s logical mind had erected in order to reject what clearly could not be correct. No this was impossible! Lemon brandy, his grand-dad’s favorite drink that David used to sometimes drink when visiting his grandparents. Yes, this voice was the voice of his granddad, but that was not possible.
Then the voice again. “David!” Yes, there was no denying it any longer. This was the voice of his late grandfather, but it could not be. “David, calm down, there is no need to panic, you’re safe here.” David tried to focus. This must be the disease talking. I must be hallucinating or dreaming. Where am I? That damn darkness! Need to shut out Grandpa's voice, he is not real! Gramps, get the fuck out of my head, you are not real, you are dead, I need to keep my grasp on reality!
“Be careful, David, that's rude! First thing I need to teach you is how to keep some of your thoughts to yourself.”
This is not real, David thought, Grandpa has been dead for over twenty years!
“In a sense I have been,” the voice responded as if it had been reading his mind, “but in that same sense you have now been dead yourself for the last 9 days now”
A shock went through David’s mind when he tried to remember. David remembered now—he died, and his memory of his death was so vivid and that David could not dismiss it as a hallucination. David remembered getting the injections that he had requested from his doctor.
He had specifically chosen a combination of injections that the doctor had convinced them would leave no room for any deathbed hallucinations or dreams.
David had taken no chances of ‘re-finding’ his religion as the result of some oxygen deprivation induced, deathbed hallucinations. David wanted to keep his precious grip on reality till the very end. Did he dream the injections? His memory was so clear. He should be dead, but if he was dead, how could he be sentient? There could be no such thing as an afterlife.
David decided to get to the bottom of it. Something must have gone wrong with the injection, it must have.
“This, David, is what we refer to as the grid. I’ve been here for the last 24 years now, ever since my body died,” the voice spoke.
David tried to focus on where the voice was coming from.
Then David became aware of many presences. He didn’t see anyone. He could see nothing but darkness. He didn’t hear any people other than his grandpa either, but David felt many people around him, sharing a space of sorts; he was aware of them in some strange way. This place wasn't his hospital room, that much was sure, but where was he? Yes, something definitely went wrong with the injection, this isn’t real. A dream, I must have dreamt the injections too, I must have.
Than David felt a sudden jolt of emotion and an erratic thought entered his mind: “Is Mom here?” His own thought startled him, was his logic failing him already?
“No, unfortunately your mother was lost,” his granddad’s voice responded instantly. A feeling of despair entered David as he listened to the voice of his granddad. There was such a sense of pain and truth in this sentence that David instantly realized at his core that the other things the voice had told him were true as well.
While David was not really all that empathetic, he did not just hear these words—he truly felt the pain of the loss of a child that only a parent can understand. As if all the skepticism David was having about his strange, inexplicable experience was completely washed away by the deep feeling that spoke from and through these six words, David instantly knew and accepted his own death and the fact that he and Granddad were now somehow joined in this afterlife. At the same time however, these six words drove confusion and despair into David's heart.
If I was wrong about an afterlife after all, how could Mom have been lost? Mom was the most devout believer anyone could imagine, and all of her life she had always been there to help anyone in need of help. If David was to imagine a true saint, his mom was pretty damn close. If she was lost, how could he, an atheist, and in the years he was obsessed with his quests as an selfish bastard who neglected his own wife and daughter for years, be here?.
“All in due time, David,” Grandpa's voice responded. “First we need to work on control. If I don’t teach you how to control and direct your thoughts,” the voice of his grandpa said, “I and all the people in this section of the grid will hear all of your thoughts.
You don’t want that. The other people in this grid section don't want that, and given some of the rather rude thoughts you just broadcasted, I am certainly not going to stand for any of that insolence much longer. I know my daughter did not raise you that way, young man. So let’s get you straightened out first and I will introduce you to the people and beings that can help you with all your questions afterward.”
Chapter 4
*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 notio
ns 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.
Chapter 5
*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.
Chapter 6
*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 c
ome 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.
Chapter 7
*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.