For the entire serial, please go here. If you like it, please consider a paypal donation to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Any donation over $21 will entitle you to a copy of any antho the story first appears in or stand-alone book if that turns out to be the first official publication.

As the experiments continue across dimensions and across time, even I cannot escape the inevitable recognition that we are all animals, and in acquiring reason we paradoxically seem determined to continually undermine reason—destabilization as a coping mechanism because our brains really aren’t ready for all of this yet. Systems we construct must therefore by definition fail. Their failure is a relief perversely. We willingly revert.

(What’s not a relief or comforting is that no permutation of any humanoid sentient species yet discovered can be said to be any less self-destructive. Is a certain type of intelligence a kind of disease? Are opposable thumbs a harbinger of disaster?)

I was listening to the transmission from a luna moth in the Southern Hemisphere of Earth 2.7.5 yesterday and it’s not as if this fact isn’t understood in every-day life, for leaking through the banal conversation outside at dusk at a cafe or coffee house, caught up in our surveillance because of the key words “angels” and “other worlds,” came this snippet rendered originally by a male voice, in Spanish: “If you notice how illogical, inconsistent, subjectively, just plan odd and off we all seem to act individually and collectively, how ideologies–which are usually a form of disease–infect us until we spout the most ridiculous generalities (whether those ideologies are on left or right), it sometimes seems Earth was created by gods or aliens to house billions of insane sentients.”

I commandeered a passing fly to settle on this man’s shoulder. He sat with a group of about ten people, middle class, clearly professionals of some sort. I listened in for a good five minutes, but the conversation turned away from the implications of what this man had said.

What I found unsettling is that the man, retreating to the bathroom to use a urinal, murmured “did you catch all of that?” at one point, and for a second I thought he somehow knew the fly camouflaged by his dark shirt was recording him…but, no, pulling out to diagnostic surveil I found he was himself “bugged” with a wire under his shirt, and clearly spying for someone’s secret service. Who he was with, or why they should be of interest counted as merely regional politics—strategically unimportant. But it amused me to discover that he watched others as I watched him.

However, it also made me paranoid. Are we all watching each other? And if so, who is watching me?

So I shall, in the secret part of each night—or what functions as night here—begin to record, in the old-fashioned way, using pen and paper, how I came to be here and the results of our experiments. I shall use English, that most out-dated of languages, as a further impediment to interception. I will number but not date these entries. (Dates are a laughable proposition anyway, knowing what I know.)

It’s possible that even though I am taking these precautions that I will be found out. I’m accepting of that possibility. The truth is, I am surrounded by people, and yet I have no confessor, no one with which I can share the inner-most thoughts that gather around me with a kind of flapping, glittery darkness. I trust no one, and they don’t, I think, trust me.

It’s not that kind of operation. I am not that kind of monster.