Man-oh-man, it's just like the hermetics said:

As above, so below. Thetic geometries in purely abstract space informing real constituents of experience! Matter copulating with mind copulating with matter. It's obscene!"

I am a blue animal that trembles softly. I am a mind without a body calling to you. Can you hear me? Do you see my smile in my words, sad and evil? Sad because I am utterly alone. Evil because I am dead and yet I live. My voice radiates through space. Past lives drift by. The damned descend into the darkness. Can

you hear me? Listen. A dead man visits you. Listen to me-someone.

Look, this sounds like ranting to you. I know. I want to speak calmly,

rationally now. I want to say the truth as I've known it. I want to say a

story-my story. Say a said. And more. Say a body. Say a way back. Say at least a place. Say something. But no one hears me. Do you hear me?

"Mr. Charlie?" A youthful, genderless voice spoke. "Can you hear me?"

A surge of darkness woke me. I felt the old, delusive joy that I was dreaming and I was about to wake to my former life. My wife would be asleep next to me, and I would wake her and ignore her grogginess to yammer about my nightmare.

"Mr. Charlie, I know you're awake."

The viscid barbs of the jellyfish's tentacles burned the length of my left

arm, my heartvalves clogged with sili-cates, and my blood turned to coral. I was dead. Whereupon the stars drag their darkness into a future without me. .

"I am going to activate your visual cortex now, Mr. Charlie. I need to talk with you."