And that's how I found Mr. Bumbles.

I spun the purple wheel and slapped at a few green pictographs. I didn't really know what I was doing, but after watching Elaine do it all night long, I kinda had the jist. Like Elaine always says, it's really about the intent, mostly.

So I gave the dumpster a big kick when I was done. The sound echoed down the alley, and Mr. Bumbles walked around from behind the dumpster and meowed.

"Mr. Bumbles!!!!" Elaine cried and scooped him up.

Mr. Bumbles looked awful. Like a drowned rat. How did he get so wet? Plus, his paws were muddy and there were fresh leaves stuck to his fur. He was a mess.

"Let's take this very ALIVE Mr. Bumbles back to the 13th floor of the Blavatsky Complex and get him some FOOD, shall we?"

As we walked back to the school, I wondered how Elaine had done it. Had she really fiddled with the controls of the world -- the "big board" as she called it -- and arranged things so that we shared the same world with the Mr. Bumbles who was alive? Or had she just used natural energies to help guide her intuition till we discovered the most likely place for him to be?

"Or..." said Elaine, with Mr. Bumbles wrapped up in her sweater, "did I know he was living in the alley behind the Handy Mart the whole time?"

Only Mr. Bumbles knows for sure, I suppose.

“Correlation is not causation. That’s one of their litanies,” said Elaine. “Total bullshit.”

It was still night. How long could a night be? After making our way through the cemetery, with Elaine stopping here and there to wave her stick or make other adjustments to the info-firmament, we ended up in the alley behind the Handymart. 

“They use it to deny any other path to their forgone conclusion — that the cat is dead.” 

Elaine nudged some cardboard boxes aside with her toe. “All the way down the line, you’re given a series of choices, each one reducing your options for the future.”

She pulled out her stick. 

“It’s the funnel. The chute. And at the end of the line, the Final Cause. A decaying isotope rigged up to a hammer and a beaker full of poison. Run that experiment enough and they'll always get the outcome they want. They want us to believe that the Theory of Everything is just a game of Russian Roulette you keep playing till it's over."

She'd cleared the space up to the side of the dumpster. She eyed the dumpster for a moment and gave big kick, which was really loud in the middle of the night in an alley.

Then, a purple and green pattern swirled on the side of the dumpster and blossomed out into circular pattern in the air. Like one of those Aztec calendars, slowly rotating, with little animated characters all around it.

"This is the node you're after. I'll let you drive from here."

I looked at Elaine like I didn't know what she was talking about. Which I didn't.

"All it takes is intent, " she said. "The cat is ALIVE."

After spending some time with the stones, Elaine Ablach led us back down Storm Mountain, talking the whole time.

"They've laid harnesses over everything," she said. "Harnessed the water, the magnetic fields. They laid iron chains all over the place."

We'd stopped at a little spring, shimmering in the moonlight.

"But the energy still seeps out, here and there."

A giant white salamander crawled out of the water and sniffed Elaine's stick. Then it licked it with its big tongue.

We came out of the trails at the cemetery on the edge of town. Elaine ran ahead and did a cartwheel in the dewy grass.

"The whole thing works on a machine intelligence, if you can call it that. Because it's not actually intelligent. Everything is 'on' or 'off.' Black or white. Binary."

We came to some kind of water pump, or hydrant, or something. It was rusty and had a wheel.

"So it SOUNDS like they're giving you a choice, right? Heads or tails?"

Elaine started tapping on the wheel with her stick. It had a kind of ring to it.

"But the whole game is rigged. Just two choices? It's so clearly a set up, but everybody has to put their dime into it and spin the wheel."

She started tapping more quickly.

"Half the time they kill everybody. Then they kill half of everybody else. Halflife, amirite? Keep making you choose and they keep making you lose. Their terms."

Elaine stopped tapping with her stick. The ringing had become a sustained tone.

"Makes people forget there's so much energy left untapped."

Between the headstones and the trees, a path through the cemetery lit up with a purple and green glow.

"The cat is ALIVE."

I've been on Calypso (also known as Saturn XIV or Tethys C) for weeks gathering data for my quantum astrology project and going out of my mind with boredom. Why don't they send us in pairs, at least? It seems like sending teenagers out on trips to the outer solar system by themselves for extended periods of time might be something they would have a rule against or something.

Which is why, when I spotted that old boney cat floating around in the hydroponics bay, I thought maybe I got sent an emotional support animal. But when it batted itself around a corner and disappeared, then thought it must have been one of those hallucinations they warn you about so that is why I am reporting it.

I woke up to a strange pressure on my ribs. I shifted and rolled over, trying to dislodge whatever was on me, and felt a jolt of pain as six sharp points dug into my skin.

I shouted in pain and rolled back over, then opened my eyes and glared at whatever had attacked me. It was that damn cat again, it was sitting on me with wide, tired eyes. It must have dug it's claws into me when I tried to shake it off.

"The hell do you want?" I mumbled, salt water spilling from my lips and further saturating the pillow beneath me.

The thing didn't answer. It just sat on top of me and stared. I glanced behind me and saw my window was open. That would explain how it got in, anyway. I started to sit up, this time picking up the cat and holding it against my body so it didn't feel the need to latch on. It just kept staring at me, silent as sand, as I stood from the bed and placed it on the ground. His eyes were still wide. "you're like me," they said, "you're like me."

The carpet had started to dry a bit, but the puddle under my chair was still very pronounced. How long had I been asleep?

"Mew," the cat let out a low and quick chirp. I turned to look at it. We stared at each other for a couple seconds before it stood and walked over to the window, sitting down again. I stepped over and lifted it to the windowsill, where it climbed out of my arms and gently hopped into the grass. It looked over it's shoulder as if thanking me and walked away.

As odd as that cat was, it was sort of comforting having it around.

So I'm in ancient Egypt doing my self-designed independent study credit, but I took this picture (attached) of a cat that looked suspiciously like Mr Bumbles lurking around the temple today.

Is everything OK with Mr Bumbles?


Caleb IV7
Scribe Expeditionary Force
18th Dynasty

"Miaow, mia-ow," the old thing almost sobbed at me, it's frail whiskers shaking as it did. I walked over to where he had stopped in front of a door. I had come this far, it would be stupid of me to ignore it, so I grabbed the handle and yanked the door free from it's frame.

The cat disappeared through the crack the moment light entered it, leaving me to blink at the soft moonlight and gently creep out behind it. There was a loud, crashing sound that repeated itself every few seconds. It tugged at my gut and left a sore feeling in my knees. Where had I heard that before?

The bouncing shape of the cat was just a few yards ahead of me. I started to follow it, then froze in place as the area around me suddenly lit up. It was as if a spotlight had found me as it swept over the ground, illuminating everything with enough power to fake sunlight. Then it was gone, just as quickly as it washed over me it moved to the next piece of land and continued on it's way. I turned around and spotted the source. I had just stepped out of a lighthouse.

Cat! That was the word I was fishing for. The thing I chased into this empty room was called Cat. I suppose I should try to track it down, wherever it ran off to. It was old enough to suggest someone loved and took care of it, so that same someone should be missing it.

It's odd tracing my footsteps back to the pillar where the old cat had gone missing. The squish of water beneath my shoes makes me realize it's real, and not an illusion. I'll deal with the whole saltwater thing later, I need to find this animal and get some answers.

The schedule is still in my hand, but seeing as I can't even tell the time from where I am, there isn't much reason for me to try and follow it. Besides, it's so soaked by this point that the ink is bleeding and the fibers of the paper are starting to fall apart. I figure it couldn't hurt to drop the thing on the floor, so that's where I'll leave it.

"Here kitty kitty,"

My voice surprises me. It's almost a gurgle, like my lungs were still filled with water. But that's not possible, how could I breathe if it were? And why was the idea of waterlogged lungs so familiar to me?

The old cat appears at the edge of my vision, another low miaow leaving it's jaws. I'm going to keep following it until it takes me where I need to go.

"ALL this shit is out of alignment," Elaine said, gesturing to the whole night sky.

I'd followed Elaine Ablach up to the top of Storm Mountain, through the trails in the woods behind school. The moon was up and we could see campus down below, then a few more hills, then the lights of the town and the suburbs all the way out to the horizon.

"The climate, wealth equity, racial inequality, polarized cultures, violence," she continued. "It isn't 'natural' or 'normal,' but they keep it so everything 'makes sense' based on its own internal logic."

Elaine bent down and picked up a stick.

"It's only been this bad for a few generations though. They needed to get a global information grid in place to really mass produce the illusion, make it airtight."

Elaine walked over to a crescent of gnarly oak trees and waved her stick. A number of small boulders materialized out of the darkness. Had they been there the whole time?

"But the original info-system is still here. They keep defacing it, grinding it down, but there are still nodes you can access. If you know how to find them."

Elaine waved her stick again, and this time it left a trail of purple light when she moved it. The trail floated out over the big stones and as it landed on the rocks, they began to light up with golden patterns. Or was it just glowing lichen and moss?

"We will find Mr. Bumbles. ALIVE."

It took the courage of twenty men to step foot outside this room. I would like to believe I wasn't always this cowardly, that maybe my bravery got lost during the voyage here, but there's no way to know.

At first there was not another soul in sight. I glared down the long corridors leading away from my room and felt seasick. It went on forever, but there was no one else wandering these halls. Maybe I was dead. For a moment I considered ducking back into my room and waiting to see what became of me, and that's when I heard a familiar miaow.

A splash of memory surfaced at the sound, but quickly dissipated when I located the source. A dilapidated old sack of fur with long whiskers and sad eyes. The shape was familiar. I almost knew what this animal was called, but the three letter word evaded me.

I didn't want to pick the thing up. It looked frail enough to keel over at a slight wind, as if touching it would reduce it to sand. Imagine my surprise when the thing stood up, revealing it's legs, and started to walk away.

I feel stranded here without the animal, so I'm going to follow it.