THE DEATH OF SURREALITY: PART ONE OF THREE
Joe: The Surreal Times has had its first journalist injured in the line of duty. Celebrated investigative reporter Moe “Tiny,” Schlemiel was exposed to dangerous levels of surreality while covering the San Andreas fault-party. Preliminary reporting brings two alarming trends into light. First: the sudden manifestation, and equally sudden disappearance, of the Stairway to the Stars. Second: the sudden vanishing of all traces of surreality on the Earth, according to top scientists.
How could this have happened? I have traced this matter to its root. Moe deserves as much. Drawing on his reporting, as well as the work of the indeterable Roberto Piccolo, I have put together as complete a picture of the events as I can get. I have divided them into three thirds. The first third I will cover here.
This is the article which started it all. Undoubtedly the first time the broad public was made aware of the Surreal Engine. Of course, this story begins with Moe.
THE NEW MEXICO SURREAL ENGINE
by Moe “Tiny,” Schlemiel, Surreal Times Reporter
Scientists working in an underground laboratory in New Mexico have created the first Surreal Engine. The Engine, drawing from a trade-secret source, conveys surreality byte-for-byte at an unprecedented speed. It has been called a “portal to surreality for the average man”.
Foreseeing widespread production of such Engines, it seems that for the first time mass surreality is within humanity's grasp. Said the top secret scientist: “It’s about time we realize that reality isn’t always the answer.”
The technology has one notable drawback. Many of its trial subjects, upon returning to reality, find themselves unsatisfied. Reportedly, they gather at night, turn their eyes upward, and lament their inability to “see past the heavens.”
Joe: Digging into this story we see some hints of what to come. The Surreal Engine itself - a piercer of planes - is in a large, clunky, experimental form. It has yet to be rendered into its final, portable configuration. We also see no mention of Dr. Linda Peterson. The rise of Dr. Linda Peterson coincided with the introduction of the Portable Surreal Engine. This was no accident. My sources inform me Peterson invented the Portable Surreal Engine, and while her lust for planal fusion was ultimately the downfall of both her and her organization, she did enjoy a brief period of success. Moe has omitted the name of the Rise Together corporation in this article. At this point, the Rise Together Corporation was reticent to attach its name to any publicity. Finally, we also see here the first reference to the Stairway To The Stars, which will become crucially important later. As is common, the names given to this phenomenon vary. Next is an article that, in hindsight, seems oddly prescient. If only we had listened to the psychologists in the first place.
THE NEW ASSAULT ON RATIONALITY
By Roberto Piccolo, Surreal Times Reporter
The top psychologists in the country, after meeting at the bi-annual National Summit, have returned with a dire warning: rationality is under siege. Long considered a bastion of logic, the brain is increasingly being found to be a collection of shortcuts. A recent experiment found that when an experimental group were exposed to small doses of surreality, given by pulling a lever, the group became resistant to reality, and near-immune to the call of rationality. The recently discovered New Mexico Surreal Engine, the psychologists fear, may be an enabler for such irresponsible behaviors. While I have a duty to remain objective, I must give my opinion: to dabble with surreality in such an unwholesome manner is to invite in that destabilizing influences. We already have enough citizens obsessed with such delusions as the “Stairway To The Stars.”
Joe: An excellent piece of reporting by Roberto Piccolo here. It should come as no surprise that the psychological elite found mass surreality unappealing. Anyone who values their pineal gland should. Here we also have experimental proof of the dangerous effects of surreality. As we shall see later in my article “PSA: Keep Animals Inside,”, small animals have difficulty processing surreality, and the effects may be lethal. Interestingly, Piccolo calls the Stairway To The Stars by its proper name here. He also makes references to citizens obsessed with this delusion (which, it turns out, was no delusion at all). While this article doesn’t contain any bombshell revelations, it does lay some of the groundwork for what was to come. In the issue of The Surreal Times the articles in this collection appeared, the fault-parties were just beginning. In fact, at the time, the links between the faults and surreality were not fully substantiated. We need only remember the Mt. Chocorua affair of 2012 to see how lucrative surreality hoaxes can be. Ultimately, the surreality at the fault proved to be quite real. Dangerously real.
BREAKING NEWS: HORDES GATHER AT SAN ANDREAS FAULT LINE
By Surreal Staff
While The Times has head only through secondary sources, it is clear masses have thronged to the San Andreas Fault Line in search of “The Means To Ascend,” - rumored to involve high levels of dangerous surreality. The Surreal Times has acquired a letter which claims that the scientists who created the New Mexico Surreal Engine has organized this gathering.
The letter also implies that the Surreal Engine, in its first tests, disintegrated human test subjects.
While The Times cannot vouch for the authenticity of the letter, anyone interested in the truth behind The Surreal engine - and the secret cabal which allegedly created - should take a look for themselves.
Joe: Here the pace begins to quicken. Throngs flock to the fault lines, particularly the San Andreas fault line. Initial reports are hazy, and to meet our print deadline, we had little control over this piece of reporting. It was difficult to ascertain both the sizes of the crowds and the level of surreality at the fault. As mentioned above, we were also cautious of hoaxes. Nonetheless, that history had to be documented as it unfolded. Of course, this article introduces the most important player in this whole affair: the Servant of the Hyper-Mundane. We mentioned his letter, and subsequently published it online. The letter was hastily scrawled and mailed to the home address of Roberto Piccolo, a Times reporter involved with this story.
LETTER BEGINS HERE
Editor's Note: What follows is a first hand account by what could be termed an amatuer investigative reporter. The development of the New Mexico Surreal Engine is both to be celebrated and feared. Just now, as we receive reports of the gathering at the San Andreas Fault, this letter seems to be even more pressing. The author has promised more letters will follow, but we have doubts - his sanity seems to be in question. Hopefully, however, this is the first of many, as we are all keenly interested in the truth behind the Engine, and equally hopefully this information is true. We have here published,with no edits for grammar, typos, or structure, the letter. The author has requested to remain anonymous, so that, as he puts it, “I might retain what little tether secures me to the real world.”
“Below are my attempts to sort out this whole issue. To discover the cause and future of the most important single development of humanity - namely, the STAIRWAY TO THE STARS.
Reality has been shattered. We must come to accept this fact. It has been broken, and fractured, and pierced, destructed, obliterated, revealed to be nothing but a phony mirror reflecting back at us, seedy tendrils of surreality behind it. I know how this happened. It begins in a lab underground in New Mexico. I worked there as a janitor, but secretly I was undercover. I mopped up the dead insects and the spilled food of the scientists as they poked and prodded reality. But really they were trying to trap HIM - the manifestation of surreality which powers the Engine.
HE was a lawyer sometime in the 60s, and surreality - that strange force which pervades but is universally elusive - came onto him. They called him a schizophrenic. Yet he was right, correct, affirmed, conclusive. He perceived reality as it is, and as it isn’t - the basis of surreality. What can be surreal if there is no real? What can a note be without a counternote? HE was a prophet of sorts, a fountainhead for this surreality. His writings have been hidden away, but I was able to take pictures with my secret camera during my days at the lab:
“Synthetic people, with saturn organs on that dark planet. Punk-thug menaces upstairs and down stairs - as in HEAVEN AND HELL. Angelic invasion - cyborg menace electric chair Old World Order Neurologic “FAST AS LIGHT,” invasion of YOUR reality - clearly present to all who see. I reveal these truths to you, for your ONE LAST CHANCE TO LIVE.”
Such words cannot come from our reality alone. There was something different about HIM, and this is why the scientists - or as they really are, the secret scientists - were so interested in him. Indeed, HE forms the basis of the Engine itself. It is unclear to me whether they smuggled his body in, or somehow extracted the surreality from his old corpse. Either way, he is gone, and if he was alive when the secret scientists found him, they killed him shortly thereafter, like the hangman rope gangsters they are.
Can you tell? Has it become apparent yet? At some point I got a whiff of that surreality. And my brain has never been the same. It feels like a herd of hornets in my brain, little pins and needles, like a brick in my brain that is expanding and expanding and pushing outwards and outwards and outwards and outward - it is very similar to being on an antipsychotic. (Note - I suspect they were putting antipsychotics in the water in an attempt to ground those living in the lab) Initially the secret scientists were unaware of this contaminative - is that a word? - property of surreality. No one knew that from whatever vestige remained of HIM mere exposure could debalance your brain - in other words, take your EXECUTIVE FUNCTION and shift it to be neither on the real plain nor the surreal plane, but somewhere in between both planes, seeing both reality and surreality.
Often as I cleaned and snooped I would overhear the secret scientists talking about the planes. They struggled with several questions. You see, reality cannot exist without surreality. As soon as one is removed, the other becomes normal. If there were only one plane, it would not matter if it was surreal in nature or real in nature - in the absence of a counter-plane it would make no difference. This should raise the next question: how does one know what plane we live on? Is it perhaps that we have become NUMB to surreality? That what we perceive as surreality is in fact NORMAL REALITY STEEPING IN? The secret scientists could not come up with a convincing answer to this.
The Surreal Engine changed all of this. What had previously been reserved to HIM - namely the ability to perceive the other plane - was now available to all. The secret scientists first subjected animals to its destabilizing rays, but this led to yet another question - can an animal experience surreality? And if it does, how does one measure it? How does one know if an animal is surreal - perhaps it has had an encounter with mundane derangement, ordinary hallucinations, everyday delusion, typical dysfunction? And so it would appear that the animals were insufficient. There was perhaps an ape or two - I was strictly forbidden from entering the Engine room - but I cannot say for certain.
Suffice it to say, it wasn’t long before the secret scientists began trying human subjects with the Engine. Now I must pause here, to elaborate on something I discovered at about this time. You see, there were gradations WITHIN the secret scientists themselves. They were all secret scientists, but a group of them were concerned less with science than with breaking reality. This group, this first subset, I term the dis-realists. They were interested in destructing reality. Now within that subset there was another group. These I call the surrealists, as they were interested both in destroying reality and in ushering in surreality simultaneously.
Here is a horrible truth about the surrealists. These madmen are not interested in just the Engine. They are interested in COMBINING the planes- THE FUSION OF REALITY AND SURREALITY PERMANENTLY. This should put fear into the heart of any hot blooded realist.
But I have digressed, and I wish to return to the current part of my story. We had just arrived at the first human test subjects. I could do little except listen in at the crack of a door, but I heard plenty. The secret scientists - that is to say all of the scientists at the secret underground facility - had a backchannel to get things in, hidden to me and the rest of the custodial staff. The existence of the Engine was known to all - the signs of surreality it produced in the entire facility obvious to anyone - and even the animals had been brought in openly. But the human test subjects were brought in by this back channel, and for this reason I am unsure as to whether they were alive or dead. It is also possible that they were heavily sedated for the experiment.
Regardless, at the door, I heard a whirring and a single clap of thunder - unusual for even the Surreal Engine - and a great many gasps. I believe I even heard some weeping. But there were no shouts of success or joy. It would appear that the experiment had failed.
Later that day, as I entered a bathroom to relieve myself, I caught two secret scientists in separate stalls. Luckily my sneak radio recorder was going. I have transcribed the conversation, which I caught mid sentence.“- think that the subject needs to be willing?”
“I think that the surreality was too much. It needs to be toned down. Total planal fusion might be too much for one organism rooted in reality to comprehend.”
“But what if the subject truly wanted it? What if they longed for the fusion of the planes?”
It should be obvious that these men were surrealists. Unfortunately, that was all I got before I was discovered. A security guard caught me listening in. For the days thereafter, tension was high, and I was worried I would be discovered. Once found out, it was possible they would try to beat the truth of my intentions out of me. And so I left, but the manner of my leaving was carefully planned.
During those tension-filled days I had a new goal in mind. Through furtive observation of the plans of the facility, in short sneak bursts, I had derived the location of the back channel the test subjects had come though. On the day of my escape, I had charged my camera and confirmed my suspicion of the tunnels location. I made for the passageway.
There was little remarkable in the that dank corridor. At the outside exit, I found a strange grain by the door. I picked some of the fine dust up, and it smelled like cooked pork. I swore to have it examined later, and secured some for the road. I had made a clean break, and for the duration of brief travel back to civilization, I consciously emptied my mind of the whole affair. Unfortunately, when I saw the skyscrapers of the city again, it came right back. I would have to report to my masters. The fine dust would have to be analyzed.
These two tasks occupied for the next week. However, something happened which I did not expect. The secret scientists WENT PUBLIC! They published their finding - now tuned to work on humans - to many major newspapers, even the one to which I am sending my report now! My masters would not be pleased. At least, I think my masters would not be pleased. Truth be told, I have never directly communicated with them. You see, the surrealists are mistaken. There are not just two planes, but three. In descending order, there is the surreal plane, the real plane, and what I call the hyper-mundane plane. My masters exist in this third plane. At least, I think they do. I WILL prove that they do. This is why I have begun to put together the final piece in this game - the HYPER-MUNDANE ENGINE.
However, there is more business to attend to. As I write this, it would appear that the surrealists have organized a gathering at the San Andreas Fault in California. The people there beckon that most degenerate of rituals and plans - the STAIRWAY TO THE STARS.
I will write when I can.
LETTER ENDS HERE
Joe: Where to begin? To anyone paying attention, this should have rung alarm bells. Unfortunately, we at the Surreal Times scoffed at this letter. While we published it, it was subject to a strained internal debate. Would we simply publish any letter sent our way? When we received this letter, we tested it with a surreality counter. The results, unsurprisingly in hindsight, showed high levels of surreality. If a hoaxer had his hands on this much surreality, then surely the hoax itself is dangerous, and so the letter is newsworthy.
We see our first mention of a fountainhead. While reality - as anyone with a surreal counter knows - is rife with low grade, background surreality, to power a device as powerful as the New Mexico Surreal Engine, a massively potent source must be found. These sources, always human, are known as fountainheads. The lawyer mentioned here - whom The Times will leave anonymous - was one such fountainhead. Him having been dead for decades did little to dampen his surreality. If the account here is to be taken wholesale - and I see no reason after my research why it shouldn’t - then they exhumed his corpse, and cut it into pieces. After using him to power the New Mexico Surreal Engine, it would seem that they attempted to use his body to power portable surreal engines, but were unable to extract enough surreality to do so.
We also see our first, and only glimpse, into the internal politics of the Rise Together corporation. The Servant of the Hyper-Mundane delineates their staff into several categories. They are all “secret scientists,”, but a number were preoccupied with breaking reality. This is wholely different from ushering in surreality. Reality is a veneer at best, but to bring in surreality is a substitution - removing reality, and replacing it with surreality. This group - those ushering in surreality - were the surrealists. Their endgame is commonly called planal fusion. We see two secret scientists discuss planal fusion, and one can infer that a living being has succumbed to an experiment involving it.
Again curiously, the Servant, doesn’t name the corporation. Why is this? Perhaps it has to do with branding. The Rise Together Corporation, at this time, was not known as the Rise Together Corporation. They went internally as “Search Technologies,” and externally as “New Mexico Research Technologies.” It was only when they began to fuel the fault parties that they rebranded themselves as the Rise Together Corporation. The Servant of the Hyper-Mundane teases the Stairway To The Stars here, but he doesn’t explain it until his next letter. Nonetheless, a sizable following, perhaps several thousand persons, were aware of the possibility for a Stairway To The Stars at this time, and they made up the earliest fault-goers. The Rise Together moniker appears to have been a dog whistle for these interested parties.
Before long, the Servant is discovered, and he makes his exit. Two important events occur at this time. One, he discovers a fine grain at the end of the tunnel. This, I have confirmed, was in fact human remains. I discovered traces of this substance investigating the scene of the extrasplosion where Moe was injured. After sending it off to various top labs, the conclusion was unanimous: the fine grain is the result of a human when all surreality has been leached away from every cell. This gives it the smell of pork.
The second point is less gastly, but should be more concerning. The Servant reveals at the end that he serves neither the real nor the surreal plane, but what he calls the Hyper-Mundane Plane. If the surreal plane is above reality, the hyper-mundane plane is below reality. I would have no reason to believe this, and neither would you, except for the extra explosion at the fault, and the sudden disappearance of all surreality from the world. Surely the man responsible for these events deserves some credibility.
THE DEATH OF SURREALITY CONTINUES IN THE NEXT PART
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