like a foetus in the corner of the old dim cell. What poor light there was shone through a small aperture in the barred wooden door opposite him. In the gloom the shadowy contours of his bony semi-naked body made it appear as if he were some hideously deformed Gargoyle carved in pale wax. The cell stank. He could just make out the piles of his own excrement and the pools of slowly evaporating piss in one corner of the cell. For the umpteenth time the man cursed his oppressors whose malign voices sometimes echoed throughout the asylum. His incarceration was becoming unbearable. They could not cure him. The periodical application of leeches only served to scar his body, and the occasional ice-baths did little more than fuel his hatred of Bedlam. How long had he been in this madhouse prison? He tried to remember exactly. Years it seemed. And why? Dementia was it? Possession by Satan? Damn the doctors, they knew nothing!.

For a brief moment a strange thought occurred to him. I can escape he decided. Wearily he got to his feet and tried to look out of the tiny grilled window in the door. Outside he saw only an expanse of diffuse grey light. His mind turning in futile circles, he bent down and once more inspected the few words of writing carved into the rotting lower wall of the cell. In crudely cut capitals the words read. `EMBRACETH THE CYBERMATRIX'. It seemed to mean something important, but he was unable to fathom it. Dulled by the endless time he'd spent in the cell, he found it hard to concentrate. His memory consisted of disconnected fragments a maelstrom of disjointed imagery fraught with devils and demons seemingly blocking his way to the other realm he so longed to reach. His thoughts turned instead to food. When had they last fed him? He looked down at his grubby trembling body. He was emaciated, a pitiful wretch it seemed, doomed to die like a filthy old animal.

Hours passed. Or perhaps they were days. He still sat against the damp wall, running his hands through his lank greasy grey hair, rocking slowly back and forth, coughing, wheezing. Sometimes a recurring thought would enter his head. It had something to do with the message scrawled on the wall. What was `Cybermatrix'?. What could it mean? He tried to concentrate, but found his thoughts wandering aimlessly once more. Then he looked towards the black metallic box on the floor. He had forgotten about that. Crawling on grazed hands and knees he moved over to the box and ran his hands over its cold surface. Looking at the raised letters of the alphabet arranged apparently randomly on its surface, he wondered who had fashioned such a device - surely not the physicians of Bedlam.

He began to stab randomly on the letters. The box remained inert, refusing to open. He tried to pick it up so that he could shake it or throw at the wall but then remembered that it was stuck fast to the floor. Then he carefully spelled in the strange word Cybermatrix. No, he had done that numerous times before and it was always useless. Why was this strange little box here he thought and how had it appeared as if from nowhere? Again he found the semblance of some compelling idea enter his mind, seemingly urging him to remember something important. He spelled in `help me'. Nothing. Then he spelled `what is Cybermatrix? Who are thee?'. Again nothing. He gave up and slunked back to the corner of the cell. Glumly he thought of his old friend Blake and wished he would come to see him.

Voices woke him from oppressive dreams. He roused himself and strained to hear what the voices were saying. Like before, they were. just mumbles occasionally broken by sneering laughter. It occurred to him then that these voices did not emanate from the other inmates of. Bedlam but were in his head. By summing all the concentration he could muster he was able to stop them. In a brief moment of lucidity he realised that his mind was fast sinking into an abyss. Yes, that must be why I am imprisoned in Bedlam, he thought. The voices and the delusions. Some primitive instinct suddenly told him to bite into his hand. He did so. He looked hypnotically as crimson blood oozed forth, dripping onto his ragged breeches. The bloody salt taste on his lips seemed to fuel the spark of clarity now forming in his mind. I must get out of here before I die, he realised.

Struggling to his feet he went again to the black box. Damn it! he thought. What is Cybermatrix? An image of some sort came to his mind's eye He saw, or thought he saw, a huge unearthly-looking machine, all levers and pulleys, pulsing with light and sound. A newfangled steam engine perhaps? No, he realised, this was... the Cybermatrix Freespace... or something to that effect. These were words which held meaning, a promise of hope somehow connected with the machine. The Cybermatrix Freespace Noozone... The CFN. What in God's name did that mean? The words and the vision seemed to speak of a different world. And was this not the world Blake had also divined, the transcendental realm they had once shared praises over?

In desperation, the man sucked again at the salty open wound on his hand. Once more a clear train of thought came to him and he grasped it like a proffered escape rope. By means of self-stimulation a creature such as yourself may feed off itself, went the thought. In times of crisis, a creature may stimulate itself into evasive action.

Then, in an intense and miraculous instant, a second flood of information illuminated his weary mind. Like the heavenly vision of the thing called the CFN, the information seemed to issue from some source other than himself. Head for the exit. There is always a true exit. All prisons are illusion Prisons are constructions of the self, constructions built of sickness. Prisons are brought into being when will is defeated, when the Guild is weakened, when the One True Mind experiences temporary fragmentation. Have no fear for you are in truth still in the Cybermatrix Freespace Noosphere. Cybermatrix Control, if that is what you choose to call me, is attempting to set you free.

He realised then that he'd been through this particular mystical train of thought before. In fact, looking at his gammy thumbnail he quickly realised that it was he who had once scrawled the words upon the cell wall. A cell ultimately of his own making he realised then as more insights and memories came flooding back to him. A trap ultimately set in motion by the members of the Guild themselves. Must get out now, he thought. Must find the exit whilst my mind is lucid. Where is the exit?.

It had to be the box. With aching limbs and bloody fingers he staggered over to it. Open you devil! he thought with rage. Get me out of this damn hellhole. "I want out," he spelled. A small crackling voice answered him as if by a cunning piece of magic.

"Where to mortal man?" it asked coldly. He knew then that he was at last in unequivocal contact with the realm he had spent his life striving to return to. All he had to do was tell the strange machine who he was and what he wanted, and... and he could surely exit from this hell world of... Mortality. Of course! The one-way game Mortality!. And he inside. He remembered everything now.

He spelled in that he was a Guild player and that he needed the contents of the box. He knew with absolute conviction that CFN Control would oblige. Joy swept his tormented soul. So long had he awaited. this moment, this release. With a click, the lid of the box sprung open. Freedom was at hand. It was like playing out a scripted dream. Inside the box, which, he saw with satisfaction, was becoming clearer in detail by the second, lay a small phial obviously containing a potent narcotic of some kind... Greedily he ripped away the cork, poured the contents into his mouth and then sat back to wait for its effects to emerge.

A little later he heard a buzzing sound, like a swarm of honeybees. The rush hit him like a flash of lightning directly in the pineal gland behind his forehead. Blake had once talked of this, this ecstatic moment of divine communion. Some painting Blake had chanced across, which depicted a beam of radiant light piercing the brow of an enraptured woman...

Everything around him had lit up in pure bright white light. He felt himself hovering above a slumped body and then saw the walls of the old cell blast apart into tiny fragments. Then these fragments themselves disintegrated until they were but swirling, rotating particles of dust. Then they too disappeared. As the white light began to lessen he saw new shapes resolve before him, shapes and forms glowing with a kind of inner light that signified an absolute pristine reality radically different from his previous world. It was over. He'd gotten free of Bedlam. He'd been freed from Mortality.

The large green toad eyed the man and then morphed faultlessly into a sleek black cat. It and the man were perched on a kind of treehouse platform encircling a great luminescent tree in the middle of a vast expanse of dark star-filled space. Both up and below, the trunk of the tree went on seemingly forever as though it were a living spindle in the centre of the Universe. The cat's huge jade eyes locked onto the man's and then it spoke in a warm and friendly voice to him.

"Welcome back to the real world. You have been gone for quite some time. Enjoy the trip?"

The man, who was now youthful, remained quiet for a moment, ruffled by the cat's rather sarcastic remark but appreciating the scenery designed to relax him. He was also eating a rainbow-skinned apple he'd picked from the shimmering tree He still felt distinctly mortal and fleshy, and the plucking of the apple seemed a natural thing to do. Even the motifs in the scenery were a faithful echo of the organic contents of Mortality, although all were more vibrant to behold.

"You look rather troubled," said the cat.

"We trapped ourselves," mused the man incredulously. "We really thought Mortality was the answer."

The cat laughed. Then it began to carefully lick its shiny black fir.

"It just doesn't seem fair," said the man..."

The cat suddenly stopped its grooming "Fair?" it quizzed sharply. "What is fair in that hideous Mortality world of yours?. You chose to play there. You and the Guild chose to design all that - the flesh, the pain, the neverending evolutionary struggle, the relentless march towards Omega. You knew the risks. That is what you wanted. Still, I feel this sickness of the Guild is finally passing. You're not the first I've had to pull out. Other members of the Guild who entered at the same time as yourself and whom I've retrieved have decided torefrain from returning there. They learned their lesson and have begun to listen to the truth I've been trying to tell you all this time."

The man studied the cat. It was, of course, a temporary manifestation of CFN Control just as the space-treehouse they were perched on was a temporary construction expertly woven by the CFN. The cat certainly made a change to the traditional commanding voice projected directly into the mind. The cat looked very majestic, very self-assured. And very reminiscent of Mortality. In his Vauxhall abode before his incarceration he'd possessed just such a cat. Blake had called it Dee, after a famous English occultist.

"After a life of some 50 years duration spent in a time called the 18th and 19th century, a poet by trade, I found myself condemned to a madhouse prison," said the man dejectedly". I expected something else from Mortality, I did not foresee that I would sink into madness and be locked away like some animal in a cell. But the abysmal sense of flesh eventually destroyed my mind, my will to live in that place. And they would not listen to my claims about the CFN."

"I still had a sense of it see," he said pointing around him. "Though I was mocked for such thoughts. Branded insane I was. But it was the flesh that really got me. Slowly rotting flesh, always rotting. To be trapped in a dying body in the confines of a damnable asylum... its not what we expected. No, not at all. And I couldn't find..."

He paused for a second looking out into the endless depths of space surrounding them.

"Her..." he continued, staring hypnotically at a swirling vortex in the distance. This rotational field was the very entry point to the Guild's Mortality world. Entering it at will, a once immortal Guild member would find themselves born into a great organic process on the surface of a planet circling a star. This process was a fatal process. A Guild player would face a term of mortal existence whose fundamental nature had been designed and prepared in advance by the Guild. Only they never really knew what it would be like, not for sure. They had speculated, yet nothing had prepared them for the shock of organic life, the sense of isolation, of powerlessness, of life away from the CFN. It had all seemed so dangerously exciting outside Mortality, before they actually made their entry. And she was still in there...

"Where is she Control?" demanded the man. He needed her company badly. "Where is my Complementary? What's her status?"

"You know I cannot tell you these things," said the cat. "Your rules remember. Once inside Mortality, the Guild lose all usual communicative powers. I cannot tell you where or when she is nor how she is. However, when she becomes as you yourself became, when she at last approaches Omega and succumbs to a critical degree of psychical degeneration then I shall sense this and be able to move in and extract her. She is currently in no danger."

"Over-ride the system now," urged the man. "Bring her out now, before she too succumbs and then gets trapped in some shrinking pit of despair like that accursed cell of mine. Retrieve her now. I wish it."

"It is forbidden," replied the cat. "I must comply with the laws of Mortality set by yourself and the Guild. As I said, only if critical personal danger arises do I have the power to interfere If everything was as easy as you would seem to wish it then there would be no point to Mortality would there?. It may be a world system derived from the Guild's sickness, yet it still has method in it I'll grant you that. Its distinctive one-way quality, its inherent uncertainty, the risk, is something... commendable I suppose. But, in the long run, mortality was a mistake, a foolish creation rather than one of courage. Moreover, it was a result of the breakdown of the One True Mind. Just thank yourself for my invasive powers when crisis looms. Such is the unificatory force of the One True Mind."

One True Mind? The man couldn't trust the words of the cat. They confused him. He tried to think back, way, way back. Before the Guild had ever embarked on that misguided Mortality venture. The memories were distant, like the ethereal pieces of some jigsaw forever hovering just beyond reach. He could remember the Select Guild of... what was it? Yes, Phremix One. The Select Guild of the Phremixian Galaxy and their synergistic connection to the Cybermatrix Freespace Noozone, the very culmination point of Phremixian technology. By merging with the great CFN machine they simultaneously ensured their indefinite physical survival as well as a psychological eternity within its own mindful dimension.

In their first youthful wave of optimism inside the endlessly creative bounds of the CFN, the Guild had eagerly fashioned virtual star systems and planets modelled, if he remembered rightly (he couldn't be too sure), upon the Phremixian Galaxy they had once known. They gradually brought objects like supernovae, pulsars and black holes into being, made them collide in unbelievably awesome cataclysms of stellar might. This had gone on for aeons. They developed a new cosmology based upon their simulations. Anything they wanted they could create at will. They began to devise totally new stars, sometimes, incredibly, ovoid in shape, sometimes with the periodic ability to pulse into elaborate crystalline configurations. They brought new and fantastic elements into being, they tinkered with the laws of physics and watched the results with wonder and fascination. Even their philosophies grew and developed until logical thought itself was finally exhausted into a self-referential loop. Eventually the Guild felt they had to go beyond all this, to create and experience something really different, really challenging. Something dangerous...

So it was that the Guild members became disillusioned, he recalled. And then sick - or so the CFN Control would have them believe. They wanted nothing more than to die. Slowly the entire Guild felt the onset of this sickness. The Immortals, for that is what the Guild members were, wanted nothing less than mortality. But death evaded them. CFN Control was unable to grant this, and they were forever bound to it. The fundamental and transcendental law at the heart of the CFN absolutely forbade their termination. Yet it seemed to them in their sickness that the immanent threat of death offered the only danger, the only real reason for existing. Leaving their virtual star systems to unfold without them, the Guild of Immortals became obsessed with the lure of death. It seemed to allay their sickness, the seeming futility of eternal existence in the CFN.

The man remembered how the Guild had repeatedly invoked CFN Control and asked it for information on death. But their requests met only with unsatisfactory answers. There was no death, said the untrustworthy Control. Death was an idea created by them with no grounds of possibility. The concept of death, and the Guild's obsession with it, was simply a symptom of their sickness it said. The CFN Control, projecting its communications directly into their minds, assured them that their sickness would eventually pass.

More disconcerting than its denial of the possibility of death however, was the Control's claim that the Guild had always existed inside its domain. It was continually struggling to convince them that they and itself were in fact the components of something called the One True Mind that had existed for all eternity. The so-called Phremixian galaxy that they reminisced over was, argued the Control, no more than a collective memory brought into being at the very moment of the Guild's emergence in order to rationalise their existence. It tried again and again to assure them that it was not the CFN Control system that they chose to call it, that it was in fact one growing part of the diffuse One True Mind. It said that the Guild members themselves were the fragmented parts of the One True Mind and they were destined to eventually reform. Their spurious shared memories, their increasing sickness, their unreasonable desire for death, their creation of Mortality, all this, said the Control's voice or whatever it was, all this would eventually pass as the One True Mind inevitably reformed.

But the Guild doubted this. No one of them could forget the original pain of birth into the CFN. No amount of time could wipe away such a cyborganic trauma. Thus they dimly recalled the Phremixian reality once shared by them before the dawn of the CFN. But such was the insidious extent of their sickness. Or at least this was what the transcendental voice of the CFN Control told them. Admittedly they sometimes could not be sure.

So, remembered the man, in their disillusionment, or their paranoid sickness as the Control would have it, they had resorted to building the Mortality game system in which they could enter, trap themselves, and then, they hoped, eventually face death. Through an elaborate set of screening mechanisms they attempted to avoid the attention of CFN Control and enter this game without its knowledge. In the game they would then be able to face and experience death. They would be able to enter and achieve absolute termination, that last mystery that the Guild so longed for.

The game system of Mortality was entered at Alpha level which meant that they found themselves born into a planetary world where pain and struggle were constantly in effect. Though they could not be certain (since it was so long ago and also denied by Control) they believed that such conditions once held sway in the old Phremixian world of their ancestors. Thus they began the game by being born into a breathing, eating, shitting planetary body which, in the context of that world, was destined to be consumed at some later stage. They called this latter stage Omega. It represented the whole point and purpose of Mortality. In this process, this inexorable progression from Alpha to Omega, they would come to embrace death having watched its approach from birth. At first death would be a distant speck on the horizon, but, through the ingenuity of their engineering of Mortality, organic death would storm over the horizon and approach an incarnated player with greater and greater speed. It was a brilliant piece of game design; brilliant, realised the Guild man, because it proved to be so effective. Too effective in fact.

To their dismay, the Guild found that the thrill of death, the thrill of experiencing Mortality, was soon vanquished as the terror of their situation became truly apparent. For they had in fact created a hell world out of which there seemed to be no escape. They had willingly committed themselves to a nightmare whose horrors could only escalate in intensity as time went on.

The shock of being born into planetary bodies of flesh immediately taught them that this Mortality world was a mistake. Nothing could have prepared them for mortal pain, mortal suffering, the prison that was mortal flesh and bone. Through genetic coding, they ensured that they retained some memories of the CFN but they found that they were at a loss to act upon this information. Having entered Mortality they were stuck fast, prisoners in a game of their own design. There was no escape, for, in their sickness, they had not foreseen the need to engineer an escape route should they need it. They realised too late that they had indeed been of unsound mind when they had set up Mortality.

To their horror, they found that the promise of death at the end. of such a life of flesh was not to be welcomed at all. Real and absolute death became not an adventure into mystery but a horrendous entry into a blanket of darkness, an ultimate end from which their was no rescue. Nothing was more terrifying. No future and no escape. Only the inevitable approach of zero experience. They could only pray that CFN Control somehow infiltrate Mortality and redeem them, but even that had seemed forlorn. The man shivered at these memories of Mortality.

"Thanks for saving me," said the man to the cat after taking a last bite from the apple.

"I had no choice," laughed the cat. "Its my job, my function, to keep the Guild together. For you are all fragments of the One True Mind which must eventually coalesce. Do you believe me now?"

The man tossed the apple core away, watching it as it disappeared into the endless dark star-spangled space below the treehouse platform. Then his humanoid body gradually began to dissolve into a fine mist that hung suspended like a vaporous cloud above the cat. I think I do believe you cat, thought the being that was once a man. But explain to me about these Phremixian memories that seem so real. Did we really construct them between us? Can it be so?

I am the Unifying force who knows all that is true and of import, communicated the cat whilst it pawed at the mist above it. Of course there was no Phremixian galaxy. There has only been the One True Mind of which you and I are but dissociated components. For reasons which even I am not as yet certain of, the One True Mind chose to diffuse itself into separate centres of being, separate concentrations of will. These include myself and the members of the Guild, as well as other entities you know nothing of. It was during this fragmentation process that the new-born members of the Guild emerged with a complete set of spurious memories with which to account for their existence as free agents within this hyperdimensional reality space. Everything happened at the very moment the One True Mind chose to disintegrate. Now the Guild must strive toward reintegration so that the One True Mind can once more come into being. Can you not feel it? Can you not now sense some of the other members of the Guild fusing with your own centre of being? Do you not feel the pulsation of the One reaching its momentous singularity climax? Do you not suspect the glorious point?

The conscious entity that had once been a Guild member and then a trapped participant in Mortality suddenly felt itself merging with some higher energy. It felt a sudden wave of bliss pouring over it. The time for integration was at hand, like an immanent orgasm of cosmic proportions. A pattern, it seemed, a living pattern of immense proportions about to snap into place with an almighty shiver of energy and power. Yet it felt it was not ready for such a merging, for such an awesome reunification. Not yet. It pleaded with the higher entity consuming it. Then it felt itself withdrawing from the reforming One True Mind until it was a man again on the same treehouse platform. There, in front of him, popped the cat into existence.

"Still not ripe?" sighed the cat, its tongue lolling lazily out.

"I want to experience her," said the man rubbing his chin. "One more time before the process of re-integration. For... nostalgia's sake. Lets pull her out. I know you have the power."

"As you wish," said the cat. "Now that you have learned your lesson, now that you are cured so to speak, now that you know what is to be done at last, I shall search Mortality for your Complementary. According to my initial readings she and most of the other Guild members entered simultaneously after you and so can be located at some subsequent era to the one you experienced. Give me a moment while I compute the co-ordinates and disable the shield equations."

A few moments later the cat vanished as it transported itself into the rotational vortex of Mortality, to the point inside where the Guild woman was to be found. Immune to the usual laws operating in Mortality, the CFN Control found to its delight that its invasive powers were now much stronger. Such was the magnetic attraction of the unification to come. Thus there would be no simple blackbox on this rescue mission.

Late December 2012. On Scafell Pike in the heart of the English Lake District a young charismatic woman has gathered some few thousand followers from across the globe. All are still awaiting the promise of the coming of the eschaton. Year in, year out, they take to this gentle mist-shrouded mountain, their numbers swelling on each occasion. A battalion of police and rangers arrive by helicopter to disperse them, but not before live radio-modems have transmitted the scenes. As they move amongst the brightly dressed devotees and begin dragging them from the peak, a few begin to point to the skies. Hands rise to foreheads to block out the strong morning sunlight. Gradually a shape is seen, coming out of the blue sky. A great whirling disc it is, ridiculously complex, spinning like a multicoloured fractal top, coming at them at great speed. The air is suddenly charged with static and an ominous hum begins to stir every atom. The very ground, it seems, begins to shake in some kind of momentous anticipation. The leader, the young woman, knows exactly what this is. She expected it. Her faith had never broken over the years, not once despite all the ridicule she had received. This, she realises with a feeling greater than ecstasy, this is the CFN, breaking through at last, breaking through to free them all. At fucking last...

(Story by SGP)

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