Chương 221: Chapter 220: Deep Into The Chrysanthemum (01/18/2016)

DATE: Monday, January 18, 2016 LOCATION: The Joe Rogan Experience | Social Media Giorgio practically launched out of his chair, eyes huge, hair looking like it was trying to escape his skull.

"Joe… Joe, listen to me! This is what I've been saying! For years! Fifteen years! The memes, the jokes, the hair—and now look! Look at the feed! They turned on a video game and accidentally woke up the pyramid! The geometry, Joe! It's the same as Puma Punku! The same geometry!" He slammed both hands on the desk, nearly knocking the mic over.

"And then the Architect appears! He hijacks all the Avatars like they're his puppets and he asks for the Babel Protocol! The Babel Protocol, Joe! You understand what that means?! He wants to reset the reincarnation queue! The soul machine! It's a machine! We are in a soul recycling facility and they just showed us the control panel!" Giorgio's voice cracked with pure glee.

"And the civilians! The truck drivers and farmers in their living rooms tagging targets for a couple hundred bucks?! They were being used as biological drones! Just like the Sumerians said! The Anunnaki needed gold, now they need processing power! It's the same thing! The exact same thing!" He leaned so far forward his hair nearly touched the mic.

"We're not playing a game, Joe… we are the game! The aliens are the server admins! We are the NPCs! We've always been the NPCs!" Joe stared at him for a long, heavy three seconds. He didn't blink. He just slowly pushed his headphones off one ear, leaned back in his chair, and let out a long, slow exhale into the microphone.

"Whoa." Joe took a deliberate sip of his water, his eyes tracking something on his monitor, consciously slowing the tempo of the room down.

"Okay. Okay, let's take a breath, man. Just... let's walk this back a second, because you are throwing a lot of heavy plates on the bar right now." Giorgio opened his mouth to speak, but Joe pointed a thick finger at him, shaking his head.

"Hold on, let me finish. I hear what you're saying about the Sumerians and the soul recycling. And look, it's entirely possible. Anybody who has done high doses of DMT—like, really gone deep into the chrysanthemum—they've seen the machine elves. They've felt that exact thing you're talking about, like they're interfacing with some cosmic hard drive and we're just meat-suits. That's a real, shared psychedelic experience."

Joe leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk, his voice dropping an octave into that serious, somber register.

"But what I can't get past is the physical reality of what happened today. Forget the Puma Punku geometry for a second. We're talking about eighty Tier One operators sitting in haptic pods out in the Mojave Desert. These guys are beasts. I train with guys who know some of them. And right now, their actual, biological bodies are seizing up. They are flatlining. Not in a game. In real life." If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Joe turned his head slightly toward the production booth, his brow furrowed.

"Jamie, see if you can pull up that clip from the Glitch Stream. The packet analysis one where the guy is tracking the biometrics." There was a brief silence, followed by the soft clatter of a keyboard from the production booth.

"I've got it," Jamie's voice came over the intercom, sounding a little tighter than usual.

"But Joe… I was scrubbing through it while you guys were talking. I was trying to clean up the visual artifacts when the purple light spikes. You need to see this. I muted the audio." The massive monitor on the studio wall flickered to life. It was the same stripped-back terminal overlay from the Dark Web stream—neon green text cascading down the left side, the center dominated by the feed from inside the Gladsheim pyramid.

On screen, the eighty Vanguard-class Avatars stood frozen, their heavy armor caked in frost and riot foam. In the center, the glitching, hooded figure of the Architect stood with his hand raised, the violet distortion radiating outward from his silhouette in heavy, rhythmic pulses.

"Watch the obsidian wall behind him," Jamie instructed.

"Right when he asks for the Babel Protocol. I'm going to pause it and bump the exposure." The video played for three seconds. The violet pulse hit its apex, blinding the camera lens for a fraction of a second. Jamie paused the video exactly on that frame and applied a high-contrast filter. The stark blacks and bright violets inverted into a sickly, washed-out grey. The obsidian wall of the pyramid wasn't solid.

During the flash, the energy illuminated something etched deep inside the translucent, glass-like stone behind the Architect. Joe leaned forward, his eyes narrowing.

"What is that? Giorgio, is that one of your Anunnaki star maps?" Giorgio didn't answer. He was staring at the screen, completely motionless, all his previous manic energy entirely evaporated. The silence from him was suddenly much more unnerving than the yelling.

"It's not a star map, Joe," Jamie said quietly.

"Look at the geometry. It's topographical. And look at the bottom right corner of the wall. Those aren't alien glyphs. They're longitude and latitude numbers. I ran them." Joe's stomach dropped. He set his water glass down slowly.

"Jamie… where does that map point?"

"It's the Mojave Desert," Jamie said.

"It's an exact, real-time topographical scan of the SR Security compound. The exact building where the operators are hooked into the haptic pods." Joe stared at the screen, the implications crashing over him. The "dinner bell." The flatlining biometrics.

"He's not just locking them out of the game," Joe whispered, the blood draining from his face.

"He's targeting their physical location. He's using the haptic bridge to trace the signal back to their actual bodies." Before anyone could say another word, the paused video on the monitor violently un-paused itself. Jamie hadn't touched a button. On the screen, the hijacked Avatar standing closest to the Architect—the one that had been frozen like a statue—slowly, mechanically turned its massive armored head. It ignored Valiant Thor. It ignored the Architect.

It looked directly up into the camera lens of the drone recording the feed. The digital overlay of the Glitch Stream flickered wildly, the green text turning to a chaotic blur of red errors. Through the Avatar's external speakers, a voice shattered the silence of the JRE studio. It wasn't the synthesized, metallic voice of an NPC. It was a human man, his voice cracking with absolute, raw terror, echoing from a pod somewhere in the Mojave:"Cut the hardline! Somebody cut the fu—" The screen snapped to black.

The studio fell into complete silence, nothing but the low hum of the equipment and Joe's breathing. Joe didn't move. He just stared at the dead monitor, his face pale. Giorgio's mouth opened and closed twice before any sound came out. When he finally spoke, his voice was small and shaky, completely stripped of its earlier manic energy.

"... They know where the terminals are, Joe." He swallowed hard, his eyes still glued to the black screen.

"They know where all the terminals are."