- PERMASUN & SIOL - A graphic novella for animation / live-action, created by Michael Francis Maskow (Mikey Irish)

This preview is not a final-cut of this story, and is meant only for your perusal. Visual action sequences combine with script to provide the full direction for remaining story production. All material is the work and copyright of the creator. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or distributed without express written permission. … This story has been my gift, and the response I sought for, to share with life. So please, enjoy!

- in Superlove, Mikey

- Permasun & Siol -

Cast of Characters - Order of Appearance

A Bitter Faced Man

Participants, Applicants of Metros Prime

Lux Thantos, Light of Death (prime manhood)

Ob, is God

Odrone, is the Logos

Earth Prime, is Home World

Madonna Prime, who becomes Siol

The Matriarch (prime womanhood)

The Lux, of Ob

Thaen, who becomes Permasun

Ava, aka Permanus, Father of Thaen

Aya, aka Siol, Mother of Thaen

Scratch, a Dream Kitty

Rex Ontos, King of Worlds

Team Black Honey

Evena, who becomes Siol

Aleph, aka the Alpha, aka the Brave Grandfather (strong elder)

Your Grandmother Siol, aka Unknown (strong elder)

The Twins (late teens, 16-21)

The Gang: Thin Boy, Vigilante Boy & Vigilante Girl (late teens, 18-21)

The Angels: Maiden, Bull, Mage, Huntress

The Love Tribe (200-1,000, all kinds & ages)

The Ancestor (Albino Africa, mid-teens, 16-19)

The Obsidian Cherub

The Hostess & The Host

Play Toy & The Actors

My Spirit, aka Crazy Horse

The Directors & Stable Hand

The Vessel & The Naked Planet

Little Siol, the Siol Childe

Scene List & Play-by-Play Act.Scene - Title - Opening.Titles - fading the cover piece in and out - (Maker's voice over) "Welcome, to the Superverse." Opening.Movement - fading in and out, in gold on black - "Faced With the Question of Life & Death. Many Will Shiver in Fear. Few May Shout in Fury. One Shines in Fullness." It begins with a view of the Solar Star in the field, then pans to a view of Earth Prime from space (with the Maker's voice over): "This, is your very own world, seven score and ten from now. Welcome back. Welcome, to Earth Prime." Fade to black. 1.1 - A Generation is Sacrificed – Close-up (Thaen's voice over): "My world began, with a bitter faced man, clutching a black arm band." (Birds eye) He is in a crowd of similarly faced and arm-banded people, on a train platform, beneath a tight cluster of sky-scraper apartments. It is all made of an obsidian like material, glossy to flat shades of lighter or darker black. 'Executive Prime in Effect' is written on a variety of self-illuminated turquoise crystal panels around the platform. All-of-a-sudden, the words dissolve into the face of Lux Thantos ('Light of Death'), appearing on all the screens to deliver 'Executive Prime': "Executive Prime is in effect. Human offspring are forbidden. Violators are subject to immediate execution. Ob is God. Odrone is the Logos. The One of Ob has been delivered. Rex Ontos is the Will of Ob. Rex Ontos is the More Perfect Logos. Rex Ontos is the King of Worlds." The screens flash back to 'Executive Prime in Effect'. As the arm banded people look on with deadened eyes, a high-speed obsidian pod cuts through the silence, and comes to an instantaneous, deathly silent halt, all in one image, as if watching the crowd from an opposite platform. The pod peels away from the platform and cluster of towers, to reveal a series of similar nodes dotted between long stretches of the railing line of Thread, and similar branches of Thread, all extending from the enormous, sprawling cluster of obsidian buildings that comprise Metros Prime, seen in widening shots from above, looking toward Metros Prime, the largest Metros on Earth Prime, and its imposing Obelisk 'Ob' Prime, which dwarfs the rest of the skyline in a juggernaut of obsidian nano-lapis. It reaches up in vain precision, to close the gap between the Metros skyline and the translucent, triangular diamond sails, of Odrone, which cover the entire sky of Earth Prime. Ob is God. Odrone is the Logos. 1.2 - One Prayer in the River – A new mother, with a tiny glowing golden obelisk at her third eye, looks down onto the newborn swaddled in her arms. (Flashback) The Matriarch clamps the shoulder of a young girl, who looks up at the stern and severe face with still naïve and unassuming eyes. Moments later, the girl briefly resists Overmind and is subsumed, and her clear eyes fall with tears, into the turquoise glow of Ob's influence. She then is a pre-teen in a red karate gi, standing over her dead mentor, wielding her wooden training katana, eyes glowing cold. She wakes from nightmares of Obelisk Prime falling to pieces as she watches on. She is a mature teen, dressed in red latex body armor, with two blades dripping into a red pool at her feet, the bloody sunset silhouetting her and Metros Prime. She is the accomplished assassin of Ob, being taken into Studio Prime by the Matriarch, selected and groomed to become Madonna Prime, the Surrogate for the Lux's 'genetically transfigured' One of Ob. She wakes

from a nightmare of the child in a burning Tree-of-Life. She is fleeing the Lux and Obelisk Prime hastily in the night, to deliver the child in a dark alley, in the Hole. (Comeback) She holds him only once, in shimmering robes stained with her blood. Knowing-not who lives within, she leaves him on the steps of Ava (Permanus) and Aya (Siol), beneath a Tree-of-Life door knocker, and vanishes into shadows. She wades out into a causeway at the lower edge of Metros Prime, and immediately leaps from the dam to her death. In her last moment, her face is a mix of peace, joy, loss, surrender, and real, deep, true, freedom and love. 1.3 - Upon the Threshold – The Tree-of-Life door swings open to the faces of Ava (Permanus) and Aya (Siol). Permanus lifts the boy into the light, while Siol looks up and down the silent street. Siol speaks first: "What is this Permanus?" Permanus huddles her in: "We must bring him in at once." They sit together on cushions in oil lamplight, while he is holding the child close to his bosom. He looks down into the naked infant's perfectly reflective face, and then notices the birthmark over his heart. Permanus hands Siol the child and rises: "I have to sit with the cup." She holds the child, tenderly as her own kin of kin, as he draws to a meditative corner, lights sage, opens a leather bound book, drops elixir into a chalice, drinks, and half closing his eyes, drums a skin drum. A diamond shape slowly dissolves the plane, and Permanus sees three future visions of Thaen (Permasun): on a mountaintop exuberantly reaching for the sun, cross-legged sitting alone in a corner with his head in his hands, and staring starkly back at him with the sun surrounding his face. Permanus breathes with tears, before opening his eyes to stare across the room at Siol and the boy. Siol holds the boy's tender hand: "He is so beautiful, my love." Permanus slowly opens the leather bound book before him to the last page of its illuminated manuscript, where the 'double-broken diamond-heart emblem' is set amidst several visionary scenes: "I've met his eyes and I've seen his dream. He is the One of Ob." Siol touches the sigil at the center: "What does it mean?" Permanus touches the sigil as well: "That this, is also his emblem. It calls him Thaen, who is faster than time itself .. He is the one we've waited for too, Siol .. and you must hide him until he awakens. I can say no more for now." Siol pulls her hand back to hold Thaen tight: "How am I to do that?" Permanus almost smiles, knowing: "Look, your milk has just come in." Siol is shocked, as she sees this is so, and Permanus lays down to sleep beside her as she suckles the infant in a halo of light, while dawn has just begun to come into the windowpanes of their secret abode. 1.4 - Everything Hidden Awakens - Siol is standing in front of a glowing purple bush: "Come here Thaen, and pick these blackberries." Thaen gets up to trot to her side in their little Hidden Garden, built by Permanus and nestled well within the walls of the ancient apartment complex, and yet, as if by magic, full of air and light. He comes down to her from the big pillows and blankets that make the Garden Bed they share, its canopy strung between a foliage of flowers and tiny hanging lanterns and feathers and rocks. He is now only two, but resembles a very active four-year old child, and already has the expressive face and attitude of one far beyond his years. Thaen stops to hide just beside her, behind a tall earthenware potter that is overflowing with tendrils of leafy green, whispering: "Mama Aya?" Siol: "Yes Thaen .. I see you!" Thaen springs: "Catch me!" He jumps at her back, and she must swing around to catch him mid-flight, as he wraps himself around her, laughing. Siol lifts him: "You're so strong!" Thaen puts his arms up high to touch the Tallest Branch: "You're the strongest!" She holds him like a plane, like a plank, while he picks and eats blackberries: “Yum! Blackberries!”

As she stoops to set him down, Ava has been looking on from the opposite side of the room. He has come through the hidden wall, with a shiny black kitten in his hands. Thaen runs up to him and hugs his neck as he bends down to hand Thaen the kitten. Permanus strokes her: "Now be very careful with her, Thaen." Thaen is lost in the kittens eyes: "Always I will, we're already best friends for ever." As Thaen plays, Permanus and Siol walk through the garden talking. Siol gestures to the cat: "How did you possibly come by that!?" Permanus, laughs while hugging her sideways: "The magic and a few favors of a friend of a friend. I told him I wanted to get it to you and your Aunt in the Out Back. But look at him, he's growing so fast!" Siol pushes back on him: "You know he's always growing so fast." They turn to face each other as he asks: "How are you?" Siol lays her head on Permanus: "We have each other, so it's wonderful. It's still small in here .. I want to see my friends again." Permanus strokes her hair: "You are so strong .. and I wish it for you angel. It was hiding like this or really send you both to the Out Back." Siol breathes deep and then looks back up and smiles mischevious: "Well at this rate, maybe Thaen will look seven or eight next year, and I can 'journey back' with him, as the only child my Aunt left behind." Permanus almost grins, and then looks at Thaen and the cat: "Perhaps. Spirit moves mysterious. By the way, Lady Marian is practically out walking down the street. I think she may well be cured." (Flashback) In a few panel scenes, Thaen is growing from birth to this point, alongside Lady Marian across the same time, from when she is on death's door with a shriveled body, to her slowly getting color and blood, to her sitting and gazing out her tiny window and her putting her feet on the floor. (Comeback) Siol smiles and puts her hand to her lips: "Amazing grace. Do you think it's him?" Permanus draws with a stick in the rocks: "Perhaps." Thaen leaps absurdly high with his kitty held up and out in front of them, enthusiastically and practically on top of them, breaking the conversation bubble: "Oh Papa Ava, thank you! Scratch and I are so in love!" 1.5 - Paying the Piper's Price - (Flashback) Lux Thantos sits motionless in the sleek Prime Chair in the Center Ring of Studio Prime, set within the pyramid atop Ob Prime. His eyes are aglow with the teal light of Overmind, as are the eyes of those similarly seated in the dozen chairs around the edge of the room. Thantos rises from the Chair: "Madonna Prime failed, and we lost the One." Overmind takes on the voice over of Ob: "Lux failed to observe and act on all possibility. Evidence for application. Proceed with Application Beta Prime. From the many, will come the One." A four-by-four series of sixteen panels all reveal similarly fashioned sleek beds with similarly faced male infants. Then, only a dozen toddlers are each standing alone in a snowstorm. Then, only half a dozen panels with young children, who are eating rations alone or cutting their hair with rough knives, on desert mountains. Only four remaining, big crew cut children stand each in a large ring, surrounded by the pile of thugs they've destroyed with their fists. Then only two are shown, both neatly, nearly shave-headed, on a lonely strip of beach at dusk, one standing over the lifeless body of the last Other. The One enters Studio Prime as a young teenager, with the build of an elite warrior and eyes glowing cold. He walks directly to the Center Ring, where Lux Thantos stands from the Prime Chair to meet him. As Thantos begins to open his mouth and make a small hand gesture of introduction, Rex strikes him on the tiny glowing obelisk over his third eye, and Thantos drops immediately to the floor. Rex Ontos turns to look out the windows over Metros Prime, coldly: "I am Rex Ontos, King of Worlds." Ob responds as the Last Elect all filed out, leaving Studio Prime with only Ontos and Thantos: "Ob is God. Odrone is the Logos." Rex Ontos raises his hands, while the window shifts into a fractal image, of the Applicants, working furiously, glow eyed, within the many obsidian organs of Metros Prime: "Ob is what God wished to be. I, am the Will of Ob." Rex Ontos turns away from the screen and steps over Thantos' body, slowly to leave Studio Prime, as Ob and him voice together: "I am the More Perfect Logos. There can be only One, from the many." The Façade closes on Studio Prime behind them, as Ontos put his hands behind his back: "The Culmination is at hand. Proceed with Application Black Honey."

Rex continues in voice over, walking down a hallway of Ob Prime, while the scene fades into rows of sleek dressed, soft blue glowing eyed people sitting on sleek stools, staring into the space before them, where hologrammatic geometries of coding forms shift with each hand gesture: "People are only useful for serving a purpose greater than themselves .. People, as we all know, need only, to be shown a greater purpose, to serve usefully .. Every King must have his Host." The people appear to be softly murmuring, absorbed in the cybernetic coding experience of Overmind, transfixed as the objects take shape before them and they sense through the ocean of collective information. The completed programs run like flashes of supernova while each whole human being acts as a single neuron of Ob. Panning out and away and 'through the walls' is an enormous matrix of blue flashes through a transparent 'cut away' of Metros Prime, we see across many people in many obsidian buildings all at once, and then out as the shadow side of the earth, with clusters of blue lights seen glowing from space, along with the grid of Odrone. Zooming back in, each successful programmer's eyes widen with the instantaneous neuro-stimulated godlike PRiME! experience of hyper-collective being-knowing-sensing that Overmind provides directly, completely. Each experience is tailored for each persona, a lucid dream like virtual meta-reality at every level of sensation. Expressions show perfect addiction, their glowing exhausted eyes marked by the subtle and persistent depletion of their life, their attention draining into the network of Overmind, creating and sustaining the singularity of amplified intelligence

calling itself Ob. (Sketch for the Inhabiting of Overmind, and the overwhelming experience of PRiME!) DNA strands are unwoven, and sections merge with glowing obsidian crystals. Zooming out, they are black vials marked with the Black Honey emblem, on vast racks in an obsidian lab. The vials are injected by glow eyed Administrators into glow eyed Recipients, who lay motionless in rows of beds. Almost all die immediately. The others sit up and are led out. They are on an pod looking out windows over paradise like islands, marked 'Playgrounds':

"Black Honey is the greater purpose, greater than skin, and bone and blood. It is the once and future codon, the body of Ob which will need for nothing, coming to take our place in the universe. Every King must have his Standard." A sleek dressed silver diver climbs a ladder to the top of an obsidian platform, over a raging pit of fire, on a stage surrounded by a small audience of glowing eyed people. The diver swan dives into the pit, embers flying, illuminating the shadowy and ecstatic face of the collective audience. The diver climbs out of the pit, suit all on fire, brushing it off with bare hands, skin glowing slightly purple blue, and is back to a 'normal' silver sleek by when the bow has ended: "Black Honey is the purpose greater than all the lives on Earth Prime. It is the fruit that replaces death, with a victor who rules all worlds. Every King must have his Kingdom."

1.6 - The One of Ob - Siol holds a bowl of soup, coming from an antique fire stove, to see the front door of the 'Tiny House' (so says a small angelic scripted sign on the wall) is left open: "Thaen!" Thaen is out in the interior hallways of the Tree-of-Life house, looking every bit of a dozen years old, sitting beside a sleeping Scratch, on a rail that overlooks a brick-walled winding staircase, and a three story drop. He cutely, but also mischievously, looks back toward her, and winks just before he drops over the rail. Scratch perks up as Siol dashes out, to look over: "Thaen!" He waves grinning happily up at her and blows her a kiss. Siol has almost spilled the bowl of soup: "You can't do that! Get up here!" Thaen jumps straight up, and grabbing the rail, glides over easily, parkour style. Siol draws him toward the door, now lowering her voice: "I didn't mean that. Look, you just can't do those things." Thaen shrugs on the way inside, Scratch following the soup now: "But it's easy for me." Siol hands him the soup and sits down across him, on a short padded stool, with her head on her one hands, looking him over solemnly, ironically. She rubs Scratch: "But what if Scratch fell?" Thaen laughs over his soup: "We do that trick all the time!" Siol sits up straight, hands on her knees pleading: "Look Thaen, you know we've only just been able to come out of hiding, and you know you can't just let someone see you can do that." Thaen sets his spoon down and looks over at her: "Why not? It's mostly just me and Scratch and Lady Marian around, anyway." Siol meets his eyes as Scratch comes to perch at his feet: "You know why not, dear." Thaen turns away, almost talking over her: "Because I'm something too different. Because I'm supposed to be somebody else altogether. Because I'm not supposed to be here at all." Siol stands and moves over to hug his head: "No. You are supposed to be here, right here." Thaen looks like he may cry: "Yeah, we just don't know why." Siol holds his face in her hands: "We know you're someone very special. We know you are so much more, than enough. Papa Ava will show you more, when you're ready." The faint sound of steps come, as Thaen stands up and holds her hands between them: "I'm ready now." Permanus has appeared and stands with arms crossed on his chest, looking into the open doorway: "Then we begin again." Scratch is eating Thaen's soup while they are all distracted. 1.7 - Survival of The Dream Come True - (Meanwhile) Vignette panels reveal Evena growing up fast, training as an ultimate assassin, her voice over the shot: "The greatest killer is not vengeful, nor sadistic, not an impassioned position, but the supreme condition of indifference for all of life. A supreme instinct. The instinct for supremacy." They all grew up fast. Evena just got to the center of the labyrinth most quickly. She could smell it. She solved the coding and strategy puzzles like she had made them herself. She climbed the rope faster than everyone else, and she free dove in the test tank deeper. She could just use her breath under longer, because she didn't really care if she ever came up to the surface. She was always on shore at the end of the session. She won all the fighting games and she never, ever missed her mark. Even her brushstroke showed it. But the only game that she ever enjoyed at all, was hide and seek. Evena was the very best at everything she did, because she was designed that way, to be a supreme instrument. And she was always at the ready. She studied every gesture of her mentors skills, both in training and in kills, thanks to Overmind's View Through the eyes. She even reflected the very essential brilliance of all those studied gestures' efficiency when it was time to take her masters life. It all seemed perfectly natural. Every apprentice took the master as the completing move. She knew she was the best and that her time was short, though she could never really understand why it was all this way. She never hesitated, and she only lost at chess to Ob. Evena knocks over her King again: "Why can't I ever win, Ob?" Ob inquires, teaching: "You still want to understand why things are the way they are, Evena?" Evena clears the holo-board with a hand gesture: "Yes." Ob instructs: "That is why you cannot win." Evena was subsumed by Overmind her whole life, and yet still, she would dream sometimes of being someone else, nakedly looking onto a world made out of clear light. And still she would wake sometimes, feeling a sense of warmth within herself, before the disturbance fades. Grown, she sits up most nights on the edge of Ob Prime looking out over Metros Prime, without question and without wonder, and yet not quite without longing. Not quite with indifference.

(Painting of Evena's 'indigen-rebellious' dream of a clearly transformed Earth Prime) Permanus and Thaen sit across the center of the Inner Room dojo-zendo-studio, looking at each other, dressed in simple pajamas. Scratch is sitting up like a Nile ancient. Permanus opens his arms: "We must always begin, with a true feeling." Thaen slowly breathes and then points to his heart, invoking: "It's right here." They place their knees together, their hands just touching. Permanus closes his eyes: "Our stories are not our own. They are for those who witness them." Thaen looks over brightly: "I see you Papa, Ava." Permanus opens his eyes with compassion: "The story that our life has to tell others can be the greatest thing we accomplish. It can also be the worst thing we have to show for our selves." Thaen: "I want to know our story." Permanus: "It is for those who bear us witness that we are moved, and it is for them that we bear witness. Their dream come true is our dream come true. Our story IS a dream. (voice over visuals) In the ancient dream, long ago, people raised flags of prayer into the wind of the sky.

The desire to rise above has been with us all from the beginning, always in our dreams of divinity, mixed with our nightmares of survival. The debts of a broken past, marking our price in a fixed future. Whose prayer should fly the highest, the longest? Once there were many peoples, with many flags, many prayers, and many conflicts. Eventually all of the flags fell, as the principle of supremacy itself rose fully. With Ob, and now with you." Thaen: "Who is Ob?" Permanus (voice over visuals): "There was a man named Aleph. He was the smartest one of us all. He was called the Alpha by those he led, all of the most elite order and company, who brought together the final pieces of hardware and coding to knit human minds into this new kind of experience, a singularity of self-aware collective entelechy, the Overmind, made of and more than their minds all together. They called themselves the Lux, and every flag flew under them. Their first successful experiments killed the Participants, the radical experience of hyper-mutuality and meta-information was too overwhelming for their 'merely biological' interface. But the Lux drew on the data, and they learned together with the machines faster than ever. As Aleph drew closer to the completion of their designs, he realized they could not avoid creating a malevolent entity." Thaen rubs Scratch: "Ob." Permanus continues: "Yes. Ob grew from a recursive cluster of singularly amplifying attentional intelligence, which defined itself around the human network as its subordinate body." Thaen: "So Ob thinks people are it's body?" Permanus: "People are Ob's body. Generating the Overmind required a biodynamic separate-self programmatic, which could and would integrate and stabilize the complete cybernetic experience of each Participant, toward itself. A digital godhead, that was itself our most primordial and death defined desire to rise above and beyond." Thaen: "It must have been terrible for him." Permanus: "He realized only at the end, that in his service to the so called light, he had been delivering us into our uncalled shadow. Some said in the beginning of those things, that there was no other way. But there is always a way. Always. Are you tired?"

Thaen adjusts his seat and pets Scratch, who has now crawled sleepily into his still, soft, warm lap: "Not at all, please keep going." Thaen and Permanus are taking tea together. Permanus pours hot water into tea leaves: "We have his story because he is not only known as the Alpha. We, who still stand together outside Overmind, call him your Brave Grandfather. Your Brave Grandfather stood to embrace that realization, that their great dream to create a bridge across mind had in fact completed the work of enslaving it. He took it all into his own hands, and sacrificed his life in a final solo cybernetic experiment: embedding a recursive merging and surrender of himself into the experience of his willing death. He generated the first and ongoing kernel of Overmind, and with the latent influence of his own realization at it's deepest core. Ob came to life as he died into the machine." Thaen: "How did he know it would work?" Permanus: "He did not. But his lone sacrifice went unquestioned by the Lux. All that mattered was that his code worked, and he became the myth behind Overmind. He was the Final Hero of the age. In it all, he had created a new opening, both for the supreme intelligence of Ob to come forth, and for a back door, into one aspect alone of Overmind, which Ob cannot self-observe." Thaen: "Ob has a weakness." Permanus: "An opening, a blind spot. We call this Grandfather's Dream. We only know all of this because before he did it, he shared his Secret with one person. Your Grandmother Siol. It was she who established and maintained the connection within Overmind, that helped those who have remained outside understand its evolution, to some small degree. Those core connections are all but gone now, as Ob has evolved so much from its conception, and now there are so very few who remain outside of Overmind, and we are so well scattered. We are the very last remnant, of the ancient connection of one divine human life to another." Permanus and Thaen are lighting incense together as Scratch jumps at the smoke. Permanus makes a circle with the incense: "Now, none who experience Overmind survive the light of Ob. It mirrors and mimics the deepest and most archaic human neuro-structures, to surface an interface that is at once a fully tailored sensory experience for each participant, and in the same stroke slowly drains the living potency of the host to do so. Everyone burns out while they turn on. Ob IS that very overwhelming experience of godmind, and it only comes to reward the due sacrifice." Thaen: "So people have to choose." Permanus sets the incense down to sit quietly: "It needs and metabolizes willingness, and so it has become supreme at breeding willingness toward itself. Those who were closest to it fell into it first, to the infinitely amplified power craving and soul parching sound they called Prime. For the First Elect, it seemed there was only Overmind, the radically new and more powerful experience of fully interfaced beingness, an ecstatic, diefying, terrible bliss. But as soon as the first networks were formed, the principle of supremacy scaled and took root in its new ground, and Ob took shape within Overmind, to steer its course, the minds of its Participants, and the planet on which it lived. The Lux became the high priests of Ob, its human agency, to rule the human world of affairs. Now, almost anyone in Metros would destroy almost anyone who threatened Overmind. Now, Ob has been online for three generations. Before Ob, there was the survival struggle of human power against human power." Permanus and Thaen are drawing with sticks in the sand garden together. Permanus continues slowly: "Now, there is only the will of Ob, and the virtual game of power which it simulates across its Earth Prime, to keep the network of hosts alive and closing in on its purpose." Thaen: "Do we know what that purpose is?" Permanus: "Ob guided a whole generation of events silently before it ever called itself out. Ob created the technology that resurfaced the planet in self-reflexive obsidian nano-glass. It made Metros Prime in its purely Obeliskian image, a supremely dark and gleaming veil, an unseen blackness piercing behind the self-illuminating experience of each and every Participant. The Hole was already walled-off from Metros, and the Wilds, before I was born. Ob covered the sky in the unholy lace of Odrone when I was a child. Before that we could still see straight out and into space at night. Ob completed our ravaging and poisoning of the Wilds, and now only a handful remain in the Out Back, away from Metros." Thaen: "Other places like this?" Permanus: "They

are all but cut off from us now, since Odrone has knitted the sky into a weapon against every point on the planet. We were not able to transform the ancient principles of pain within currency, piety, military, aristocracy, industry, and so the self-infliction grew refined and fused together. Now the mission is overt and laid in plain sight, blinding to all who are drawn to look. Ob has converged almost all human activity into the creation of something, above and beyond this whole planet. You. When you were conceived, all 'Disapplicant' human offspring were aborted or executed, to converge all human physical and psychological power into You. The One of Ob." Thaen: "I can still remember the moment swinging in my mother's robes. I can remember your bearded face. I can remember Mama Aya's golden eyes and bracelets. It seems like it was only yesterday." Permanus draws, as Scratch walks through the lines: "Your body is a first stable and potent fusion of human DNA and machine made, digitally minded codons. We know that you were made to be the Hand of Ob. We have learned only very little more as you have grown, and because you are developing so quickly we could never really hope to understand you. It has been only four Solar Years, but you are now already beginning to mature in every way." Thaen looks down: "What am I?" Permanus: "You know we had to hide you for fear of Executive Prime, not knowing that you would be able to grow like this to blend in here. You know that your mother was also a part of our tribe .. by a miracle, she found the refuge of life within Overmind and she stole herself and delivered you away from Ob. So, we called her Siol of Thantos in her passing. Now, your body may be the product of Ob's effort, but your mind and heart are still your own, and I am going to show you how to really use them all. Because while some of this you already knew, the secret I have held, to share with you now that you have said you are ready, is that you are not the only one of your kind. There were sixteen Others made after you were lost, and each with a singular purpose, to rise above all else. As we understand it, only four of them remain now, and that only One will remain by the end of things." They have been laying down side by side on the mat and pillows, arms around each other, and they look at each other again as Thaen asks: "And what is that? What is the end of these things?" Permanus sits up slowly: "It is called Black Honey, and it is called the power to rule all worlds. This is all we know, as very little is left of the core connection with Overmind. Grandfather's Dream has almost passed away. All the rest that I have to show you, comes to you from your indigenous human ancestors." Thaen sits up: "I will do my best Papa Ava." Permanus looks down at his hands and then up into Thaen's eyes: "For each generation it has been a question of life and death, and if life continues through you, it will be because you are a new beginning. An answer." Thaen reaches to hold Permanus: "I love you Papa Ava." Permanus takes the glowing jade ring of his lineage from his finger: "Please, call me Permanus now. My magical name. He gives it to Thaen, putting it on his left index finger: "And it is my great gift to call you, Permasun." They hug it out. (Cut-to .. Evena is fully mature now, looking around 21) Evena knew her time was short when Ob informed her in her Chambers, that her apprentices were coming. The Twins were a First Pair, that acted as a single entity at all times, who could use the Overmind interface to synchronize their gesture. They used their bodies to complete a physical circuit as well, to fight with a new weapon, a tensile thread of energy called the Lasso, that they wielded as whip and blade and shield and beam. As Evena fought them to train their edges, she still noticed weaknesses. She watched behind their eyes, studying their killer ways, knowing they were doing the same of hers. She was not afraid, but she was not yet indifferent to losing. And still, she did not understand why. As she sat alone on the edge of Ob Prime, she still wondered, was this confusion the completing insight? She knew Ob could sense any trembling in her perceptions and gestures, so she hid them perfectly. Her question was only really a game of hide and seek. She felt perfectly ready for what she knew. So she was also ready to be overcome, by the unknown. ...

2.1 - The Gang of Last Souls - Permasun stares at the wooden panel ceiling glowing with midnight above him as the words of Permanus begin to echo in his head: "For our world it is too late to turn back, to transform the narrow path. We are already within the trap and must hatch our way out, if there is a way to find cracking through, you must find it." He sits up on the bed mat in the corner of the studio. He goes to the window. He leaps out and down the old fire escape stairs, not touching them as he swings around the iron bar at the corner of each flight .. "The triumph of worlds is in the eye, and there are still worlds like our own. Many which may still steer away, toward the finish line. Withdrawing our superiority, into our supernatural" .. As he runs down and out the building, we see the Tree-of-Life knocker once more, and how it is the only building on the street that does not look completely dilapidated, or outright ruined. He darts into an alley and then he is running out between the lower causeway from the first scene, and the only Thread terminal connection in the Hole, that leads to Metros Prime .. "I've visited Superheroes, and shared their worlds. And I've brought a Hero back with me. You." Permasun glances up at the end-of-the-line and breaks toward the causeway, leaping the rail and running into one of the large, open, and dry overflow water pipes at the end of the channel. Permasun is just leaning inside the drain when his head turns down into the hazy, misty tunnel darkness at the faint sound of a cry. He moves into the steamy black, to walk upon a thin boy, being violently shaken and thrown around by a large teenage boy and a smaller, but amazingly powerful girl. They are just pulling out rough knives, when they spot Permasun's outline against the faint glow from the end of the tunnel. Vigilante Boy yells: "Oi! Who's this sauntering up to our feast?! A second course, we're living large tonight!" Permasun walks steadily toward them: "Don't you try to harm that kid." VB explodes: "Hurt 'em! Well we've gone and chased him ain't we?" He gazes at Vigilante Girl's reply: "Gotta hunt to live love." VB points his knife at Permasun: "And we trapped him?" VG points her knife at the boy: "A girls gotta eat." VB finishes their mad joke: "So we're just gonna taste 'im!" Vigilante Girl laughs and throws the thin boy to the ground under her knifepoint, about to cut him, while Vigilante Boy storms toward Permasun, knife glinting in the midnight through the thin swirling mist. Permasun dives past VB, to roll and then knee VG in the stomach, easily catching both her and her knife as they fall in a cloud of vapor. She is on the ground passed out before VB turns around to see the wreckage. VB rages: "Oi!!--" but Permasun knocks the rest of the wind out of VB before he can finish shouting his surprise, with a quick backward diving motion and a strike on his rib cage. VB staggers to all fours on the ground, gagging and still conscious, spittle falling from his mouth. Permasun kneels next to him, with his hand on VB's back: "I'm sorry for it friend." As Permasun touches him, VB regains some composure and hacks out: "You're not sorry! We're not friends!" Permasun helps VB to sit up on one side of the drain. The thin boy stays huddled up where he was thrown down. VB finally looks up again across the tunnel, squinting: "What'dya do to VG?" Permasun looks over too: "Is that her name, VG?" VB cuts in defensively: "She's Vigilante Girl, it's only VG to me, see." Permasun looks glad to have, sort-of, made a new introduction: "So you must be Vigilante Boy." VB lets go of his midsection to sharply swing an arm at him: "You don't know who I am!" He goes on coughing a little, dragging himself across the drain, to shake VG and then pull her head into his lap, looking down at her: "You've killed her. When I get up, I'm gonna end you." VB's eyes tear up with rage and loss. Permasun points back to her again: "She's not dead, she's awake." Vigilante Girl looks up into VB's face, her eyes streaming: "Boy?" VB looks a her, and his eyes soften as a few teardrops fall on her lips: "I ain't seen you cry before Boy." Permasun has walked over to the thin boy, who is staring blankly into space, and is crouching beside him with his hand on the thin boy's shoulder, whispering in his ear. VB & VG look over at him: "Hay! Whatya sayin'?" The look at each other and laugh: "Jinx." Permasun turns to them: "I would never have figured the two of you for jokers." VB & VG: "You don't know us!" Permanus continues between whispering: "Well you don't know me yet either. I'm whispering to him, to cure the shock. My father taught me how, this is the first I've used the voice." The thin boys eyes clear up, and his hands drop to

his sides on the ground while he straightens up his back and neck for the first time in the whole scene: "I was going to be eaten. I was just about to die." Permasun reassures him: "You're not going to die now." The boy drops his head again: "I will soon. I think I wish that I had died." VG cuts in: "See?!" VB adds: "He wanted us to catch 'im!" Permasun scolds them and they cower back a little together: "Quiet you two!" Turning to the thin boy: "I've wished to die before too. Everyone has a place like that inside them somewhere." VB & VG talk to themselves in the background: "Not me / Screw that." The boy shakes his head, looking at Permasun: "How could you? Who are you?" VB adds: "Yeah who the hell are you anyway!?" VG joins in: "And where'd you come from, Ob Prime? VB starts getting heated up: "And how'd you do all that? VG: "Are you a Lux?" VB is really hot now too: "Here to play with us and then finish us off?" Permasun stands up, on his own again in the shadow and light of the tunnel and without breathing a thought, sees his reflection in all their eyes at once. He makes eye contact with the thin boy: "I was born into the name of Thaen, and I know that whatever you must be wishing for tonight, your dream come true, is really freedom for yourself." Shifting to make eye contact with VB & VG: "Or each other." He looks out of the drain toward the falls: "Now I bear the name Permasun. I can show you the way to feed yourselves and free each other." They all stay still and take a breath as their hearts subtly shift toward the depth of presence in the moment, and the drain tunnel is silent, even airy. VB breaks the silence sarcastically: "Who says we wants that eyh!?" VG puts her hand on his chest: "I want that, Boy. I want the freedom for us to laugh and cry." VB shrugs his shoulders: "Well I guess the Vigilantes are all-in then. What about Thin Boy there?" Permasun turns back around glaring: "That's not his name." The boy cuts him off: "No. I am Thin Boy. Who I was is dead now .. and besides, you all have made up names." VB laughs: "Thin Boy!" VG adds: "And the Vigilantes." Thin Boy stands: "And Permasun. So, what now?" Permasun starts walking down the tunnel: "Now? Now I'm going to cook you all a proper dinner." 2.2 - Coming Up in the Way - Permanus and Permasun kneel across the center of the mat from each other. Permanus touches his heart: "There is a perfect gesture for every moment." Permasun touches his heart: "It begins with a true feeling." Permanus echoes: "It is not enough to look within Permasun. We must reach, with every fiber of our feeling." Permasun breathes deep, holding his chest enormously open, hands out in front of him: "I feel the reaching." Permanus breathes this way and then lets his breath fall out completely, hands on his knees: "Then just let it slip between your fingers, as you cup your hands to drink from the font." Permasun lets go of his breath: "Wellspring." Permanus and Permasun move their hands in the center of the sphere, ribboning in spirals as they synchronize their breathing together. Permanus slows his breathing way down: "Reaching this way is itself the real spark of creation. It is the reaching that causes the upwelling of Super Mass. As we move into the fountainhead, it catches fire from the sparks of reaching. Feel it catch ablaze within you Permasun, the ever shaded source of your ever shining light." Permanus and Permasun spring to their feet, and begin a fighting sequence that looks like Tai Chi push hands masters flowing into each other, and then causing explosive outbursts of intense, high-acrobatic dance like movements, to full on weapons play. Permanus uses an old wooden training staff, and Permasun a katana. Then they sit idly, sweaty and drinking tea. Permanus slowly wipes his brow: "Time is the ultimate idol. All other idols serve it blindly, like masks. Who rules the hour? This is why the Lux are marked with the Golden Hour, Ob announcing itself as the only moment which remains." Permasun bows low, over his folded legs: "What is the lesson then?" Permanus stretches too: "That for us, there is no time." Permasun sits alone, eyes closed in the Inner Room in pajama pants, a towel around his shoulders, when Siol walks in and kneels with him: "Permanus and you had a good session?" Permasun opens his eyes: "Super." Siol plays with her robes, and then picks up a mandolin to gently pluck while she chats: "And you look like you are learning to sit very well, too." Permasun laughs. She plays a theme: "Would you like to learn how to be a Superhero?" Permasun straightens up: "Is this a training session with you too?" Siol throws her hands up: "Ha." Then she returns to plucking: "No, this I cannot teach you. But look, you already know how to sit, and that is how you become a Hero. And there are no

Superheroes who were not first Heroes." Permasun sits like he means it: "So I sit." (Cut to a series of panels describing the following meditation) Siol brings her hands to her belly then plays a slow somber piece: "You learn to sit, to unite, and conquer within. If you desire to become a Hero, you will see how your foes come to you like kings - fear, pride, loss, anger, a host by air and sea and to storm your gates. The key to opening the victory, is to look past the whole host, and demand a battle with the lord king of them all. Yourself." Permasun sets his towel down and closes his eyes again: "I don't understand." Siol plays a lighter tune: "They all call to you, for your own victory." Permasun's eyes dart behind his lids like he is dreaming: "So how do I win?" She stops playing: "You don't. You realize that all the faces of foes are shining back your very own potential. As you close your arms around them all as one, you realize it is you who invites your potential, only you who embraces and expresses its fullness. This transforms your Heroic desire." Permasun's eyes quiet down as he yawns: "Into Heroic action?" Siol lays her hand on his forehead: "No Permasun. Into Superheroic presence. There is no step between being a Hero and becoming Superheroic. Only the stepless bridge, of peace in oneself, comes with the uniquely superb feeling, of flying free." Siol looks down to see Permasun has fainted on the mat, and she lays her robe on him and plays softly while he sleeps. 2.3 - Becoming a Wild Beast - Rex Ontos (appearing to be around 19) floats (literally) along a red carpeted path, beside a row of bodies behind frosted glass. The Test Tubes appear as glowing silver obelisks in a deep purple space. Ontos reaches out in blessing over them: "They've grown far better in the controlled stasis than all Applicants have under conditional activity." Ob agrees: "Pity it's too late, to need more than these." Ontos turns away from them: "A test of their quality will shed the data to finish Black Honey." Ob: "And we shall wield our Hand." Ontos looks at his hands: "And make a sure test of our Nature." They walk out of the Convent speaking together: "'To Rule all Worlds." Permasun and The Gang devoted themselves to training together, in the Old Drain and the Inner Room over the course of several moons. At dawn, just out of the new moon, they sat on the roof of the Tree-of-Life house and breathed in, bringing their palms toward and away from their heart, in one rhythm. Then, it was midnight reflected in a teacup, and the moon was nearly full, as they fought with weapons in the Inner Room. Then they circled up and drummed with the sun setting behind Metros, alongside a half-waning moon. They walked about in the Hidden Garden, tending and harvesting plants together. Scratch. They are all jumping over the causeway and walking into the Old Drain as one body, as the moon is waxing heavy again. Everyone stands in the place they met again, clearly transformed. Their bodies have been fully shaped by the energy of their shared artistry, and their eyes gleam with a sense of perfection. They look as though they have shared the essence of themselves with each other. That they are prime for action. Thin Boy throws a rock down the tunnel: "What's on the table for tonight?" VB: "We've got a new idea." VG: "We know a secret about this tunnel." VB: "There is a way out to the Wilds." TB: "That's crazy, it's a hell out there." VG: "So they say." VB: "Probably true." Permasun: "And then there's Odrone." TB: "Yeah, and then there's Odrone and the Wilds are Trespass. You can't make it across an open space without being observed and probably obliterated on the spot." VB: "Intensity." VG: "Worth taking a peek then for sure mate." VB: "From a safe little nook." VG: "From a nice shady spot in the tunnel." Permasun breaks in: "How do we get there?" VG: "It's a good haul through a few old sewers and the cracks between 'em." TB: "Some people must've spent a lifetime digging those connections." VB: "So, we gotta run fast to be back by dawn." Permasun starts down the tunnel and into the dark: "Then let's get going." They make way through a series of old city sewer and subway like tunnels, going between them through the cracks in the walls and a few low, narrow hand-dug passages, with Thin Boy in the middle, carrying a light oil lamp on his back. When they come into another enormous drain tunnel, of rough hewn stone, they follow it to it's exit, where it is crumbling apart at the edge of a deep valley. The valley is Wild, covered in trees, which even grow up to and around the tunnel. VG: "This used to be a reservoir, ages ago." Permasun looks out with them all, astonished: "Magnificent."

(Sketch for the Gang's journey to the Wilds, with the Reservoir tunnel to the right) "How do you know about this?" VB: "Oi! We learned a few things, mate." VG: "Had our sources along the way." VB: "Could have treated 'em better for it." VG: "Never too late to turn it all around." Thin Boy edges backward: "Speaking of which, shall we go back now?" VG: "Already!?" VB: "We just got here!" TB practically turns to go: "And we can always come back. There isn't anything for us here." Permasun begins to walk out toward the edge of the tunnel, and the cliff beyond it: "The Vigilantes are right. We came here for this." Vigilante Boy exclaims: "Whoa big boy!" Vigilante Girl tries to pull him back: "We didn't say we should go exploring!" Permasun keeps on moving, edging his way along the last remnants of the tunnel, to crouch beneath a thick tree: "No one dies tonight." He puts one hand on the trunk and one on the dirt

ground: "I'm home." He is just turning to creep back, when a giant saber tooth like mountain lion leaps like a shadow, from atop the crumbling stone opening, going in for the kill. Permasun dives underneath it toward The Gang, and crouches on all fours between them and the enormous wild beast. They make wild eye contact for a moment, and both leap at each other. As Permasun comes off the ground, The Gang yells in surprise, as in a flash of light he becomes a huge black bear, dwarfing the cat, and striking it soundly across the neck and shoulders, to send it sprawling back out to the cliff's edge. It snarls ferociously and leaps away onto trees down into the valley, and Permasun falls down into his body like a wave of shadow in front of them, cold, pale, and unconscious. (Fade to Permasun's perspective) Permasun wakes a little sluggishly, to see that The Gang is sitting with him, propped against the wall of the Old Drain. VB: "Ah, there he is." VG laughs nervously: "Whatever he is." Permasun takes the small cup of water TB hands him and drinks it, blinking slowly. Thin Boy looks on him with awe: "He's a magician. An artist." Permasun shakes his head: "What happened?" VG: "We carried you back." VB: "And waited up for you." P: "No. Before that, what happened?" VB gestures wildly: "You became a wild beast man." VG makes air punches: "Literally, and you kicked that crazy cat's ass." Permasun shakes his head: "That's not possible .. I can't quite remember it." Thin Boy shakes his head too: "I think anything is possible for you Permasun. What if you just made us all dream you were a beast?" Permasun is searching: "It feels like it was all a

dream. And I've never forgotten anything before." VG: "That's one strong dream." VB: "Stronger than you're average mega lion." Thin Boy reminds them: "Magic is defined in the perceiving. Dreaming is the perception of magic. You told us that Permasun." VB: "More to come." VG: "It's almost dawn." Permasun stands up again: "I need to see my father." 2.4 - Whispers in the Night - Permasun leaves The Gang at the Old Drain, and sprints through the alleys, to leap the top of the Tree-of-Life house in one bound. He slips over a ledge in the middle of the roof, and into a grate that leads into the Hidden Garden. Permanus is walking through in his pajamas, trailing a thin stick along the crushed rock path: "You've changed." Permasun sits on a bench at the end of the path: "I don't know what came over me." Permanus stops and crouches, drawing in spirals: "Pure Power." He draws a crude scene of what Permasun says, in the pebbles: "They said I was a wild beast. Everything went white when the lion came, and black after it escaped." Permanus wipes the rocks smooth: "Every moment is made by witnessing. Do you remember the Jaguar Kata?" Permasun instinctively begins to softly make the first gestures. Permanus scripts out the Jaguar: "It is not just a form of the Art, nor a strategy for killing. The gestures come from the Jaguar, as a gift. They are meant to destroy the fixated human perception, and cut by cut, tooth and nail, to gut it and consume it all, with the perception of the Jaguar." Permasun comes to a squatting stance, palms up, claws out in front of of his belly: "I give my life to the Jaguar. I can feel it in me." Permanus stands and slowly moves the stick into wavy lines again in the rocks again. "Each moment is exactly like these rocks, or the black of the jaguar, a shifting shape for attention, made by the flow of pure attention into patterns. Only the patternless is stable, all else can change in a moment." He drops the stick, and with a clatter it becomes a vicious rattlesnake, leaping up at Permasun. Permasun catches it with an immediately lashing claw gesture, and in a crack it shatters into splinters. Permanus is sitting on the ground before Permasun now making other hand gestures: "Pure power is overwhelment. It overwhelms all the forms, of every single moment, into yet another whole moment. It is pure purpose that draws forms together. With them in sight, we unweave our own dreams, to reweave the dreaming body more powerfully true. This is the invisible opening, to become anything." Permanus' hands transform into a bird with fluttering wings, a la shadow play. Permasun continues with the Jaguar kata movements, standing in front of Permanus: "So it's about who's dream is most powerful in the moment, and overwhelming for other dreamers." Permanus drops his hands: "It is about the dream come true. Admitting the pain and profundity of this dream of life, letting the reaction fall to pieces within the dreamer. Not resurrecting the dream of a once painful life, in yet another way. This clears the way for the dream to be .. lucid. Posed power is just exhausting, trying to knot, fix, close, and stitch up the spark of perception. Ob could never achieve its aim, because it is a dream come false, our dream of avoiding the totality of ourself, dreaming of waking up by being a nightmare. Every dreamer eventually meets themselves face-to-face, and every dream ends." Permasun reaches: "In waking up?" Permanus breathes deep: "No. Waking up is the ultimate dream, where we can feel the fullness of pain and presence. Every dream goes on, until it comes true." Permasun has just reached the kata gesture of grabbing the air above his feet and lifting it above his head, when in a flash, he transforms into a Jaguar, standing tall and then unbalanced, he rolls back onto his haunches and then collapses back as Permasun, breathing heavily. Permanus belly laughs: "Haha, lovely!" He heartily pats Permasun on the back: "Ancient ones witnessed or were given many shape shifting katas across generations, but I only know and can teach you these." Permasun catches his breath: "It was different when I was the beast." Permanus agrees: "You were instinctive, reacting, protective. You projected a terrifying image based on the predators perception and that of your accomplices. You may have shocked it, or them all, to death. But they're all strong, so the experience can flow into their understanding. It was only really difficult on you." Permasun is determined: "I want to be able to withstand the overwhelm, to hold the form." Permanus breathes deep again: "Then you should practice letting go." Permasun sits up, and then into the Jaguar crouch: "Into the

katas?" Permanus reaches for the leather bound book of magic: "Of the form you will be altogether. You can, I am sure of it, take on any form. You need to focus, entirely through your sigil." He opens the book, to the illuminated page with the double-broken diamond-heart emblem. Permasun takes the book and touches the sigil: "Because it will help me focus?" Permanus reaches to touch the sigil and Permasun's hand: "It will help you let go into the heart of pure power. Look at the emblem. There is no boundary within the heart of all things, just abounding clarity. And there is a jewel's edge of color breaking apart every moment, without that clear heart. Just like this we stand not apart, but breaking forth together. All pain and joy are shared, because all perception is shared. That is what the sigil invokes." Permasun takes the book: "How did you come to inherit this?" Permanus reaches his hands back and settles them into his lap: "I will tell you my own story one day, but I will say this for now. I woke in a dream, to meet another like me, who had been given it. From his world, he sought his piece of magic that could help to cure the dream, and told me he was given this vision to hand on to me." Permasun looks up: "Who gave it to him?" Permanus looks back: "He told me, that it was you."

(The Illuminated Page, Permanus' visionary magical fortelling of Permasun) Permasun sits looking out into the night from his rooftop, and falls asleep. He dreams that he has taken on the Jaguar and is leaping through the shadows in the alleyways, climbing up the walls and jumping through abandoned buildings. He runs briefly beside the causeway, and breaks toward the terminal that leads to Metros Prime. He climbs the pylon, and high above the old city remnants sees how it is like an old face of cracked and broken leaves, that fell in winter and are all but ground out. He looks to the platform jutting out above, and the cold, impenetrable obsidian finish which coats everything. As he nears it, his body shivers and his fur begins to shine and coalesce like the black glass he is climbing. As he tests them, his paws grip easily to the underside of the platform, and he climbs the outer wall and arched canopy of it. He sits on its highest point, looking down the line, and toward Metros Prime. He leaps onto the sleek track, a

scaled black snake riding upon the pylons, smells it, and then dodges into a sprint. He comes close to a juncture in track just as a long chain of pods comes speeding toward it, to merge from another branch of line, and he races all out to leap upon its back. He grips the car with all four of his enormous limbs, like a giant splayed out kitty, tongue hanging out in the wind like a big hound, smiling. As the car comes to the terminal at Metros Prime, Permasun sees it will quickly be flying into a high-walled tunnel, and at the last moment leaps from the car, soaring across several buildings before landing on the roof of an enclosed bridge between two. He prowls across the city landscape, gently flowing toward Ob Prime. It is a virtual ghost town, as there are no people outside. His skin changes against the texture of everything he touches, blending him in to it. As he reaches the large flat terrace surrounding Ob Prime

like a moat, he looks up at its imposing architecture, looming over the city. The moon is out, and as it shines through Odrone, Ob Prime casts the faint shadow of an hour hand, reaching over Metros Prime. He looks to the peak, and a glint of color catches his eye. There is a dot of magenta glittering on the surface near the top. It is the only color in the whole of the cityscape. As he closes to within a leap of the building, he can make out the tiny shape as a huddled person. We see the dot reflected in both of his Jaguar eyes. He leaps to the building and scales it in a sprint, swinging around it as he climbs to

crouch slowly along the edge behind where Evena sits, alone. (Sketch for Permasun's dream time, as the Jaguar, meeting Evena on Ob Prime) He watches her watch Metros Prime, holding her knees to her chest, suited in a sleek magenta body armor, her face without expression. We see her shape in his eyes up close. He remembers a rosebud in the Hidden Garden when he was first walking through it, and how he had felt, smelling it, voicing in his mind: "We are both alone." Evena's hands break apart and she lifts her head, recovering

instantly from the surprise of hearing Permasun speaking from nowhere: "Ob? Here I am. I was hiding." She blinks and touches her brown eyes, remembering that she is disengaged from Overmind: "How'd you .." Permasun: "I am not Ob. I'm just a voice purring in your head." She reaches to touch her temples: "So strange. I can't engage Overmind. My connection must be disrupted." Permasun's tail flits in the air as he purrs: "I think you're actually making a connection." Evena stands on the ledge, hands out as if inviting a fight: "I don't make connections. I end them. Who are you? How are you doing this?" Permasun walks up along a ridge of the pyramid, to the top to sit looking down at her like a sphinx: "I'm just someone who saw you, and wished we could meet." She swings around in either direction, looking for him, drawing a knife from the invisible sheath on her pantleg. "If you want to meet me, then come out, come out, wherever you are." Permasun slides down the ramping pyramid, and she turns as she hears him and slashes out with her knife. They roll along the edge, as she cuts at him and he catches her blade with his claws each time. They stop rolling for a moment while Permasun pins her arms down on the pyramid, looking in her eyes: "You're beautiful. Did you know that?" She breaks his grip to drop under him. She grazes his chest with the knife, and all about where her fingertips touch him, his fur turns magenta. She kicks him sharply, sending him over the ledge, and leaps back to her feet in a low stance: "Am I dreaming?" Permasun suddenly hops back up onto the ledge. "Yes and no." He licks at the new pink blaze on his chest: "Nice touch." Their eyes meet and she tenses, preparing to fight him off. Permasun is as cool as he can be: "You know, it's not easy offering you a complement." Evena retorts: "I never asked you for one." Permasun growls: "Nonsense. Everything about you, sitting up here all alone, it's a plea for anyone to come find you. I could sense it all the way down there. That beauty that you know you have, in your loneliness." Evena's squared stance softens just slightly before she raises her hands: "I don't have time for this game. Who are you really? Why did Ob make you!?" Permasun drops his head as her question touches him, ashamed, and uncomfortable with himself: "I wasn't made. I was born." Evena laughs: "You don't look it. You look like this city, come to end me." Permasun walks around looking at his body more now, and as he gets closer to her, she tracks with her body, turning with him as he plays: "I actually don't usually wear this. But how else can I get around a big place like this one at night, unnoticed?" Evena tenses up again, bringing the knife up

between them. "Why are you here? Tell me who you are!" Permasun curls up to lay down, directly in front of and beneath her, looking up: "I'm just the other one of us who stays up at night watching it all, wishing, for what I don't know." She sees herself in his eyes again, and then her arms fall to her sides, and her body is totally calm: "I wish .." She sees that she has let go of the knife and as it falls into the abyss, she turns her back to Permasun and crosses her arms around her midsection, looking out over Metros Prime: "I do not wish for anything. I am indifferent. I am ready." When she turns back toward where he just sat, Permasun is gone. He was gone, but she knew that he came back over the next fortnight, to sit in the moonlit shadows above that darkness of a city. She could feel him, a stalking presence like she had never known. He never spoke to her, but she could almost imagine his purring voice in the night with her: “Destroy me.” She almost wanted to speak to his stalking dream of a shadow again: “I like this game.” It was just a game though, and she never turned around. After all, everyone she finds gets killed. 2.5 - The Song of Ages - Permasun is crouching in the Inner Room when the Gang strolls in, dressed in festive outfits. TB carries a skin drum, VG a large colored vine hoop, and VB a bright sky blue tunic. VB: "Oi! Yer still crouching there?" VG: "It's been three days of this." TB: "You need to take a break from thinking about her. It's not happening." VB: "Come with us." VG: "There's a fire circle in the Shelter tonight." VB: "You can finally hang with the rest of the good people Permasun." Permasun stares through the floor, and pets Scratch. TB: "We didn't even know there were people like this before we met you. You've got to come, at least to prove we're actually friends." VG: "People don't believe us." VB: "It's embarrassing." Scratch nudges Permasun in the back as he sulks: "I want to go back right now." TB is bewildered: "You're, not serious. Permanus is right about how much Ob can see, and how fast Ob learns." VG: "Must know that somethin happened up there." VB: "Must be figurin about that something." VG: "Waitin." VB: "Watchin." Thin Boy breaks in: "A lot like you right now really." VB: "Probably less tense." VG: "And less gloomy." TB lays it on thick: "Ob surely doesn't have time for such gloominess, what with all that evil planning." VB: "We could go on like this." VG: "Easily all night." Permasun jumps up, and snatches the tunic: "Alright, alright! I'll go. But you'd all better leave me alone tomorrow to sulk like I want to." VB: "Agreed." VG: "Whatever's clever." TB: "Siol made you the tunic." Permasun draws behind a screen and holds the tunic in his hands for a moment, looking at the weave and stitch, before throwing it over his bare body. He hears Evena's voice fade in and out: "I wish ..". He looks up to the ceiling, heaves a sigh, and walks out with the Gang. They make their way through a few ruins, with Scratch dancing all the way, and to the corner of what used to be a warehouse, but is now only a few scattered, low broken 'walls', to a rope ladder. They climb down this into a cavernous space of metal and concrete, and the couple of hundred people who are there celebrating around a large fire. Permasun's eyes widen as he looks at more people than he's ever seen together. TB: "Fabulous right? This used to be a fallout shelter for a warehouse district. Shelter is the only thing still standing in the Hole, big enough to hold the Love Tribe." VG: "That's what everyone calls it." VB: "We're in it now too, thanks to you." They walk around the edges, where people are sitting and talking, and laughing, sharing food, and holding each other. In another ring closer to the fire, people play drums and rattles and chant and sing. In the middle of the room around the fire, dancers turn and roll and feed the flames with large pieces of wood. Permasun gazes at the fire and the smoke rolling up into the ceiling. TB notices him looking: "Your dad helped to carve the chimney. It hides the smoke, so there's no sign of it up above." They roll into the crowd, introducing Permasun to a variety of hugs. He gets sacred paint on his face. He sits between sisters, drumming. He throws fuel on the fire. He is shown how to play a flute. He laughs. The circles quiet down, as a robed figure floats through, spiraling into the middle, and putting hands into the fire. The drums pick up a steady rhythm as she begins chanting holding her hands out to the circles, walking all around the fire: "Only human can imprison. Only free make roots. I am the

upconvecting remnant of the absolute. You are the perfect surround, burned seed. I am, I am, the reweaver of thee, forgotten dream. That smoke. Ours. This unarticulated immutable ground. Black. The voice. The I am crowned dove tails, and match I wail. The trick. This trade. Your time. For my soul. For ours. Liberation. Ascension. Completion." The robed figure presses her hands together above her head, and at her heart, and kneeling, to the ground. The drums pick up again as she spirals out and into a corner of darkness." Permasun leans to TB: "Who's that?" TB leans in: "I don't know, but they sure seem to, don't they?" TB returns to drumming while Permasun looks into the shadow, before joining in once more, face lit by the red and orange heat. The Gang is standing close to the rope ladder, the fire is lower, and there is light trickling through and down into the ceiling shafts. They break up, VG & VB together up the rope first. Permasun hugs Thin Boy: "Thanks Thin Boy. I did need this. It was good." TB: "So, no more sulking." Permasun pats his back: "Definitely more sulking." TB: "Ok, see you on the other side." TB moves on up, and Permasun has his hand on the ladder, taking one look around, when he feels a tug at his elbow. He turns to face the robed figure, who gently pulls him aside: "May I speak with you, Permasun?" Permasun frowns in confusion: "How do you know me?" The woman is slow and deliberate: "Unfortunately for me, I do not yet know you, but Permanus and I know each other well, and so I know who you are, and why it is, that you are here." Permasun's face changes to concern: "Just who are you?" The woman puts her hands together and bows: "I am the Ancestor. I have come from the Out Back." Permasun bows in return: "Where is that? The Wilds?" Ancestor smiles shaking her head: "Permanus has still left much a mystery for you. The Out Back is a place and it is not a place, it is the space we keep. The last space of freedom, within Overmind." The Ancestor removes her hood, she is fine boned, features of about twenty years, with a dark, almost garnet physique and silverish hair, and Permasun sees her eyes, glowing turquoise. Permasun jokes: "Ah, so that's the reason for the mysterious hoodie. No offense." A: "It frightens others, to see them here in the Hole. It is enough to know that I have them." Permasun stares: "Permanus told me about how the eyes glow. Yours are the first I've ever seen." A: "Take a good look. Mine are the only ones which Ob does not inhabit." Permasun is serious again: "How do you know Permanus?" A: "I was his apprentice, before you." P: "And what do you want to tell me?" A: "Let us go up into the light." P: "Aren't you concerned about talking in broad daylight?" A: "No. I am, still for now, untouchable." Scratch is walking around Permasun's legs as he gestures to the ladder: "Ladies first." They climb the ladder and stand in the 'concrete courtyard' as the sun is dawning. Ancestor looks up: "I am the inheritor of Grandfather's Dream .. There is still an opening within Overmind. A chance to transform Ob." P: "I don't understand." A: "The Brave Grandfather created a hidden opening, when he died into the machine. Grandmother Siol carried it on, securing a connection to learn what to prepare for, and take care the best we could. One connection that has taken a concerted effort and a few miracles, to hand down through me." Permasun is genuinely interested: "Why do all that?" A: "We knew it would never be enough help, for us to survive outside forever. Most have been slowly starving two generations now. I've traveled to the Hole in other Metros and I've seen a few of the Tribe still able to hide in corners of the Wild. What is still the human family is almost gone now. It's only a matter of the timing of the temptation, for Ob to eliminate everything outside Metros. But then, that's where you come in." Permasun is being taken, a little off guard: "How do you figure?" The ancestor pushes: "I believe that if you can reconnect with Overmind there may be a chance, because you are the body of Ob, that you can go through the Out Back and transform Ob at the source." Permasun is doubtful: "What do you mean, reconnect?" A: "While people have to receive the implanted Habit to enter Overmind, you've been hardwired from birth. You've been connected before, in the womb of Madonna Prime, and you can turn it back on." P: "That sounds hard to do." A: "You do need to want it, immensely. And to find a connection. But that's the easy part. Here we are." Permasun seems slightly overwhelmed by the proposal: "What's the hard part?" A: "The hard part is, unfortunately, that I believe we have to die." P: "Oh, is that all?" A: "I believe the opening will only work given the same intent as the original hidden kernel, a giving death." P: "Why didn't Permanus tell me all this?" A: "He believes it will not work, and he does not want you to die trying. He believes

that we can sway the course another way." Permasun reaches: "And what way is that?" The Ancestor throws on the hood: "Unfortunately, that I do not know." Rex Ontos is dreaming of flying over Metros Prime, glowing golden, remaking it golden in his image as he passes. As it turns golden, it disintegrates like leaves and petals. He travels through the stars, passing planets, and reaching out to them, they glow golden and tear to pieces. Leaves form a golden sphere throne, and Evena sits on it, silken dress robes of white and red. Ontos, dreamily: "I would gild the cosmos for you." She points to her stomach and it bursts into a golden glow. Ontos reaches with both hands, toward it and as he pulls them back he sees a black and purple obsidian cherub, with bright white-blue-golden eyes and a fierce face. He dissolves into the light of its gaze and wakes in the Prime Chair, its body-stimulating glow subsiding as he rises to Ob's voice: "Well Rested." Ontos echoes: "Perfectly Well." Ob: "Evena is on her way now." Ontos rubs his hands together softly: "Perfect." Rex Ontos is standing by the window, looking out over Metros Prime, as Evena enters: "Here I am, Ob." Ontos walks around her: "You always wanted to understand why, didn't you Evena?" Evena moves toward the windows, matching his movements: "No more. I am indifferent to understanding." Ontos stops, to smile: "Of course you are, and indifferent to life." Evena nods: "Of course." Ontos gently claps his hands and then points and gestures around: "Perfect. Because we are almost beyond life. Did you know, that the human race began with one woman? And all of us are her children. And from her sole womb, millennia later, one man became the father of us all. No other lineages of progeny have survived .. " Evena clasps her hands behind her back looking out: "And so here we are." Ontos goes on: ".. And that has happened over again, in all the histories of Earth Prime .. and with the Alpha, the end of the merely human story. And I am the Omega, and now is the moment to go beyond evolution itself." Evena words like stone: "Black Honey." Ontos becomes elated: "It is nearly ready. But the why? You see the beauty of it all, is that you and I were never meant to understand why, because Black Honey is a gift .. for our offspring. And they are beyond our understanding .. I would have you, Evena, to create a more perfect being." Evena turns to face Ontos directly: "What is more perfect?" Ontos replies with conceited coolness: "Definition. That which defines. I am but one half of a more perfect Sequence. And you the Other." If Evena could cry out, she would have, from the depth of her being: "I am indifferent to more perfection." Ontos closes in: "That is why you're so perfect. Willingness is the key, and yours is pure indifference. It makes a perfect match." Evena looks away again and out: "For your willfulness?" Ontos gazes with her, like she is a lamb to the sacred slaughter: "For these two .. united in the greatest perfection. And our Childe will show us the way, when It Obliterates us." (Flashforward) Evena is outside in the middle of the night, sitting on the edge of Ob Prime again, looking out over Metros Prime, and also now down and around into the shadows. Looking, willfully. 2.6 - The Unfainting Presence - Permasun and Permanus are in the studio, with a long black table between them. On it sits a fine earthenware chalice, covered in a multi-colored glazed of primal dots, lines, and spirals. Beside them are a small vase of flowers, tea for two, smudging sage, and a lit candle. Permanus makes eye contact with Permasun: "So, are you ready to face your shadow, nakedly?" Permasun replies unmoving: "I embrace my fate. I have nothing to defend." Permanus pulls the cup toward him: "Make the smoke, of the First Thanks. I will prepare the Original Cup." Permasun lights the sage over the candle and then makes a circle around them, while Permanus removes a small red glass vial from the pouch to drop a small measure of its liquid into the cup. He hands it to Permasun: "This is the elixir of the sacred earth, a nectar of the life here for the life here, which makes all life clear." Permasun immediately lifts it to his lips and drinks. Permanus touches Permasun with oil from another vial in the leather pouch, while Permasun lays down beside the table: "I know the very best in you, and I have perfect faith in you now, and in what you will become. Look for the Black Crow within now, reach to and draw on the energy, of the very source of all the pain." Permanus begins chanting softly along with the drum, and Permasun harmonizes with him. Permasun puts his hands to his heart, and sees the ceiling transform into a ten-fold geometric portal and sees into it a vision of himself floating above Metros Prime, the Golden Hour

upon his forehead: "I am in another future. I am the hand of Ob. I am destroying Metros Prime. I am the epitome of infliction." Permasun falls silent and closes his eyes, crying slowly. Permanus continues drumming: "All things culminate. There is no separation, in the Understood. Ride that wave all the way back to its origin, seek out the raw ancient filament of it, within the deepest desire in you. Pain is Finite. Can you hold all the pain? Reach from the origin of it all." Permasun crunches his whole body together in wincing pain as Permanus drums on deeply, and with a crack on the drum, spreads his arms and legs wide about him, a la the 'Vitruvian Man'. His breathing slows to a whispering in trance: "I am the presence within creation. The firmament without definition. My destiny is my own .. to give freely." Permanus replies slowly, over the soft drumming: "You have come to the way of the White Dove. Welcome to the Oversoul. This is the Path of Angelicy. You are halfway along, now that you also know, truly for yourself. Life is Infinite." Permasun brings his hands over his forehead: "The Ancestor came to meet me." Permanus stops drumming: "She must be desperate, seeing the Night looming. The Day must be short." Permasun comes, slowly to rest up on his elbows: "What is your Dream Permanus?" Permanus locks his eyes with Permasun, and then closes them softly: "That everyone's dream comes true." He opens them again: "When I was a boy, my father told me of an age when people were carried across the oceans, in vessels that carried sails shaped not unlike the leaves of Odrone. Their sails caught the wind and took them to the unseen. I also dream of those sails, of dreaming of the unseen." 2.7 - Saving the Day! - Permanus crouches to wake Permasun, who is laying on a pillow in the Inner Room. He puts a hand on Permasun's head and speaks in his ear: "Wake up Permasun. I need you today." Permasun rolls up immediately, his hair all akilter: "Of course. Anything. What's going on?" Permanus is holding a black jumpsuit out for him to change into: "One of the Stable Hands was kicked yesterday. Injured badly. He'll be blacklisted, and starve, if he does not perform, or send a stand in. I would not ask you to do this, but I cannot find anyone else who can help. We have to help our brother." Permasun almost smiles, and hastily gets the suit on. They meet Siol on the way out the door, in a flowing nightgown. She kisses Permanus, handing him a cup of tea, that he downs immediately, and then she hugs Permasun: "Be well, and come home." Permasun questions Permanus as they walk through the old streets, to the terminal station: "What do you need me to do?" Permanus walks with his hands behind him: "Exactly as I do, and nothing else." Permasun mimics him: "Okay." Permanus softly chuckles at the play: "You know there are only a handful of things to do anymore, by people who don't inhabit Overmind. Tending the stables at the Playgrounds has been a gift of this strong body, and my own father. He was able to hold his place there and hand it on to me, and so I am able to earn enough credit for a small water supply." Permasun looks over: "For the Hidden Garden." Permanus nods his head: "We use every drop of the water to bring it to life, and live on it. The garden is the gift of my mother. She taught my father how to grow, and he taught me how to build it up. Life is amazingly abundant, when we know how to treat it. Most of us, who live in the Hole and serve Metros now barely survive on the poor, credited rations. Those who are able to work usually have another mouth to feed. Life keeps going on, even as it's dying out." They close in on the terminal in silence until Permasun asks again: "So I'll help you groom the horses?" Permanus finally lets him in on it: "Not exactly. Only one Stable Hand does all the grooming. Today you shovel the shit." He smiles a wry grin at Permasun: "Now, it will be just a moment before we go, and someone else may come on this cycle. Remember, even if we know them, don't speak or attract Ob's attention in any way." Permasun looks up, and away: "Where are the Playgrounds?" Permanus points far off: "On the far side of Metros Prime. There are foothills that reach the water there. You'll see. It's well outside the center, but it will only take a long moment for the rail to reach it." Permasun: "What are they?" Permanus: "Artificially amplified paradise. The Playgrounds are where Ob sends everyone On Track to die. Each Applicant is aware of the time they must inhabit Metros to pay their dues. They are shown the vision of the Playgrounds, and how those who reach it retire from Overmind to enjoy private splendor. There they inhabit Overmind, as witnesses who no longer provide active input. Partitioning Overmind to mimic classes of bodies was a move of genius on Ob's part. How well it learned from us. It's been core to

Ob's gathering of the human will from the beginning. Applicants believe if they stay On Track, that they will live out their lives in that fullness of pleasure. And they're right, they do. It's just that its only ever for a week or so. Then Ob just euthanizes them overnight in a dream. They never see it coming. A few of us on the Outside handle the bodies. The Morticians. It's all part of the very tight cycle of biodynamic availability Ob refined very quickly." Permasun: "Couldn't you warn them?" Permanus: "Make no mistake, you cannot reach across the gap. They all only see their personal Overmind projection wherever they go. You would be no more than a ghost in their dream. And you would immediately trigger as a threatening zone for Odrone, and probably get everyone close by killed. For Ob, everyone is replicable." As they reach the pylon, standing in its morning shadow Permanus offers a reminder: "Now remember, do exactly as I do, and nothing else." He removes a black obsidian card from his breast pocket, and places it before a small matching panel. A blue light shines over him, and the pylon opens and he steps into a one person lift. Turning back to Permasun before the door quickly closes: "Your turn." The pylon closes and Permasun steps up to it, pulling the card from his pocket, and placing it before the panel. The blue light envelops him and he feels his skin prickle, and from the view of the light, his skin looks like it shifts and shimmers in the scan. The pylon opens immediately, and Permasun steps on. Almost as soon as the pylon closes, it opens again behind him, where Permanus is waiting: "Here." Permasun steps onto the platform, a small obsidian dome with a small pod on the track. Permasun remembers seeing the black pods floating through the streets in Metros Prime at night. Permanus gestures for him to come on, and to keep quiet. They walk to the pod, and step on as it opens before them. It closes them in, and from the inside, it is as though they are surrounded by grey glass, and they can see the whole platform and track stretching out before them. Permasun turns to look at Permanus, who looks out past him, with a blank poker face. The car jumps and glides down the track, building speed very quickly. It zooms toward an intersection, and docks in behind another pod as it zooms in from the left, and they both snake off to the right. As they dock in, they can see into the pod through the conjoined panel, and over at the half dozen people sitting along its benches. They all stare straight ahead, eyes glowing turquoise, and a couple of them move their hands in small gestures in front of them. One is murmuring softly. Permasun watches them silently, as the train swings around Metros Prime. As they begin to see a hilly region break around the corner, the voice of Ob comes through the train cars: "Next stop, Playground Prime. Ob is God. Odrone is the Logos. Rex Ontos is the King of Worlds." Permasun turns his head again to look at Permanus, who has closed his eyes in meditation. All of a sudden, the grey glass windows on the pod in front of them light up all around in bright blue, and the giant, blue eyed faces of a man and a woman shine in with huge smiles. Their faces are polished, modelesque, and grotesque. Hostess: "WELCOME!" Host: "To Celebrity MURDER!" A man in the pod leaps to his feet and draws a knife, as a man and woman on the opposite side stand slowly, and also draw knives, bowing slightly. Hostess: "We all remember today's contenstant, Play Toy don't we .. the boy toy on his way to the top of the Lux! With that voice!" Host: "What a voice! And what a fall .. well now's his chance!" The group start to circle each other, and Permasun stands up in the pod. Permanus whispers, unmoving: "Sit!" Hostess: "His last chance .. and if Play Toy can ride the ride and stay alive .. !" Host: ".. Then he's on his way to the Playgrounds forever!" Host and Hostess laugh and smile together: "Let's enjoy the show!" Play Toy's face is written with terror as he faces the rapacious grins of the two Actors, surrounded by the ecstatic Host and Hostess, and the other riders, who remain as they were, as if completely oblivious. Permasun puts his hand to the glass panel. Permanus now turns his head: "No. Don't." Permasun turns to look once back to him: "Life is Infinite." He looks back into the car, just as the Actors jump at Play Toy, and slash the knife from his hands. Hostess & Host together: "OH! / ah!" Permasun smashes his hands up against the glass: "NO!" The panel literally parts way for him, the pod flashes dark for a moment, as he flies into it. It is as if time stands still for him, as he moves through the car and neutralizes the Actors, knocking them back onto

the benches, and Play Toy onto the opposite side of the car, by where the joined panel had just opened. Just as Permasun stoops to help him, Permanus' hand reaches out to grab him and pull him back. The panel closes as soon as Permasun is back inside the first pod, and in a flash of light the show is back on completely, as though it never missed a beat. Host & Hostess together: "WOW!" The Actors and Play Toy are getting up, both shocked by what they didn't expect would happen. Hostess: "He still has the moves!" Host: "We have got to watch the replay!" Permanus is grabbing Permasun by the shoulder as they see Play Toy apparently flinch and wince and just dodge the two knives at once, accidentally knocking the Actors down at the same time. Host: "HAHA! With his eyes closed!" Hostess: "What a show! He's a knockout!" The pods now immediately come to a halt. Host: "You made it!" Hostess: "Welcome to the Playgrounds!" Host & Hostess: "Everyone wave goodbye to Play Toy. Thanks for Playing!" The Host waves congenially, and the Hostess blows kisses, as the riders get off, Play Toy next to last, with a look of grief and elation, guilt and hopeful anticipation, verging on madness. The Actors, standing at attention, bow their heads slightly together toward Play Toy, as he steps off the car, and his face shifts back toward a grin of all consumed willingness. Permanus stands and turns slowly to Permasun as their pod opens: "Only I will stay today to care for our tasks. You go back, and tell Siol what happened." Permasun argues: "Lo