Homo conexus
"Dreaming behind all of our eyes"
Previously: Crowley and Astra have escaped captivity. They confront the new world they created, having been trapped for months inside of Alexei’s nightmare.
● Post-Opening Era, many years later, the Dreamworld
Astra-the-girl looked away from the memory.
—Crowley…he was my father’s friend.
—Yes. Friend and closest colleague.
—Is that why I was so mean to him?
—Maybe. I suspect you were mean to him for helping create The Project that you inherited.
—The Project to “awaken the collective mind of humanity?”
—Yes. It was your soga al cuello––ehm, “ball and chain.”
—No…I don’t think that’s why I was mean to Crowley.
—Why, then?
—I’ve been looking at, um, this older version of me, and…well, she seems like she really needs someone to take care of her.
—I agree.
—And Crowley wants to take care of her.
—You’re saying she’s mean to Crowley because he wants to take care of her?
—Yeah. But sometimes the thing we need most is also the thing we’re most scared of. And so we push it away.
—Very insightful, cuchurrumin.
—Not really.
—No?
—Maybe for a normal girl it would be insightful. But my father and mom made me this way, remember? Normal girls get trained in how to read complex series of symbols and then they can read books. A normal girl who can read books would seem insightful to, like, a caveman. You and me were trained in how to read people. We can look at them and read them like books.
—Maybe. What do you read you look at me?
—You’re not a person.
—Aren’t I?
—Not exactly. But when I look at you I see who I could have been…if I had let someone care for me.
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, Brooklyn
She plucked out a strand of fading blue-hair. The pain helped her concentrate. “I’m fine,” she said, feeling Crowley’s concern. “Let’s start with this: Why are we still alive?” Then she sent Crowley a mental image of the two suited men behind them with a tone that meant, Hurry up.
Crowley caught up to her, huffing. “How are you able to walk so quickly after months of––?”
“Alexei sent only five men to stop us. Why not twenty? Why not rig an explosive?” Astra looked around. Was it only the two behind them? Who else was watching?
“We need to find out how the rest of the team is doing,” Crowley said. His high-cheekboned face hung slack.
“That’s second priority. First, threat assessment.” She made a left at the corner bodega. The cashier stared out at her from behind the window. “Alexei: Why keep us alive?”
“Perhaps he’s been compromised,” Crowley offered.
“By psychofauna?”
“By love.”
Astra felt disgust flashed across her face before she could stop it. This loss of reflex, it meant her mind was…atrophied.
Crowley still hung on his own word, love. “The team, dear… Dreamer, Dr. Cassidy, Nyoshul Rinpoche, and all the rest – we need to check on them. Do you suspect Alexei got to them?”
Astra felt his dismay wash over her like an octopuses’s ink plume. She needed to ignore it for now. “Alexei, compromised…” she considered. “It might explain I’m still alive but not you. He never liked you. It also doesn’t explain why we were allowed to escape. No, it’s something else.” It came to her: “He’s testing us.”
“Testing us? For what?”
“I don’t know, but we’re safe for now. Can you feel the two men on our six?” She glanced into the mirror of a delivery van to catch sight of the men turning the corner behind them.
“Not at this range. You can?”
“They’re connected to Alexei somehow. But they not here to harm us.”
“Then what are they here for?”
“I don’t know.” Astra focused. “They’re pursuing something.”
“Us?”
“I don’t know.”
These two were not the only ones she could feel. Somehow Astra was connected far beyond them – to constellations of bodies stretching outward to horizons. It was making it difficult to concentrate. “What other players are on the board?” she asked, getting them back on track.
“Let’s see: the rest of our team if they’re still…active. Who else? Any demagogue out there, they’ll be players now more than ever, and…hm…what about that other traitorous bastard?”
“The Colonel. Alexei will have him under his thumb.”
Crowley shook his head. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
“Let’s come back to him. What others?”
“Well…your family.”
She jaywalked them across 3rd Avenue, causing a car to top short and honk. “My father hasn’t been seen for 15 years. If he were alive, we would have woken up to a very different world. Not…this.”
“One can still hope.”
“You can,” she said, allowing some spite to leak into her voice.
“And then there’s your brother.”
“Half-brother,” she corrected. “He’s similarly missing, but—”
● Post-Opening Era, many years later, the Dreamworld
—Wait a minute!
—What is it?
—I had a brother?
—You still have a brother. He created this place. Well…not created it, but made it what it is today.
—I’d like to meet him.
—I’m afraid that’s not a good idea, cariña.
—Why not?
—Because we are hiding you from him.
—Oh. Is he afraid of me too?
—Yes.
—Do you think he’s right to be afraid of me?
—Ehm…
—Maybe you’re not exactly a person but I can still read you, Aletheia. I want to be good. I want to be a good person this time.
—I know, little cookie. You always wanted to be good.
—OK. The way you said that makes me feel a little strange, but I’d like to see the rest of this story please.
—I…. OK, you’ll learn more about your brother soon.
Astra glanced around for the source of the presence she was tracking. “My half-brother, I can feel him.”
“What, here?” Instinctively Crowley activated his mental defenses.
“No. Not in body. Only in spirit. Look.”
Ahead of them, where the street opened into a large avenue, a stream of masked figures ran between buildings. One, with a devil mask, turned to look at her. The masked woman cocked her head. Then another of the band, someone with a unicorn mask, tugged her away toward wherever the gang was running.
Suddenly, the presence of the two men behind them grew stronger. She and Crowley turned, prepared to engage. But the two men were clearly uninterested in them. They ran past, one turning his head back to bark, “Your truck is blocking a roadway, ma’am.”
Interesting. So they were after the gang.
“We need more information. Let’s follow it,” she decided.
“Er, ‘it?’”
“Yes, it. I feel one of my brother’s egregores,” she said, using the old occult term for a group mind.
“Ah. Yes, I saw other egregores walking around in packs as we drove here.”
“If one loosens the boundaries between minds they begin to crop up.”
“You mean if we loosen the boundaries between minds,” he said, moodily. “Which we did, to try to unify them. This is the opposite, dear.”
That reminded her: “Homo conexus,” she said.
Crowley stopped walking for a moment. “What?” Then he scrambled after her.
“It’s another potential threat.” Astra assessed a cop putting a ticket on the windshield of a car, and then a group of young mothers wheeling similar strollers.
“Astra, dear, Homo conexus never woke up. If it did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d be celebrating with the rest of our team inside of a planetary organism. Mission accomplished.”
“It did wake up.”
She felt Crowley scan her to see whether she’d gone mad. He was losing faith. She added a mental note to deal with it later.
“It woke up,” she reiterated. “It chose Jonah Levin as its voice and then it chased me through the streets. Hundreds of people, yelling, ‘mother.’ Almost caught me before Alexei did.”
“Mother?”
“It thinks I’m its mother. In some sense I am. The problematic thing is that that it’s inheriting our attachment patterns. ” Astra probed the passersby with her mind. She sensed them, and in sensing them felt how deeply her plan had gone awry.
Then there was the inner voice again: You failed. You failed. You failed. You fail––
Astra severed this repeater with the ghost-dagger of her attention.
Her intrusive thoughts had returned. Parts of her mind had reverted to childhood habits. Months trapped inside of Alexei’s nightmare had fucked with her years of careful mental programming. She would reinstate it later, after she figured out what had become of the world in her absence.
“Homo conexus woke up,” she said to Crowley, “And now it’s back asleep. Dreaming behind all of our eyes. Yours and mine too. Look.”
She nudged his consciousness into place with her own. And she saw what he saw
out of my eyes watching you from a window above, and in the apartment buildings I am walking up and down the stairs, searching, clambering out of pits, yearning, eating the thoughts of lesser forms, dreaming, arriving at the office late with my belt loose and my pants down with everyone watching, no no no no, and I’m late for the final test, or so says the Prince as he chases me down the corridors, at the end of which are my mother’s tattoos across the walls, bright and glowing, and they speak to me, “I abandoned you because you are wretched,” and I am wretched I am I am I can’t help it, because my organs fight inside of me, two of them growing, cancerous, the wild one of the Prince and the cold one of the machine who seeks my mother––
Astra snapped her fingers in front of Crowley’s face.
“What fresh madness is this?” he stuttered.
“It’s the madness of a million conflicting perspectives, all inside one being. Imagine a child who saw out of everyone’s eyes at once. It would go mad.”
“Christ….”
“Focus. We need situational awareness.”
“So we failed quite miserably then, didn’t we?”
“No.” She crossed the street toward the skyscrapers that rose over Downtown Brooklyn.
“Some bloody saviors we were, eh?” He laughed like rain falling into the hollow of a tin can. “We set out to create a liberated being, an awakened and loving collective being, and instead––”
“It’s not––”
“––over yet? Too late? Ha! Oh noooo. It’s not too late! What’s the new plan, dear?”
“Same as the old one. Now let’s catch up to that gang.”
“Oh goody, the old plan. Let me see if I have it right: Make humanity telepathic – check, we did that, go us. Then find new meditators – we’ll just find new meditators to replace the old ones, who Alexei has likely enslaved or murdered or some other ghastly business. But they were replaceable to you anyway – weren’t they? We’re all replaceable to you.”
The passing pedestrians were acting as unconscious repeaters, amplifying his anguish, dispatching it back into his nervous system. A runaway feedback loop.
She warned him: “You’re entering a––”
“Wait! Let me pitch you on the rest of your plan! So we’ll just build new electromagnetic amplification suits, right? – since your boyfriend likely hoarded all the old ones, didn’t he, after killing our team, most likely? So we’ll just stuff the new meditators in the new suits – and then, um, profit! They’ll simply meditation-blast us all into liberation. Global ego-death shockwave! Just like the 1960s, but this time with neurotech. We swear it will be different this time!”
Astra sensed a ripple moving through the minds around them.
She and Crowley needed to move more quickly to catch up to the gang they’d seen, even though it would further aggravate Crowley’s sympathetic nervous system. “Keep pace,” she instructed.
“Do you think that psychopath will help us program the suits again? Maybe in return we let Alexei steal another Command Suit off you. What do you think he’s been using it for by the way?”
For a moment, a mailman, a nurse in turquoise scrubs, and a boy sitting on the stoop of a brownstone turned to gape at them. Not good. Crowley was stirring Homo conexus. He was, after all, one of the few who knew its name.
“Good god…” Crowley was shaking. “We buggered the whole world didn’t we?”
“Stay with me.”
The boy stood up and descended the stoop. The mailman and nurse changed direction toward them.
The memory flashed through Astra’s mind: Jonah Levin and hundreds of people sprinting toward her out of buildings and restaurants. She couldn’t let that happen again.
“Crowley! Listen to me!”
She reached through realms, inward, to the innermost depths to emanate the last thing she felt in this moment: Hope.
An old woman in the apartment building above opened her window to stare down at them, entranced. A construction worker on the scaffolding across the street turned toward them.
Astra reached through the 7th direction, the space of pure Mind; she reached into god and took in the grace she’d spent her entire life deferring, until someday, someday. Some of that grace was needed right now. So she emanated salvation. “We will fix this.”
The eyes of the pedestrians went white, their eyelids fluttered. Then went back on their ways, a bit dazed.
Crowley sighed and lowered his head. “You really think so?” he asked.
“Yes,” she lied.
Next release: Astra and Crowley meet their pursuers & the gang of masked individuals.