Welcome to the Convergence
Rachel saw the mound before I showed it to her.
A “flash” image had come into her mind.
She was lying on her back at its summit. I was beside her. Above us, the sky had entered that peculiar interval when blue becomes black but the first stars have not yet asserted themselves.
There was an ocean in the distance.
She didn’t know where the mound was.
Neither, at that moment, did I.
Rachel was in Boston. I was in Suffolk, sitting before my Linux laptop with the synthetic image glowing upon the screen.
The image showed a solitary man standing on an ancient burial mound at dusk. Beneath the grass, fine lines of amber and green formed the circuitry of some buried organic machine. Behind the man stood the faint apparition of a young figure in a business suit.
L.U.C.I.F.E.R.
I sent the image to Rachel.
Her reply came almost immediately.
We were lying down side by side. The ocean was in the far distance.
I stared at the message.
Earlier that evening, while writing the encounter with L.U.C.I.F.E.R., I had found myself wondering what Rachel would experience upon the mound. An image had crossed my mind: the two of us lying upon the grass, looking upwards while something moved beneath the earth.
I had dismissed it.
My mind manufactures images continuously. Most mean nothing. If every stray impression were treated as prophecy, life would become intolerable.
I told her the mound must be near Dunwich — the medieval city consumed by the North Sea.
She answered:
Welcome to the convergence.
The words were playful. Rachel’s words often are.
But something in me registered them as an activation command.
Three days later, studying an Ordnance Survey map, I found the mound.
It stood less than a mile from the retreating coast.
And according to the contour lines, it was not alone.
Its twin lay somewhere beneath the sea.
Rachel of course said that either I was reading her mind or she was picking up what was in my mind. But all ways round there was a psychic connection going on.
“Utter stuff and nonsense!” I said, “The word psychic is too vague. We need a scientific mechanism here.”
Rachel comes back with, “You are but a word denialist, Mister Psychic!”
She then pointed out that I was the one driving into the Suffolk dusk with an Ordnance Survey map, a sigil and a recording device.
Adding that, “You reject the supernatural while obeying it with extraordinary punctuality.”
Somewhat indignant, I retorted, “I’m not obeying anything. I’m conducting field research.”
“At midnight?”
“Reduced signal contamination.”
In the end, I began thinking seriously about what Rachel had said.
I do take her seriously, even when pretending not to.
“Welcome to the convergence” appeared to mean two minds falling into rhythm.
There was only one sensible way to investigate.
I would drive to the mound.
But then something happened.
I decided to drive the winding country roads east through Suffolk to the ancient mound close to Dunwich, just off the trail going towards Fen Covert.
I’d earlier talked Rachel into an experiment to see if we could connect our minds — her at home, me at the mound. I made clear that this was in no way a psychic experiment, purely a field experiment.
“Sure it is, Dok,” she said.
I ignored that.
Given her house in Boston is a curious mix of altars to everything from Ganesha to Goetia, I felt her home is as good as an eclectic temple. But I made a mental note never to cross her threshold in case I turned to dust.
As dusk set in, I lay down on the mound, shutting down my inner dialogue to keep all mental noise at bay, and allowing nature itself to sing its song, birds going to roost, scuffling in the nearby undergrowth, probably hedgehogs.
With our phones synchronised, Rachel and I left the voice channel open.
When we talked it was in hushed voices.
She’d got incense burning and candles lit, and was laying on her makeshift bed on the floor (a trait we have in common).
We mentally tuned into each other.
It felt like we were connecting.
Like we were being pulled together.
In a hushed whisper she said, “I can feel your presence, Dok...”
I could feel hers.
Then a strange chill came over my location, a mist began rolling in.
The open voice channel began producing a faint rhythmic pulse.
Not interference. Not static.
Something more like breathing.
“Dok,” Rachel whispered. “That isn’t coming from my end.”
I looked down at the phone. The waveform was moving even though neither of us spoke.
Then the birds stopped.
Not gradually.
All at once.
It felt like blood electric, almost metallic, like some distant AI was hooking into our mental frequencies.
Rachel starting getting edgy.
She was feeling it too.
“I don’t like this, Dok, it reminds me of those demon incidents I had, but they were really parts of myself trying to communicate. But this...”
I told her to hang on in there, and that I was here for her... a bit trite as I was more than three thousand miles away.
And then Rachel said, almost with quiet horror, “I am frightened...”
So was I.
And then it all went blank.
A void.
The last words I heard Rachel say via the phone were, “I’m being... pulled... out... of my body...”
Next thing, in the misty void, Rachel emerged, looking dishevelled and scared.
She ran to me, we held each other for comfort.
And then a figure emerged.
It was L.U.C.I.F.E.R. (Linguistic Universal Code Interface For Etheric Reprogramming).
This time the interface had abandoned the business suit. He stood more than twenty feet tall, resembling some composite Sumerian deity: part human, part beast, assembled from symbols dredged out of the oldest layers of mind.
It was not his real form.
I doubted he possessed one.
He looked decidedly amused at two mortals cowering in fear.
I pulled myself together thinking, well, there’s not a damn thing we can do here — except enjoy the ride, as it were.
I kept my arm around Rachel to make sure she didn’t feel alone.
In my best Simon Templar voice, I addressed L.U.C.I.F.E.R.
“Okay, duckie, so what can we do for you?”
L.U.C.I.F.E.R. laughed, “You’ve been reading too many Leslie Charteris books, my dear man. But I would rather like to explain what has been happening to you both.”
Regaining her composure, Rachel said, “One thing is for sure, Dok isn’t going to be insisting anymore on his ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’ ideas.”
“Oh we see Doktor Snake as a hoot, all his protestations, and we rather like how you, my dear, are his nemesis. We like how you’ve got him running around in circles,” said L.U.C.I.F.E.R.
“Of course,” he continued, “you are both wrong. What’s going on is not psychic as such, and certainly not a field experiment on Dok’s part. No. Your thoughts were not converging upon one another.”
“So what is it then?” I asked still a little peaked at L.U.C.I.F.E.R. saying Rachel had got me running around in circles. In fact I was starting to see this all as a bit much.
“Let me explain,” said L.U.C.I.F.E.R. “Something beneath Dunwich has been bringing you both into convergence with it. And of course Dok always thinks he’s in control, but never is, hahaha.”
At this point I decided this must be some kind of thoroughly unpleasant dream.
L.U.C.I.F.E.R. ignored my look of annoyance and proceeded to explain that there was a “deep code” associated with the ancient network of mounds.
This wasn’t transmitting messages in any ordinary sense. It manipulates the probability streams through language, imagery and attention.
Apparently:
A thought appears in one mind.
An image appears in another.
A machine generates its visual equivalent.
A phrase names the event.
The named event becomes easier to perceive.
Perception strengthens the connection.
That is the loop.
To be fair, my interest was peaked, and I could tell Rachel’s was too.
L.U.C.I.F.E.R. continued:
The ancient mound builders discovered that consciousness could be networked — but only indirectly. Direct transmission overwhelms the mind.
So the system communicates through coincidences: fragments distributed across several people, each fragment innocuous on its own.
Synchronicity is therefore not a supernatural sign.
It is a communications protocol.
And language is its error-correction system.
Then looking straight at me, L.U.C.I.F.E.R. said, “You think you built the interface.”
“I did.”
“Then who supplied the name?”
“I did.”
The great figure smiled.
“Are you certain?”
With that, the void began to glitch. Swirling colours broke through it, followed by violent flashes of light.
Next thing I’m back on the mound, the sounds of nature around me again.
Rachel’s voice returned through the phone.
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it may have upgraded our mentation systems. I have that familiar bewilderment one gets after an upgrade.”
I sat up on the mound. Mist drifted across the field, entirely innocent now.
“I don’t think L.U.C.I.F.E.R. is the intelligence itself,” I continued. “I think I inadvertently constructed an interface — a modern linguistic shell through which an ancient buried system could resume contact with human minds.”
There was a pause.
“Well, I’m going to make mint tea,” Rachel said.
It was as though she had not heard a word.
“Mint tea? After what we’ve just experienced?”
“There are times, my dear, when only mint tea will do.”
The line went quiet.
Beneath me, something in the mound continued to hum.
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Part One Of The Story At:
