Prologue

In the world from which all possible worlds emerge it is always night time. In the night time dwell two dreaming cousins. Both of these dreamers are ancient enemies unable to dream together. Thus, the dreamers have come to a truce. Whilst one of them is in a waking dream, the other sleeps and is trapped in a nightmare. Between the night time realm and all other possible worlds there exists a series of thin veils. These veils are the web spun by Grandmother Spider. She is the Great Grandmother of both dreamers and all their descendants. Whilst lucid dreaming or loosing the plot, many of us have flown through the veils between the worlds. Most of the time we get caught in the web and stuck in one type of world, which we then mistake as ‘the real world’.

 

The people of the Altered States of Mania are descendants of one of the two dreamers of the night time realm. The O’manian tribes (from which most Psyberians originate), are the descendants of the Great Wolf Mother known as ‘Snow White’. At present Snow White has been sleeping for one hundred years, held there by a poison thorn in her side and contained within a cryogenic chamber. The waking dreamer is known as the Translymanian Vampire Queen Scarlet Riding-Hood.  When the people of The Altered States post their stories into the multi-worldwide web, these stories bleed through into the night time. Scarlet feeds off them and she and her descendants grow stronger and richer. The moon in night time wanes under Scarlet’s waking dream. Scarlet’s waking dream is Psyberia’s nightmare. Her aim is to keep all Psyberians locked in a waking nightmare and never let them dream freely.

 

Grandmother Spider links the immortal world, with all worlds that have ever existed and have never existed. She spins the web of stories from which Psyberian’s spin their yarns and from which every worldwide web in all possible worlds is intrinsically linked.

 

When Snow White wakes up and breaks out of her cryogenic coffin, part of the web that covers her coffin will be broken.  When this happens, what happens in The Altered States will no longer be dependant on what happens in the multi-worldwide web. The threads that connect these worlds and other worlds will be broken. Psyberians will more easily be able to fly through the veils between worlds without getting stuck in a particular reality. 

 

When part of the web is broken, Grandmother Spider will start to re-spin her web and the stories that bind these threads together. The worlds as many people know them will change. No longer will we see ourselves in terms of a part we play in a story, but conversely, we will see the stories for the part they play in us. Grandmother spider will call upon her descendants to help her re-spin the stories and the threads that unite them. Special Agent Psyberians will set free the Wolf and capture the Vampire Queen Scarlet Riding-Hood in the great web. This period of freedom will last for one hundred years.

 

This once-upon-a-time is upon us all.  Grandmother Spider now calls upon the Big Bad Wolf to spin the yarns of Snow White.  As the Wolf wakes up in her world, the special-agents of Psyberia must sleep in theirs and dream the new world into being. Those residents of the Altered States who are descendants of the Vampire Scarlet Riding-Hood will wake up to themselves when their queen sleeps. They will come to learn the reality of their addiction to the ‘happy-ever-after’. This lesson may take them another hundred years.

Chapter 1

Someone must have reported Kay Joseph. She knew that she was of no immediate danger to herself or others, but, one morning, she was WARPED under section 22.5(b) of Psyberia’s National Wellbeing and Recovery Protocol, (WARP). 

 

Every morning at eight, Samsa, (her holographic case manager) would appear in Kay’s room in the assisted recovery compound (aka the ARC, level 5, East Border Ward), and tell her that it was time to get up. This is not to say that Kay always got out of bed when she was told to do so, but usually she made the effort of waking to her Psy-Watch alarm before the Psy-Message came. 

 

To refuse to get up would result in a ‘warning’. On the other hand, much like the nurses on the Virtual Psyche Ward, holographic case managers could not in any real sense physically drag anyone out of bed. However, what they could do, as Kay recalled with a shiver, is to send optical-kinetic/sound Psy-Bites in ever increasing frequencies through her Psyber-Net implants and Psy-Spy bio contact lenses. The result was tormenting voices and visual-kinetic hallucinations that forced the patient into compliance. Kay knew that she had been ‘bitten’ by these high frequency mega-bites on numerous occasions, but the experience was a bit like waking from a nightmare that left her with a cold sweat and a gut-wrenching feeling of horror, without actually being able to recall in any coherent way what it was she had been dreaming. Much like nightmares, the ‘Psy-Bites’ could appear to go on for months, when in real time the experience had only lasted a few minutes. It was, Kay imagined, like getting sucked into a black hole where the game of life and death gets warped around itself and all the rules as you know them change.

 

At best, a Psy-Bite experience was like being yelled at and dragged out of bed, but there were always higher frequency mega-bites that could do a hell of a lot worse. Compliance always resulted in an optical-sound hit or (Psy-Fix) that mimicked endorphin signals and eased the morning anxiety known by most as ‘the fear’.  Kay felt her main reason for compliance was to dispel ‘the fear’ and avoid getting bitten. Her prescribed medication wasn’t really working very well, and she was not really one for a free fix of the plug-in-drug. Her recreational drug of choice was Cat-A-Tonic.

 

Her stay here in the ARC meant that she had earned ‘privacy privileges’. She was not obliged to enable the live psyche-ops that enabled online friends, family and virtual health care professionals to follow her daily activities on the Psyber-Net through their Psy-Watch devices, Psy-Spy bio-contact lenses and Psyber-Net implants. However, like most people, Kay took comfort in the fact that her friends, family and case manager could watch over her, especially while she fell asleep. This gave her a feeling of safety and she always felt uneasy when the psyche-ops were disabled.

 

Last week, Kay had been given a warning for missing her virtual support session. She was unsure of what a ‘warning’ actually meant, since no one had explained that part to her. She had guessed that after a certain number of warnings, she might get bitten by a Psy-Bite she had not yet encountered. Maybe it would be something much worse than that, like becoming a target of Psy-Kick attack?

 

When Psyberia was established as a quarantine and processing island, the elite High Permaniacs in the southern Altered States of Mania created the ‘Psyber Skin’, an anti-viral nano-tech psychic defence barrier around Psyberia’s borders. On the 7.30am news this morning, Kay heard more reports of violence erupting through the ‘Psyber Skin’. The Transylmaniacs had invaded through The Skin and were now penetrating the minds of the higher functioning Psyberians.  Psyber Skin Hackers and Psy-Kick Investigators, like Kay’s friend Adam, were particularly prone to Psy-Kick attack, as were users of Cat-A-Tonic. The recreational

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Maria Marsden (2018)
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 15.08.2018
ISBN: 978-3-7438-7796-2

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Widmung:
This book is dedicated to all survivors of the psychiatric system and to all those people living on the autistic spectrum whose sensitivities and abilities are misinterpreted by mainstream society. This is fiction based on the authors experiences of the psychiatric system