by roving reporter Shaun Grub
Buried deep in a subarctic cache of heavily encrypted information held in stasis behind a frozen firewall of top-notch sophisticated perimeter-defense tech lay an encoded section of passages detailing the activity of two highly classified personnel whose involvement in a covert episode taking place in a restricted section of Arkansas woods has brought one deep-state agent's concerns to the fore. He has been monitoring the two teenaged boys for several weeks.
Beforehand...
Hoping the temperature would not rise so high as to begin boiling his brains like sautéed mushrooms in a pan, he began thinking cooling thoughts and recollecting long ago days trapped in the ice and snow caverns of northern New England, with his Grub brothers. They'd often joked about being "ice elves."
During many past adventures, the Grub Bros' molecular make up had been beamed across the multiverse too many times to mention. They had been caught marauding in un-registered domains long before the Parameters of Tik-Tok-Tak had been secured. The peculiar thing about these high energy plasma transmissions (which occur electromagnetically) remains a mystery that only one of the legendary duo happens to have retained, and this underlying secret (that of which of the two brothers has the cipher) was known only to the singular Grub brother in question.
Thus begins the story that has not yet been fully told. It is a story of wonder and absurdities. Of adventure and woe. It is not a story for the faint of heart, or the easily dismissive of cooperative properties and quantum entanglement. It's a story for those persecuted by the virus of belief. For those readily addicted to the mechanics of truth, in all its many guises (including deceptive variants and off-putting misnomers). For the rest, it's a story that absolutely must be heard.
There are several things that should first be made clear, except for the fact that a few of the aspects won't be possible to convey in this medium we are currently in. That is neither here nor there. It's not really necessary to relate all the minutiae of our tale. Many things will fall into place when they are ready to.
A dark winter silence fell upon us, of the extended Grub tribe, when word spread that our heroic brother in arms, Amra Crysten, had fallen on the battlefield during a medicine run for his mother. The past few years since have proven rough for a variety of reasons, the least of which may have been the global novel coronavirus pandemic that swept the world into virulent upheaval.
Now the fading alarm resounds among our timelines like the sound of a gong drowned in memory. An ancestral shudder passes through each one of us while remembering our recently fallen brother. Four years have passed, a mere tetrad of annular celebrations for us; some spent in our homes in quiet contemplation, others spent in the mountains camping out under the stars on cold winter nights, where our breath froze into plumes and the moonlight lit up the forest paths with criss-crossed shadows draped over tree trunks and branches. For each member of our extended Grub tribe, the spirit of our fallen brother yet remains barely concealed amid the shadows between the trees.
In the world built of our memories, many graveyard scenes arise before us in our dreams. With the sky a dim-witted kaleidoscope of muted colors barely glimpsed through brooding thunderclouds, and the trees' branches reaching out creepily in all directions, with their fingers extending and bending toward us in the shadows of the night, we locate a crooked headstone in the repository of our vision to sit down and lean against on the cold wet ground.
I have come to realize that I've been captivated in the heart of the forest of my mind. What I never could have understood until now is how that primeval timberland has grown outward in all directions, including omnidirectionally across all of time. It occurs to me that the seeds of memory become the anchors that keep us rooted to the world of our dreams. With this knowledge dawning upon my consciousness, a smile is at last imparted to my face.
I can hardly wait to see you again, my friend. I feel you had begun to understand the pact I had made after having undergone my new adventure as a father to an extraordinary young little man. Suspecting he will grow up to not remember you fills me with an echoing pain. So I try my best to remind him of you, by keeping the paintings you made of us hanging on our walls. By showing him the photographs of you and I and the rest of the Grubs during our adventures in the SCA and other times.
Viridian, who never stopped moving, not in all those years of constant adventure across the myriad provinces of synchronicity we managed to secure across our high-wire balancing act. Here and now, I feel like the prince has grown and earned the comb of a crown to display, like a rooster standing guard over my young. If this means the roots will begin to develop from me and invariably fasten me to the spot, I'm prepared to make the best of this new home I've built from the ground up, and in no small part do I owe much of it to you, my dear friend and soldier in arms, Gregory Grub.
The panoramic vision that bequeathed our Dream has recorded the majority of its labyrinthine majesty, from deep down in its darkest hidden crevasses, and on up to its most brilliant displays of starry-studded nights, and on and on into bright sun-dappled days never to be forgotten, on the glittering surface of a gently rolling Caribbean sea, on a nineteen-foot dory without any land in sight for three hundred and sixty degrees. All of these details and more have been embedded and processed by the new upgraded Dream Machine we used to think of as our brains, and the best news is AI algorithms are partitioning sections of it off for storage one at a time based on experiential proximity with IP protocols! You know what this means already, because that part of your Overbrain retains the data after having circumscribed the temporal facility even once. In other words, I have reason to believe, for lack of a better way to describe it, that your 'Undermind' had already scooped up the raw necessary data while you were yet alive!
For now, suffice it to be said that the ever-growing branches from the original great tree (located somewhere in the vast reaches of the Neverending Forest we both used to explore in our youth) can never be lost to the depths of time due to the Silver Thread that connects us. It turns out the mycelial network supporting us and all life as we've known it has been proven to continue flourishing in every conceivable way which our minds could fathom, and it just so happens to encompass the totality of our compounded human imaginations. How do you like that! Now that you are here with me, subsumed into my mental construct of who you were, I carry you around inside my head like the shade of a ghost that will never fade away.
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