Part 9 of some new science fiction. If you're just tuning in, consider starting with part 1. The image above was created with stable diffusion.
After a massage followed by a sauna, James took a nap and woke up as the sun was setting. The wind had died down, so he went back to the beach and built a fire. Janet stood while James sat on a section of weathered log, eating materialized little sausages with spicy kimchi. Before long, the man in the brown jacket from earlier walked up. "Mind if I join you," he asked, sitting down. "I'm Ed. Nice night for a fire. Want a brewski?"
"I'm good," said James, finishing his last little sausage. "But I'm about to take mescaline if you want some."
"No shit?" said Ed. "Well, my wife will probably kill me, but how could I say no to that?"
"Mescaline?" asked Janet.
"You in?" asked James. "If you want, I can materialize it directly onto your tongue so you can tell your higher ups that you didn't have a choice."
"Thanks, but someone has to babysit you," said Janet.
A few minutes later, once James and Ed had each taken small blue pills, Ed began looking nervous. "Probably should've asked before, but what exactly am I in for?" he asked.
"You've tried LSD?" said James. "Like that, but it lasts longer, and the hallucinations are of a different quality. More shapes made of neon lights than worlds melting."
"Cool," said Ed. "I guess you do this all the time?"
"Not since I was eighteen," said James. "But I'm looking for something. A new perspective. Maybe an insight. We'll see."
"I've got an insight for you," said Ed. "What do Jeffrey Epstein and Sam Bankman-Fried have in common? Give up? The CIA."
"Please don't tell me you're one of those," said James.
"No, hear me out," said Ed. "Epstein's lawyer Alan Dershowitz, the one who worked magic with Florida prosecutors way back, also did a bunch of strange diplomatic work in the Middle East. If he wasn't CIA I'll eat my hat. Now, the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell is all over Bankman-Fried's bankrupt exchange FTX. And they've been doing CIA work since at least 1954, when they were involved in a coup in Guatemala."
"Okay," said James.
"Now I'm not saying FTX was a CIA operation," said Ed. "But I'd bet money on there being FTX depositors who are CIA assets."
"I guess I can see that, but so what?" asked James. "Janet, what do you think?"
"I think the suspicion seems warranted, and also don't see the point in such speculation," said Janet.
"Just making conversation, is all," said Ed. "Figured you must be tired of talking about the Visitors."
They stared at the fire in silence for half an hour. Suddenly Ed jumped up. "Oh shit!" he said in a distorted voice. "Rainbow snake!"
James laughed as Ed ran off without further explanation. Janet finally sat down. "Does your altered state impact your use of your Artifacts?" she asked.
"Let's find out," said James. A minute later, two mugs of steaming hot apple cider appeared on the ground in front of them. "All good," he said, trying the cider. "Should I try something more complicated?"
"Please," said Janet.
Closing his eyes to focus despite the hallucinations he was experiencing, James said nothing for thirty minutes. Eventually, a boxy shape appeared in the shadows at his feet. Picking this up, Janet saw that he had materialized a rugged laptop computer. "Did it work?" she asked.
"Checking now," said James, opening the laptop. "Looks like the computer works, but the program I tried to create on it isn't working."
"What program?" asked Janet.
"I wanted a program that let me see through any camera in the world," said James. "But all I'm seeing here is a security feed in some office building somewhere."
"Still quite impressive," said Janet. "Will you let me take that machine back with me to study it?"
"No prob," said James, closing the device and setting it aside. "What next? Oh, I know."
Five minutes later, a strange contraption appeared next to James. A mechanical dragon, five feet tall, with innards that glowed like the heart of their campfire. Touching his nose to the dragon's, James received a cloud of smoke in the face.
"Is that ... ?" asked Janet.
"A mechanical dragon powered by burning hash?" said James, coughing and grinning. "Why yes, it is."
"I must admit, you aren't at all what I expected," said Janet, smiling at his childish antics.
"I'm not at all what I expected, either," said James. "I know what the Visitors did to me. But I still feel like they did things to me that I can't understand. Changed me in ways I can't understand."
"What does it feel like, the change?" asked Janet.
"Imagine a picture," said James. "Where you look at it, then look back at the world around you, and suddenly that world is different. Like, the world itself didn't change. All that changed was you looking at the picture. I feel like the Visitors showed me a picture like that. Only I can't remember the picture itself. Or the exact moment it happened."
"Did they ever share with you how their materialization or teleportation technology works?" asked Janet.
"I'll tell you, but only if you nuzzle the dragon," said James.
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