The Sleepwalker's Journey along the Devil's curve.

I’ve heard tell people have hallucinations

that are more than somnolescent machinations.

Past lives reveal subtle inclinations .

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The day at work was hectic. As often happened, Eigen went home, tired and confused. The feeling hovered between a brain disorder and a hangover. She sensed the stench of offal and ordure that was usually undetected. She slept and felt herself dissolve into a plasma-like film in a sea of dark mud.

In her sleep, the lessons she had been taught came back to her.

With a thunderous explosion, the universe began. Earth was born of stardust. Then meteors brought essential amino acids that combined in a primordial ooze. Lightning electrified the surrounding acidic waters. Life began. Once there is one life, there are many.

At first, osmosis provided for needs and ridded wastes. Reproduction involved splitting. Mutations occurred. Two forms united into a symbiotic organism that provided each other a better option than the struggle alone.

Bacteria were the first organisms, and were now controlling humanity and most other life forms. Quorum sensing, with complex chemical and physical signals that coordinate inter and intraspecific communities, make them powerful.

Eigen awoke. Vague uneasy remnants of the dream remained. Yet, Eigen wanted to explore the message of her subconscious. She was the willing servant, ready to change the future. Yet, there was no choice but to work, eat the three rations of food supplements offered each day, and then return to her cell, confused and exhausted until she sensed the stench of offal and ordure and slept.

Eigen appreciated when her subconscious processed her thoughts. Each life is the product of many different lifetimes. New species evolve. Each holds a genetic message that revive the past. She concluded she was Frankenstein, an apocalyptic zombie. She depended on instinct driven by bacteria as much as the social and educational mosaic.

She awoke, went to work, ate the supplements and at the end of the day, weary through to her bones, she smelled the offal and then slept.

The self-centered ‘Divine Masters’, spawn of the god Mammon, were driven to compensate for their lack of spirit by their greed and drive to accumulate wealth. Eigen was a drone, manipulated by bacterial distillates that formed the neurotoxins, needed to control the masses.

She awoke and worked until exhausted, smelled the offal and then slept and let her subconscious explore.

Retirement age had been extended, so the period until death was reduced. Health care for the aged was not affordable. Only death could ease the financial burden on society and family. After death, individuals were recycled into the slurry of what would feed the next generation.

Eigen awoke. She carried on through the next day, eating the supplements, then exhausted, she sensed the stench and slept.

Eigen was an innovator. Her task was to control the structure of human hive society that was grasping onto a branch of the tree of life, which held many different fruits. She was inherently an altruist. The promises of a good life, and a legacy that would remain after death, assumed a repetition cycle.

Each next day at work was like the day before. She continued the bleak nightmare until she slept and dreamed.

Mathematically she applied her knowledge of the hyperbolic curves between spherical pathways of electrons and protons to see if there was an end to the repetition cycle. She concluded that there was no ending the repetition. Individuals had to return to the place where they had begun unless they could eliminate the root causes of suffering, namely ignorance, craving, and attachment.

As Eigen went through life, she realized that she was more awake when she was asleep. She came upon an image of two sticks that held the pattern of infinity within. This was the Devil’s curve (named from the Greek roots meaning ‘to throw across.”) that describes a quartic equation that uses four roots, such as length, width, height and time.

She saw the point of crossover, the X that marked the importance of a moment. It was the starting place for infinite possibilities of happenings and non-happenings. The still point held pure potential. It was the point of inflection all fluctuations, where the differential between binary polarities of zero and one cease.

Eigen awoke. She needed to alter her sleepwalking state. She accepted that you are what you eat. She reduced what she ate of her portions of the personal-sized meal portion jell packs, balanced for protein and carbohydrates, artificially flavoured and covered with edible oil byproduct and saved them to create a mega dose.

The surplus of the bacterial symbiote proved that physiological exhaustion and the stench arrived when it was consumed. With the excess bacteria, she slept before being exhausted and smelling the stench.

As a sleepwalker, she gained the ability to sink into the roots at the center. It was the source point of a nonlinear continuum. From the center she could move into the slipstream through intertwined gears that carried her high along the tree of life, where she could see what is below with much more clarity, or to the depths hidden in the mud.

The next morning Eigen awoke.

option A: She did not go to work, nor eat her rations. The bacteria that had remained inside her had multiplied. She was not dependent on the supplements but had a self-regulating source of the neurotoxin. This allowed her to communicate within the continuum of past and future lives, each with their own challenges, and not dream. She accepted the pressure of using her own past lives, each with their own challenges to live in the present while working with the Divine Masters. She no longer had to live the nightmare of being controlled by living without them.

option B: without the bacteria, Eigen withered and died as she continued in an endless sleepwalking state.

option C: Eigen woke up the next day. She was no longer in her own body. She had died and been assimilated into the food rations. Her bacterial overload acted as a virus that infected the hive. She was part of the divine Masters and was viewing the consequence, of the prey's destruction by her voracious predatory bacteria cohort.