Beyond the cracked sidewalk, and the telephone pole with layers of fliers in a rainbow of colors, and the patch of dry brown grass there stood a ten-foot high concrete block wall, caked with dozens of coats of paint. There was a small shrine at the foot of it, with burnt out candles and dead flowers and a few soggy teddy bears. One word of graffiti filled the wall, red letters on a gold background: Rejoice!
The word “peace” was prevalent during the first Summer of Love, but the word “rejoice” exemplified the second Summer of Love, the one that followed the Watchers being revealed. To be fair, a few people did spot the Watchers during that first Summer of Love, but thanks to the prevalence of Lysergic Acid at the time, nobody took them seriously.
Who would have thought that a new epoch in human history would be ushered in by a night-time security guard who lived out of his Winnebago? Fairly luxurious accommodations compared to what many residents of the Bay Area had to endure. Block after block of people sleeping in their cars or in makeshift shelters tucked into the armpits of freeway overpasses. You don’t need to hide when everyone averts their eyes.
Jarrod had liked the night shift because he could park his motor home in the nearly deserted parking lot of the genetic engineering firm where he worked while he was on duty. It was a lot easier to get away with sleeping in your vehicle in the daytime and he had avoided being ticketed since he had gotten the gig.
Part of the giant genetic engineering firm’s campus was devoted to testing new drugs and therapies. There were hospital rooms that had one-way mirrors mounted on the walls so that you could see inside each one, unobserved by the occupants, as you walked down the hall. Most of them were asleep during Jarrod’s 11 to 7 shift, so all he saw were flimsy hospital sheets outlined by vaguely human shapes, sometimes an arm sprouting various arrays of intravenous tubing or a tangled halo of electrodes crowning the occasional head.
One night, after taking a few rips from his vape pen in the parking lot while on break, Jarrod saw something intriguing going on. In about half of the cell-like rooms, patients were sitting cross-legged on their beds with huge smiles plastered across their faces. Many of them had tears rolling down their cheeks. They were all staring into space in ecstatic oblivion. The other half of the patients appeared bored, laying on their beds with their hands behind their heads or simply asleep.
Jarrod didn’t know what a double-blind trial was, but he was not blind to the lucrative opportunity that this presented. Those people were obviously under the influence of some kind of bad-ass new drug. He knew a guy who lived in the tent city near the Berkeley campus. He had a job with a major chemical company, but he had gotten busted for manufacturing MDMA and had served a dozen years in prison. Despite his doctorate, he was having to work as a barista. Jarrod figured this guy could figure out what the stuff was and how to make it and they could make enough money to both get off the streets. All he had to do was get a sample.
He had done this before when he had stolen dilaudid from the hospital where he used to work. He had gotten empty bottles out of the dumpster and used a syringe to refill them with water. He had tumped over the cart that was on its way to a burn patient and pocketed his intended dose, crushing the empty bottle under the cart. Nothing was reported as missing and everyone was happy, even the burn patient who was quickly provided with a replacement. Jarrod had traded it for an ounce of some mighty kind weed. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could get away with on a regular basis, but all he had to do was get one sample.
It turned out that Jarrod didn’t have to overturn any carts or break any ampoules. Once a dose was extracted, the remainder in each ampoule was placed in a biohazard box that was sent off for incineration. The flames didn’t know they were consuming saline when he swapped the biohazard boxes.
At eight in the morning, after getting off his shift, Jarrod had stopped at the Coffee Lab, a miniscule café located in Berkeley’s chemistry department where his friend Pete, the disgraced chemist, was able to find employment due to a sympathetic former professor. When the rush at the window subsided, Pete joined him where he sat at one of several outdoor tables and set down a triple espresso latte in front of him. Jarrod extracted a quarter-full ampoule from his inner jacket pocket and set it down in front of Pete. They each contemplated what was in front of them.
“I’m going to have to do a liquid chromatography analysis to see what’s in this. Only then will I be able to tell what we would need to synthesize it. What is it? A hallucinogen? Some sort of amphetamine? A synthetic opiate compound?” Pete asked after holding the vial up to examine it in the sunlight.
Jarrod had another friend who worked security at LabCorp, where the urine specimens for his company’s drug-testing were sent. He was able to give Pete access to exactly what he needed to get a list of ingredients for the mystery substance. He looked like a teenager who had just gotten laid for the first time and was dying to tell someone. “It’s like a fucking skeleton key!” he exclaimed. “It works like a drug. It works like an enzyme. It works like a catalyst. It changes the way proteins bond. The way the benzene rings are arranged is an utter trip. This thing could rewire a brain. Not just change the way the synapses connect, but actually induce new and different neurons to form. What the fuck is this stuff? It’s like injectable neurosurgery.”
“All I know is that when people take it, they go out of their minds happy,” Jarrod shrugged. “And I’m going to go out of my mind happy if you tell me that it’s possible to manufacture this stuff. What do you think?”
“I’m going to make a little shopping list. Most of the items you’ll be able to get online or from a hardware store. Buying shit used from Craigslist and garage sales works great because its untraceable for all sorts of dual-use components. Some of the precursors are tightly controlled, but I still have a lot of contacts in the business. The thing is, I can’t be near any of this stuff. You’re going to have to make the payments and pick the stuff up. Once we have a lab set up, I can’t go near that either. I’ll give you detailed instructions so you don’t fuck it up, but I can’t go against the conditions of my release. You hear me?”
“I hear you, bro. I hear you loud and clear,” Jarrod grinned and nodded, “You’re telling me that we can make this shit, but as far as being a chef, all you can do is provide the recipe because you’re still on papers, right? I’m as dirty as anybody else, but I’m clean on paper. That’s how I’m able to work all these security jobs. I’ve never robbed a joint, but I’ve told people whether or not there was anything worth stealing and where it could be found, so I feel where you’re coming from. There’s some risk involved, but the less people that know about this the less ways we’ve got to split the money, so fuck it. Teach me how to cook the shit and you can stay out of the kitchen.”
Before they could proceed any further, the co-conspirators needed to gather some capital with which to finance their ad-hoc laboratory. Jarrod was dating a young woman from Alameda who was a dj/exotic dancer/prostitute/masseuse/drug dealer when she wasn’t delivering Uber Eats. She preferred driving food to driving people because people talked and that was the last thing she wanted to do after having spent all day in the service industry. She was given the unfortunate name “Lucretia” by her mother who intended it as an homage to her favorite aunt without realizing the weight its ugliness would eventually put on her new daughter. Her abuelo, Hector, started calling her “Lucky” before she was old enough to talk and the name stuck.
Lucky was able to line up some dancing gigs and escort work for Jarrod. He was popular because he was a rarity in the stable. He was straight and he was sporting a lumberjack beard that customers either loved or hated. Enough loved it to fill the pockets of his trousers, even as they lay on the ground, with enough money to purchase the parts and ingredients necessary for the lab. Now the only challenge was to find a place where it could operate undetected.
Another homeless friend was living on board a forty-foot fishing vessel that was being held in escrow as a disputed asset in an inheritance dispute between two siblings that was sure to drag out for years in litigation. Neither one of them was legally allowed to come on board the property until the matter came to its final conclusion in probate court. It was Kyle’s job to perform maintenance, upkeep and security on the vessel. It was surrounded by dumpsters filled to the brim with fish scraps that completely dominated the olfactory landscape with the stench of death and decay. It kept away casual onlookers and meant that any odors associated with the synthesis of the drug could only be considered an improvement.
Pete met Kyle at his apartment and walked him through all of the plans for the construction of the laboratory. He made him promise to keep everything within the temperature boundaries he had specified and had him do a dry run on measuring the chemical components by using laundry detergent and borax powder as proxies. Jarrod proved to be a surprisingly apt pupil. Who knows what he could have accomplished if he had different opportunities than those life had presented to him. Once Pete was convinced that Jarrod wasn’t going to set himself or the fishing boat on fire, he released him with a bear hug.
Eight days later, Jarrod summoned the entire team to meet at the boat. At some time in its less-than-illustrious career, it must have served as a brothel boat. It had three small, but nicely-appointed, bedrooms and a recreation area that featured a Blaupunkt stereo system, a bar, shuffleboard and an old Sony projection TV. Jarrod, Lucky, Pete and Kyle all sat on barstools watching as Kyle unpacked four large glass ampoules and a plastic bag full of disposable syringes.
Pete asked how he knew what the right dose was and Jarrod responded, “I seen them administer it through the glass at work. The syringes looked like they were about this size and I could see that they was filled up about this much,” to which he held up his thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart in pincer formation. “From what I seen, that ought to do ya.”
What happened next can only be cobbled together by the various stories given by those that were there, but of course they broke psychedelic safety rule #1. Somebody remains sober – or at least just drunk and stoned. It wasn’t exactly as if they had become intoxicated at any rate. It’s just that there wasn’t anyone there outside the experience to let them know that it was real and unadulterated. The most real experience that any one of them had ever had before in their lives.
At first it was like a profound acid trip. There was no feeling of separation between them. Their egos completely dissolved and they felt as if they were one. They felt ecstatic and unnecessarily bound by their clothes which soon littered the floor. They felt compelled to touch one another, stroking and embracing and kissing with no regard for gender or sexual orientation or marital state. Then reality itself seemed to strain at the seams. They could see that they were all like knots on the same piece of rope and that they were no more than shadows compared to the multidimensional beings that cast them. Beings whose light and color were so intense as to not normally be perceptible to the human eye, but these capacities were being expanded in these psychedelic explorers as the other components in the cocktail lifted the veil over their eyes that revealed that the kingdom of god was here all along. It was also revealed, a couple of weeks later, that Lucky was pregnant.
There was no discord or jealousy within the group. What they had experienced, changed them profoundly. Instead of trying to sell the new chemical like some sort of party drug, they were divided between having it studied scientifically as some sort of gateway into an elevated state of consciousness, or treating it more like some sort of religion, distributing the truth freely to all who seek it. History tells us that they did a little bit of both, I suppose, but they certainly did not profit monetarily from their discovery. They celebrated the birth of Jarvis, nine months later, and some old graybeards came bearing gifts of money, marijuana and sandalwood on the night that he was born. One left a celebratory note in spray paint. They knew immediately that Jarvis was different, but years later it became apparent to everyone, enemy and follower alike.
The kid got up onto a milk crate and raised his hand. A murmur went through the crowd and then it fell silent, except for a few people shouting words of encouragement at him. The kid acknowledged them with a nod and a shy smile. In the full light of day, he looked less angry and more beautiful. He waited until people stopped shouting. A siren could be heard, maybe five or ten blocks away. The kid raised the bullhorn, pressed the button, and began to speak.
“I do not greet you, for there is no I separate from we. There is a movement of love like the rising tide and a movement of fear like the falling tide. We are but the seaweed being cast in this direction or that. The tide moves but we are not moving the tide. We are not the tide. We watch the tide ebb and flow. We, and the tide, are being moved by forces that we cannot see. A tide that rises in another dimension pulls the watery depths of our subconscious here. How can you tell, when you can’t see what moves you, whether you should follow or resist? What indication do you have that your actions or decisions will be to the benefit or detriment of the multiverse? Rejoice! There is a signal available to you and I am the signalman!”
The kid had an extensive vocabulary because he had spent his entire life being interviewed by theoretical physicists and philosophers. He was like a tent show revivalist, with the exception that every word that issued from his mouth was not only believed, but true. For Jarvis, the material world was porous. Translucent. He could clearly see what lay beyond its bounds or, more accurately, what it was connected to. The “kingdom of heaven,” and its darker counterpart, were both a part of us.
“What about you, sir?” Jarvis pointed to a bearded man in the back of the crowd. “Yes, you with the striped shirt. What do you need to know in order to guide your decision? You have an important choice to make?” Jarvis held his hands in the air palms down, then lowered them slightly, causing the murmuring of the crowd to subside so that the man’s plea could be heard.
“Yes,” the man responded, “I’ve been offered a job that pays more than the one I currently have, but I would have to move my family out of state to Oregon. I feel compelled to take it, but I’m not sure what’s driving that decision. Is it my love for my family or my fear that we won’t have what we need? I’ve agonized over it.”
As soon as the man finished speaking, the crowd began to chant in unison. Softly at first, but gradually growing in volume and intensity: “Love or fear? Love or fear? Love or fear? Love or fear?” Jarvis thrust his palm out towards the crowd and they were instantly silenced. He studied the man, or a space above and beyond the man, for a few moments and then began to speak.
“I see what is connected to you, brother, and it is dark. You fear loss, yet that fear would be the very thing that causes the loss. Do not be moved by the darkness. Let it pass.” People standing near the man started patting him on the back and embracing him. A new chorus arose from the crowd, this time repeating the word “rejoice!”
There were many who thought Jarvis a charlatan, a criminal prodigy. But he never took money for his services and nobody had ever complained about the advice they had received from him. All he requested was a place for himself and his family to stay and some food. Of course, in those times, such commodities were becoming rare. Some thought of him as a mid-21st century Rasputin, attempting to curry favor with those who held the reins of power, but more often than not he revealed their Machiavellian schemes for what they were. His most ardent followers came from the scientific community. He had willingly submitted himself to their tests which revealed no fakery on his part. Several doctoral theses in physics had been written on the long-elusive subjects of dark matter and dark energy which Jarvis had revealed to be caused by the influence of “objects” and “forces” from beyond our perceptible three-dimensional timespace.
Jarvis was the first to point out that he wasn’t unique, however. There had always been signalmen whose perception bridged the dimensions. Regaled as shamans, gurus, prophets and messiahs, they were not bound by time or space yet bore witness to higher spheres of being from whose vantage point it became clear that we are one. Rejoice! Everyone remembers the second Summer of Love back in 2028, when he revealed The Watchers who had been using Dimensional Bridge Arcing (DBA) to access every point in three-dimensional timespace. They were only allowed to observe from a point just outside of three-dimensional timespace ever since they accidentally created humans when one of their craft broke down several million years ago and they did a little genetic tinkering on some apes so that they could help gather materials and assemble them for the repairs. They could not bring themselves to euthanize the several hundred beings they had created, so they left them to meet their end in the inhospitable wilderness. That small population evolved and became us. We are going to evolve and become The Watchers.
One of the manifestations wrought by the Bay Area’s proximity to this interdimensional intersection is the fault system that plagues the area. Jarvis held a huge festival at Golden Gate Park and there was plenty of what people had come to call “the serum,” the concoction that Jarvis’s dad, the corrupt security guard Jarrod, had stolen and synthesized years before. It allowed its users to experience the world as Jarvis did for a few hours, but it was enough. Enough for them to see the huge ship that was parked over San Francisco Bay. The hull was ionized and the charge was an alternating current that alternated at the speed of light. This caused the illusion of a glowing or highly reflective disc. It also induced a sort of interdimensional plasma state which was why airplanes from Oakland Airport and San Francisco Airport had been able to fly right through the craft for decades and not even know it.
The governments of the world could no longer lie. They had known about the watchers since the early twentieth century, but saw no reason to inform the general public that the world as they knew it was in thrall to the future. A number of futures. The exact number of possible futures goes up and down with each decision that is made, whether by protons, men or galaxies.
While the same truth was revealed to the entire world, it was received in many different ways. People used the presence of The Watchers to support whatever views they already possessed. For the Christians, they were either angels or demons. For the Hindus, they were vimanas from the Bhagavad Gita. For atheists, they were interdimensional beings with a level of technology that was indistinguishable from magic. For the Jarvinians, as the followers of Jarvis had come to be called, it was about a more sophisticated understanding of the laws of cause and effect. An entire realm and its influence were missing from the laws of Newtonian physics and Jungian psychology. The population in general believed that the Jarvinians could see otherworldly influence on the affairs of this world, but opinions were divided on whether this power made them valuable allies, simply benign or dangerous.
There was a significant minority of people who were violently opposed to Jarvis and his followers, and they sent an emissary to the second gathering in Golden Gate Park, held to mark the first anniversary of the revelation of The Watchers. The carbon fiber weapon with the telescoping titanium barrel belied the professional status of the gunman. It was tucked inside a bag of lenses that also served to corroborate his cover as a photographer. He had no qualms. The assassination of a child merited four times his usual fee.
The Watchers were forbidden from perpetrating acts of violence to preserve their timeline, but they were permitted to defend people who were essential to the realization of their future. For this reason, they had surrounded Jarvis with a traumatic field. Any force or object directed at the field would return to its point of origin. This boomerang effect was accidentally discovered by US Army river patrol boats in Vietnam. When they fired upon a UFO, it returned fire that sank their vessel. The rounds recovered from the wreckage had come from their own guns. Most of the crowd at the Golden Gate Park event had their love and adulation returned to them. The would-be assassin had a .223 copper-jacketed hollow point returned to him.
While Jarvis’s life was saved, the incident created a number of problems for the Jarvinians. Their reputation was sullied by the fact that a man was killed at an event that was supposed to exemplify peace, love and understanding. Nobody paid any attention to the details, such as the fact that the victim was armed. Ballistics showed that the fatal shot came directly from the stage, which put Jarvis’s security team front and center in the investigation. The flames were fanned across the Internet by the Chinos (Christians in Name Only) who had hired the hit man, but they weren’t the only ones who were concerned.
Jarvis’s parents, Jarrod and Lucky, were unnerved by the attack because they knew that he was the intended target. While Jarvis was the one who came up with the events and ran the show, he was still dependent on his parents to sign contracts and take legal responsibility until he reached the age of majority. They usually deferred to him, but the attempted assassination spooked them badly. He wasn’t just the messiah of a new evolution of human consciousness, but their son. It was hard for them to determine whether their desire to protect him stemmed from love or fear.
“Mom, I’m going to be fine,” Jarvis told Lucky when she expressed her concerns. “If anything, what happened should bring you a sense of relief. The Watchers stopped a bullet that was headed straight for me. What better protection could I have?”
“It’s not that, baby,” Lucky said. Motherhood and the Jarvinian movement had both altered her entire reason for being. Her former life was like a cautionary story about somebody else. “It’s the fact that there was somebody out there who hated you so much that they wanted to kill you. It’s that level of hate that’s freaking me out. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“They don’t hate me, mom,” Jarvis said, looking for all the world like a child reporting an incident with a bully on a playground, and in some respects that was exactly what he was doing. “They’re just afraid of something they don’t understand. Really, they’re afraid of themselves, afraid of what they might be capable of. Afraid of their connection to the great beyond.”
“And what I’m afraid of,” Lucky responded, “is anything happening to you. It wouldn’t matter to me one bit why someone would hurt you. I just can’t imagine the world without you. You’ve made a difference in so many people’s lives, but mostly mine.”
“So, what do you want me to do? I can’t cancel the events that we have planned. People are looking forward to receiving answers to their questions. Many have put off decisions that they should have made long ago, waiting on me to give them the blessing. I do need to stop, but first I need to show people how to figure things out on their own. I’m not that special. Everybody is connected to the great beyond, they’re just blind to it. They have to figure out what’s there by the influence it has on what they can perceive. Once people are able to do that, then I can step back.”
Jarvis was true to his word and did just that. He used his most trusted associates, his parents, along with Pete and Kyle who were just as much a part of the family, to determine how the influence of the higher dimensions can be inferred by careful observation of the context of any given situation. He collaborated with Jarvinians who were experts in the fields of probability and statistics and computer programming. They produced an application called “Jarvision” where the user could input all known facts and observations surrounding a situation and the algorithm would generate a response that stipulated the odds of it being influenced by the great beyond. A response might be something like “88% EDI” which meant that the event had an 88 percent chance of being influenced by extra dimensions.
The application became an overnight success and, even with the price kept down to a dollar a download, it generated millions of dollars in income for Jarvis. The other thing it did, which was much more important for Jarvis and his family, was to free him from the touring circuit that he had been on since he was five years old. He was able to celebrate his twelfth birthday with pizza and cake and ice cream. A magician, wearing a superhero costume, absorbed the type of attention that was normally reserved for Jarvis and he had the time of his life. His withdrawal from public life, however, did not mean that he was forgotten by his enemies.
The next attack that came was not on Jarvis himself, but was a carefully crafted piece of malware that rendered Jarvision completely useless by causing it to generate false probabilities. Nobody was sure exactly when the virus originated because users simply assumed that the information they received from the app was accurate, but complaints started coming in. When the IT team that had helped to create Jarvision examined the affected apps, they discovered that it had been compromised by a virus of such sophistication that it was extremely unlikely to be the work of a lone hacker, but was most likely sponsored by a nation-state.
A patch was created, but it was more than just the program that had been compromised. People could no longer trust what they saw on their screens. The patch worked, but it made Jarvision seem vulnerable. They projected their own thoughts and fears and desires on the EDI percentages that they viewed. There was only one way for Jarvis to restore faith in the system. He had to return to the circuit and personally corroborate the information that his followers held on their screens. He soothed his parents’ fears by reminding them that he still had a top-notch security team and was protected from physical attack by the traumatic field.
There was a Jarvinian who came to see him at an event in Bakersfield. He wasn’t a Chino, but a real Christian. He feared for Jarvis. He feared that he would suffer the same fate as Jesus of Nazareth, that he would be transformed into an idol or graven image and elevated in importance above his message. The Christian’s great-great-grandson was going to be a genetic engineer that pioneered the science that would give rise to The Watchers. Jarvis had already served his purpose in their evolution. Jarvis crumpled to the floor of the stage. One future wept while another rejoiced.
Literature in Small Doses 