Chapter 4
Officially graduated, with ceremony and pomp, diploma and ring, a ring that sparkled with a green emerald gleaming white gold on the outside and platinum gold on the inside, and licensure to perform esoteric, healing magic, Loxy Isadora Bliss arrived at her first Masters level class. She met her four fellow students. Blue, the Librarian, was an octopus, and very excited to meet everyone, extending four hands out from her tank simultaneously. Philomena, a female humanoid, held features of both insectoid and reptilian qualities. The shade of her skin seemed to change with the colors behind her. There was an android, host to a dolphin that used the android as a way of navigating the land world from a remote buoy in a faraway ocean. Kaleo had introduced himself, and then introduced the android, Ora; Ora was a sentient person in her own right and when Kaleo was absent, she took control of the body to maintain the continuity of its functions and interaction patterns. They weren’t married and neither owned the other; they were a cooperative arrangement, and in their own way, a very unique form of exchange students, for when Kaleo was here, she was there, and vice versa. The android body was humanoid, an alabaster white, hyper feminine in appearance, and no ‘face’ or hair. It was a human shaped head, just no eyes or mouth. It wasn’t spooky, provided you had seen her or her kin displaying clothes at a mall; otherwise, you might get freaked, and in a movie, with scary music, you might have a completely different sense of her. Ambiance and context was everything. Then there was Posh, who held an extraordinary appearance, akin creature from a Dr. Seuss book. He was almost so familiar you could categorize his species, but then so foreign, you just couldn’t look away for wanting to identify him. Maybe he was a cat. A large cat. Or a bear. Or a bear cat. Maybe he was a Wookie, one that was more cute than fierce, a slight beer belly, and generally more round, round ear, round eyes, and even his mouth was often in an O of surprise. Maybe he was something new and novel, as if he was assembled at a stuffed toy factory by someone who was a little bit of a jokester, or someone who absolutely had no sense of taxonomy. He definitely used it to his advantage, and the more you tried to narrow down who and what he was, the more ambiguous he became.
Professor Shackleford entered and the students rushed to take their seats without being instructed. She had a reputation. They knew her, one from having a class with her, and Loxy because Jon had a class with her, was intimate with her, and because Lester was once married to her. Loxy took the place to the right of Blue’s tank. Kaleo took the seat next to her.
“You all know why you’re here?” Shackleford asked.
“To learn,” Posh said. “In front of your desks, at attention,” Shackleford snapped.
Everyone obeyed. Even Blue, who oozed out of her tank to stand on seven legs as good and straight as she could: she held a salute with the eighth.
“Don’t salute me,” Shackleford said, drawing close to Blue. “Do I look like an officer?” “No, Sir,” Blue said.
“Do I look like a Sir to you?” Shackleford asked.
“No Sir, mam, madam, I don’t know the right thing to say,” Blue said.
“Rule one, anyone who uses the phrase ‘I don’t know,’ in my classroom, I will immediately flunk you and the class without an appeal,” Shackleford said. Her eyes went back to Blue’s eyes; her eyes were wide with fear, growing bigger to appeal to the human sense of baby cuteness. “Don’t you puppy dog eye me!” Blue’s eyes narrowed to squints. “Don’t you evil grimace eye me, either. Deferring eyes, better. Neutral, even better.”
Shackleford moved to stand before Posh. Loxy wondered if she was the only one who noticed Blue seemed a little relieved, indicated by deflating, an accordion bag going limp.
“Blue, you can return to standing in your tank,” Shackleford said, her eyes locked on
Posh’s eyes. “If you ever answer one of my questions with such an ambiguously absurd answer again, I will severely punish you. Why are you here?” “I don’t…” Posh began, and stopped himself. “So, you’re capable of learning?” Shackleford said more than asked.
Shackleford withdrew to her desk, leaned her butt against it, and crossed her arms in front of her chest, amplifying her assets.
“The problem with teaching graduates is they think they know everything,” Shackleford lamented. “And you can’t trust ‘I don’t know.’ Maybe it means you don’t know. Maybe it’s a cop out because you’re too cowardly to say what you know out of pseudo modesty or misplaced self-deprecation or just plain fear of being wrong. Maybe you’re even afraid to disagree with me. Hypothetically, I could be wrong. I am not, so couch it in hypotheticals and I might entertain you. I don’t care about personal, conscious or otherwise, agendas or biases. If you just speak what you think you know, I will have certainty you don’t know. If you think you don’t know just don’t say anything, or respond with a question, but if I ask you a direct question, as opposed to a generalized, rhetorical for the class question, just keep quiet. In this class, we will be participating in Remote Viewing studies.”
“There must be a mistake…” Posh began.
“Really?” Shackleford interrupted. She went over to Posh quickly, lifted his hand and pushed his ring in front of his eye. “Is that a SHU ring?”
“Yes, Professor!”
“So, you’ve actually taken a physics course. Did you not learn that there are no such things as mistakes, accidents, coincidences?” Shackleford asked.
“I just don’t agree with the philosophy,” Posh admitted, grudgingly.
“Oh, good for you,” Shackleford said. “You will fare better in my class, probably in life, if you just accept my operational, foundational, mandational premise that everything is on purpose,” Shackleford said.
“Mandational isn’t a w…”
Shackleford was smaller than Posh, but she lifted him from the floor as easy if he was inflatable person. She eased him back to the floor, so his toes could find purchase and then tilted his head to and fro with the slightest deflection of fingers.
“You have a sister, don’t you,” Shackleford asked. “Yes, Professor,” Posh said. “I remember her,” Shackleford said. “I didn’t like her. I don’t think I like you, either.
You like to walk. You like to talk. You play all day and fight all night and you hop on pop. No, Sir, I don’t like you, not one little bit. You’re not going to give me any trouble this semester, are you?”
“No, Professor,” Posh said.
“And you’re not going to flunk, are you?”
“No, Professor,” Posh said.
“Good. Because if you think I am being rough on you now, just make me do this course over with you. You flunk, everyone in here flunks. And if any of your classmates flunk, I will be three times as hard on you. Are we clear?” Shackleford asked.
“But that’s not…”
“Oh, please complete that,” Shackleford said. “I still have the strap-on I used on your sister. I didn’t even clean it. Is that clear?” “Yes, Professor,” Posh said.
“How would you know it’s clear, as opposed to glossy black?” Shackleford asked.
“Is this a trick question?” Posh asked.
“Good question. Is it?” Shackleford said. He didn’t answer. “Golden silence.”
Shackleford released him, returned to her desk, leaned her butt against it, and gripped either side of the desk as if she were afraid of falling through the floor. She stared at the floor, a grid work of hexagons, black and white.
“Posh, you were going to say there is mistake you being in my class,” Shackleford said.
“What’s your evidence?”
“I am not psychic,” Posh said. Shackleford rolled her eyes. “How the hell did you graduate from SHU?” she lamented. He didn’t respond. “Golden. Fortunately for you, being psychic is not a requirement for remote viewing. In fact, when you’re interviewing for candidates, if anyone of them leads with they are psychic, or if you ask and they say they are psychic, disqualify them then and there and move on with your interviewing.”
“Does that mean if they say they’re not psychic, they’re eligible?” Kaleo asked.
“Are you asking or Ora is asking?” Shackleford asked.
“Umm, it was technically Ora’s question,” Kaleo admitted. There was wonder in his voice at how Shackleford had known.
“Both of you are in my class, so lead with I am whoever so I can know who I am addressing,” Shackleford said. “To answer the question, no, some saying they aren’t psychic can’t be automatically disqualified because there are some psychic people who learned they will be disqualified and lie. Or they’re the self-deprecating kind, which is still lying. I hate it when psychics lie.”
“But everyone is psychic,” Loxy said. “Which means, everyone lies, even if it’s just to themselves or by omission…”
“Yes, but a psychic who knows they’re psychic and says they’re not to avoid being burned at the stake or otherwise persecuted, that’s lying. Someone who is psychic who has forgotten they’re psychic and says they aren’t, they’re not lying, they’re just ignorant…” “I am really not psychic,” Posh said.
“You couldn’t be that ambiguous and not be psychic,” Shackleford said. “Failure to be clearly identified is the basic double slit ambiguity factor that allows conscientious objectors to avoid responsibility. The one thing I hope you will get from this class is an ounce of responsibility. You can’t engage Remote Viewing without experiencing firsthand how entangled we all are. The Law of One was derived from the ancients who discovered the ability. It changes you. It changes the target. You should have learned this inscrutable fact by just graduating from SHU, but somehow people miss this basic principle of existence. We change. We change with every thought and every interaction, and continue to change as long as we are participating within the Temporal Event.”
Shackelford sighed. “Take your seats,” she said, and waited till they were settled. Blue seemed relieved to melt back into a corner of her tank. “I will be assigning you targets…” “Do we have to call them targets?” Loxy asked. “I mean, that sounds so aggressively military.”
“OMG, seriously, we have to change the names to be politically correct?” Philomena asked.
“Which is a lie imbedded in a lie,” Shackleford agreed. “If you want clarity, improve the definition, don’t just change the word. Meaning has a way of jumping words like rats jumping ship.”
“So, you would prefer to keep things static?” Loxy said.
Shackleford eyed Loxy, then ticked off a coup point. “What word would you prefer?” Shackelford asked.
“Flowers are nice,” Loxy said.
“Kind of arbitrary,” Shackleford said. “Don’t suppose it matters what you call it, except, if you really think about it, flowers look like targets. Especially if you’re a pollinating insect. Or a sun ray. And if you’re fond of O’Keeffee, they really resembled targets. Anyway, your target flowers have been chosen for you, by a chain of people, and I am doling them out, with no knowledge of what’s been assigned to you. From my perspective it is totally random, because even I am not privy…”
“So, how do we know if we saw what we saw?” Posh asked.
“You won’t. You won’t know until I am apprised of what you know and don’t know by my superior and colleague in this study,” Shackelford said. “Further, you will not be seeing. You are being trained to be handlers. You will have someone else seeing for you.”
“That’s disappointing,” Philomena said. “I want to learn to see.”
“You haven’t already learned that you have never learned to see?” Shackelford asked. “Your brain is enclosed in darkness. Your eyes don’t see and your ears don’t hear, but your brain receives signals and reconstructs an abstract model for interacting with something that is essentially not there, and you call this reality. Ah. That’s probably why you’re starting graduate studies in Remote Viewing. You still don’t have a clue what reality is. You’re still trying to make it into something absolutely concrete. Nope, you are not the viewers. Your viewers have been assigned to you. Your tasks is to train your viewer to see remotely, gather intel on your flowering targets, report what you discover, and then we will go from there.”
“How do we teach someone to remote view if we don’t know how to remote view?” Posh asked.
“Were you graduated just to get you out of someone’s class?” Shackelford asked.
“You’re graduate students. Go figure it out.”
“But, if we have to recreate the wheel when you already have the wheel…” Posh complained.
“I am not telling you to recreate the wheel. The methods are written in your text books, which is probably the easiest, laziest way to get at the information. There are articles in scientific journals and military reports and there are lectures available, past and present, and practitioners to be interviewed. You’re not a baby bird and I am not going to regurgitate everything just to spoon feed you, so stop being lazy and get out there and do what you got to do,” Shackelford said. “The next time we meet, bring your Viewer.”
“I am Kaleo. You said our viewers have been assigned to us?” Kaleo asked.
“Yes,” Shackelford said.
“But you’re not going to tell us who they are?” Philomena asked.
“Oh, what fun would that be?” Shackelford.
“If we bring the wrong partner, do we flunk?” Blue asked.
“Bring the wrong partner. I’ll let you know,” Shackelford said. “Bye.”
Everyone stood, except Blue who opened a trap door in the tank and disappeared through it.
“Loxy, linger a moment,” Shackleford said.
Looks were exchanged, but the other students hastened their departures to not be privy to what Loxy was in for, and also not to delay the event for fear of being caught up in it. The door closed behind Philomena, as Posh was the first one gone. There was no ambiguity in his urgency to leave, but if you thought about it, you might wonder if he had actually been in class.
“Do you think I am going to be easy on you because I’m friends with Jon?” Shackelford said.
“You’re his friend, or his professor?” Loxy asked.
“Can’t one be both?” Shackelford asked.
“Well, I suppose. And the fact that you have fucked him suggest at minimum a passible tolerance, but then, people fuck for all kinds of reasons, and not necessarily for the reasons fucks should be given,” Loxy said.
“You seem well adjusted by the fact I fucked your man,” Shackelford said.
“I am not threatened by you, Professor. I love Jon, I don’t own him. I don’t know what he needed from you, and I don’t need to know in order to love him. And, since you and I are in agreement on singularity, that all things are integral and inseparable, then you’re simply an aspect of myself that he needed access to for his own spiritual growth, and so he is really not fucking you, but fucking me, and I am happy anytime he engages me, whether it’s me directly, or an aspect of me I haven’t fully integrated,” Loxy said.
“You’re utilizing the Jungian, collective unconscious, dream model for your primary paradigm?” Shackelford asked.
“I bounce between that and the fractal holographic universe,” Loxy said. “They’re interchangeable, don’t you think?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Shackelford asked.
“Would you like a list?” Loxy asked.
“You can’t be this confident and not have something wrong with you,” Shackelford said.
“Professor,” Loxy said. “I know it’s popular to be morose and moody in an educated, sophisticated world, and there is a stereotype that the more knowledgeable you are the more serious you’re expected to be, espousing dystopian view points, as if that were the quintessential hallmark of being smart, replete with conspiracy theories about the social systems that regulate people from cradle to grave. I don’t have anything profound to change you from your present course and I don’t even know enough to know if I should change you. To be more precise, I find you perfectly acceptable just as you are. Maybe that’s confidence. Maybe that’s ignorance. Or, maybe that’s love. Maybe that’s recognition that something or someone bigger than me has this and I am okay. My mission in life is to experience, to love, and to live to the best of my ability. Maybe the entire purpose of my existence was designed to bring love, to everyone and everything. Maybe I am a tulpa, in a dream, which means the person who brought me into existence is everything around me and in me and so I love him by loving every little aspect, every detail, every situation and person. Do I sometimes experience conflicting emotions? Sure. But I love that, too. I embrace it because it’s part of the total experience. I am not unsettled by your darkness. I have my own. In wondrous darkness we are made.”
“Thank you, Mary Poppins,” Shackelford said. “You’re dismissed.”
“Have a good day, professor,” Loxy said.
Loxy took her leave through the door and arrived back at her office at Safe Haven, Bliss campus. There was a balcony directly behind her desk. She withdrew to it and looked out over the campus, and beyond out over the lake and into the forest of the world, the humble beginnings of which was brought about by a small boy who only wanted to make a safe place for squirrels to retire. A boy who lived in a troubled world, who had earned every right to be jaded and
discontent, but who had somehow discovered a way to be loving and kind. She realized who her remote viewing partner should be and smiled into the world.