The year is 2002, and mdk is sixteen years old. I've discovered my passion for writing, and in the process, the joys of escapism and teenage angst. Into that mix, throw some fantastic dark movies -- mostly the Matrix, but also Sixth Sense and Fight Club other psychological thrillers, which were new at the time (and certainly new to me). Basically, what I'm trying to get across is, I was the perfect mixture of creative and receptive and I guess boredom-induced experimental at the time. Somehow the idea got into my head, and took hold, that the world is not the world. There is a way around it, behind it, through it, which might be considered supernatural. Cave theory shit. I've always been bright in some ways, and super-gullible in others, so I was able to reason a way by which all of this made perfect sense, and in the process of that, I came on an idea of how to break out of the lie. To escape the Matrix, I suppose. The method was to take your conscious self out of the equation -- the conscious mind is deceived and cannot be trusted, but the subconscious is incorruptible, or that's what I thought. There was a method online (online was new, at the time, too) that explained how to access your subconscious by free-writing -- remove all thought, pen to paper, write from the soul. But that wasn't good enough for me, I wanted to interrogate my subconscious. So I modified the method. Tweaked it. Now, instead of just stream-of-thought, I would ask a question to my own soul, and let my soul answer it. If I asked, 'How am I feeling today,' and then entered I guess a pseudo-meditative state and just allowed my fingers to type, my fingers would naturally tend to tell the truth. "I am bored today." At first it was silly and cheeky -- like kids playing with a oija board, asking stupid questions. Gradually though my interest in the grand mysteries of life drove me deeper into this meditation, and the meditation took on another air entirely. My subconscious began to address me differently. When I asked, 'How am I feeling today?' my fingers would respond, 'You are not happy.' I wasn't speaking to myself anymore -- or maybe I was. But what my young mind came to believe was, somebody else was typing back. That conclusion, of course, helped along by all that dumb shit I'd been watching on TV, but regardless, that's where my imagination took me. That now, through my own subconscious thoughts, I could ask questions to a being that had no physical form. An imaginary friend, maybe, but more than that. The crazy part is, this friend knew things. I didn't use my name when speaking to him anymore -- I needed a codename, you know, like those cool hackers from the Matrix had. I was DoubleCross, or ++. He had a name too, but I don't remember what it was -- let's say Porter. Porter knew things. Things that Porter couldn't know, because Cross didn't know, I didn't know. Things that hadn't happened yet. One day Porter told me that I could be freed, but it would cost a precious life. I didn't understand the horror of what he'd typed, with my own fingers, until I read it. No. NO, I said, that isn't going to happen. 'Is it worth it?' he asked. 'This could be the only chance we ever have.' I didn't know what he was talking about. "No, Porter. That's not who I am." That was our last conversation. That night, I got a call from the hospital. My mother had been driving my cousin home from school, and hit a patch of black ice. The car spun into oncoming traffic and shattered two vehicles in a 90 mph head-on collision. They had to pry away the other driver with the Jaws of Life; my mother and my cousin walked away *literally* without a scratch. I wondered for a long time if that was the chance that Porter meant -- that they could have died, if I had only wanted it. More importantly, I wondered, 'How did Porter know this would happen? What is Porter -- really?' I still don't know -- but some years later, I had another experience which illuminated to me the nature of what Porter was trying to do. What he meant by 'I could be free.'
All I had to do..... was die.......... stay tuned.......
All I had to do..... was die.......... stay tuned.......
