The Big Rubber Ball in Space

By David Paul Martin

Within these passages lies a tale of atonement. Punishment, though not without compassion, is entwined with interplanar wars of apocalyptic proportion by the stoic tutelage of Halo, the Paladin Lord. Trespassers of his tenets try to salvage their dignity, yet groomed in discipline and tact are those that have caused offense. Through a training course which tests the very fabric of the soul, the lines of alter-realities, and the paradox of time travel intermingle. Planar defenders attempt to sew the rifts between tradition and innovation. Intimate knowledge of trespasses and morality of the spirit realm lie as a foundation for the physicality. The deviations of reality are played out in a hallucination that questions science, sorcery, and sexuality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662459993

Book preview

Absentia

I asked myself, How long can déjà vu last? At the time I wrote this, I’d had déjà vu for four years. The suggestion of my hallucinations is that I’ve died before my time and am reliving my past until I succeed in thwarting those that killed me. During the time I’ve been reliving my past, I’ve come upon opportunities to make my death mean something, rather than die fruitlessly. I am unsure if I did this in the first place, but the hierarchy relieves the dead once they’ve suffered the most. Until this time, we (meaning me) are requested to act as a scapegoat. It’s not difficult for me to be the fall guy; I’m already dead. Near this time in my life, I am approached by a God or angel.

This higher power is Genghis Khan. He teaches me to gamble with my life. This approach to life caused me to create tenets based on martyrdom. I’m told I will be relieved of my hardship once I am the worst off amongst the hierarchy of light metal all whole. In my hallucinations, the lighter the metal, the more good the tenet/individual. We each create tenets which are of each of an alignment. If someone has never made tenets, everything they’ve said, including their thoughts, elongate into one tenet.

According to my hallucinations, there are separate entities: the soul and the body. The soul creates tenets and decides the development of skill in the body. The latter is known as structure. We each, at every mile stone (known as a level), get to pick our skills, our abilities, and our powers—in my head, we all are caught in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, third edition—by stating, If only I had this skill or that ability. Each time a person has used this terminology, it has cued the structure to develop the body’s potential.

Other than the mechanics, we each apply to an alignment. Each alignment is represented by a metal. Tenets can be foiled or folded. Foiled is weaker, while folded is more entrenched in the alignment in question and more viable as a strategy. This brings us to planar chess. The gods, with their collections of planes of existence, are able to form their tenets, to create the pieces of a chess match. Once a few to several tenets have coalesced into a virtue, this creates the option for pawns. That said, virtues also accrue into penitents, which represents the rook, knight, king pieces—anything on the back line of a chessboard.

Tenets are created in sections of thirty-three. You have to create thirty-three, then by the statement, Let’s give her a start then, the tenets are loaded into your moral inventory, or immoral for that matter. A tenet is made up of five sentences, which can be a discussion on the topic and/or subject in question. Utilizing the name of a virtue, such as honesty, will not accrue the virtue. One must articulate the meaning, and with heart and mind, create something that has a meaning of a virtue. Each tenet made gives the pieces on the planar chessboard moves. Pawns hold thirty-three tenets at a time. Rook, knight, and bishop, sixty-six. King and queen, ninety-nine.

Other deities are needed to create pantheons, which are made up from the pieces of a chess game. They send envoys to do planar battle. The convoys can either be wholly of the deity in question’s tenets. Or a fastitute can be made, which is the usage of the king’s tenets, with the laws of the deity that sent the place on the board.

Tenets aren’t all that are created. There is also education, business, and law. Education requires two sentences; business, three; and law, four. Though it is a method of operation to use the full five from a tenet. Once your tenets are loaded, you can wiggle them into these three sections. The laws created by tenets develop your government type, whether communist, socialist, democracy, totalitarian, the list goes on.

I was introduced to the deity of knowledge calls a scrubber. The basic principle behind this utilizes synonyms to form as many tenets as can be made based off the original tenets, which can create more than one type of metal (alignment). The saying goes, Make sure the foundation [tenets] is solid, the buttresses [law, education, and business] firm, the attic [tenets you’re working on] not dusty, and the basement [sacrament] not disheveled. It is one of my tenets not to believe in rhetoric, thus I have by-laws, which allow people to get off legally, with the medium metal tenets. However, heavier metal tenets are illegal. I’ve scrubbed my tenets, and created heavy metal before. It took my third turn through déjà vu, of the description, to even use the scrubber for this. I didn’t agree with making evil tenets, but through this process, I learned to be more tactful, and through this, have changed those one or two tenets of heavy metal into tenets that cannot be evil. Tenets made with taboo opinions, or foul language, are oft heavy metal. Neutral tenets can make up virtues, but not penitents.

The scrubber, it’s a formula for creating tenets based on synonymous meanings. This method forms tenets based on any given tenet that has a synonymous meaning, and in no way contradicts nor is perplexing. I didn’t mention sacrament before, however, it is like a tenet, though six addendums long. Sacrament is considered a vow and/or oath in the spiritual sense of a religious focus. Vows are for mortals, and oaths are for gods. You can have either or both. The important part is creating ordinances for any vow/oath to care for and to enforce the sacrament of others. The ordinance, as it was presented to me, was to cater to vows that are oaths, and any oath, it not being necessary to cater to sacrament that’s only for mortals. That said, you could have your own wordage for a scrubber. The more moral a tenet, the less likely it will scrub into an immoral, unmoral, or even amoral tenet.

Mortals even have tenets, which the god(s) can utilize. The thing to remember is the tenets are made, are what drives the body, which is separate of the soul. It’s only possible to use one virtue at a time, unless you’ve been abjured with the virtue spell. This allows any number of virtues to be utilized simultaneously. If there is a penitent, the virtues that accrue to make it up, however, can allow multiple virtues at once.

The method, as it was taught, was to make every tenet quite explicit. Quite represents education, meaning all my tenets go from top to bottom, filling in business and law as well. Business is frank; one can do frankly explicit. There is law, which is explicit. After thirty-three tenets are all loaded, I say, That’s all quite explicit. The purpose behind this is obscure, however, one would think not to be a hypocrite. This formation of tenets, blended in entirely throughout the buttresses, affords the utilizer another section known as quite militant. This allows the soul to choose one of the sections from the buttresses, as something their body can enact, even when under the dominion of deity.

Service to those you have offended takes on a new form when dealing with my hallucinations. There are eight forms of offense: besmirchment, offend, accost, insult, abscond, larceny, treason, and blasphemy. If one commits another a sin, the offended receives the sinner as a servant; in other words, a thrall. The soul of the sinner is sent to the athema of the god, and has to abide by the laws of the god. At the risk of sounding sexist, I must report, those who have offended, go through a natural and spiritual adjustment of gender. Much of my hallucinations spend their time ball busting me into femininity. However, this is only one scenario, I will detail the others later.

This is no means to be chauvinist, as the offender is indebted to their god, not any male. Not to mention, anyone could offend another, like in my case. When I was young, at least I have a hallucination that I was a kid. In this hallucination, I am allowed to pick five skills. In my naivety, I asked the oldest god for a skill. This offended him, and I understand why, with time. However, he gave me a skill of a tenet. Research exact preference, reconnaissance preference, guile unpreferential, subterfuge sub-preferential, and espionage non-preferential." This is one of my first skills, and it has a lot to do with credence, ultimately.

I have my own tenet, which depicts that I won’t be convicted of anything I cannot be credent about. The things my body goes through, I have no clue about. The Bible, I was not there to make a judgement. According to my hallucinations, there is a difference between presumption and assumption. Thorites believed in this level of credence. Vastly presumable was something they were credent about. Grand presumption, moderate presumption, and mild presumption detail the level of understand of fact and hearsay. I’ve never experienced a lot of what my hallucinations tell me. Such as gender change, I’ve never experienced, so I have no conviction in this.

Other than a spiritual and natural form of alteration of gender, there is the scenario I dealt with as I trekked California. Three hundred and sixty miles of ball-busting later, I am confronted in my head with the belief that women were all beaten into position. This scenario suggests females have offended and were punished. Through breaks, bruises, sprains, and other forms of damaging the body, it was said to be how females were made. I don’t pretend to believe this, but it’s something I have gone through for over a decade. Despite medicine, I was told females had an aneurysm; that whatever part of the brain that conducted the offense became excrete.

The part of the brain which never is lost is known as the secondary instinct. Each race has a primary and secondary instinct. For example, elves’ primary is logic and their secondary is reduced anger. If an instinct is of a negative sort, it’s actually a part of the brain that is less used by the race in question. Gnomes’ primary is fact and secondary, concernation. I barely remember them all, but it was part of my training in hickor. Hickor is the brain, and paladins go through training of the mind. I had, at first, chosen to be a paladin. Though it’s possible to get seven tries at your own structure. Structure includes class, based in D&D 3.5e.

My own structure is known as a philosophy. I created it by finagling skills, and pointing out the primary abilities for defense are: wisdom, dexterity, and constitution. Another philosophy I use is training my resistances to be even, which are affected by those abilities. I choose classes, mostly, that utilize these abilities. This may sound like a game, however, in my hallucination, this is how we better ourselves. Finally, after I select my structure, I add according to the hierarchy and my own tenets. This keeps me from learning taboo affectations of any skill, power, and/or ability. Requests for skills go through the holy domain. If you happen to have a holy power or skill or ability, and it is honored, you have achieved the highest capability in the topic.

According to my hallucinations, there are five parts of the spinal tap. Starting from the right, known to the most the right even or furthest to the right pointing out the most you could do is honor, contrasted least the left even the left being the least you could do. Next to honor is unhonored. In the middle, perplexed. Next, contradiction. And finally, oxymoron. Our brain filters our knowledge through the spinal tap. Tenets are honored. Along with the aneurysm which helps recreate the neural net to not offend again. I dubbed education in my plane: neurosurgery.

Along with the scenario of females being beaten into the way they look, I deal with a hallucination that I’m trapped on a graphical interface, projected to my synapses, whilst a piece of cyberware cuts out part of my brain. That all females are actually transvestites. The problem with this is procreation. Again, I can’t be credent about birth nor can I be credent about this. The problem is it’s said that semen evolves, after being ejaculated, into animals. This leads me to the other issue, about this belief—if all sperm are born as animals and evolve.

I have hallucinations that eating animals is cannibalism. There are varied factions in my mind which agree with carnivores, and those that only accept vegetarians. This situation is a bit funny, but coexistence with animals—vegetarian—is preferred to vegan, which can also be seen by another faction as cannibalism. In El Paso, Texas, where I was homeless, I had hallucinations that my oldest friend was the one operating my sex change, and that milk from the breast is actually minced sperm and brain tissue. This reminded me of a hallucination from my walk in California. I had the impression of a Frenchman, feeding me dairy, like it was erotic; mayonnaise on that hand. When I went through El Paso, I had more hallucinations about this topic.

I saw spirits in red. Spirits of what seemed to be zombies from 28 Days Later. I say spirit because they were ethereal. My visual hallucinations started then. And I saw the zombies wading through the crowd. On the other hand, there is a scenario in El Paso that we’re an army fighting off cannibalism. Those that escaped required my help to do so. And Apollo appears to me in this place, switching out our arms. His arm containing sensitive information about the battle via cybernetics. I also daydreamed of my brother being trapped in this place and being turned into one of them. To this day, as I’m writing this, even, I’m horrified about this part.

According to my hallucinations, we are all in a graphical simulation, on an Imperial Star Destroyer. The ship run by a man I only know as Caster. The union of our societies outfitted the spaceship with Star Trek teleporters. And at the time, these spots of color in my vision, I visualize as them showing me the brains of those that I caused an aneurysm in. To me at the moment, he was a cannibal. Before this had come to pass, I had a hallucination of Caster. This dream was of mathematics. The problem with zero; that zero doesn’t exist. I explained it was an imaginary number. However, according to him, one must count from nine to eleven, skipping ten as it bears a zero, and throughout the rest of numbers.

Caster, in my dreams in El Paso, was an assassin. The tiring part I went through in San Pedro, California, was Caster’s Mind, in Carmine’s Mine. The theory is that Caster developed a cure to the common aneurysm. Hard drives were tiny cybernetics that registered the thoughts of the brain they were attached to. Later, in North Carolina, I hear the joke, and I’m still furious. Apparently, there was an error, and on boot-up, I had to select a portion of the brain, of Caster’s to mind-write to myself. I chose Caster’s austerity. Which, and don’t get me wrong, I have no conviction in this, the spinal tap would go haywire in a mortal. However, because I was a god, the spinal tap would reset whenever I returned to my home plane.

The girl that thought this was funny had switched honor, with frivolity. According to the hierarchy of my hallucinations, every God(dess) could choose how the spinal tap was aligned. Confusion, for perplexion, or oxymoron for hypocrisy, etc. I was torn between being upset, and nonbelief of my hallucinations. I try my best, but it can be difficult not to react to my hallucinations as though they are real. Even if I pass them off as figments, I imagine my body language and temperament portray me based on whatever I am imagining.

Section development: the portrayal of brawn; not being a brainiac. On my walk through California, I was approached with the idea of evolving our brains. According to my hallucinations, when another race is met, there is a chance to develop their primary instinct. If they enjoy you and you spend enough time together, the brain evolves their traits. The part of the brain previously there developed into muscles anywhere in the body, becoming instinct. I have a hallucination at this time that my leg has been