The Templar Cartographer: London Oniric Exchange, #2

By Cristian N. George

The Templar Cartographer describes the experiences of a survivor of the cataclysm that decimated humanity. Alexandre Deschamps was living a normal life in Paris with his wife Daphne when an eerie light enveloped the city and reduced it to rubble. A climatic catastrophe had destroyed irremediably the planet, and post-apocalyptic tribes began to organise themselves socially once again. Floyd, one of Europe's Silicon Valley Templar missionaries, rescues Alexandre from the brink of death and, integrating him into the order of new civilising heroes, appoints him as the Temple's cartographer. The cause of the catastrophe seems to be the simulacrums, formless entities, chimaeras, and spectres that haunt human minds. Alexandre will embark on a spiritual adventure to identify the ancient energy meridians, known to ancient esoteric wisdom, through which the invisible entities have triggered a process of involution, favouring the rise to power of the Selenarian Military Junta, a regime led by Pontifex Delta, a dictator who has instituted directed discarnation in exchange for the vain promise of an immortal ideal body. At a rapid pace, other characters are integrated into the narrative with the same fervour to map the unknown. Stanislas Huchette, a historian of ideas documenting a treatise on the Enlightenment in Rome, discovers in a lost Pythagorean manuscript, used by the ancient intellectuals of Rome's antique Portico for necromantic ceremonies, strange references to an occult geostructure from the time of the flamens and sybils. After the strange death of a prelate who bequeaths him strange artefacts, the scholar embarks on a desperate expedition in search of an archetype with a magical cosmogonic function related to Rome's obelisks. London secret agent Scott Lloyd, disgusted by the misanthropy of the reformed intelligence agency which recruited him and the maverick journalist Sara Lodge, who found strange clues in a lost letter of lord Bulwer-Lytton, are also on the trail of artefacts and meridians known since time immemorial. This is a complex and detailed story in which the real and the dream intertwine, revealing the contradictions of the human condition. In a possible future where the promises of transhumanism to improve the human condition prove to be empty aspirations, the novel is an expression of rebellion against the paradoxes of identity, individual free will and the potential to transcend biological limits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cristian N. George
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224580491

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Succubus Nymphomaniac

Never have any doubt that [...] dreams, hallucinations, beliefs, attitudes, desires and intentions all pass for mental. [...] The unhesitating classification suggests not only that we have a clear intuition about what constitutes the mental but also that it has something to do with non-spatiality and the idea that mental entities or states could somehow persist even if the body itself were annihilated.

When the species is extinct, human nature's total message will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies - the more, and the more various, the better.

Richard Rorty

Le Havre, 2045

Through the endless rain pouring down on the storm-shaken porthole, the flickering light of a candle reveals to me a world fallen into chaos, where primal instincts and barbarism have taken hold of the souls of the survivors. The woman with the name of a goddess and sandal straps curling high around her ankle is awaiting me in the hold of the ship, the hordes that have already arrived in port may have already boarded the vessels preparing a pirate-style approach, but I must tell you this story. Perhaps those who escaped from the idol houses will catch up with us and I won't get the chance.

Before the massacre, I was a writer and that's why I detail reports to Silicon Valley with a collateral ap-pendix in the form of a diary, although it would suffice to mentally dictate dates and maps on my cortical key-board. I'm sure no one will read them - the post-massacre generation writes and reads in Ideoranto, the jargon of the apocalypse - but I still write in a dead language. It is, if you will, a kind of romantic reminiscence of a former littérateur. I'm already wired up to Neuro-Sign and I begin the dictation which, encapsulated in the shipwrecked man's bottle, will float forever on the waves:

"I look now through this window thick as an em-brasure at the allusive silhouettes of the crucified and hanged that the rain has encrusted in the filth, it is the black history of a ruthless colonization drawn on a smooth, fragile, treacherous surface, dimly lit by the flickering flame of the candle in my gloomy cabin near the wheelhouse. Dusk grimly pastes a twisted, grey cloud on the angry waves of the horizon. The drunken sailor is somehow part of this unwritten story, some-where by the hatch, accompanied by the shrill laughter of the prostitutes who embarked from Normandy for the promise of a better life in the Kingdom of Steel whose shape borders the Free Zone.

I saw the bare breasts of one of them, down in the dark of the ship's hold, trembling impertinently in the rhythm of belly dance, a rhythm that moved the glutes of her barely hidden buttocks by some silk strips woven with beads in a way that drove sailors crazy. They struck the lead jams of sahoma on the oily tables, hiding with their patched berets their involuntary erections and their gaping mouths shouted the hymn of perdition:

In the apocalypse, when the world collapsed

With the sky on fire of napalm and wind howling

We stayed, chaos and night

With heavy hearts, with burning souls

Light, slender and mysterious women

You charmed us with these brave spirals

With naked breasts, treasures in a low hold

We are pirates of resistance, we dream 

It's our fate!

When the orgy started, I wandered the corridors in a delirium for a long time. That dance reminded me of a time in my life, faded into oblivion. Something I'd never have repeated in my weirdest dreams.

There was a time when the flesh peddlers, the reactionary instigators, the histrionic sailors who would stab for a fistful of quarters, and the scabies-bearing women, princesses of darkness with flames hidden behind their eyes, luring sailors from quarterdeck in rags, did not exist. Or at least I was unaware that they, the survivors, shadows wandering through the depths of the night, would appear when the world lost its grandeur, which had sprung from the alleged sanctuary of reason, falling into the canyon beaten by the raging winds of disaster. The shadow of madness that has hovered over continents for no more than 24 hours has stripped people of their light (and the celestial one barely pierces the dark toxic veil), contorted drinking water pipes, crippled telecommunication channels, destroyed railroads, rendered maritime shipping routes impassable and grounded aircraft. The force that has divided a progressive humanity, decimating us and reducing us to a bunch of hungry tribes running around in rout, did not come from outside as the prophets predicted.

But let me talk about those women.

Some of them were descended from the survivors of a large hippie community in Normandy and still wore the colourful amulets, rings, and scarves of their parents decimated by the plagues of the apocalypse. Pendants, rings and bracelets had semi-precious stones arranged in mythical-magic ornaments. They still wore scarves and bandanas, flared jeans or long steamy dresses and ponchos in vivid colours and psychedelic patterns. They also held guitars, whistles and drums in their tattooed arms. Some violins, bagpipes or accordions were pierced by bullets but the women carried them after them like relics anyway. 

I passed their group in the dining room, where an irritating smell of sour wine and rotten wood was wafting through the air. One of them vaguely reminded me of Daphne, and that made me suddenly sad because I'd been trying to forget her for years. The women waltzed, flirtatiously and provocatively, with sailors thirsting for carnal pleasures, under the sickly, apathetic stares of the vagrants huddled in the corners of the room. Their eyelids were smeared with ashes and the pupils of their eyes a hazy white, and their dark lips seemed to whisper words of enchantment as they flaunted the ivory sheen of their protruding incisor teeth. Their eyes, like split pearls, penetrated deep into the retina, giving the impression of a feverish search, and their smile, fleeting and deliberately seductive, revealed part of the subliminal message of desperation. There was a tinge of twilight in their voices, an echo of unspoken venereal mysteries, and their movements, somewhat anguished by routine, radiated mesmeric waves of premeditated seduction through bodies that rippled like flames ignited in the middle of the night. 

Above that swarm of dirty, sweaty bodies, coughing in convulsions, breathing their own stench, deafening each other with grotesque howls or vulgar roars, hung an air of happiness and germinating hope. That group, myself included, had managed to board the only motor vessel still running between Le Havre and Dover. Like a desperate gathering of shipwrecked people on the smoking quay of the harbour we gazed towards the only lighthouse in the dense fog, waiting for rescue, which had appeared two days late, wrapped in a ghostly tether of metal and steam. 

We all knew that the advancing hordes from Eastern Europe would not spare us; once caught, they would scalp, disfigure, cut chunks of flesh from us, chained up for their savage feasts. They would have hacked us into hunks like the ancient Huns used to do when they put chops cut from their live horse’s croup under the saddle until we would bled to death. Within 24 hours, all that humanity had built for millennia had been shattered to make way for primal instincts, and itinerant cannibalism was merely the rebirth of a past, seemingly forgotten pastime. Watching those embarked on the ship of hope, this rickety and precarious wooden and metal guarantee of tomorrow, I considered myself, for the umpteenth time, lucky to have enough money to pay for a cabin with a private closet. Cholera was still raging.

Maybe I would bring that woman to the cabin, a plan had already been drawn up in my mind. Although they offered themselves to sailors there in warehouses, raising the laps of skirts and spreading their legs directly on cattle feed bales, I wanted to ask her some questions in private. I doubted that she was what wanted to look like.

The catastrophe was merely the expression of an excess of primal, instinctual impulses on the part of a paramilitary group, escaping the moralistic control of the press and international arbitration. The impurity of an abscess. We were struck from within, tons of napalm and blocks of ice fell on us with the implacable fatality of the zodiac of doom. What followed next, causing explosions, was the vindictive slap of the Military Junta, now in power.

The members of the Junta, with all their humanitarian pretensions, were in fact disgusting scum, individuals trained to adapt and act under any circumstances. From seducing curly-haired sows into officer training colleges to training to bring order to ankylosed institutions, they saw themselves as enlightened heroes, ready to reform and re-industrialize a backward society. With their arrogance and claims to be channellers of the meaning of history by divine revelation, these decrepit reformers of the West saw themselves as the manufacturers of the new political paradigm. In reality, they were merely the Grim Reaper henchmen, manipulators of power and of the people in order to satisfy their own selfish interests. They are just imposters, shamelessly flaunting their shiny uniforms, fake medals and faked badges, while behind them hide hideous faces, corrupt souls and the tyranny of Simulacrums. 

The survivors of the bombings, who did not perish in subsequent earthquakes or under rubble, drowned by tsunamis, or dismembered by hurricanes or violent climatic cataclysms, gradually shrivelled, like the delicate petals of a flower in the wind, due to hunger, disease or infighting.

On paths coveted by death, we have trodden, knights of nothingness among smouldering ruins, somewhere where the fragile equation of life stretches between neurotic spasm for oxygen and the struggle for the last morsel of bread.

I'm trying to fall asleep, but I can't. I try again to fall asleep, but the effort of doing so keeps me awake. The haunted stares of the wanderers, who roam like ghosts through the bowels of the creaking vessel like a rotting barrel, give me no peace. The image of the vermilion-stained prostitutes, hiding in their bowls the remuneration after the hard nights of recreational work, from when they used to roll with the sailors among the bales of tarred cloth in the hold, haunts me. The grim expression of the proud sailors, with bayonets curved into sheaths fastened to their belts, the swaying gait and that disdainful smile on their sunburnt, wind-bronzed faces, make me feel like an exile in the purgatory of the island of unhappiness, an interstitial world rising in the middle of the ocean, under whose incomprehensible golden haloes hope and penitence intertwine. 

I look at the door latch again, it seems pretty sturdy. I feel my stylus, check the status of the battery in the laser gun, everything seems fine. I feel nauseous, I think I'm seasick, I've thrown up three times so far in the closet. Moisture has entered my bones, wet clothes envelop my body like the shroud of a tender but deadly ointment, sticking poisoned needles into my wrists.

Through the porthole I see, the sea is just the black shroud of a cavern, a black pit veiled by swirling, cloudy whirlpools beneath a bright rainbow. It's been 15 years since the Emerald Dome sat atop the world. No one knows why those green flames can be seen on the horizon. Some say that the bombing did something to the magnetic poles and that it damaged the atmosphere, making the Earth more vulnerable to cosmic electromagnetic radiation, which is why we have a kind of permanent aurora Borealis overhead. Others say it's a toxic gas that the Junta is pumping out to burn our lungs. 

To all of us. We're the only survivors, a possible threat to them. But weakened and unorganized, we are just the last survivors of human helplessness.

The desperate cry of the prophets of decay, the militant reformism of the new ecological consciousness, which sought to protect the children of the future and give them the same rights and privileges as those already born, was in vain. The fear of the future, of science and technology, embodied in the cultural manifesto of the techno-iconoclasts denouncing the evils of industrialism and its excesses, the escalation of pollution and environmental degradation, the alarm bells sounded spasmodically and repeatedly in the face of the danger of the arms race and cybernetics, was dismally ignored by the hedonistic futurists that we all once were. We, proud members of the Sino-European-Atlantic alliance! Ignoring the panickers, those pitiful Saint-Simonist martyrs of a cause greater than themselves, located in a vague hypothetical future, has cost us far too much.

It was a time when the whole landscape changed, and disaster struck the earth with unparalleled fury. I remember with horror even now how the ecological catastrophe unfolded before our eyes in a spiral of destruction and despair. Like an apocalyptic whirlwind, earthquakes shook the foundations of our cities, shattering buildings dozens of storeys high and reducing them to rubble. Massive tsunamis have hit the shores, swallowing everything in their path and leaving behind only collapse and death. Typhoons slammed down with unprecedented violence, ripping the roofs off buildings and tossing them into the air like dry leaves.

These were not simple natural disasters, but signs of ecosystem collapse, a disruption of the ecosystem due to the premeditated actions of the Military Junta. The bombardment with tons of napalm and ice shells from space amplified nature's fury, turning it into a punishing and vindictive nightmare. Killing flames engulfed the forests and fields, turning them to ash and desolation. Icy asteroids crashed from the sky like giant bombs, shattering oceans and generating monstrous waves that engulfed entire cities. 

Great cities, bastions of human civilisation, have been swallowed up by chaos and destruction. Skyscrapers and architectural monuments have collapsed in a merry-go-round of concrete and steel, turning into a steaming pile of rubble. The deserted, windswept streets have become the tombs of a civilisation reeling under the weight of its own sins.

I witnessed the last cataclysmic chapter in the Book of Life, in which humanity paid tribute for its negligence. Earth, our common home, has sent us a violent ultimatum, showing us that we are not its masters, but merely transient inhabitants of an intricate and unpredictable universe. In the face of nature's unleashed power, we realised too late that we had been fundamentally wrong, that we had forgotten that we are part of the same fragile and interconnected web of life.

In the aftermath of this devastating spectacle, only a pale trace of our past glory remained. We have been thrown into a world in ruins, where survival has become a daily struggle. But there is still a spark of hope. Some of us, who had the strength to break away from barbarism and fatalistic resignation, have found the courage to fight for a redemption of the age in which nature and humanity coexist.

After the fateful day, I had managed to emerge from under the rubble of my studio in Montparnasse with a nasty fracture in my left forearm and a concussion of the skull. I couldn't describe what happened. A blinding light fell from the sky, then haunted over monasteries, hills, forests, herds of cattle and forgotten villages, flashing across the shingle roofs of suburban inns and mansions, until it swept through the streets of Paris, bringing disaster. After regaining consciousness, barely escaping the flood that had torn Daphne from my arms, I wandered the streets for hours without knowing it. In a toxic haze that deceptively caressed the grand buildings of Paris, the old houses with tall windows and ornate balconies - which preserve secrets and untold histories - and the narrow streets that are lost in their shadows, I made my way through the blackness that enveloped The Louvre, the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower. These once grand and imposing monuments, with their air of eternity, now rose beyond the mist like ghosts tainted by the city's suffering and decrepitude.

The statues and fountains, long adored for their almost divine beauty, blended in the sifting light, tinged with ash, with the gloomy atmosphere of the city, like entities born of dreams and nightmares. The Seine, the eternal river that had germinated impossible love stories with its elusive waves, was now mirrored in a murky water in which corpses floated, lost in an infinity of darkness and melancholy. Notre Dame Cathedral, once a symbol of greatness and faith, seemed abandoned by divine grace and covered with the sad veil of abjuration.

Out of the toxic blackness of Paris, suddenly emerged the silhouette of a ragged woman, wrapped in the rags of a silk dress, limping wearily through the dark streets. Her loose garters clung to the bushes as she made her way, and from beneath her dirty skirt, her fleshy thighs, stained with dried blood, were visible. With one shoe stumped and the heel nearly detached, her every step was an effort, a struggle with the pain and heavy load of the moment. Limping and breathing heavily, she exuded a strange and terrifying sensuality, her voluptuous breasts sprang free from her torn bra with every jerk of her unleashed movements, drawing the stares of those who groaned and shuffled along the way.

That was the first time I encountered a Simulacrum and I still can't explain how I survived. Floyd told me it was some kind of transference and that the man I killed was possessed by that entity. I don't even know why I did it, how my impulse was triggered and where I found so much strength. A man rushed at that woman, running out from under the ledge of the collapsed wall. He was covered in blood and had bloodshot, expressionless eyes. (The symptomatology is described in the first paragraph of the I.D. Phrenology Manual - Incubus Detection.) He pushed the woman against a wall, trapping her with his weight and lifting that rag of skirt, he pulled his penis out trying to penetrate her from behind. Strangely, the woman didn't struggle, nor did she resist in any way, yielding obediently, like a resigned female in the face of male biochemistry. Later Floyd told me she was possessed too, no doubt, but at the time I couldn't make out the signs. Recognizing an invader behind human eyes had become an art acquired under the sapient tutelage of the Temple.

Months later, in a dimly lit salon with chandeliers with candles of a mansion in the Champ de Mars area of Paris, right next to where a pyramid designed by architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux to commemorate the French Revolution had been provisionally erected in 1793, I looked up at Flloyd, who fascinated me with his eccentricity and alternative perspectives on reality and I asked him:

Flloyd, you have always captured my attention with your intriguing theories about the evolution of the human mind. How do you interpret this 'invasion of simulacra' you often talk about? How has this affected the mental evolution of humanity?  The day before yesterday I was about to be torn apart by a vagrant - who thought he was the incarnation of a basilisk - who kept glaring at me and threatening to turn me to stone.

Flloyd, with a transfixed expression and a ponderous tone, took on a professorial air:

If we are to reflect on this hypothesis of the bicameral mentality, certain philosophers - Julian Jaynes, for example - have hypothesized that our ancestors, up to the time of Ancient Greece, did not perceive emotions and desires as products of their own minds, but attributed them to the influence of the gods. Sounds familiar and even topical, trite even, doesn't it? Let's imagine a human mind operating in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain - the left hemisphere -, which seemed to 'speak', and a second part which listened to and carried out the will of the gods - a bicameral mind. Later, the end of this division gave way to reason and so the gods were silenced.

With a sense of amazement mixed with horror, I fell into thought. I had been informed that over the smouldering ruins of Britain the autarchic regime of a tribe whose chieftain was a self-proclaimed incarnation of Merlin, ruling alongside the odious replica of the witch Morgan le Fay, had been established. The Balkans in turn were ruled by the tyrannical sceptre of a detestable tribal chieftain who, aided by bands of marauders dressed in wolf-fur like werewolves, would tear up wandering pilgrims and bathe in their blood.

So how does this theory relate to the 'simulacrum invasion'? How did the catastrophe affect our mental evolution? Who dissolved the protective barrier of rationality? How did the gods retrieve their voice again?

Flloyd, gazing with an air of dismay into the infinity of the starry night beyond the mansion windows, expresses his thoughts solemnly, Alexander, it is crucial to understand that the invasion of these entities is due to subtle, deeply buried changes in the structure and distribution of the gravitational strings and knots of dark matter. The cosmos hides many mysteries, and the syncretism of astronomical and physical theories of matter and gravity provides us with an essential key to understanding the phenomenon. I am talking here about dark matter and its connection to invasive entities. In astronomy, that is a hypothetical form of matter that does not seem to interact with light or the electromagnetic field. Certain phenomena such as the formation and evolution of galaxies, gravitational lensing, and the anisotropy of cosmic background radiation cannot be explained by the theory of general relativity unless there is more matter in the cosmos than is visible.

I vaguely remembered these terms from a discussion I had with a fellow editor who was proofreading a manuscript on the New Age mentality written by a disciple of Capra. So, I asked Floyd:

But how does this relate to string theory and gravity?

"String theory is a model in which the point particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. This theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, it appears similar to an ordinary particle, with mass, charge and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantized particle that carries the gravitational force. String theory is therefore a theory of quantum gravity. And dark matter to our senses, is just gravity. And somehow, our brains are influenced by the new gravitational parameters. That's why I gave you the equipment. Without it we'd just be delusional mystics, wandering madmen, hallucinating pilgrims raising bare arms