allahu.cipher

There really isn’t a world as such, only the appearance of the world, which in reality is an interlocking system of organic machines, each with its own dimensions and rules, each utterly different from every other. The cogs and wheels and levers of these machines are made of green things, human things, wisps of cloud, and rage, and longing. They are made of stone and music and interstellar gases and a million other possible things. These machines are conscious, but its a collective kind of awareness among its many living parts, like the communal mind of a hive of bees. There are certain actions or combinations of actions, like ontological keyboard shortcuts, that lead to major shifts in the functioning of these machines and how they are configured. Even the tiniest, most innocuous of actions can cause uncanny new machines to emerge from the clockwork of the old ones.

Barb Fenstermacher didn’t intend to do it. She wasn’t even aware that she had done it after the fact. But saying the words “orange crush” while digging into her right ear with her pinky under a full moon in October turned out to be one of the keystrokes that triggered the birth of a new machine. Sometimes these moments lead to massive and immediate transformations. Other times the effects are more subtle. In this case, the shift created a machine that would come to be known as the Fargus SK System, which was composed of xenon gas, Grady Martin’s guitar hooks on the twangy 1950’s country hit, Chattanoogie Shoeshine Boy, a male Mount Kaputer slug in southeastern Australia, and a mainframe computer in the Alaskan NORAD Command.

On the plus side, the new system bumped a flaming comet out of its course in which it would have slammed into a moon of Jupiter and sent it careening billiard-ball like right into Earth. On the negative side, it caused a tsunami in southern India and Sri Lanka, a severe bout of colic in the babies of the high Andes mountains, and a rising American political wunderkind to flatulate on live television.

Fargus SK also shifted the atoms in the frontal lobe of a young man named Jihad Robert Yamamoto. Young Jihad didn’t feel anything in particular that day that Barb stuck her finger in her ear and shifted the jangly workings of cosmos. But the wheelchair-bound San Diego teenager would subsequently lead a movement that would change the human race forever.