Period of HOZ

You latch onto the exit from humanity that it constitutes, applying electrodes to both of your skins — the cathode to yours, the anode to its. Nanosurgical needles penetrate your upper arm and the back of your neck. Your blood and spinal fluid begins to mingle in the holy grail of urban decadence. “Chittam”, the Hindus called it, mindstuff, drained into pellucid receptacles that float in weightless night at the outermost edges of space and time. Your blood pressure plummets and you are about to go through the looking glass, but first you realize that you were always already looking through it darkly. Everything in your field of vision collapses as if onto a screen. Then the screen is wiped away. Your sensorium is corroded by immersion into a froth of vantage points. Something splits. Suddenly there is access to the double, eidolon, doll or shadow, projected by your self into the domain of that which is not: an avatar, your real outside, which is not your skin — that part of you which is most yourself and has nothing in common with what you are, which is sorely exposed to that which is without you, prone.