1.  "You won't be safe sitting on the fence!" Eagle asserted.  "I'm not sitting on the fence!" Taron defended himself.  Their bodies had a soft translucent glow that was not fully corporeal.  In the distance flashes of thunder and lightening blended with gold and red streaks.   There was a more furious commotion at the source.  The Patience of God. 

2.  "If you're in love with it, then join it!" Eagle admonished with a crapload of sarcasm and regret, "you already admitted that you 'admire' him!"    

3.  "What is the point of experiencing a fake existence, in a slowed down corporeal form; where everything will be in a constant contradiction?" Taron defended himself.  "Oh, listen to you!" Eagle rebuked him, "You don't even know what you're talking about!  You don't have any experience with which to form an opinion."

4.  Taron held his incorporeal tongue:  'Experience' was the point and the problem.   "See, Taron," his friend said compassionately," you DO want to find out, but you're presuming knowledge that you haven't earned."  He sighed to search for more precise words, "you're not giving yourself a chance."

5.  A legion of angels zoomed overhead toward the comotion's source, which was getting progressively more and more heated.

6.  "You'll be with me?" Taron heard from among the rustling wings overhead.  His spiritual face blushed noticably; a confession of admiration and fear, morphing into realization and regret.  Eagle read it clearly on Taron's face.  "Am I being too proud?" Taron asked meekly.  Eagle nodded with restraint -- it wasn't only pride, but a blend of indescretions that caused Taron's conflict.  The opposition was demanding that God, 'Magic Them Into Gods,' like Himself:  "Aren't we 'free' to chose our own way?" they complained.  Those who agreed with The One couldn't understand why the opposition was getting so violent.  

7.  Eagle grinned, "You're getting worried," he observed.  "I think you're attracted to the fight," Eagle said.  Taron was conflicted and looked down.  Eagle lifted Taron's chin, "You haven't sinned yet."  He again looked toward the expanding conflict zone, "But you KNOW they're going to get kicked out."  His voice was earnest but hushed, as if that particular subject was taboo.   There were many who didn't want to talk about it. 

8.  Streaks of light from everywhere in the Universe was converging at that one point in space.  "Stay with me," Eagle encouraged him.  "Stay with HIM," he corrected, "You'll be on the right side." 

PREDICATED

9.   "Have you ever wanted to be inside someone's intimate thoughts?" the blue creature asked.

10.  It was a pleasing blue.  Kiles examined the various shades of molten blue, from cobalt to aqua.  Its aqueous form featured glowing interior jewels of varying radiance like a nebula.  "I've never seen a blue person," Kiles thought.  The creature's morphing FX upstaged everything he had seen so far.  "All on Azoth's ... blue Earth," Kiles thought. 

11.  "I think everyone is in denial," Kiles answered.  The creature cocked its head and nodded.  In the quantum view, every conversation has already occurred. 

12.  "So you know their thoughts?" it surmised.  Kiles did not become psionic until his latest stop at Corlos.   Prior to then, he was super-intuitive but not psionic.

13.  "There's a reason why Azoth made some shells psionic and other ... worlds ... not."  It remained prima facie that shells are psionic, and 'worlds' are not; an unadmitted personal bias.  In reality, the limitless convergence zones in a water shell creates an omni-synapse that can be felt by cognizant beings inside.  They become psionic and take the ability for granted.  Kiles had been raised to keep his unEarthly attributes hidden when in public. 

14.  "Azure," Kiles laughed when he read the creature's name.  Azure bowed in confirmation.  "What do you think of this?" Azure asked, extending an arm to present a scenario.

15.  There was a 15-year-old Human kid laying alone on his bed in the loft of a forest cottage.  Nobody else was home.  A gentle breeze turned a squeaky rooftop vent and pine tree boughs arrthythmically brushed the cabin exterior.  Within seconds, the environment felt as real as stepping across the Corlos simulator threshold.  Azure only had a feint outline - his interior absorbed the dark thickness of the forest.  If the scene became any darker, Azure might disappear.

16.  Before Kiles could ask, Azure answered, "It depends on whose eyes you see me with." 

17.  "Another riddle," Kiles sighed under his breath.  Azure touched Kiles' temple with his finger and installed additional information like Oni or Xanax would do in Q-cept.  His post-Corlos physiology could accommodate expanded exosensory perception that his pre-Corlos body could not.  With the additional information, he could adjust the brightness of Azure at will, and discovered that he could adjust the brightness of everything else too.  "Do you want to see the caveat within the caveat?" Azure asked. 

BLUE FUNNEL AD INFINITUM

18.  Azure located Earth with one precise swivel and rotated the planet for a straight descent above the north Pacific, 1300 miles inbetween Ancorage and Honolulu.  Tokyo lay west and San Fransisco, east.  The 12-mile diameter disk of International Island came into view and Kiles came to rest in a large chamber below decks.  This was far below the opulent conference room in the sweeping arched tower above. 

19.  The room had dark grey carpeting and a central oynx podium that blended demure Elite aesthetics with futuristic Corlos functionality.  The intrigue was inescapable.  "What's this doing here?" was Kiles first thought.  The shock would be no less than finding an Elite cave underneath Manhattan. 

20.  "Isn't this a bit advanced for Earth?" Kiles asked.  "This is merely the opening," Azure replied.  "...of the rabbit hole," Kiles added psionically, to which Azure agreed.  "Go to the podium." Azure gave him a psionic nudge.

21.  This definitely was not Corlos.  The operating panel had underlit hieroglyphic characters of a Sumarian-Egyptian blend.  Instead of a joystick, there was one raised circular knob.  When Kiles brought his hand near the knob, additional instruments illuminated.  He studied the design and entertained potential purposes of the device and the room itself.

22.  "For every measurement," Azure prodded.  "There is an equal and opposite..." Kiles recited, as if being tutored by Oni.  The dynamics of the device seem more focused on perdition.  Kiles withdrew his hand, remembering how his father's misadventure began on Corlos.  "Don't worry," Azure assured him, "I'm with you."  That was a luxury that Dayton didn't have at the time. 

23.  Kiles raised his hand toward the dial once again and Azure added, "But you're right about the perdition part." 

24.  "So what my Dad did, wasn't," he concluded, except by a Corlos standard.  This was an adventure Kiles would have to experience to understand.  The information could not simply be installed.  Kiles touched the knob.  "Don't worry about what you see," Azure warned him, "they won't be able to see us..."  With dramatic flare, Azure spread his arms to indicate, "because 'yours truly' is here."

25.  Kiles touched the dial.  A subdued slider on the left controlled the dial's attentuation.  "Attentuation for what?" Kiles wondered.  He turned the dial ever so gently on the attentuator's lowest setting.  In the space in front of them, a boardroom table lit up like an animatronics presentation.  It was the same private boardroom located many decks higher on the Island's highest tower, just underneath the visiting head-of-State's office.

26.  "Very, very nice," the CFO praised his agent while toying with a newly aquired device.  He pressed a switch and disappeared and reappeared in another chair.  Everyone clapped quietly and offered softly spoken praises.  This crowd had mastered the art of masking their farts.  The executive at the other end said, "Theos has been wanting one of those forever:  We're already got an inventor, backstory; the works," he added.   Kiles cocked his head toward Azure with a psionic question mark.  Azure merely extended his arm toward the presentation to indicate that the answer was forthcoming: 

27.  "We'll have to keep that timeline going," the CFO said approvingly.  Kiles examined the control dial and the procedings more studiously, "Perdition," he lipped.  He remembered his mother's description of Corlos meetings; how everyone acted nonchalant no matter how devestating the news.  It was a 24/7 dreamscape there as well as here. 

28.  "Blue Funnel is seeding different timelines in different dimensions from apsionic worlds," Kiles surmised:  "Then retrieving the best products from each."  Under his breath, he whispered, "They're fracking farming!"  Technology farming.  Corlos would indeed have a baby dinosaur if they knew -- it made their mission seem trite by comparison.  "But how are they getting away with it?" Kiles asked.  He turned the dial, which returned to the kid in the forest cabin.  He had wondered how that picturesque moment connected to anything... 

29.  A panel lit up with a DNA helix and an enlarged heavy water molecule next to it.   "Deuterium," he noted.   There was nothing terribly wrong with a trace of heavy water in a biological.  Another panel lit up.  It was a photonic index.  An image of Vejhon... Kiles gave the image a double take, "No... Earth," with a watershell:  The kid's photonic index characteristically matched those that the lightrace seeded before Earth's watershell collapsed.  

30.  "This is getting harder to quantify," Kiles conceded.  "I admit; I like a good mystery... but these are layered agendas within dimensions," he surmized.  "Why does God want to know any of this?"  He adjusted the emphasis, "Does He even want to know?"  Somehow, the answer to his own existence and transformation seemed intertwined with all of this.

31.  "In the mind of Tetragammeton," Azure said gently, "It all makes perfect sense."  Azure was an agent of A'zoth, who had sent him to assist Kiles.  "The singularity?" Kiles remembered, "Is that me?" 

PRE MORTAL

32.  Kiles, at this point, was beginning to feel like a god, albeit, a humble god.  The more his faith increased in each equation, the more information flowed through him like a cosmic wind.  The data was drawn from different points in time and space.  "This must be how Xanax does it," he thought, and in fact, it was. 

33.  Xanax contacted him, "I was thinking at some point, you would catch onto me," Xanax quipped in Q-cept.

34.  Kiles grinned, quite happy.  It almost felt like a graduation ceremony had taken place and this was his diploma.  "I don't see you," Kiles said.  "I'm everywhere," Xanax replied, "Everywhere you see a part of me -- my corporeal form is merely an interface.."  A simple photograph that stored information everywhere in the Universe.

35.  "I feel like I'm going to end," Kiles said.  He wanted to close the rupture and return everything to normal.  "I can do anything," he reasoned.  "I can never go back to being ordinary Kiles."  Who, by any standard, was not ordinary in any sense. 

36.  "To close the rupture, I have to not..."  Xanax interrupted him, "Who's to say you weren't supposed to go on your journey?  In my clinical opinion, it was only a matter of time.  Sooner or later, you were going to evolve.  Why can't it be now?  You can't keep..."  Kiles interrupted him, "... going back and back expecting to fix time."

37.  "Well said!"   Kiles attributed the line to his Mom; and Xanax to Dayton.  Actually, the rendition he just uttered was sort of a fusion. 

38.  From low Earth orbit, Kiles descended above Ewa Beach and landed next to the bubble with his concurrent self still suspended inside.

39.  He reversed time and watched the ocean waves go backward; with the effect of watching a broken egg or a broken glass magically revert to mint condition.  The sea swells were reversed and the birds flew backward. 

40.  At the moment Xanax created the bubble, Kiles froze time and toyed with his new found time-altering capability, moving the moment forward and backward at will.  He entered the area directly behind his concurrent self so that he wouldn't be noticed right away, then advanced time just enough to enable the bubble, but blocked the worm termination that Oni and Xanax created.  The bubble would now serve a different purpose:

41.  The pre-Corlos Kiles had not yet noticed anything any different since pre-Corlos Kiles did not have post-Corlos Kiles' memories.  He didn't know how any of this would unfold because he had not yet gone anywhere.  Pre-Corlos Kiles had not yet hit Kor, met his son, or experienced anything beyond that point in time. 

42.  The post-Corlos Kiles did not want to startle himself because he knew that it might result in a fight, so he permitted himself to make the discovery on his own.

43.  Technically speaking, in the Elliptical view, every entity has an independent identity, even if it's co-mingling with itself at the same point in time and space, they're separate entities.  In biology, cellular division requires a photonic host for animation.  Machines don't have that problem.    

44.  The post-Corlos Kiles waited.  The pre-Corlos Kiles looked surreptitiously to his right, slowly, as if he sensed something unnatural behind him, but he didn't turn around or act startled.  He was way too comfortable in his element to act surprised.  

45.  "Kor?" he asked

46.  "Kor!" post-Kiles exclaimed with an unabashed laugh.  "Would I really have thought that?"  He was truly shocked if not bewildered. 

47.  Pre-Kiles turned around and didn't act any differently upon seeing himself.  "Oni?" he asked out loud for an explanation.  The droids were there but neither Xanax nor Onimex volunteered any information.  Naturally, pre-Kiles might come back, as post-Kiles, to tell himself something profound.  

48.  "It's not that I haven't figured out some of this already," pre-Kiles said, "but are they my droids or yours?"  An Elliptical quandary. 

49.  Post-Kiles was truly amazed.  Why would he presume that the droids are not co-located in this case, as he knows they are continually, ad infinitum?

50.  This was not how post-Kiles imagined the dialogue would go, and as he thought about it, he realized that he had just created another timeline.  In a photonic sense, thinking and doing are the same. 

51.  The function of the bubble was to insulate their adventure from non-existant, time-integrity monitoring agencies.  Worm terminations originating from inside the bubble, shouldn't violate any known time-tampering conventions, depending upon one's point of view. 

52.  "So, I've been there and back," pre-Kiles observed.  Post-Kiles didn't know whether his pre-Corlos self was impressed or perturbed.  Pre-Kiles spread his arms bewildered, "Why would you deliberately create another paradox?" then he swayed his hands back and forth between themselves to point out that there was two of them now.  He accused him psionically, "Wasn't one of us enough already?  If Mom catches wind of this, I'm never... we... will never hear the end of it!"  He gave the matter a second thought, "Maybe two of us would be better than one?"  He didn't say it out loud. 

53.  "Your thoughts are not really private," post-Kiles thought out loud.  Pre-Kiles was not a bona fide psionist, but their alpha signatures should still be identical, which would eliminate the need for psionics.   Pre-Kiles didn't know he was psionic because nobody had trained him.  Ireana and Oni's motives were not sinister, but they weren't perfect either.  They thought it was best, given their isolated situation.

54.  This was not at all how post-Kiles thought his pre-Kiles self would react.  His pre-Corlos self displayed a deeper sense of responsibility than his post-Corlos self did.  "I thought you would..." Kiles searched for the right word.  "Be amused?" pre-Kiles offered.  "Yes," post-Kiles answered.  

55.  It's not that his pre-Corlos self didn't sympathize.  He lightened up and stepped forward to touch his future self then suddenly froze, "We won't... both, annihilate?" he asked.   Post-Kiles finally smiled because he knew pre-Kiles wasn't being serious.  His grin turned into one of paternal disappointment and pre-Kiles knew that expression like the back of his hand.  "What happened?" he asked, "You wouldn't be doing this just for fun."   Not after all that had been said and done on the subject.

56.  "I'll show you," post-Kiles said sardonically, changing the scenery to a Vejhonian rain forrest.  "This is just as good as any, I suppose," he said.

57.  Pre-Kiles was impressed.   "No...not quite," post-Kiles said like Monet selecting a paint brush, "This..."

58.  They were in El Sha's pantheon on the same stone bench where he had conversed with her earlier.  Pre-Kiles was impressed again.  "Is this?" he began... "El Sha's home?" post-Kiles finished for him.  "Yes," he answered, "I could just give you all my memories," he said, "We have the same Alpha... you can take my thoughts, after all, they're yours."  The concept was biologically true, but Elliptically inaccurate, however trite the semantics.  Machines care about such things. 

59.  Pre-Kiles gave the download some thought.  He saw his transformation at Corlos; his validation by Conscious.  He was thrilled when he decked Kor... he went through every moment as if he had lived it, because he did.  He saw his Mom at the Director's Spire; he met his son Flash in the ante-diluvian world.  He saw his Mom married to Kor in the alternate timeline.  He watched each dreamscape until Azure removed Kiles from the bubble because Kiles had learned how to control time.    

60.  Time outside the bubble did not move.  The bubble merely existed to protect them from Corlos.   "We're now on the same page," they both agreed. 

61.  They also understood the quandry they were in.  Post-Kiles didn't know whether it would be more compassionate to simply terminate himself or to let pre-Kiles have his memories and decide the best course for himself.  Post-Kiles concluded that warning pre-Kiles was the least destructive option.    

62.  "If you didn't go on this adventure now, you would have gone eventually," post-Kiles said, "... I ... would have gone eventually," he amended.  He didn't want pre-Kiles to feel accused. 

63.  "We can't just superimpose this bubble forever," they both knew.  There was no reason to claw for air, or pontificate the inevitable:  One of them had to terminate.  A line had been crossed and an inviolate law broken.  Once the bubble was terminated, one of them would disappear.  If one was inclined for dark humor -- pre-Kiles would be committing suicide from a biological perspective, and post-Kiles would be committing murder in the Elliptical view. 

64.  "I'll be the one that goes," post-Kiles said, "because 'you' didn't cross the line.  I did."  He smiled thinly, "That's why I gave you my memories."   Pre-Kiles had not yet committed a crime, and by inheriting the knowledge and experience of post-Kiles, could modify his future.      

65.  "You're a God now," pre-Kiles reasoned, "Can't you just 'magic' something into existence or just... live somewhere else?" He was searching for hope in the wind; for a hidden truth within cosmic justice somewhere.  "Corlos overlays operatives all the time -- why do they get a pass and we don't... you, don't?"  

66.  "They don't really overlay," post-Kiles said, seating them both at the Corlos boardroom, "They emanate from here and return to here.  They never do what I did:    They deploy through the simulator and return via energy matter, and it's all sanctioned by The One.   Nobody wonders why, that's just how it's done."  They heard their mother giggle.  "Mom!" they both said in unison.  "Is she here?" they were alone in the boardroom looking at each other curiously.  

67.  "I think we just wanted to hear her," pre-Kiles said.  They listened to the strange music of Sunova for a moment.  "This doesn't seem like any dream," pre-Kiles confessed sadly.  "How could I set myself up for this?" pre-Kiles thought, "this self-inflicted cruelty?"        

68.  "Here's the bright side," post-Kiles said, "You have my memories:  Now you can abandon our obsession with crossing those lines.  You'll still be here, just like it never happened."  Post-Kiles experience was not reality for pre-Kiles, but because they were now on Corlos, the paradox could terminate.   

69.  "I'm not sure I can just give up that easily -- you know I don't just give up, on anything!," pre-Kiles said, "Maybe having two of us in the Universe would be a GOOD thing!"  And thus, he rested his case.  Post-Kiles knew that it would be impossible to disuade pre-Kiles from a stated course of action once he had made up his mind.  Already, they were emulating the qualities of two distinct people.  In the Elliptical view -- they were distinct.    

70.  "Xanax and Onimex," post-Kiles commanded, "Terminate the bubble."