Chapter IV

I.

Fortune Lobo and Monkey are
travelling to the ubi-verse’s end;
they have forgotten their purpose
in search of a MacGuffin, but still

holding the talisman, just in case.
Monkey is particularly upset, he
spends his nights in panic. The wall
is painted with fiendish shadows.

II.

They have escaped Hades (the
black hole) without any second
act resolution, and their period
of struggle has been truncated.

In short, they have copped out.
Gawain has been obliterated in
the hole, along with many other
characters. The NeverEnder ship

III.

drifts. Its caravel credentials have
been put into question. Unconscious
ly, Monkey and Fortune Lobo have
set out to heal a raging imbalance.

the very purpose of neverending
poetry is to find a cure for the sick
thoughts of planets, but existing treat
ments only brought very transient

IV.

peace. Out of the abyss, a large
ship has sailed out from the depth
of the mediterranean. Its shape has
turned into a blue whale. It has

swallowed Fortune Lobo and
Monkey in a big gulp. In the belly
of the beast, they are playing cards,
gambling for mere compulsion.

V.

Sean X has tried to log on to the X,
he has hacked his own Thing, the
code that determines his identity.
In trying to modify it, he keeps

making mistakes. The rewrite is
a very slow process. You can’t
just hack a DNA sequence to
pieces or stick gold teeth into

VI.

it, or chew its methylation, or
compress its chromatin, or expand
its transcriptome. In short, the
technical review of this process is

the following: we don’t know
shit. The Pheistos disc is not
legible, the secrets are locked to
us, and Sean X still tries so hard

VII.

to unlock the Raven and the
pendulum. He is quite mad.
He hacks, he minces, he ambles
he lisps, he gambles. That’s it!

So the characters of this impro
vision are kept in the black hole
for a while, stewing like good
meat. What happened to the

VIII.

others, by the way? Fortune Lobo
is having stomach cramps. Monkey
is spending his money on TV ads.
They have forgotten their identity.

This is because Sean X is messing
with his own code; this echoes into
the ubi-versal archetype, creating new
fallacies: memories are modified.

IX.

In this way, some monsters are
created. Sean X is attempting to
transform himself into a Grendel
morph in order to slay the dragon.

He thinks that the X is a dragon.
Cicciotta can see that he is having
hallucinations. Of course, she slipped
out of the black hole. She is Beauty.

X.

Even if the blue whale is vegetarian,
Fortune Lobo and Monkey are slowly
being digested. They happen to be in
the ocean of strawberriness on planet

Poseidon. The view is very peachy:
stars and a wonderful balcony panorama
on Saturn and Titan. Cicciotta is looking
for the soap in order to wash Sean X.

XI.

He is driving himself mad, working
until late at (Saturnian) night, trying
to hack the codes. In the meantime,
there is a falling cadet. She has found

some bread floating in the black hole,
and so she decided to free fall (let us
ignore all we know about gravity).
Finally, there are showers on Titan.

XII.

These showers are composed of falling
cats and falling slices of bread buttered
with strawberry jam. That’s Cicciotta’s
notion of gravity. We have come to

the treatise of antigravitatory cats in
application of Murphy’s law. Spinning
forever, like the evolution of the interact
ome of DNA and all its attached sarabande.

XIII.

Thus, since there is a cat-toast equilibrium
point, we’d like to speculate that there is a
Pheistos disc / The Thing equilibrium point.
May I remind all remaining passengers that

when I say (write) Pheistos disc I mean to
say the code of the universe, meaning the
code that codifies the order of God or some
such. And when I say (write) The Thing

XIV.

I mean to say the whole complex biology
of DNA and its attached proteins, including
histones and the epigenetic modifications,
in sum all the stuff that codes for the genome

and its expression as a phenotype. Cicciotta
is so bored. So much biology in one page
makes the doctor go away and come back
with a bad stomach (like Fortune Lobo).

XV.

I tell you who has a bad tummy now.
The whale! Imagine being a vegetarian
and having swallowed two whole monkeys
(primates) complete with space suit and

helmet, and perhaps even some books
because Fortune Lobo does not go any
where without his copy of the Gita.
Where the whale actually is, remains

XVI.

to be established. dearReader, have you
got any suggestions? It was last seen in
an ocean on Poseidon. But, as a dutiful
reader might suggest, they are all in

John C’s memory, somehow lost to the
present and the past, especially as it
is being rewritten. The dearReader is
tired. We are going to be tired now.

XVII.

The past is the past, the future is not
told. Is that so. Yet for all the possible
spins of the multiverse narrative, we
are but slaves of death and fear, and

our little lives are rounded with a
wirelessness and a desire to cable.
Gawain fell into the hole, and all the
inverted fears came to surface, as an

XVIII.

assault. He lost faith in himself, and
woke up in the middle ages, on Earth.
No better time, the spiritual path for
to find. The mirror in the mirror may

be broken, but Cecco is still living,
breathing, and he also finds himself
back where he started, having a
choice of Guelfo or Ghibellino.

XIX.

Cecco and Gawain are united in their
quest for a token of civilization, which
a magical voice in their head tells them
to seek. Increased knowledge of the

unconscious brings a deeper experience
of life and greater consciousness. They
have arguments about what it is, this
thing called unconscious. Cecco usually

XX.

swears and fumes, while Gawain plays
it cool. He takes the moral high ground,
since he belongs to the bastard race of
the north. John C is still battling the

dance-zheimer disease, and his attempts
to hack his own code are increasingly
frustrated. He has slept little for a long
time. And you know what happens when

XXI.

you don’t sleep for long. Fuck-ups happen.
He keeps deleting the wrong strings, and
chopping off the wrong methyl ends, and
he keeps trimming the causality parameter

with the wrong scissors. ‘Art is no longer
the province of the artist, it is the domain
of the entrepreneur.’ His delirium is worrying
Chubby, who has brought him back to

XXII.

Titan after he went on crazy adventures
around the multi-verse, and he nearly got
himself killed. On planet Vashisht she found
him tripping on loneliness, convinced of

finding true shanti shanti shanti in the high
mountains, in the frozen lakes in winter,
luckily the local monkeys pissed in the right
direction, and pointed him to her, and so she

XXIII.

saved him from himself. He’s back to him
self. That is, he is back feeling low self worth,
he deluded himself of being Sean C or even
Sean X, but all this re-write left him codeless

and the epistasis of his being has suffered
greatly, he does not rest, he thinks only of
genomic-engineering himself to solve g.o.d.’s
algorithm, or answer the riddle of the sphinx

XXIV.

or even find a cure for the sick thoughts of
planets. But Monkey always said it, and John C
is struggling to admit it to himself, there is
no cure, as a matter of fact. Planets are sick,

and their bodies are brittle like glass beads.
Chubby is completely non-committal on the
issue. The Borovoe download has collapsed
onto a molten drive, and all data are now gas.

XXV.

John C insists on sniffing the download-upload
in search of the characters that made him laugh
tear, and all the rest. The molasses of the mid
life crisis are the period of the latent dream.

All the fantastical fire in the firmament, the
liquid luscious waves and the blue thought,
nothing can heal the mind that is raging and
painful. John C is hacking the code, he now

XXVI.

just deletes, and edits, and memorizes the
wrong sequences. Chubby picks up the pieces.
In the stomach of the whale, Fortune Lobo
and Monkey are playing poker. They are

oblivious to everything except the gambling
and the fun. They have switched on the telly,
and they listen to K-pop. What a lovely tune!
Please cut my veins vertically not horizontally.

XXVII.

Ariadne is steering the NeverEnder in an
asteroid field of faithlessness, and there is
such a hopeless vibrational energy there,
that all the members of the crew are freezing

with fear, and with despair. Officer Flexa
herself is losing hope. A vein of creativity
has burst inside her mind, and she now sees
all the cosmic beauty as echoes of suffering.

XXVIII.

Desert Storm and Tierra Madre, holding hands,
are looking at the falling stars of the ubi-verse
as the hurricane of materialism rages and the
blood of the prophets soaks the ether, and all

the midicloreans are bursting with entertainment,
the final selling out of all the myths, the reli-john
and all DorianGray imaging serving the cause
of the volcanic marketeers and the whoreshippers

XXIX.

of god-mobile. Unexpectedly, in a moment of
weakness, all the X’s energy flow momentum
has been wiped out, and the whale has stricken
the NeverEnder’s joy. Hyperconnectedness

means that information devours beauty, and
art is transformed into entertainment, and
entertainment is the instrument of repression.
Repression, in turn, eats the souls of humans.

XXX.

Voices of the ether. Cecco and Gawain are
listening to the voices. The latter, like visions,
are autonomous manifestations of the senses
caused by the activity of the unconscious.

Isn’t that ironic. The voices are telling them
to find the unconscious. A bit like two snakes
biting each other’s tail. Psyche, or Eros, accord
ing to a theory that Ahura Madza has been

XXXI.

trying to refute, are the only true forces of
anti-gravity. Eros being the son of Chaos, and
Psyche being a weightless deceiver (or deceived)
we are to recognize that our trouble is deep.

It is the time in the night when the whale
is snoring (do whales snore? That’d be fun).
If they do sleep like humans, they should
snore. Anyway. At this time, on Poseidon

XXXII.

the echo of the ancient mariner’s voice
wakes the soul of Fortune Lobo from his
slumber. Unfortunately, Monkey has been
listening to the advertisement campaign

of the mischevious marketeers for far too
long, he (she) now feels a kind of attraction
for the dark (dork) side. Monkey swears to
serve the profiteers, and become a profiteer

XXXIII.

himself (herself). Monkey sold out. ‘We all
do everyday, might as well be on the winning
team…’ But Fortune Lobo is resolute, and
he wishes to set it right (the world out of joint).

Unfortunately, Monkey stands in his way.
They start fighting in the stomach of the whale,
stumbling on a Pinocchio leg (ah, that was so
cheap). They both have magical powers.

XXXIV.

The ancient mariner’s spell gives Fortune
Lobo the power to shapeshift, but Monkey
was born with that gift. So the first thing he
transforms himself (herself) in, is a wolf.

Fortune Lobo is taken aback. He is like:
‘Wait a minute, that is me! I am supposed
to be the wolf from Scythia!! He took my
mojo.’ Monkey grins, he is picturing the

XXXV.

mayhem, and all the wonders of the MON(K)EY
he’s gonna make. Mon(k)ey, Monk-key, M’honey.
Our precious. We wants it, we needs it. First
thing, we needs a connection. Like a rabdomous

fire, they seek wirelessness as if it were water.
Russell Brand would say, ‘Monkey’s one of them’.
Yes, indeedy. ooh, I have an office at Canary
Wolf… gnam gnam gnam. GnamGnam style…

XXXVI.

Fortune Lobo is not such a great guy, he is just
a lad, and he is very confused. He likes pussy
a bit too much (I don’t mean cats and I do admit
that is a sexist statement, kill me). Anyway. He

does what he can, even from page three of a
certain tabloid. Fortune Lobo shapeshifts into
a sexist macho (you can picture it in your head,
what is the shape of a sexist macho, do tell).

XXXVII.

Suddenly, Monkey is scared. Then he recovers,
and he starts planning a way to make a buck out
of the sexism. For example, we coulds hooks him
this way or that way… by God, today I saw a

VietcomBank, I thought I read Vientcong Bank.
What is the world coming to. Fortune Lobo is
getting distracted, it must be all that testosterone
pumping up and down his Power and Glory.