ripping

glassdimly.com/TripIntro
At first nothing happened. He simply continued his vigil as his inphones set his thoughts to a heroic soundtrack.
It began as a metallic taste in his mouth. Which, when he thought about it, was a fishhook that ran through his tongue like a piercing, the haft down his throat into his body where it disappeared. It wasn’t painful, but the music pulled at it gently, with a faint sense of hunger, as though his throat were a limitless pipeway to the wharf where longshoreman bundled and shipped the throbbing bass to echo down the fleshy corridors, beating his hanging tonsils like a boxer working a bag…
He snapped upwards from his book and looked out the window. Suburbia was the same, except… there was a slight discrepancy at the seams… yes.
When he looked more closely he could see the houses were made out of cardboard and he was looking at the number tabs holding them together, artifacts of the build-a-house assembly instructions written on the inside walls. It was all as neatly glued as a Happy Meal box, with the edges perfectly square.
So… it had begun.
Out of the corner of his eye, the keyboardist in his poster lunged out over his keyboard toward him, briefly and without malice, as a way of self-expression. When Isaac fixed upon him, he sat as stark and still as American Gothic, but with a mischievousness glinting beneath the dour visage, as though if he looked away again for a second his face would be split by his tongue, his eyes would bulge, and his cheeks would inflate.
Ah, he knows I’m tripping, thought Isaac.
He felt the tugging again at his fishhook, and as he peered down it, he realized that the line ran straight from his tongue through mindscreen, disappearing up into the ether, pulsing lumininescent with rainbow lights. He stepped in through his mouth, feet squishing along his tongue, and plucked it like a guitar string, sending a swirl of pixie-lights racing along the translucent cord like chemical messengers stimulated by an agonist. The cord hummed a deep note that he felt shiver through the tongue and into his feet. He padded his feet on the tongue and briefly flashed into a cat searching for a cozy nap-spot, kneading a tongue-bed.
This fishhook must be the limbic connection, he thought with animal satisfaction, licking a piece of tuna from his whisker.
He stepped deeper along the line, and then pulled himself to climb up toward his brain through his right sinus. At the top of his sinus-tunnel, the line cut deep into the pink mucosal lining as it rounded the corner to stretch out nearly horizontal, and he was forced to reach and grab hold of the taut line up above after it had made the bend. He pulled, and emerged up into a chamber. The walls were crenelated like coral and shone pinkish-gray, When he looked close, he could see the steady slight pulsing of lifeblood, carrying millions of electrified particles, each excitedly seeking a home in the various organelles and vesicles of the brain.
Before him, in the center of the chamber, the clear fiber-optic fishing line disappeared into the center of a glowing rectangle, a perfect screen that rippled and glowed exactly like backlit water beneath its perfect glass surface, casting reflections on the ceiling in a perfect parabola. He stepped close and saw his own reflection, more real than real. He saw all the pros and cons of himself in stark relief against his face like pimples and jewels.
He slowly moved his hand closer to stroke the screen, perhaps to reveal a set of controls by swiping. But his hand melted in like water. He pulled back his hand in mild surprise at the wetness there, and the surface undulated gently at the disturbance. But as he rubbed his fingers together, he realized that they weren’t wet at all, but coated in a glittering film that dissipated as he rubbed it. Interesting.
He plunged his hands in and brought forth a cupful of the stuff, but it melted away through his fingers and fell like faerie dust or screen static, twinkling and moving as though alive or seized by Brownian motion, shooting out points of light like starlight or sparks from a wand as they fell back to the screen. Funny, which is it? he thought.
He was seized by an urge to see what was behind the screen like the itch in a new bug-bite, strong and irresistible. He tentatively pressed his face through and saw what appeared to be blue, pink, and green elemental spirits made of pure light, sliding up and down a translucent tube. Their faces, which were angular: thickly whiskered with long noses and juttings that reminded him of trees and bushes, were lit with an element’s joy as they moved up and down the tunnel doing exactly the thing they were made to do.
One swept toward him and collided with the screen silently, dissipating into a light cloud of faerie dust, but the expectation of collision caused him to surface suddenly, spluttering before he realized that he had been breathing the whole time and he wasn’t wet, sparkles falling from his face like gentle meteorites.
That was the path to the Mind. He knew it. He knew if he followed that path, he would find some answers to his questions.
And so he steeled himself, clasped his hands over his head, and dove straight into the screen like he was going down a slide at WaterWorld.
All of a sudden he was an elemental spirit, a packet of data. He moved his right side up, and while he did so, he felt his left side lowering like a matched piston or a goomba from the Classic PacMan arcade game. His blue light-face was locked in an expression of fierce glee, and he was fixed on that feeling, as though stuck on a single, humming, 8-bit chord of joy. He’d never felt so complete before, never felt such unwavering devotion. He’d never felt absolutely, one-hundred-percent who he was and who he was made to be as while he traveled down that cable as a packet of information destined to the Mind.
He traveled for a year, or perhaps it was a thousand years. Or perhaps it was actually an infinity of being compressed into a single nanosecond.
Up ahead, through the translucent tubing, he could see the server with its glowing lights as he approached. His joy neither increased nor decreased, it simply was with the finality of being, his goomba legs moving up and down like 8-bit pistons and his whiskered face smiling fixedly.
He burst up on the other side, spluttering and coughing on the ground, gradually himself again but forever changed by his newfound awe and reverence for the simple yet joyful work of data packets.
He stood, brushing bits of faerie dust from his clothes, the sparkling puddles gradually fading. He looked around. He was in what appeared to be an empty hotel lobby made entirely of a clearish rubber. He reached down and felt the ground. Squishy and smooth. Like… silicon.
He was in a hotel made entirely of silicon. He looked down at himself to find he was garbed in a suit of pure white. He turned around to look at the screen he’d emerged from and watched a data-spirit burst on the other side of the screen. He felt a wave of desire to become an elemental again, to focus with that finality of vision. He laughed to himself: I will fade into the West and remain Galadriel. I pass the test. And for a moment he was Galadriel, with that clear Lothlorien crystal on her brow, feeling the weight of elvish mortality just after casting aside the Ring of Power, her eyes locked on a Western star.