One Note - XV
RECAP - Cedary
In Chapter XIV, we met Cedary in her physical life - an older, brown-skinned woman with white hair and skin so wrinkled that she compares it to the bark of a cedar tree. Cedary had been working in the Life Sciences department at an institution of higher learning, where she taught biology classes and did research into the genomics of old-growth forests.
Cedary, as you will recall, is one of the founders of the Music Road Trip venue in the virtual world of AltLife, where the strange audio anomaly occurred that has caused such an uproar.
Cedary took the job as a way to help Stefan meet other academics and to give him access to libraries and other research institutions. When we meet her today, she is leaving her job in preparation for Ryan’s recall.
Recall (verb)
To bring (a fact, event, or situation) back into one's mind; remember.
To officially order (someone) to return to a place.
Recall (noun)
An act or instance of officially recalling someone or something.
The action or faculty of remembering something learned or experienced.
Recalls are never easy, especially when an unexpected event such as this activates the harmonics within the support lattice*. The network enabling Ryan was already twitchy - with random pitch variations occurring due to One Note - but we were coping, hoping to keep his awareness confined to dreams until Stefan completed his work.
But this is the nature of any composition played on instruments/bodies designed to be perpetually out of tune - instruments played in the key** of duality. Eventually, the scales were bound to tip too far - Ryan’s mind would attune to jouissance triggering an equal and opposite response from the other side of the equation. We tried to delay the start of another cycle long enough for One Note to do its work, to remind the defended they have a choice.
Recalls are also rare, as the laws that govern and protect physical reality are immutable. For a recall to occur, a place where spirit, dreams, and waking reality can co-exist outside duality must be created, and only those who’ve been stripped of the layers of altered beliefs and emotions that define that reality can enter. In my experience, this is not a pleasant process.
Recalls are not bound to a single place or time. Once the call goes out, each participant receives a path to follow. I have heard it said that some are guided by stars; others by animal totems or the souls of ancestors. But for me, the path always appears as a simple dirt track winding its way over and through the landscapes of my own forgetting.
Today, the path appears as I’m visiting my garden. Dusk is falling and the sky is splashed with watery shades of violet, sunray, and crimson. Tiny brown bats are just beginning to forage for their dinners - dipping and diving as they snatch mosquitoes from the air around my head with uncanny precision. Beneath my feet, I feel the nightcrawlers and voles starting to stir, and a rush of air above my head tells me Otto the Great Horned Owl is up and about. One of our favorite things to do at night is to hoot to one another from various parts of the garden in an audio game of hide-and-seek. “Sorry, Otto,” I say, “I can’t play tonight. Hold down the fort while I’m gone.”
The path becomes visible at the back of the garden, leading through the sagging wooden gate and on into the scrub pines that mark the boundary between my property and public lands. I slip off my shoes, taking a moment to feel my toes and the soles of my feet engage with Earth, then bid my garden goodbye. “Here we go,” I whisper and take my first step down the path.