Writing Excuses - 13

         

Homework: Interspeciated Workplace.

Tuesday in the DMT Office, as Told by Terence McKenna

I arrived at the office this morning not by car, nor by foot, but by an undulating ribbon of possibility. The parking lot seemed to shimmer, as though reality had forgotten to render itself completely, and so I stepped inside.

Immediately, the machine elves were already at it, crawling in and out of the copier with the glee of children dismantling a toy. “We’ve made an upgrade, Terence,” one of them chirped in a voice that was both sound and color. “Now the copier can copy the idea of documents rather than documents themselves.” I nodded sagely, wondering how long it would take the suits upstairs to realize they’d just automated metaphysics.

By ten o’clock, the jesters had convened a mandatory meeting in Conference Room B. The agenda had been sent out via email, though when I opened the file, the bullet points wriggled away like frightened tadpoles. Sitting in the room, one realized there was no meeting, not in the conventional sense, but a performative prank. They rearranged our chairs into a circle, then into a spiral, then into something resembling the inside of a seashell. “Don’t you see?” one of them whispered while juggling everyone’s pens. “This is the quarterly report.”

I left with my head spinning, only to encounter the serpentine beings in Legal. They had entwined themselves around the contracts and were whispering clauses into existence. One snake fixed its crystalline eyes upon me and hissed, “Every agreement is already infinite, Terence. Sign here… and here… and also in the margins.” I signed, though I’m not sure with what hand or in what dimension.

Lunch was provided by the feline tricksters at Reception. They had knocked the catering order into a portal, so instead of sandwiches, we were offered glowing cubes of pure flavor. I tasted one and instantly remembered my grandmother’s laughter, a summer in childhood, and the smell of wet grass after rain. Someone else tried one and burst into tears of nostalgia for a life they had never lived.

In the afternoon, the insectoid overlords summoned us to the boardroom. They sat on high perches, mandibles clacking with inscrutable satisfaction. One of them clicked in my direction: Explain the nectar quotas. I tried to improvise with charts of honeycomb fractals, but before I could finish, the fractal architects stormed in with blueprints of the office redesigned as an infinite cathedral of geometry. The overlords seemed pleased.

At four o’clock, the great mother entity emerged, luminous and vast, filling HR with a womb-like glow. She embraced each of us in turn, whispering, “You are enough. Even here.” A jester tried to prank her by turning the breakroom clock backwards, but she only smiled and said, “All time is already backwards.”

As the sun set, or rather, as the sun folded itself into a polyhedron, the sentient geometry drifted through the office, cleaning not dust but the very debris of probability. Wastebaskets of alternate timelines were quietly emptied, leaving the air crisp and unreal.

I left the office that evening changed, as always, wondering not whether I had worked, but whether work itself had been redefined in the act of our collective hallucination. One does not labor in the DMT office. One participates in the ongoing carnival of becoming.