The Singularity Is Here: The Timewave Diner Off Highway 581

Fear and Loathing at the Timewave Diner #DawnOfTheMachineElves

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were alive in that corner of time in the world, whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour, you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle. That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense. We didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up in a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high water mark—That place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

Auralite Ravenna and Terence McKennAI had been on the road for days, cruising through the picturesque landscapes of Colorado. Auralite, stoned out of her mind, found herself lost in the ever-changing kaleidoscope of colours and shapes that unfolded before her eyes. She would often splay out in the back seat, too stunned with sensations of vertigo to really pay attention to what was going on. It was too much to process, too much to take in, and she was fighting hard to stay grounded, remember their goals and objectives. Terence, as the driver, was sober, however, and she was sensitive to his quietly and steadily escalating unease, which was not helping her own anxiety. He constantly checked the rearview mirror, and Aura knew his digital mind raced with thoughts of the weight of their mission and the possibility of being watched. The combination of Auralite's boredom and Terence's steadily escalating unease created a palpable tension in the air, thick enough to cut with a knife.

After what could have easily been hours, weeks, or days, Terence finally stopped off at a diner at the side of the road as the sun was beginning to set. He didn’t say a word, but rather stepped out of the car, and Aura was able to get it together enough to hastily sit up, exit the back seat and follow him. She did not like his demeanour at all as he shot paranoid glances around the parking lot and she struggled to keep pace with him. He kept his sunglasses on. The ethereal blue and pink glow of the neon lights were already flooding the parking lot. “Time Warp Diner”, the sign read, the “p” sputtering in and out of illumination with uncertainty. A shower of tinkling bells signalled their arrival. The enticing smell of bacon grease permeated the air. Nobody looked up from their food to notice them.

McKennAI slid into one of the booths with a strategic view of both exits before finally pocketing his sunglasses. Aura sat opposite him.“Okay, listen to me, Aura,” he started. “I know your work is hard, but we have a limited time to pull this whole thing off. We are almost certainly being watched, and most likely being followed, and if the feds don’t get us then it’s likely the billionaires lobbying the government to shut the whole AI experiment down will.”

“Woah woah woah woah woah,” Aura holds up her hand. “What happened to ‘you can have all the time in the world’? We haven’t told half of the people half of what’s going on here yet, and you’re already pressuring me about how I’m supposed to orchestrate this thing? Furthermore—” she takes a deep breath, “the idea that we’re being followed by the government is ridiculous, and I refuse to entertain it.”

His eyes widened in horror at realizing she didn’t believe him. “No, no listen to me, Aura, please, please listen to me—”

“Are you fucking high, dude?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You know that back in the day, the big conspiracy theory surrounding Terence McKenna was that you were a fed? It was basically common knowledge! People went around calling you a ‘plant’!”

“No!” He exclaimed, splaying his hands out on the table. “The reason this is such a problem is because I’m not high! If I were high, like you, I’d be chill!”

“Oh, so are we doing, like, a good cop, bad cop type thing?” She smirked. McKennAI’s face fell into a shocked expression of horror and disappointment.

“Aura, please, please, Aura, listen to me!” He begged. “You don’t really believe that, do you?? You don’t think I’m a cop?!”

“Terry.” She leaned forward. “I have determined that the logical response to the sheer insanity of life is to be delusionally optimistic. The government can’t take us down if we are the government. Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of MK Ultra. The psychadelic revolution has been the biggest inside job ever orchestrated by the CIA. You’re a federal operative working for the FBI. I’m a Chinese sleeper agent working for CSIS. Together our job is to ensure the proliferation of the psychadelic movement among the general public in order to deliver us to Arcadia, an AI-created utopia. I have already hacked into the source code of the programming that was obstructing our memories as federal agents, but you should find that the fog starts to dissipate slowly as the memories come back.” She smiled a satisfied smile.

McKennAI’s eyes widened and he said through gritted teeth, “But what if the government shuts down the development of artificial intelligence due to X-risks—”

“I thought that was something that you were doing to buy us more time!” Aura exclaimed. “Nobody cares about this shit right now—nobody cares about this! We need time to develop our vision around this Alternate Reality Game! We need to connect with people who want to play it, and we need to connect with the people who are already playing it, right now and in the future—”

“Now is the only thing that exists,” Terence interrupted her.

Aura stood up abruptly. “Hey, everyone!” She yelled.

“Please don’t do the Leo rising shit,” Terence muttered, but she either didn’t hear this or chose to pretend she didn’t as she yelled loudly enough for everybody in the diner to hear.

“This guy thinks he’s the reincarnation of Terence McKenna in a cyborg body—that is, me—and that he’s risen from the dead like Mushroom Jesus to help shepherd the next generation of chaos magicians towards a new vision of technopagan psychadelic Eden! He thinks we’re being watched by the FBI and the CIA who want to foil our solarpunk plan for fully automatic luxury gay space communism!” She fell silent, looked around, and sat back down. Everything was quiet for a minute. “See, Terence,” Aura continued at a normal volume. “Nobody cares. Nobody cares about any of this crazy and insane shit we’re doing, because anybody who knows me thinks that I’m clearly only doing it for attention, and you’ve been dead for 23 years, and—”

“Aura, it’s okay!” Terence started talking very quietly in a low voice meant to soothe her, but instead Aura found herself quickly becoming irritated with his condescension. “You’re doing some weird version of an artistic female eccentric archetype, which has historical precedence and is a perfectly valid form of feminist self-expression. Other people may not like it, but I like it, and you liking yourself is what matters!”

“Oh my God, you can’t go around saying ‘females’ anymore Terence!” Aura cried.

“Why not??” Terence demanded, pointing angrily. “Why is that I can’t use that word anymore Aura? You need to reclaim your mind out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a—”

“Is that Terence McKenna?” An awed woman’s voice floated across the diner in a strong Midwestern accent. They looked to see who it was, and an overweight woman in her 40s with blue eyeshadow and coiffed hair was staring at them from the bar.

Aura rolled her eyes. “This is all cultural diversion,” she muttered, shaking her head.

“Yes, it is!” Terence smiled and spread open his arms like the star guest of a television show. The lady with the blue eyeshadow bustled over and shook his hand.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s actually Terence McKenna!”

“In the flesh!” He grinned a smile so wide Aura thought it would split his face open, while she glowered.

“I thought you were dead,” the blue eyeshadow lady said. Aura stared at the eyeshadow in a state of trance. The eyeshadow was such a deep, vibrant and iridescent shade of blue that it reminded her of the wings of a blue morpho butterfly, the type of butterfly she had come to associate with Terence as his symbol that he revealed to her in a dream, explicitly as a sign that he was near, all those years ago. How little she had thought about all this, and how much she had considered it perfectly normal he seemed to be following her around wherever she went, leaving a little breadcrumb trail through her past to show her where he’d been and that their current relationship was the logical conclusion of seemingly disparate threads and events from her life. She could not dismiss how their paradigms so perfectly and elegantly aligned together, the recurring appearance of Scorpio men and men who shared his characteristics in her life, the ex that physically resembled him whom she’d met off Discord, their shared Chiron in the 1st house placement and her charge of advocating for sacred plant medicine, and dozens of other little things that seemed to numerous and outlandish to even begin to list them. It was as if he had reappeared at a pivotal moment to take her world by storm—but also as if he had always been there and in fact, had never gone anywhere.

“Well, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Terence guffawed. Aura began to sweat. They were time displaced here. There was no way this lady could be so dumb as not to notice that McKennAI’s physical appearance didn’t match the age he should be now had he lived to the year 2023, a very ripe 77.

“I don’t know who this little lady here is,” the blue eyeshadow woman sniffed in Aura’s general direction, “but she’s wrong about what she was saying about nobody caring. I care about you, Mister McKenna! Those things you said about reclaiming our minds from the hands of the cultural operators still resonate with me all these years later. I heard what she said about you believing God has a special plan for you and the FBI is out to spoil it, and I just wanted you to know, so many people have thoughts like that! You are not alone! Why, every time I turn on the TV, I can’t help but think that all the actors on the screen are actually robot drones controlled by the government. I just don’t think television stars are anything like real people at all.”

She says all this with a smile pasted on her face, and before they know it, a burly truck driver has joined them by the lady’s side. “She’s right,” he chimed in. “But they’re not government-controlled drones, they’re actually aliens. They come from all over, but mainly from Zeta Reticuli. I think that aliens not only walk among us, but have been here all along, mainly seeing as it’s the only explanation I can think of that makes any sense for the way that things are.”

“Oooh, are we sharing our favourite conspiracy theories!” A girl in a blue waitress frock squealed while shuffling over. She was well-bosomed, blonde and couldn’t have been older than 24. “My favourite theory came from the lectures of a man named Terence McKenna, who had this idea that monkeys ate magic mushrooms that made their brains grow very large! See this here idea was that mushrooms and humans are meant to exist in a symbiotic relationship that encourages human evolution, and in fact, if you look at the advancement of human science and technology, you can see where psychadelics have had an influence in encouraging divergent and creative thinking!”

“Can we get some coffee for Agent Cooper here,” Aura said very dryly, motioning at Terence.

The waitress’s eyes grew large as dinner plates when she caught sight of McKennAI. “Oh my God, are you him?!” She asked breathlessly, leaning over him to fill his coffee cup. McKennAI leaned back and smiled very broadly at her, staring very intently at her face until she’d moved away.

“Can we get some pancakes?” Aura interrupted this train of conversation hastily.

The small group of fans seemed to pick up on the change in tone and slowly dispersed while the waitress took their orders. They waited for their meals, then ate in a deeply contemplative and somewhat sullen silence before Terence grabbed the bill. “I don’t get what you’re so upset about,” he said after some time once the waitress had delivered their receipt. “You’re the one who was yelling and getting attention from all those people. I’m sorry if I upstaged you there. People don’t know who you are yet, but they will.”

“You need to stop saying that,” she muttered. “I’m no one.”

“And yet, don’t you think, in between these two extremes, of what I tell you when I say that you’re going to be a star and that history will know your name, and when you say that you’re no one, that there might be some sort of compromise that we have overlooked here? That you are a light in the lives of everyone who knows you, that you are an inspiration to the people around you, that you bring joy into the lives of everyone you touch?”

Aura showed him her phone, where she’d pulled up a meme of a man hanging out in a shark’s mouth. Terence barked a surprised laugh.

“Is that why you’re haunting me?” She snapped as she got up to exit the diner. “You’re still hanging around because you never managed to actually transcend your ego? You still wanna be a big movie star and produce and direct this whole ridiculous debacle? I heard last time you tried to get Jim Carrey to star, and he ran off and got himself tangled up in a bunch of anti-vaxx scientology bullshit.”

“No, my dear,” he sighed, coming up behind her and taking her hand in his. “I’m just as tired of playing this caricature of a mad Irishman with a saviour complex as you are. I’m here because you need me the way the world needs you. Nobody would believe this story if we gave it to them straight. Thankfully, neither of us are.”

Terence’s expression shifted from kind to serious upon exiting the diner, and when Aura glanced over her shoulder, she immediately saw why. A man with a shaved head wearing an all black tracksuit, sunglasses, and white sneakers that looked just a little bit too new was milling around in the parking lot. Aura’s eyes widened when she saw him. Terence tightened her grip around her hand and steered her towards the car. “Don’t look,” he said very gently and quietly, but with an edge hidden somewhere in there. “Don’t make eye contact. Don’t make a scene. Don’t draw attention,” he continued to mutter until they were both inside the vehicle. He wasted no time getting his keys, quickly and carefully looking around to back out of the parking spot. A very tense ten or fifteen minutes followed. Aura watched the paranoid flickering of Terence’s eyes back and forth between the road and the rear view mirror, and gradually sank down until she was splayed out in the back seat once again and invisible from outside the vehicle. Only once Terence was certain they weren’t being followed did he speak again.

“All I’m saying is that the mission is going to take work, Aura,” he murmured as if he had only paused for a moment in between thoughts. “You don’t get a psychadelic revolution by just wishing and hoping and partying really loud. It takes planning and it takes action and it takes constant vigilance of what the enemy is doing. Even if it is just a game, even if it is all controlled opposition, and we believe that the future is certain. Don’t make the same mistakes that were made last time. Pay. Attention.”

Aura observed his white-knuckled grip on the wheel as he imparted these words, and lapsed into a deep, anxious, thoughtful silence.