Dream Diary #2: Storm

I see a hurricane turning, slowly shredding everything in its path.

My head says it is a hurricane. Everything I ever logically laid out in my life says hurricane.

My blood says it is a party.

I wake up with my head pounding.

Kalika here.

I wanted a chance to write out and explain this myself.

I called in some contacts and took the substance to a bigger lab with better equipment. With the small sample I wanted to go more in depth and prove my theory.

It was blood, but with fewer red blood cells, and therefore a bigger percentage of plasma. It appeared to have a crystallisation adjutant added, collectively this produced an orange substance. That is the basic oversight of it, but none of this is what stood out to me.

As soon as I knew it was blood, I began looking for azoth, which came out positive along with a similar grey material I couldn't identify. I then started testing for drugs, which was when I moved to the bigger lab. The emails sent do not make any kind of word or meaningful anagram. Rather, they match a chemical formula, which is C12H16N2. And as I suspected, there were abnormally high traces of this chemical - N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. 

For the uninitiated, DMT is a powerful and fast-acting psychedelic, a rather uncommon street drug, and an active ingredient in ayahuasca. It induces feelings of extreme joy, terror, anxiety or spirituality. Users given high enough doses often report visual and auditory hallucinogenic experiences such as accessing a "higher plane of existence", meeting what is described as "intelligent beings" that they are able to communicate with. These beings are typically described as humanoid, but often supernatural in nature. So I initially suspected that this proxy was taking this substance recreationally. Min gave me a few more details about his behaviour and how he seemed to have different states of consciousness, and this matched the effects of DMT.

However, in the blood I found no evidence of the usual impurities that DMT or other drugs are cut with, and I find it hard to believe a teenage boy as unstable as Graham would be able to get hold of purified DMT, or be able to purify it himself - it is hard enough to test for, to the extent where I needed a lab. While I cannot conclusively rule out that it wasn't externally produced and ingested by someone, I wanted to discuss something else about this compound. It has been theorised DMT can be endogenic in mammals, a.k.a. naturally occurring in the body. In 2013 researchers found the compound in the pineal gland of rats. It has been put forward as a scientific explanation of alien abductions and spiritual experiences. A leading researcher on DMT has hypothesised that in near death, the pineal gland produces a significant amount of DMT that would cause near-death experiences.

I haven't identified the grey composite, and neither could anybody at the lab. It seemed, to us, quite comparable to azoth in structure and mystery. For now I'm calling it "gris", after the French word for grey.

This is based off one sample with an unreliable source. But if we were to assume everything about this was legitimate, I would say that as it seems to interfere with other chemicals in the brain, azoth, and/or perhaps that other grey substance, can somehow stimulate the pineal gland to produce DMT.

This is all very hypothetical. I plan to do further research on our source.

Kalika

Kalika

I have a room mate of sorts now, although I don't know how great that is if you both hold a gun at your sides when interacting.

She contacted me by email asking to study the substance. Since I've made no progress and she seems to have the know-how, I agreed. We settled on a meetup at an alley behind the bar and immediately pulled guns out on each other. I showed her the emails and let her go through my entire phone just to prove who I was. That basically set the tone for the ensuing hidden weapon checks and our tense walk to where I was staying. Things settled a bit after. At least, once a certain amount of time had gone by without anybody shooting or stabbing anything.

"You can call me Kalika." She set up a fold-out table and got out a micro burner and some test tubes.

"Kalika. OK. That's a pretty name."

"It's not my name. It's what you can call me." Kalika pulled out what looked like a small microscope, and held it up to show me. "I lived off nothing but one Pot Noodle a day for months to afford this, so if you break it, I break you. And for when you put this on your blog, the same goes for Graham and any of those other bumblefucks."

"I'll make sure I post about it. How long have you been running for?"

"From the rakshasa? Twelve years, maybe. Since I was ten."

"Ten? How did you survive?"

"I had a group I ran with who protected me, showed me the ropes and the guns," she said shortly, tossing a sealed bag of azoth on the table. "I was raised on bullets and wack theories on just about all the rakshasas you can think of. And my group ain't here now, so don't bother asking. We're not friends, and I don't need what happened publicised."

"Right."

"Anyway, I've got a pretty good idea of what this stuff might be based on those letter emails you got. It fits into a theory I had. I'd say those emails basically confirm it."

"What's the theory?"

"It can wait. Need to translate it anyway." She pulled out a notebook.

"What's that test tube thing with the stuff in it?"

"It's not a test tube. It's a gas chromatograph."

Not knowing what any of the fuck that was, I decided to leave her to it. Now she's hard at work, and I'm typing this up while guarding the door. Hopefully this gets somewhere.