(Notes and disclaimer in part 1)

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"Jason, do you know anything about quadratic equations?"
Jason looked away from filling his Brain Freezy cup. "Nah, I took
Remedial Algebra all through high school. Why?"
Rachel chewed on the end of her pencil. "Just homework."
"You're doing homework now? Why?"
"I gotta get good grades," Rachel said. "Gotta go to a good college,
gotta get out of Red Bank, gotta get a good job." She looked up. "I
saw some of those movies you were in over the weekend."
"Which ones?"
"The one about the angels, and the one with the clerks. Mom made me
watch it. She says she doesn't want me to end up like the guy in the
movie."
"Good idea," said Jason. "Stay in school. Don't take drugs, all that
shit. What'd you think of the movies?"
Rachel shrugged. "The one with the clerks was sort of funny, I
guess. I like Monty Python better."
"What about "Dogma"?"
Rachel wrinkled her nose. This was a maneuver which would have
looked good on someone with a cute little button nose, a cheerleader
perhaps. But Rachel had a long Roman nose, and was on the debate
team besides, so it just made her look myopic. "It was sort of okay,
I guess. But the theology was all wrong."
Jason blinked. "How's it wrong?"
"The Metatron bit, for example. A fallacy. The whole Voice of God
idea was a superstition made up to explain the fusing of the
bicameral mind several thousand years ago." She nodded and scribbled
something on her notepaper.
Jason shook his head. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Haven't you ever read "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind"? Oh, and the thing about God being both male
and female, that's wrong."
Jason wanted to hit his head on the counter, but settled for biting
the edge of his cup. "Listen, it's just a movie, there's no..."
"The universe began with two dynamics, male and female, entropy and
regeneration. When humans evolved, they began to separate the two
into good and evil, which consequently unbalanced the dynamics. The
female dynamic, which was considered to be evil, sickened and died.
The male dynamic mourned her loss and attempted to fit itself into
the gap left by her presence. This meant that the universe became
schizophrenic, which is why reality is so fucked up."
Jason stared at Rachel. Her entire speech had been delivered in a
complete monotone entirely unlike her usual petulant, precise
speaking voice. The only part of it that had sounded anything like
normal were the last eight words.
"How the hell do you?..." he finally asked.
Rachel shrugged. "Just common sense, really." She began humming.
Jason rifled through the magazines at the counter. It was a minute
before he realized that Rachel was trying to sing along with the
Styx song currently playing on the sound system.
"Secret secret, I got a secret. I am machine, not man, I'm an
electric ant. My brain is IBM. Domo arigato, roboto-chan..."
Jason blinked, and there was another hallucination. Rachel was no
longer at the desk. Or rather, it was Rachel, but not Rachel as he
had seen her these past few months. From the neck up, she was a
perfectly ordinary fifteen-year-old girl. Below that, she was made
up of whirring machinery, wires and computer chips.
He understood perfectly now. Rachel was a robot. She probably didn't
know it herself, because it had been programmed into her to think
that she was a human. But some part of her somewhere knew, and that
weird speech she had given him was something that only a robot could
know. She was trying to tell him; unconsciously she wanted someone
to find out. That was why she was singing that song.
Where the hell had that idea come from?
"Jason? Yo, Earth to Jason. What's wrong?"
Jason shook his head, and Rachel was no longer a robot. "Spaced out,
I guess. Fuck, that was weird."
"What was?" Rachel sounded concerned. "What did you see?"
Jason let out a laugh, an admission of his silliness. "For a second,
I thought you were a robot. You were singing that song an' all,
and..." He couldn't think of anything else to say, so he just trailed
off.
Rachel nodded. "I see. That's a common hallucination among
recovering junkies." She dug in her pocket and produced a small blue
round thing. It looked like a breath mint. "Maybe you should take
this."
Jason held up his hands. "I told you, I'm not allowed to have any of
that shit."
"It's not a drug," Rachel explained. "It's an antidrug, a powerful
antihallucinogenic. It's called mors ontologica, and it reconciles
both halves of your brain."
Jason groaned. "You aren't going to go on that riff about God again,
are you?"
Rachel shrugged. "You already heard it. Anyway, the parallels should
be self-evident." She tucked the pill into Jason's hand.

Jason ate the pill. It was chewy, and it tasted like blue raspberry
mint.
"I took the blue pill," he said. "So what?"
So nothing. He'd seen the Matrix. The blue pill rocketed you back to
the little world you'd built up in your head. Maybe that would be
better. Wasn't there a Pink Floyd song about it, about exchanging a
walk-on part in a war for a starring role in a cage...Something like
that.
That was why he had started smoking pot in the first place. The
future hadn't been worth shit for a foulmouthed little prick in New
Jersey. Life was better if you couldn't see what was going to hit
you, that was his motto.
Why had Rachel had that pill anyway? She didn't need it. She was
going to have a good life. No she wasn't, she was a robot and robots
didn't have lives. But she wasn't a robot, she was just a kid and
she had a pill and she gave it to Jason.
Jason sat on the couch in his apartment and waited for the pill to
take effect and thought about a story. In rehab, in the New Path, he
had had a roommate named Horselover Fat. He'd laughed, because that
was a stupid name, but Horselover Fat (he refused to let anyone call
him by a shortened version of his name) wasn't someone to laugh at.
Horselover Fat had told him a story about a buddy of his. This buddy
had taken an incredible amount of acid once, and been on a trip for
about a day and a half.
"He was totally out of it," Horselover Fat said. "He was speaking in
tongues, and it was only afterwards that we found out he was
speaking perfect Latin. And he saw God."
"I've seen God, too," Jason had said. "She looked a lot like Alanis
Morrissette."
Horselover Fat shook his head. "No, not Yahweh as it says in the
Bible. Yahweh is the occluded creator god; there is one more
important. Anyway, this guy said he saw a doorway. It was beautiful,
and there were red and gold sparks coming off it, and through the
doorway he saw a sunset sky and a wine-dark sea, and a statue, like
a Greek statue. And he sat there staring at the door for hours,
because it was so beautiful. And it was only afterwards that he
realized that the doorway had been God and the place he saw was
Heaven." The bearded man looked into the distance. "But he had been
so busy wondering at the beauty of the door that he didn't go
through. And then he was so depressed, because he knew that he would
never see it again."
"So what did he do?" Jason asked.
"Oh, he killed himself." Horselover Fat chuckled to himself,
although it wasn't funny. "The joke was on him, though, because the
Bible says that you can't get to Heaven if you kill yourself."
Jason thought he knew what the man in the story had felt. He had
seen some of the divine glory when God had kissed him on the steps
of that hundred-year-old church in New Jersey. He had understood
everything, known everything, felt every emotion there was to feel
(but you didn't, Jay did, he was the one that got kissed by God and
all you did was get to tell dirty jokes to a Canadian singer), but
now that the movie cycle was over, now that "Jay and Silent Bob
Strike Back!" was done filming and the saga was laid to rest, he
knew that there was no chance of him ever feeling that again. He
couldn't lobby Kevin to include another appearance by God in another
movie, because he wouldn't be in it. He wouldn't be Jay for God to
kiss.
Horselover Fat had been a pretty weird guy. He had been writing some
kind of treatise on religion, and he had read some of it to Jason.
Now that Jason thought about it, bits of it had been almost
identical to some of the things Rachel had been saying.
But there was no time to think about that now. Jason had to get to
the comic book store and take inventory. At least, he thought as he
got up to leave, if he couldn't put his mind and his thoughts and
his life in some semblance of order, he could tidy up someplace
else.