The Hypercastle of the Miizzzard lies deep in the Urscape. It was built in the fold between two ridges of pale orange rock that have pushed through the plains. Here, close to the substrate of reality, the Miizzzard observes the realms of the multiverse and performs his ablutions of the macrocosm.

Through his telescope, he is closely observing the skin of the living multidimensional cosmos. It is pocked and pitted, burned and scared from the violence of its birth. The scorched flesh forms a pattern, a tattoo that is the after-image of its fiery birth. On its other side it is cool, and it casts a three-dimensional shadow onto the walls of its cave.

But the Miizzzard is not interested in shadows. He is closely scanning the skin, looking for infections. On an inverse of the anterior edge of the eleventh-dimensional manifold, he sees a small outcrop of brackish, fuzzy slime that has accumulated enough mass to loom above its crater womb. The Miizzzard blinks and shifts in his seat. From his felt suit coat, he pulls out a worn, turquoise notebook and writes down the eleven coordinate points of the infection from his display.

He gets up and takes the long walk down spiral staircases to the lower floors, working out the stiffness of his joints. The Hypercastle has no foundation, it rests directly on the foamy surface of the Urscape. The Miizzzard is standing in a huge room, his bare feet touching the bedrock of reality. An orb is suspended in the middle of the room, with steps leading up to it and wires stretching away to the darkness of the corners and into the Ursurface. The Miizzzard enters the body cavity within the orb and the door scrapes against the threshold as it closes behind him. Wires painlessly attach themselves into his skin, and suddenly the Miizzzard is no longer himself; he is the living cosmos. He stretches to accustom himself to the new form and cracks open and close in spacetime. Galaxies shatter as he walks across the cave floor, past the fire still burning in the floor form his birth, and to the entrance. There is a silvery, sludgy stream running there, and thin flesh-colored clouds are racing across the sky, but the light is so bright that the Miizzzard-as-the-cosmos must close his eyes as he bends down to the stream to clean himself. The waters are steaming as he washes in a ritual pattern of left then right then left, seventeen times total. He murmurs a prayer that echoes in the quantum flux, and returns to the cave.

In the basement of the Hypercastle, the Miizzzard descends the steps from the orb. He touches his stomach, and begins the long climb to eat his daily meal of bread.

The other day, the Miizzzard decided to take a walk, to more clearly contemplate the strange flowering that has blossomed into the sentient universe and the techno-spirituo-promise of the singularity. “Space is the Place,” sing Sun Ra and June Tyson; “There’s no limit to the things that you can do (Space is the Place) There’s no limit to the things that you can be.” Well, pounding the paved swamp of the Greater Houston Area gives one perspective on the relationship between concrete and the stars. Maybe one day homo cosmos will swim in the free-fall of the middle of hollowed-out asteroids; maybe one day we will all know the joys of the Silver Surfer. But these are days of lead, and each step is heavy.

The Miizzzard stands alone underneath the mystic crystal pinnacle of his trans-dimensional hypercastle, focusing the magical energies to better delve into the universe. The weight of it all presses against his flesh as if he were buried in mud at the bottom of the ocean; and yet, he is lighter than air atop a structure that cannot be contained in any one locus of the space-time continuum. The paradoxes of his life drive him down the cascading steps, tapestries of lost times mocking his vision; which at times, can cut into the vastness of infinity. But not now. It is occluded.