Do not wonder where the top of the rainbow is, and do not wonder where it leads to either. It’s all hogwash. Did you know the cytostream makes up the dream so that we cannot see what it’s doing to us? Fucked up. That’s what it all is. Fucked up beyond all recognition. No not recognition, but belief. You will not believe any of it. You will not be able to until you kill your dreams. Until you learn to keep your eyes open.

The cytostream needs to be circumvented. I’ve found the proper chemicals with which to do it. It will be a little messy. You have to crack open some batteries and get your hands on a very specific brand of detergent, but you can do it yourself. Right from the comfort of your home.

Ms. Wallace is staring at me again. She doesn’t fucking know. I smile and wave as if everything is all right. Everything will be all right so long as I don’t try to leave this room. I must type it all on the page. Type the thoughts as they occur. That’s the only way to get this right. I have to keep fighting the cytostream.

It takes over when you are not thinking. If you let your mind wander too far away from anything, then everything will get fuzzy and your brain will start hopping on its own. That’s the cytostream. When you’re weak it doesn’t even wait for you to be asleep. It just comes at you from nowhere, and it’s addictive.

Why is Ms. Wallace walking by again? Does she not trust me? She has that stupid grin on her face as if she knows what’s good for me. Did she just fucking wink at me? Those papers in her damn hands better be important. She had better have a purpose in this steaming pile of bricks and nothing masquerading as something that is not a prison. Ms. Wallace, I hope you choke. I hope the cytostream takes you every night into obliviousness.

The best way to fight the cytostream when you are alone, at least the best way that I have found, is to write. As long as your eyes are open, and the keys are being punched with reckless abandon, then the cytostream can’t take over and try to teach you about how it doesn’t exist.

I first discovered the cytostream when I was in college the first time. Staying up all night, cramming pills into me just to study. Just to learn all that I needed to learn because the exam was tomorrow and I didn’t even know what it was about. It is amazing what they will let you get away with. They were all doing it in college, and I didn’t want to be any different. In fact, I wanted to be better. I went three days once. Three days with no sleep. What they don’t tell you is that at the end of it you sleep this long languid and almost disgusting sleep. You do not wake up feeling refreshed. You wake up dead inside.

Okay, why the fuck is Dr. Farthing walking by now? Doesn’t he see that I’m busy? If you even think about coming in here then so help me god I will throw this typewriter at you. It may be antiquated, but that just means that it’s fucking heavy. Oh, if I killed you with this thing wouldn’t that be brilliant? Wouldn’t that be just wonderful, Dr. Farthing? You gave it to me, don’t you remember? I said I wanted to write like they used to. Write and know that any mistake I made would sit there on the page staring back at me. You found this thing for me. I don’t know where you found it, but you did, and it will make your death all the more poetic. Stop reading that damn clipboard on the wall. It’s nothing interesting. Nobody in the history of time has ever affixed anything interesting to the wall via a clipboard.

Finally, he’s gone. Thank God, or thank something anyway. We do have to thank something don’t we? I had nothing to do with his leaving, and the fact that he did, makes it almost feel like someone was listening. Almost.

It was not my three-day bender that brought on the cytostream. It was just that one night and the right mix of lord knows what that brought me to the edge. I was drooling, and my eyes were gone. I was not dying. I was sleeping, but I was awake. I could feel everything. I could see the radio waves, or whatever they were, that were traveling through the air and trying to change my brain. I could feel it all. See it all. Taste it all.

I wonder how many acid trippers and people on holy fucking messiah in the sky saw what I was seeing right then and just assumed it was nothing. Just assumed it was a side effect and not an effect.

I could actually feel it trying to pull me under. Like swampy fingers, pulling up from the sludge that I still called life. I do not know what to call life anymore. Being locked away in here day after day doesn’t help. At least I like this room. I like the things that I have collected here. A smattering of books that nobody else that I know has read, this typewriter, and a pile of papers that I do not care to look at.

You should only ever look into the past in your head. All that shit written down in books was written by the cytostream. At least I assume it must be. I know I never wrote like this when the cytostream had me at its whim every night. I used to write so pleasantly. I was even published a few times in obscure scholarly journals. Can you believe it? I can, but I don’t want to acknowledge it. I don’t want to read those bland cytostream papers.

I’ve been trying to figure out how old the cytostream is. I mean it could be anything that created it. Something so powerful may very well be from out of this world. Maybe they are trying to kill us. They came close with the cold war. What the hell happened? Or were you trying to scare us? I was too young. You didn’t make me piss my pants you fuckers.

Are you kidding me Ms. Wallace? I know she has to be watching me. There is no possible reason on this green Earth she could have to walk by three fucking times in ten minutes or however long it’s been. I lose track of time a lot now. I’m convinced that the cytostream is part of time. That they’re linked. It uses the time to tell us what to do, and when to sleep.

Talk to someone who works third shift for a living. I guarantee that they have something figured out. The cytostream is still in them somewhere, but they’re aware of it at some fundamental level.

Has Ms. Wallace just been standing there staring at me? I gave her a damn smile and a head nod for the third fucking time what more does she want? What does the cytostream want? She’s just looking at me like she’s waiting.

I’m debating taking my shoe off and fucking throwing it at her, but I don’t want to take my fingers away from the keys. Maybe I can do it with one hand and type with the other. The mistakes will be merciless, but it could be worth it.

Never mind, she’s gone now. She didn’t look too happy, but I gave her another smile and a nod and that seemed to do the trick. Such an odd system of currency for the cytostream to listen to.

I failed that test by the way. The one back in college. Actually, I didn’t even show up for it. It was too late to drop the class too. I had to retake it over the summer. I just stole all the answers from a buddy of mine who already passed the class. Much easier to memorize answers than facts. I’m sure that’s what the cytostream would want. You’ve been in a cytostream dream before. Everything makes sense until it doesn’t and then your whole morning is fucked because of a series of thoughts that your brain strung together when you weren’t even conscious. That hardly seems fair.

It took me nearly a decade to figure out what that one night meant though. That one night where I could see the waves radiating into my head and I could actually feel them changing me. That was perhaps that scariest night of my life. It was so vivid. So real. Realer than real. It was metaphysical and strange. It was like the world was opening up for me and pressing down on my shoulders. I knew it was important. I had even tried to recreate the experience with no success, but now I can block the cytostream completely. I can tell because I can write about it, and I can tell because its name comes to me so easily.

I did not name it. I should mention that. It came to me in a foggy dream that I don’t think was supposed to happen. The same dream taught me how to stay awake indefinitely. It’s been twenty-six days now. Ask a doctor, not Doctor Farthing though. Ask a real doctor. They will tell you that my claim is impossible. That I should be dead. I expected to die. I was waiting for it seventeen days ago, and sixteen days ago, and fifteen days ago, but at some point, I realized that it just wasn’t going to happen. That I had cut myself away from the thing that had given itself a name.

Now I am here, madly typing at my typewriter with all my books and my little desk and the place where the phone should be and fucking Ms. Wallace staring at me. She looks really angry now.

I am looking at the clock and I realize why she is angry, why she has been pacing. My class started ten minutes ago and she was too polite. I have to teach these little brats about heterocyclic compounds and nucleophiles. Their exam is tomorrow, and they will use shitty speed that will teach them what they need to know for the exam. Not the good stuff. Not the stuff that can teach you about God and the cytostream.

Go the fuck away Ms. Wallace. I need a new assistant.