I remember him saying it was like being drowned in a calculator, that first Field. The entrance. The barrier wasn’t visible but once you penetrated it, christ. Every atom of your being felt like it was being divided, subdivided and sorted in elaborate and esoteric orders and patterns. It felt like a long, long time but according to our timepieces it was no more than a minute.

We found the first Field using two scraps of audio we’d salvaged from a hulk. No idea what race had built it. No idea how old it was but it seemed very old, ancient. The machine we took had no obvious purpose. But we got these two scraps of very damaged audio. And found coordinates in the codec. ‘Record03 (Feb 2011) [granular lol analysis]’ contained the X axis, Record04 (Feb 2011) [filthy tube] the Y. And get a load of those dates. At least I think they are dates. In an extremely old format if they are. But I am not an expert in these things.

We got spit out the other side of this first Field like pennies from a change machine at the arcade. Possibly I made that association because of the weird coppery taste in my mouth after all the atomic sorting business. I assume this was a very thin residue of blood left over from being pulled apart in every direction and then being put back together again. We’d all lost our hair. I remember he joked about hoping there was a toupée machine on the other side. It was around that time I observed that our minds weren’t quite right. What the hell is a toupée machine? You ever see a vending machine with wigs?

Out of the Field, the other side was featureless, a wasteland. Waiting for us was a humanoid figure but made from some kind of metal or metallic substance. It was clearly trying to communicate with us but didn’t speak our language or was just broken. All that came out were strained, garbled noises, jagged and glitchy. But it had enough nous to be able to signal to us to follow it, as it turned around and walked away from the edge of the Field. We started jokingly referring to it as the tinman as we followed.

After a couple of hours walking we started to see *something* on the horizon. As we got closer it appeared to be some form of court. Like a tennis court? But not really. The design was not geometric, and it was very busy in pattern. It hurt either your eyes or brain to look too long at it.
Around this ‘court’ there were various items which I guess you played this game with, like goals or basketball hoops, but they weren’t anything recognisable to us.
The tinman motioned us to stand in certain positions on the court and pick up the objects. Odd thing to say about a featureless metal figure but it appeared quite excited.

The next….hour? Day? Week? Was a blur. I know we played whatever that game was, and obeyed the rules of play. But I have no idea what we did or how we played, or how we knew how to play.
When it was done, the tinman walked straight towards me emitting a vicious white noise and I realised a strip of paper was slowly coming out of its mid-section. The sound was an internal printer.
It handed me the strip and I saw printed on it were words, in English. So it did know our language, I guess its audio module or whatever it emitted sounds with was broken.
‘You Are The Lucky Chuckwu’ it said, and a smiley face next to it. The tinman grabbed my other hand and held it aloft while I stared at this perplexing message.

The tinman motioned at me. Pointed at the paper, pointed at its audio module opening, pointed then at my mouth. It then began to rub its stomach. I realised after a while it wanted me to eat the paper. So I did, out of politeness. It was a mistake.
Seems obvious now that the paper would be adulterated with something, if it wanted me to eat it. It started to kick in immediately. I’ve done psychedelics before. Am a seasoned psychonaut you might say. This was not that.

I realised that we’d had an audience the whole time we’d been playing this game. But only now could I see them. They were all singing together now that the game was finished. I couldn’t tell you what they looked like. They kept shifting in my vision. They were bluish and purplish? Some pink? Their general anatomy moved like a kaleidoscope moves and they were completely symmetrical across both axes
I felt them all reach out to me inside my brain. To communicate.
“We are the Jarky noe. We are well met to you, Lucky Chuckwu”
It felt warm and nice and welcoming. I didn’t trust it one bit. And I was right to. The last thing I saw as I fell backwards down a strange and filthy tube were the rest of my team being vaporised. Their screams followed me. It didn’t appear to be a quick way to go, despite the seeming efficiency with which the tinman took them all out simultaneously.

The tube dumped me out of the ceiling of what looked like a normal human living room. There were power sockets on the walls. A dado and picture rail running around the walls. Nothing else though. No furniture. There was a door in each wall, dead centre.
It was a while of exploring but I can save the time now to tell you I worked out I was in a cube of rooms like those old puzzle cubes. If my calculations were accurate there were 400 of them. I’d gone around and scratched numbers into the walls. The one I entered was number 14. Every now and then I would find food or water in one of them. Always when I was at the edge outright starvation mode. The food and water were prepackaged but with no information on them. Usually a sandwich, and a carton or a can of water.

I was using room 42 as a toilet. And that was where the Frequency Fold happened. I guess moving my bowels in there invoked something. Something that had already been watching me maybe?
I’d been building up weird faecal energy. I could feel the air vibrating in there. Flexing.
I’ve neglected to mention that each room had a strange tone playing in it, some louder than others. In 14 it was barely there. In 42 it was loud and dissonant. I preferred that for shitting out of just old habit. There was nobody there to hear me move my bowels but even if there were, they couldn’t over that racket.

So I am there doing my business when something changed in the tone, the frequencies *folded*is the best way I can put it. And with them so did I. I was once again put in mind of the first Field, as my body began to be divided and folded like a piece of paper. But the feeling this time was *stutter-y* except if I was being more accurate it was *stutururts-y*. Make sense? Yeah me neither.

So now I am existing as all these long thin shards of information and I am being pummelled through radio and video transmissions. Catching thousands of tiny little fragments of them as I pass through them all. Bits and pieces sticking to me like burrs. I heard some kinda theme song that was either ‘hello Larry’ or ‘hell no Larry’. Something about chicken? Something about warheads? What was the purpose of all this? If there even was one.

I don’t know how long I’d been lying there after it was over. I’d been staring straight up into the sky unaware that’s what I was looking at. Eventually I sat up and there was the tinman, somehow looking very pleased to see me. I was back in the wasteland.
I heard the noisy printer in its midsection going again and it proffered another scrap of paper at me.
I took it and read it, though slightly wary to let my guard down and look away from the tinman.
‘I hope you enjoyed your stay, you lucky chuckwu you. The way out is through The Sterlit Field. Hope to see you again!’ Another smiley face.

It once again motioned for me to eat the paper. I wasn’t falling for that again. I screwed it up and dropped it on the ground. I could see this Sterlit Field now, it was a strange one. Like a wall of shiny black jelly with points of white in it in a diamond pattern.
The tinman had thrown its hands up and hunched down to the ground after I’d thrown away its message. It blocked my path as I walked towards the starlet field and proffered the paper again. I refused and walked around it, getting closer to this weird shiny black wall.

I told you before that eating the paper had been a mistake? This time *not* eating it was the mistake. Whatever substance is in there, you need it to cross the Sterlit Field and get out on the other side.
I know this because I am in here with all the other Lucky Chuckwus. They told me. We don’t age, we don’t need to eat or sleep. We can’t really move either, it’s like being suspended in thick jelly. I can hear fine though, I wish I couldn’t. There are so many of them in here and they do not stop fucking talking. All of them all talking at once all the time. About nothing interesting. Mainly smugly reminding you of your mistake about not eating the final message, and then segueing into nostalgia of the time they made the mistake. And a grudging respect and affection for the tinman.


The only relief is our ability to sync our minds and watch each new participant. As it turns out, we are the Jarky noes. It’s a form of astral projection. We watch each new team enter and then we root for the next lucky chuckwu, cheer him or her on from the sidelines so to speak. The cube of rooms is particularly good because we can take turns inhabiting their body for limited periods and feel what it’s like to eat and shit again. In the frequency fold we can access the collected fragments of audio and video signals and stitch them together into an acceptable form of entertainment while we wait for the next team. It can be a long wait, sometimes a couple of hundred years. But once we are notified by the tinman that another lot of players have emerged from The Field, the excitement is palpable.

3737 bald men thrumming with excitement in a vast strip of black jelly.