15

Everyone, to varying degrees, has a subconscious mind. Of course, people refer to it by many different names: gut feeling, instinct, conscience, voice of God. Whatever name is used, the subconscious often makes itself known when a person is confronted with a potentially dangerous situation. Perhaps you shouldn't go down that dark alleyway. Perhaps you didn't lock the front door. Perhaps she really does love you. And many times, the subconscious is right, though not always.

The majority of the population spend their lives idly glancing at their subconscious, heeding intuition as often as not. There are some people who have, through trial and error, learned to harness their subconscious mind to a degree, and thus have lives full of "beating the odds" and coming out ahead of the pack.

There is a danger in this approach. Yes, heeding the advice of the subconscious mind can reap copious rewards, but if one listens too intently or too long, the subconscious mind will begin to expect recompense. It extracts this payment the only way it can, by claiming parts of the conscious mind.

Usually this happens unnoticed. You forget what kind of birthday cake you had when you were three. You can't recall the name of your college friend's mother. You remember that your wedding banquet was delicious, but not what kind of food was served. This, again, happens to everyone in varying degrees, and is expected as people age.

But from the people who allow their subconscious to influence their decisions more than they should, larger memories are taken. Did I pay my rent this month? Why am I on a bus to midtown? Where did my wife go? And on and on, until the entirety of the conscious has succumbed to the ravenous appetite of the subconscious.

You encounter people who have been consumed by their subconscious all the time. A homeless man at the bus station, the cashier at the fast food place down the street, the woman on your block with the dozens of cats. They live beneath the waves of their own mind, unable to think, unable to perceive anything at all.

As horrendous as this may sound, there is a worse fate. For as it is possible to lose oneself to the subconscious, it is also possible to destroy it completely. If a person is somehow able to deny their subconscious, hard enough for long enough, then the conscious takes over. Suddenly, everything in your mind, absolutely everything, comes to the forefront. You will remember.

You will remember the exact moment your parents stopped loving you. You will remember how grotesque you felt when you hit puberty. You will remember things you shouldn't know at all. How it felt to rob the fast food place. The words your son used when he penned his suicide note. Where you hid after you killed your own wife as she walked down a dark alleyway.

You will remember your own experiences, other people's experiences, towns, nations. Without the subconscious tempering the conscious, you will expand to remember all that there is to be remembered. You will be a universe unto yourself, and you will move past the universe into the void. You will be inside and outside yourself, within and beyond, none and all. You will remember.

Hold these words with you as you can, though you will certainly forget them in time. Some things were meant to be forgotten.

There are seven words in every Gideon's Bible - y'know, the one they stuff in every hotel room - that can't be found in any other bible. If you repeat those seven words to yourself while grasping the doorknob to your room, the door will open to any hotel room in the world. Of course, if you want to control where you're going, you'll need to know the Gideon's Key - one more inserted word, unique to each copy, that acts as an index for each room.