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Ghostpowder:
Portal Crossing Sections 1 & 2
by
Jake Blackwood

It’s hard to know where to begin. Conventional logic says “the beginning” but when you’re dealing with dimensional shifts, time travel, resurrection, and thoroughly insane concepts like “the beginning” usually end up wrapping around themselves and really just make things more difficult to understand. The important thing is what I really said, which is “it’s hard to know where to begin” with “where” being the key to this whole situation (at least as far as I can tell, I haven’t thoroughly explored all alternatives).
So where did it begin? Even that is a difficult question, I suppose the where in this case could be the year 2036, but then again that’s also the when. Sometimes they’re the same thing, especially in situations like this. Although reflecting on it all I don’t think 2036 is the best place to begin.
June 28, 2009. Famous physicist Stephen Hawking hosted a party for time travelers, the following day he sent out the invitations. His intention was that this party would be documented and at some place in the future, if time travel were possible, people would show up. No one did, which is really maybe the reason for all of this but I can’t be sure.
Now what makes this party for time travelers so important is not really the fact that no one showed up, people often don’t show up for all sorts of things. In fact, it feels intuitively true enough to me that I’m going to state as fact that there is no one in most places most of the time. The lack of people is not remarkable, the remarkable thing is that it is typically never documented that there was no one. There’s just a lack of record. No record stating that someone did arrive, which could just mean they didn’t fill out a record or someone forgot to record their attendance. This party is one of the few, if not the only, instance where it is documented that no one showed up. The difference between a party with no documented attendees and a party where it is documented that there are no attendees.
Based on previous rituals and experiments resulting in Ghostpowder’s first release “Halogen Transmission” we set out to see if it was possible for Ghostpowder to attend this time travel party, not when it happened of course, because no one showed up, but rather now. The flaw in Hawking’s theory was that that he believed that data could not escape a black hole, thus making the idea of time travel into the past via the traditional understanding of “worm holes” impossible, resulting in a documented incident of zero time travelers attending his party.
In 2019 (depending on where you are when you read this) theoretical physicist Netta Engelhardt and her team at MIT would discover, amongst other things, quantum extremal surfaces, an invisible surface inside the event horizon of a black hole to which data that enters it is encoded and changes when data escapes. Hawking was wrong. If data can be transferred then anything can be with the proper methods. Everything is data. Data goes in the black hole, doesn’t disappear, entropy simply means what we do not know about the interior of a black hole, but we’re not worried about the interior, we’re worried about the exit. If it were to be encoded on the quantum extremal surface, then enter another micro-black hole it could be decoded on the other end.
Another thing worth mentioning is the suicide of a writer I’m going to call WB. If you’re reading this you likely know who I’m talking about, but if you don’t it won’t be that difficult to find out. So, he killed himself, at least he did when I was there, or rather where I’m from he killed himself. Actually, before I continue talking about the suicide of WB, I should probably touch on the year 2036, which starts in back in 2000-2001 with John Titor.
John Titor is a fictional character, at least here when I’m writing this. In 2000-2001 and in 2036 he is a military time traveler who is on a mission to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer from 1975 so that following nuclear war they would be able debug old computer code using a secret feature on the IBM 5100, which they needed to do because of the 2038 problem (think Y2k but for real). Where we are right now, this was an early piece of transmedia experimental fiction, which was inspired by an earlier work “Ong’s Hat” by writer and artist Joseph Matheny. Now I don’t have time nor the inclination to go into exploring every corner of all these other events and stories, but they need to be there as scaffolding for your way out of what I’ve experienced.
On November 2nd 2021 at 11:33 pm EST I sent my Ghostpowder partner Ryan Madej the following message:
“Ryan, send me things. I need tracks, throw away stuff to hyper intentional whatever. We have to do a second album. Don’t tell anyone yet but We’re going to play a live show on June 28th, 2009 at Stephen Hawking’s time traveler party. But we have to make the “live album” of it first to set the intention so we can do it in the future. Send sounds.”
Following the success of our ritual experiments with Halogen Transmission, it only made sense to see if we could unlock further phenomenon. The intent was important at this stage, possibly the most important ingredient in the whole thing. If we set the intent and take action then somewhere in the line the things converge and you end up at your new destination. Building new circuits, sound waves, encoded data, were all present in our first effort. Intent lacked, there was no destination so, no calibrated reality for us to compare and contrast. This is what made it dangerous, but also honestly kind of fun. I’m not even sure how many steps away we are from where we started. Doesn’t matter, the point I’m getting to is that I learned one of the keys of this from the CIA.
In 1983 the CIA classified a report regarding Project Stargate, a study on the methods developed by Robert Monroe. In Monroe’s work he refers to the “Hemi-sync” method as a means of projection alignment through time, the future and the past. The CIA engaged in more than 450 missions devoted to this specific process and this work was greatly beneficial to this album. There’s simply too much to go into but all the declassified documents related to Project Stargate can be found in the CIA’s archives at www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate
Studying these archives, I was able to take the things we’d already discovered and incorporate them into where I found practices lacking in the “Hemi-sync” or “Gateway method”. To be frank, some of the claims made in certain documents available from the CIA are ridiculous in nature and while I’m not one to engage in conspiracy theories, I will say that it would make sense for them to alter their reported findings as a method of subterfuge. Afterall, I’m certain on some level the fundamental calibration of experienced reality is a matter of national security, but then everything they want to control is. Moving on.
As Ryan and I worked on the project we encountered a few roadblocks. The largest one being that producing micro-blackholes is expensive, you can’t just order up an acceptable accelerator from Alibaba and expect things to go smoothly. This is where a longtime friend and collaborator who goes by the codename “Xeropoint'' helps us out. For legal reasons Ryan was not made aware of these events due to the sensitive nature of Xeropoint’s involvement and the fact that Ryan is Canadian, means that there would have been some murky international guidelines at play should he have known. To keep everything cool, we never told him that Xeropoint was in the Quantum Systems Group in the Space Intelligence Division at Los Alamos. I’m sure he was suspicious about the vortex reactor but actually this Ryan might not even be the one who was there. I haven’t brought it back up since, Ryan when you read this let me know if you do or if we haven’t got there yet.
“In several papers I examined it was surmised that through the immense influence of magick and eventual scientific discoveries at CERN that both forces opened portals into unknown realms, which led to the subsequent dismantling of the machine” Assassin, pg. 37
Things get spooled up, bam, we’re doing our thing. It’s recording. I’ve got some wild stuff going and Ryan is delivering an incantation that’s really stirring up some stuff from beyond the veil. I’m not sure what, it was similar to what we’d experienced before but closer, you could hear it breathing. I could smell the freshly turned dirt, that kind of ozone smell. Everything disappeared, not to blackness but as if sight had never existed, some sense beyond our conception. We were in 2009 at Stephen Hawking’s time traveler party. I was holding my bass. Ryan was in my periphery and my fingers were moving but the only sound was the lateral hum of data being lacquered across the surface of damaged time. A time where the writer WB had killed himself.
When I first shifted back, I wasn’t at the Fergus Falls compound. I was back in my study in Tennessee. My travel bag was next to me and inside a reel-to-reel tape. I should explain the WB suicide thing now I think, otherwise it seems like I’m intentionally keeping it from you, which I’m not. This is just when things get strange for me. Keep that perspective, it’s all about perspective.
See, I knew WB. So did Ryan. I remember them working on a book together, it was pretty successful and got them a lot of recognition. I just really sort of talked to him once in a while and we orbited some of the same literary outlets online. He impacted a lot of people in one way or another, a sort of polarizing figure. I had been in the hospital when it happened. I had three terrible days of sleepless infection after my appendix burst, laid up in county hospital ER on a drip of Hydromorphone and no one attending me. I’m fairly certain they were just waiting for me to stop moaning and die rather than having to perform surgery. In their defense this was the beginning of the Covid-19 panic and it was a really shitty hospital. Eventually someone takes pity on me and I get transferred to another one and they pull out my appendix.
I spent the next week in a hospital trying to recover and when I returned home there was a pretty long rehab process. During all this I hadn’t been active in the writing community so when I returned I sent an email to WB asking him how things were going and reconnecting. There was no response. I figured he just didn’t feel like responding until about a week later I asked someone if they’d heard from WB. They told me he killed himself, and sent me links to the news reports. I started going back through people's social media posts until I found a wave of grief. Post after post of tribute and memorial. Here I’d been thinking WB was just a dick for not responding.
The why and how of WB’s suicide isn’t important, it’s not really for me to even discuss. After all, it's not my business. It only comes up because after listening to the reel-to-reel of our ritual experiment of playing our live show back in 2009 at the time traveler party, I uploaded the recording and emailed it to Ryan. When I reloaded my inbox there was an email from WB or rather his email address that we’d always used before. There was a link to a song. The Dark End of The Street by James Carr which begins with the following lyrics:
At the dark end of the street
That's where we always meet
Hiding in shadows where we don't belong
Living in darkness to hide our wrong
This is when I started investigating. I messaged three people, who I will not reveal here so as to maintain some stability item to calibrate to should things be even more different than I thought they were. I asked these people if they’d heard from any ghosts lately. It’s important when moving through whens and wheres that you not show all your cards. It’s not that you can’t trust people, it’s that you don’t know them. They think they know you, or sometimes don’t but still, there’s no accounting for how they’re likely to interact with you. I mean you have no idea what you’ve even done. Maybe they’ll lie to you or try to hurt you, not even because they’re a bad person but maybe it’s justified. Maybe you when you were here before or back where you were from later you were of despicable origins. You could have very easily been the bad guy. That’s why worrying about who you were before or where you were when you did something you regret is just sort of silly. What’s important is the where you are now and the when you’re going to be at.
Everyone I asked got the same email from WB. Now as I’ve said before, I’m not prone to conspiracy theories. Erasmus’ Cudgel states that the easiest explanation to hit is most likely to be the correct one, thus someone had access to WB’s email account. Maybe it was meant to be a memorial message amongst friends and associates. Yet what everyone told me was about how they knew WB had faked his own death. That I was right all along. That my early investigations into the death of WB had finally come to show that I was correct. Now parallel memories aside, it is entirely possible and partly required by the very framework our perspective operates on top of. The important thing is not that now I was where WB had faked his own death, but rather soon a cryptic twitter account surfaced teasing a trailer of a new work by WB to be released on 12/22.
It’s hard to keep things together sometimes. The Blackwood Conjecture states:
“You know that you forget things or rather what you remember is from somewhere else. Never knowing what it is that you’re forgetting is the trouble. If you know you’ve forgotten you can just move forward and back. If you don’t know that you’ve forgotten anything then you can’t go back because even if you ended up there you wouldn’t remember. “
Moving forward in my documentation, The Blackwood Conjecture and all matters (material and otherwise) which may be drawn into question or scrutiny will be noted with the √ on the appropriate heading of the document. Labeled as such by myself or any authorized agent on my behalf, such documents should be cycled through perception sync protocols prior to viewing such materials. Failure to do so may compromise mission critical criteria.
At this point I have two options. I can go into depth regarding the resurrection of WB, the shadowy agents, the clues, hidden messages, and general tradecraft involved in me learning everything I understand up to this point, which is where I am as I’m writing this, not necessarily where you are while reading it. This would require the introduction and possible disclosure of several other figures who are central to everything that’s happened.
The second option is that I skip right to the thing that threads through all of this - the IBM 5100 was used at the Fergus Falls compound during the session with Xeropoint. The same model of computer that John Titor was on a mission to take back to 2036 to likely solve the 2038 problem. The same John Titor that Joseph Matheny is documented as having been consulted on and created Ong’s Hat. Joseph Matheny was one of the very first people to interact with the first cryptic tweet sent by the new WB twitter account. When I joined the now vanished Discord server posted by the Twitter account, Joseph Matheny was there having spoken to an agent claiming to be speaking on behalf of WB. The agent said that WB had not faked his death, but was rather running and hiding from personal situations. That it was someone else who had said he died.
I remember the news reports. No one else here does or at least they haven’t said so. Listen to the recording and if you figure anything out please email me at JakeBlackwood@protonmail.com