The Polymorph

Originally posted on Twitter October 31, 2020.

Many remember the good-ol’-days of Internet yore, that frontier filled to the brim with Geocities and Angelfire, bespoke web pages for all sorts, from the esoteric to the plain weird.

One could, if one knows what to look for, spend hours traversing through some professor’s collection of mathematical figures, learn the ins and outs of an obscure British series to greater detail than any wiki, or solve cryptic puzzles messing with the web interface itself.

Long before the rise of homogenized, centralized social media, this was the chaotic garden that many thrived in and were fascinated by, and I, in my younger days was no exception. I would pore over site after site absorbing miscellanea until the break of dawn.

One, in particular, would interest me. The URL and the site itself has since been lost to time, but I can clearly remember its title: The Polymorph.

And its headline, embossed in 72pt text in bold red:

THE POLYMORPH CLAIMS A SOUL.

What follows is, to the untrained observer, a discordant series of paragraphs of varying fonts, sizes, and colors, seemingly spat out by a text generator.

WHAT IS GOD? FREE WILL IS AND IS NOT FREE WILL. TEN = TENTACLES IN DIMENSIONS> for example.

What impressed me at first was the sheer depth of references. To nearly every major and minor religion in the world. To gnosticism, hermeticism, the I Ching. To minute details in various branches of science too specific for a layperson to know but jumbled together haphazardly.

Often I would find a word or term I didn’t know and search for it, resulting in a wikipedia binge on some cool topic I hadn’t heard of before. There was so much of it too… I don’t think I ever could read the whole thing, just bits and pieces that stood out. And there were many.

To most, including the ones who introduced it to me, it was nothing more than a novelty. “Look at this crazy guy’s ramblings” they would say. But to me it was more than that. There was intentionality there, a truth to be discovered. A message. A code.

I started parsing out key phrases and trying to interpret them. THE SEVENTH LEVIATHAN — okay, seven is an important Biblical number. THE BLACK ASTER — a flower associated with love and wisdom, or maybe a star? TWENTY FOUR EMPERORS — the hours of the day maybe?

Most of it was speculation, drawing from my knowledge and research of various mythos. But now and again I find something too… intentional to be a coincidence.

A paragraph where the number of letters of each word followed the digits of the Golden Ratio. Font colors that corresponded to the DNA sequence of a tapeworm. Text alignment that mimicked the party makeup of the U.S. House of Representatives.

If this seems farfetched and unlikely… it was. To this day I still have no idea how I really reached those conclusions. Maybe the site was calling to me somehow, tempting me to unlock its secrets.

Maybe FIBONACCI’S CURSE made me think of the Golden Spiral. Maybe UNRAVEL THE PARASITE made me think of annelid nucleotides. I don’t know. All I know is that the Polymorph drew me into its world, to the point that unraveling its secrets became my primary hobby, my obsession.

I had folders of notes, both digital and physical, and cork diagrams that would make a conspiracy theorist weep. A binder marked “Theories on TANTALUS REBORN (Part VII)” An entire bookshelf of annotated reference material.

There were “kingdoms”, main lines of thought that permeated the text. Multidimensional models that dissected the text from every aspect. “Landmarks” that seemed to feed into other aspects of the site, building on each other like a growing colonial life form.

I delved further into the text, analyzing each new occurrence and placing it within my model, shifting it as needed. A reference to the BALLERINA MACABRE would mean shifting the PHANTASMAGORICAL PENDULUM over three notches, for example.

The Polymorph was… long. Abnormally long. Almost to the point that it went on forever. But that wasn’t possible was it? It was just a static file, no scripts involved. It had to end somewhere. But it was so large the scrollbar would be invisible.

Sometimes I would get bored and scroll down, down down… but eventually I would just get to a wall of text whose references I wouldn’t understand, that didn’t fit in my model, and I would get discouraged and go back.

But after a month of my analysis, and feeling no closer to reaching understanding, I made a bold decision.

I would find the end of the Polymorph.

I picked a weekend to begin my “expedition”, so that I may venture forth uninterrupted by school or work. I prepared nourishment, opened my web browser, and ventured forth.

After thirty minutes I scrolled past my last analyzed excerpt, “THE PENDULUM OF TANTALUS: THE WAYWARD.” After an hour, the last phrase I recognized from previous scrolling attempts, “STAKE THE FREE WILL ON THE THRONE OF JOB.” After half a day, I was in completely new territory.

I noticed, too, the character of the site changing. While the nonce phrases were still syntactically correct before, now the text often seemed to just mash words together.

VISHNU APPLE TELEOLOGICAL HYPERBOLA QUEENDOM ENTERPRISE A KIN SEXOLOGY FOUR THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED

Even the formatting was wonky. Before, at least the individual paragraphs were consistently colored and typeset. But here, far from the beginning, colors would morph from letter to letter, text would move from serif to sans serif. Glyphs would jump from miniscule to giant.

The whole ordeal was both invigorating and overwhelming. It was so much deeper than I could imagine, but too much for me to take in. What could a 60pt red “A” mean next to a 12pt Arial green ”∂“? What could be behind the Unicode code points of each symbol? What could it mean?

And then, scrolling through the chaos, through the stranger and stranger symbols, the cacophony of colors and fonts, the unthinkable happened.

My browser froze.

I couldn’t get it back. Refreshing just took me back to the beginning of the page. Just when I was starting to get excited… it was gone.

I grew disheartened with the Polymorph soon after that. It took me a whole day to get to that point… and it was all gone before I could study it. All these tomes, all that research, for only a fraction, less than a percent of all the content the Polymorph had to offer.

I moved on, focused my time back on my other neglected obsessions. For months the writings of the Polymorph were etched in my mind, triggered by the slightest provocation. Its words were etched onto blank walls in my mind, its meaning echoing in random sounds.

And then, a few years and several obsessions later, I felt like I was ready to revisit it.

But it was gone. The URL led to a “For Sale” sign. Then a few months later, a marketing startup.

Of course, I checked all the old forums for information, but information was hard to come by, not helped by the fact that “polymorphism” was such a loaded term in various fields.

My folders of research were lost in various moves and house cleanups, my digital files corrupted. But I wasn’t going to let go that easily.

I opened up the Wayback Machine and typed in the old URL. Snapshot by snapshot I tried to find the site I knew, but each time something went wrong. The page loaded as a series of � glyphs. Marked as malware. Redirect to a Rickroll.

Then, after hours of going back in time, I found it. The first snapshot taken of the site, from the early 90’s, a decade before I first saw it. I clicked the link.

It was a short page. Being the beginning of the site, the endless paragraphs of esoterica were gone. Its only content, plastered in the middle, was the familiar line I had seen and analyzed so many times, but only now truly understood.

THE POLYMORPH CLAIMS A SOUL.