San Diego nights have a way of painting themselves. Neon dripping off wet sidewalks, gaslamps flickering like old film reels, the whole city vibrating with a low, crackling hum.
Duke leaned against a brick wall, Louie snoring at his feet, the Prizm jar from Maven Genetics in his hand. Packaging slick enough to pass for a Rolex box. Inside, nuggets glistening like amethyst veins pulled straight from the earth’s marrow.
He sparked up.
The first hit hit him back—a gassy, mineral slap across the palate, bitter melon and dentist’s office bitter sting. Duke coughed, grinned, and then the city cracked open like a Faberge egg. Light split across the skyline like a prism catching moonlight, Pink Floyd vibes. Billboards refracted into hidden codes, alleyways shimmered with color bands no sober eye could see. Good thing Duke was far from sober. He felt more like Neo from The Matrix than a straight-edge soldier.
Prizm was more than weed; it was a key. And Duke – switching roles between Neo and The Keymaker – had just unlocked the first door.
They say there’s a vault beneath the Gaslamp, a place where stolen light went to die a quiet death. Prisms lifted from observatories, stained glass ripped from cathedral domes, psychedelic relics once passed through Kesey’s bus and Leary’s basement.
“Myth, mostly,” Duke thought. But Prizm had him feeling like he was walking through wavelengths. So, if there was ever a time to see it for himself, it was now.
He followed the spectrum trail – orange light bleeding from the Taco Stand’s neon sign, bending into a side alley that smelled like fryer grease and wet dog. Which, of course, made Louie perk up, tail wagging. The alley ended at a blank wall, but under the Prizm lens it wasn’t blank at all.
It was a door.
A second hit, tasting of bubblegum and freezer-burned grape Otter Pop, and the wall dissolved, humming with indigo static. Duke took a deep breath and stepped through.
Into the Maven Genetics Prizm
The vault was alive. Buzzing with colors.
One moment, it was a Moroccan bazaar – spices in pyramids of red and gold, light shimmering through blown glass lanterns. The next, it flickered into a NASA cleanroom, sterile and humming, prisms mounted like satellites on white pedestals. Another blink and it was a smoke-filled jazz club, Miles Davis forever tuning his trumpet in the corner.
Every pull of Prizm twisted the setting again. The third kiss of lime-kissed rosewater turned the walls into a living cathedral. The fourth hit, an umami bomb – slow-braised pork glazed in apricot – shifted it into a Chinatown banquet hall. Duke felt as though he was walking through the strain itself, each terpene a multicolored doorway, each flavor a different kinetic frequency.
Louie barked, chasing something Duke couldn’t quite see. A glimmering beam of color skipping across the floor like a jittering laser. They followed it deeper, through the kaleidoscope of shifting worlds, until they reached the center.
There it was: a pearly prism the size of a fist, resting on a pedestal carved from onyx. It pulsed like a heartbeat, scattering impossible colors across the chamber. Duke picked it up, remembering that Pippen had made the same rookie mistake with the palantir in Rohan. Fool of a Duke.
The second his fingers touched glass, his life fractured into light.
Memories refracted: the first joint behind the college bleachers, every laugh, every heartbreak, every ounce hustled and burned. San Diego rooftops, New York subways, the Houston, Texas fog – all of it split into colors Duke didn’t even know existed. His rods and cones burning with new life.
Regrets, a bruised shade of indigo. Triumphs, a screaming gold. Kisses glowed coral, and Louie’s bark was a shade of green so bright it hurt Duke to even look at it. It was too much. Too real. He staggered breathlessly, clutching the prism like a relic.
And then – gone. Everything.
Back to Reality
The vault blinked out. Duke was back in the piss stench of a Gaslamp alley, Louie shaking rainwater off his ears, the joint burning the tips of Duke’s fingers. No relic in his pocket, no vault underfoot. Just the neon lights and a dog barking at puddles that shimmered with colors no one else seemed to notice.
Duke laughed, coughed, and hit the roach again.
Prizm was more than a strain. It was a spectrum. And Duke, with Louie by his side, had walked through every shade of it tonight.
