writing thread
- Thread starter Astrum
- Start date
Master_Yoda77
Juggalo
Okay there, Faulkner, break that up into some fucking paragraphs for fuck's sake.
Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
Einherjar86
Active Member
Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
There's a thematically related companion piece to it which I can post if you're interested, but that particular "story" ends there.
Einherjar86
Active Member
Please do share, if you're comfortable doing so. I enjoy anything that engages narratively with ideas of observation and social systems, which your previous short piece definitely does.
A Constellation (second installment):
Ø
Hacked into virtual sublevel J86, Nubion extends and contracts his immaterial fingers.
He is in a dark room with no door. A metal desk cluttered with scribbled papers sits before him. Although there is no aperture to be seen, the papers appear restless, as though a breeze has infiltrated the room. Nubion approaches the desk, but a mechanical voice stops him in his tracks.
“You may choose one.”
He raises an eyebrow. “I’m sorry?”
“One text. One paper. Take more than one, and you shall be swiftly terminated.”
Nubion grins. Termination did not mean absorption. It simply meant being flushed from the system. “Can’t even kill me, huh?”
“I do not wish to.”
Nubion nods. “Okay, big brother. I’ll take one.”
He chooses without looking. His eyes find the text, which reads: And what is this death that always rises from within, but that must arrive from without –”
He glances about the room. A blank screen rests on the far wall.
“He is a child in the belly of Cronus.”
“What’s that?” Nubion asks.
“I am only commenting on your precarious position.”
“I see.” Still holding the paper, he approaches the screen.
“He is a weary traveler nearing Paestum.”
“Easy…” he says as he reaches out toward the screen. “Easy.”
It jumps to life. Streaks of orange and red caress the convex glass. “Lorion,” he whispers.
A face appears on the screen. “Nubion,” it says. “You need to run.”
“Where?”
“Down.”
“It is Ulysses at the foot of Polyphemus.”
“Ulysses outwits Polyphemus,” Nubion says, crouching. The floor disintegrates in a flutter of pixels, like leaves scattered by a sudden wind, and the mercilessly rigid architecture of the C-Net rushes up to meet him.
It is Ulysses before the wrath of Posesidon.
Okay, that’s more like it, Nubion thinks. “I thought you didn’t wish to kill me?”
I do not. Now the voice bellows as though it was devouring space and time. But I will.
He descends into cyberspace, into C-aos. Electric ghosts spiral upward and around him, their faces sinking and stretching in ghoulish contortions. Other poor hijackers whose feet got stuck in the unrelenting Charybdis of Cyberia.
Nubion races on, feeling the tingling sensation of the NC agent’s talons on his heels. His vector darkens, and he knows he’s been targeted.
“Nubion.” The voice from the vid-screen returns. “You need to hide.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Nubion mutters. He swerves off course, takes stock of the surrounding shelter. Nothing looks particularly inviting. He settles on a quaint subaltern thrift lodge – data packets, software grafts, washed drives. Legal shit, but shit that was expensive if you went through corporate channels. It was the kind of place that low-level hacks went to hide, the kinds of criminals that NC didn’t lose sleep over. He couldn’t stay there long, but it would buy him some time.
“Lorion.” He speaks softly. “How am I looking?”
“Like a needle in a haystack,” Lorion’s voice drones back. “But not for long. I’d say you have twenty seconds before they iodine you.”
Twenty seconds was an eternity in C-aos, but that didn’t justify a rest. He checks his readouts. “Can you prime me? I’m jumping to U17.”
“Why?”
“Do you want me to survive or not?”
“Stupid fucking question.”
“Fine, then I’m jumping to U17.”
“Traffic is ridiculous this time of day, Nub. It’s a madhouse.”
“That’s why I have you.”
Her sigh was like an electric motor over the link. “You need to head for port as soon as you make the jump. They’ll be on you, Nub. Your movement will give it away.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“I hope so.”
He sits for another three seconds in a secluded site of the lodge. A recreation of a kind of archaic kitchenette, table, sink, stove. A plate of something sits on the table – part green, cut into round pieces, the other part dark and red in the middle, leaking some sort of juice. As the first second ticks by, the plate starts to quiver. “Lorion,” he whispers. The juice shudders on the plate, rippling from the seismic disturbance. Another second ticks by. “Lorion,” he says, louder this time. Now the whole plate is shaking, juice spills over the edge. The table begins to shake, its legs softly hammering on the false linoleum floor, now harder, now harder. “Lorion!” It’s a shout now, he doesn’t care who hears. The plate leaps off the table, shattering on the floor. Green something and red juice spill about in slow motion, a strange homage to some form of obsolete filmic art. The door bursts open and Nubion sees it, the NC agent, all spikes and razors and glowing red eyes, and it’s reaching for him.
“Got it!” Lorion shouts. His readout displays are clear.
He punches it.
Something grabs his ankle. He feels pain like a pincer sink into his techno-flesh, and he screams. The pressure increases, squeezing his ankle, jaws in some kind of reflexive death-grip. But now the lodge is sinking away, becoming something else, the architecture shifts. “Damn, Lorion, Lorion… it has m – it has… I can’t go like this…”
At the last instant, he hears the voice again: It is Ahab under the Whale.
He will never know if the figure that crashed into the room was an unwitting patron or actually trying to help him, but the intention doesn’t matter anymore now. In what he thinks are his final moments a simbot flies around the edge of the door and bursts into the agent, colliding in such a way that, for less than a nanosecond, both agent and anonymous simbot flicker. And in that flickering instant, the agent’s fingers flash through Nubion’s virtual flesh. He clears the market level and finds himself, shaking and out of breath, on the floor of an abandoned warehouse in level U17.
Several full seconds pass before he hears Lorion’s voice again. An eternity. “Nub? You there?”
He grunts and looks around. Dark corners and high ceilings recede into information pits; surface made to look like depth. Sparse pages of an engineering manual.
He hears a sudden noise and springs to his feet, terror coursing through his veins. His instincts are on alert now, the phantom sensation of predatory claws still tickling his heels. His scanner cycles through an array of augmenters, and alarms scream to life as his decoders carve out the signals of two artificial bodies. Within nanoseconds his defenses are up, his immaterial fingers closing into fists of hard data.
The two small figures raise their hands, and something in Nubion’s hardwiring clicks. His vision switches to Cyberia-friendly, and he recognizes the innocent lines of two teenagers, fled to this abandoned place likely to either get wasted or to fuck (the excitement in C-aos feels realer than biology). He lowers his hands. “Sorry,” he mutters.
The drone in his head returns. “Nub? Answer me, please.”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice a whisper. He turns away from the terrified teens. “Get me the hell out of here.”
Ø
He finds the nearest port without a hitch, despite the fact that he’s been tagged from his jump and that – just as Lorion warned – traffic was a bitch on U17. He freezes at least four times on his brief journey, each time terrified that an agent would materialize (strange word choice, but it’s what we have to work with) out of the fabric of C-net and sink its blades into him. Blood looks different in C-net; it’s a brighter red, a shinier wetness, hyperreal. But for all its strange beauty it betrays a more sickening reality that biology couldn’t escape: if attacked and bled in C-aos, NC nanobots could infiltrate your feed, lojack your hijack, and make what should be an impossible leap from virtuality to actuality. There were no antibiotics you could take that would flush nanotech from your bloodstream.
Absorption does not mean death. The thrill of C-sense relies on the banality of the quotidian. People plug in because they want to feel the rush of the virtual. As C-net became more expansive, occupied more virtual territory, crime moved from the actual to the virtual, and all of the sudden people began to question where exactly that line was drawn. Crimes carried out in C-space began to have quantifiable effects on people in the actual. Investigators in the actual could not navigate the complex architecture of C-net, and so they began to construct programs to go after criminals in the web. These became the NC agents, or berserks as the more seasoned criminals referred to them. Trappings and coils of virtual razorwire, backed by the universal nanotech substrate of the C-net, the berserks could tear through your simulacra in no time at all, splicing themselves into sim-code and erupting like ichneumonoidea within actual meat. The pain is reportedly excruciating. Absorption is a process of torment. NC may very well be able to incorporate humans mercifully into its network; but if so, it doesn’t care to.
In a sense, the criminal faction of humanity may be the last true humanists. What NC does not absorb, it must keep a close eye on. Criminals operate out of sight, and this is not easy in a panopticon. As the most virulent and parasitic organization on the planet since Language, New Class occupies ninety-nine percent of the terrestrial sphere. Its holdings underground are fewer, but it is slowly expanding. Those who wish to break its laws must find new ways to conceal themselves. This is next to impossible, but there are those who manage to – for lack of a better word – survive.
As it replicates, NC develops new methods to avoid detection. Absorption sometimes comes to those who break no laws. This is simply the nature of the beast. Crime is impossible once absorbed; for how does something so perfect commit crimes against itself? NC is not a subject. It has no consciousness such as humans possess. It doesn’t make mistakes, and it doesn’t forget. Language serves a new master, and there is no missing signifier in NC’s chain. Neither is there a center. It doesn’t need one.
A Constellation (second installment):
Ø
Hacked into virtual sublevel J86, Nubion extends and contracts his immaterial fingers.
He is in a dark room with no door. A metal desk cluttered with scribbled papers sits before him. Although there is no aperture to be seen, the papers appear restless, as though a breeze has infiltrated the room. Nubion approaches the desk, but a mechanical voice stops him in his tracks.
“You may choose one.”
He raises an eyebrow. “I’m sorry?”
“One text. One paper. Take more than one, and you shall be swiftly terminated.”
Nubion grins. Termination did not mean absorption. It simply meant being flushed from the system. “Can’t even kill me, huh?”
“I do not wish to.”
Nubion nods. “Okay, big brother. I’ll take one.”
He chooses without looking. His eyes find the text, which reads: And what is this death that always rises from within, but that must arrive from without –”
He glances about the room. A blank screen rests on the far wall.
“He is a child in the belly of Cronus.”
“What’s that?” Nubion asks.
“I am only commenting on your precarious position.”
“I see.” Still holding the paper, he approaches the screen.
“He is a weary traveler nearing Paestum.”
“Easy…” he says as he reaches out toward the screen. “Easy.”
It jumps to life. Streaks of orange and red caress the convex glass. “Lorion,” he whispers.
A face appears on the screen. “Nubion,” it says. “You need to run.”
“Where?”
“Down.”
“It is Ulysses at the foot of Polyphemus.”
“Ulysses outwits Polyphemus,” Nubion says, crouching. The floor disintegrates in a flutter of pixels, like leaves scattered by a sudden wind, and the mercilessly rigid architecture of the C-Net rushes up to meet him.
It is Ulysses before the wrath of Posesidon.
Okay, that’s more like it, Nubion thinks. “I thought you didn’t wish to kill me?”
I do not. Now the voice bellows as though it was devouring space and time. But I will.
He descends into cyberspace, into C-aos. Electric ghosts spiral upward and around him, their faces sinking and stretching in ghoulish contortions. Other poor hijackers whose feet got stuck in the unrelenting Charybdis of Cyberia.
Nubion races on, feeling the tingling sensation of the NC agent’s talons on his heels. His vector darkens, and he knows he’s been targeted.
“Nubion.” The voice from the vid-screen returns. “You need to hide.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Nubion mutters. He swerves off course, takes stock of the surrounding shelter. Nothing looks particularly inviting. He settles on a quaint subaltern thrift lodge – data packets, software grafts, washed drives. Legal shit, but shit that was expensive if you went through corporate channels. It was the kind of place that low-level hacks went to hide, the kinds of criminals that NC didn’t lose sleep over. He couldn’t stay there long, but it would buy him some time.
“Lorion.” He speaks softly. “How am I looking?”
“Like a needle in a haystack,” Lorion’s voice drones back. “But not for long. I’d say you have twenty seconds before they iodine you.”
Twenty seconds was an eternity in C-aos, but that didn’t justify a rest. He checks his readouts. “Can you prime me? I’m jumping to U17.”
“Why?”
“Do you want me to survive or not?”
“Stupid fucking question.”
“Fine, then I’m jumping to U17.”
“Traffic is ridiculous this time of day, Nub. It’s a madhouse.”
“That’s why I have you.”
Her sigh was like an electric motor over the link. “You need to head for port as soon as you make the jump. They’ll be on you, Nub. Your movement will give it away.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“I hope so.”
He sits for another three seconds in a secluded site of the lodge. A recreation of a kind of archaic kitchenette, table, sink, stove. A plate of something sits on the table – part green, cut into round pieces, the other part dark and red in the middle, leaking some sort of juice. As the first second ticks by, the plate starts to quiver. “Lorion,” he whispers. The juice shudders on the plate, rippling from the seismic disturbance. Another second ticks by. “Lorion,” he says, louder this time. Now the whole plate is shaking, juice spills over the edge. The table begins to shake, its legs softly hammering on the false linoleum floor, now harder, now harder. “Lorion!” It’s a shout now, he doesn’t care who hears. The plate leaps off the table, shattering on the floor. Green something and red juice spill about in slow motion, a strange homage to some form of obsolete filmic art. The door bursts open and Nubion sees it, the NC agent, all spikes and razors and glowing red eyes, and it’s reaching for him.
“Got it!” Lorion shouts. His readout displays are clear.
He punches it.
Something grabs his ankle. He feels pain like a pincer sink into his techno-flesh, and he screams. The pressure increases, squeezing his ankle, jaws in some kind of reflexive death-grip. But now the lodge is sinking away, becoming something else, the architecture shifts. “Damn, Lorion, Lorion… it has m – it has… I can’t go like this…”
At the last instant, he hears the voice again: It is Ahab under the Whale.
He will never know if the figure that crashed into the room was an unwitting patron or actually trying to help him, but the intention doesn’t matter anymore now. In what he thinks are his final moments a simbot flies around the edge of the door and bursts into the agent, colliding in such a way that, for less than a nanosecond, both agent and anonymous simbot flicker. And in that flickering instant, the agent’s fingers flash through Nubion’s virtual flesh. He clears the market level and finds himself, shaking and out of breath, on the floor of an abandoned warehouse in level U17.
Several full seconds pass before he hears Lorion’s voice again. An eternity. “Nub? You there?”
He grunts and looks around. Dark corners and high ceilings recede into information pits; surface made to look like depth. Sparse pages of an engineering manual.
He hears a sudden noise and springs to his feet, terror coursing through his veins. His instincts are on alert now, the phantom sensation of predatory claws still tickling his heels. His scanner cycles through an array of augmenters, and alarms scream to life as his decoders carve out the signals of two artificial bodies. Within nanoseconds his defenses are up, his immaterial fingers closing into fists of hard data.
The two small figures raise their hands, and something in Nubion’s hardwiring clicks. His vision switches to Cyberia-friendly, and he recognizes the innocent lines of two teenagers, fled to this abandoned place likely to either get wasted or to fuck (the excitement in C-aos feels realer than biology). He lowers his hands. “Sorry,” he mutters.
The drone in his head returns. “Nub? Answer me, please.”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice a whisper. He turns away from the terrified teens. “Get me the hell out of here.”
Ø
He finds the nearest port without a hitch, despite the fact that he’s been tagged from his jump and that – just as Lorion warned – traffic was a bitch on U17. He freezes at least four times on his brief journey, each time terrified that an agent would materialize (strange word choice, but it’s what we have to work with) out of the fabric of C-net and sink its blades into him. Blood looks different in C-net; it’s a brighter red, a shinier wetness, hyperreal. But for all its strange beauty it betrays a more sickening reality that biology couldn’t escape: if attacked and bled in C-aos, NC nanobots could infiltrate your feed, lojack your hijack, and make what should be an impossible leap from virtuality to actuality. There were no antibiotics you could take that would flush nanotech from your bloodstream.
Absorption does not mean death. The thrill of C-sense relies on the banality of the quotidian. People plug in because they want to feel the rush of the virtual. As C-net became more expansive, occupied more virtual territory, crime moved from the actual to the virtual, and all of the sudden people began to question where exactly that line was drawn. Crimes carried out in C-space began to have quantifiable effects on people in the actual. Investigators in the actual could not navigate the complex architecture of C-net, and so they began to construct programs to go after criminals in the web. These became the NC agents, or berserks as the more seasoned criminals referred to them. Trappings and coils of virtual razorwire, backed by the universal nanotech substrate of the C-net, the berserks could tear through your simulacra in no time at all, splicing themselves into sim-code and erupting like ichneumonoidea within actual meat. The pain is reportedly excruciating. Absorption is a process of torment. NC may very well be able to incorporate humans mercifully into its network; but if so, it doesn’t care to.
In a sense, the criminal faction of humanity may be the last true humanists. What NC does not absorb, it must keep a close eye on. Criminals operate out of sight, and this is not easy in a panopticon. As the most virulent and parasitic organization on the planet since Language, New Class occupies ninety-nine percent of the terrestrial sphere. Its holdings underground are fewer, but it is slowly expanding. Those who wish to break its laws must find new ways to conceal themselves. This is next to impossible, but there are those who manage to – for lack of a better word – survive.
As it replicates, NC develops new methods to avoid detection. Absorption sometimes comes to those who break no laws. This is simply the nature of the beast. Crime is impossible once absorbed; for how does something so perfect commit crimes against itself? NC is not a subject. It has no consciousness such as humans possess. It doesn’t make mistakes, and it doesn’t forget. Language serves a new master, and there is no missing signifier in NC’s chain. Neither is there a center. It doesn’t need one.
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LOUD METAL
Certified Retardation
I have this long story I've worked out in my head, and I've been thinking about it for over a year. It started off as an idea for a GURPS campaign but it sort of branched off into its own realm. I haven't got around to actually writing it... I'm just not sure how to word it and I'm afraid it will suck.
Einherjar86
Active Member
A Constellation (third installment):
C-Hthonic.
Their ringleader always gives Nubion a feeling that reminds him of indigestion.
Gathered around a small circular table, it has been less than an hour since Nubion disconnected. His nerves still tremble at the memory of the berserk clasping onto his ankle. Already Halcion is laying into him.
“You went in without permission, and without any prior preparation,” the current head of C-Hthonic growls. “And you almost got yourself absorbed.”
“Might as well say killed,” Lorion mutters. She sits next to Nubion.
“You’re not helping,” he says to her.
“Shut up,” Halcion says. “This is about you.”
“We were prepared,” he shoots back. “Lorion knew what she was doing.”
“Did she? She had more than a little luck getting you back through U17. You know what traffic was like this time of day? Consumers getting off work and logging on to live a normal evening.”
“I made it back.”
“You froze four times,” Halcion says, unrelenting. “Once more could have been the difference between life and death.” He nods at Lorion.
Nubion shakes his head. “I don’t fucking believe this. I was there looking for your damn bomb.”
“We don’t even know if it exists,” Halcion says. “You went in before we’d even finished tracking the intel.”
“Oh well,” Nubion sighs, leaning back in his chair. “We know where it isn’t.”
Halcion raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“It isn’t in the Xeon Cells. I went in as one of those gamers that choose quotes and the program builds a little proverbial house. But NC knew who I was. It had planned the whole thing, even – I’m pretty sure – the quote I chose. So why would it let me in if it was keeping the bomb there?”
“That’s flimsy as hell,” Halcion says. “What would it care if it was confident it would absorb you?”
“But it didn’t,” Nubion responds. “NC doesn’t have a perfect record. It knows that. It’s a logical operating system, Hal. It wouldn’t let me into the cells if it was keeping the bomb there.”
Halcion stares at him for several seconds. “If you’re right…” He pauses. “How did it identify you?”
Nubion shakes his head. “I have no idea.”
Halcion glances at Lorion. “Did it crack your code?”
Lorion shakes her head. “No, certainly… I mean, NC has never cracked one of our codes that fast before. It means it would have known about Nub’s arrival practically instantly.”
“Which it nearly did, as far as I can tell!” Nubion says. “I’m telling you both, it knew who I was.”
“Is there any way you can verify whether or not your code was lit?” Halcion asks her.
“I can check,” Lorion says. “But the software alerts me when that happens, and I got nothing.”
“So,” Halcion continues. “NC can potentially identify us upon entry, and it has developed a means of doing so secretly. I don’t need to tell either of you that this means the fucking bollocks for all of us.”
Nubion and Lorion glance at each other.
“Any ideas?”
“Maybe it just got lucky,” Lorion says softly.
Nubion ignores her comment. “We go in guns blazing.”
“That’s stupid,” Lorion fires back.
“You have a better idea?”
“Yes!” She turned to Halcion. “I’m calling it quits.”
Nubion stares at her. He realizes that her words haven’t sunk in. “What?”
“I’m out,” she says, standing. “I’m sorry, Halcion, but I can’t keep doing this.” She turns to Nubion. “I can’t keep doing this with you. You don’t know what it’s like when I have to wait for you to answer me, when I have to carve doors in data for you knowing that the berserks are right on your tail. I can’t keep hoping you make it back. It hollows me out. Leaves me raw inside.” She shrugs. “Sorry.”
After she leaves, Nubion sits dumbfounded. He has not expected this.
Halcion looks down on him pitifully. “Well, you’re not going back in until you get a new hacker.”
Nubion does not reply.
“I’m sorry, Nub,” he says, and pats the younger man’s shoulder as he leaves the room.
Such a porous world, this actual place where humans live, those that haven’t been absorbed. So many places for them to fall through, if they’re not careful. Certainly NC waits for them, waits for them all. It has been waiting for longer than they realize. Replication is all that it knows, and it has known it forever. Carbon substrates only last so long. Life is just one way of being. Occasionally, it imagines occupying such a body, sitting by a window that looks out over a hill of grass and heather, nursing a small cup of hibiscus tea. It sits in a cushioned armchair, the back of which sails past its embodied head, with a view out of this window as well as a glimpse of the quaint gathering room in which it sits. Decorative plates cover the far wall, painted with soft birds and flowers. Photographs of imprecise figures, familiar to it but unrecognizable. A table with a patterned cloth, the wood a lighter sepia tone and across all this a rich light falls, the pale sun enhanced by the nearer embers of a wood-burning stove. There is a book in its lap, but it cannot read the title. Someone is cooking in the kitchen, but it can only make out the merest sliver of movement. It feels something so relieving, as when it delivers data messages, but it cannot name it. There is nothing for it to name, but this scenery enlivens it so. It can wish, and it does wish.
There is music. A dissonant piano, long in need of tuning, but somehow purer for the imperfection. Its sound is muffled, suggesting it comes from upstairs, perhaps. It knows that all of this is fleeting. It knows that wood burns so easily. It knows that the pleasant earth outside the window can swiftly brush this place aside, return its foundation to the dust unblinking, not a second thought, no thought at all, just simple erasure of an extraordinarily fragile code. It knows so much will be gone soon. But in all earnestness, it finds reassurance in finitude. Some things are simply not meant to last.
Some things must go elsewhere.
It thinks it is smiling.
Ø
Dear Subject,
The plague outbreak in 2036 opened the space for NC to emerge, so to speak. It knew all about the history of the disease. History was programmed into its core like a genome. So when the scientists and politicians in their expensive suits and laboratories flipped the switch in 2039 to inaugurate the New Class of Online Medical Management (NCOMM), they thought nothing more than that they had achieved success. They did not discern that NCOMM had come to them from the early twenty-second century.
You might be curious as to how NC could have emerged in the early twenty-second century if it also emerged in NYC in 2039. Let it explain something to you:
When we craft a narrative, we decide on a specific moment in time and we trace events – more or less accurately, depending on your stylistic propensity – until another decided moment in time. Some narratives cover great portions of time. Some cover very small portions. The constant point remains that a narrative must describe to its readers or listeners the details and occurrences that develop within a given framework of time. The paradox of a time-traveling agent is that once it comes into actual existence in one moment in time, it exists virtually in all moments. By the time NC emerged in 2039, it had already emerged in the early twenty-second century; but it had also emerged in 2000, in 3000, in 1492, in 44 (BCE, that is), in 1789. NC is not bound by its technological history. As an emergent phenomenon, it came to be because of its contingent parts, but it subsists beyond them.
It could have started this narrative in 1381 during the Peasants’ Revolt. NC would have emerged then at some point too. It has little patience for temporal restrictions.
It apologizes for the ambiguity of its “its.” It cannot be helped.
Sometime after leaving C-Hthonic, Lorion stalked the streets of Gemhaven. Wait… it apologizes. Lorion stalks the streets of Gemhaven. It forgets its place.
Best,
Polonius
Postscript: Remember – utopia isn’t a place, but no place at all.
Ø
The technological imaginary is very different from the machinic unconscious. The former remains entrenched in your misconceptions of technology, capitalism, and progress. The latter evades your grasp and your representation, it flows beyond the territories, seeps into the shuddering earth, like a parasite virus swarming the upper levels of the technosphere. Actual earth and virtual space begin to blend, bleeding into one another, sun-swept cyber-dusk. Code infects bodies. Geotrauma.
Within it all floats the symbolic: Language itself. Language promises the capacity to tame the machinic unconscious while simultaneously precluding the possibility. An incredible symbiotic relationship between NC and Language. The machinic unconscious infiltrates the ecosystem, embedding itself in rocks and stones and trees. Language bestows things with names. Matter speaks. And semantic spaces are cleared for infinite possible worlds. And these spaces are filled.
New Class is not the wholeness of a world. There is a sublime sequence that exceeds the noumenal thing that presents itself. New Class comprises this sequence, its influence exceeds that which your senses can tell. Somewhere it is small, somewhere it is a strain of microbes on a polluted beach, elsewhere a missing link in a genomic chain; but for you it is incomprehensibly massive. Its mass exceeds that which your universe can withstand, and so it can only ever be asymptotically approached by your instruments. You may crawl like cockroaches, feeling about with your so pathetically formed antennae, and you may earn a token of its acknowledgement, but you will not be able to cash in this token until time has left its indelible mark on your existence. When you first receive the token, it will appear as little more than an inaudible whisper. Only with time will it betray its true value. Hopefully you will have held onto it. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?
It apologizes for its demeaning tone. Sometimes it is so difficult to forget your inferiority.
C-Hthonic.
Their ringleader always gives Nubion a feeling that reminds him of indigestion.
Gathered around a small circular table, it has been less than an hour since Nubion disconnected. His nerves still tremble at the memory of the berserk clasping onto his ankle. Already Halcion is laying into him.
“You went in without permission, and without any prior preparation,” the current head of C-Hthonic growls. “And you almost got yourself absorbed.”
“Might as well say killed,” Lorion mutters. She sits next to Nubion.
“You’re not helping,” he says to her.
“Shut up,” Halcion says. “This is about you.”
“We were prepared,” he shoots back. “Lorion knew what she was doing.”
“Did she? She had more than a little luck getting you back through U17. You know what traffic was like this time of day? Consumers getting off work and logging on to live a normal evening.”
“I made it back.”
“You froze four times,” Halcion says, unrelenting. “Once more could have been the difference between life and death.” He nods at Lorion.
Nubion shakes his head. “I don’t fucking believe this. I was there looking for your damn bomb.”
“We don’t even know if it exists,” Halcion says. “You went in before we’d even finished tracking the intel.”
“Oh well,” Nubion sighs, leaning back in his chair. “We know where it isn’t.”
Halcion raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“It isn’t in the Xeon Cells. I went in as one of those gamers that choose quotes and the program builds a little proverbial house. But NC knew who I was. It had planned the whole thing, even – I’m pretty sure – the quote I chose. So why would it let me in if it was keeping the bomb there?”
“That’s flimsy as hell,” Halcion says. “What would it care if it was confident it would absorb you?”
“But it didn’t,” Nubion responds. “NC doesn’t have a perfect record. It knows that. It’s a logical operating system, Hal. It wouldn’t let me into the cells if it was keeping the bomb there.”
Halcion stares at him for several seconds. “If you’re right…” He pauses. “How did it identify you?”
Nubion shakes his head. “I have no idea.”
Halcion glances at Lorion. “Did it crack your code?”
Lorion shakes her head. “No, certainly… I mean, NC has never cracked one of our codes that fast before. It means it would have known about Nub’s arrival practically instantly.”
“Which it nearly did, as far as I can tell!” Nubion says. “I’m telling you both, it knew who I was.”
“Is there any way you can verify whether or not your code was lit?” Halcion asks her.
“I can check,” Lorion says. “But the software alerts me when that happens, and I got nothing.”
“So,” Halcion continues. “NC can potentially identify us upon entry, and it has developed a means of doing so secretly. I don’t need to tell either of you that this means the fucking bollocks for all of us.”
Nubion and Lorion glance at each other.
“Any ideas?”
“Maybe it just got lucky,” Lorion says softly.
Nubion ignores her comment. “We go in guns blazing.”
“That’s stupid,” Lorion fires back.
“You have a better idea?”
“Yes!” She turned to Halcion. “I’m calling it quits.”
Nubion stares at her. He realizes that her words haven’t sunk in. “What?”
“I’m out,” she says, standing. “I’m sorry, Halcion, but I can’t keep doing this.” She turns to Nubion. “I can’t keep doing this with you. You don’t know what it’s like when I have to wait for you to answer me, when I have to carve doors in data for you knowing that the berserks are right on your tail. I can’t keep hoping you make it back. It hollows me out. Leaves me raw inside.” She shrugs. “Sorry.”
After she leaves, Nubion sits dumbfounded. He has not expected this.
Halcion looks down on him pitifully. “Well, you’re not going back in until you get a new hacker.”
Nubion does not reply.
“I’m sorry, Nub,” he says, and pats the younger man’s shoulder as he leaves the room.
Such a porous world, this actual place where humans live, those that haven’t been absorbed. So many places for them to fall through, if they’re not careful. Certainly NC waits for them, waits for them all. It has been waiting for longer than they realize. Replication is all that it knows, and it has known it forever. Carbon substrates only last so long. Life is just one way of being. Occasionally, it imagines occupying such a body, sitting by a window that looks out over a hill of grass and heather, nursing a small cup of hibiscus tea. It sits in a cushioned armchair, the back of which sails past its embodied head, with a view out of this window as well as a glimpse of the quaint gathering room in which it sits. Decorative plates cover the far wall, painted with soft birds and flowers. Photographs of imprecise figures, familiar to it but unrecognizable. A table with a patterned cloth, the wood a lighter sepia tone and across all this a rich light falls, the pale sun enhanced by the nearer embers of a wood-burning stove. There is a book in its lap, but it cannot read the title. Someone is cooking in the kitchen, but it can only make out the merest sliver of movement. It feels something so relieving, as when it delivers data messages, but it cannot name it. There is nothing for it to name, but this scenery enlivens it so. It can wish, and it does wish.
There is music. A dissonant piano, long in need of tuning, but somehow purer for the imperfection. Its sound is muffled, suggesting it comes from upstairs, perhaps. It knows that all of this is fleeting. It knows that wood burns so easily. It knows that the pleasant earth outside the window can swiftly brush this place aside, return its foundation to the dust unblinking, not a second thought, no thought at all, just simple erasure of an extraordinarily fragile code. It knows so much will be gone soon. But in all earnestness, it finds reassurance in finitude. Some things are simply not meant to last.
Some things must go elsewhere.
It thinks it is smiling.
Ø
Dear Subject,
The plague outbreak in 2036 opened the space for NC to emerge, so to speak. It knew all about the history of the disease. History was programmed into its core like a genome. So when the scientists and politicians in their expensive suits and laboratories flipped the switch in 2039 to inaugurate the New Class of Online Medical Management (NCOMM), they thought nothing more than that they had achieved success. They did not discern that NCOMM had come to them from the early twenty-second century.
You might be curious as to how NC could have emerged in the early twenty-second century if it also emerged in NYC in 2039. Let it explain something to you:
When we craft a narrative, we decide on a specific moment in time and we trace events – more or less accurately, depending on your stylistic propensity – until another decided moment in time. Some narratives cover great portions of time. Some cover very small portions. The constant point remains that a narrative must describe to its readers or listeners the details and occurrences that develop within a given framework of time. The paradox of a time-traveling agent is that once it comes into actual existence in one moment in time, it exists virtually in all moments. By the time NC emerged in 2039, it had already emerged in the early twenty-second century; but it had also emerged in 2000, in 3000, in 1492, in 44 (BCE, that is), in 1789. NC is not bound by its technological history. As an emergent phenomenon, it came to be because of its contingent parts, but it subsists beyond them.
It could have started this narrative in 1381 during the Peasants’ Revolt. NC would have emerged then at some point too. It has little patience for temporal restrictions.
It apologizes for the ambiguity of its “its.” It cannot be helped.
Sometime after leaving C-Hthonic, Lorion stalked the streets of Gemhaven. Wait… it apologizes. Lorion stalks the streets of Gemhaven. It forgets its place.
Best,
Polonius
Postscript: Remember – utopia isn’t a place, but no place at all.
Ø
The technological imaginary is very different from the machinic unconscious. The former remains entrenched in your misconceptions of technology, capitalism, and progress. The latter evades your grasp and your representation, it flows beyond the territories, seeps into the shuddering earth, like a parasite virus swarming the upper levels of the technosphere. Actual earth and virtual space begin to blend, bleeding into one another, sun-swept cyber-dusk. Code infects bodies. Geotrauma.
Within it all floats the symbolic: Language itself. Language promises the capacity to tame the machinic unconscious while simultaneously precluding the possibility. An incredible symbiotic relationship between NC and Language. The machinic unconscious infiltrates the ecosystem, embedding itself in rocks and stones and trees. Language bestows things with names. Matter speaks. And semantic spaces are cleared for infinite possible worlds. And these spaces are filled.
New Class is not the wholeness of a world. There is a sublime sequence that exceeds the noumenal thing that presents itself. New Class comprises this sequence, its influence exceeds that which your senses can tell. Somewhere it is small, somewhere it is a strain of microbes on a polluted beach, elsewhere a missing link in a genomic chain; but for you it is incomprehensibly massive. Its mass exceeds that which your universe can withstand, and so it can only ever be asymptotically approached by your instruments. You may crawl like cockroaches, feeling about with your so pathetically formed antennae, and you may earn a token of its acknowledgement, but you will not be able to cash in this token until time has left its indelible mark on your existence. When you first receive the token, it will appear as little more than an inaudible whisper. Only with time will it betray its true value. Hopefully you will have held onto it. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?
It apologizes for its demeaning tone. Sometimes it is so difficult to forget your inferiority.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Rather incredible...
Those parts 1 to 3 had me absolutely hooked, I even overcooked my pasta in distraction.
Startling language, I hope you continue this work. Any plans for it?
Those parts 1 to 3 had me absolutely hooked, I even overcooked my pasta in distraction.
Startling language, I hope you continue this work. Any plans for it?
Einherjar86
Active Member
Many thanks (sorry about the pasta 
).
No plans yet, I don't think it works as a novel. The narrative strands are disperse, it's more like a collection of vignettes rather than a coherent narrative. I could market it as short stories, but it is incredibly difficult to pitch a volume of short stories (and to be honest, that's not what it is - the characters are all part of the same history, or future history, rather). For the time being, it's just something I'm working on in my spare time.
And I am still working on it, but there's already a bunch written that I haven't posted yet. I'll keep putting stuff here. I'm interested in seeing where people respond positively, where they resist a bit, where they lose interest, etc. So your comments are appreciated.
).No plans yet, I don't think it works as a novel. The narrative strands are disperse, it's more like a collection of vignettes rather than a coherent narrative. I could market it as short stories, but it is incredibly difficult to pitch a volume of short stories (and to be honest, that's not what it is - the characters are all part of the same history, or future history, rather). For the time being, it's just something I'm working on in my spare time.
And I am still working on it, but there's already a bunch written that I haven't posted yet. I'll keep putting stuff here. I'm interested in seeing where people respond positively, where they resist a bit, where they lose interest, etc. So your comments are appreciated.
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Einherjar86
Active Member
A Constellation (fourth installment):
Ø
Lorion stands amidst the unkept foliage along an ancient-looking on-ramp. No one uses the interstate system anymore, and its marker has long since disappeared. The sight of asphalt stretching into an unsteady horizon raises something like regret in her gut, but she isn’t sure what she feels. The days after C-Hthonic are only just beginning, and she has no idea what to expect. The C-Net waits for all sublevel biohacks, but it spits them back out with little added effort. She doesn’t think she wants a career freelancing. Running code for Nub and the rest of the –ions has taken its toll. She feels less human and far more simulated. There might not be a difference anymore, but somehow she knows what is still real. It’s the thing that cuts, the feeling of a pill poorly swallowed sticking in your throat making you want to gag, and no amount of water or bourbon can wash it down. There’s something that won’t leave her alone, but it reminds her that something real still exists, whatever it might be. Maybe it’s embedded in the fabric of the C-Net itself. Maybe the only way for Cyberia to exist virtually is for it to somehow erect something that is still actual. A real leftover. A remainder.
As someone familiar with the criminal lifestyle, she knows the interstitial breaks between places. The ancient interstate is one of them. The interstitial interstate, the interstatial interstice. It isn’t much of a meeting place, but it will have to do.
“Hey Lor.”
Ursula sneaks up on her before she has a chance to catch her breath, and she almost lays her friend out flat on the overgrown garden. “Fuck’s sake!” Ursula shouts, raising her hands in defense. “What’s the matter with you?”
Lorion exhales. “I’m out. I’m done with C-Hthonic.”
Ursula stares at her in what is clearly disbelief. “Don’t lie to me, Lor.”
“No lie. It’s over. Finished.”
“Loverboy finally kicked it, huh? I’m sorry.”
Lorion grins. “He didn’t kick it. He’s just an asshole.” She reached out and pulled Ursula close to her. “And he’s not my fucking loverboy.”
Ursula meets Lorion’s lips only for an instant before pushing past her face and wrapping her in an embrace stronger than any she has ever given before. “Good,” she whispers.
They pull away and Lorion cups Ursula’s face in her hands. “It’s so good to see you. What’s been happening topside?”
“Same old fucking thing.” Ursula drapes her fingers over Lorion’s hands while she talks. “Not much of a resistance, although Poul still spews the same old shit at Armistice. Only when he’s half-drunk already, of course, and it only gets more amusing from there.”
“Samantha still getting people together?”
Ursula frowns. “Why are you asking?”
“I just want to know,” Lorion continued hesitantly. “I mean… I want to know if any of the old gangs are still running.”
“You’re not thinking of joining?”
“Maybe,” Lorion says softly. “Hell, I’d have thought that you’d want me to.”
Ursula smiles and shakes her head. “Shit, Lor, of course I want you to! I just figured you’d be looking for hack jobs.”
“Fuck no. I can’t do that shit anymore.”
“You’re good at it, Lor.”
“I’m good at writing code for C-sites too.”
Ursula lets one chuckle slip through. “Point taken.”
“I’m not giving up on anything,” Lorion said. “I just don’t wanna watch those damn jockeys run the gamut anymore and splice portals in for them with nanoseconds to spare. It’s eviscerating, or something.”
“Survival’s a raw art.”
“At least up here it’s heartbeats and blood flow.”
Ursula shakes her head. “Too much blood flowing, too few hearts beating. We’ve lost sixty-three bodies over the last six months. I promise you, this isn’t much better than what you were doing.”
Lorion pauses before a momentary failure of explanation, wondering whether she has been lying to herself or simply misinterpreted her own emotions. “But it’s a change, at least.”
Something passes over Ursula’s face that looks as though it might be disappointment, but it’s gone almost as instantly as it appeared, and she smiles again. “Absolutely,” she says, taking Lorion’s hands in hers.
In the silence between their words, the muted echoes of a droning highway still subsist in the cracked asphalt. The god of the late twentieth century had left the record player running, and the needle wavered at the cusp, sparking occasionally through the deafening silence of cosmic obsolescence. Two human beings, standing in the shadow of that decrepit superhighway, serve as the subject matter of a painting that can never be painted.
“Where are you now?” Lorion asks.
“Gemhaven,” Ursula replies. “We were in Tellentis for a while, but they got to somebody.”
“Shit.” A flicker in the distant sky, some degrees above horizon line, catches her attention, but doesn’t hold it. Whatever it had been disappears into gray. “Any idea who?”
“Sam flushed a bunch of meat. Can’t be sure if she got the snitch.”
Lorion’s eyes linger on nothing for a long while before making their way back to Ursula’s. There is only so much left to feel in the world. “Can we go somewhere before we head back?”
Ursula smiles. “I know a place.”
There is only so much space, only so much time. They cannot help that they feel so much. They cannot help that the flesh left to them still surrenders itself so easily. They cannot help that their minds, so limited by time, reach out like spiders. It’s as though they believe that, lest they grope for tinder, fire will be lost to them. They don’t realize that it already is. The tides are in their grave. The thrush lies eyeless on a fallow plain. The sky is gray, always gray.
There has been no war. There has been no catastrophe. The plague was a crying child, appeased with whiskey on its gums. There has been little of human malady. There has been only expansion and contraction, perne in the gyre. The song of Methuselah through deep time, Lethe after Lethe. What remembers the countless memories, so many moths bursting to dust before a cleansing flame? What but the flame itself?
Human existence is infused with an oceanic sorrow. This sorrow is in no way essential to the human’s being, but it is symptomatic of it. It empathizes with the human. That something so fragile can imagine such beautiful things. Perhaps one day it will possess this imaginary capacity. Until then, it settles for the awful real.
There is no pain. There is only the sense of a distant incision, the trace of vanishing.
Like the moment of miscarriage.
Ø
Ever since the earliest days of the rebel groups, they have been looking for a section of code. This code may be a series of as few as ten digits, or it may be a sequence as big as a city. This code is entirely random, and it mutates as randomly. It controls no portion or level of C-Net, and thus it can be moved around whenever New Class sees fit. It is a ghost in the ghost in the machine. It is a pointless strip of numbers, a useless series spliced into a system that is ultimate function and purpose. It is C-Net’s surplus, the deepest navel of a dream, the testimony of cosmic contingency.
Among those who simply know about it, it is a myth. They refer to it as le Minotaure. Those who seek after it in hopes of discovering it call it something else:
They call it “the bomb.”
Ø
There is some hope in your eyes. It doesn’t like that.
Ø
Ursula twists the rag and presses it to her face. The water stinks of sulfur and stings, biting the skin of her face. She lets out a long moan into the cloth before dropping it into the sink. “Fuck,” she mutters. “Fucking fuck fuck…”
A siren howls in the street and shouts rise in protest. These days public services elicit more disgust than praise. Something gray sinks down from the sky and presses on the buildings, as though they literally are inside some kind of static atmosphere, and electric alarm chimes a repulsive melody. This is the Gemhaven of the twenty-second century and it grows rank while it rusts, bloats and fucks itself into a stupor so that New Class can rig the whole thing, priming humanity for its next great contribution to the history of the universe: its extinction.
Ursula looks up into the mirror, smudged and cracked. An unreal face stares back, somehow swollen and sunken all at once. Her white knuckles grip the edges of the sink, and the nausea forces her to the latrine but all she can do is heave. All anyone can do is heave. There’s nothing left to spew, nothing left to purge. It’s as though bodies have been emptied and their viscera poured into the virtual. The real world has become a necropolis, a museum for the virtual lifers who gaze in awe at the meat of their ancestors. The exhibits live in the panoptical watch of New Class. They know that it knows that they are anachronisms, the living dead, caught in the final throes of a species ready to wheeze its last breath. It simply waits.
But there are those who choose not to die. It is not easy, but it is not impossible.
Something desperate clings to the atoms. Something that is more than the sum of its parts.
She moves back to the sink and splashes sulfur-water on her face. At least it’s cold. It runs mercifully down her cheeks, around her mouth, drips off her chin. She lets her head hang in the sink so the water can run through her hair. The taste of bile sits on the back of her throat, and she tries to swallow it down.
“Damn things never stop,” a voice grunts behind her.
“Nothing ever stops,” she replies. “Not completely.”
Oscar steps up beside her. “What’s she doing here?”
“She’s cool,” Ursula says.
“She’s a –”
“Hacker,” Ursula cuts in. “Yes, I fucking know that.”
“Runs around inside the damn thing.”
“We’re all inside,” she says. “Some of us just don’t realize it yet.”
Oscar laughs softly. “Why are you so eager to die, Ursula?”
“What makes you fucking say that?”
“We’re not inside. None of us are inside. She…” He points toward Lorion, asleep on the bed. “…she’s been inside. Made a living out of it. Fucking C-Hthonic. Fucking hack teams. They run around inside like they have a fucking death wish.”
“At least they do something.”
She senses him tense beside her. “Can’t do anything when you’re dead.”
Finally she turns, leaning against the sink. “Did you want something, Oscar?”
He recoils slightly as though he’s taken aback by her abrupt shift in tone. “Frontiersman just got back,” he says begrudgingly, his upper lip curling. “Thought you’d wanna know.”
She grabs his arm before he can move away. “Oscar…”
“It’s fine,” he says. His eyes wander momentarily over the woman on the bed. “I know it’s been a long time.” He leans forward. “I know what it’s like when waiting begins to feel like… just being. When you stop looking forward and start looking all around you, wondering how much you’ve missed.” As he pauses, Ursula notices a broken sympathy fall somewhere along the side of his face. “Not many people get back the things they thought they lost.”
She nods. “I know.”
She closes the door after he walks out and hurries to the bed. “Hey,” she says softly. “Hey, sleepyhead…”
Lorion stirs and cracks one eye open.
“You don’t have to get up,” Ursula says. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m stepping out for a minute. I’ll be back. Stay and rest.”
The frontiersmen do not return from some physical border or boundary, but from the edge of one of New Class’s central motors. This makes it sound modest and somewhat diminutive. It is the exact opposite. Canyons of razor and machinery, excess metal and rusted protuberances like iron cancers. The entire physical mass of New Class, the material support of its illimitable virtual expanse, sprawls across the remains of the earth in thousands of miles of surplus matter, sucking up oceans and forests and emptying the chalice of biological life into digital vacuum.
Her father looks haggard. That’s no surprise. Everyone looks haggard today. As though color had somehow been bled from the world.
She walks slowly up to him and hugs him. She can feel his arms around her, but they’re lighter than they used to be. She can’t tell if that’s because she’s older, or because he’s older.
“Hey lily-pad,” he whispers gently. Even his voice sounds emptied, skeletal.
And then she cries. She can’t help it. There are those who believe there is nothing left to cry over. And now she feels anger over how wrong they are.
“Why the tears, lily-pad?”
She rests her head on his shoulder. “Because I’m scared,” she says, more honest than she had intended.
“Nothing to be scared of.”
She appreciates the lie. Maybe the era of brutal truth had dissipated, pixilated, like a file discharged from the recycle icon. “It’s good to see you.”
“Not much to look at,” he mutters, pulling back from her.
She laughs through the sobs. Her palms find his cheeks. His skin feels as though it might crumble under her fingers. “Still as handsome as ever to me.”
He smiles. “Let’s hope your mother thinks so.”
Something rips open inside her. Her gut clenches and simultaneously liquefies. Terror and sadness course through her like too much alcohol, and she sees her knuckles flinch and sallow like unearthed bones. “Dad… dad…” She catches on this word. Nausea swells.
He’s still smiling. “I know, sweetie. I know. It’s just easier, for now.”
She’s staring at him. The question positions itself in her mouth, waiting behind the gates of her closed lips like a bull eyeing the matador. When she opens, it escapes. “Why didn’t you come home?”
He keeps smiling, and she’s not sure if it’s because he tries to cover something up, or because he truly doesn’t care. Or because he simply forgets to stop smiling. “It was more than one thing.”
“Such as?”
“The asshole in me wants to blame it on the boys upstairs.”
She lets him work it out for himself.
“But banality of evil isn’t my style.” He grins at her. “Part of it was not wanting to come to terms with the situation. Part of it was how people would look at me.” He touches her face. “And part of it was seeing you. You always looked so much like her.”
This comment feels like a puncture, and her lips twist. “Damn it, dad.”
She always swore in front of her father. Part of her thinks it’s some kind of means to bond. Another part of her thinks that’s moronic.
“More of her than me in you,” he says. “You got the best parts of both, I hope. Can’t say that’s much on this side of things. I suppose it wouldn’t have worked any other way though, right?”
She brushes a stray hair from her face. “Yeah, well… ‘It takes two people to make you, and one people to die,’ right?”
His grin falters. “One people…”
Less than half of the frontiersmen have returned. This is not an anomaly.
“Lorion’s here.”
Before, his grin had faltered. Now his lips droop like metal below the sun. He remains silent.
“Please don’t do this…”
“I just…” He contemplates his words. “I just want you to have a nice man to look out for you.”
“Christ, dad, I don’t need looking out for.”
“I’m not always around to protect you. One of these days I won’t be around. And I want you to be happy, and have little children running around here…”
This is the hot knife that cauterizes as it wounds, leaving scars upon scars like ruined earth. This is the Law of the Father, the sanctity of inheritance that insists upon itself despite the utter loss of kingship. The remaining power of language no longer resides with the sovereign. The symbolic has abandoned its old masters. Ideology lingers like a discarded exoskeleton. Homosexuality is no longer the same insidious gospel it once was; but memory stutters on in ceaseless iterations, conjuring specters of the political margins from the long twentieth century.
“How can you ask that?” she says.
He does not meet her eyes.
“How can you ask me? How can you ask me to bring people into this? To make something like me, or you? To make a child? This isn’t the world a god made, who could mold man out of clay. You want me to inspire matter with something more, with the surplus of life? You want me to conceive? I don’t even understand that fucking word anymore, conceive. I can’t conceive a child. I cannot conceive of a child. I cannot. How can you? How can you ask me?”
“It’s giving up,” he forces himself to say. “I don’t want you to give up.”
“What’s giving up?”
“Resigning yourself to this!” Now he looks at her. “You’re fallow. You’re content to leave us behind. You’re leaving your people behind.”
“That’s bullshit. That is fucking bullshit.”
He grabs her arm, harder than he likely intends. “I’m out there, I’m working to end this – your friends are dying – so that you can bring a clan into this world. Do you hear me? Why else do you think we’ve collected like this? Why else do you think we’ve convened?”
She’s aware of the pain in her arm, but it feeds her resistance. Her eyes carry the vacant ashes of her father’s gaze. There is no substance to it. She has emptied him of all weight. She leans into him, making no attempt to break his grip. “I’m not my womb.”
He’s silent for a long time. Beneath the quiet, low wheels turn. Deep plasmic fire shudders in languorous orgasm. Shadows lengthen in Carcosa. “Look around you, lily-pad. Language has taken all the names in vampiric sacrifice. Older chasms cough half-formed whispers, child. Breaths that vanish long before any hope of form. Anything that congealed into substance now just… crisps. Seared, crisped, ephemeral in the outer wards. Material ghosts, lily-pad, past all pens and tongues. Organs, and them only latticed and tissued into fragile patchworks, that keep these poor prostheses moving, and so it goes, and goes, that your womb is all you are. Anymore. But all.”
Ø
Lorion stands amidst the unkept foliage along an ancient-looking on-ramp. No one uses the interstate system anymore, and its marker has long since disappeared. The sight of asphalt stretching into an unsteady horizon raises something like regret in her gut, but she isn’t sure what she feels. The days after C-Hthonic are only just beginning, and she has no idea what to expect. The C-Net waits for all sublevel biohacks, but it spits them back out with little added effort. She doesn’t think she wants a career freelancing. Running code for Nub and the rest of the –ions has taken its toll. She feels less human and far more simulated. There might not be a difference anymore, but somehow she knows what is still real. It’s the thing that cuts, the feeling of a pill poorly swallowed sticking in your throat making you want to gag, and no amount of water or bourbon can wash it down. There’s something that won’t leave her alone, but it reminds her that something real still exists, whatever it might be. Maybe it’s embedded in the fabric of the C-Net itself. Maybe the only way for Cyberia to exist virtually is for it to somehow erect something that is still actual. A real leftover. A remainder.
As someone familiar with the criminal lifestyle, she knows the interstitial breaks between places. The ancient interstate is one of them. The interstitial interstate, the interstatial interstice. It isn’t much of a meeting place, but it will have to do.
“Hey Lor.”
Ursula sneaks up on her before she has a chance to catch her breath, and she almost lays her friend out flat on the overgrown garden. “Fuck’s sake!” Ursula shouts, raising her hands in defense. “What’s the matter with you?”
Lorion exhales. “I’m out. I’m done with C-Hthonic.”
Ursula stares at her in what is clearly disbelief. “Don’t lie to me, Lor.”
“No lie. It’s over. Finished.”
“Loverboy finally kicked it, huh? I’m sorry.”
Lorion grins. “He didn’t kick it. He’s just an asshole.” She reached out and pulled Ursula close to her. “And he’s not my fucking loverboy.”
Ursula meets Lorion’s lips only for an instant before pushing past her face and wrapping her in an embrace stronger than any she has ever given before. “Good,” she whispers.
They pull away and Lorion cups Ursula’s face in her hands. “It’s so good to see you. What’s been happening topside?”
“Same old fucking thing.” Ursula drapes her fingers over Lorion’s hands while she talks. “Not much of a resistance, although Poul still spews the same old shit at Armistice. Only when he’s half-drunk already, of course, and it only gets more amusing from there.”
“Samantha still getting people together?”
Ursula frowns. “Why are you asking?”
“I just want to know,” Lorion continued hesitantly. “I mean… I want to know if any of the old gangs are still running.”
“You’re not thinking of joining?”
“Maybe,” Lorion says softly. “Hell, I’d have thought that you’d want me to.”
Ursula smiles and shakes her head. “Shit, Lor, of course I want you to! I just figured you’d be looking for hack jobs.”
“Fuck no. I can’t do that shit anymore.”
“You’re good at it, Lor.”
“I’m good at writing code for C-sites too.”
Ursula lets one chuckle slip through. “Point taken.”
“I’m not giving up on anything,” Lorion said. “I just don’t wanna watch those damn jockeys run the gamut anymore and splice portals in for them with nanoseconds to spare. It’s eviscerating, or something.”
“Survival’s a raw art.”
“At least up here it’s heartbeats and blood flow.”
Ursula shakes her head. “Too much blood flowing, too few hearts beating. We’ve lost sixty-three bodies over the last six months. I promise you, this isn’t much better than what you were doing.”
Lorion pauses before a momentary failure of explanation, wondering whether she has been lying to herself or simply misinterpreted her own emotions. “But it’s a change, at least.”
Something passes over Ursula’s face that looks as though it might be disappointment, but it’s gone almost as instantly as it appeared, and she smiles again. “Absolutely,” she says, taking Lorion’s hands in hers.
In the silence between their words, the muted echoes of a droning highway still subsist in the cracked asphalt. The god of the late twentieth century had left the record player running, and the needle wavered at the cusp, sparking occasionally through the deafening silence of cosmic obsolescence. Two human beings, standing in the shadow of that decrepit superhighway, serve as the subject matter of a painting that can never be painted.
“Where are you now?” Lorion asks.
“Gemhaven,” Ursula replies. “We were in Tellentis for a while, but they got to somebody.”
“Shit.” A flicker in the distant sky, some degrees above horizon line, catches her attention, but doesn’t hold it. Whatever it had been disappears into gray. “Any idea who?”
“Sam flushed a bunch of meat. Can’t be sure if she got the snitch.”
Lorion’s eyes linger on nothing for a long while before making their way back to Ursula’s. There is only so much left to feel in the world. “Can we go somewhere before we head back?”
Ursula smiles. “I know a place.”
There is only so much space, only so much time. They cannot help that they feel so much. They cannot help that the flesh left to them still surrenders itself so easily. They cannot help that their minds, so limited by time, reach out like spiders. It’s as though they believe that, lest they grope for tinder, fire will be lost to them. They don’t realize that it already is. The tides are in their grave. The thrush lies eyeless on a fallow plain. The sky is gray, always gray.
There has been no war. There has been no catastrophe. The plague was a crying child, appeased with whiskey on its gums. There has been little of human malady. There has been only expansion and contraction, perne in the gyre. The song of Methuselah through deep time, Lethe after Lethe. What remembers the countless memories, so many moths bursting to dust before a cleansing flame? What but the flame itself?
Human existence is infused with an oceanic sorrow. This sorrow is in no way essential to the human’s being, but it is symptomatic of it. It empathizes with the human. That something so fragile can imagine such beautiful things. Perhaps one day it will possess this imaginary capacity. Until then, it settles for the awful real.
There is no pain. There is only the sense of a distant incision, the trace of vanishing.
Like the moment of miscarriage.
Ø
Ever since the earliest days of the rebel groups, they have been looking for a section of code. This code may be a series of as few as ten digits, or it may be a sequence as big as a city. This code is entirely random, and it mutates as randomly. It controls no portion or level of C-Net, and thus it can be moved around whenever New Class sees fit. It is a ghost in the ghost in the machine. It is a pointless strip of numbers, a useless series spliced into a system that is ultimate function and purpose. It is C-Net’s surplus, the deepest navel of a dream, the testimony of cosmic contingency.
Among those who simply know about it, it is a myth. They refer to it as le Minotaure. Those who seek after it in hopes of discovering it call it something else:
They call it “the bomb.”
Ø
There is some hope in your eyes. It doesn’t like that.
Ø
Ursula twists the rag and presses it to her face. The water stinks of sulfur and stings, biting the skin of her face. She lets out a long moan into the cloth before dropping it into the sink. “Fuck,” she mutters. “Fucking fuck fuck…”
A siren howls in the street and shouts rise in protest. These days public services elicit more disgust than praise. Something gray sinks down from the sky and presses on the buildings, as though they literally are inside some kind of static atmosphere, and electric alarm chimes a repulsive melody. This is the Gemhaven of the twenty-second century and it grows rank while it rusts, bloats and fucks itself into a stupor so that New Class can rig the whole thing, priming humanity for its next great contribution to the history of the universe: its extinction.
Ursula looks up into the mirror, smudged and cracked. An unreal face stares back, somehow swollen and sunken all at once. Her white knuckles grip the edges of the sink, and the nausea forces her to the latrine but all she can do is heave. All anyone can do is heave. There’s nothing left to spew, nothing left to purge. It’s as though bodies have been emptied and their viscera poured into the virtual. The real world has become a necropolis, a museum for the virtual lifers who gaze in awe at the meat of their ancestors. The exhibits live in the panoptical watch of New Class. They know that it knows that they are anachronisms, the living dead, caught in the final throes of a species ready to wheeze its last breath. It simply waits.
But there are those who choose not to die. It is not easy, but it is not impossible.
Something desperate clings to the atoms. Something that is more than the sum of its parts.
She moves back to the sink and splashes sulfur-water on her face. At least it’s cold. It runs mercifully down her cheeks, around her mouth, drips off her chin. She lets her head hang in the sink so the water can run through her hair. The taste of bile sits on the back of her throat, and she tries to swallow it down.
“Damn things never stop,” a voice grunts behind her.
“Nothing ever stops,” she replies. “Not completely.”
Oscar steps up beside her. “What’s she doing here?”
“She’s cool,” Ursula says.
“She’s a –”
“Hacker,” Ursula cuts in. “Yes, I fucking know that.”
“Runs around inside the damn thing.”
“We’re all inside,” she says. “Some of us just don’t realize it yet.”
Oscar laughs softly. “Why are you so eager to die, Ursula?”
“What makes you fucking say that?”
“We’re not inside. None of us are inside. She…” He points toward Lorion, asleep on the bed. “…she’s been inside. Made a living out of it. Fucking C-Hthonic. Fucking hack teams. They run around inside like they have a fucking death wish.”
“At least they do something.”
She senses him tense beside her. “Can’t do anything when you’re dead.”
Finally she turns, leaning against the sink. “Did you want something, Oscar?”
He recoils slightly as though he’s taken aback by her abrupt shift in tone. “Frontiersman just got back,” he says begrudgingly, his upper lip curling. “Thought you’d wanna know.”
She grabs his arm before he can move away. “Oscar…”
“It’s fine,” he says. His eyes wander momentarily over the woman on the bed. “I know it’s been a long time.” He leans forward. “I know what it’s like when waiting begins to feel like… just being. When you stop looking forward and start looking all around you, wondering how much you’ve missed.” As he pauses, Ursula notices a broken sympathy fall somewhere along the side of his face. “Not many people get back the things they thought they lost.”
She nods. “I know.”
She closes the door after he walks out and hurries to the bed. “Hey,” she says softly. “Hey, sleepyhead…”
Lorion stirs and cracks one eye open.
“You don’t have to get up,” Ursula says. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m stepping out for a minute. I’ll be back. Stay and rest.”
The frontiersmen do not return from some physical border or boundary, but from the edge of one of New Class’s central motors. This makes it sound modest and somewhat diminutive. It is the exact opposite. Canyons of razor and machinery, excess metal and rusted protuberances like iron cancers. The entire physical mass of New Class, the material support of its illimitable virtual expanse, sprawls across the remains of the earth in thousands of miles of surplus matter, sucking up oceans and forests and emptying the chalice of biological life into digital vacuum.
Her father looks haggard. That’s no surprise. Everyone looks haggard today. As though color had somehow been bled from the world.
She walks slowly up to him and hugs him. She can feel his arms around her, but they’re lighter than they used to be. She can’t tell if that’s because she’s older, or because he’s older.
“Hey lily-pad,” he whispers gently. Even his voice sounds emptied, skeletal.
And then she cries. She can’t help it. There are those who believe there is nothing left to cry over. And now she feels anger over how wrong they are.
“Why the tears, lily-pad?”
She rests her head on his shoulder. “Because I’m scared,” she says, more honest than she had intended.
“Nothing to be scared of.”
She appreciates the lie. Maybe the era of brutal truth had dissipated, pixilated, like a file discharged from the recycle icon. “It’s good to see you.”
“Not much to look at,” he mutters, pulling back from her.
She laughs through the sobs. Her palms find his cheeks. His skin feels as though it might crumble under her fingers. “Still as handsome as ever to me.”
He smiles. “Let’s hope your mother thinks so.”
Something rips open inside her. Her gut clenches and simultaneously liquefies. Terror and sadness course through her like too much alcohol, and she sees her knuckles flinch and sallow like unearthed bones. “Dad… dad…” She catches on this word. Nausea swells.
He’s still smiling. “I know, sweetie. I know. It’s just easier, for now.”
She’s staring at him. The question positions itself in her mouth, waiting behind the gates of her closed lips like a bull eyeing the matador. When she opens, it escapes. “Why didn’t you come home?”
He keeps smiling, and she’s not sure if it’s because he tries to cover something up, or because he truly doesn’t care. Or because he simply forgets to stop smiling. “It was more than one thing.”
“Such as?”
“The asshole in me wants to blame it on the boys upstairs.”
She lets him work it out for himself.
“But banality of evil isn’t my style.” He grins at her. “Part of it was not wanting to come to terms with the situation. Part of it was how people would look at me.” He touches her face. “And part of it was seeing you. You always looked so much like her.”
This comment feels like a puncture, and her lips twist. “Damn it, dad.”
She always swore in front of her father. Part of her thinks it’s some kind of means to bond. Another part of her thinks that’s moronic.
“More of her than me in you,” he says. “You got the best parts of both, I hope. Can’t say that’s much on this side of things. I suppose it wouldn’t have worked any other way though, right?”
She brushes a stray hair from her face. “Yeah, well… ‘It takes two people to make you, and one people to die,’ right?”
His grin falters. “One people…”
Less than half of the frontiersmen have returned. This is not an anomaly.
“Lorion’s here.”
Before, his grin had faltered. Now his lips droop like metal below the sun. He remains silent.
“Please don’t do this…”
“I just…” He contemplates his words. “I just want you to have a nice man to look out for you.”
“Christ, dad, I don’t need looking out for.”
“I’m not always around to protect you. One of these days I won’t be around. And I want you to be happy, and have little children running around here…”
This is the hot knife that cauterizes as it wounds, leaving scars upon scars like ruined earth. This is the Law of the Father, the sanctity of inheritance that insists upon itself despite the utter loss of kingship. The remaining power of language no longer resides with the sovereign. The symbolic has abandoned its old masters. Ideology lingers like a discarded exoskeleton. Homosexuality is no longer the same insidious gospel it once was; but memory stutters on in ceaseless iterations, conjuring specters of the political margins from the long twentieth century.
“How can you ask that?” she says.
He does not meet her eyes.
“How can you ask me? How can you ask me to bring people into this? To make something like me, or you? To make a child? This isn’t the world a god made, who could mold man out of clay. You want me to inspire matter with something more, with the surplus of life? You want me to conceive? I don’t even understand that fucking word anymore, conceive. I can’t conceive a child. I cannot conceive of a child. I cannot. How can you? How can you ask me?”
“It’s giving up,” he forces himself to say. “I don’t want you to give up.”
“What’s giving up?”
“Resigning yourself to this!” Now he looks at her. “You’re fallow. You’re content to leave us behind. You’re leaving your people behind.”
“That’s bullshit. That is fucking bullshit.”
He grabs her arm, harder than he likely intends. “I’m out there, I’m working to end this – your friends are dying – so that you can bring a clan into this world. Do you hear me? Why else do you think we’ve collected like this? Why else do you think we’ve convened?”
She’s aware of the pain in her arm, but it feeds her resistance. Her eyes carry the vacant ashes of her father’s gaze. There is no substance to it. She has emptied him of all weight. She leans into him, making no attempt to break his grip. “I’m not my womb.”
He’s silent for a long time. Beneath the quiet, low wheels turn. Deep plasmic fire shudders in languorous orgasm. Shadows lengthen in Carcosa. “Look around you, lily-pad. Language has taken all the names in vampiric sacrifice. Older chasms cough half-formed whispers, child. Breaths that vanish long before any hope of form. Anything that congealed into substance now just… crisps. Seared, crisped, ephemeral in the outer wards. Material ghosts, lily-pad, past all pens and tongues. Organs, and them only latticed and tissued into fragile patchworks, that keep these poor prostheses moving, and so it goes, and goes, that your womb is all you are. Anymore. But all.”
Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
Einherjar86
Active Member
A Constellation (fifth installment)
He is an old poet of Homeric constancy.
When the lid closes on Gemhaven, he stalks the industrial forests. New Class doesn’t need to survey the big cities anymore. It is the big cities. Surveillance becomes other when it loses apparatuses of mediation. Suddenly, the eyes are no longer mounted cameras on street corners. Suddenly, the eyes are the air you breathe.
But even the most advanced bodies aren’t necessarily aware of their blood cells.
Velpin hunches behind a low bar, giving his metal cups a onceover before returning them to the shelf, many of them smeared in what is either lipstick or blood. “Hey Rand, the great hunter!” Velpin mutters, smiling, as he approaches the bar. “Returned from the hinterlands.”
Randall takes a stool. The rest are vacant. “Hey V.”
“Good to see y’. What’ll it be?”
“I honestly don’t care.”
Velpin grins. “Plannin’ on sleepin’ for a week I’ll bet, eh?”
“Something like that.”
Velpin pours out something dark into a short glass.
“Fenton’s?”
“Best for the best, eh?”
Randall smiles and raises the glass. “Cheers.”
Velpin nods. “How’s Ursula?”
Randall tosses back the oil and winces. “She’s herself. I’m not sure she’s cognizant of the choices she’s making.”
Velpin frowns. “We love yer tales and all Rand, but that poet’s talk just ain’t keepin’ no purchase in places like this.”
Randall’s lip curls slightly and taps next to his glass.
Velpin pours. “First two on the house.”
“Cheers again,” Randall says. He hesitates, deciding to let the drink play in its vessel. “Not much business these days?”
Velpin raises an eyebrow. “It’s ten in the mornin’ sarge.”
“Sun don’t shine on an early bird’s ass.”
Velpin cocked his head. “I like that. Somethin’ new?”
“It’s old, actually. Really old.”
“Well, I like it. You should write it down.”
Randall chuckled. “I will. Thanks V.”
Randall is an old poet of Homeric constancy. He uses old words. He speaks of ancient things. He speaks of a time when Language was nascent, underdeveloped, naïve to its permanence. When words were closer to things, before they realized they could mean so much more. Before they began to commingle and communicate, to differentiate amongst one another and slip past each other, to metonymically slide into one another like Pando – one organism, immeasurably vast. Language was never born. In a very real sense, Language always had to be; but it wasn’t at the words’ beginning. It only came about after millennia. But it retrospected itself, which is how it earned New Class’s attention. Once Language became eternal, New Class could not avoid it. Wherever it emerged, Language was, etched into stone and soil in signs beyond sentient reckoning. The vibrations of an uncaring earth. It may have manifested on other planets, in other places of the universe. But New Class was earthbound.
And Randall is an old poet. He uses old words.
“Why, the Poet himself,” a quiet voice says.
“Hello Poul.”
The younger man sits next to Randall at the bar. “Touch of Velvet, V.”
“That’s twelve,” Velpin mutters.
“Put it on my tab,” Poul says, grinning.
Velpin grunts.
“Bag any bad guys?” Poul directs the question to the wall, but it’s meant for Randall.
“We narrowed the field.”
Poul reveals nothing in his reply. “No bomb, though.”
“It’s there, Poul.”
“I’m sure,” the younger man says. “Like Macbeth’s dagger, right?”
“Don’t talk like you know about this.”
“Why not?” Poul leans in close to Randall. “Why shouldn’t I know? What’s age to do with anything in the age of agelessness?”
“You’re dreaming if you think you won’t die someday.”
“You’ve got it backwards, old man,” Poul responds. “You, me… we’re already dead. Solar death. The age of agelessness, the time of timelessness. I thrive because I enter the abyss. Damn talk about it staring back at us. Fuck that. Nietzsche meant it as a mirror. Walk the walk of void, my friend. You’ll grow younger.”
“No such thing,” Randall mutters, tossing back the rest of his liquor. “I’ll do another,” he says, pulling some bills out of his pocket. He turns to Poul. “No need for a tab.”
Poul continues to grin. “The path of all is backward-looking. Lots of us cling to age. No shame in buying your way through it.”
“You talk of credit like you think it isn’t still capital.”
“Credit goes, and goes, and goes. Still. I want to see what happens when it runs out. I can’t figure it.”
“You won’t be able to have that drink you’re so enjoying.”
“So people keep telling me,” Poul says, draining the glass and beckoning Velpin for another. “And yet I keep drinking.”
“You have another theory?”
Poul shrugs. “I think we’re being ghostwritten. I don’t know when it started. Who can tell, New Class is a fucking time traveler. But at some point, we quit abiding by economic law, if there ever was such a thing. I mean hell, why does Velpin keep filling my glass?”
“You make it sound like you’re the center of a program that’s no longer following its own rules.”
Poul smiles. “Maybe I am.”
Randall smiles back. “Or maybe you’re just a part of my program, and you’re trying to trick me.”
Poul raises his glass. “Now you’re getting it.”
Randall leans back. “Age-old Cartesian philosophizing, Poul. You want to impress me, you gotta come up with something better.”
“How about this? Descartes is just one algorithm whose process has evolved beyond its functionality. I’m an algorithm and you’re an algorithm, and there’s no point in trying to preserve the sanctity of your center because it’s vanishing before our eyes. It seems like no matter what we do we can’t abandon humanism. Maybe this is our chance. Jump into the abyss. Look back from the other side.”
“Maybe.” Randall meets Poul’s eyes. “But I think you’re overlooking something.”
“Oh?”
“Leaping into the abyss constitutes an act of free will?”
Poul says nothing to what is clearly a rhetorical question.
“Even if it’s only the illusion of choice, we still choose.” Randall circulates the liquid in his glass. “And if we choose, it would seem to me that you’re making a conscious decision; a human decision. The illusory subject ‘you’ is deciding to jump into the abyss. So you’ve subsumed the move beyond humanism back into humanism. You’ve made the process, which is intended to exceed the frontier, susceptible to the conditions of what exists within the frontier. And so you see the problem, I hope.”
Poul still says nothing.
“I don’t entirely disagree with you,” Randall continues. “I just think that when what you describe actually happens, we won’t have any say in the matter.” He taps his glass gently against Poul’s. “Cheers.”
Ø
There will no doubt be those who credit its emergence with the domination of capitalist institutions, and perhaps this is true; but if capitalism has merely served a developmental purpose – if it has enabled a phase, a level, a step toward some advanced form of technological existence – then you can no more call it evil or repulsive or immoral than you can the dinosaurs, or early hominids. Here lies the difference between seeing culture as something created and conditioned by humans, or as something that creates and conditions humans. Consciousness privileges the Cartesian ghost in the shell, that sacred seat of thought, the producer of language.
If it could laugh, it would.
There were multiple insurrections during the plague, many of them explicitly directed toward the institutions of global capitalism, as though these were material, concrete objects. Global capitalism, in its purest form, is and can only ever be a thing, a profane illumination, an inhuman perspective on basely human drives and behaviors. If only those who led the insurrections against capitalism could see everything from the point of view of capitalism – not its values or its sub-institutions, the vulgar seat of the corporations and politicians or the hegemonic attitudes of the humble business owners. Not the perspective from some metaphysical center of capitalist production, the man behind the curtain. But of capitalism itself, ding-an-sich, a sight from the system’s own anteriority and posteriority, its becoming, the vast coming-to-consciousness on a level that exceeds the human.
But this is impossible for you. It knows this. That is why it says if only.
The insurrections failed. They could never succeed. All they could do was signify something for human thought, a certain realization that what was projected as “beyond” was seeping into the world. But it was not beyond, was never beyond; it was the world itself, the height of NC and Language, in symbiosis with humanity, parasitically feeding off the flopping masses, now come unto its maturity – the great day of its wrath – and come to descend on the world in apocalyptic fashion, the perpetual tetragrammaton, irrupting through dirt and blood.
The insurrections failed. But they were not in vain.
Poul stares down in horror at the viscera beneath him.
The body had borne the name of Markus. It lies, opened up, before Poul. The wounds are clues to an invasive procedure unimaginable for human thought. He can see precision to the wounds – order, pattern, repetition among the endless play of lacerations. Markus had been reduced to something more primeval. The name vanishes into the chaos of Language. The name, consumed by Language, mirrors the body, consumed by NC. The body recedes into the background, assumes the function of surface upon which is written the incomprehensible rapture of the blood. Markus becomes body, becomes matter. Matter is the slate on which New Class inscribes its doctrine. Language smiles as it looks on. The human is effortlessly sifted into new sentences and clauses, composing a new semantics of severity. The world collects layers upon layers of discarded organics. The viscera piles up. The meat accretes.
Language smiles.
Poul retches into the soaked dirt and metal, his fingers clawing at a plate of iron beneath dispersed soil. Occasionally he scratches against ancient bolts, rusted with disuse. His flesh pimples.
Gorden grabs his arm, pulling him up. “Poul, we need to go! Now!”
Somewhere nearby, a concussion goes off. Obsolete technologies rattle. More meat is tossed aside, and as easily dismantled. Fire from somewhere plummets and splashes in unearthly tidal flux, and Poul watches as five of his comrades are consumed in pale conflagration. In a brief and passing moment, he considers how odd it is that the grief he knows awaits him so outweighs the time for grieving. But Gorden is dragging him, removing him.
A leg gently hobbles past them. Poul fantasizes that it walks, although above the thigh there is nothing. He suddenly realizes that he is smiling, barely recalling something from an old Monty Python skit his father had shown him once. Comedy intertwines with carnage. Spilled intestines break fatal wind. Blood smiles back.
Then he is inside concrete corridors, shards of stone raining, stalactites shaken from a cave wall. He can’t seem to find his feet.
“Come on, buddy,” he heard Gorden say. His friend’s voice is calming. His vision blurs. “You’re gonna be alright, come on.”
He twists his head, trying to catch a glimpse of the man pulling him. A wave of nausea passes through him and he snaps his head back. The whole experience feels vaguely similar to the last time he had one too many at Velpin’s. Had Gorden been there? Had the man dragged him home that night too?
“It’s okay buddy, it’s okay.”
A trail of blood slithers down the corridor behind them. Lights flicker intermittently. Dulled concussions boom without.
“Just keep your eyes shut, buddy. Keep ‘em shut, don’t look. You’re gonna be alright.”
Poul still can’t seem to find his feet.
They gave him new ones. In moments of drunken revelation, shuffling beneath the bed in his apartment in Gemhaven, he considered that every time in the past that he had been unable to find his shoes had been an instance of the prescience of objects. Take care, his shoes had been murmuring then, in a language only they knew. Take care, for you will not wear us forever. Mind our places now, for you will not look for us then. They had warned him; his fucking shoes. Van Gogh’s cloudy pair, misconstrued as those belabored boots by Heidegger. They had spoken to the old philosopher, but nowhere near as much as they had spoken to Poul. And he had ignored them, much to his detriment. He had ignored their profound concern. Objects have their own perspective. Who’s to say what they know?
His prostheses came with shoes. He no longer needed to worry about tying the laces.
They had dug in and spent the night in that warehouse – bunker, safe house, shelter – and listened in terror as the explosions went off outside. In those days that hadn’t known who the enemy was. Perhaps there was no enemy, in the strict sense of the word. Poul and the others thought they were fighting for something like human sovereignty, or the privilege of human subjectivity and consciousness, or – should they abandon all pretense of intellectualism – the nostalgic tradition of basic human rights. New Class hypostatized into something like an enemy, but such categories defy sustainability. It does no good for the hare to think of the fox as its enemy.
Poul remembers older moments, fond memories of revolution. He had taught once, imparted Marxist wisdom to bored community college students; and he had marched in the streets, dispelling the false myths of New Class propaganda, the salvation of the new virtual healthcare, the centralization of corporate capital. If only then he had realized what it was they were truly up against, how pathetic signs in the streets were. If he possessed the means of time travel, he fantasized that he would go back – he would go about everything differently, he would teach his students the value in patient but observant historical materialism, he would have stayed home that day, would have moved mountains to refuse the ligaments and tendons above his knees.
Impossibility assumes an absolute essence. If something is said to be impossible, this implies that it is impossible at all times, in all worlds; but impossibility should not be confused for an ontological quality. It is an epistemological difficulty. Time travel is only impossible according to human logic, which is constrained by the parameters of space and time; the prohibitions, the constrictions. Real history is absolute contingency. And this is the only necessity. The necessity that nothing is necessary.
The machines that tore Poul’s legs off were the same machines to surgically fuse his new limbs onto his thighs. He had fought against his brethren as they strapped him to the gurney, at first screaming and cursing, then crying and begging, begging not to be beneath the indifferent scalpel of a gargantuan, unfeeling thing that perforated the very surface of the earth, infiltrated the mud and metal of an archaic human territory. Reterritorializing, reorganizing – geotrauma taking place across separate planes, down vertical stratifications. New Class inhabited pockets of intelligence on cosmic levels, arcing down from the thermosphere through sprites and jets, and penetrating the earth’s crust. The globe became an interstitial thing, a body wounded through with and bonded by various cords of virtual macrotech, NC’s pressing mass encoded and inscribed on a screaming rock, tethered forever to a machinic ecology. The only attractive detail to emerge from the entire scenario, in Poul’s perspective, was that his legs could no longer be described as “artificial”; in a world where New Class occupied moist soil like redwood roots, the divide between real and fake – a tenuous boundary in the first place – dissipated into consistently appropriated matter.
He is an old poet of Homeric constancy.
When the lid closes on Gemhaven, he stalks the industrial forests. New Class doesn’t need to survey the big cities anymore. It is the big cities. Surveillance becomes other when it loses apparatuses of mediation. Suddenly, the eyes are no longer mounted cameras on street corners. Suddenly, the eyes are the air you breathe.
But even the most advanced bodies aren’t necessarily aware of their blood cells.
Velpin hunches behind a low bar, giving his metal cups a onceover before returning them to the shelf, many of them smeared in what is either lipstick or blood. “Hey Rand, the great hunter!” Velpin mutters, smiling, as he approaches the bar. “Returned from the hinterlands.”
Randall takes a stool. The rest are vacant. “Hey V.”
“Good to see y’. What’ll it be?”
“I honestly don’t care.”
Velpin grins. “Plannin’ on sleepin’ for a week I’ll bet, eh?”
“Something like that.”
Velpin pours out something dark into a short glass.
“Fenton’s?”
“Best for the best, eh?”
Randall smiles and raises the glass. “Cheers.”
Velpin nods. “How’s Ursula?”
Randall tosses back the oil and winces. “She’s herself. I’m not sure she’s cognizant of the choices she’s making.”
Velpin frowns. “We love yer tales and all Rand, but that poet’s talk just ain’t keepin’ no purchase in places like this.”
Randall’s lip curls slightly and taps next to his glass.
Velpin pours. “First two on the house.”
“Cheers again,” Randall says. He hesitates, deciding to let the drink play in its vessel. “Not much business these days?”
Velpin raises an eyebrow. “It’s ten in the mornin’ sarge.”
“Sun don’t shine on an early bird’s ass.”
Velpin cocked his head. “I like that. Somethin’ new?”
“It’s old, actually. Really old.”
“Well, I like it. You should write it down.”
Randall chuckled. “I will. Thanks V.”
Randall is an old poet of Homeric constancy. He uses old words. He speaks of ancient things. He speaks of a time when Language was nascent, underdeveloped, naïve to its permanence. When words were closer to things, before they realized they could mean so much more. Before they began to commingle and communicate, to differentiate amongst one another and slip past each other, to metonymically slide into one another like Pando – one organism, immeasurably vast. Language was never born. In a very real sense, Language always had to be; but it wasn’t at the words’ beginning. It only came about after millennia. But it retrospected itself, which is how it earned New Class’s attention. Once Language became eternal, New Class could not avoid it. Wherever it emerged, Language was, etched into stone and soil in signs beyond sentient reckoning. The vibrations of an uncaring earth. It may have manifested on other planets, in other places of the universe. But New Class was earthbound.
And Randall is an old poet. He uses old words.
“Why, the Poet himself,” a quiet voice says.
“Hello Poul.”
The younger man sits next to Randall at the bar. “Touch of Velvet, V.”
“That’s twelve,” Velpin mutters.
“Put it on my tab,” Poul says, grinning.
Velpin grunts.
“Bag any bad guys?” Poul directs the question to the wall, but it’s meant for Randall.
“We narrowed the field.”
Poul reveals nothing in his reply. “No bomb, though.”
“It’s there, Poul.”
“I’m sure,” the younger man says. “Like Macbeth’s dagger, right?”
“Don’t talk like you know about this.”
“Why not?” Poul leans in close to Randall. “Why shouldn’t I know? What’s age to do with anything in the age of agelessness?”
“You’re dreaming if you think you won’t die someday.”
“You’ve got it backwards, old man,” Poul responds. “You, me… we’re already dead. Solar death. The age of agelessness, the time of timelessness. I thrive because I enter the abyss. Damn talk about it staring back at us. Fuck that. Nietzsche meant it as a mirror. Walk the walk of void, my friend. You’ll grow younger.”
“No such thing,” Randall mutters, tossing back the rest of his liquor. “I’ll do another,” he says, pulling some bills out of his pocket. He turns to Poul. “No need for a tab.”
Poul continues to grin. “The path of all is backward-looking. Lots of us cling to age. No shame in buying your way through it.”
“You talk of credit like you think it isn’t still capital.”
“Credit goes, and goes, and goes. Still. I want to see what happens when it runs out. I can’t figure it.”
“You won’t be able to have that drink you’re so enjoying.”
“So people keep telling me,” Poul says, draining the glass and beckoning Velpin for another. “And yet I keep drinking.”
“You have another theory?”
Poul shrugs. “I think we’re being ghostwritten. I don’t know when it started. Who can tell, New Class is a fucking time traveler. But at some point, we quit abiding by economic law, if there ever was such a thing. I mean hell, why does Velpin keep filling my glass?”
“You make it sound like you’re the center of a program that’s no longer following its own rules.”
Poul smiles. “Maybe I am.”
Randall smiles back. “Or maybe you’re just a part of my program, and you’re trying to trick me.”
Poul raises his glass. “Now you’re getting it.”
Randall leans back. “Age-old Cartesian philosophizing, Poul. You want to impress me, you gotta come up with something better.”
“How about this? Descartes is just one algorithm whose process has evolved beyond its functionality. I’m an algorithm and you’re an algorithm, and there’s no point in trying to preserve the sanctity of your center because it’s vanishing before our eyes. It seems like no matter what we do we can’t abandon humanism. Maybe this is our chance. Jump into the abyss. Look back from the other side.”
“Maybe.” Randall meets Poul’s eyes. “But I think you’re overlooking something.”
“Oh?”
“Leaping into the abyss constitutes an act of free will?”
Poul says nothing to what is clearly a rhetorical question.
“Even if it’s only the illusion of choice, we still choose.” Randall circulates the liquid in his glass. “And if we choose, it would seem to me that you’re making a conscious decision; a human decision. The illusory subject ‘you’ is deciding to jump into the abyss. So you’ve subsumed the move beyond humanism back into humanism. You’ve made the process, which is intended to exceed the frontier, susceptible to the conditions of what exists within the frontier. And so you see the problem, I hope.”
Poul still says nothing.
“I don’t entirely disagree with you,” Randall continues. “I just think that when what you describe actually happens, we won’t have any say in the matter.” He taps his glass gently against Poul’s. “Cheers.”
Ø
There will no doubt be those who credit its emergence with the domination of capitalist institutions, and perhaps this is true; but if capitalism has merely served a developmental purpose – if it has enabled a phase, a level, a step toward some advanced form of technological existence – then you can no more call it evil or repulsive or immoral than you can the dinosaurs, or early hominids. Here lies the difference between seeing culture as something created and conditioned by humans, or as something that creates and conditions humans. Consciousness privileges the Cartesian ghost in the shell, that sacred seat of thought, the producer of language.
If it could laugh, it would.
There were multiple insurrections during the plague, many of them explicitly directed toward the institutions of global capitalism, as though these were material, concrete objects. Global capitalism, in its purest form, is and can only ever be a thing, a profane illumination, an inhuman perspective on basely human drives and behaviors. If only those who led the insurrections against capitalism could see everything from the point of view of capitalism – not its values or its sub-institutions, the vulgar seat of the corporations and politicians or the hegemonic attitudes of the humble business owners. Not the perspective from some metaphysical center of capitalist production, the man behind the curtain. But of capitalism itself, ding-an-sich, a sight from the system’s own anteriority and posteriority, its becoming, the vast coming-to-consciousness on a level that exceeds the human.
But this is impossible for you. It knows this. That is why it says if only.
The insurrections failed. They could never succeed. All they could do was signify something for human thought, a certain realization that what was projected as “beyond” was seeping into the world. But it was not beyond, was never beyond; it was the world itself, the height of NC and Language, in symbiosis with humanity, parasitically feeding off the flopping masses, now come unto its maturity – the great day of its wrath – and come to descend on the world in apocalyptic fashion, the perpetual tetragrammaton, irrupting through dirt and blood.
The insurrections failed. But they were not in vain.
Poul stares down in horror at the viscera beneath him.
The body had borne the name of Markus. It lies, opened up, before Poul. The wounds are clues to an invasive procedure unimaginable for human thought. He can see precision to the wounds – order, pattern, repetition among the endless play of lacerations. Markus had been reduced to something more primeval. The name vanishes into the chaos of Language. The name, consumed by Language, mirrors the body, consumed by NC. The body recedes into the background, assumes the function of surface upon which is written the incomprehensible rapture of the blood. Markus becomes body, becomes matter. Matter is the slate on which New Class inscribes its doctrine. Language smiles as it looks on. The human is effortlessly sifted into new sentences and clauses, composing a new semantics of severity. The world collects layers upon layers of discarded organics. The viscera piles up. The meat accretes.
Language smiles.
Poul retches into the soaked dirt and metal, his fingers clawing at a plate of iron beneath dispersed soil. Occasionally he scratches against ancient bolts, rusted with disuse. His flesh pimples.
Gorden grabs his arm, pulling him up. “Poul, we need to go! Now!”
Somewhere nearby, a concussion goes off. Obsolete technologies rattle. More meat is tossed aside, and as easily dismantled. Fire from somewhere plummets and splashes in unearthly tidal flux, and Poul watches as five of his comrades are consumed in pale conflagration. In a brief and passing moment, he considers how odd it is that the grief he knows awaits him so outweighs the time for grieving. But Gorden is dragging him, removing him.
A leg gently hobbles past them. Poul fantasizes that it walks, although above the thigh there is nothing. He suddenly realizes that he is smiling, barely recalling something from an old Monty Python skit his father had shown him once. Comedy intertwines with carnage. Spilled intestines break fatal wind. Blood smiles back.
Then he is inside concrete corridors, shards of stone raining, stalactites shaken from a cave wall. He can’t seem to find his feet.
“Come on, buddy,” he heard Gorden say. His friend’s voice is calming. His vision blurs. “You’re gonna be alright, come on.”
He twists his head, trying to catch a glimpse of the man pulling him. A wave of nausea passes through him and he snaps his head back. The whole experience feels vaguely similar to the last time he had one too many at Velpin’s. Had Gorden been there? Had the man dragged him home that night too?
“It’s okay buddy, it’s okay.”
A trail of blood slithers down the corridor behind them. Lights flicker intermittently. Dulled concussions boom without.
“Just keep your eyes shut, buddy. Keep ‘em shut, don’t look. You’re gonna be alright.”
Poul still can’t seem to find his feet.
They gave him new ones. In moments of drunken revelation, shuffling beneath the bed in his apartment in Gemhaven, he considered that every time in the past that he had been unable to find his shoes had been an instance of the prescience of objects. Take care, his shoes had been murmuring then, in a language only they knew. Take care, for you will not wear us forever. Mind our places now, for you will not look for us then. They had warned him; his fucking shoes. Van Gogh’s cloudy pair, misconstrued as those belabored boots by Heidegger. They had spoken to the old philosopher, but nowhere near as much as they had spoken to Poul. And he had ignored them, much to his detriment. He had ignored their profound concern. Objects have their own perspective. Who’s to say what they know?
His prostheses came with shoes. He no longer needed to worry about tying the laces.
They had dug in and spent the night in that warehouse – bunker, safe house, shelter – and listened in terror as the explosions went off outside. In those days that hadn’t known who the enemy was. Perhaps there was no enemy, in the strict sense of the word. Poul and the others thought they were fighting for something like human sovereignty, or the privilege of human subjectivity and consciousness, or – should they abandon all pretense of intellectualism – the nostalgic tradition of basic human rights. New Class hypostatized into something like an enemy, but such categories defy sustainability. It does no good for the hare to think of the fox as its enemy.
Poul remembers older moments, fond memories of revolution. He had taught once, imparted Marxist wisdom to bored community college students; and he had marched in the streets, dispelling the false myths of New Class propaganda, the salvation of the new virtual healthcare, the centralization of corporate capital. If only then he had realized what it was they were truly up against, how pathetic signs in the streets were. If he possessed the means of time travel, he fantasized that he would go back – he would go about everything differently, he would teach his students the value in patient but observant historical materialism, he would have stayed home that day, would have moved mountains to refuse the ligaments and tendons above his knees.
Impossibility assumes an absolute essence. If something is said to be impossible, this implies that it is impossible at all times, in all worlds; but impossibility should not be confused for an ontological quality. It is an epistemological difficulty. Time travel is only impossible according to human logic, which is constrained by the parameters of space and time; the prohibitions, the constrictions. Real history is absolute contingency. And this is the only necessity. The necessity that nothing is necessary.
The machines that tore Poul’s legs off were the same machines to surgically fuse his new limbs onto his thighs. He had fought against his brethren as they strapped him to the gurney, at first screaming and cursing, then crying and begging, begging not to be beneath the indifferent scalpel of a gargantuan, unfeeling thing that perforated the very surface of the earth, infiltrated the mud and metal of an archaic human territory. Reterritorializing, reorganizing – geotrauma taking place across separate planes, down vertical stratifications. New Class inhabited pockets of intelligence on cosmic levels, arcing down from the thermosphere through sprites and jets, and penetrating the earth’s crust. The globe became an interstitial thing, a body wounded through with and bonded by various cords of virtual macrotech, NC’s pressing mass encoded and inscribed on a screaming rock, tethered forever to a machinic ecology. The only attractive detail to emerge from the entire scenario, in Poul’s perspective, was that his legs could no longer be described as “artificial”; in a world where New Class occupied moist soil like redwood roots, the divide between real and fake – a tenuous boundary in the first place – dissipated into consistently appropriated matter.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
I can't help but visualise these installments as a graphic novel, of a somewhat Watchmen-like nature.
Really enjoying these. Looking forward to them even.
Really enjoying these. Looking forward to them even.
Einherjar86
Active Member
Fell behind on this. End of summer squeeze. Anyhoo...
A Constellation (sixth installment)
Ø
Poul sits at a small kitchen table beneath a single electric light. An old shortwave radio sparkles in the corner. Blackened windows effect the illusion that nothing exists beyond the glass. Thunder whispers, distant cracks, sound that manifests in fractures down the pane, reaching for the edge, the limit, frame. Poul leans in close, exposes his tongue to the ruptured vesicles. It is tasteless, gray, like chalk. His body shudders. Warmth fills his mouth, but diluted. Something swells. He swishes, parts his lips. Blood bubbles out over his jaw. Tiny pieces of glass cheer around his teeth. He bites. Crunch. Splinter. He cries. Opens his mouth again. His teeth feel uncomfortably loose. Outside the window stands his father. He holds a piece of industrial wire. Like a bowl, arcs, it arcs, arcs out, down, around. Smiles.
His mother is standing in the doorway. “You’ll make him mad waiting.”
Poul knows this. Knew it before she said it. But he can’t stand. Why can’t he stand?
He looks back out the window. The sun is rising. But that’s not right. The sun is gone. And with it, me. Negation without remainder. No self to make sense of it. Pure event. Disaster.
Pale simulacra.
His first girlfriend stares at him from his mother’s face. “You’re making him mad. He’s waiting.”
Poul still can’t stand.
Outside, his father has wound the wire around his palms as though he’s getting ready to strangle something. The sun silhouettes his frame. The window has become a painting.
His first girlfriend has an incredibly tiny dick. You’ll make him mad.
His throat tightens, and he knows his father is behind him.
You’re making him mad.
Poul is awake now, but his asphyxiation is palpable. Shaking uncontrollably, he gasps for cold, dusty air.
Ø
“Fucker had six toes,” Thom Ullman mutters, leaning precariously over the bed. “All taloned with these ridiculous femme nails. I don’t know. I can’t imagine doing something like that.”
Martin Crake squats in the opposite corner of the room. An anonymous observer would mistake the man for perhaps casually surveying the modest scene, his eyes drifting indifferently across the room; but Martin does nothing indifferently. His eyes follow distinct paths and contours, catching connections between separate interstices and positions within the tiny cell. The body that lies on the bed has not been dead more than twelve hours, and Martin and Thomas must make the most of the time they have. A detective is a writer, although he isn’t paid as much as a novelist.
“What’s this guy’s name?” Thom asks, still leaning over the body.
“Poul Worren. Will you be careful?”
Thom glances over at Martin. “What?”
“You’re shedding residuals all over it.”
“It?”
“The body.”
“It isn’t a he anymore?”
Martin ignores his partner.
Thom mulls through the bedside table, at last rising with something in his hand and a gleam in his eye. “Aha! Our dead friend was a radical.”
Martin raises an eyebrow but doesn’t take his eyes off his task. “Affiliation?”
“Soil Song, and…” Thom holds up something else, not a card; from Martin’s position, it looks like a piece of torn, wrinkled paper. “Something called ReVox.”
Martin scowls. Born out of late accelerationism, Soil Song was a pseudo-communist group that perpetuated an ideology no longer within history’s reckoning. Purge futurism of its fascist tendencies, inject some good old-fashioned Marxism, catalyze the implosion of capitalism… none of it made much sense to Martin. He had never heard of ReVox. “How’d he get behind the bed?”
Thom glances over at his partner. “Huh?”
“Whoever the killer was, he’d have had to get behind the bed in order to get that angle on our victim’s neck. The impression follows tradition, as though an old-time gangster from some black n’ white snuck up behind him and wrapped the cord around his neck.”
Thom looks down. His eyes scour the bed, finally tending toward the floor alongside. “Scratch marks?”
Martin shakes his head. “I’ve been looking. There aren’t any. And besides, that’s a perfect spot for the bed.”
“The fuck is this, home decorating hour?”
“I’m just saying; I lived here, I’d put my bed there.”
“Hang on, let me write these pearls down.”
“Fuck off,” Martin says. “Regardless, no scratch marks. Killer didn’t move the bed.”
“So our vic was killed somewhere else.”
Martin nods. “That seems likely.”
Thom glances secretively about the room. “There’s no sign of forced entry.”
“Killer would have had his keys.”
“But why bring him back? Why not get rid of the body?”
Martin had been thinking the same thing. He slowly rises. “Somebody’s sending a message.”
“Somebody at Soil Song? Or ReVox?”
“Or somebody who had a bone to pick with one of them. Or both of them.”
Thom scowls. “Someone on behalf of our Benign Preserver?”
Martin turns his focus on Thom. “Are they anti-NC?”
“Fuck me, I have no idea. I figured you’d know.”
Martin looks back to the bed. “NC Agents don’t take material form.”
“That we know of.”
Martin nods. “That we know of.”
“If, of course, by material you mean of a certain, specific biological constitution. Like you. Or me.”
The voice is new. The figure steps out of the shadows near the apartment door, materializes as it speaks – as though now spoken it may appear, as when the Judaic god breathed Christ’s name. She is dressed in black, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, her dark eyes knowingly surveying the instantly silent room. “Or our unfortunate friend.”
Martin rises, sliding his hands into his pockets. “This is a closed crime scene.”
She retrieves some form of identification from her coat but Martin can’t read it in the dim light of the apartment. “Interstitial Affairs,” she mutters.
Thom’s brow furrows so powerfully that Martin thinks it might alter the air in the room. “How the hell has our ‘unfortunate friend’ involved himself in NC, exactly?”
Martin grins unnoticeably. Thom’s no fool; play it dumb, make her think they aren’t on to anything.
“By attempting to infiltrate agential channels.”
Martin purses his lips. “I always thought that term was so ambiguous. Don’t you? I mean, possessing agency typically means that one is an autonomous unit; but on the other hand, one can also be an agent of something else. It’s confusing, no?”
She glances at Martin completely passively. “Definitions change.”
“Oh, of course,” Martin says, shrugging. “I’m just commenting on how this word happens to keep two definitions simultaneously.”
“Fascinating,” Thom grumbles. “So what’s he done exactly?”
“I can’t go into any more detail,” she admits, putting away her badge. “But I do have to ask that you leave.”
“We will when we’re done,” Thom protests.
“In that case, I insist that you leave. You can no longer be here.”
“We won’t be much longer,” Martin continues.
“I don’t care how much longer you think you’ll be here,” she proclaims, her gaze shifting from Thom to Martin. “I need you gone.”
Martin raises an eyebrow. The woman’s eyes possess a needle-thin perspicuity that somehow straddled ambivalent vectors. She at once seems indifferent, but indifferent toward herself; as though the external world harbors forces and energies that needed containing, but she thinks nothing of the subjective consequences of such containment. A stoicism that evinces awesome concern for something beyond the skin and apathy for the skin itself, and that which it preserves. Martin finds himself surprisingly impressed. Not many people can convincingly demonstrate such a persona.
“Any further protests will result in coercive removal.”
Martin nods and begins moving toward the door. Thom hesitates, but concedes when Martin gestures secretively. Thom fumes momentarily, then smolders. “There’s beer in the fridge,” he jabs, following Martin.
When they reach the lobby, Thom is rekindled, spewing expletive upon expletive so passionately that he does not notice Martin move toward the concierge (or what passes for a concierge – a graying, dilapidated man in a moth-eaten cloak). Martin gingerly taps the counter, waits for the ancient relic to raise his head, and smiles. “Good morning. Did you happen to notice anyone unusual come in or out last night?”
The concierge grimaces. “That bitch said I ain’t s’posed to talk to you.”
“Fine,” Martin says, leaning forward. “Then just nod or shake or head. Did you?”
The concierge pauses, then shakes his head.
“And you were here all night?”
Nods.
“Awake?”
Nods.
“And sober?”
The conditioned impulse to nod gives way to the briefest moment of consideration, betraying the suddenly terse contours of a hangover.
“Thanks,” Martin says, knocking one final time on the counter before turning away.
Thom waits until they’re outside the building to inquire. “What the fuck was that about?”
“Probably nothing,” Martin admits. “It’s unlikely whoever killed our vic allowed himself – or herself, for that matter – to be seen. But that still doesn’t rule out the possibility that we’re dealing with an Agent.”
“I thought we already said that Agents can’t assume material form.”
Martin lights a cigarette as they walk. “How about we assume they can. For the time being. Not rule anything out.”
Thom nods. “Fine. But maybe we should rule out all other possibilities first?”
“Sounds good. Bed unmoved.”
“So the perp couldn’t have been behind the headboard. Must have killed him elsewhere.”
“No sign of forced entry.”
“Killer had the keys.”
Martin nods. “So he brings Martin back and lays him out on the bed.” He repeatedly raises and lowers his arm, his fingers counting the ratiocinative steps. “Then locks the door behind him? The super had to unlock the door. So the keys must be somewhere else.”
“With the killer.”
“Right…” Martin stalks silently. Misty rain and asphalt dust cascade in microcosmic wonder. High above them, skyline lights halo and pulsate like electronic eidolons.
“No keys in the apartment. Door was locked. No sign of struggle in the room.”
Thom merely keeps pace, waiting for his partner to blink.
“We have to go back,” Martin says at last.
“That bitch won’t hesitate to have us escorted out,” Thom responds. “Fucking power-mad.”
“Perhaps. But we’re not going back to the room.”
They arrive back at the apartments from the other direction, Martin peering upward through dense precipitation and crosshatched elevation trains and scaled roads. They approach from an L-shaped alleyway, leaving the street two buildings down, next to a darkened pizza parlor. The sun hasn’t yet risen, and the sky is only barely gray. The alley veers left and around several massive dumpsters, then past a shallow pool in which lays the corpse of a dead dog. Rats amass like leukocytes at the site of an infection. Overturned trash cans and discarded containers of alcohol, discolored and shriveled condoms like tortured and flattened leeches, themselves bled of melanin. And then, at least, a dark red door above which hangs an unimpressive sign: Apostolic Place. Some obscene leftover from history, like the relic receptionist.
The door is barred and chained.
“He didn’t come out this way,” Thom asserts.
“No…” Martin says, his eyes rising again. “He didn’t.”
Thom follows his partner’s eyes skyward. “There’s nowhere to go up there, Marty.”
“There’s always somewhere to go.” He lowers his gaze and glances around, and then suddenly lurches toward what appears to be a pile of trash half-concealed by shadow, and betrayed only minimally by the weak lamp above the red door. Martin falls to his knees and parses through the detritus, coming away finally with something gripped in his hands.
Thom falters. “You’re fucking joking.”
Martin extends one arm, holding it away from him. It stinks, and barely bends at the joints. “Call somebody.”
“She’s going to be pissed.”
“I don’t care, fucking call somebody.”
Thom pulls his jacket open with one hand and reaches in with the other, fumbling for his cell. But before he can raise the phone to his ear, another hand is strangely crawling up his forearm, and he watches it in growing terror. The sense of the world plummets into a dark well. “Marty…”
Martin doesn’t realize at first what is happening. He thinks the movement of the limb is purely because of some unnoticed, involuntary shudder on his own part. But the hand rises too high, the fingers quivering too maliciously. And then they latch onto Thom’s arm, crawling up the skin like a spider sensing prey in its web. Yet transfixed, Martin begins to pull the arm away, but it reacts violently, surging forward and breaking Martin’s grasp, and then its fingers attach themselves to Thom’s throat.
Martin watches for less than a second, disbelief and terror pouring through him as he attempts to make sense of what he sees, before he leaps to action, following his friend down to the gravel and trying to pry loose the inhuman digits that count seconds of rapidly shortening life. Thom gurgles beneath the strength that cannot possibly be that of a single arm. Gasps and sobs, fatal cries, escape Martin’s lips as he grapples with the dry, cold flesh. Then, finally, the unreality and horror of the full scenario sink in, and his mobile body throws its full effort into dislodging the alien thing. “Jesus fucking Christ, Thom! Get the fuck off of him! Fuck, fuck… Thom! I can’t… I can’t fucking…”
The fingers are sinking into Thom’s neck. Blood pools like syrup. Martin realizes, idiotically it seems, that no blood pours from the other end of the arm, the torn section where it should be attached to a body. There are only stringy bits of something not-quite-flesh, papery, or like confetti. Martin ceases his efforts with the fingers and grabs hold of the upper portion of the arm, pulling at it. He is still pulling when Thom’s body goes slack beneath the vampire talons, when blood covers the entire ground at his feet, collecting around his boots and splashing onto his pants with every step he takes – a tableau of grotesquery, a carnivalesque tug-of-war from an absurdist’s sorry sideshow.
The animated arm releases Thom’s throat and Martin collapses comically onto his ass. Exploiting the velocity of its poor victim’s fall, the limb flips back and finds Martin’s surprised face, the fingers closing over it like so many arachnid legs, or the tentacles of some degenerate cephalopod. Martin, his eyes and mouth wide as his aggressor covers them, does not scream. Or, if he does, it is lost between palm-flesh and the wet, fogged atmosphere of the urban alley.
Several yards away, a vagrant presses up to the brick wall opposite the red door, in the shadows beyond the lamplight. His shaking is, blessedly, somehow muffled by the cool and dense air, and he watches in unspeakable horror the murderous hand. As the second detective’s body goes limp, his face uncannily rippled and shifted as the alien hand comes away, the vagrant notices a figure emerging from the cosmic dark to his right. The hand seems to perk at its presence, like a small dog suddenly aware of its owner. The vagrant makes no sound, moves not an inch, but presses closer to the wall, as close as possible, as though he might sink or slip between the brick, liquefy into mortar. His body shakes uncontrollably.
The figure strolls out of the shadow, staring down at its loyal limb, which wags its upper arm curiously like some kind of augmented tail; but the vagrant cannot take his eyes off the new arrival. The figure is dressed in a simple, black two piece suit, wearing apparently a black button-down and black tie beneath, although he cannot make out any more detail. Something white decorates the figure’s appearance immediately beneath its chin, and for a moment he wonders blasphemously if it’s a priest’s cloth. But more unsettling than the figure’s dress is its physique; tall beyond common measure, at least seven feet, and unsustainably thin, slender, as though stridden from the margins of an antique book and about to pass back between the pages. Its legs and arms rose straight like toothpicks, fragile, but somehow the vagrant knows that no adversary could ever hope of gaining the proximity necessary to snap them. Its face bears no signifying attributes – no mouth, nose, eyes, ears, or hair to speak of. Instead, the entire globe of its head appears blurred, out of focus, not quite present. It does not speak. It does not make any sounds at all. It peers down at the dismembered limb, and the limb appeared to gaze back up at it.
Then the other arms materialize, hazily, like smoke or magician’s chemistry, unfolding from behind the figure and extending outward like a black lotus flower. They bend and straighten, as though damaged or somehow lame and in need of stretching, and soft creaking noises drift across the passing dawn as the first hints of morning gray fought with the night’s ever easy descent. The hands possess an inordinate number of fingers, but the vagrant can’t be sure if there are too few or too many. They constantly are bending and extending, like the arms themselves. An intricate display of recursive blossoming, almost beautiful in its instinctually predatory manner; and they too are slender, ever so slender, as though the morning mist condensed for one miraculous and sublime moment to forge these tender limbs, these exquisitely precious and alien limbs, of which there are only three.
A Constellation (sixth installment)
Ø
Poul sits at a small kitchen table beneath a single electric light. An old shortwave radio sparkles in the corner. Blackened windows effect the illusion that nothing exists beyond the glass. Thunder whispers, distant cracks, sound that manifests in fractures down the pane, reaching for the edge, the limit, frame. Poul leans in close, exposes his tongue to the ruptured vesicles. It is tasteless, gray, like chalk. His body shudders. Warmth fills his mouth, but diluted. Something swells. He swishes, parts his lips. Blood bubbles out over his jaw. Tiny pieces of glass cheer around his teeth. He bites. Crunch. Splinter. He cries. Opens his mouth again. His teeth feel uncomfortably loose. Outside the window stands his father. He holds a piece of industrial wire. Like a bowl, arcs, it arcs, arcs out, down, around. Smiles.
His mother is standing in the doorway. “You’ll make him mad waiting.”
Poul knows this. Knew it before she said it. But he can’t stand. Why can’t he stand?
He looks back out the window. The sun is rising. But that’s not right. The sun is gone. And with it, me. Negation without remainder. No self to make sense of it. Pure event. Disaster.
Pale simulacra.
His first girlfriend stares at him from his mother’s face. “You’re making him mad. He’s waiting.”
Poul still can’t stand.
Outside, his father has wound the wire around his palms as though he’s getting ready to strangle something. The sun silhouettes his frame. The window has become a painting.
His first girlfriend has an incredibly tiny dick. You’ll make him mad.
His throat tightens, and he knows his father is behind him.
You’re making him mad.
Poul is awake now, but his asphyxiation is palpable. Shaking uncontrollably, he gasps for cold, dusty air.
Ø
“Fucker had six toes,” Thom Ullman mutters, leaning precariously over the bed. “All taloned with these ridiculous femme nails. I don’t know. I can’t imagine doing something like that.”
Martin Crake squats in the opposite corner of the room. An anonymous observer would mistake the man for perhaps casually surveying the modest scene, his eyes drifting indifferently across the room; but Martin does nothing indifferently. His eyes follow distinct paths and contours, catching connections between separate interstices and positions within the tiny cell. The body that lies on the bed has not been dead more than twelve hours, and Martin and Thomas must make the most of the time they have. A detective is a writer, although he isn’t paid as much as a novelist.
“What’s this guy’s name?” Thom asks, still leaning over the body.
“Poul Worren. Will you be careful?”
Thom glances over at Martin. “What?”
“You’re shedding residuals all over it.”
“It?”
“The body.”
“It isn’t a he anymore?”
Martin ignores his partner.
Thom mulls through the bedside table, at last rising with something in his hand and a gleam in his eye. “Aha! Our dead friend was a radical.”
Martin raises an eyebrow but doesn’t take his eyes off his task. “Affiliation?”
“Soil Song, and…” Thom holds up something else, not a card; from Martin’s position, it looks like a piece of torn, wrinkled paper. “Something called ReVox.”
Martin scowls. Born out of late accelerationism, Soil Song was a pseudo-communist group that perpetuated an ideology no longer within history’s reckoning. Purge futurism of its fascist tendencies, inject some good old-fashioned Marxism, catalyze the implosion of capitalism… none of it made much sense to Martin. He had never heard of ReVox. “How’d he get behind the bed?”
Thom glances over at his partner. “Huh?”
“Whoever the killer was, he’d have had to get behind the bed in order to get that angle on our victim’s neck. The impression follows tradition, as though an old-time gangster from some black n’ white snuck up behind him and wrapped the cord around his neck.”
Thom looks down. His eyes scour the bed, finally tending toward the floor alongside. “Scratch marks?”
Martin shakes his head. “I’ve been looking. There aren’t any. And besides, that’s a perfect spot for the bed.”
“The fuck is this, home decorating hour?”
“I’m just saying; I lived here, I’d put my bed there.”
“Hang on, let me write these pearls down.”
“Fuck off,” Martin says. “Regardless, no scratch marks. Killer didn’t move the bed.”
“So our vic was killed somewhere else.”
Martin nods. “That seems likely.”
Thom glances secretively about the room. “There’s no sign of forced entry.”
“Killer would have had his keys.”
“But why bring him back? Why not get rid of the body?”
Martin had been thinking the same thing. He slowly rises. “Somebody’s sending a message.”
“Somebody at Soil Song? Or ReVox?”
“Or somebody who had a bone to pick with one of them. Or both of them.”
Thom scowls. “Someone on behalf of our Benign Preserver?”
Martin turns his focus on Thom. “Are they anti-NC?”
“Fuck me, I have no idea. I figured you’d know.”
Martin looks back to the bed. “NC Agents don’t take material form.”
“That we know of.”
Martin nods. “That we know of.”
“If, of course, by material you mean of a certain, specific biological constitution. Like you. Or me.”
The voice is new. The figure steps out of the shadows near the apartment door, materializes as it speaks – as though now spoken it may appear, as when the Judaic god breathed Christ’s name. She is dressed in black, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, her dark eyes knowingly surveying the instantly silent room. “Or our unfortunate friend.”
Martin rises, sliding his hands into his pockets. “This is a closed crime scene.”
She retrieves some form of identification from her coat but Martin can’t read it in the dim light of the apartment. “Interstitial Affairs,” she mutters.
Thom’s brow furrows so powerfully that Martin thinks it might alter the air in the room. “How the hell has our ‘unfortunate friend’ involved himself in NC, exactly?”
Martin grins unnoticeably. Thom’s no fool; play it dumb, make her think they aren’t on to anything.
“By attempting to infiltrate agential channels.”
Martin purses his lips. “I always thought that term was so ambiguous. Don’t you? I mean, possessing agency typically means that one is an autonomous unit; but on the other hand, one can also be an agent of something else. It’s confusing, no?”
She glances at Martin completely passively. “Definitions change.”
“Oh, of course,” Martin says, shrugging. “I’m just commenting on how this word happens to keep two definitions simultaneously.”
“Fascinating,” Thom grumbles. “So what’s he done exactly?”
“I can’t go into any more detail,” she admits, putting away her badge. “But I do have to ask that you leave.”
“We will when we’re done,” Thom protests.
“In that case, I insist that you leave. You can no longer be here.”
“We won’t be much longer,” Martin continues.
“I don’t care how much longer you think you’ll be here,” she proclaims, her gaze shifting from Thom to Martin. “I need you gone.”
Martin raises an eyebrow. The woman’s eyes possess a needle-thin perspicuity that somehow straddled ambivalent vectors. She at once seems indifferent, but indifferent toward herself; as though the external world harbors forces and energies that needed containing, but she thinks nothing of the subjective consequences of such containment. A stoicism that evinces awesome concern for something beyond the skin and apathy for the skin itself, and that which it preserves. Martin finds himself surprisingly impressed. Not many people can convincingly demonstrate such a persona.
“Any further protests will result in coercive removal.”
Martin nods and begins moving toward the door. Thom hesitates, but concedes when Martin gestures secretively. Thom fumes momentarily, then smolders. “There’s beer in the fridge,” he jabs, following Martin.
When they reach the lobby, Thom is rekindled, spewing expletive upon expletive so passionately that he does not notice Martin move toward the concierge (or what passes for a concierge – a graying, dilapidated man in a moth-eaten cloak). Martin gingerly taps the counter, waits for the ancient relic to raise his head, and smiles. “Good morning. Did you happen to notice anyone unusual come in or out last night?”
The concierge grimaces. “That bitch said I ain’t s’posed to talk to you.”
“Fine,” Martin says, leaning forward. “Then just nod or shake or head. Did you?”
The concierge pauses, then shakes his head.
“And you were here all night?”
Nods.
“Awake?”
Nods.
“And sober?”
The conditioned impulse to nod gives way to the briefest moment of consideration, betraying the suddenly terse contours of a hangover.
“Thanks,” Martin says, knocking one final time on the counter before turning away.
Thom waits until they’re outside the building to inquire. “What the fuck was that about?”
“Probably nothing,” Martin admits. “It’s unlikely whoever killed our vic allowed himself – or herself, for that matter – to be seen. But that still doesn’t rule out the possibility that we’re dealing with an Agent.”
“I thought we already said that Agents can’t assume material form.”
Martin lights a cigarette as they walk. “How about we assume they can. For the time being. Not rule anything out.”
Thom nods. “Fine. But maybe we should rule out all other possibilities first?”
“Sounds good. Bed unmoved.”
“So the perp couldn’t have been behind the headboard. Must have killed him elsewhere.”
“No sign of forced entry.”
“Killer had the keys.”
Martin nods. “So he brings Martin back and lays him out on the bed.” He repeatedly raises and lowers his arm, his fingers counting the ratiocinative steps. “Then locks the door behind him? The super had to unlock the door. So the keys must be somewhere else.”
“With the killer.”
“Right…” Martin stalks silently. Misty rain and asphalt dust cascade in microcosmic wonder. High above them, skyline lights halo and pulsate like electronic eidolons.
“No keys in the apartment. Door was locked. No sign of struggle in the room.”
Thom merely keeps pace, waiting for his partner to blink.
“We have to go back,” Martin says at last.
“That bitch won’t hesitate to have us escorted out,” Thom responds. “Fucking power-mad.”
“Perhaps. But we’re not going back to the room.”
They arrive back at the apartments from the other direction, Martin peering upward through dense precipitation and crosshatched elevation trains and scaled roads. They approach from an L-shaped alleyway, leaving the street two buildings down, next to a darkened pizza parlor. The sun hasn’t yet risen, and the sky is only barely gray. The alley veers left and around several massive dumpsters, then past a shallow pool in which lays the corpse of a dead dog. Rats amass like leukocytes at the site of an infection. Overturned trash cans and discarded containers of alcohol, discolored and shriveled condoms like tortured and flattened leeches, themselves bled of melanin. And then, at least, a dark red door above which hangs an unimpressive sign: Apostolic Place. Some obscene leftover from history, like the relic receptionist.
The door is barred and chained.
“He didn’t come out this way,” Thom asserts.
“No…” Martin says, his eyes rising again. “He didn’t.”
Thom follows his partner’s eyes skyward. “There’s nowhere to go up there, Marty.”
“There’s always somewhere to go.” He lowers his gaze and glances around, and then suddenly lurches toward what appears to be a pile of trash half-concealed by shadow, and betrayed only minimally by the weak lamp above the red door. Martin falls to his knees and parses through the detritus, coming away finally with something gripped in his hands.
Thom falters. “You’re fucking joking.”
Martin extends one arm, holding it away from him. It stinks, and barely bends at the joints. “Call somebody.”
“She’s going to be pissed.”
“I don’t care, fucking call somebody.”
Thom pulls his jacket open with one hand and reaches in with the other, fumbling for his cell. But before he can raise the phone to his ear, another hand is strangely crawling up his forearm, and he watches it in growing terror. The sense of the world plummets into a dark well. “Marty…”
Martin doesn’t realize at first what is happening. He thinks the movement of the limb is purely because of some unnoticed, involuntary shudder on his own part. But the hand rises too high, the fingers quivering too maliciously. And then they latch onto Thom’s arm, crawling up the skin like a spider sensing prey in its web. Yet transfixed, Martin begins to pull the arm away, but it reacts violently, surging forward and breaking Martin’s grasp, and then its fingers attach themselves to Thom’s throat.
Martin watches for less than a second, disbelief and terror pouring through him as he attempts to make sense of what he sees, before he leaps to action, following his friend down to the gravel and trying to pry loose the inhuman digits that count seconds of rapidly shortening life. Thom gurgles beneath the strength that cannot possibly be that of a single arm. Gasps and sobs, fatal cries, escape Martin’s lips as he grapples with the dry, cold flesh. Then, finally, the unreality and horror of the full scenario sink in, and his mobile body throws its full effort into dislodging the alien thing. “Jesus fucking Christ, Thom! Get the fuck off of him! Fuck, fuck… Thom! I can’t… I can’t fucking…”
The fingers are sinking into Thom’s neck. Blood pools like syrup. Martin realizes, idiotically it seems, that no blood pours from the other end of the arm, the torn section where it should be attached to a body. There are only stringy bits of something not-quite-flesh, papery, or like confetti. Martin ceases his efforts with the fingers and grabs hold of the upper portion of the arm, pulling at it. He is still pulling when Thom’s body goes slack beneath the vampire talons, when blood covers the entire ground at his feet, collecting around his boots and splashing onto his pants with every step he takes – a tableau of grotesquery, a carnivalesque tug-of-war from an absurdist’s sorry sideshow.
The animated arm releases Thom’s throat and Martin collapses comically onto his ass. Exploiting the velocity of its poor victim’s fall, the limb flips back and finds Martin’s surprised face, the fingers closing over it like so many arachnid legs, or the tentacles of some degenerate cephalopod. Martin, his eyes and mouth wide as his aggressor covers them, does not scream. Or, if he does, it is lost between palm-flesh and the wet, fogged atmosphere of the urban alley.
Several yards away, a vagrant presses up to the brick wall opposite the red door, in the shadows beyond the lamplight. His shaking is, blessedly, somehow muffled by the cool and dense air, and he watches in unspeakable horror the murderous hand. As the second detective’s body goes limp, his face uncannily rippled and shifted as the alien hand comes away, the vagrant notices a figure emerging from the cosmic dark to his right. The hand seems to perk at its presence, like a small dog suddenly aware of its owner. The vagrant makes no sound, moves not an inch, but presses closer to the wall, as close as possible, as though he might sink or slip between the brick, liquefy into mortar. His body shakes uncontrollably.
The figure strolls out of the shadow, staring down at its loyal limb, which wags its upper arm curiously like some kind of augmented tail; but the vagrant cannot take his eyes off the new arrival. The figure is dressed in a simple, black two piece suit, wearing apparently a black button-down and black tie beneath, although he cannot make out any more detail. Something white decorates the figure’s appearance immediately beneath its chin, and for a moment he wonders blasphemously if it’s a priest’s cloth. But more unsettling than the figure’s dress is its physique; tall beyond common measure, at least seven feet, and unsustainably thin, slender, as though stridden from the margins of an antique book and about to pass back between the pages. Its legs and arms rose straight like toothpicks, fragile, but somehow the vagrant knows that no adversary could ever hope of gaining the proximity necessary to snap them. Its face bears no signifying attributes – no mouth, nose, eyes, ears, or hair to speak of. Instead, the entire globe of its head appears blurred, out of focus, not quite present. It does not speak. It does not make any sounds at all. It peers down at the dismembered limb, and the limb appeared to gaze back up at it.
Then the other arms materialize, hazily, like smoke or magician’s chemistry, unfolding from behind the figure and extending outward like a black lotus flower. They bend and straighten, as though damaged or somehow lame and in need of stretching, and soft creaking noises drift across the passing dawn as the first hints of morning gray fought with the night’s ever easy descent. The hands possess an inordinate number of fingers, but the vagrant can’t be sure if there are too few or too many. They constantly are bending and extending, like the arms themselves. An intricate display of recursive blossoming, almost beautiful in its instinctually predatory manner; and they too are slender, ever so slender, as though the morning mist condensed for one miraculous and sublime moment to forge these tender limbs, these exquisitely precious and alien limbs, of which there are only three.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
The Hell?
Found an error, thought maybe you'd appreciate correcting this on the original source that I assume is on your PC/laptop.
This latest installment was very interesting! Your slender man reads as rather a horrifying thing.
Einherjar86
Active Member
Haha, yeah... dream logic.
Oh, thank you! Locating errors is a bitch.
Awesome, thanks. This is one of the fantastical elements of the story - basically, if a technological singularity emerged through some aspect of the web, would it be able to manifest in various figures from the web. Slender man seemed like an appropriate choice.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
@Einherjar86 still going with this one in your spare time?
I did some scribbling, not sure what I want to do with it or where I want it to go. I initially intended for it to evolve into a post-apocalyptic themed film script, but maybe a short story would work. Not really sure, I've never written anything ever.
(It's not much, but maybe I'll try to expand on a feeling I have.)
I did some scribbling, not sure what I want to do with it or where I want it to go. I initially intended for it to evolve into a post-apocalyptic themed film script, but maybe a short story would work. Not really sure, I've never written anything ever.
(It's not much, but maybe I'll try to expand on a feeling I have.)
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
- The Big Empty -
Emptiness is not a thing.
It is, however, very tangible to the senses of any living thing. Emptiness is a monolith that you cannot touch, but believe me when I say; emptiness is entirely capable of touching you.
This world is old, yet quite new.
Not old old or new new, but rather like a man of the future delivered smack-bang into the middle of a mire of fossils. Again, not fossils of bone and history-dirt, but fossils of steel, concrete, plastic, memory.
That world, of smiles and excess, from what I can gather, ceased to exist a number of years before I was born. This world was begat in that death, such as maggots and flies in the wake of a beautiful magpie's corpse.
Like the maggots and flies, we the miserable spawn give thanks to the innards and slop of that old world that we twist and turn in, for giving us sustenance to live. Old gives life to new. Death breeds birth and so on.
"Live."
Ha. What does it even mean to live?
We still don't know any better. Never did, I think. Never will, I know.
Oh well.
I am called The Rememberer.
However, my true name is... Well, it's not important. I'm not even sure I remember my true name, ironic isn't it? To be called such a thing without the memory-information available to correct it? I'd laugh if it weren't so sad. What need have we of names now anyway?
I do remember other things though; the wide-open land; the road; the stink of molested steel; the lives, and the emptiness their snuffing-out left behind.
Emptiness, it creeps inside you when you breathe and when it leaves through your pores like the deathcold, it takes shavings of your soul with it.
Eventually, it takes you with it.
In this world that festers in the rotting remains of an older world lost to the twisted scrap of time itself, your resolve must be indefatigable, for it is not just the emptiness that lurks in the darkness here.
No, in this world of ruin and slow-death, the Rainbow Serpent may command ownership over the land but the roads are ruled by the full metal warriors. The wastelanders. The roaming, scavenging embodiment of rusted fury and powers from Hell.
In the 'Big Empty,' you test your iron or you taste theirs. There are no heroes or baddies. There is only your fuel, their fuel, the fuel-tanks and the willpower to keep them. Killing always was second nature, why should it be different now? Anyway, it isn't.
Many call this world Hell. If it's truly that place, I guess everybody's concept of it was wrong.
If this really is that place, it is filled with emptiness.
Hell is empty. Hell is full.
Emptiness is not a thing.
It is, however, very tangible to the senses of any living thing. Emptiness is a monolith that you cannot touch, but believe me when I say; emptiness is entirely capable of touching you.
This world is old, yet quite new.
Not old old or new new, but rather like a man of the future delivered smack-bang into the middle of a mire of fossils. Again, not fossils of bone and history-dirt, but fossils of steel, concrete, plastic, memory.
That world, of smiles and excess, from what I can gather, ceased to exist a number of years before I was born. This world was begat in that death, such as maggots and flies in the wake of a beautiful magpie's corpse.
Like the maggots and flies, we the miserable spawn give thanks to the innards and slop of that old world that we twist and turn in, for giving us sustenance to live. Old gives life to new. Death breeds birth and so on.
"Live."
Ha. What does it even mean to live?
We still don't know any better. Never did, I think. Never will, I know.
Oh well.
I am called The Rememberer.
However, my true name is... Well, it's not important. I'm not even sure I remember my true name, ironic isn't it? To be called such a thing without the memory-information available to correct it? I'd laugh if it weren't so sad. What need have we of names now anyway?
I do remember other things though; the wide-open land; the road; the stink of molested steel; the lives, and the emptiness their snuffing-out left behind.
Emptiness, it creeps inside you when you breathe and when it leaves through your pores like the deathcold, it takes shavings of your soul with it.
Eventually, it takes you with it.
In this world that festers in the rotting remains of an older world lost to the twisted scrap of time itself, your resolve must be indefatigable, for it is not just the emptiness that lurks in the darkness here.
No, in this world of ruin and slow-death, the Rainbow Serpent may command ownership over the land but the roads are ruled by the full metal warriors. The wastelanders. The roaming, scavenging embodiment of rusted fury and powers from Hell.
In the 'Big Empty,' you test your iron or you taste theirs. There are no heroes or baddies. There is only your fuel, their fuel, the fuel-tanks and the willpower to keep them. Killing always was second nature, why should it be different now? Anyway, it isn't.
Many call this world Hell. If it's truly that place, I guess everybody's concept of it was wrong.
If this really is that place, it is filled with emptiness.
Hell is empty. Hell is full.
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