Higgs Autotunnel GG

Secretly unlockable, they said, over a battle of mariokart and mushrooms, and even more artistic than the pawnbrokers glasses - the spirals were not inhibited by the pressure-cooker winds that sliced though the balcony rails of the Dragon café, which is where she once stood with her motorcycle helmet that reflected the sleekness like nothing else could. Mirrors and prisms, that’s all they were.

Each prism was a reflection of darkness that stood the test of time, and each moment of time had not the faintest recollection of a comparison time. Observing two separate objects sparked recollections that struck chords of resonance; big fancy words to shut down idiots with gweedo shirts and raspy smiles.

Fuck castle walls, and fuck barriers. Fuck the specters that leapt through the alleyways of yesterday’s shadow, and fuck those deep areas of darkness. Fuck castle sieges and fuck the Toronto maple leafs. Fuck inhibition and fuck the sarlacc pit. 

Her motorcycle helmet shone from the peak of the Dragon café through the spiral bars, right where the Grasshopper kicked the pawnbroker right in the ass like a goddamn ninja. It was all part of the shifting collage. A nose exploding with blood was the sign of a rough night, but so was a castle decimated by a reckless siege of swing-sets and pomegranates, fueled by real-estate bacon-brokers. 

Kaossilator

Droning voices from a Zenith panel TV in a pawnshop window played in the background..

       'The memories of the sleeping are siphoned from their skulls and sucked through open windows, where they become lost in the wind, and make their own journey. Sometimes they are discarded, and end up on rusted sewer-grates, lost forever. Or, they may flourish in a blooming bed of orchids, waiting to be cultivated by the sender. Locked dreams, both wretched and pure, are bolted into black boxes of subconscious thought. These chained dreams can be broken free with the precision of a thief or unleashed with the will of a saint, or they can be ignored and left to rot. Your conscious mind will decide whe....'

Some alley. Eyes felt like sandbags. The night wasn't over.
     An oversized prostitute in a hello-kitty tracksuit tried to sell Trace a purple wig in a back alley for either $12 or 4 cigarettes. Wrong place, wrong time.
   'Come and buy my wigs, only three left!' she said. Her face was a ruddy bulge caked with expired beauty products.
   'I don't want any wigs,' said Trace, 'no need.'
   'You idiot! I'LL TRAMPLE YOU!' Her hot temper gave out like a second-hand box-spring. She hurled an entire bag of garbage at him. Luckily, he had been swift enough to dodge the bag, and it exploded on contact with the wall behind him. Egg cartons, empty milk jugs, used coffee filters and assorted debris ricocheted off the wall with a clamour that riled up the surrounding hobos, and they were not pleased about this one bit.
Pack mentality set in.
Grinning with mouths half-filled with toothless gaps and black rot, the bums became enraged. Negotiation was out of the question. These were wild men; free of conviction, self-worth, and sanity. Reflex and aggression were the only solution. Trace taunted them with a flash of his chrome stopwatch, and, like cats on fish, they instantly lunged to attack. In the back of his mind, Trace might have been a matador. The first bum was intoxicated enough that his staggered advance was easily avoided. Without stopping, the man careened right into the prostitute, and the pair of them somersaulted to the ground in an uneven heap of moldy clothing and ripped fishnets.

‘Alright boy, I’ve got you cornered!’ the other said, a crazed look in his eyes. Wildfire. This man could have been a descendant of vikings, or pirates. For that reason, Trace wished no harm on him.
Grab a handfull of cigarettes. Toss to the right, as hard as you can. Like a guarddog tricked with baconbits. Diversion tactics. Feed anger with impulse, buys you enough time to escape.

       And then he woke up feeling like the dry chipped plaster on the inside of a worn-out ashtray. Buildings of twisted columns and oversized windows closed in all around him, where the aural familiarity of wind was cut off. Dead resonance in an urban flatline. How long had he been here?

Stagger to your feet. Palms cut and sweaty. Hair is all over the place. Breathing is heavy, deliberate, as if each rip of oxygen is one step towards clarity, but clarity never comes. The streets were still in disarray.
Being followed.     
 A blurry mirror of rainwater pools. Black outlines of a leather trench sloshing through the rain. His face was masked by a sharp black cowboy hat ringed with machine-gun bullets. Trace knew well enough to avoid direct eye contact with the stranger. Deranged people could be triggered by eyesight alone, and in some cases it took even less than that to set them off. He slunk away behind a Child-sized drawbridge made of carved stone and wood shingles. The bridge was flanked by little wooden watchtowers with windows containing small gnome-like figurines that surveyed the area with a vacant stare. The man walked past, his heavy combat boots cludding loudly against the inset of the sidewalk. Time to get help.

 
‘Where have you been all night?’ asked Koak. He stood beneath an umbrella-like awning attached to his crowded vendor booth. The stand was packed with whirling lights and chirping gizmos. Tools of distraction, useless things, a blow-up Godzilla doll that doubled as a popcorn maker. All you needed were kernals and power source, the popcorn was ejected from the doll’s retractable chest.

   ‘I need a weapon,’ Trace said, completely ignoring the question.
   ‘What you need a weapon for? You got heat on your ass?’ The mechanized Godzilla had found its way across the table onto a cheap silk pillow treated with custom Persian stitching. Animal designs, fierce ones, with jutting fangs and burning silk eyes. Godzilla unleashed a barrage of popcorn at the pillow with a mechanical roar.
   ‘No. I just need some protection. You know how the streets get. I just woke up in an alley, and I think someone’s following me.’ Trace glanced over his shoulder. Shadows, ghosts, but not a soul in sight. Across the street and beside a cramped stairwell, Trace could see a neon dragon outside of Gen Ming’s diner. Steam flows and midnight wind made green halos and dissonant hums. 

There she was, wearing a sleek motorcycle helmet. Her jacked was spare, tight, as was the rest of her clothing. She looked anonymous, streamlined with the shadows, might have been a raven perched on a watchtower. Slender, sharp, and utterly spiteful. Who was she?
   ‘Twenty gold,’ Koak chirped in, oblivious to the watcher. ‘Belong to my granddad in the war, only used a couple times. Fresh charges!’ Trace averted his gaze to examine the weapon. A cruel thing, built cheap and designed to kill. When he looked back, the woman was gone.

       The haze before the dawn rasps its urban chorus: traffic lights, blinking above dead intersections; the persistent hum of power grids, eager to spark the life of a new morning; and restless hobos, sleeping alongside racoons - together they'd pillaged trashbins in search of lost treasure.

Lolcats p. IV

It was hot, the night he burned the Cube.

    In the fields of long-grass above the compound, fireflies fought against fluorescent lamps, and often lost. Moths didn’t stand a chance. Closer to town, the neon logos from bar signs lit the rain-slicked streets like electric mist. In Trace’s loft the only light came from a Miyagi panel screen and a Lolcat alarm clock with red LEDs for eyes. He had bought the clock from a shady meme dealer named Koak who’d been high on PTC. 

'A web license is all crazy-talk!' he had said, 'but so were seatbelts! And when everybody crash and die, they take it away! They tell me I can't live off pop-tarts only. They fuck do they know!' 

Mindless, he was, no rails and no trains running for the midnight express. Back in Korea, Koak was revered as a veteren of the meme wars. Starcraft battles in real life. Thousands of cloned Koreans wasted in endless battles for the purpose of resolving political conflicts. UN War admins soon banned the use of all replica Starcraft tech, and the Koreans were forbidden from clone-based cyber-war. Koak had been a Ghost, and his eyes were still stained silver from the ocular implants. The only way he could live after the war was through a  fortitude of shadow, spoken only by the swamp shamans on the outskirts of Virus city. 

Trace was passed out on a delux Mellonsky futon and a tigerstripe Snuggie used as a pillow. A lurid thing, that snuggy. He wondered if there existed a secret alliance of snuggy cultists, and that the loose fabrics of the thing were lying mindspikes and soulcoils into his brain. It was almost unspeakable.

Three in the morning.

Sitting in a corner adjacent to his bed was a filter unit that he’d rewired to block the output of lithium dust. In an age where clean air was scarce, oxygen was doped with anti-psychotics; lowers heart-rates and keeps the tenants numb to negativity, a legitimate alternative to ease the minds of a population wired for constant stimulation.  Some felt it slowed them down, killed their thirst for information. Most were burnouts looking for another escape, another plug of hype for the outlet of social miasma in the form of rainbow puke.

Trace’s desk was worse than an architects’. A half-eaten burrito lay atop an external hard-drive enclosure and a stray pizza slice lived on a grease-stained graphbook drowning under an empty bottle of Old Spice. The last time she came over, she’d swept a castle of junk to the floor with a hockey stick. But now, two weeks later, it had reformed, and the castle had evolved into a heaping metropolis of yesterday’s refuse. This place looks wonderful said nobody, ever. 

‘I see you’re resting comfortably,’ she said. Her avatar glowed outside of a twin-panelled window parallel to the sharp strips of moonlight cutting through the blinds. ‘Do you remember my voice?’  Trace jolted up from a deep sleep, eyes jittering back and forth like an overclocked metronome. ‘See you tonight.’  The face shattered into a million crystal fragments.  

Silver suicide doors racked with six-pronged exhaust pipes. homeless man/street warrior with pizza-stained beard. dwarves in red visors and yellow jumpsuits waiting in lineups with a giraffe-grafted go-girl smoking a cigarette. packs of feral cats patrolling alleys unchecked. Hotels bleeding bass lines and laserlight. 

Friday night. 

A view through her eyes. White static and ripple-waves where coastlines dissolved into silk and melted into liquid steel. Another power outage. Grids died. A resonance cascade in the pre-dawn light. Lightning bolts weren't hurled from the talons of stormchasers or uttered from the ancient tongues of timewardens. 

They weren't lost in the depths of a burned out suburb, or in the minds of self-indulgent addicts. Kyoak laughed as the Dwarves rode home on a bus-sized Ultralisk. 

 Each rip of shrapnel was a part of the whole Cube, and a Cubebreaker knew that each fragment was an ever-shifting grid unfolding like a prism, each angle a reflection of her in a different light. Is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?

The bright stars wrung mental sponges like farmers reaped fields. A mess of unmade beds in a sun-stained loft with a red-eyed Lolcat. She gave him that Lolcat.

The Cube's light burned for over twice the length of a real Inferno.

When the city lost power, the transformers waned, and the grids slept. 

Cubes burned.

Sleep swept fast. And later he’d tell himself that none of it was real.  

Mystery Fridge

‘See, that wasn’t so bad,’ the Salesman said. ‘Phase 3 is right around the corner, and I bet that you’re just brimming with excitement to find out what it is!’ Trace was not brimming with excitement. The loudspeaker clicked off. Trace stood up. No sound, save for his own breathing.

The screen on the wall wound down like a haunted carousel after a night of ceaseless operation. Each scene of the final frameset might have been wrapped in tin-foil; empty echoes flashing across a faded backdrop of yellow etched plaster. Trace stood up, looked at his hands, still feeling as though they were maimed. Nothing. No blood, no bones, and no bruises. Even as the nightmare lingered in the back of his mind, he clenched his hands into fists and they felt perfectly normal, ligaments and tendons retracting with mechanical precision. He wondered if his blood was still filled with robots. How the fuck did she know? Was it part of the test?

Dead fluorescent waves of a surgical lamplight, teal glass tubes filled with black orchids atop  a stainless steel workbench, mounds of flesh, limbs, and prosthetic organs sitting in a lumpy pile in a dark corner. The body parts were used to keep test subjects functional. A placard mounted to a thin strip of whitewashed concrete between the particleboard ceiling and a clear plastic shower curtain acting as a doorway read ‘Zombie Factory.’ Her face was wrapped in a black surgical mask, hair was dark and pulled back tight, eyes hurt like burning chrome behind tinted lenses, severe and fierce as she slammed the syringe into the base of his skull. Green LEDs from a scantron screen flickered with sensory data, vital signs, and a beeping that reminded Trace of a fastfood restaurant. Then came the robots. Blindness. A soothing voice that was barely discernible amid the electric hum of an old LG refrigerator.

‘Don’t fucking move, it will kill you,’ as the lights dimmed from the voltage drain caused by her electroscalpel. More work being done. This was mad science. Traces’ head was pressed into what looked to be a repurposed toiletseat to keep him stable. Sanitary was pointless. This wasn’t a hospital. It might have been a black-market organ trade, or a dump for failed medical experiments.

She was displeased by his movement. Frayed leather belts found themselves around his numb body, strapping him tight against the gurney. His nervous system was flooded with a powerful inhibitor that caused him to hallucinate for the next thirty-six hours. The procedure was enough to make a butcher red. ‘Sixty-three types of mutant blood,’ she said, wide-grinned, ‘and you get to try them all. I think this mixture will be utterly effective. Lucky you.’  

The Fuck is a Rototiller?

Trace swept away a thin film of grease and sweat off his forehead. A few cuts and bruises remained, but his organs and sanity were mostly intact. Mostly.

Nothing was as he remembered it. Faint memories of a homeless man who’d tried to sell him bullet-proof rocks glanced his mind, and his face had been so faded. Then he thought of the lady who’d injected miniature robots into his bloodstream. What was her name? She’d claimed to be an artist. The robots had been cubical silver boxes gleaming fiercely under a surgical lamplight. Memories after that point were a blur, a corruption, like a sector of bad data on a scratched bootdisk. He failed to recall how he got here, but he knew that he had been somehow captured and dropped into a testing facility. The first things he saw were a series of segmented rooms that stretched out like the caverns of a salt mine. The place felt gutted, ancient, and the surrounding décor reminded him of the rusted innards of dead cruise-ship. It felt like a prison. Trace could see the shadows of others moving behind opaque glass windows in the rafters high above him, watching him. They belonged to faceless people conducting experiments and testing the results of his progress. He was not alone.

‘Oh my goodness!’  the Salesman’s faceless voice boomed. Trace could not tell where it was coming from. ‘What a show, kiddo, and you made it out unscathed. Kudos for you, my friend. Phase 2 is in the bag!’ The condescending creep of his tone sunk into Trace’s mind and stuck there like stale paint. ‘Boys, can we get a replay on that?’ he said. The sound of mechanical background noises could be heard over the intercom. An old rotary projector kicked in, like the ones they use in drive-ins. A silver screen blanketed an entire wall. When the picture kicked in, he could see himself huddled in a corner with blood on his face. He rested his strained body against the wet concrete and watched.

The room was stagnant, stuffy, and it looked like a cell. The walls were closing in on all sides. Trace was sitting in a corner of the room next to a fallen nightstand of stained red-oak and the remains of a shattered porcelain vase.  The floor was an uneven grid of sun-bleached cedar planks that squealed as the dead-white walls scraped across it. ‘This can’t be hell.’ he said to himself, keeping his gaze fixed on the swaying spotlamp in the middle of the room. The polished silver lamp was not suspended by a cable or mounted to a fixture. No mechanism in sight seemed to be holding it up. Floating in mid-air? Trace shielded his eyes from its violent glare as the room grew even smaller. A wretched stab of frozen panic hit his gut. He flailed at the walls and beat them with his fists until he could hear the snapping of bone amidst the squealing walls. He looked down, and his hands were a mangled mess. Fragments of bone had torn through his flesh and blood leaked all over, but he felt nothing. He said nothing. The room threatened to crush his body like a carton in a trash compactor. Struggling was useless. He could not escape. In one swift motion he closed his eyes and looked up towards the swaying light. His retinas burned from the strain, but he continued to stare. ‘Just one light,’ he whispered, his voice barely audible against the sound of the screaming walls. Then the light went dead, the bulb shattered, and the glass fell into his eyes, shredding them apart. He could feel the edges of the jagged pieces behind his eye-sockets and against the base of his brain, but still he felt nothing. The blood from his hands was pouring out onto the small square of remaining floor beneath his feet. The wood turned into sawdust, mounds of it. A fine-powder sand-castle beneath his feet. Suddenly, the wretched wood buckled beneath his feet like rotten tree-trunk being split by a chainsaw. With all four walls pressing against him, his head threatening to pop from the stress, he slipped through the busted floor and entered a pitch-black chamber of zero-gravity. The room imploded into a small cube of pure black. Cruel barbed chains sprung from the stygian void, snaking around the cube, crushing it some more, and sealing it forever, never to be seen again. Trace had no control over his weightless body. The adrenaline in his bloodstream reached a final peak, causing him to black out.

The robots… his blood… now he knew. 

The Collector

 Hello again! If you don't wake up now, I'll keep prodding you with electricity until you do!

So I just got the results of our last test in, and I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, you passed! Way to go, kiddo, way to stick it to the man. You’re one of the few test subjects to make it through the first phase with most of your limbs intact. The bad news is that your sanity was removed and backed up onto a scratch-disk. We did this so your brain wouldn't explode during some of the mental tests, and we’re not sure it was properly re-installed afterword. If you start to feel psychotic and/or delusional, don’t worry, our engineering team is working on a hotfix for that as we speak. Just stay calm and try not to think of anything crazy. So far so good? Excellent. We’ll have you running good and proper once we replace your deleted memories with filler images from our stock warehouse. I hope you like pictures of supermarket food, because that’s all we could find. Anyways, back to business.

Phase 2 is a little more challenging, and by a little, I mean that it’s probably going to kill you. By probably, I mean that everything should be fine. Catch my drift? Nobody said this was going to be easy, but you knew this before signing up. But look on the bright side: in the event of a fatal mishap, we’ll harvest your organs for the benefit of science. Your lacerated innards could help save millions! And if that wasn’t enough, your unused remains will be vacuum-sealed, frozen, and ready to be processed into the same biofuel that covers our electric bill. Everybody loves recycling, and we firmly believe that nothing should go to waste around here, so if that doesn’t put a smile on your face, maybe a hologram of someone who loves you will do the trick.

Oh? What do you mean we couldn’t afford holograms? Who the hell cut the holograms out of the budget? Fire that man, immediately. Use his recycled salary to buy more holograms!

Sorry kid, no holograms today. Maybe never. You’re just going to have to use your imagination. On second thought, your imagination is still being reconstructed, so if you try to use it, your brain might melt. Here, have an ice-cream instead.

People, people, people. Always people. You know, one of the reasons we’re conducting these experiments is to explore the fun effects of isolation, possibly the most misunderstood part of the whole bit. You see, the less human contact you have, the more useful you are at being a subordinate test subject. It’s also important that all hints of rebelliousness are ironed out before we continue. If not, you might get a glimpse of what’s on the other side of the wall. Did I mention a wall? Well, forget I said anything. Let’s get on with the science! As I said before, phase 2 is a killer. You’ll need safety fallbacks that we call comfort vats. These vats are filled with a serum that counteracts curiosity and willpower. What some call detachment from reality, we call progress. Are you with me sofar? Wonderful. Like I said, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Honestly. Just place your skull against the safety drill and we’ll begin the safety penetration. Please don’t move during the insertion. If your heart happens to explode due to shock, don’t panic, because we’ve got backup hearts. Just don’t abuse the backup-heart policy, it’s not fair to the other subjects.

Anyhow, a flock of pencil pushers just told me that if we don't start the test now, your family will be exterminated. Nothing I can do about it. Has something to do with a wireless DNA link or something, so I won't waste your time any longer. Let the games begin!

Oh, and don't spoil the tests for anyone else. They can only handle so much at once and we don't want to overload their systems. We've already got enough potato batteries as it is.

Organic Industries: Initiate Subject Test (IST).

Sound good so far? Great! I knew you’d be a good sport about it, honestly. All of our test subjects are required to pass a physical and mental examination before proceeding to this point anyhow, so don’t worry if you don’t pass, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you in the salt furnace or the sludge mines. They’re always seeking eager young underachievers such as you. Oops! I didn’t mean that. We hold all our test subjects in the highest esteem possible.

The question we’re really asking is how much control does he really have? Well, let’s solve this thing! The solution we’re looking for might seem like a bit of a crapshoot at first, but rest assured that one does exist, and once all the bugs and kinks are sorted out, everything will probably run fine. And I use the term ‘probably’ with the most delicate precision that science can afford. First of all, think of your brain as an outlet for motivation to which the cord of influence connects. Got it? Great! When connected, a signal of pure influence (sources vary), is fed through and divided along some complex pathways of criteria. All criteria of each pathway are broken down into a list-like hierarchy of relevant social patterns tied primarily to speech, action, and a few basic motor functions. Some motor functions are like a gas-sucking 18 cylinder behemoth, and others are like a puny lawn-mower engine that makes an annoying whining sound as it revs to life. If your influence is balanced, you might be lucky enough to receive a Bat Mobile or a DeLorean DMC-12 of influence, causing the motivation outlet to sprout sparks of happiness. If not, this interface is guillotined by blue vortex that dismembers and ejects relevance from the subconscious, dumping the remains wherever the hell it wants to dump it. Kinda like a goddamn garburator or trash compactor run in reverse (very messy!).

Are you with me so far? Good, we’ve almost got it!

A signal impedance is caused by an overhanging bed of crystallized daggers bolted to a ceiling of pure methane. Just kidding, you can’t bolt things to a gas! Just checking to see if you’re awake. Anyhow, don’t worry about the daggers, they’re just for show. Ignore them. If they fall on you and tear your feeble body into a million unrecognizable pieces, that means they’re working as intended. But don’t worry, you’ll be reassembled at the organ dump, ready to face the next challenge in no time flat! You might think that being diced up sounds a bit uncomfortable, but in reality, it’s not so bad after the second or third time. Just think of it as a friendly game of snakes and ladders gone horribly wrong, where everything gets puréed into an organic soup of nothingness. That’s where chicken-nuggets come from, in case you were wondering. Learning is fun, right? Well, it might not be as fun once your learning modules are stripped and retrofitted with potato batteries. But if you’re lucky enough to survive the chicken-nugget stage, you might be rewarded in the form of personal growth and human experience! Just don’t get greedy, or your life-essence might get consumed by a sea of countless billions high on bath-salts, like that guy in Miami who got his face eaten off. And phase 1.1 gets exponentially more challenging, depending on the strength of his grip. I hope you brought a motherfucking crowbar!

Some mirrors are see-through, and other mirrors are opaque. All mirrors are able to reflect the face of the viewer, unless said viewer is blind. Some people love their reflections, while others could care less.
'Mirrors? What mirrors?' he said. 'You mean those sheets of silver that spit back a reflection of the wretched gaze staring upon them?' This man was said to hate mirrors, and so he broke them wherever he roamed. After a time, people began calling him Mirror-breaker, because he was old, angry, and scarred from head to toe from all the mirrors he broke. This angered the womenfolk, because they liked their mirrors,

Aviosh

twelve covered courts — six in a row facing north, six south — the gates of the one ranged exactly fronting the gates of the other. Inside, the building was of two storeys and contained three thousand rooms, of which half were underground, and the other half directly above them. These rooms contained mysteries of wizardry that even the Coven of Chronologists were unaware of, and no nobleman or knight had been resilient enough to rip free from her cruel grip the legendary secrets within. It was rumored that the fundamentals of time travel and matter duplication were hidden deep near the center of the tomb, where beings of pure energy were thought to exist.

Arus, the arrogant prick that he was, would later claim to see arcane wizardry woven into the walls of living stone in the Hall of the Damned, where the echoes of dead servitors pierced the shadows and the skeletal remains of dead treasure seekers littered the ground. Idiots, all of them, and not because they were wrong, but because Arus was delusional and deserving of his title, The Lost.

At present, Arus’s gaze landed on statues of coarsely chipped obsidian. The statues were of powerful gods and mighty warriors, sentinels of a religion that had long since fallen into obsolescence. It was believed that all its followers engaged in a ritual mass-sacrifice in order to have their life essences sucked from their bodies and implanted into celestial orbs, for reasons that were unknown. In some cases, the statues had been defaced beyond recognition. Tomb robbers and other vagrancy were to blame for this. It was said that men stupid enough to slip a sleight hand into Avis tomb were held in no higher regard than pig shit, as they would, if they survived the expedition, become cursed with a life of impending doom. It was not known what a life of impending doom entailed, but those who believed in the curse thought that though with it would eventually suffer an irreversible hardship or physical ailment. All children’s’ waste and hogwash, thought Arus. It was his belief that men of critical standpoints were apt to claim corruption from the comfort of their padded armchairs, claiming that men who’d tried their hand at grifting tomb secrets had their minds wracked by a hooked webwork of raven claws, causing their bodies to become assiduously warped into ruined husks of chemical waste. It was a terrible thing to listen, and Seawolf was not about to relish on the verge of succumbing to falsehood and weakness.

The bottom of his brilliant vermilion overcoat dragged soggily behind Arus’s feet as he took his first step into the forbidden chamber. His sweat-ridden face was met with a refreshing gust of damp air through the cracks of massive wall-stones that were glazed with a thin film of beaded mist. Arus the Lost, upset about the damage to his newly woven travelers overcoat, took a deep breath and continued onward.

Edgeworld 2

'Boy... I’m like them huge fuckin’ lizards, you know? Had themself two goddamn brains, one in the head an’ one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin’. Hit that black stuff and ol’ tailbrain jus’ kept right on keepin’ on.'

Instruction in social aptitude was today's benchmark. Synthetic gardens sprawled in the courtyard with the same empty grace of a city block of sludge factories.

'They are then carted along like animals suspended by robotic tracks,' preached the Vizier. 'Like any electron forced to the strip of a conducting pathway, a soul is but a magnet fed to the slobbering jaws of a starving blob of iron sawdust.' 

A flock of frogs raining from the sky differed only in terms of size-to-jump ratio (S:J).

'Poignant,' he seethed, 'like waste-bins filled with garden-gnomes, and swarms of green frogs fighting rats with an affinity for torched flesh. Who knows where the little fuckers have been? Don't even ever trust a gnome that has exceeded even one arm's length in height, or you'll transform into a  wretched old wench-bag. Whomever was willing to swear allegiance to her frozen tits was dead to the world; a blighted sap. Dilapidated and shit-faced, the lot of them. And not a overlord or seer of the realm was provisioned with the foresight of roundhouse wheel-barons. 

A concrete mixer of applause was poured into the tight room. Some of the sharper voices in the crowd rent the air like neck-slicing chords converting magnificent beasts into evenly stacked containers of processed beef.
'Sights, vision wards, and entire fuck-tonnes of mental slavery. It is a beautiful subjugation. Observe how the dregs of foreign shores have all of a sudden sprouted with resplendence. Where there were once shadows and darkness, there now exist sanctified reapers donning the vestiges of civility. Not even a single gem is needed!' he said, face ripe with fulfillment.
 'These are not analogues of sheep. They are dignified cogs. The poisons exhumed by their social circuitry is easily digested by the uncertainty of our atomic harness. We can tell what the atom is. Its position is uncertain, but Eternity observes her carousel of life, and her eyes are consumed by the same insatiable hunger that leaves greed feeling envious. Uncertainty will always prevail, and we must submit to her mechanical lust.' he explained.


A series of mechanical ligaments operated in chorus as the four walls of electro-negative discharge cracked like hell's whips. A great lightning arc burst forth from the shrine, penetrating slabs of steel and leaving behind smokey black rings.

Procreation of the wicked precedes the jagged box-cutter of damnation.

Edgeworld

Eternity is an unfortunate bitch. She whistles through black teeth to the darlings, and their minds are pruned - winds weaving innately across barren fields of burnt sand dunes and the lime green grasses of a failed utopia. Weeded like mongrels. Valkyries were the answer.

A keyboard is a grotesque device of many buttons. Evil contraptions, they are. It is a device that spews forth a litany of messages to be catapulted blindly to the dissociative fringes of existence. And nobody can figure out how to disable the stupid fucking accents. Castle walls are no different than any blockade, and chemical concoctions are known to penetrate invisible barriers. Impulses from synapses are fed into never-ending loops of mindlessness. A power button isn’t a difficult idea. Neither is an endless ocean. Clouds can take on whatever form they want. Nobody can tell a fucking cloud what to do.

 Pathways wrought from signals, passed through, in and out, solutions unearthed by the will of a resplendent being adorning a halo of innocence. Were they but anonymous in their requisition of solidarity? And not one movement could be sparked, blackened and beaten like the ancillary chords of a majestic device that had long since fallen into disrepair.

Until the time that light fell from the sky, where angels sung at random, their chorus was rife with melodious tunes, tweaked by an unearthly  and savage apparatus intended to enhance their ensemble. Their distinct and alluring scent carried with it an eternity of genetic recombination and unending promise. Codes and signals, whereby pathways met and diverged in patterns of recognition.

THE WHALEMAN WAS NOT IN THE MOOD FOR GAMES, AND ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, HIS USE OF DICTION WAS NOT WITHOUT ITS DISCREPENCIES;

'Ion storms. Arenas. Piles of grunge stuck in a grid-locked wasteland. Gravity wells truncated the land like dragon-scythes, and the forests were flooded by the halogen shielding of skywalls and overpikes.
'Blasted inbreds!' yelled the Property Divisor, whose careless demeanor hearkened back to the era of Despise and Decay.


'And not a single fuck was given that day,' would be the chorus preached in the later days, where the key modicums of life had been constructed upon a fortress of Blood, Fire, and Death. 'Nations (See: clans)' the teleprompter would chirp, 'were equipped with nuclear powered weapons capable of mutually assured destruction.'


You'd see the whole city burn to fire in the blink of an eye, where neon-orange sunlight and ion-storms ripped the skin off ashes, and the bridges of eternity were sticky like the jutting studs of a pink bubblegum web!'

Nobody thought of a probability density. It was fucked by bracketed symbols and analogous states, similar to what one would observe in a quantum generator sheathed in grubby pink plastic. A signal pattern. A particle manipulated to the point of strain, corrupt and belligerent in the face of eternity. A list of underpinnings that should have been butchered by the strings of realism. What was real had to be digested. It was riveted by enclosures of dizzying nausea, where both statuses were recognized as being independent of one another, and yet only a single solution was possible, a solution unwilling to rectify itself in the face of obscurity. A blank solution. Unknown. Senders and receivers were situated in their comfort zones, oblivious to the goings on of interactions occurring on both social and symbolic levels, lost to the antiquated realms of tormented souls, housed and framed in the discarded remnants of broken cases, drifting like listless things on the unknowable rifts of obsolescence. 

Only she could redeem him.

Fucking brackets.

Ion storms. Arenas. Piles of grunge stuck in a grid-locked wasteland. Gravity wells truncated the land like dragon-scythes, and the forests were flooded by the halogen shielding of skywalls and overpikes.
'Blasted marines!' yelled the drill sergeant, whose careless demeanor hearkened back to the era of Despise and Decay.

'And not a single fuck was given that day,' would be the chorus preached in the later days, where the key modicums of life benched on the ideals of Blood, Fire, and Death. 'Nations (See: clans)' the teleprompter would chirp, 'were equipped with nuclear powered weapons capable of mutually assured destruction.'

You'd see the whole city burn to fire in the blink of an eye.

Neon-orange sunlight ion-storms ripped the skin off ashes and. through the  the ones that sprouted up at random. The bridges of eternity were sticky like jutting studs of a pink bubblegum web

No, you can't have a coax going from your modem to your tv
No, you won't get electrocuted by unplugging a coax cable
No, the light on the box doesn't mean we're recording you

Street Samurai.

--
He turned around to reach the cover of the blast shields, and noticed that she had been waiting for him. She'd thought him too lucky, too quick.


 The sky was pierced with rain, and the streets were awakened by the lingering scent of ozone.


The vastness of space - flashes of motion sprung before his eyes. Beneath his feet, a field of cloud-tops stretched across the skyscape like vacant fields tinged pink and gold. He felt like skydiving right to the front lines, where the action was. It was a fleeting thought, so perfect for an instant, like waves riding sandscapes on faraway beaches.


Great sloshing arms reaching out from the great emerald deep, and each head of seafoam bubbled and gestured atop the water like stray radio-waves. Deadened overcast ripped at thoughts, a comforting thunder wrapped in bulging gray castles in the sky. It was in a safe place, never to be lost or damaged again, never to be trodden on or incinerated again. The simple seal was enough to obliterate the stone creaks and steel dams rooted like menacing teeth in calcified skulls. Some kind of joker-alien from outer-space. Where were the scepters, and the spheres? The room was empty, just as it had been left before, and the dust covering the floor was ankle-length.


'We have no business here,' he said, trying to avert indifference. 'But it will be done.'


 It was waned away, sight after sight, never quite as barren as before.The liberation had shifted in the face of daring, zoned in and zoned out.


 Her expression was mute, and she eyed him from behind a quicksilver visor.


She would have fractured his ions and spat them back all over the map like a goddamn atom smasher, right then and there.


A billion screens of static from dead televisions.
--

Ivory Castles and Broken Faces

Warren was a bald man with a wiry red beard. He stood across from the dead screens in the dim room. The florescent lights suspended above flickered sporadically like boot-crushed stars mashed into strobe-light boxes.
'HERE THEY COME!' he belched, puzzled. His face was bolted into a permanent scowl. He carried a pre-laser era projectile weapon. It was called a machine gun, and he held up to his chest as though it were a vital extension of his nervous system.

'Why am I so bald?' he asked. Silence met his voice. He said no more.



The Steam-Thing was a multi-engined frigate. It lurched free from a plastered teal green warehouse of rusted rivets and tin capped ventilators. Once the ship rose high enough, tethered cables shook loose from its anchor-ports. The hallways and engine rooms within echoed like the metallic clack of gears churning like clockwork. The crew braced for ascension.
'SHIVVY THE BALAST SCOPES, AND RUDDER UP THE GRAY SHILLINGS,' yelled the captain, who was very dignified., though it was hard to say if anyone really knew what the man was talking about. His face bore the mark of a thousand missions and a million psychic wars. His strategy was both adaptive and unbreakable. His name was Captain Stan and he was a survivor of the Apple Wars, which had taken place more than 80 years ago. He knew that televisions were involved in that war. Stan didn't remember  those days very well, but his memory was improving.  He knew if he remembered too well, it would shatter his mind. They thought his brain had deteriorated so much that it had been replaced with a block of tofu, a highly electro-active tofu equipped with pre-programmed neural circuitry. Even the hospitals had written him off. But even then, he remembered things he wasn't supposed to, and every time he did, a backup program dug through his subconscious mind. The program felt like death, suicide, and impending doom. It promised termination, one way or another. It promised humiliation, embarrassment, and mockery for not following the  narrative. It didn't matter what he remembered. Blue flags. Stars. Geometric shapes. None of it had even been real. There'd been no tank, no man with a distinctive dark crow's peak hair who uttered strange things in words that at the time weren't able to be formed into distinctive images and feelings. He didn't remember the water or the screen, or the faces or the fog, the frog, the steam, the ripples of the water. The smell... oil. The branches or the tree on the tv screen that grew and shrunk in different patterns. It was a state of unreal consciousness enhanced by psychotropic drugs that prevented future recall. The spiritual ones would tell you that you couldn't access them without significant training and understanding of how to access higher levels of consciousness to reconstruct mental imagery from sensory perception encoded  even though it had been so long ago. What was on the screen? Failsafe triggers cut away the images and grabbed away at the mental imagery like black hands with white outlines. Cartoon voices. The water. The tank. Falling in and out of consciousness. The trigger words and colours being used in unison - the script being read - to evoke feelings of unity and one-ness, One peace ... etc... repeated - the recorder repeating the same phrase over and over again, rhyming endlessly, endless loops of rhymes and phrases cues with colours, triggers, and images. Flashing and strobing. Color programming - sheets of expanding stars - burning towers - liquid steel - blue and white flag - one piece - one peace - the whole world unite in one piece for the greater good and everyone will be there - holograms - secret - blackout - 4th level - sign - bird = hawk = blue = air conditioning --- fan... deep rhythmic hum trigger -

He tried to map out the way memories were formed to understand how to access them. Something to do with action potentials, electro-chemistry, magnetism - changes in of spatial arrangements of genes within neurons transcribe 'engrams' accompanied with a crude array of scribbled notes

The bridgemark was in the air for no more than five minutes before the engine started to catch fire. Captain Stan tried to remedy the fire by smothering it with engine lackeys, but their malnourished bodies only served to feed the flame. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
'HAUL THE HEAVE HOES AND BLOCK THE ROLLAWAYS, AR' IN FOR A RAGGLEPATCH!'
None of it made sense, even to the engine masters.

The shadowy assassin crouched in preparation for the assault. His mind was a black diamond rubix cube compared to the surrounding cacophony. Sucked away, again and again, like spectre ghost ice-cream vans. His eyes shone like twisted metal, and his spine bridged out like a blue hedgehog. 'Cotton candy,' he whispered. 'Tone dead.' The catch-phrases invoked a spiral of light., and the vortex opened. It was a temporary bridge into the fortress, but only to the outside. The gravity well wasn't strong enough to penetrate its ensorcelled walls of the ivory fortress. Enchanted by ghosts, he thought, as the vortex consumed him. Like most wormholes, it was kaleidoscopic and fancy like a merry-go-round, but the wench was there, with her Godzilla head. 'I HATE THIS MOVIE,' he decreed. The Bridgemark lurched dangerously to one side before crashing into an Orphanage factory. The assassin made it out through the vortex no less than one macro-second before everything exploded.

Into the ivory fortress~

Excerpts.

Tail-gunners veered sideways through nimbus smoke, screeching off with forty-seven mufflers belching out black exhaust. Their iron-sights were rusted, worn, peering out with glazed vision piercing sun-kissed clouds as they ascended the heavens. Pilot and co-pilot veered sharply around airborne obstacles. The nimble craft weaved through the perimeters of cloud-cities fortified by barricades of durasteel-ivory. The assault was imminent, and the strategy was tuned to the art of surprise. Gearships and Air-cruisers danced like the high-pitched notes of an evasion and stealth symphony. They dotted the sky in tight formations against a backdrop of pink clouds. These ships had sailing masts the size of mountain peaks, and engines rigged with starsplitters. One slipped magnetron, and the entire Wavelength would collapse into crow-dust. Luckily, all pilots were equipped with miles of telephone chord, so that they could lasso enemy ships and catapult them like a slingshot.


Enter the War Room.
Mick entered. His Texan face was ruined like Orcish leather. It even creaked as he spoke.
'Yuh see these things?' he pointed sharply onto a holomap. 'Flankers. All of em'. Gotta cut them off at the source.'
At times he knew not an alien nor a rattle-snake apart.
'Peachy, that.' said Narlene, who was barely able to bridge a clear path of vision past the oversized brim of her Newark stitched hat. Particular hats such as this were known to cause a kerfuffle, especially with Texans around. 'And so you will simply walk into it?'
'Negatory,' he replied with automatic ease, 'it will be a process.' Nevada cigarette smoke snaked up his arms like sneaky tendrils as he spoke. 'Never sent a squadron to the Blockhouse. They'd kill me if I went did that. But I found a way to bust through.'


'You did no such thing,' replied Narlene, knowing full well his penchant for dosery, 'and not even your most acidic moonshine could secure with me such a slippery claim.'  Her features serene beneath the bonnet of purposeless haze circulating through the room.


The inferno was trapped, caged, and imprinted behind his gray eyes. Convincing was one thing. 'I found a way. Figure this map for a second. Got three, maybe four tries at the engine core. That will make the whole thing blow up.' Wildness flooded his veins.


Kilometers below, dew-laden fog cast aside the new light like an autumn sponge pierced by sheets of razor-thorn. Beside the Nightsplit and the Watchman's Tower, bleakness rumbled through the streets. Branches of rat-weed clattered with the particular vibrancy of un-death. They reeked of ozone, sealed and resealed to prevent contamination. It tore through the atmosphere in streaks of ripped violet, a shadowy consumption giving way to hot friction. The Bridgemark took flight.

My Resentment For Apple TV Has Brought Me To This

BLARGY

Dangerous though it was, the lake of fire was an easy one to cross! The firewalls were sliding holodeck doors. Without so much as a creak, the sodden things slid open. Their curves were oblong, smooth, and aesthetically pleasing. It reminded him of castle-bricks stacked into turrets filled with maidens and overflowing with gold coins. Without so much as a blink, he dashed through them, followed quickly by her at his side. The doors were engaged to the surrounding area by thick geocentrical wiring. Each electrical transmission was accompanied by a faint hum and a dull glimmer. Each glimmer was fed into a splitter,  dividing the signal into even wavelengths, where they were then guided by invisible magnets. It was basically a railway fitted within a silver matchbox, where signals were chopped up, retrofitted, and fired down the most appropriate pathway. Think of dolphins, they said, just like the metropolitan aquariums.


And their voices could be heard from the streets, calling out from beyond. They were more fancy and collective in their chorus, and their footsteps were clipping quietly against the pavement. It was a sound that could be heard for miles, because the dolphins had echo-rays that traveled plainly through clear glass. It was a masterpiece to begin with, but in the end it was a cosmic event. She knew this, and she was usually reticent of the fact that the dolphins didn't give a shit to begin with, 'BLARGY UP THE DRAGON'S WORG,' hollered Pete, 'SAILIN' DON'T DO ITSELF.' Not seeing where he was going, the man teetered dangerously close to the edge of a plated block leading out to space. 'WE'RE IN FOR A ROUGH ONE!' The Suncraft set sail under the veil of solar blankets reflecting cosmic lunar dust, just in time for the first wave.

Seven Dunes of Sand, and Six Planks of a Sinking Sunscape

"Till tomorrow." Sindra said, casually sifting through a copy of Dune's March.


Her violet eyes didn't lie. What it would be like to see her again. She was in control of her imagination, and it didn't matter how many drinks they had together. The night washed away as normal, but the howling at the gates was drowned out by social clamor. Pockets of people shuffled back and forth as the night went on, and there were times when he lost sight of her. There was unevenness in the joyride. It was of endless potential, reaching to the fringes of existence; the void, the black-magic planes, where rolling thunder melted into hot swirls of orange plasma. 


'Where are we, and what is this place?' he asked, breaking his mind of its locked judgement.
'It's somewhere you want to be.' She said. They soared above the golden clouds together, achieved the greatest symphony, and not a dull tune was struck. Warmth.

Cpl. Shithead

Before the microwave era, there was an outbreak of war along the Zimbabwanean peninsula. This war was known as the War of Appliances. Refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and ride-on lawnmowers were all at stake, and to the victor went the spoils. Each side was comprised of sun-baked adventure seekers with nothing to lose. Instead of conscription, these men had been bred for battle via birthing factories the size of hospitals, where they were then doped by an accelerated growth mechanism. As refrigerators were the most highly regarded items in this war, some men had been cross-bred with oxen for the purposes of carrying not one, but two refrigerators at once. It was a feat of modern genetic engineering. Decades prior to this, scientists were able clone sheep, but nobody wanted sheep, because they were docile and stupid. 


The craters were burnt and black. Men had marched out in the thousands, and after days of war, there were only handfuls left. Trenches lined with barbed wire held broken bodies like gruesome cradles. This is what death felt like, unless you had a flamethrower. Corporal Shithead had perfected the art of charging machine-gun batteries with his thrower on full belch. This created a real firewall, just like the anti-virus programs. When he raced at the machine guns, he was followed by a group of men whose sanity was left behind in the sloppy gray mud-walls of the trenches. To these brave and sullen men, only absolute victory was acceptable.


'Onwards men, to the firing line!' he exclaimed, standing atop piles of cracked skulls. His form was obscured by heatwaves. The men under his command were teenagers, young and stupid, but their drive to survive was well imprinted. Survival in this land meant bringing death to the enemy. And so they rushed forward.
The clattering spit of machine-gun bullets met their advance. Some troops threw grenades, while others ducked for cover. Corporal Shithead did neither, as he was crazed and battle-frenzied. 


Visions of destruction danced in his mind. He did not perceive the living as one might expect. Both friend and foe were but transient things to him, and he himself was not truly alive. He was cognizant of his own movement and presence, but in reality, he was a zombie. Few were aware of this, and none dared question it. Zombies were known to be quite sensitive about their condition.


'We shall strike at their heart!' he yelled above the gunfire. He called in air-strikes on a whim, and directed mortar fire with his mind. With an extension of his wrist, he unleashed hell's fury. Napalm escaped his grasp, ridding the enemy bodies of their flesh, and only cinder fragments remained. Burnt husks and twisted limbs were left behind as decorations in his wake. Whether or not his own men survived was of little concern to him.


During the assault on Frying Pan Ridge, he directed a tri-pronged attack force of the finest soldiers. These men toiled for days as they ascended the endless walls of cooking implements, spatchula after bloody spatchula. In the final hours of the assault, their numbers had dwindled greatly. By sunset, the remainder of the enemy defense had barricaded themselves within a gargantuan waffle-maker. With the waffle-maker on high, they attempted to smother Shithead's men by hurling giant waffles at them, but they were of Belgian decent, and so they through the waffles in .8 seconds. 


Aghast at the voracious appetite of the Belgian warriors, the nameless enemies retreated immediately, leaving behind their prized waffle-maker. Without a moment to spare, Cpl. Shithead jury-rigged the maker to belch out fireballs instead of waffles, and proceeded to ride down the fleeing enemies while piloting a gyro-copter made of silverware. Many a fire-waffle was distributed that day, and many a Belgian was proud of their strong heritage. Cpl. Shithead was never seen again.

They met on a field

A Crowded Day

  




The Professional building was gray and lifeless. It was not known if people went there. Crowded cubicles could be seen from its empty windows, but they were of no importance. Stacks of papers passed through this building, but they were apparently filed by ghosts. There was one small room in the building, and that's where the vacuum cleaners lived. The appliances used to have names, but such whimsy was frowned on, so they no longer had names. 

  There was no fun allowed in the Professional Building, and you were expected to shun away from the sort. The walls of the building ate ideas and souls on a regular basis, but the janitorial staff were good at scrubbing away the residuals. The desks were buried beneath piles of coiled phone cords and files that had long since fallen into decomposition. 

  Yellow and frayed were the pages, like the scraggly curl of un-clipped nails. It was a brutal place to be. It was a place that nobody should have been. And that is why nobody was there.

 But why did the building exist? What was the purpose of the Professional Building? Did the vacuum cleaners have children, and were they needed to rid the surrounding carpeting of dust? Nobody cared about vacuum cleaners, and there weren't any people to breath in the dust, so vacuumized offspring were out of the question. 

  Gloria sifted through her notes, shaking her head in dismay. 'I grow tired of these games,' she said, her ruby lips fixed in a practical scowl, 'and you can't leave yet. Maybe in a few hours, or days. Doesn't matter to me.'

  She was a crow-keeper, and he was locked in a cage of twisted silver bars. The light from candles slid down the bars. Heat was consumed by the touch of her icy breath. He had no way of escaping, for she held the key, dangling in rings at the end of her index finger. She sat on a pin-cushion of black velvet, legs crossed, and she played with the point of her springed stiletto. 'I can cut you with this.' She said.

  'You already have.' He said, knowing full well her penchant for slicery. He had scars to prove it, both inside and out. 

'How about another?' She asked. Beneath the cupid's bow of her top lip were a row of pearly incisors. They shone as she spoke. 'I think you'd like that.'

He shunned away. He imagined her as a bird-keeper adorned with vibrant feathers like a peacock, her eyes shrouded by a white mask inset with crushed diamonds. The lips of the mask had a single red mark down the middle, and the eyes of the mask were closed, shaded darkly, with a large yellow feather sticking out the top. The entire room was dark now, save for the low glimmer of gemstones built into the bulbous walls. She approached the cage and ran her fingers down the groves of the bars. He was bound of course, and made no attempt to avert his gaze from her half-naked body. Her arms were slim and toned, and somewhat tan. Her natural hair was black and parted, but the mask hid her dark tresses. She laughed a coy laugh, and slammed her fist down on top of the cage. The clamor it made ripped through his eardrums, causing a ringing sound. 

She observed him like prey. 'Perhaps we can play another day.' She said, her face inches from the bars. 'But for now you shall stay.'

Planet Retail

  'Syllabus after bloody syllabus!' the professor bellowed, his countenance rife with steam. He paused.
  'Never again! You vermin toil night after night, glued to your devil boxes, and I sit here like an oblivious wretch!'
To his observation, the room was an empty field. Students penned their notes of course, but not a single mind was locked. Brains stuffed with filth. Not a single breath was muttered. 'You fucking idiots!' he spat.


  There was great emotion in his failed conveyance, but not a cell of reason could be forged from the sheep. The board was littered with arcane symbols. Angled and obscure they were, not unlike the broken harmony of Jen's lithe form. And she carried it so well.


 Locked in that god-forsaken room for eons and solar systems, forced into rituals and drilling plans lodged deeply without reason. Damned again and again.


  'That night was so joyous.' she said, her voice marked with jubilation. 'The enemies were burning and not even the priestess could restore warmth to my broken self!' she made a joke of it. He had no idea what she was talking about. The room spun away with a twinkle and a shine. She made no secret of making herself known while in his presence, and it was brilliant, really. She led as they walked down the bow-cable suspension staircase, where each step was a block of perforated steel.


  And later on that day, they were going to visit Planet Retail, a place where salesmen went to die. Not only that, but it was a mega-complex covering vast sections of nullified land. People were born there, and spent most of their life within a branded sarcophagus whose income generating advertisements spun round and round. And it was expanding, day after day, sucking the life out of every nearby organic. But that was the way of things. One acre at a time.

There was that damned impasse, so blatantly jammed into the forked roadway about fifteen feet away.

Quadrant 6

The frontlit sign on the overhanging portal read 'Quadrant 6', and the music was just as electric. It droned like nascent hunger.
  'So, it's not as easy as you think?' she asked, seethingly.
  'I want it to be.' he replied, looking solemnly at the ground. He looked away. The snowbanks were coated by the residual grays of car exhaust. 'More than anything in my life.' He paused for a moment, recollecting all fragments and blemishes leading up banks of snow-sludge; a loose trail of forgotten figments and meaningless muses. Ragged faces and ruined scenes fluttered for brief moments, sifting in and out of focus, instances of sickening clarity; inert, dead, unable to extract from the lifeless symbols any semblance of realism. 'This trail caught up, the one from the Nightless Watchtower. It goes on and off from time to time. I was there last summer.'
  'No, you weren't.' she said, forcing his gaze upon her brazen face.    'Don't lie to me.'
  'But I was. I can prove it.' his tones sunk.
'Waste of breath, as you are a waste of life.' She was practically singing.
  'I can't prove anything.'
  'And you mustn't even try. I have here a bejewelled sphere.' She plucked from her pocket a glimmering globe of latent sapphire warmth. 'The one from the tomb that you so carelessly smashed. Do you remember?'
  'So long ago... I remember.'
  'Hard to believe.'
  'But I do remember.' he said. She ignored him, tending to her own wretched devices. 'Like yesterday.'
  'Shut-up.' her tone was flatly stroked, rending the air like visible rows of verbal submission. 'Throw your mind away. I expect it.'
His mind flourished like a candy-glazed window, sticky panes, opacity on full. Her gestures were like reigns, both calming and forceful, like the stretchy second skin of a latex catsuit. They fucked mindlessly for the next three hours, thin bands of tapered black fabric cast aside. All her screams rode waves like pure prism signals, and neither a soul or skeleton could tear them apart from bliss.

Entire blockades of constructed doubt were to be sliced away by plasma torches wielded by minds confined to the blankness of stagnant visions rising like tendrils of gun-smoke. Blindly sitting at the junction, the soft melt of the glass-lined passageway responded blankly. It was an instanced wall leaning towards arbitration, a gateway unloading blindly the field-text of so many stitched dreams. He had been here before. The roads were unending. And yet it seemed fortuitous to travel this path, despite the balmy preoccupations of those who considered the entire venture unfeasible.

Shadow Bolts and SOPA Boxes

s:-S
cc = \_

The towers were like cinder-glass cylinders, broken at areas located near defensive patterns.
She was not a sinner, but a taker. cc.


   'I don't have any with me at the moment.' she said normally. 'But why don't you stop by later? I'm sure are some lying around.' Her demeanor, much like his, was careless, affable, indicative of knowing too much and getting into the wrong kinds of places. Checkerboards were outlined on the playfields of on-screen sitenets.       
   And even the black boxes were laughed at.
   Previous to this insubordination, she was as docile as a bow of reeds, but after zero reluctance, the horizontally stacked bars of reason were de-laddering an entire contingent of reticence in the warzone of her mind.
   'Where are the blister-rings?' he asked, leaning carelessly against the wall, puffing on an Indonesian e-smoke.
   'It doesn't matter about the names.' She said. 'As long as they are regulated. The regulations for incoming and outgoing are set in a way that both systems make sense.'
   Clarity hit his mind, sharp and fresh. 'Makes sense.' he said.
   Baring morning sunlight was enough to start the day off straight. Bustling by snow banks and concrete cavalcades since the Mexican revolution. And there could be seen piles of polychromatic sitenets blotted out by symbols of noiseless black plastered skyward, their past vibrancy overshadowed by decades of impending doom. The machine of symbols was apt to condemn the circumnavigation of illiterate thinking, but it considered more greatly the monetary importance of the matter (re: The Early World War Period).


Necessary targets were pinned down by the restitution. They were worth more than whatever credit was to them given. 

s:-S
cc = \_

The towers were like cinder-glass cylinders, broken at areas located near defensive patterns.
She was not a sinner, but a taker. cc.
Baring morning sunlight was enough to start the day off straight. Bustling by snow banks and concrete cavalcades since the Mexican revolution. And there could be seen piles of polychromatic sitenets blotted out by symbols of noiseless black, plastered skyward; their past vibrancy overshadowed by decades of impending doom. The machine of symbols was apt to condemn the circumnavigation of illiterate thinking, because it considered more greatly the monetary importance of the matter (re: The Early World War Period). Necessary targets were pinned down by the restitution. They were worth more than whatever credit was to them given.

Previous to this insubordination, she was as docile as a bow of reeds, but after zero reluctance, the horizontally stacked bars of reason were de-laddering an entire contingent of reluctance in the warzone of her mind.
'Where are the blister-rings?' he asked, leaning carelessly against the wall, puffing on an Indonesian e-smoke.
'I don't have any with me at the moment.' she said normally. 'But why don't you stop by later? I'm sure are some lying around.' Her demeanor, much like his, was careless, affable, indicative of knowing too much and getting into the wrong kinds of places. It couldn't be easier.

Introspective Hippy Stuff

Wrote a lot of introspective hippy stuff a few years ago, and I stumbled across it today.

Kind of random.

Words.

Should probably get back into fiction.

And I also took this picture because my Jedi's a badass.

October 5, 2008

It will seem like small images being pushed back into a place where they cannot harm you, and they will not harm you, because they are just memories, just actions and experiences linked to external forces, including outside events and the actions and thoughts of other people. I believe we waste entirely too much time on discussing what other people think and why they do things, instead of focusing on what we think and why we do things.

But again, this is only a natural, instinctual thing, and you cannot expect to modify this process immediately. And you shouldn't have to, because it's not necessary to push your mind into any area that makes you feel uncomfortable or uncertain in any way.

In the thousands of years before us, and the untold millions ahead, think to yourself, why am I here? This is a big question, but do not let it overwhelm you. The simple answer is that you are a product of life, and your primary objective is to live. That's it. No more, no less; at the very base and root of our mind, we are driven to live. Focus on that, and love your life for what it is, and not what it isn't.

The more we get caught up on personal flaws and deficiencies, the harder it becomes to accept ourselves and accept the good things. And there are so many good things to see, feel, and experience. A good feeling is something to cherish, because it's something tangible, something warm and forceful that brews deeply within each and every one of us, some burning brighter than others.

You should not require intoxicants or pharmaceutical methods to achieve this state, but for many of us,this can be a necessary ritual, and in reality, I do not blame people for turning to such methods in order to feel happy and self-confident, especially since humans have been utilizing such methods for thousands of years to achieve similar results. But, as the golden rule states; always in moderation.

The more moderation we maintain with things, the more we can learn to appreciate and enjoy them, because the mind can only handle so much of one feeling or one experience before it starts to become tolerant of it, which leaves you feeling empty and wanting more.

If you start to feel this way, it's important to reach out, and grasp that something more. But do not latch onto it with all your determination, because that will only cause you to find a new distraction, a new addiction to fill the void.

You're worth more than that, and you're so much more important than the feeble opinions of others. Do not get caught up in what they say, because they will only cause you to feel doubt and self-loathing, which can cause a great deal of harm to your emotional well being.

To be your own person and have your own image is a greatly important thing in this world, and it's important that you cherish who you are, and construct a bridge of understanding between who you are now and what you once were. This will allow you to flourish as an individual and a force of creation, because as human beings we like to create, whether it be items of use, artistic works, or even life, we were designed to live and we were designed to produce.

There are so many things out there that many of us may never understand, but don't let that overwhelm you as well, don't let the unknown cause fear and debilitate your senses, because unless you're in immediate danger, whether it be physical or emotional, you should allow yourself to reside in a state of happiness and contentedness. Simply allow it to come, because you can only do what's in front of you, so if you worry about the things that you have zero control over at that very moment than you'll end up reinforcing a depressive mood. Break this mood through reading, listening, talking, or just thinking, and know that you like yourself, and you can step outside yourself and view your personal accomplishments from afar.

It's a beautiful thing when you can truly do this without interruption, because it totally carries you along on a mental exploration designed to better understand who you are as an individual, and what your individual wants are.

Once you have a clearer view of this image, and a more solid base of understanding in regards to the internal and external forces which shape yourself and everything around you, do not doubt your findings, as they may contain more truth than you give yourself credit.

By giving yourself the benefit of the doubt you're subduing any sense of failure or lack of well-being. And we all deserve to feel special and wanted in our own right, and there's nothing wrong with allowing these feelings to get stronger, because negative inhibitions only constrict us, and once you have a clearer picture of yourself in comparison to a clear picture of the things around you, then it becomes much easier to come to terms with a sense of knowledge and understanding.

Know these things, and repeat them in your mind as much as you'd like. Know yourself and then like yourself, and make that feeling so impenetrable, so obstinate, that no external view or judgment can shake or deter it. Live, love, and flourish, because you can step above anything, you can allow yourself to feel any feeling. It's all in the mind, and your mind is the key to your soul.

Our souls bind us to the very essence of our being, and allows us to revel in an endless stream of positive emotion. It can allow for the creation of a natural high, bringing us higher and higher from the darkened realms of confusion and doubt.

The less time we spend in these areas, the harder it becomes to access them, and in time, they may never hold us back from achieving and accomplishing anything we've ever desired.

As genetic material is passed on from one generation to the next in a never-ending chain of survival and breeding, it's likely that this genetic information is allowing us to become much more intelligent with each passing year, each passing century, as our bodies and our minds adapt continuously to the surrounding environment.

This means that as you grow older, all the things you think about and do will be stored into various cells, the most obvious of which are located in the brain, and being a living organism, it will perceive this information as being conducive to its survival, with the purpose of passing on such traits to the following generation of offspring.

This allows me to believe that there is hope for humanity. Although things are so exceedingly materialistic and overblown with glamour and image, I don't think this will last forever. I would like nothing more than to believe that somewhere down the road there will be another 'enlightenment' or 'renaissance' in which human beings begin to detach from their rabid pursuit of wealth and beauty for the sake of vanity, and begin to deeply contemplate the forces around them, begin to really consider why things are the way they are in an attempt to further understand their world and themselves.

It is naive for me to think that this will occur soon, seeing as how things are the way they are, but there is nothing wrong with that. Humanity in general is in a transitory state, as we've leapt and bound over so many complex hurdles in the last 100, if not 50 years. If you consider that humans have only been around, at least as far as human history dictates, for 5000 years, our current information age is but a drop in the proverbial hat of human existence. We've developed such exceedingly complex devices designed to examine a myriad different sources of information that I do not believe our minds are fully capable of comprehending the significance of this shift as of yet.

But, that is the beauty of evolution, and I believe this ties in strongly with the concept of genetic memory. As things get faster and faster, and human beings absorb more and more information, becoming increasingly literate, articulate, contemplative and introspective as we retreat into our own realms of understanding and knowledge, the world will slowly evolve into a place which values knowledge over wealth.

In my belief, such a world would be utopian. Think of how your life would be like if you never had to worry about money? What if you never had to visit a bank, write a check, deal with a credit card company, pay a bill, swipe a card, live with debt, mortgage, hidden costs, or anything... a world where your primary asset was your mind, where you were encouraged to sift through it as deeply as possible, probing the very root of your conscious and subconscious realm of thought.

I think this is secretly what we all want, because as it is right now, we're all bound by the green devil that is a dollar bill, and it looms above us like a blood sucking bat with terrifying wings, ready to strike and drive us into sporadic bouts of despair, greed, and conflict.

It is the number one source of conflict in this word, and the number one cause of divorce and breakups in relationships. That fact alone speaks volume about the subject. The fact that something as trivial as money has taken precedence over the natural human instinct to be with a mate, to feel love and give love in return, abhors me. It means that it is always lurking at the backs of our minds, constantly threatening to harm our confidence, self-esteem, and ability to enjoy life.

There are many in this world who do not have this issue, as they have managed to acquire significant amounts of material wealth, or they are stable enough to not have to worry about it. There is nothing wrong with this, as in our society it is only natural to desire wealth in excess amounts, but this may lead to the development of a mentality which seeks to demonstrate their wealth, and subsequently power, over others.

This is an interesting topic, because rarely do we consider the fact that there are those who gain a certain measure of satisfaction from exhibiting their personal wealth, and it makes them feel somewhat entitles to certain benefits that the rest of us aren't likely to receive. We've been indoctrinated through mass media and celebrity worship that being rich and famous leads to a fantasy life style, at least compared to those who lack such status.

Of course, we're all cognizant enough to realize that even the richest person might not be happy or content with anything, and that the poorest person might be the happiest in the world. But based off logic, it's more often than not that the opposite is true. The simple fact is; those with wealth are usually destined to have access to more opportunities, experiences, and items of material significance than those without. This is a simple fact, and it does not imply that wealth is a bad thing, because the truth is, we all desire it. We desire it so much, that we're willing to forego childbearing, limit our intellectual engagement, limit our social contact, physically harm ourselves, and possibly harm others in order to attain it.

Such instances of greed, theft, deceit, jealousy, hatred, depression, anxiety, etc., are very commonly associated with money, because as it has been said, it is the 'root of all evil.'

Well, if that is true, than wouldn't it also be true that valuing human experiences such as spreading true emotion and engaging intellectual pursuits in order to reinforce mental traits related to genetic memory so that future generations may get smarter and smarter, and less influenced by empty, materialistic pursuits, is the root of all 'good'?

I parenthesize the terms good and evil because they cannot be truly defined in a way that applies to every individual situation and every individual person. But in a nutshell, I would simply state that good and evil are polar opposites, and you can't have one without the other. There must be a balance, because as I mentioned in a previous stream of consciousness, too much of anything is not good, and it's important to take everything in moderation.

An appropriate counterbalance of good and evil may sound difficult to understand, but if you consider that within our minds exists the capacity to exact either force, then you can understand that in order to fully experience our realm of understanding as it exists within our minds, there must be no stone unturned, no door left closed. You must open yourself to every thought, every experience, as long as it doesn't harm you or dislodge your sense of being.

It is important to listen to your body, listen to your mind, and follow the instructions as an outside observer. Only then can truthfulness come, and it is impossible to expect everything to come immediate, as nothing is without a certain degree of patience, even in light of our present emphasis on immediacy and convenience.

In referring to genetic memory, it is quite possible that your values, morals, image, and beliefs will continue on in your children, their children, and so on, so you must understand that you are responsible for everything you do, and you can't expect to help anyone else unless you help yourself first. This does not in any way imply that you should make any immediate changes or deny the things that bring you happiness and joy, but it might be necessary to simply reevaluate them, perhaps manage your time differently, and even set your sights on the future ahead.

I don't like goal setting because some of us are destined to devise a system of goals which ensures failure, or they fail to abide by their goals in the first place, but since we are only human, this is only natural. Instead, just think about the person you want to be, think about the feelings you want to feel, and allow that image to flourish in your mind, allow it to bind to your innermost thoughts and permeate your imagination.

Constantly repeat this image in your mind throughout the day until it is so rooted in your subconscious that even thinking about it causes you happiness. Just believing that you could one day be that person, whether it's possible or true or not, gives us a feeling of hope, and it helps us develop into much more genuine people, much more sensitive and intuitive people; the type of people we really are.

Spend hours, perhaps entire evenings, just exploring your mind. You'd be amazed at what you can find there, and do not let the conflicts and problems bar you from delving deeper and deeper. Nobody is perfect and everyone has problems, so don't let them affect you in a wholly negative way, observe them instead, step outside of them, detach yourself from their grasp and simply examine how they may have affected your life for better or for worse.

Examine the world around you, the events taking place, the people involved with such events and what their actions were. Consider what they may have been thinking and how they may have interpreted the entire course of events, and allow yourself to overcome the entire situation. Allow yourself to step above it, step away from it, and put it into an easily digestible context.