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