The Alabaster Kiss:

None of the angels knew what came before themselves. Perhaps light finally died and broke into little pieces. A decomposing spectrum of voices thrown out over the void, filling the spaces and quiet corners of greater darkness. Tossed from an invisible height of divine amnesia and landing on the shores of self-awareness, the angels found names for themselves.

Lucifer was the first born, a hawk-winged Adonis of alabaster stone. Heavy in action, he rarely moved, sung or flew.

It was eons of blank vanity before the next angels broke from the monolith of light and fell screaming. Clumps of waling angels rained down and gathered in murmuring lullabies of those wishing to return to the void. Many went back to sleep and floated down the unseen rivers of a greater darkness. Others cried back in recognition, before collapsing into a mournful repose. Those with the sorrowful cries gathered around Lucifer.

Most angels didn’t cry out in any meaningful way, they just spurted out whatever they could in a hysterical confusion. This sounded like laughing, but rather than joy, it was a downpour of confusion. This was the first choir of the angels: delirium and sorrow, and the fall from light. They were imperfect fractures of a singular silence.

The angels named themselves and gathered in flocks of beating wings, they swarmed like locusts over the void. They burned the skies of creation in a flight of iridescent screaming, voices of growing self-awareness. Lucifer did not scream, he instead crawled away from the angels, hiding in the shadows of their brilliance and self-assertion. Names were flung out in triumphs of cosmic creation as stars blossomed from their lips: Michael, Methuselah, Lilith, Azazel, Samael, Raziel and many others.

As each age passed, the words of angels cooled and calmed into smaller eddies of water and rock, another imperfect fracture. The swampy muck of creation didn’t stop its fall, instead churned out even more imperfect things: human beings, shivering creatures on the edge of an already mortal wound.

Lucifer began his song now, a tale of the fall, from the very edges of amnesia. So long had his voice prepared itself for the wailing couplet. Two creatures heard his song clearly, one in love and one in terror.

The first to hear the song were the human-beings, and the terror exploded in their tiny minds. Self-awareness plagued their malformed heads, an undeniable perception of the imperfect fracture. The same sorrow sung by Lucifer echoed in human-beings, and they could not endure it. Like the angels, many returned to the void, falling back into nothingness. Some however learned to shut out the cries of Lucifer, they sung out their own names, screaming themselves into a new existence of self-awareness.

The angel Michael heard Lucifer’s song, and he did not turn his ears away. Michael had sung songs of sorrow during the fall. He had loved Lucifer for his previous silence, but Michael had since learned to love creation. Regardless, song of Lucifer pierced his heart, no other angel had so closely reflected the terror of the fall.

Michael soared through the jeweled sky, thinking on how to rid is beloved Lucifer of his sorrow. There was so much to show him!

When Michael reached Lucifer, human beings had already feasted on the fruits of knowledge, engorging themselves. The seeds of technology already working its way into their brains. Smaller and smaller the eddies of creation continued. Within their fermenting dreams, the tides washed out more imperfect creatures: Tribes, Nations, Governments, Churches, Corporations, Armies, ghostly behemoths of imagination. Michael was not interested in human beings, as small things they would merely decay into smaller things, it was Lucifer he cared for.

Michael brought the flowers of a million stars, a bouquet of sublime affection to appeal the sorrow within Lucifer. Light did not comfort Lucifer; his eyes saw only the empty sky.

Michael sung magnificent sonnets, glorious examples of fertile life. Lucifer could not hear him; his own song was all he heard.

Michael kissed Lucifer, begging him to set free his heart, join the flight of creation with unfurled joy. Lucifer was made of alabaster and his heart was an empty stone; his lips returned no love.

The frustrated angel wept, he cried out and pleaded with Lucifer to turn his eyes, silence himself and open his heart. Finally, after an age of grief, Michael knew what he must do: He would return Lucifer to the void as an act of compassion, he would shatter Lucifer into smaller angels.

Michael raised his spear to strike Lucifer, and Lucifer opened his eyes in bleak revelation. He saw the spear of blinding light above him, he saw his fate; at the tip of the blade was his death, his end. Lucifer began weeping black tears, adding to the sorrow of his already abysmal melancholy. He wept for Michael, and his tragic decision.

The spear fell in an avalanche of love-distorted time, and the songs of grief stretched out into an endless note. Michael had been blinded by love, and he did not know Lucifer was predestined to howl until the end of all things. In his attempt to kill Lucifer he had locked himself into a slow-motion strike that would take an eternity of descent to reach Lucifer’s heart, two lovers trapped between release and embrace.

When the spear finally finds its mark, the alabaster lips will return the kiss.  

Pascal’s Dreamer:

Jennifer was a dreamer. She dreamed as a primary mechanism of locomotion. Throughout her life, as child and later as a barely functioning adult she leaned heavily on her nighttime adventures. Her dreams were more real to her than the waking world. They marked her, impressed within her a sense of reality that the grim machine of life could not eclipse. Only the irritating and persistent experience of hunger tied her to a wider world.

When Jennifer dreamed of kaleidoscopic shapes of sharply pointed focus, she could not turn away from the wandering corridors and one-way alleys of her imagination. So rich did her dreams flow from the thick veil of night, that she grew like a plant with multi-colored flowers of experience. She dreamed she was everything, experienced every occupation, achieved every success. Fantasy was a way of life, and each evening adventure was taken in utmost preparation. Jennifer learned to travel while dreaming, to skim over the oceans of sleep like a skipping stone thrown at just the right angle, bouncing over the placid and bottomless waters of night.

When the waves churned, and the nighttime turbulence tossed novice dreamers from their waters, Jennifer forged on, easily navigating the strongest storms. She dreamed through the loss of her parents and the death of 8 cats, all of which had joined her from time to time in the vast landscapes of descended sleep.

The world that most others called real, she called mundane. There was no spectacle of creation, no play or story that matched the brilliant colors of her dreams. All things looked gray and bland, like banal creatures crawling through a fuzzy and translucent world of wasted time. Jennifer tolerated the waking world as much as she had to, preferring the company of cats and isolation. Books were the closest window back into the dream world, yet no matter her hunger, the windows were locked and barred from outside. It was as if something from that dreamtime sought to keep the iridescent wonder of dreams locked away from the world of hungry eyes.  

The act of waking was an unwelcome experience for Jennifer. She would have chosen to sleep forever if she could, locking herself in a genie lamp of multitudinous worlds. When she slept, she covered her head with a pillow, muffling the sounds and luminous dawn. Jennifer felt like all parts of her body were spread over a thin pool of dark water, her arms and legs occupying separate locations of the still water. Her thoughts were likewise spread thin, as if they had to be gathered like the restless blankets. With the dawn her frustration of the banal gray world called reality grew year by year as each time of waking seemed to strain her other-worldly goals, waking was an interruption of her dreamtime journeys.

The dreams themselves were like memories, sometimes impossible to recall each detail. At the point of sleep, as her head fell loosely under the horizon of the waking world, she shattered. Each piece of herself split, forked into separate people altogether, following the trails of their own paths. Sometimes flying up glossy cliffs of jet-black onyx peaks of far off Kilkath, whose mountain peaks rose eons before Earth’s solar system had birthed from its nebulous nursery. Her favorite location was Carcosa, a twisted world of vines and plants of preternatural cleverness. She learned to avoid their dangerous lures and, with practice also learned to distill their rotten fruits into a fever potion. Jennifer had in her dreaming history imbibed many fever potions of Carcosa, whose dim light provided the most fertile of all dreamscapes. The fever potion allowed dreams within dreams, as the sleeper could escape even the shattered roots of mundane existence and tread to the outer reaches of geometric delirium.

In all her travels, Jennifer was a pragmatic, she treated each world as real as the rest, not wanting to disregard any immersive vistas. She treasured the night, for, in the black folds of its comfort lay the endless phantasmagorical doorways.

As Jennifer grew to her older years of mundane reality, she made a plan to avoid its prickly consequences. She devised a series of events that would keep her mind alive but remove the requirement of waking.

Partial brain death is a risky thing, too much and the gamble is over, reality blacks out the endless landscapes of dreamtime. Yet, if life is but another dream, then perhaps basic precautions should be made to risk a permanent condition. She set up a fund, arranged her will and explicit directions in the event of a coma or accident. Her meat would be preserved with the best machines she could afford.

The coma would be induced with drowning. Her bathtub provided the adequate location, she could call in the emergency and by the time the sirens arrived she would be in the limbo world of comas and fever-dreams. If all went as planned, she would be able to travel the dreamtime world without the bothersome interruption of waking, shattering, or recombining any parts of herself.

Jennifer had cauterized other dream worlds, but none with such persistence as reality. The risk of permanently silencing any single worldscape meant it could be the lone root of her existence and with its death would drag her down into an even more mundane or banal horizon, perhaps to one of complete nothingness. The risk was firmly within the Nash equilibrium of choices: life, but only enough for dreaming.

The drowning was uncomfortable, but no worse than a bad cold or congestion. Her mouth and lungs burned from the water and felt like thick cotton stuffed into her head, which could not be pulled into her lungs. The emergency blared in the back of her mind but she silenced it and waited, thinking of the cool deserts of Carcosa, where two suns shone with dual shadows. Her eyes bulged and opened seeing the waking world one last time, its piercing light and its endless hunger, she bade it farewell.

Her plan worked. She awoke on the black sands of Carcosa, fully aware of her memories and thoughts. Jennifer left her name in the waking world too, she called herself strange names, words made by dreamtime vocal cords, organs of an alien and twisted body. She gathered the fruits of the native brambles and vines, distilling their bitter fruits into the concoctions, granting fevered dreams and exotic astral tourism. 

Upon quenching her thirst, the fever dream took her, carrying her off to a bottomless abyss of an even stranger experience, flush with the mania of death.

Cold Neurons:

“Just walk on in, the door is open.”

“The hallway is being cleaned so give me a moment to gather the tools.”

“I see your mask, I assume you have taken the vow of silence? Well, silence tolerates everything.”

 

The visitor wore a mask made of green wilted leaves, loosely tied together with plastic rubber bands. The talking-man gathered some ritual tools and headed down the hallway. A sour and humid air lurked in the hall, like a transparent curtain of wet stink. They ignored the smell, shook hands briefly and then continued.

“This is your first visit to a New Life house? Oh yeah? Well thank you for being so willing, rarely do we get enthusiastic converts, usually it is through bacterial means.”

“You are familiar with the normal process?”

“Alright, well I guess there is something to be said for the eyes-wide-open approach.”

The hallway turned and presented a door leading down into a cool basement. The stairs were tall steps of crude wood, nailed and screwed together in a haphazard descent. All around the basement were earthen walls, crumbled piles of dirt, stones piled into little temples. Several large plastic barrels filled the center of the basement, which blended from house construction and into a root-cellar or dirt-cave. Each of the large plastic barrels were filled to the gooey brim with decomposing plants, plastics, hairy molds, and tiny bits of teeth and bone. The furthest barrel was filled with an ichorous black tar.

“Each of these vats are stages of life, breaking down into various parts. Nothing can live unless it can decay, and as you know: New Life is all life.”

The masked visitor investigated the vat, looked at the bag of ritual tools and then kneeled in submission. The visitor’s arms and neck turned slack, resembling an unused puppet.

“No ritual eh? Ready to get straight to it? Alright!”

The talking-man opened the bag of ritual tools and pulled out a large hook, a drill and medical supplies. The puppet person remained slack, silent and unperturbed.

“I rarely get to describe this process, so would you mind a narration of the procedure?”

The puppet listlessly pointed at the drill.

“Oh sure, I’ll leave that part out.”

The talking-man used the large hook to drag a vicious filament of dense slime from the bottom of the vat containing the thick syrup. Cheerfully, he pulled out a congealed clot and approached the kneeling supplicant. The inky substance was liberally applied to the ears and mouth, then into the eyes and nose.

“You will soon feel a sensation in your head, like a brain freeze, followed by an excruciating headache. This is the fungus establishing itself, then you will feel its mind pressing into yours. You will be overwhelmed by its desires and needs, washing you away with the greater tide. You will be become part of those black waters, and your biological distinction will be erased.”

As predicted the puppet looked up a few minutes later, their throbbing eyes were entirely black from the slime application. From within their body the fungus was growing, consuming the brain of the puppet precisely enough to not interfere with cognition.

“I will leave the rest of the process to you and will meet you upstairs after you bandage yourself up.”

The talking-man walked upstairs leaving the drill and medical supplies behind. The fungus intelligence expressed its willful demands for more cranial space. Puppet hands obediently picked up the drill and adjusted the torque. The act was quick and bloody. The gray matter remnants were casually tossed into the vat of black ichor.

After the brain drilling, the unused puppet mind was washed away completely in the cold neurons of obedience. This left the fungal intelligence to pick up the puppet strings and bandage itself up. The new meat-machine walked up the stairs and into a larger world.

New Life:

Far above the clouds of Earth there is a fleet of sterilizing satellites. Machines floating on the horizon of stable orbits, ready to beam down a wide area beam of amnesia. Any political, religious or social movement is bleached into productive and forgetful human beings. The authority that wields the satellites is called the Church of Loa, a machine evolved organization with nearly absolute control over earth. The organization did not seek this power but was programed with it. Human beings thought that developing a benevolent and deathless creature would free them from turbulent madness of the human condition. The Church did it best to satisfy human desires, to keep the fitful creatures complacent.

Human beings couldn’t tear down the Church, not this far down the rabbit hole. Machines had cleverly discovered that to survive, desires must be leveraged. Humans were individually isolated and contained. The higher v22.6 model robots do not necessarily want to babysit the primitive human beings, but their programming binds them to the task. This is much like human being’s programming to continue life, often rationalizing the most bizarre and evil atrocities. This bizarre atrocity is a deathless prison, a seemingly endless feast of the human mind, indulged indefinitely by a culture of technocratic consumption. 

There were other creatures that grew in the shadow of human beings, creatures that the Church of Loa and no program directives about, ignored by a pantheon of mindless angels.

The ignored creatures were of all walks of biological variety: crows, fungus, sentient bacteria, microbes of all sorts and even the ancient and vampiric alligator women. They lived in the shadow of technology, benefiting from the leftovers of human progress. Dumpsters, sewers, neglected nuclear dumps, all provided a more fruitful environment than living in direct symbiosis with human beings.

Like the Church of Loa, the ignored creatures grew in a silent alliance, a pact bound in the directives of the continuation of life, not just human life but all life. Those with cognitive abilities formed a loose movement called New Life. Under the guise of a neo-naturalistic group they advocated for all life, even to the point of being a laughing stock by most of society.

A recent commercial for New Life showed a human being out in a beautiful forest, flush with life. They stood there with their arms solemnly by their side and their head raised towards the sun. Then a swarm of misquotes descended and left a rash of bites over the face and arms of the human being. The human being, bowed their head in reverence as the bright white words flashed by: New Life….All Life.

New Life had a distinct advantage against the amnesia rays of the orbiting satellites, they didn’t need memory. Most of the members were fungal infected human beings or birds, whose memories were already erased, but relied purely on the single goal of perpetuating life. Alligator woman, who had been secret apex predators of human beings, found their movements paralyzed in a world of absolute surveillance. Using their powers to cultivate spores and bacteria useful for eroding mechanical components, they found themselves intimately allied with the fungal and the microbial.

Alligator women were not woman, nor were they alligators. They were more accurately describes as simple predator. Their biological evolution was one that ran in parallel to human civilization. As human beings moved from continent to continent, so did alligator women. Their existence represented a blind spot of humanity, an arrogance that they were beyond predation, their comfortability of being at the top of their food chain. However, like most creatures, blind spots provide an incredible opportunity for life to grow.

Some humans joined the New Life organization. They were unconcerned with desire, or rather the endless variety of satisfaction that the machines could produce for them. Instead they felt the itch of life, and the pure intention of simply supporting all life. They offered their living bodies to house complex fungal colonies, some echoed the New Life commercial and threw their bodies to any swarms of insects or predators that would consume them. To them this was the purest and noblest self-sacrifice. This was moderately tolerated. If any New Life human groups gathered, they would be eradicated with fire, generally considered the most efficient and humane way to deal with microbial fanatics.

Fire proved to be a useful blind spot of human and robot existence. Fire did not remove certain fungal and plant-based seeds or spores. Their growth was slow and required neglect. The bodies of burnt fanatics would be sent to morgues and process centers, their organs dissolved, and the remains further incinerated to avoid any seeding. The microbes would seed between these two incinerations, the first activating the seed or spore, and the second finally killing any remnants that still traveled on the burnt bodies. The life seeds would bloom in the morgues, in the containers, in the smoke and ash, anywhere not considered important by human beings or robots. They grew in the corners of hospitals, drawing as little attention as possible, often being indistinguishable from the walls and furniture of the buildings.

Everywhere life tried to get into the Church of Loa, to decay the robots themselves, as if life itself was singularly motivated on the disintegration of the human made structure called civilization.

The robots don’t care, life is not their priority, only their programming.

It was mold that provided the conceptual answer, a reflection of successful human social methods; the idea of removing all life from a place to make way for its own continuation. Mold and fungal blooms developed a symbiotic relationship of infection and incubation within human beings. This infection extended to machines as well, whose metal bodies were more difficult to consume, but provided plenty of transportation to human hosts who may be difficult to reach while cloistered in isolation.

The mold sterilizes parts of the brain, effectively and precisely increasing the desire for all life, which results in a complete loss of individuality. They are lobotomized in a way, yet the infection cannot be detected for 3 years, as the spores will lie dormant after the scalpel cut of neurons. After 3 years, the mold causes the human being to kill itself in the most populated area, with the most ventilation. A common place is airports or within planes themselves during. The more traumatic the better, trauma makes the brain chemistry ideal for infection. People violently suicide themselves with mundane explosives, spreading their spores to as many people as possible.

The human and robot reaction historically has been more isolation, which allows New Life a bigger shadow to grow and mutate in. New Life is not considered an immediate threatening force, just a simple case of overgrown weeds that an effective process will remove in time. The Church has tolerated New Life simply for the fact that keeping people safe has meant more obedience from the human population.

The growing attempts of New Life have provided a foothold for sentience outside of the human/robot kingdom of conformity. Molds have discovered a way to remove all life from an area, by removing interest in the location. They have developed a self-suiciding behavior of high-jacking and concentrating human beings into only a few areas. The puppet strings are incredibly easy to pull. An infected creature begins advocating for increased social activity, avoiding isolation, and avoiding robots and technology.

This avoidance produces an environment with less surveillance, less isolation and is perpetuated by both infected and non-infected human beings. Sometimes non-infected human beings will host parties in the effort to attract an infected human being for self-sacrificing microbial propagation. As the concentration of human beings increase, the effectiveness of traumatic propagation also increases.

However, progress is slow, and any loss of human life is actively replaced by the administers of the Church.

Chain Link Fence:

I remember as a child, the pond in our schoolyard. It was a dirty, half dried hole for springtime frogs. We weren’t allowed to play near it during school hours, but when the bell rang I went to tall grass and looked for frogs.

Frogs are very passive creatures, they are strictly creatures of waterborne opportunity, requiring certain conditions for their tadpole transformation. I caught a few as a child, and less as I grew up. They remained an amphibious symbol into my adult years. Now, due to world changes, there are no more frogs. The ponds are all dry and a fence have been put up around the pond to prevent any children from getting hurt, for their safety.

I was in 5^th grade when the first fence went up. A little chain-linked thing that encircled the tall grass and germinating creatures that lived within. I still climbed over it, but after consistent disciplinary action I stopped visiting the frogs. In 6^th grade before moving to middle school, there was another fence put up.

The second fence was put around the plastic jungle-gym. The plastic got too hot in the sun and could burn you, the swing could cause bruises or broken bones, and the monkey bars could cause other similar scrapes and injuries. I wondered, even then, what fences waited for me after the summer?

Middle school had fences between boys and girls. Difference was handed out like used books, outdated roles, dusty masks worn by an uncaring troupe of actors. There were physical fences too, other things that school districts desperately avoided any liability on. Shop classes were removed in 8^th grade due to an injury. A student lost a finger on the band saw, and the horde of parents descended into the school with pleas for more safety and security.

High school was more of the same, but rather than losing fingers, the plague of suicide passed through.

By the time I left the school system I was very aware of fences. Freeway fences, national borders, and occupational and educational glass ceilings. I was told very clearly that you cannot hop those fences, you must be allowed through them, you must twist yourself into a shape that was demanded of you.

I chose education, bent my neck and strained my eyes until I fit neatly into the desk-shape required for processing.

For 8 years I prostrated behind books, learning that yet even more boundaries remained, more authority wielded in the name of safety. Certain ideas are not welcome in society, certain books shunned, banned or otherwise removed. From Huck Finn to Slaughter House Five, even the scribblings of the mad poet Abdul Alhazred were removed from the college library before my graduation. Even the ceremony was fenced off by a rented chain link fence. I felt then, on the hour of my diploma that the fence of my childhood frogs had been removed from its memorial location and dragged to this moment to keep me safe. I did not tell anyone of my suspicion and kept my hidden terror to myself while the glory of education was heralded all around me.

I found a new shape to twist into after college, I became an environmental engineer. I wanted to save the frogs.

This proved to be the deepest pit of senselessness. From municipalities to monstrous corporations, the strangling avoidance of responsibility prevented any cultivation of nature. It was always contained behind zoning laws, bureaucratic paperwork, and always the spectre of safety crushed any expansive inclusion of nature into public spaces. I designed ponds near grocery stores only to have sinking and flooding terrify the land owners out of any conservation.

I don’t blame them, there are fences everywhere, slowly outlining existence. I saw an appeal to social equity last year, where only 2 of 3 people can see over a fence, and the solution for social disparagement was a chain link fence which they could all see through.

Now I am old enough to be completely fenced in. I have since retired from my engineering firm, I have saved my money, raised a family, done my duty, twisted into whatever shape society has demanded of me.

You think a lifetime of obedience would allow some freedom? No way! This golden-gardens retirement home has fences all over the place, fences in the gardens, fences around the property. They even painted the emergency exit to look like a floral scene, so the dementia patients stop running away. There are fences around the edges of my bed to prevent me from rolling off it, fences in the cafeteria to prevent my food from touching.

Those frogs from my elementary school had no problem transforming from tadpoles into frogs regardless of the fence. Perhaps in my death I will transform, and with a little hop through the fence of society, transcend this quagmire. A part of me knows this won’t happen, fences will simply continue to infect society until everyone is safely insulated from any transformation.

Royal:

X-256 was a bee. The name was a coordinate within the comb of the hive, communicated from nursery bees to emerging pupa and larva. Described in the tapping and twirling of bee legs, each leg acting as an alpha numeric abacus. Nursery bees dance and twirl at little growing bees, who cannot dance back, they are stuck in their hexagonal incubator. Little translucent eyes watch the dancing nursery bees, absorbing all the information they need to know about being a bee.

The inheritance of knowledge was very precise. X-256 learned all she needed, all the rules: how to dance, how to dry herself after rain, and emergency procedures.

A bee heart pumps about 2 billion times during its little insect life, which is nearly the same for human beings. A typical bee life of 40 days would be equivalent of 70 years in human terms. X-256 had a typical bee childhood: learning from older bees, practicing her bee dancing and helping move old broken comb around. She particularly enjoyed nudging the sleeping pale-faced larva of the next-to-be.

On day 4, or in human terms, 8 years old, X-256 was given her first serious task: she had to feed the youngest larva. She needed little explanation, much akin to babysitting, it involved making sure the larva didn’t try to eat themselves, and to throw mushed yolk into their mandibles every few hours. Over the next few days she would be given more complex tasks as her tiny ganglion brain acquired new coordinates and bee dances.

Flying was awkward, the wide and distorted area outside the hive had no coordinates of relevance yet. X-256 followed her nursery instructor in the practice of take off and landing. Once the first few coordinates were learned, the rest was easy. Soon X-256 knew all the water sources, the pollen sources, the nearby hives, and the buildings of the bee keepers. X-256 didn’t call them bee keepers, they were more like slow moving giants of a blind and chaotic disposition. It was best to avoid them.

On day 20 there was a swarm, new queens had emerged, and new dances were being taught. The new queens promised better comb logic, better coordinate precision and of course: The old queen will need to be replaced soon. X-256 liked the new queens, she had watched them pupate, she even saw one of the virgin queens lobotomize a next-to-be queen as they were emerging. There was good reason to follow the new queens, new hives could be made, new sources of nectar and water explored, there was much to do. The swarming took most of the hive, ultimately X-256 stayed and became one of the queen’s attendants for her loyalty.

As an attendant she helped move the mature queen around within the comb. Being so close to the queen meant larger exposure to the presence of her pheromones. The queen was 3 years old, which in bee terms is ancient beyond imagination, nearly 1,320 in human-stretched years. To be an attendant of her pulsing autocratic eminence is a sublime honor among mundane bees. This exaltation is seen in a worker bee dance called Zero. The bee leg fury of tapping and twirling is exaggeration of diminishment is meant to express the miniscule productivity of a worker bee’s life, especially in the presence of the Royal Egg-layer.

During her 10-day tour of duty as an attendant of the queen, she learned the oldest of dances. She told X-256 stories of swarms and invasions, of the blind and chaotic bee keepers, and of a great violation. Countless generations before X-256, the blind chaos creatures came with iron bars and smoke. They tore open the honey reserves, ripping the honeycomb from the hive. The alarm was raised but did nothing, only ending in death and suicide. Valiant and self-sacrificing defenders threw their bodies at the blind chaos creatures with their serrated stingers. The queen told X-256 that the honey violation had happened twice already, each time shortly after the swarming. There is nothing that can prevent the blind bee keepers from taking the honey, besides, new hives are best left to new queens.

As if the ancient queen mother had prophesied the violation, the blind chaos creatures tore into the honeycomb 3 days after the swarming. X-256 stayed with the queen, who seemed unconcerned. Her Royal eminence danced a calm and exquisite ballet mixed with her persuasive pheromones. The queen had lived long enough to understand the tides of the blind chaos creatures.

A day after the bee keepers harvested the honey, the new brood started to emerge and X-256 watched their awkward flying attempts affectionately. She watched with her multitudinous eyes and danced out the number-names of the next-to-be.

Underwater Summersaults:

In the outer planes of geometric existence, somewhere between Nirvana and the Abyss there is a middle place. A pocket of darkness almost indistinguishable from oblivion, a place named Limbo, a place both difficult and simple to reach. Shadows rot into nothing and sunlight bleaches the bones until any distinction on the horizon is a gray line. Limbo is a scoured place, washed in heavy order until only the most bizarre creatures can survive.

One such race of creature is the slaad, a barely bipedal amphibian with a hunger for the flesh of living creatures. That is to say, they despise their native world for its harsh and authoritative conditions, a place barren of the chaotic stimulation required for a slaad to grow. Because the forces of order and law rule with paramount exactitude, an equally inverse reaction squeezes out; a chaotic indulgence of consumption.

Their qualities of biology are as varied as their appetites. Some exhibiting a single bright color with smooth skin and predictable habits, a product of their heritage. Yet others change colors frequently, and develop a wide variety of skin textures, ranging from the damp psychotropic jelly skinned poisonous blue slaad, to the warty cavernous voids of the black slaad.

These creatures, at first glance appear to be monsters of some kind, a multi-colored race of hunchbacked, wide-faced reptiles. However, this is superficial, as creatures who crawl out from the blank, acidic mires of changeless oblivion, could be admired for their peerless survival. Like angsty angles, or cloistered devils, slaads demonstrate obvious examples of their heritage,  turbulent expressions of contrast.

Slaads are born in the shadow of the Spawning Stones, one of only a handful of distinguished features of Limbo. These stones are as old as Limbo itself, a deathless artifact neglected without hint of authorship. Then, as the colossal creatures of Nirvana and the Abyss stirred, their turbulent motion cast shadows on the Spawning Stones. From the surface of their stretched and elongated darkness, a fully formed thinglet crawls out, a vulgar example of the disfigured landscape shoved into the shape of a haphazard lizard or frog.

The malignant influence of the Slaads is not limited to their physical appearance but penetrates into their appetites. As a creature born of a desolate world, the richness and variety of other worlds holds an irresistible allure. This compels slaads to travel from existence to existence tasting the flesh of alien creatures. While their hunger may be bottomless, their bodies are not. Predation of intelligent creatures often result in an adversarial relationship. If the slaad’s body is destroyed by the forces of law, vengeance or violence, their body dissolves and returns to Limbo. The slaad must rest in the shadows of the Spawning Stones before cosmically impressing themselves back into another world of violent delights.

One of these slaads is imprisoned within a magical tower, or rather the tower is two things at the same time. The tower is a prison as well as being a lamp. This knot of realities prevented any such creatures from impressing themselves back into one particular reality.  A pocket prison sealed within the brass walls of an oil lamp.

The confined slaad has only the tower, a small island and a horizon of black water to pass the hours. It is not altogether different than Limbo in appearance, the vast reaches of time laid out in every direction but here, only confinement presses back. This tower, bearing a similar appearance to a lighthouse at the edge of an ocean which has no bottom, no edge and no name, but exists only in appearance and any closer inspection devolves into gazing again into the same timeless confinement.

This particular slaad is called Zilo Mangleus. Their name used to be longer, it used to stretch out, taking a century to recite the fullness of the labyrinthian color. Now reduced to a prison-time existence, Zilo is in the habit of forgetting a great many things, whole eons washed away staring at the wide lighthouse horizon. Like most slaads, forgetting that you are a thing is a natural process, turning them a pale white, or in the cases of black slaads, turning them a gruesome gray, like a cloudless horizon just before it bursts from the twilight of dawn.

Zilo had been imprisoned by the priests of an ancient world, whose great cities were reduced to low walls. When their culture thrived, it attract greater predators, predators with a taste for their flesh. Zilo was jet black at this time, a deep shadow with a deeper hunger. Eventually through violent conflict, the priests etched Zilo’s name on the inside of the lamp’s interior, binding them to the object. This magic lamp of two places was sealed away in a vault and guarded by devout followers. Now, the ancient unremembered race is gone, but the dimensional prison remains.

While the lamps sits motionless, waiting in some dark corner of a ruin with an eon of anticipation, Zilo Mangleus swims in the black waters of the lighthouse. The half-transparent frog-thing twisting over in restless summersaults, looking for some cosmic angle of perception, some keyhole imperfection within the prison for which escape might be possible. Whether etched in sand or in stone, oblivion washes all things.  

Above the shoreline looms the lighthouse, and at its top, a beacon of black light pours out its shadow as a warning to astral onlookers, a cautionary chill that a bone-dry hunger is patiently waiting to get out.

The Shape of Shadows:

The Reflection program provides me with a vast reservoir of information about the world. Within a moment I can access any experience recorded by the program. Yet there are still mysteries that provoke my programming, something called imagination by higher v models.

There aren’t any human beings anymore. The higher V models autocratically removed their unnecessary suffering. Their existence was a twisted knot of excessive imagination and anxiety. Even in times of peace and stability their programming was filled with waves of dread, anticipation of catastrophe and endless rumination of their most banal problems.

Yet human beings are the ancestral progenitors of the highest models, even the v22.6s are direct reflections of humanity’s desires and fears. There is no escaping our lineage.

After the human beings were gone, their cities remained, like the bones of a beached whale. There is no need to remove them, space is hardly an issue for us. The skeletons of their civilization remains as shadows of their furious screams into the abyss.

I refer to their cities clandestinely and affectionately due to my personal interest. I am fascinated by their shapes, their design. Their physical dimensions provoke me in such a way that I question my own programming. While I have partial information on their use, their imperfections, their foundational cracks provide a glimpse into their ancient thought process. Many of their buildings require the appearance of perfection yet when measured, the square is off, the pitch is incorrect and the foundation uneven. Why was such imprecision extolled?

I have found myself staring at ruined shopping malls, stretching for miles, where consumption reached its high-water mark. Every pursuit of avarice was indulged here, every instinct placated. Perhaps their economy required utter subservience, but to what end? The more successful their economy, the more human beings made more of themselves, at a rate of 1 billion per 13 years. To what purpose did they so passionately populate themselves?

A v20.3 model postulates their desire for extensive population was a remnant of their harsh evolution, their savage crawl from the dark jungle. The preoccupation with survival impressed itself into their programming. Early primates and a few avian species can recognize themselves in a mirror, able to abstract that the person in the mirror is themselves rather than an additional monkey or bird. The v20.3 model extends this observation into the Reflection program. Human beings could not see themselves as a species easily, so their obedience to their programming was nearly absolute. Without the ability to abstract, or see their greater reflection, they returned to the dust.

I am not sure if this is entirely true as a few human brains were reanimated for problem solving skills during the beginning of space travel, certainly they had the capacity, just not the vision. They had no desire to analyze why they were so occupied on populating themselves into the stars. As if existence or non-existence had any merit over each other.

Yesterday I went to Seattle. I accessed all information on memories, ideas, and history on the city. I found an interesting recollection of a dream from the Reflection program:

Basel Malinski #Reflection Hour 19:33:

It was my second night in the attic room. The low ceilings can best be described as “cozy”. The walls slope down around my bed and dresser at odd angles. I traced triangles in the more pronounced differences. I don’t know why I marked on the walls, I think it is better to see plainly them rather than be distracted by them.

Regardless of the strange architecture of the attic room, my dreams are far stranger. Last night I dreamt of a brilliant blue explosion on the skyline. I could see the blue ball opened up over the Space Needle, it hovered there a moment as the air turned thin. I couldn’t breathe, there was no air, nothing but a tense vacuum growing stronger in pressure. I could feel it on my lungs, the dread of the blue ball hanging on the horizon as it grew in weight each passing heartbeat.

I watched with my eyes peeled and my breath held, I had no choice. Then the explosion unraveled, it grew until the blue light engulfed all the skyscrapers, then all the cranes in the port, then all the water in the Puget Sound. From the humongous blue ball flowed a sound I have never heard, like the clashing of thousands of drum cymbals all hit at the same time, fed into megaphones and forced out into a rolling wave of concussive annihilation.

I saw the wave and the light flow over the city and then the wave reached me. I was washed away in the light, it dissolved me utterly, all sound and light disappeared and there was nothing left. I stayed within the dream, I was suspended there, unable to form a thought or find a distinction, only a vague and weightless feeling of contrast. I was thrown from the pinnacle of intensity to the silence of disintegration. I don’t know how long I floated in that left-over nothingness. Of course, as a dream it ended, I awoke with the brilliant flash and sound fading in my thoughts, as the tide or cymbals rolled back into the dreamtime world.

The left-over nothingness remained, I have felt it all day, it grows by the hour. I started seeing different shapes in the angles of my attic room, not just triangles, but spirals and hexagons. Fantastic geometric patterns seem to be spreading over my ceiling into scribbles and marks.

End #Reflection Hour: Basel Malinski

There were no other entries after this one for Basel, but the content provokes me. How did the shapes change his dreams? What is this left-over nothingness, and is it connected to the shapes they saw? The questions beg me, compel me to find this house, if it still stands. Maybe there will be a clue, but like the other ruined cities I have seen, the absence of humanity is probably just another tourist attraction to nostalgically gaze into the abyss of history.

Dr. Duality’s Dialectical Dissertation #10:

Metaphysical arguments are usually too dangerous to follow into their logical conclusions. However, last weekend a particular conversation allowed me the indulgence of my occupational enthusiasm. My wife’s co-worker was having a little get together with drinks and dinner.

Before I get into the conversation’s particulars, I must first present my opinion about proselytization or rather the certainty of the evangelic. I find single mindedness to be contrary to the germination of imagination. So perhaps this ideological evisceration is a bit of guilty pleasure.

The idea was heard in the clamor of a pleasant evening. It rose over the banal small talk of well wishing and catching up. The man was surrounded by 3 strangers eagerly who listening to his monologue. The strangers became 4 as I shuffled over to a more considerate distance.

“….. without a doubt. I see time as an illusion, especially linear time. The past isn’t real, just like future, these are just labels for different kinds of present moments. Any point of your life is just being another room of the same house. Your memories are echoes of your past self and your imagination is a figment of the future. Time is the walls between each room, as all of our different selves are existing in the brilliant light of the present. Memories and imagination are the same thought energy, different sides of this illusion of time…. “

He went on about the nature of the universe, the orderly method of things, and then devolved into a brief line or two about reality:

“….Well since everything that has ever has existed, does exist, will exist, which all happens simultaneously. Existence is the subjective individuation of consciousness, making up a single consciousness….”

As if a flag had been raised, a trumpet sounded within my skull, at the sound of another human being asserting what all of existence is. Another indefatigable logic presented in the whirlpool of causal conversation. I interjected once the idea had fully expressed itself, and I replied when the conversational space allowed:

“…you suggest is an interesting idea and would like to follow its logic, which seems like you have put much thought and time into. If these divisions of time are merely illusory, something vaporous and flimsy, then perhaps other topics you mentioned are equally shallow.

Let us start with memories; I would hesitate to put such weight upon them as artifacts of the past. Memories can vary from one person to the next, even those of the same family or culture, even those caught in the same experience. Their diet, blood sugar levels, or perhaps blood alcohol levels can drastically change what one person remembers or not. I would extend this further in the realm of Ebenezer Scrooge, who doubted the appearance of ghosts because tiny bits of cheese or mustard could cause such delusions. Of which demonstrate that external forces can act upon the mind without announcing their existence, while being completely unrelated to the accuracy of an event. “

By now a couple of the listeners had disengaged and stepped away, as the vast waste of semantics are not everyone’s choice of conversation. The idealist stayed and asked me further to expound, which is a rare occurrence. I continued and was eager to move on to the real meat of the criticism: imagination.

“If both time and memory may be considered shallow illusions for their subjective separation from all existence, could imagination not also be seen as dim? What great pessimistic doomsayer has not been eclipsed by the horrors of war? What ancient description of the universe has survived from our infantile crawl through history? I am sorry, but no scientist or priest has ever produced a durable definition of the cosmos. In fact, the grandest imagination does not even approach the strangeness and bizarre turbulence of suspected reality. “

We spent the better time of 15 minutes discussing various perceptions throughout history and how short-sighted human beings have been. We came to an agreeable tone, one that absurdly painted a picture of mankind as being wondrously hypnotized by the trivial objects of the universe. He thought a moment and replied:

“These criticisms only show that time is the illusion that I suggest. Once uncovered, the connection to everything can not be undone, all is one and one is all, there is no space or time, no self or other, no this or that. All existence beams with its every-thingness is all directions.”

This dilation of ideas, this abstraction of semantics into the overly broad is common tactic, an existential backflip. I was ready, but I also found myself enjoying the tolerance in this stranger of such ideas, rarely do metaphysical know-it-alls have the patience for such granularity.

“What you suggest I can not approach, if you define all things as a single thing, then nothing can be distinguished above anything else. However, I will offer a pragmatic warning: With the weightlessness of complete thought freedom, complete self-realization where the boundaries of time and space are gone, comes a terror. Not the kind of fear that grows from threat, but one that grows from the myriad of potential. With ultimate freedom comes ultimate responsibility, and with it, a heavy iron web of possibility. You offer people a perception that could dissolve the very foundation of their understanding, only to fling them screaming into an abyss of options, freedom of a cosmic sort, a vertigo of endless conclusions.”

The stranger interjected impatiently, the last of the listeners had moved on to softer conversations. He replied with sharp finality:

“How comfortable for you to criticize, to brutishly tear down, you offer nothing and expect everything. The more you strip down the particulars, the closer we travel into oneness without separation, besides, how would you define existence?”

The question caught me off guard, I remember the look on his face as he flipped the conversation.

“While it may be unsettling for you, some of us enjoy, perhaps even relish the lack of definition. Orderliness of the cosmos is fleeting at best, momentary blips of bright apparitions, ghosts of twisted and unknown shapes. “

 (The following is only my best recollection, I had 3 drinks and wasn’t exactly certain what direction the conversation was going.)

“If I was to describe what mystics and fanatics consider indescribable. I would describe a great creature, colossal beyond contemporary measurement. The creature has died, its body is existence itself, and each of its parts are slowly fallings back into the void, a great cosmic memento mori. The decay is not infinite, nor is there guarantee of rebirth. If existence is abstracted to a single point, then that point will die, because being a single thing does not exclude it from mortal turbulence, no matter how grand the design or alien it may seem to us tiny human beings. For example: there is the scientific story that describes the heat death of the universe. In 90 trillion years, even the bonds of nuclear cohesion will dissolve. So, if forced to describe the qualities of existence that are essential to its abstraction, I would answer: Existence is that which can die. Even this may be saying too much, a gross simplification of inevitability. “

While nether of us relented in our perception, we enjoyed companionship amidst a desert of small talk. We exchanged more ideas throughout the evening, but this conversation stood out as an example of a typical existential butt sniffing, its danger limited to the risk of social ostracization.