They call me a rat. Well I call them a circus of fools. I gnaw through rolls and rolls of their barbed wire with ease. My tools make short work of such stupid hindrances. It’s not long before I’ve left my mark on their idiot-rockets and am comfortably back in my warm little hole. I didnt damage anything, mind you. Not structurally anyway. Just a little defacing to show them what I think. A piece of my mind to take up there with them.
As if I’d ever go up there myself. Dont make me gag. All those idiot clowns convinced they’ll create some utopian colony out there in the stars. Whoever gave them such lofty notions? They couldnt make a utopia down here in this hole. I wonder how many of them will die in that metal rocket before they reach the closest dirt ball. Good luck without the freeze-pods.
Not that we’re any smarter than them down here. Us left-behind good-for-nothings. Seems escape is on everybody’s mind these days.
Some chase it in cables and servers. Is that still the same fool in there? I wouldnt know. All’s I know is he’s just as unhappy in a machine as in flesh and bone. There’s no escaping the skin, same as there’s no escaping here.
And those vampire fools as I call them are just as backwards. Faulty blood and tattered degenerates seeking eternity one fix at a time. There’s no escaping the now: not into some golden tomorrow, same as you can’t run back into your memories.
All we have is now. Here and now. And even an idiot rat like me in his little fool hole knows that much.
King Arthur and Ægle in the Happy Valley, by J. Martin (1849, oil painting)
There’s many a Welsh tale that an Arthurian knight sleeps deep within this pregnant hill I chose to retire upon. That come the appointed hour he’ll rise to answer the nation’s clarion call for aid. Complete nonsense – I’ve phased through and checked the truth of it for myself: it’s sodden dirt through and through.
But these Cornish tales serve my own ends. True or not, I enjoy steeping myself in lore. In the immersion, the entanglement of my own foreign ways with the confused mythos of these lands.
And of course should I be caught unawares, I appreciate too the plausible cover it provides me. For you see, I am a jinn and this hill is my chosen home.
And as such, its people fall under my protection – I’ve no legal or religious obligation toward them, mind you. No, my duty is a moral choice. One that I’ve extended to my human neighbours personally.
My home, built brick by brick by my own hand, is a cube of three floors, and on each floor three by three rooms. There are no windows, doors or stairs inside: for I ask you, of what use are those to we jinn?
The rooms each hold their own rotating gravities in accordance to a logic that human minds could never comprehend, and rotate about one another like a jinni hand puzzle you might be familiar with. When I slumber within my home I inhabit all nine spaces within, simultaneously using all nine as one and the nine at once separately.
I only tell you all this so you understand the world of difference between my kind and your own.
From the outside, my home on a hill looks like any nondescript human home you might half-remember. Glamoured as to not entice curiosity or exploration, and tailored to be near-invisible to an individual’s memory, each person sees a uniquely dull thing each time they chance to look upon it. The hill is common ground, so many do.
I walk into the town in human form, on the hunt for a new woman to satisfy my appetites. It’s the only payment I demand for the services the locals are unaware they benefit from. I first purchase my trinkets and amusements then quickly find a petite earthly thing with hair in ringlets of spun gold. I spot too a bosomed maiden of raven-hair. I will have both tonight.
I stare intently at them, knowing they feel the heat of my eyes. Once they turn to face me, the deed’s as good as done. They’re prey paralysed, can only see visions in their mind of the pleasures and perversities to come.
I speak to them in old Brythonic tongue but the words incanted are mere formality. They don’t understand the symbols I speak, not consciously, but the strong Bretton blood in them stirs under the surface. Bubbles. It recalls older transgressions, recognises this for the violation of ancient covenants that it is. Tonight our fornications will spawn nephilim of the new age.
In my short time in this land I have seeded many women this way. In the morning they’ll wake in their own beds, bellies full with abomination and hearts with gratitude. No mortal men will ever be enough for them after such a night. I conquer wholly and forever their bodies, hearts and souls before moving onto new fertile lands.
My children – these nephilim – will live long fruitful lives like their father. Endowed with inhuman abilities and jinni appetites. They will enjoy mortal visages and inherit their mothers’ love for these lands. And between great acts of renown will they slumber deep in many pregnant hills.
In such a way have I mixed my heritage with that of this nation, granting truth to their fanciful tales.
The Overlife bloomed one spring morning and persisted all through that summer.
I was awake and outside that first sunrise, was present in the fields as it happened (Or, I should say, was absent, being lost deep in my thoughts already). As light broke through the trees and light mist, I saw at once the reflections of a billion worlds on the dew that set on each blade of grass. And these world-containing reflections, this universe of mirrors, sat in a golden carpet of light that led from me to the warm sun.
Drawn out from within myself by such a scene, I felt my heavy heart lighten for a brief moment. It was then that their cries drew my notice, before I saw a single babe.
A thousand newborn babies, wet from fresh birth glistened on the grass like dew. They littered the field randomly, evenly, like sprinkled salt. No just God would torture me so. No. So I ran. From their pitched screams and from the horror of the scene. I ran from that field where the Overlife had bloomed not knowing if I stepped on any of them, not knowing this field was but one of thousands. By midday those thousand-thousand babes had melted away like drops of dew.
I never wanted a child until it was too late. Even the monthly tug of the moon couldnt abate my fears of an accident throwing my life into disarray. I was constructing ever so carefully the jigsaw puzzle of my life and children were messy things.
They called it the Overlife. And were it not for worldwide videographic evidence to the contrary, we could’ve chalked it up to a mass psychosis. We would’ve been happy to. Theories abounded about what it was, what it could possibly mean.
The term Overlife itself must’ve caught on because it was such a neutral-positive phrasing for a phenomenon so horrifying to witness. As though it was a mild pleasant abundance of goodness, and not the sudden emergence and extinction of a million unsheltered souls from somewhere unknown. Ridiculous, yet somehow we were placated. Naming the thing took away its terror. So much so that when the event repeated not a fortnight following, it was barely a blip. Markets moved on, joggers jogged on. I think we would’ve been more inconvenienced if each crying child was replaced by a rotting cauliflower head.
With my career where I wanted it at last, I felt an empty pit in my belly. An empty hole that left me unfulfilled, unsatisfied and hollow. I realised that I wanted so badly to have a child of my own. That he or she was the central piece of the puzzle, not some outside chaotic force. But by then my womb had grown barren with age. It was an empty pit, incapable of producing offspring.
The souls of the unborn and aborted, some surmised of the Overlife. That was the best we could philosophise whilst scientists tinkered away in their labs for a cool explanation. That these were unwanted souls who were somehow perforating their holding womb-space together, and entering into the cold world regardless.
None of them were mine. Certainly not in some genetic sense, as I had not terminated anything viable. But I decided I would make one mine nonetheless. Why should a babe in need of a mother be denied one willing? I felt my womb quicken and ran out, letting it lead me to the child, as though we were connected by a cord.
I knelt in the grass and waited for the Overlife. Soon enough dew followed and then the wails and wails. I picked up my baby and held her tight as I felt my chest grow heavy with milk, grateful that she’d chosen me.
Tonight the city rings louder than most nights. Its walls and floors are alive with electric – they throb in sync with the shrieking pitch and drumming heartbeat in my ears. The pressure in my head can no longer be contained. I feel sick – I throw up.
I drag my wet leathered shoulder across the fence. Some of the panels are digital but they bear my weight nonetheless. I trudge forward, half-blind. I picture myself through the eyes of my pursuer. So kino – I’ve been shot.
It’s too late for me. All I have left to give is this last defiance – to be gunned down in the grey rains like a dog and take joy in the aesthetics of my out-of-body imaginings, that it might inspire those who witness it.
Ah my eyes. I pause again to catch my breath. Is that me wheezing? Ah my lungs.
We did nothing for too long. It hurts to admit it, much less to say, but our generation has failed yours. The only baton we pass on is a lesson in the follies of patience and passivity – in not believing your eyes over your ears. Just know there was no malice for you in our hearts, young brothers and sisters: only ignorance, denial and cowardice. Fight. Every day, fight.
We grew up witnessing the first decline, were promised the momentum of history would drive us through it like a speed-bump. We dutifully abided. We couldn’t conceive the bait and switch done to us, maybe because we couldn’t conceive doing the same to you.
It’s said every generation must rise to its own challenges. Ours was to recognise the nebulous rot that had emerged in every system before the era of singularities entrenched them to code. For a generation so used to standing by, to watching and observing, how could we have failed so utterly? It will be yours to excise the rot, root and stem from code. So kino.
The nano-swarm in the grey rains concentrate around me. I see them swarm like locusts, I’m sure of it. Natural rain didnt look like this did it? The aftermarket cybernetics often trigger terrible bouts of visual snow in me. Or maybe that’s just permanent nerve damage or the mould exposure. I’m no expert – it doesnt matter. Tonight the nano-swarm jam my optics far worse. I can feel them in my nostrils as I go blind. Can smell them plug my airways.
I realise too late that I’ve been robbed of my kino last stand. As in life, so too in death. The seeker will not come to finish me. Nor will the drones: no spider pack, no dogs, no birds. Instead they’ve blinded my senses. The nano-swarm congregates in my lungs and brain until even my mind’s eye is blind. In penance for a lifetime of perverse voyeurism and standing idly by, I am robbed of an audience, of performing my final act, of even witnessing it in my imagination.
They disable the panel my dead body leans on. It collapses unceremoniously in cold vomit.
My father had always warned me of strange things in the forest. He was a wise man and forbade me from wandering after dark alone and from straying too far from our cabin when we holidayed there. I never doubted his words, but in turn he rarely indulged me any further details. He was a brave man and my rock besides, and I could see that even speaking this much on such matters bothered him. I would not press the issue.
Still a child is a child and liable to err from good advice as much by innocent neglect as by childish rebellion. And I was no rebel. Before I knew it, the air began to turn and I realised the river had led me farther from the cabin than I could make back by sunset. I stabbed my fishing spear into the mud, a signpost of the furthest I’d ever ventured, and made haste on my return.
A girl’s laugh carried through the winds and accompanied me on my panicked dash. It seemed close and quiet, like a whisper to my ears and persisted whichever way I turned my head and wherever I went. The laugh was joyful but undoubtedly cruel and inhuman. Did the forest itself delight in frightening a poor child? Was it merely a sylph or perhaps God herself? I just ran.
The years since then swam through my fingers like baby fish in the river. But that moment of helplessness stands still, forever etched in my heart. I retrieve my old fishing spear. Where once it had marked the furthest I’d been from home, in the years since it was as close as I’d get. The sight of it would fill me so many things. Fear, anger, loneliness. But disgust at myself, most of all. I used any and all emotion as dirty fuel.
My old spear once stood a head over my own, but now it barely cleared my chin. No more was I a helpless child, to be paralysed by the forest’s malicious nature. The sylph had invited me to return when I was ready, and ready I was at long last.
The cabin looked smaller than I remembered and its wood somehow duller than in my mind’s eye. But I could smell my father here, as though he had never died that day.
The sylph’s face burrowed out of the trees, and her body emerged from the soil to join as one. And that mocking cacophony, that whispering laugh from my old relived nightmares.
She had dared me to save my father once. ‘I’m scared’, I’d replied. I was just a helpless child. She had gloated that helplessness was irredeemably in my nature and not a part of my youth.
My father emerged now from the cabin, shocked to see his child so grown. He recognised me at once and I froze once more for I knew instantly that I had been given more than I could endure. More than I’d been promised. Beside me, a smaller younger me also froze, oblivious to my presence. The sylph took much glee in our failure to act.
Again and again she brought me back to that moment, such that I populated about the cabin silent and still, much like the trees. And not once could I move to save my father.
I returned to my hometown convinced it was all a simulation; all of it Stumbling onto the word of God like that, those incontrovertible laws of physics Well it was clear as day, even to a fledgling programmer like me Code: code from the top down and again code beneath it all, lurking Every invisible pit in the night sky, every degenerative telomere in our baked clay All of it preordained and pre-set in the Preserved Tablets above: code is code
Soon after my return I met with a distant relative of mine who I hadnt seen in years, not since I had left for the city She was something akin to a cousin Dearer to me in fact than actual blood Well she sat across from me a priestess of sorts now, with bleeding pits for eyes Both of them gouged out by her own hands in sacrifice for true vision I couldnt conceive of such a senseless belief or conviction
Well she claimed she was a channel to the beyond now and nothing more That she had gouged out more than just her eyes: that she’d also gouged out her mind She was my cousin and kin no more and instead a passing face to be worn by things unknown, and furthermore, unknowable
Who would consent to such a thing? To be reduced knowingly to an antenna No; to a glove, moved around and puppeteered at the fancies of the betentacled Were they terrifying angels or demons that possessed her? Did it matter an iota?
I cannot believe divine providence would allow my dearest cousin to expunge her soul so wholly, yet what is Written for you will reach you as surely as code is code
I sing a song of history a song of bloody memory I sing of ships and spice and gold that men may venture forth once more like days of old with a familiar vigour
I sing a song of fable a song of sword and stone I sing of weaving myth from tales that men might hear for truth this day if nowhere else but in their soul
I sing a song of meaning a song of dragons slain I sing a song of prayers and cloth that men abate their wroth and pain instead in common ground, in blue and white and red
I sing a song of servitude a song of civic duty I sing of knights about a table round that men may learn of gallant beauty and their brotherhood be found
I sing a song for tomorrow a song of hope and harvest I sing of full bellies, of fertile tum and lands then men may count within their hands and know all the ways in which they’re blessed
I sing a song for Albion and the Lady of the Land I sing of a people’s dreams the anthem that its men would chant anew in sport or hearth, with an ale to hand or brew
No doubt it will be used on me the moment its existence becomes public. I tinker away in secrecy, amused that there’s no real way for me to profit from my invention. But that was never the intention was it? It’s a compulsion after all: We are who we are and cannot help our passions nor what we’re drawn to. I remember making an L out of lego bricks in reception, then being told on and having my makeshift gun confiscated.
I havent given the prototype a distinct name as it rightly deserves, but it’s a gun. Of course it’s a gun. When has anything else ever changed the world?
Though the technology has broader implications, none interest me aside from this singular implementation. The concept is simple and once I finalise it, the ensuing deaths will be elegant.
Picture for a moment the usual trajectory of a bullet fired by a gun. It explodes from the nose, rippling through space and tearing through all materials in its path. The entire time it loses speed, arcing down under the weight of gravity until at last it lodges itself into its final location. Glorious, but inelegant all the same.
And what of all the collateral damage between the gun and target? What of poor aim? Of distance, rendering targets missed or unreachable?
Now imagine a gun which fired bullets directly to a point in space, instead of tracing an arc through it. The target, and only the target, would be killed by the marksman, irrespective of what lay between them and how far. Beautiful. Simple. Drone strikes and snipers have never looked so unsexy.
My gun consist of two parts: a glove and an augmented visor. A perfect synthesis of action and observation. Of thought and execution. The glove functions as control and trigger; the visor displays coordinates in spacetime. You simply navigate through space-points, directing the bullet to when and where it should lodge. Theoretically you could kill a man on another continent yesterday with none the wiser.
That’s what should be possible. My prototypes have killed men living in the past already, dont get me wrong. But as yet the execution remains messy.
The maps do not thread to the endpoint neatly. The bullets in effect still arc a line, only now through a greater range of space and time. They appear and disappear seemingly at random through existence, until they land when and where they ought to. The target still dies of course, but the problem lies in all the collateral deaths along the way.
As it stands my gun is as much a machine gun as it is a sniper rifle. Doubly inelegant, no less discriminate than a nail bomb. So I tinker away in secrecy. The greatest evidence of my success and genius will be my dying before it can occur.
I knew he was the devil the moment he walked through my door. The way he sauntered in, even the way he sat down. No mere human could exude such condescension doing so little.
‘You know why I’m here.’
I did. As deep as I’d buried it, it all unfolded to the fore now at once. Here and there over the years, an anxious lingering might’ve persisted in the rare dream. A scream yes, but no more. Never had a nightmare bubbled forth like this frozen moment.
The devil, one ankle resting atop the other leg’s knee, tugged up at his trouser. His socks of course were red. He looked around the consultation room with pretend amazement, that smile of his never approaching those falsely big eyes. ‘You’ve done well for yourself, doctor.’
‘Please. I’m a good man. I help the sick.’ How to plead with the devil? There was no use, I know. This foul creature that wore a person’s shape like a coat knew me better than any real human on God’s earth. Knew all my idle thoughts, what my hands did in darkness. But I was a good man, truly.
‘A lifetime of good could never wash out a stain so black as yours.’ So it was that then. Of course it was. The gall of me to think I could ever truly forget.
I believed – in all the proper things, God, heaven, hell – and I lived my life accordingly. But truth be told, I believed in them more as stories and metaphor. The literal devil sat in my room dispelled any notions of their fantasy now. Yes, now I certainly believed every word concretely, knew it to be as true as any diagram in my medical books. ‘I was just a child. No older than six. I couldn’t know what I meant.’
‘And yet you meant it all the same. With the best intentions, you cant put Humpty together again. That baby is dead because of you.’
Could words uttered in the human heart actually kill? Could laser eyes burn death into whatever they held? Yes: At long last I knew the truths I’d wrestled against and denied for so long. Yes.
God was real and the devil was real. My scientific rigour could not refute them, nor the old superstitions back home. Nazr, the Evil Eye was real and I had cursed a baby to death to exact vengeance for my dead bird. Decades of buried guilt, of remorse could never even the scales. His mother’s wailing scream in the dirt, that white noise of my dreams; there was no making amends for that.
Uselessly I wondered who might’ve cast nazr on me back then, a rich western child, to so ensnare me in the devil’s gaze.
It wouldnt save me now but I couldnt help but recite a piece of scripture to the devil. Verse 5:32 from al-Maa-idah, most closest my heart: ‘Whoever kills a soul except for manslaughter or corruption, it’s as if he killed all of mankind; and whoever saves a soul, it’s as if he had saved the entirety of mankind.’
The air hangs heavy with her love. Her hair is everywhere and everything. I breathe it in. I savour it. Devour it, consume it as I do every part of her whole. I tug at her scalp and she shifts again.
My arm snakes hers, the hand now caressing the soft of her nape and neck and throat. A light squeeze and then a harder one so she knows she’s mine, and then a tracing finger reaches up, up to the corner of her mouth. She turns her head, capturing my finger between her teeth and sucks gently. Her actions and purring remind me I am just as much hers, if not more. We writhe as one, every moment forever and every moment fleeting.
Even as her face and body continue to morph, I exalt in her constant being. The taste of her multitudes, all the fragrance of her deepest secrets. She delights in being seen at last, in truly being known. In being discovered and explored by one who would dare venture the contours of her soul as much as those of her skin.
I’m ravenous. I want more than there is. Her smell smothers me of sense, as much as it suffocates me of oxygen. I will take and take and take. She is the universe in one woman. She is every woman. Still, it’s not enough to satiate me. Something is not right. Something is empty.
In a transient moment of clarity I recognise the fever dream for what it is and this clearly disturbs her, though I cannot say whether she’s ignorant to the game at play. My apprehension infects the space, distorting it as much as my senses. She forks into two universes of woman, and both beckon me to forget or to remember: Which I cannot say. She forks again and again.
A thousand soothing fingers run through my hair, massage my scalp and thigh. Her multiplied faces, as alike as they are different, litter the horizon and my eyesight and periphery. One face rests in my lap. Buried under the weight of her constance and drowning, I focus my energies upon it alone and on breathing.
I do not regain control of my self, only of my breath. I choke her. I will take and take and take. A universe of universes will not satiate me. Her infinities lessen exponentially. A thousand becomes one becomes nothing. Her hair is everywhere and everything.
abdulj. 