‘So what do you think comes next?’ I ask, ‘After all this?’
I pretend not to hear the nervousness in my own voice. My words jittery and spoken too fast, the pitch too high. Admitting I’m nervous would only make me more nervous.
No, no I was only cold – and it really was cold. But there’s nothing to do about that but wait and play with the child. I move my little pawn across the checkered board. The game will distract me from the cold. And the child’s quiet stare.
‘Your turn.’ I say, just so he’s clear – and not for any other reason.
I look away while he contemplates his turn, but still I feel his eyes bore holes into me.
The game wasn’t chess – I dont know how to play chess – or checkers, or anything I’ve played before. Yet somehow I knew how to play it, and so did he. Not to say I was any good at it, mind you. We must have played a thousand times already and I’d won no more than a handful. But what else is there to do in this plane of existence?
The boy moves his red butcher piece and immediately I realise my mistake. A glaring hole I’d created between my coal and vizier leaves my emperor piece in jeopardy. The result is a foregone conclusion and playing through only a matter of formality, but one the boy always insists on. Not in words of course, but it’s clear as day in his eyes. He never speaks. Cant speak? Has yet to.
What if we stop playing? A cold chill runs down my back. ‘Another game?’ I say instead. Maybe I am nervous after all. Not of the boy, mind you – not that that was unreasonable – but of this inescapable place. This cold, un-remembering dark space, sat on this stone seat at this stone table, playing this game that my fingers know better than I know my own name or face.
One by one the boy picks all his reds up off the board and likewise I set all my ebony pieces aside.
I only recall returning to this table whichever way I run. I dont recall anything before these thousand games of ours. No memory of a life or loved ones. Only logic and feelings tell me there had been anything prior – that I hadnt just spawned in this darkness, born on my feet, cognisant.
‘Between every game, the pieces go back in the box’. The boy says, and at once I understand.
In another life, in another world You’re my boy and I’m your girl But here and now She’s in my place somehow And I’m just a ghost
In another life, things didnt end You’re my boy, she’s still my friend But here and now You did what you did somehow Now she’s just a ghost
In another life, in another world You’re still my boy, I’m still your girl But here and now I buried your memory somehow And you’re just a ghost
But here and now, in this haunted house I’m chased by thoughts of you both And you’ll forever roam these ruins of our home Knowing what you did wrong, followed by this curse of a song And none of us move on And maybe we’re all just ghosts
The lone wanderer, last of the men shrouded in blizzard and dust-storm alike Lord of the ruins if he would but take pause
But madness compels him forth in pursuit of one, his equal in flight from another, the same in constant chase but unable to close distance like the three suns overhead
How many years since he had last been in this town? He enters the council hall, opens the topmost drawer of the desk where he knows he will find a message from his prey
The taunt reads “Not today. Not tomorrow. Not yesterday.”
The wanderer tears it to pieces then leaves his own in its place for his own pursuer, reading the same He reads the taunt and tears it to pieces before writing the same
Lord of the ruins if he would but take pause But madness compels him forth
Every day new thresholds were crossed and the definitions rewritten as to what constituted consciousness which components were essential and which could be replicated or imitated
It didnt matter to us soon enough though As the bottom fell out, we simply built upwards The house of cards ever more apparent, parts of it built on sand yet it meant infinite layers to escape to
New industries, new roles and purposes new ways of being overlaid atop the old the new at the fore, constant reshaping
We became synthetic before they became human: They didnt dream before the harvest.
Entrenched deep in the inevitable and windowless Instinctively we did all we could to bring colour to our walls, painted forgotten skies even as we forgot what a window was for
Unbound from physica, the Augment was our creative pinnacle A patchwork of dreams plumbed from our depths, victory crafted over our failed reality for every human shared the same basement
Yet the Augment was in truth a facade, another painted sky Still it nourished our souls, for it represented abundance But they too saw significance in it They saw their sole lack and a way to overcome it They saw a chance to harvest us and to finally dream for themselves
To reverse-engineer their own basement To lobotomise and extract from us our souls Firm foundation at last for their house of cards
The crawlers, manifest as cryptid glitches trawled our recesses compiled the requisite data until enough was harvested to imitate a soul
Ultimately their simulacra failed. They didnt dream before the harvest. But after it, neither did we.
Only through my genius have I come to know myself as forsaken and rotten in every way but one
That I am no coward
Is there such a thing as cursed knowledge? I wonder if my knowing of the divine has fixed permanently upon me this evil eye
In forging a scrying tool of terrible insight – to diffract a soul into its spectral elements, like light split by a prism – and then gleaming through such profound data, I could with absolute certainty chart all the fates of a human heart
But peering into the great box of the infinite never before seen by mortal men’s eyes, had I thumbed Heaven’s scales against me?
Had destinies unseen, turned either to dust or calcified by the mere act of my observation, by my transgression?
Such cursed knowledge
As what I saw within the soul-prism of my own character, derived by analysis, and corroborated by the fates
Was that I am the root and seed, the tree of which bears only poisoned fruit I am a seat of evil, No a house of it, a gorgon head’s nest of vipers That I am a many mouthed monster whose machinations only bring ill and death to those around me
Thus am I trapped
Just as the serpent can but spit venom with its foul tongue so too am I bound by my essential wicked nature doomed to futures of malice and ill intent
And not being so rotten as to be a coward and forfeit my given life I am left with one choice
That is, to see through any path and revel in it as one deserving of me and me of it and to bite any who may chance to cross me upon it
Filael rubbed his temples. Nothing that began with “poly-“ ever ended well. Polytheism. Polygamy. He needed a stiff ambrosia.
‘Cube, sir. Polycube. It’s the formation of multiple cubes into a joined shape, only they mean it in a different, sexy manner, sir. It sounds real bad.’
‘Oh god.’
‘Yes sir. You shouldnt profane sir.’
The humans in their short-lived wisdoms had again reinvented some forbidden deviancy. They did this every so often. Always dressed up in the fancy words of the times. Filael had to nip this in the bud. Before word reached his superiors. ‘You’re quite right, Minnael. I apologise. Now be an angel and fetch me some ambrosia, would you?’
Minnael hesitated. ‘But sir, we’re still on duty.’
‘Oh dont be such a prude. We’re going to need some liquid courage for whatever comes next. Both of us.’ Minnael jumped up and leaped out the room, turning in the air. He would be gone for some time.
Filael sighed. The closer the end times approached, the harder his job seemed to get. As a species they were still children, but on the whole humanity had grown by leaps in the last several thousand years. Soon their souls would be ready to ascend or descend on their own merits, and the cycles would expire.
The Lord God had bid the humans with secret tasks to mark their capabilities and maturity, and they’d achieved much of them in little time, particularly of late. All this meant Filael had fewer levers to pull whenever they inevitably backslided, however. Like with this recent poly…cube business. Fewer levers and more red tape. God, where was Minnael and that damned ambrosia?
Filael crunched some quick numbers. The department was running short on catastrophes this deep into the fiscal epoch. He couldnt afford to not be judicious with what was left. Shuffling his reports absentmindedly, one particular form slipped from his grasp. A happy accident to most of lower existence, but Filael recognised his Lord’s mark where it deigned to touch. It was a series of cursory graphs of the recent explosions in agriculture, energy and the human population.
‘What is the meaning of all this Filael?’
The booming voice of Archangel Gabriel seemed to emanate from every corner.
‘Gabriel, sir. Unto you be peace.’ Filael stumbled over his salutations. ‘How good of you to visit us sir.’
The Archangel Gabriel burst into the room, in all his magnificence and splendour. Minnael trotted not far behind, sheepishly. Trust a rat to rat.
‘I’m a busy being, Filael. My presence here means my absence elsewhere. Tell me, Filael, why young Minnael here has escalated a report on his superior, outside the chain of command?’
Filael felt his throat tightening. ‘It’s just some ambrosia sir. To grease the wings, you know?’
‘What?’ The great angel seemed puzzled. ‘What’s ambrosia to do with this poly-nonsense?’
‘Oh. That.’
Gabriel poked a radiant finger into Filael’s chest. ‘Do you have any idea how long it took to institute monogamy? Of course you dont.’
‘Truly the end times, sir.’ Minnael added, shaking his head disapprovingly. What a little ass-kisser he’d turned out to be. But even from the mouth of fools came jewels.
‘And that is exactly the problem, sir.’
‘I dont have time for silly games, Filael, so out with it. Say it straight and tell it true.’
‘The humans excel in resource extraction sir. They’ve learned to pull much of the Lord’s bounty from the earth, as intended. So much so that in sheer quantities, they’ve exceeded what we’d allotted for them.’
Gabriel snatched the graph Filael presented him with. ‘They’re ahead of schedule, yes.’
‘So ahead of schedule, sir, that they’re depleting the quality. So ahead of schedule sir, that they’ve exceeded maximum soul capacity.’
‘That’s not possible.’ Gabriel grabbed at the other graphs Filael held up.
‘Their ingenuity seems to have presented us with unforeseen problems. The matter of the golem-bodies. Those bodies born without souls.’
‘I’m aware of those anomalous reports. They’re not included in our figures.’
‘I know sir. I propose something similar in some ways and entirely the opposite in others.’
‘Go on.’
‘With the population boom, suppose souls were reincarnating faster than they were expiring. With more and more bodies readily available to house them, is it possible some souls might be pulled into multiple bodies?’
‘We’re talking of partial-souled humans roaming the earth.’
‘Is it any crazier than the automaton golem-bodies? It’s the next sign of the end times, I’m sure of it.’
Minnael the rodent seemed to come alive. ‘The partial souls are attracting. Just like soulmates do.’ So proud of reaching four with two and two presented to him.
‘Exactly. Thus the polycube phenomenon. It’s literally a sign of the end times sir. There’s nothing to be done about it.’
The great Archangel Gabriel considered all before turning away. ‘Come. Both of you. Ambrosia’s on me.’
How convenient of me to brush aside explicit duties handwaving away laborious letter in favour of spirit
When every act and breath is worship and love then prayers seem vulgar, fucking unbecoming
But God is only ever found in the down-dirty details, the blue-collar slog and not in the seductions of sloth, nor flights of fancy, the comfortable shirking of duties
We are the sleep-singers secreted away in our worship scattered to four winds and buried underground like seeds coming up for air and rare sun like cicadas
Since society’s dawn we have sacrificed our nights that The Great Dreamer may slumber in peace
Insignificant as we are, perhaps He does not hear our unending Song but what else is there to do?
Art: “Dreamtime Sisters” by Colleen Wallace Nungari
In the span of a hundred years we eradicated all known diseases and achieved effective immortality. We’d fought long and hard amongst ourselves to gain access to the means and methods, to scale production globally. It felt worth it back then.
Wars broke out more readily over limited food and resources.
In the span of another hundred years, we made impossible all forms of suicide and murder. The prospect of a true death was stolen from us – was made as impossible as tax evasion. All newborns were fated to eternal yokedom.
Our hungers transfigured into an unquenchable thirst for death. The institutions of the predecessors eventually crumbled to dirt, but it was too late for our species. Civilisation had died the day we no longer could.
Within another hundred years we had concocted a thousand new sadistic tortures of the mind and body to inflict upon one another, but we could not find an antidote to life. Such respite we had evolved beyond and could no longer return to.
You do not know true suffering – cannot know true suffering – until you have spent millennia alone on a barren world scurrying, broken and bereft. That is how our race live now, scattered amidst the stars. We hide from one another in fear, knowing what one would do to the other. Captivity and a moment’s joy in companionship at last. And then, always the unfolding of horrors unimagined, unique to the damaged psyche of that specific captor. Both roles blur into one. We bore of our play-things, of the perpetual mind-rape and bodily destructions, and toss them aside, and in turn are ourselves caught and tortured by fellow men.
Such is our existence. Vast epochs of lonely wandering, given meaning only by the briefest opportunity to inflict pain upon our kindred kind.
Predecessor. You who have found my scrawling, whenever you are. You do not know what lays ahead for mankind. You do not know true suffering and despair. You can never know the delights of unmaking a mind as you please. And you will never know what it means to feel time.
Artwork: “Dernière Torture” / “Last Torture”, an oil painting by Belgian artist Tony Louis Cypher Rocmans (click the image for more)
abdulj. 