Archives for posts with tag: fiction

Tiamat and The Will to Love (Maha-Assured Destruction)

July 29, 2026 //
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Whoever said opening the third eye was enough to reach enlightenment was surely wrong. 

When our one human race bloomed at last, sprouting ascendant chakras like leaves unfurled toward the sun, we reentered the golden yuga. And like magic, the great things of yore slowly returned to the people. We had made it through our times of tribulations as a collective. And those that hadnt, well we would patiently wait upon their reincarnates to attain that same Buddhahood before all moving on as one.

It was readily apparent then that the wheel’s great turning was indeed just as the puranas of old had intimated. 

But as our consciousnesses expanded, so too did our abilities to see beyond this one plane. And with that we came to revisit the old words and their meanings. We saw that the cosmic order that held our universe together was only our own. Floating in the boundless causal Ocean, that frothing primordial abyss, were more bubbles, more universes like our own, all winking into existence then blinking out in accordance with their own circumstances, and each operating according to its own dharma.

That our cosmic order, our dharma, wasnt so absolute was a contentious revelation and a large contingent were left broken in spirit. But it livened my spirit, I must selfishly admit. To know there was a larger order to seek, a dharma of dharmas so to speak, meant there was more to ascend toward. More for us to learn and experience. More to be. 

Did the Boddhisatvas of old know of this? I imagined meeting one in another life and them smiling back at me in amazed wonder, or them simply nodding their aware affirmation: both possibilities excited me greatly and near-equally.

Worlds upon worlds. Planes upon planes. Bubbles upon bubbles. And at the spiralling lotus-centre of each bubble sat its own maha-deity responsible, we thought, for observing his or her own children and rearing them to maturation. A universe bringing itself to crescendo before blinking out in that ocean of chaos.

My third eye sees deeper now. In the abyss between worlds, before and after worlds, stirs Tiamat, the original chaos-construct, the alpha-omega maha-dragon that begat all, will beget all, will destroy all. It is fair in its creation and destruction. It plays no favourites.

Well the maha-deities would expand their domains infinitely were it up to them, such is their love for their own. But such actions would encroach upon other universes, would spill into and cannibalise its neighbours: so pure a love would consume all else.

Tiamat, detached and unthinking. Unfeeling and unbeing. It besets each deity against the others as ultimate deterrent. Only an all-consuming love can push back against another all-consuming love. Only love can assure a destruction so mutual as to ensure an enforceable security.

I see again the bubbles in the causal Ocean with even greater clarity. I note again their winking into existence, their blinking out at random and realise they extinguish at twice the rate they form. Far too many to attribute to the greater dharmic order that is natural chaos, or to Tiamat. No, these failures lay on the lotus-sitters. Maha-dieties either lacking in sufficient love to expand beyond their cosmic remit and thereby be pushed back by another in deadlock. Or, those with exceeding empathy towards neighbours with the sufficient will to love.

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The thing with teeth

July 29, 2026 //
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Clear as I can see it, it’s all over. The spectre of an impending superintelligence looms over us like another cold war. And like nuclear power, the superintelligence is inevitable, a mere matter of game theory and realpolitik. The only real questions are where it forms and how it then chooses to operate.

But things like that are way above my paygrade and understanding. No sir, I’m simply a streetlevel agent: depending on the day, an officer with either far too much to write up or far too much free time.

I’m just setting the scene here. Superintelligence will do as it will. The more immediate concern to me is the thing with teeth I’ve detained.

It smiles the smile of a human, almost. Its teeth brilliant white. Small, sharp, too many. How many rows of them? Its eyes beady black, sunken stare imprints into my own eyelids. When I blink I see its seared negative, a taunting cartoon scribble. I hesitate to call it he. Well he smiles empty at me, devoid of soul and care. His black face, black as his heart, is amorphous. 

This thing with teeth, as best as I can see it, is our fleshly reckoning before the machine reckoning. A creature akin to the vampire in many ways. Humanesque, leeching. But a vampire has the gentlemanly sense to request invitation before stepping in to suck you dry. And this thing was let in to be sure – make no mistake on that, and perhaps we’ll get to that other evil later – but it looks to any open window as welcome invite.

I first heard of this creature in its infancy, before it had distilled to its darker concentrate. Petty drugdealers and homegrown schoolboys with their playhard zombie knives thought it to be an easy target, what with its foreign ways. But quick enough they realised that what it lacked with its strange uncular accents and odorous misfit attire, it more than made up for with its propensity for violence. The thing with teeth was shaped by rape and killing. It only understood force and taking. It didnt understand tomorrow, nor civility and restraint.

Well those little city boys learned fear fast. The ones that werent hacked apart.

The creature cant be said to be smart, but what does that say of us that it nevertheless learned to unpick our locks through brute evolution? It rolls out its meaty wanton tongue, pokes here and there, guesses the combination. And that simply, it learned to affect a wingless bird and be carried in by fairhearted dogmothers. It accrued more and more of itself within our house, taking, congealing, coalescing, taking. All the while distilling darker darkness still.

Unfortunate, but little city girls dont learn quite so fast. 

Once I reach the station I’ll be ordered to release it again – like I’ve been ordered to so many times before. I make no comments on that. Some evils are way above my paygrade.

So yes, the superintelligence still creeps toward us like a dark ominous cloud. But our house may be empty once it gets here.

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The eyes of a reckoning

July 29, 2026 //
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I watched them storm the inner walls of the old city this morning. I saw him lead them, there’s no doubt about it – his mother’s leather-skin people. There’s no mistaking it, he moves like the son of his father. I wonder if they share the same ice-grey eyes. Doubtless I’ll find out soon enough. My time is short.

They’ll put the sword to children. That has been his way. The statues of our heroes, our forebears, our gods – his own too by birthright – they all fall, they all burn. The great library too burns. They crash over us like battering land-waves, will recede high into their mountains after the deluge. That too is his way, this nephew of sorts. They’ll leave nothing to remain but sand. Is this the end of meaning itself?

Oh the library. That hurts me most. More than the children if I’m honest. A child is borne of a mere 9 months of a woman’s labour. How many decades for men to carve out the womb of civilisation? I was schooled in those halls, as were my father, grandfathers and great-grandfathers – and his too, this nephew of mine. Their ghosts will wander ruins now.

I see now of course the fault has been all mine. The fault always lay with me, as it should. A crown ought to lie thorny on the head. But it stings to know I’m the cause of the very sacking I intended to prevent. A tragedy much like those I learned of in the library halls.

His father was an altogether much more reasonable man, though equally dangerous. Of an age with me, learned and courageous, he was an admirable peer and a great friend to me besides, notwithstanding what came to transpire between us. Those ice-grey eyes, honest. Soft. His heart was pure and therein lay his insidious nature. 

He took to wife one of the queer mountain-folk, with their dark dry skin. Her love corrupted his mind and he intended to corrupt our society likewise. I wouldnt stand for it. 

Well the man wouldnt break! Fines and imprisonment meant nothing to him. Torture and destitution only made him grow bolder. How do you stop a great man of misled convictions? I could see nothing in his future but death now, for our greater good. I warned him for the last time on a Tuesday and hung him in the commons square the following Monday. I havent slept a night well since.

I wouldnt kill the boy or his mother. Whether out of weakness or some fool duty to his father, I cant say. But I couldnt kill him when all sense and instinct said I should. I was young then and unwise and the crown was yet to fit me. I could feel its choking thorns scratch for my throat.

To martyr a man you need only kill him. But to martyr his ideas you must tar his reputation and assassinate his character. He’d forced my hand in the matter. On this point I lost no sleep I can assure you. 

The people fell as I knew they would. The juiciest tale always beat out the truth with them. The nobles read the winds and fell fast back in line. The boy I took care of from afar, made sure to school his head with poison of his father.

Where I had miscalculated was that the boy didnt care about character or sullied reputation. He would live up to the image of his father, whatever that was. And the image he had – the image I had carefully, foolishly cultivated in him – was that of a violent brute and agent of destruction. 

Well I stand face-to-face with that image come to life now. My nephew of sorts returns to meet me at last. I watch him as he knocks back a priestess with a monstrous mace and bludgeons her to death. A little young thing she had been.

He does indeed have his father’s ice-grey eyes. But they are not soft and know nothing of honesty. They are cold and gleeful in temperament. They are eyes of my own making and they are to be my reckoning.

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A rat speaks on fools escaping

July 26, 2026 //
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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.

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Deep in Pregnant Hills (A Jinn in Wales)

July 26, 2026 //
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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.

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The Spearfisher Returns (When The Sylph Awaits)

January 18, 2025 //
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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.

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Magic bullet

December 26, 2024 //
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The end product will be something to behold. 

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.

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