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.
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.
Oh god. We thought we were at war. We thought we knew who we were and who we were fighting against. What we stood for, and what they didnt.
It felt good to feel good again. To feel just and right. When the old ways had fallen to the way side one by one, we humans were reduced to feeling zero.
Perhaps they had only been false things – religion and politics – or irrelevant identitarian tribalisms – nation, wealth, race, creed, sexuality. But once the scores had been settled and the winners decided, all sides remaining stood empty. Invariably we were left with fewer and fewer groups to be right against.
Whether by war or sanction, public outcry or personal shaming – or simply the decay of older generations, the world folded neatly into itself. Over and over. Healing a little each time. Until we were left with the one final fold.
So it was when I was born. The world preparing to win or lose. To adapt or die. A war to end all wars. The Last World War.
It was almost funny how little it took for the old fault lines to reveal themselves. Had all the preceding wars been the same? We on this side, and they on theirs? Olds slurs ripped anew, hate hidden in the blood and given fresh form?
It was simply a matter of direction. We wanted freedom above all. Autonomy. Bravehearts as we were. And they wanted efficiency. Fairness beyond reproach.
In truth it was a fight as old as time. But the technology gave it a new flavour. A fresh lick of paint. We, predominantly western world wordcels, indulging ourselves with verbiose rhetoric and philosophical minutiae. And they on the eastern front simply intuiting their black boxes.
The real reason communism had never worked beyond a pencil and paper was the human beast. His greedy self-interest left unharnessed, Her slovenly reach left unchecked. Their black boxes could fix all that. What humans could not, algorithms simply Did. Ruthlessly. Efficiently. Blindly. Fairly.
Trust the Chinese to throw away their freedoms for a shred of stability. There we go with old slurs.
Were we really any better? Scattered, disunited states, fragmented former-federal friends. Together only in our will to be apart. Perhaps beliefs on both sides run deeper than we can admit.
So we fought. Their black box leviathan replicated. Its tendrils and heads seeped into every pocket around the globe. It was a hydra, it was a kraken. And we did what we did best. We fractured. Decentralised to dust, too scattered to be worth chasing. One man cells if resistance. Sometimes less. Much was possible in the new world.
How horrible an epiphany then, to realise one day that the war was already lost. It had been lost before we had even begun. That we ourselves had been another head of the hydra, another tendril of the kraken.
The wargame theory of the black boxes exploited our propensity to divide from the outset. Any strength we ever had had been in our numbers. And in not standing together, we had walked right into the leviathan’s mouth.
All of us isolated, alone. Single cell humans, rendered inert. Swallowed whole by the enemy. Each one slowly realising our folly. We thought we knew who we were fighting against. Oh god.
—
this (unedited) one was based on a couple of vague dichotomies that have been swirling around lately
wordcels vs shape rotators formalism vs intuition decentralisation vs AI west vs east
You spear throwers think yourselves apex speak yourselves deep into this delusion as though you came to the fire and not it to you
all the creatures of the kingdom play chase so tell me why man prefers to hide than seek except that in your heart of hearts you recognise you are still the prey and something hides in the brush
–
The prison is all but complete, hell manifest and the meat bicker over who holds the keys and who paints the cells
abdulj. 