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Your brother’s last stand (too little too late)

February 4, 2025 //
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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.

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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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The Avatar, expunged and worn

January 15, 2025 //
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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

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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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All of Her, Everywhere and Everything

August 27, 2024 //
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An oil painting by Gustav Klimt called Vatten Orm II, or Water Snakes II.

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.

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Soul upon Soul

February 13, 2024 //
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Soul Walk 02, a painting by Tzi Artistic

The stone, smooth. To look at. To touch. As though washed over by a thousand torrents, which it had been. Polished as though it had passed a thousand sculpting hands. In actuality though just one sculptor had lain hands upon the stone. A pearl, the likes of which had heretofore been rarely seen but oft spoken of. Even now the sculptor toiled away beside it, though the thing was discarded to his mind.

Well. He had been a sculptor once. In a sense he still was but what he shaped in this younger age had changed. As had how he shaped his new object and the tools he employed in its crafting.

He bristled as an accidental glance aside brought the smooth pearl to fresh attention. That response by now as automatic as it was cultivated. The stony pearl, that had been the object of eons of his attention, irritated him now. Once though it had been both his literal soul and the perfected fruits of its labour.

But in the age that followed his heart and mind became clear upon the fact that the shape of his soul was incongruous to the whole. An inert piece perfected far beyond its complementary parts. But there was no fashioning a like heart or mind, for such things were by-products only. No the only hope was to develop them in the process of crafting as he knew.

So he fostered imperfect impulses within himself now, so as to craft a lesser soul-form and in the doing craft a sharper heart and mind of a more approximate measure. And these impulses by design, namely: a reasonable impatience at the glacial ages that his craft took; a resentment and anger at the punitive nature of the way of things to his early attainment of a perfect form; a pre-emptive exiles, self-imposed and borne of feeling deserted by his kind; and an entitlement that such a master sculptor as he should ever be denied any fruits, even those not yet laboured towards.

He looked back now to his new incomplete soul-form: as yet a jagged dull knife, not reflective of the epochs spent upon it. They would not have his soul. Not the old or new. And he would have his bettered heart and mind one way or another.

In the throes of all his nurtured impure impulses, the once-sculptor angrily took into his hand the perfect smooth pearl. And as though it were a whetstone, he sharpened his new soul-form upon the old.

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Between our thousand games

November 18, 2023 //
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‘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.

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The angels muse (on unforeseen problems presented by human ingenuity)

February 1, 2023 //
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‘Poly-what now?’

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.’

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To feel time

November 17, 2022 //
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“Dernière Torture” / “Last Torture”, an oil painting by Belgian artist Tony Louis Cypher Rocmans

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)

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Stockport in smog / Oklahoma City, Zach Bryan

November 1, 2022 //
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Does anybody believe Stockport is a real place? Spoiler warning to outsiders: it’s not.

It’s an inside joke between true northerners, little more than a winking jibe at our past. As pretend as the mad hatter. 

It’s the haunted tale of a place hidden in smog, inhabited by wheezing ghouls and the restless spirits of the never-were.

A liminal town, cosy in its eternal withered state – somehow just as near its demise now as when the old mills first shut.

It’s the wistful return to policemen walking their beat and knowing your name. Of horse-drawn carriages and polite manners.

A paradox to be teased out if you would compile the urban myths. Somehow a love letter to both small talk gossip with strangers and the quaint knowing of everyone of everyone else. 

Stockport is the dream of cityfolk reeling from their busy lives, a fantasy concocted by the sick collective.

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