Archives for posts with tag: short story
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To beseech a miscreant

August 16, 2026 //
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The miscreant’s outer fingers, thick with dirt and clotten blood of animal and man alike, twitched nervously like antennae, his thumbs and indexes still pincered in the skeleton of an oloid. He watched the lickspittle candleholders grovel and worm their way forward on dirty knees. It had been a hundred half-years or inverse that since they’d taken to worshipping him, but he was yet to grow accustomed to it. They looked pathetic, their faces soilward, no doubt resentful of their lowered stations. It was a far better arrangement than he’d held with the humans prior, but still left him feeling uneasy. What they’d given almost freely could just as easily be taken away from him. It would never do to remind them of this reality.

The two candleholders, ranked higher and more learned in the magicks than the rest, had been the ones to lead their paltry human procession to him on this visit. The miscreant’s nose twitched. His grotto was small and he could smell the heat of all their bodies, could feel the heat of the twin candle flames. He didn’t like their bringing warmth into his home: it somehow made apparent the cave’s dank cold, and so they would pay for it dearly.

‘What offerings do you bring me?’ He brushed aside the unfurled deer-heart that was pinned to the flat slab used for a study surface. The natural topologies drew his fascinations of late.

A flesh-lacken child shuffled out from behind the two candleholders and laid a glass bowl down carefully. The boy ran back into the herd as the miscreant descended the hollow’s steps, eyes fixed on the black eels sloshing in the bowl.

A candleholder spoke. ‘We offer you eel to feast upon. They heard the whale-song yet still live.’

The miscreant raised the bowl high then to his lips and swallowed its waters in long gulps, only biting down to sever an eel once. Clouds of red inked the soup instantly. He wiped his face of blooden saliva and saltwater with a forearm. ‘The offering is accepted. Now what of sacrifice?’ He could feel the grin form as the words left his lips.

The first candleholder looked to the second. ‘Will you not first hear our request to decide upon your levy?’

The miscreant crashed through the dark of the cave, furious and serpentine and pulled the child back from the cloaked herd by his scruff. He turned to address the candleholders before they’d registered his true direction. ‘I did not intrude upon your home. You intruded upon mine. Word was given once. Accordingly all your lives are forfeit until suitable sacrifice is proffered.’ He could hear their hearts beating, could smell the child’s blood where his fingers had cut into its neck. The boy did not make a sound though a woman bleated from the cloaked herd.

‘Please. Mercy, please.’ Said the second candleholder. Yes, he saw some resemblance between them now. ‘Let the child live and I give you my own life.’

The miscreant released the bony child, and within a human eye’s blink had crawled and galloped to the candleholder, snaking this way and that through shadow and darkness. He pinched out the candle-flame, instantly killing its holder before the man had even registered any movement. 

Then the miscreant licked the molten wax of a snuffed human life off his fingertips of clotten blood and dirt. 

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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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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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