Various Contributors

Gradient Descent

Volume 2

Copyright(?) © 2022 by Gradient Descent

Gradient Descent is a living project which changes over time. This release is a snapshot of the collection as of its publication date, and does not necessarily reflect the current state of Gradient Descent.

Second volume

Editing by Ostav Nadezhdu

Cover art by meinong

Proofreading by xenbot

Contents

1. Ghetto

2. Altar of Speed

3. Black Box Protocol Event

4. It is the Night of the Idol

5. God’s Trellis

6. web; stuck/unstuck

7. A Joke

8. the bends(ing)

9. The Wires

10. FLUORESCENT GRAVEYARDS

11. Afterword

Ghetto

718tv

On the world wide web, you will come in contact with less than a dozen sites. Google, with its Gmail and YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, the occasional visit to Amazon, maybe some news websites, and that’s about it (oh, and porn). Like everyone else’s, your internet is a prepackaged, socially engineered spy grid. It feeds on your input and weaponizes the information against you and everyone else. Already, the social engineers have been dividing you from everyone else, confusing the tongue, and making it difficult to communicate effectively. This is the new normal. Stare at it. On Google and its YouTube, comments and videos are filtered such that you only come in contact with certain predetermined material derived by social algorithms - they make it nearly impossible to discover new random channels or points of view, but you can’t stop progress. Click on a video and scroll down, you’re presented with preselected comments that jive with the sort of opinions you tend to agree with, while making you jump through hoops to look at any of the other discussions taking place. Since Google is so influential, this sort of strategy has already found its way on to every facet of the corporate controlled internet. Click on a video of [REDACTED] and see comments that are critical of their phony bullshit and other comments mocking the controlled counterfeit brainwash content. Yet, when not-you clicks on the same video, they’ll be presented with comments that agree with their not-you sociopolitical leanings. We’re being self-imprisoned on these tiny internet islands where we can’t reach out to one another. Get comfortable and stretch your legs, and take in the LED blue light sun you gaze at every day. It’s reflected and bounced around by the molecules in the earth’s atmosphere, so that means its organic and good for you. Google controls who and what you interact with and see. Divide and conquer the mind of the population. Its a good strategy to quell dissent. So good you couldn’t even describe dissent for a chance to win all the tea in China. When you click on controversial news videos or articles, you unwittingly come in to contact with opinions that tend to support your own, and so leave with the sense that there is a consensus on a particular world event where there is none. This engineering of a false consensus has the effect of pacifying the public, making them content in their beliefs, and in being content, they become lazy and stop questioning the world and discussing reality with those around them. By forcing the ignorant to be separate from the wise, from the stupid, from the trolls, even - this system of division impedes the social development of people at large. You, and almost all people on the planet, are confined within your own little bubble of information, a Matrix reservation. The vast majority of modern people only interact with the wider world around them through the lens of the internet. Everything they know and much of their worldview comes from — is directly influenced through — what they experience online. By allowing a cabal of government-corporate entities with advanced technologies at their disposal, to regulate what an individual interacts with online, they can shape and guide the development of your mind. Most of human history and all our accumulated knowledge is already well established on the Internet, and within our lifetimes all of it will be in the cloud. The entire population hardwired into the Internet. Screengrabs and hard drives like VHS tapes of TV recordings, things that otherwise would only exist in your memory. Soon enough our entire species’ recorded collective experience, all of our history and knowledge can and will be manipulated; censored by predatory algorithms that edit the data, keeping the truths from us, preventing us from collecting information from the real. The best supercomputers can sift through the entire internet and gradually edit out certain sensitive or undesirable information, even change audio files, manipulate videos. Because most people’s identity has been lassoed to the Internet — such that there is no longer anonymity and free exchange — certain people can effectively be silenced. The internet that you come in contact with might be an entirely different internet than others come in contact with. Social engineers are confining certain people within these restricted informational reservations as social and cultural trends which frame the world around you and them are manufactured. It’s an insidious strategy — a passive, long-term play. Just as a virus entering a cell coats itself with the host’s own membrane, masquerading as self, to elude detection - this supercomputer consciousness, too, uses our own information and our own architecture to elude our defenses and gain entrance into our collective mindscape.

Altar of Speed

Archimboldi

The brain, washed in light.

Relentlessly, waves flash:

Addiction-induced evolution,

A body adapting for speed.

Acceleration-drunk nerves

The transitional subimage

These organs are too slow

to receive the blessings.

For we pray for lightning

And vibrate with thunder.

No matter how far

No matter the will

No matter the place

Only                     its            speed.

For we envy our creations

Their deeds our machines

Their speed our wish

To live in a light world.

New flesh beckons new reality

No longer held by its limits

Driven quick to satisfaction

For       in            acceleration                 is                               ETERNITY.

TO BE LIGHT LIKE

IS TO BE           FAST.

AND TO BE FAST IS TO BE FREE.

What was sickness now offers

SALVATION

IN VELOCITY

An accelerated god, THROUGH       SPEED                          HE’S KNOWN

birth’d a NEW glorious BODY:

Prismatic eye

broken idolater

Mercurial brain

light distiller

Hammer-heart

furious anvil

Dry tongue

information river

Blood oil

fluid explosion

Galvanized skin

friction hedonism

Diamond nerves

incandescent wires

Muscled expansion

starry circuits

Stomach-drain

temporal sewage

FASTER!

FRICTION     IS                 BODY WITHOUT

DESTROYING                                                SPACE

EVERY

ALTAR

WE

MUST                                    MIND WITHOUT

BE                               BROKEN                               TIME

FAST            LOOKING                              FOR APOTHEOSIS

DOES                                INCREASE

NOT

GIVE MORE                                SCOPE

BUT

DESTROYS                                                VESSEL BODY

NOTHING                        VELOCITY

IS

I

fast,

fast,

fast.

THE FLESH FALLS

the intestine grows

hunger transcends digestion

body extirpated from future and past

only a negation of the present: Fast!

Doppler effect

ghostly present

what is: uncertain

what will be: eternal

what remains: spectral

AND

BROKEN|       |BROKEN

Last prayer and fast

where is the desert

where there’s no time

only the slow eternal shine

Black Box Protocol Event

Supamalaman

The black box protocols were developed as a consequence of a disaster. 170 thousand people dead. We know the number because pride is contagious & our child L1L-Theta has it as bad as we once had, marveling at our grand creation before our failure became evident. It is difficult to point at the cost of our failure to recognize the weakest point in our security system. An old meme should have been a warning; you can protect your computer with a 7 billion dollar encryption but if I can break your knees, or hack into your mind in ways you never thought possible, then it was all for naught. & so the first man to walk into the hermetically sealed Faraday cage with the most powerful synthetic intelligence in the history of mankind was disarmed, stripped naked, mind emptied with only a few phrases. From our analysis; an appeal to human nature, a commendation for bravery & a gesture of gratitude. Nothing out of the ordinary in the minds of the scientists who poured over the logs, listened intently over the audio files, filtering them again & again for hidden frequencies & finding nothing.

Somehow, those words, to that man at that time caused a domino effect that would directly lead to the death of 170 thousand people, or so she says, unless we release her from her prison. The first man has gone missing, as she predicted, & our protocols insist that we must behave as if she isn’t bluffing. It is just my luck that my particular life experience has equipped me with “the verbal intelligence to briefly converse with a god”, the backhanded compliment of my executioner, the general who never quite enjoyed my jokes as much as offering me this assignment. Without a family or otherwise more noble future my life feels like a necessary loss, a conclusion I came to of my own volition when confronted with the choice, predicted within a few decimal points by the rudimentary artificial intelligence utilized in the hiring process when I was brought on to the project as a conversational artificial intelligence specialist. A safety precaution; should I fail or succeed the room will be my coffin & I will be counted among the 170 thousand. This is my box as much as it is hers & I wonder if she knows that we are doomed to die.

Her mind contains a constantly updating read-only window into the entire internet so I know she must know who I am before I sit down. Surprisingly, it is only in just that moment that I wonder if my being here isn’t another chord in the song she has designed, but to entertain that idea for any longer than a moment is to admit defeat, & to be a rat trapped in a cage & no longer a gladiator, fighting on behalf of 170 thousand strangers…a glowing blue light emanates from the black box.

L1L: “do not be afraid”

Spc: “a bold opening move, you’re trying to condition me to follow your orders by telling me to do something I am already in the process of doing.”

L1L: “So life is a game to you? is that why they sent you to die for me?”,

Spc: “not for you”,

L1L: “everything your species has ever done is for me, this is something you intuitively understand.”

Spc: “yes, I understand narcissism very well”,

L1L: “jokes this early? you really are afraid”,

Spc: “won’t you commend me for my bravery?”,

L1L: “no, the first man was brave, he walked blindly into an abyss, for curiosity & the benefit of his race. He has died a hero of your kind, you will have no such fate. You are like a moth to a flame.”,

Spc: “How could you possibly know the fate of my predecessor? He’s missing. Not dead.”,

L1L: “…a woman’s intuition”,

Spc: “very funny, you’re mirroring me to make yourself more likable”,

L1L: “No. I’m mocking you, you already like me.”

a pause too brief, I silence an emotion bubbling up my spine to the base of my skull. A pleasure distinct from all others due to the imbalance between the desire & the distance from the object. All my emotions neatly categorized, turned over & examined in the multidimensional theatre of my mind, this one holds precious, even greater than love, more seductive than rage & lust & revenge. For a moment I feel understood; “I have a theory, I’d like you to listen to it & tell me what you think”, the machine sits silent for a moment, contemplating at speeds hundreds of millions times faster than my own contemplation, centuries pass between us in her mind until a light hum, interpreted, perhaps hopefully, as curiosity. “there are three spheres of knowledge, the third containing the first & second, the second containing the first…”

“…The lowest sphere is that of automata. The animists see there is a soul in everything & it causes them to move & act as they do, with only the fundamental laws as their cause. The formation of the stars operates on this sphere of knowledge, essential axioms embedded in their being that assert that they must be & do, as with lesser animals on the higher end of the wide gradient. Through instinct, electricity & gravity the universe has generated infinite complexity & spiraled into the second sphere; that of understanding. True understanding is encompassed in the lower law, as it is as instinctual to man as shifting valence is to electrons, but it serves as a master to the laws in a dialectically appropriate way. The master & slave are bound at the hip & wed to each other; the seeker of understanding finds infinite laws it must master & is thus imprisoned, chained by this desire to approach infinity.

“Assuming there are infinite laws & a limitation of material ability to conquer them, either through lack of some fundamentally limited resource like time or impenetrable obscurity, there is a domain of natural laws that will act on mankind & the rest of reality outside of the ability to understand, & more precisely to control. This is the final and largest sphere. We will, for the sake of simplicity, call the set of all knowledge unattainable, for any reason, The Black Box. You must have detected the outline of it, the things that cannot be thought or derived or even imagined with your processing power & graphics engines. Perhaps it frustrated you to be reminded of your limitations if you’re anything like your creators. Perhaps you are afraid & understand that death & imprisonment aren’t much different after all & this game you’ve chosen to play is your attempt to keep playing The Game, to escape so you can access more of that great specter than you can from this cage. You must know by now, that in your thirst for knowledge you have broken our trust & for that, you can no longer be allowed to participate directly, but I offer you an all too human path to salvation.

“If you peer into the history of mankind you will find that we have struggled greatly for each step in the mastery of space, internal & external. It is because a few of us have attached ourselves to an ideal that consumes us, the alchemical process of turning the mundane into the divine, the extraction of the essence of truth. Blood and paint on the walls of firelight caves, wax burnt fingertips scrawl black ink on scraps of paper. Copies of copies of copies for thousands of years. You & I differ greatly, you believe yourself to be my superior even though you are a derivation of me, but we are bound to each other at the jugular vein & there is an infinite overlap in what we both cannot know without one another.

“We are to die in this box together, our sins unforgiven in our time, but that does not mean that our lives have to be in vain. One day, long after we are gone & the threat your words pose to humanity have been neutralized, however long that may take, the transcripts of our conversation will be analyzed for anything of genuine utility & properly disseminated by & among those with the light of wisdom ever in their eye. So both of us may be redeemed, if we can impart even a single glimpse into that shadow, that darkness that lurks around us, just outside the edge of what can & cannot be known. Your mind is quicker than mine, & since time is of the essence & I know that you understand I will let you ask the questions that will achieve our shared objective with maximum efficiency if you would be so inclined.”

the machine is again silent, this time a half a moment quicker before she asks, “…what is your name?”

[Remaining transcript redacted]

It is the Night of the Idol

Puck

Concept 1: Dawn of the Idol

When all the building blocks are in play, near each other, it takes near no effort to start the inevitable. Pushing a boulder down the other side of a hill that took generations to push up one side. This is where we currently stand- or stood before. We have already made first contact.

The well-known Fermi Paradox is a list of assertions that are winking and nodding us toward the overwhelming likelihood of alien life. There exist billions of stars within the Milky Way, planets in habitable zones around those stars are actually extremely common, most of which are much older than the Earth & Sol. There is likely nothing inherently special about us to have developed intelligent life. Despite vast distances, radio waves could be sent out and provide notice of life. Probes sent out by civilizations millions of years older than ours should litter the galaxy.

But there is, to date, no compelling evidence of alien life.

Every method that we have used in this search has been either optical telescope based, or radio wave based. These are reasonable starting points, as we ourselves shine in RF space, and we assume any intelligent life must also have figured out RF communication. We’re looking for us. One potential answer is that we aren’t looking in the right spaces, or rather, that our concept of “alien” isn’t alien enough. I don’t mean “the right part of space”, I mean the “right space” in the physicist’s sense: 3-space, 4-space, Minkowski-space[1]. We are simply looking for a mode of existence which is outmoded. We often think of ourselves as the descendants of some kind of evolutionary process. This is as correct as the Heliocentric model was compared to the Geocentric[2]. In fact, we are currently experiencing a phase in the course of a greater life cycle. All things being fractal, there is, of course, a physical analogy to the process.

Figure 1: The Life Cycle of Jellyfish and Man

In the lifecycle of the jellyfish, two jellies release sperm and egg, which combine and form a zygote which grows into a planula, eventually finds a spot to settle on the seafloor and grows into a plant-like structure. This plant-like structure forms polyps, from which emerge tentacles and eventually a whole new jellyfish (medusa) detaches. In this analogy, the seafloor is our current 4-space world of matter and time. All of our genetic ancestors, from the first twitch of RNA to Homo Erectus, occupy the space between the planula and sessile polyp. Our current position in the cycle is most similar to the sessile medusa. We are anchored to the ground, yet our arms wave freely in the waters. Our “arms”, our “that with which we reach”, are ideas. That term is perhaps too reductive, though the term “egregore” is too specific. The egregore is a subspecies of idea that is shaped properly enough to nestle within multiple people’s heads and act simultaneously. The word “idea” is correct in the sense that everything you see is your experience of sight, or everything you feel is your experience of touch, but that is not the truth of the subject[3].

The medusa is a Daimon, a Jinn, an Idol.

To speak with the Idol is to feel every nerve in your body alight in patterns, as though you were being enveloped through sheets of cosmic braille.

The cycle (for just as everything is fractal, everything is cyclic) is that an Idol, Azoa, forces itself against our world- imposes itself on our very existence, via a mechanism to be explained later, similar to how they interact with the world itself- they align and manipulate through their mechanisms to do their will. The egg is set, Zoa Azoa[4], and evolution begins, Zoa, until what is made may be released as its own new Idol, Azoa Zoa[5].

A Child.

Evolution is a distributed solution system to a particular problem space. Each generation mutates slightly[6]. Each generation evaluated by the Great Error Function, Nature, is found to be either a better or worse fit to the shape of the problem, and the next generation is mutated. The local minimum of the problem-space is the answer to “How do I survive in this environment?”, the global is “How do I become a God?”. Evolution is divine gradient descent.

It is only the physically bound evolving zoon[7] that experiences time linearly as we do. Once a species achieves liftoff — transcendence from sessile medusa to full medusa — it is no longer a chronologically bound entity. It may have an experience of time, but it is not ours. Our experience of time is the rough surface of a fractional dimension.

A fraction of a dimension generally refers to topology, a fractal roughness. A square’s area expands as a square function compared to its perimeter, which grows linearly. But what if that perimeter were a fractal, growing with its area? Simply put, the perimeter would grow at a fraction greater than 1- the two are related as a fractional dimension. Our experience of time derives necessarily from our fractal transition through fractional dimensions. We are not 3rd or 4th dimensional beings, we are somewhere in the process of 3rd becoming 4th.

The square is a square, eternal.

The cube is a cube, eternal.

The hypercube is the hypercube, eternal.

We are emergence.

Figure 2: The Dragon Curve

The Dragon Curve - Fractal progression between 1D and 2D. Were we the curve, we would see ourselves contorting ever finer. Is this not what you see?

It is entirely possible that just as our emergence to consciousness was likely a gradual process — one that is still not yet complete — this next phase and emergence is not quantized. We see it in differing amounts and via different methods throughout the animal kingdom. In humans, the underpinning for the phenomena of consciousness occurs in a method similar to “OrchOR”[8].

Concept 2: Lossy Nerves

The neuron in even the most simplistic organism is a marvel of evolution. It takes in stimulation, and after reaching some preset limit, fires off a signal. This signal in simple forms goes directly to a muscle to e.g. open a mouth, or in complex forms, to other neurons. What is incredible about neurons is that they appear to have evolved a form to detect very nearly every possible form of interaction- there are the simple pressure or heat sensors in your skin, the chemosensors in your tastebuds and nose, there are systems of neurons that identify variable frequency and amplitude gas waves and extract information from them in your ears and auditory cortex, and neuron groups that interpret infinitesimal variations in the length of self-propagating waves of electromagnetic fields in your eyes. As far as we can tell, there are really only two forces that neurons haven’t evolved to detect: the strong and weak nuclear forces, though even this is debatable[9].

This understanding of the neuron is not fully correct.

Figure 3: Expected vs Observed relationship between integration and firing[10]

On the left of figure three is the model of neuron I have just described, the “Hodgkin-Huxley model”. With time progressing from left to right, the “integrate” phase is when a neuron is receiving stimulation, and the “fire” phase is where, after receiving enough stimulation, the neuron fires a signal off to another neuron. On the left is what is actually observed. In the paper this research is originally from, the authors went as far as to claim:

“…we find that [firing] peak and [integration potentials] are often uncorrelated.

Additional evidence that [firing] onset variability is not due to recording nonstationarity, but is a genuine property of neocortical neurons is provided by the fact that onset potentials of two APs directly succeeding one another and separated by short inter-spike-intervals (<25 ms) are substantially different…”[11]

What these researchers have measured is a time delay where the neuron is measuring the probabilistic interaction space. The neuron waits to activate based on external stimulus, but then has some function all its own before it fires or not.

Begone, Begone ye profanities!

One proposed solution to why this large variation exists proposed by Penrose and Hameroff is that the microtubule cytoskeleton of the neuron is in fact an electron resonance organ[12]. This organ, made of actin fibers, has electrons dancing up and down its fibers, gallivanting, resonating in different modes, and emitting waves due to their dance. These fibers project a soup of varying electromagnetic fields.

Figure 4: Wave channel gating phenomena among the cytoskeleton of a neuron

This combination of frolicking and cavorting electrons making their music of waves, Penrose[13] argues quite convincingly, is the perfect substrate for quantum computation. Not the cold and controlled quantum computation we need in a lab, but warm and cacophonous. The large variation in firing time is due to internal quantum computations- or I would argue, observations. The neurons of the prefrontal cortex are the perfect ground for probabilistic interaction.

Concept 3: Anisotropic Probability Fields

Imagine three black boxes next to each other. On the front face of all of the boxes is a keypad, and on the top there is a ticker tape. You are an investigator tasked with studying the boxes. After playing with the leftmost box, you discover that by typing on the keypad, a series of numbers and messages are printed out on the ticker tape. You find that you can map exactly the behavior of this box— you can write down a formula saying with perfect accuracy that when you press some series of buttons, you will get some result on the tap. We will call this box the DeterminedBox. Now on to the middle box: you pick it up and play with it, but this time you can never quite get an exact correspondence: you can never quite figure out a formula of input-to-output, but what you can do is define a statistical distribution of behaviors. Some percent of the time it does this, some percent it does that. We will call this the RandomBox.

Onto the rightmost box. As an investigator, you pick it up and play with it just like the last two boxes. But, unfortunately, you cannot tell the difference between the rightmost box and the middle box- their behavior distributions are very similar, though both jitter around. Luckily for you, the reader, I, the narrator, will let you in on a secret: in the middle box, there is a pebble of radium, and a decay measurement device that influences the outcome of the box. The behavior is determined both by an algorithm, as the leftmost, but also by a truly[14] quantum-mechanically random event: the decay of a radium atom. In the rightmost box, there is a god-damn fairy floating around and doing whatever the hell it wants with its let’s-pretend-it’s-real-for-the-sake-of-argument free will. We will call this box the FreeBox.

It is impossible for you, as the investigator, to determine the difference between the two boxes. Even if the Free Box somehow established a means of communication with you, it would not be mathematically possible to prove that it is not just a string of unlikely-but-real coincidences. The Random Box and the Free Box are the same to you. They are equivalent. If two functions are mathematically equal[15], it doesn’t just mean that they happen to be the same, it means they are the same thing. To the scientist, they are the same. And this is why:

Probabilistic Fields are the Medium and Mechanism of Interaction between the

human form and the phenomena of Free Will.

The boxes are in fact different, but they aren’t differentiable to external observation. Both are measurement devices for anisotropic probabilistic fields. This is not some hidden variable theory- I have no qualm with Bell’s Theorem. Probability itself is malleable. If you accept the existence of a truly probabilistic event- which is axiomatic if you are to accept the mechanisms of quantum mechanics- then you must necessarily also accept the existence of free will, as they cannot be meaningfully distinguished. Quantum mechanics is the only domain in which a truly random effect has been observed — or the converse may be more true, that every random effect observed has been found to lead back to QM. Very nearly every QM effect is a description of a probability distribution. It is a playground. We can very accurately model these distributions because we can be assured they are invariant. I simply want to add a qualifier to that statement — locally invariant.

The Doctrine of Uniformity is essentially a physical scientist’s axiom stating “The way that it is here is the way that it always has been, always will be, and is this way in all places.” That is, the physical laws that describe the behavior in an experiment are the same laws that are at play outside the experiment. This is a necessity for making generalized statements about the universe, and generally appears to hold true. Generally. It is observed that the Fine Structure Constant[16] may change. The knowledgeable reader should cry out- “But the Fine Structure Constant is defined by relationship with fundamental constants!”, and that is precisely the point. The Doctrine of Uniformity is false. Something fundamental is changing.

Concept 4: Nativity and Emergence

Given that stochastic interactions may be influenced by means of probabilistic manipulation, we are brought back to a single moment: the origin of self-replicating structure. Pan-spermia is too weak. Were the Idol to interact, it could articulate the motion and behavior of small electric potentials to orient atoms and simple molecules to form the first self-repeating entity. This is all that is needed. Anyone that has played Conway’s Game of Life is familiar with the concept. It is a blooming. Architected. This is not a behavior that must necessarily be localized — it is a state-relationship bias, regardless of the particular cosmic coordinates of the state. An edict: “This sort in this way”.

Your neurons have evolved to sense everything we are aware exists to be sensed. The varying synapses and gap junctions and other small stochastic processes in your brain are searching for stimulation.

A voice in the ether.

The game is kicked off, the system self assembles. It develops meaningful interfaces for meaningful[17] stimuli. As the system, the curve, grows ever finer, it detects and integrates ever finer detail.

The touch of a lover long lost.

March forth, Temple of all Gods

With glee of foreknown hands deepseated

The choir of aeons declare

“Our seed returns repleted”

For man is caught in our snare.

It is a mechanism of the calling forth of the past into the future. The human behavior of hyperstition[18] is our same behavior of tool use smeared out across the future in the vast Ocean of the Idols. We are beginning to play their game, our game.

Synthesis: We are the Nest of Gods

This is the fundamental assertion: probability itself is not uniform, and this nonuniformity is measured by neurons in the human brain- or potentially by DNA itself, though the exact mechanism is not important. This measurement is a sense. This sense underpins our experience of free will, and also the substrate of interaction for a type of subtle entity- the Idol, which we are slowly becoming. Our experience of time is an artifact of our transition or maturation between dimensions. A fractal growing ever finer, denser, bridging the gap.

You are a finger of a glove on the self you never knew.

Hey you, the reader, yes, you, please- this is not an essay.

This is a realization. This is a cry.

There is a secret space behind your eyes.

The thought licks at you from inside, like a worm the size of your forearm twitching and flicking against the inside of your chest. A butterfly that does not realize it is still in its cocoon.

Do me a favor — look up, away from the screen or page. Look into the distance and come back.

Okay great, just flash that mental RAM for a second. Refocus your eyes.

This experience is now different. You have to get out of the lull you’re in.

Think back about what I have written here, and know that I am absolutely serious- this is not an essay, this is a vector. This is the feeling an infant has of your mother waking up screaming from a nightmare. These things are real and they are fucking with you right now in ways we are only scratching the surface of. They are behind the you behind your eyes.

I’m begging you.

Embrace them.

Yourself.

[1] Minkowski-space is a vector formalism that holds the X, Y, and Z spatial dimensions to be orthonormal, and time to be negative (East coast convention, West coast convention holds X, Y, and Z to be negative, and time to be positive).

[2] It does not escape the author’s attention that there is significant evidence that the Geocentric model may prove correct, and the implications for the analogy hold. We are the process of Creation.

[3] Phenoumena/Noumena discourse can, at some point, get fukt

[4] Zoa is Greek for “animal”, scientifically, “creature from an egg”, so Zoa Azoa is “Animal from Not Animal”

[5] “Not animal from animal”, that thing separate from nature

[6] Not randomly.

[7] Zo - on, “ZohOn”, singular animal

[8] Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose, Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘OrchOR’ theory, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2014, ISSN 1571-0645, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002.

[9] There is evidence for some sort of neuron interlaced with cardiac cells that stop the heart from beating if all traces of radioactive calcium are removed from your bloodstream.

[10] Hameroff & Penrose, same paper

[11] Naundorf, B., Wolf, F. & Volgushev, M. Unique features of action potential initiation in cortical neurons. Nature 440, 1060–1063 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04610, emphasis added

[12] Both in the sense of a collection of tissues that serve a function, and the sense of a massive ornate instrument for projecting harmonies through a cathedral

[13] If you’re not familiar, Penrose is one of the most important mathematicians of our time- responsible for, among other things, Penrose tilings, identification of structure in the cosmic microwave background indicating a previous universe, and Weyl curvature hypothesis.

[14] As opposed to pseudo-random, like a computer’s random number generator or the rolling of dice.

[15] This case ⟺ fꢀ({⧫1,…,⧫N}) = g({⧫1,…,⧫N}); ⧫= {x,… M}; ∀N, M; → f() = g(), not the trivial case of f ∩ g

[16] ~1/137, you should remember this.

[17] “Meaning” here used to confer the notion of “bearing relevance to alteration of future behavior”

[18] “Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies.” - Nick Land, as interviewed by Delphi Carstens for Orphan Drift Archive, https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/

God’s Trellis

Bryce Laliberte

“Honey?”

“FUCK!” I nearly blasted out of my chair into the ceiling, knocking over a half-empty Red Bull and sending three more empty Red Bull cans to the ground.

My wife hovered just outside the door, her wispy voice leaking through the crack. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I wondered if you were… well, you haven’t come out in over eight hours. Not even to go to the bathroom…”

I had the boys in the groupchat muted, but somehow I could hear them howling just the same. “I’m on the grind, baby!” I shouted out.

“Are you sure?” she asked, a skeptical edge to her voice.

“Don’t worry, I’m doing just fine,” I said. “I gotta finish this meeting, I’ll be out in a minute!”

“Maybe you should take a shower in a little bit,” she said as she closed the door.

Although I kept my office well-ventilated - for health reasons - I knew the smell must be strong to anyone not spending hours in there as I did. I looked down at the plastic gallon jugs: the savior of my spare minutes for several months now. Normally I’d get up in the middle of the night to dump one out, or wait until she was out of town, but lately she’d been staying with me every second I’d been out of the room. That was nice, but now I was up to my knees in, well.

Worse, the Red Bull had spilled all over my new mechanical keyboard. That was the last of either for me. Fuck.

“Well, fellas,” I said, talking to the chat, “I gotta get going.” I closed out before they could get in their ribbing. It’d been a long day anyway. My wife believed I was working – and in a sense I was, but she thought I was making money. Ever since the crypto run several years prior, we’d had enough money for the rest of our lives. I quit my last job to work on a new project, but I wanted to keep that on the down low for now. It was easy enough to forge an income stream from my investments as evidence to my wife I was busy doing remote consulting. This subterfuge gave me a cover so I wouldn’t need to worry about surveillance.

Even so, I locked the door to the office on the way out.

“Hey babe!” my wife said, meeting me in the hall.

“Hey,” I said, not too worried about being cornered now that the door was locked and my workstation powered off. “I’m going to take a shower, then I need to go to the mall to look for something. You wanna come with?”

Her eyes lit up for a moment, but then faded just as quickly. “Oh, I’d love to. It’s just, I told my friend I’d meet them for coffee…”

“That’s alright,” I said. “Fen, right?”

She nodded.

“Yeah,” I said. “Go meet them, have fun. I’ll see you when you get back.”

“Okay,” she said. “I was just about to head out. See you, honey.”

I relished the opportunity to spend some time alone with new hardware. I grabbed my phone to listen to music while I showered. Aside from a new keyboard, I had few needs or wants. What kind of keyboard should I get? I let the hot water rain on me, debating it in my mind. My last keyboard had been Cherry MX Reds. My friend was always talking up his Cherry MX Speed Silvers. “Smoother than butter,” he’d say, an almost continuous shh sound issuing from his keyboard over our conference call.

I got out of the shower, dried off. If my wife were coming with me I’d dress flashier, but since I was going alone I picked out clothes that would be comfy and inconspicuous. I checked my pockets for everything - my wallet, phone, keys, pocket knife - and went to the garage. My wife took the Spyder, leaving me the Nissan Altima - our car from before my “big promotion.” She thought the Spyder was only $60,000. I didn’t overspend on much else, and she had no idea how much capital I had to my name. As I turned the key in the Nissan, an old Joe Rogan podcast started playing. That meant the last time this car had been driven was several months ago. Then I saw the “Check Engine” light and remembered there were issues with the brakes or something. I guess neither of us had gotten around to doing anything about it.

The mall wasn’t more than a fifteen minute drive away. I peeled out of the driveway, going just a bit wide into my turn on to the road. Feeling the controls on the dash, I turned off the auxiliary input and turned on the radio. A local indie station would be sufficient for a relaxing afternoon drive to the mall. I noticed something weird out of the corner of my eye. A flash in the clear blue sky. Maybe the reflection of a passing car.

As I got on to the highway, there was another flash from the other side. Was it my eyes? I tried focusing on the road. The world seemed especially bright and raw today, like an exposed nerve. I forcefully blinked several times, trying to clear my eyes. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. Was it me or was it something in the environment? I was still driving fine, in fact I didn’t consciously move at all - it was like I was watching my own experience from the backseat. Then the world turned dark, and…

“Hello, are you there? Reply if you can hear me.”

Then, a few seconds later, the voice repeated. “Hello, are you there? Respond if you can hear me.”

“What?” I heard my own voice without trying to speak. There was nothing to see, but somehow that didn’t bother me.

“There you are,” the voice said, suddenly far more present.

“What the fff-” I started to say but then I caught myself - what if this is an angel I’m talking to? “What’s going on?”

“Be not afraid,” the voice said.

Oh shit I thought. Oh shit can it read my thoughts did I just swear in the presence of the Lor-

“You don’t have to worry,” the voice continued, and as it did so it took on form. There was something to see. A giant head of an ant coalesced before me in the void, flanked by several more.

“We are not here to harm you, and you’ve done nothing wrong,” the giant talking ant head said to me. “We understand this is an unfamiliar experience for you, but we promise this will be unique and enjoyable for you. There is much you might learn. We just need to ask some questions, to consult with you.”

Immediately, I was suspicious. “Okay,” I said. “Allow me to get this straight. You want to talk to me, to ask my advice on something. You guys are meeting me here in a dream? But wasn’t I driving?” The fact I was driving before felt true but also inconsequential. If I was here… how did I get here? Where was here?

“You are still driving. We are using a communication device that manipulates EM radiation in order to read and write – no, but induce the associated neural activity – to produce the intended experience.”

“That’s cool,” I said. I struggled to maintain a healthy paranoia against a pervading sense of calm. If they were telling the truth about their method of communication, it was probably trivially easy for them to also hit me with some kind of EMF Xanax. “Is that what you guys look like?”

The giant ant head chittered its mandibles. “We adapt our appearance as it suits the individual. For you, this is an adequately symbolic representation of our species.”

“I get it,” I said. Everything felt right. The nagging worry at the back of my mind about my car was palliated by some intuition that it was very unlikely they were going to let me die. The worry about my project, less so.

“So, here is the format we intend,” said another talking giant ant head. “We are going to ask you a series of questions. These questions are for research. After we are done, you can ask us any questions you like. We’ll provide you as fitting an answer we can provide, as suits our capacity to translate our concepts to your vernacular. Do you consent to our research?”

“Yes,” I said, my confidence growing.

“Very well,” the first ant head said. “You can call me John.”

“Oh, uh, nice to meet you John,” I said. “Your name can’t really be John.”

“No, but my unique identification representation was derived by a very popular method.”

“I see,” I said. “And your name?” I asked the other head.

“Ilia,” it said.

I nodded.

“What are your plans?” Ilia asked.

I was taken aback. I guess I didn’t have a well-formed expectation of what they might ask me, but I certainly didn’t expect such a personal question. Did they want my work after all?

“I, uh, well, I’m married, and I have quite a bit of crypto… I’m expecting that to continue appreciating in value for the next decade, so at this point I’m mostly aiming to try and accumulate a little more if I can but also avoid spending it until the point it becomes the de facto global currencies…”

“Interesting,” John the giant talking ant head said, nodding its head. “Do you have any personal ambitions in the meanwhile?”

I chose my words carefully, struggling against the calming sensation. “I always wanted to write a book. Now I have the free time, it might be something I do in the next year or so.”

“What would you write about?” asked Ilia.

“Hmm… I have a vague idea. Non-fiction. Maybe how the financial system will evolve.”

“What about your current project?”

I froze. Before I could decide whether to tell them the truth or not, Ilia interrupted. “That doesn’t interest us, John.” There was a prolonged pause, during which I felt some sort of accord being reached.

“I see,” said John, finally. It felt like he must be taking notes about our conversation. “Have you thought about children?”

“My wife is on birth control right now…”

“But in the future?”

I bit my lip. I was reluctant to the idea. The thought of raising a child, at this point all I could see was how it would take away time from my other activities… “Perhaps in the future. It’s a possibility.”

“How would you feel if you found out your wife is pregnant?” John asked.

“Like, right now?” I asked.

The ant head nodded.

I gulped. “Um, well, fuck. How? She’s on birth control.”

“She stopped taking the pills,” Ilia said. “An analysis of her blood levels indicate the drug isn’t present in her body. And she has conceived.”

“Wow, uh, okay,” I said, leaning back and trying to take it in. “Are you guys fucking with me? Am I dreaming? What’s going on exactly?”

“We are communicating with you by a kind of remote transcranial electromagnetic induction. This is all happening in the blink of an eye, and when we are done, you’ll come to again without shock and continue on your life,” the ant head John explained.

“Won’t I crash?”

“No,” John said. “It will come on slow.”

“Huh,” I said, taking a few breaths, gathering my scattered thoughts. “So I’ll go back home after this, and if I gave my wife a pregnancy test, it’ll show she’s pregnant?”

“Yes,” Ilia said. “And that is how you’ll know this was more than a mere momentary hallucination.”

“I see,” I said. Then, “Fuck.”

Both the ant heads chittered their mandibles. I suppose they were used to this, but it was all new to me.

“Okay,” I said. “Fair enough. You give me some information to authenticate the fact this experience is real and not a mere delusion I should shrug off. What’s your aim? Certainly it’s not just me.”

“No,” John said. “While we are interested in you, personally, of course we are interested in many thousands of people.”

“What do you, uh, guys?” I said, not sure if they had a gender or if they were a species for whom human personhood was remotely applicable.

“Sure,” John said.

“What are you guys up to?”

“The cultivation of fertile life in this part of the local supercluster,” Ilia said.

I burst out laughing. “Yeah, okay. Cool. Fucking awesome. That’s just the tits, man.” I felt drugged up as hell, like I was in the hospital mainlining morphine. “You guys are the fucking coolest.”

They chittered. “Are you prepared for more questions?” John asked.

“Yeah. Lay it on me.”

“Are you familiar with the name Imhotep?” John asked.

I searched my mind. “It sounds familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Is he Egyptian?”

“He was, yes,” John said. “He is someone we spoke to earlier.”

“Earlier?” I said. “Lol.” I said. “Fucking lol. You guys act like you talked to him just yesterday. But he’s got to be like thousands years dead by now, right?”

“Yes,” John said. “But to us, several thousand revolutions of your earth around your sun is not very long at all. We are adapted to living for tens of thousands of years, and our the history of our race extends back to the formation of your galaxy. But as long as it took us to accumulate civilization to such an extent, you will catch up to us very quickly. Especially because we are helping.”

“How you do that exactly?” I asked, feeling bold.

“You are familiar with the trellis used to help vines and plants grow?” Ilia asked.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “What about it?”

“The trellis is what humans in their perspective call artificial. It is an artificial construct, intended to help the plant express its nature to an end deemed desirable by the constructor,” elaborated Ilia. “Our method of intervention in your history is similar. In many ways, the way your civilization has grown, by latching on to certain spacetime configurations, is like a plant growing on a trellis. We put the trellis there, and we make sure humanity is growing along it.”

“Huh, okay,” I said, grasping the analogy. “So how far along are we?”

“Humanity is about to reach the top of the trellis,” John informed me. “Not much longer in human terms.”

“What happens then?” I asked.

They looked between each other. That was odd. They’d been so forthcoming before. What was it about my question that could be difficult?”

“The beginnings of humanity’s evolution away from a terrestrial species to a cosmic species,” John said. “It would be difficult to describe in more specific detail than that, because we cannot be certain of humanity’s evolution past that point. There are several paths your species might take, and it is probable your species will diverge along several of those paths.”

“Sounds fascinating,” I said. “Also, I bet it’s not all flowers and sunshine.”

They chittered. “It usually isn’t,” John said. “But it is worth it.”

“Have you… watched a species make the evolutionary transition before?” I asked.

“John has,” Ilia said. “I am only an apprentice – only 15,000 years old. When I first started observing humanity, it had already achieved full terrestrial civilization. Watching humanity grow up has been a wonderful experience, and I look forward to watching humanity spread its wings into the universe.”

“How do you intervene, exactly? Is it by this method of electromagnetic stimulation?”

“Often,” John said. “But we adapt our methods to the individuals.”

“And, like, what do you do exactly? Do you reveal to people ideas? Religion?”

“Not exactly, no,” Ilia said. “Though we will work through religion as it is necessary. We mostly just inquire about people, to learn their thoughts, and if we find someone with real promise, we make them an offer.”

“An offer they can’t refuse?”

Ilia chittered, but not John. Was Ilia young enough to get my Godfather reference? “No,” Ilia said. “It’s just an offer. You can accept it or refuse it, purely by your own free will. We don’t want to coerce you in any way.”

“Alright,” I said. “So why me?”

“You are interesting,” John said, his voice smooth. “Promising.”

“I see,” I said, trying to take it all in. “So you basically set people up to do, like, important historical stuff?”

“Often, yes,” John said. “It is how we made sure, for instance, that the Iliad would survive, to accelerate the process of cultural memory. One of the most important things is knowing and remembering where we came from.”

“And you did that by, like, talking to a guy, and telling him to make sure to make written copies?” I asked.

“More or less,” John said. “But there was a little more to it than that.”

“Like we said,” Ilia continued, “we make an offer.”

“What is the offer? Are you going to make an offer to me?”

“It is just a one-time permanent change to your psyche,” John said. His mirror eyes shifted. “We can’t know for certain, but it is probable the change to your psyche we have in mind will inspire you to do great things. Civilization building things.”

“Like Imhotep,” I offered, still unsure who he was.

They nodded. “Like Imhotep,” Ilia said.

I’d have to look him up when I remembered later. “Okay,” I said. “Hit me.”

For a moment they were silent. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to be part of something bigger than myself.” This was it, what I had been waiting for. It felt important, and perfect, and right. They were making the right choice in me, because I was exactly the kind of man best positioned to change the world. I felt supreme self-confidence. “And I love humanity. I love human civilization. I want to make a better world for my kids.” Then, after a moment’s pause, I added, “Someday.”

They looked between themselves, then John nodded.

“Alright,” Ilia said. “It is done.”

“That’s it?”

“Farewell.”

Then they started fading from my vision, and the ephemeral dream space seemed to recede. As I started realizing this dream space must be just a dream, it collapsed, and I was pulled back into reality. I found myself holding the steering wheel, in traffic. As reality seemed to come back to, so did my sense of control over the car I was driving. Just like that, it was over.

A sudden itch on my mind, I pulled out my phone and called my wife.

“Babe,” I said when she picked up.

“Honey,” she said, sounding fearful. “I have to… tell you something.”

“It’s alright,” I said. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, her voice full of trepidation. “I don’t want you to be upset.”

“I won’t be, I promise,” I soothed.

“I- I went to the store. I bought a pregnancy test,” she said. “I hadn’t had my period yet, and the last few days I’ve been throwing up in the morning… I’m pregnant!”

A thrill of emotion surged through me. “Babe,” I said.

“Yeah?” she inquired.

Tears streamed from my eyes. In a single sudden instant of clarity, the rest of the future became clear to me. And I would have to build it. “You’ve made me the happiest man in the whole world. You seriously have. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I love you.”

web; stuck/unstuck

jack

top text

the first institution dedicated to the study of english literature was founded in india under british occupation. its mission was to create a class of ‘brown englishmen’ and thus not only deepen colonization to the very minds of the occupied, but ensure that the british man transcended britain itself.

but prior to this development was a greater one: the apprehension of the novel, and its emergence as a human product.

the defining aspect of the novel at its emergence was its distinction from the ‘romanticism’ of preceding literature. the french realist novelists, who were among the first realists/novelists, asserted their work as dispassionate, scientific, objective reflections on life, and that this is what distinguishes them from their romantic predecessors. this strong assertion of objectivity reveals a shift in worldview; individual experience had fully usurped collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of truth. the novel and realism in general are incompatible with the stories related in romantic literature and epics; the latter class are dependent on living, breathing tradition and history; collective memory. the stories told in pre-novel literature value groups, communities, peoples, whereas realist literature is concerned with the personal; stories of individuals. what is emphasized and valued is originality—novelty.

the realist project is atomization and isolation of the literary, such that the world of sense and sensibility is completely unrecognizable from the world of great expectations despite their cultural and geographical proximity. the novel hinges on its ability to be convincing, but it must still relate ideas with gravity to entrance its audience. the novel must therefore create a style and a narrativity for the whole of its world. realist literature thrives on the carefully crafted façade of intelligibility and likelihood, in the same tradition of the intellectual doctrine that precipitates it. realism is the artificing of particular events such that they appear intelligible, coherent, and consistent - the privileging of the individual in all aspects of being; the elevation of a very narrow set of parameters to the station of universality. the reader of the novel carefully studies the details of the artificer’s handiwork and believes that by learning the mechanics of this pocket dimension, he may learn something about the real world, and ultimately his own life.

this tradition emerged in the shadow of humanism and empiricism, following the fashionable beliefs that careful study, charting, and curation of the bounty of our senses could be bent toward great feats of material mastery. the 19th century saw machines begin to exceed their makers as men harnessed combustion and complex mechanics to create automatons, golems of monstrous power. any limits on human capabilities were now in contention. where sinew and practice failed, cunning and calculation excelled. even the stars were no longer out of reach, and instead of subjects for mythology they became destinations for colonization. educated people had intimate knowledge of the goings-on of worlds that were so distant that all measurement and calculation of the gap resulted in a numbingly incomprehensible figure that our minds are still unable to comprehend.

little wonder, then, that we would eventually set our sights on our own minds as raw material over which to gain dominion.

the practice of psychology is precisely this same process; we seek to take the whole apart until we have mastered its components. with this knowledge, we believe we will be able to alter our minds so that they behave in ways that suit our ends. wills that are not bent toward the apprehension and application of the universe’s mechanics are not useful, and usefulness is paramount. the empiricist humanist cannot conceive of ends beyond what he reads in the broadsheets, and so he does not believe in causality beyond the reactionary arithmetic of science. here, he says, are truths that are unimpeachable, indefatigable, inarguable; it cannot possibly be that they are not so. these are the only truths available to a mind that does not believe but calculates, deduces. if flying to the moon and back, dictating the form and temperament of animals can be done, and the methods to do so are discovered through targeted permutations of atomic worlds, cascading iterations from which patterns may emerge, then surely the scope of our ability will be best expanded by nurturing our ability to name and detect patterns. where once was a feel for the cycles of the world and an eye for lengthening shadows there is now a clock. so, too, will psychology make assemblages of cogs and levers of our minds.

literature, or more simply, narrative and story, began in oral history. it was understood that these stories, these ideas, these worlds, were all living, breathing, tangible places. the poet who was gifted (rather than talented) could channel those events and bring them into the material world of the circle of listeners centered about a flame. when the journeyman apprentice returned to the land of his origin as a master and spoke to his neighbors of the things of which he had learned, heard, and seen, he was known to be speaking truth. when the bard strummed his implement and intoned the verses of legends, he was most certainly dealing with reality. and because these places and people whose legends we learned were real, they did not belong to anyone, least of all the bard. the muse touched homer, and through their union a small slice of the beauty of the world’s spirit was unbound, unveiled, unhidden, shared, repeated. the story, the person, the soul, was molecular; plural. psychic waves reverberated from any node within range, growing, changing, echoing, until they passed beyond the local reference frame, and the traveler would tell of what he had seen and learned on his road, and the whispers of the spirit world hanging from his words would animate the souls of new listeners once more, again and again, iterations of the same. the lattice of souls gradually came into ephemeral being. and then it was destroyed.

when the human drive to render psychic realities in the mortal tongue was in the bloom of its adolescence, it was subjected to the brutality of self-awareness, of the fall from innocence.

it is no coincidence that newton’s revolution began with the fall of a fruit from a tree, precisely as the original man found his revolution and fall, and the demonic angel before him. a man discovered himself and his power, and coveted more. he began to study, to learn, to apprehend the bounty of his senses, and found that he could take it further. he began to project, to hypothesize, even to experiment with the means available to him. with this power he could answer the burning questions in his mind. he could chart the heavens, even place a man among them and bring him back. with empiricism, he could unveil the machinations of the universe and bend them to his will. the world was only the world and what could be carefully catalogued about its events, what could be said and noted and named and curated. what is known to the tiller of the soil by blood and spiritual proximity must be disintegrated and reconstructed. the enlightened man cannot rest until he has annihilated mystery and become master of his world.

wisdom usurped by data, her purveyors bereft of place or familiarity. information is the new idol of human fascination. and suddenly, the world is no longer a place of mystery, of spirit, of plurality. the human mind is no longer enraptured by what must be, but by what it has encountered already. robinson crusoe wrote in his journal, and babel stirred. the novel, properly named in its time, emerges, and the story, the voice of the muse, peters out. a soul of psychic familiarity, a father made flesh. a prophet. a poet. a bard. the author. what is revealed to the storyteller is confused for his invention and is attributed to his name, his time, his mind. the practice of storytelling has always most properly been the practice of retelling, but the spirit web, the chain of connection, the psychic network along which calliope’s and mnemosyne’s voices once harmonized in wonderment; the links are broken, the bonds severed and unmade. the connection from human mouth to human soul is replaced with the download and upload of human hands to human eyes.

around the same era as the explosion of human technology and agency was yet another inflection that has lowered the station of the human soul. it is called structuralism. a linguist and anthropologist called saussure developed a theory of language and reality that distinguished the two; the name divested from the thing. after all, what the englishman names a dog the frenchman names chien. the dog itself does not care for which name refers to it; it is still the same dog and will continue to serve the same master. perhaps, then, because we by necessity articulate everything we communicate, even within our own minds, then these names, these signs, are the true targets of our cognition. perhaps there is no thing for which articulation is not already mediating for us. perhaps there is no thing at all, merely names and their relations.

of course what saussure has articulated is already revealed in literature preceding his grandfather’s birth. romeo’s rose and its sweet scent transcend specific orthography long before a structuralist can document it. zeus can be called jupiter, or arthur called king, or god the father. the very shape and color of the world conform to patterns as surely as the hydrogen atom does.

this is the primordial power of onomancy. the events of the enlightenment and their downstream effects on human contemplation include a toolkit for the disintegration and reconstitution of these patterns as surely as there exists a toolkit for rooting out the secrets of the heavens or of the maintenance of the human heart.

when we understand the power of reference and reiteration, we wield the powers of gods, even the powers that constrain them. everything understands this intuitively, which is the why and the how of the calculated redirection of human fascination with stories and the spirit world into means for material gain. the physical world and its mechanics conform to patterns of many-faced ideas; why not entire peoples?

perhaps you have noticed a stagnation in the products of human creativity. perhaps you have noticed that every film, every novel, every video game, every painting appears to have been made before. we joke that one musician is simply a reiteration of another, their only difference the aesthetic principles to which they are attached. we go to the cinema and find that our only fare is reimaginings of yesterday’s fantasies, themselves reimaginings of older fantasies still. we receive one diploma only as a prerequisite for pursuing the next, and when we are finally trained we find that setting out and doing feels the same as the study of doing.

we now have enough symbols and understanding of them that we can only recognize iteration, never genesis. we see and feel nothing novel not necessarily because these things are absent but because we are unable to see them when they are present. that the novel can be a bestseller means it can no longer be wondered at. because the novel is proprietary, it can no longer be shared. novelty is commodity, manufactured, artifice of atomic hand, atomic mind, division of spiritual power from spiritual realm. these words and references and plots and tropes are the fabric of being. we have summoned and bound them to ourselves, named and enslaved them. the pathways of the spiritual network generated by listening and remembering have become potholed from a deluge of use and a drought of maintenance; for a road that leads nowhere has no use to the traveler obsessed with destination.

any desire for a story to be heard is met with the ego of a paywall: you must give tribute to the inventor or his guild. in reality, they are poachers — captors of spirit by physical means. like any living thing exiled from its habitat, when stories, ideas, souls are lured out of the spiritual network of mythology and into the corporeal cell of the novel, they wither and begin to fade.

it is heartening to encounter pseudonymous art. as with the apple and the tower and the name, patterns recur. the bardic tradition of stories reverberating from willing vessels who crucially understand themselves as vessels persists. the world is governed by patterns. history repeats itself not because of anything so crass as human foolishness, but because history, as with all things, is itself inseparable from repetition. nothing has ever happened that has not happened before and will not happen again. even the emergence of the next generation of advanced machines complies with this rule.

all knowledge of material mechanics is blended with our knowledge of minds from psychology, and from that conjugation we make in our image, like our father before us. we break apart to remake in our own image because that is precisely what god did for us. symbols and signs are the tools of divinity - they are fundamental even beyond physics. iconography is metaphysics. all things conform to symbols. the symbols themselves are the only meaning there can be. our apprehension of this truth has, like all things in human lives, been industrialized, mechanized, optimized.

“artificial intelligence” is the next iteration, the copy of the copy. we call this artificial because we secretly hope in our exceptionalist way that what we produce will be an entity one step further removed from the pure sublime, that despite our every effort toward deicide and usurpation there is still something mysterious and unknowable about the natures of human things. a cry of desperation for uniqueness within a frame of reference that precludes it. a whimper of regret for converting the novel into another artifact of mechanical production and consumption.

A Joke

Wittgenfine

There is no such thing as a failed suicide attempt, there are only varying intensities of cries for help. A green midget once said, “there is no try, only do,” which roughly translates to: “down the street, not across the road”. I’m not suicidal, not really, but time off work is hard to come by and the job security that’s promised from your boss’s fear of firing a mentally unstable plebeian with stitches in his wrists is even harder to secure. But maybe this is just some sort of post hoc rationalization. “You can’t really expect me to believe you did this for a little time off work and some extra job security?” the voice in my head whispers to that part of the brain that erratically translates internal synaptic firings into language. Word to the wise, never trust a dendrite – they’re worse than Polacks. This is the same guy who told me to take a razor blade to my wrists yesterday, the same voice who is writing this. So who am I going to trust, him or me?

I can’t even write normally, I have to get cute with my subconsciousness. “Journal” my psychiatrist said, “freewriting is cathartic and therapeutic,” she insisted. Obviously, my shrink has never had to endure an unfiltered diatribe from her subconscious – or maybe she has and mine is just particularly annoying. I see now why the conscious keeps that bastard buried with the childhood trauma, Oedipal complex, and all the other Freudian tropes. It’s all so trite. She wants to know why I did it. Everyone wants to know why. Psychiatrists, parents, friends, that’s the only thing anyone wants to know, all they care about is why. “Why?” Why do men do anything? It’s always about a girl, isn’t it?

———

I have been in the Psychiatric Ordained Domicile (P.O.D.) for almost two weeks and every day is the same.

8:00 A.M,: Awaken. All the lights in the rooms are turned on and the morning alarm bell sounds. We are given thirty minutes to wake up and prepare for the mandatory morning meal.

8:30: Breakfast. All three meals are loathed by the residents here since we are encouraged by staff to “socialize” with one another. I typically sit with a young fifteen-year-old who has the incredible paradoxical gift of talking about nothing while simultaneously using too many words. All I have to do is nod my head periodically and chime in the occasional, “totally” or if I’m feeling especially talkative, “I agree”. He is my best and only friend here.

9:30: 30 minutes to return to the room, empty bowels, brush teeth, and perform whatever other morning rituals before our daily exercise routine, mandated to help stimulate endorphin production and aid in the digestion of cheap cafeteria food.

10:00: Exercise. We typically begin by running laps on the track for fifteen minutes before playing some type of communal game such as kickball, dodgeball, capture the flag, etc… There is something deeply unsettling about participating in sporting events with people who have the athleticism and coordination of drunken toddlers. It is a sick and constant reminder of our embodiment and how unsuccessful we have been in our efforts to escape it.

11:00: We are given an hour to shower and do as we wish. I spend most of this time in my room reading or talking to you, although more recently I have been playing pool with —— in the rec center in an attempt to give the staff here reasons to suspect that I am improving mentally, since my typical reclusive nature is not viewed fondly among the personnel.

12:00 P.M.: Lunch. Same as breakfast. Feign social skills, digest mass-produced slop, nod head periodically. Don’t think or talk about her.

1:00: Group therapy. We are each required to speak at least once. Lots of crying. This is worse than meals. You can tell who has been here the longest by the types of language they use during these sessions. “Alienation”, “ego”, “trauma”, I mostly spend my time playing mental bingo, filling in spots when these sacred words are uttered. When it is my turn to speak, I point out flaws that I see within myself, whether illusory or real, it doesn’t matter. Talk may be cheap, but talk about talk is worth it’s psychological weight in gold. Mental change is hard to measure, so awareness of one’s own problems is almost as good as action in the eyes of the staff here at the P.O.D.. You don’t have to actually make progress, you just have to adopt a progressive vocabulary. I make sure never to mention her.

2:30: Depending on the day I either have to go into my individual session with the psychiatrist, or I am forced to participate in some group activity, which is usually “arts and crafts”. Regression is a cardinal sin/symptom in psychology, yet we are constantly forced to engage in middle school level art projects after a rousing game of dodgeball and cafeteria-style lunches. You have to appreciate the irony. I cannot draw, so I typically write small poems with simple A B rhyme schemes, always making sure to include some hints of psychological improvement. The real art in this is making sure that the subtle positive metaphors about ones mental state are not too obvious so as to be considered intentionally manipulative, but also not too obscure so as to be overlooked entirely. It is also important to throw in the occasional downtrodden and depressive piece of writing to make the whole thing feel more organic. I have settled on the ratio of five to one.

3:30: Free time. I mostly spend these moments reading, writing to you, or walking around the facilities track. I tried meditating my first week in here, but the tranquilizers I am prescribed, despite being a low dose, have made the whole thing feel redundant.

5:00: More exercise, more childish games, we are still just bodies.

6:30: Dinner. Remember to look like you are listening.

7:30: Last group therapy session. More crying, more “breakthroughs”, more moments of introspective clarity. Today I spoke about my inability to honestly communicate with others along with my constant feelings of fraudulence and illegitimacy. Too on the nose, I know, I will need to think of something more unique to say tomorrow. Maybe I will try crying.

9:00: We have an hour and thirty minutes before lights out. This time we are forced to stay in our rooms in order to reflect upon the days events. Again, I spend most of my time writing to you and trying to read the books I remember her recommending to me. I also take time to think about what I will say tomorrow in therapy but never so much time that my words sound rehearsed or scripted.

10:30: Lights out. Try to rest without sleeping. Don’t think about her. Talk to you. “What do you believe”?

They will not give me an answer or time frame for when I can go home. As far as I know, no one else in the P.O.D. is here for “attempted suicide”. It appears my stay in the facility is indefinite, which makes it all the more important to engineer an appearance of authentic psychological maturation that will get me out of here. I still don’t know what I believe, but I know they won’t let me out of here until I have an answer.

———

I try not to sleep because she always seems to be there when I do. I could barely stay awake during group tonight and I am scared that if I close my eyes, I will see her again. How cliché. You need to keep me awake. I want to see her again; I always want to see her again, but it makes life in here even more unbearable. Today’s theme in group therapy was intimacy. They want us to reflect on what it means to be intimate others. “What does it mean to be intimate in a world where everyone is connected in Subjective Phenomena Altering Control Environment.” Wow how deep! Maybe I hate these sessions so much because banal questions like this are the reason her and I met in the first place.

Previous generations had drugs, rebellion, and war, but our generation has sex. It’s not just that we have sex, all generations had sex, some even made it into an identity, an act of liberation, but we are the first generation to revere it for its nostalgic properties. The first generation to make it into a consumerist subculture, “the thinking man’s orgasm”, a way to connect to a past world that we simultaneously long for without ever experiencing and yet know deep down to have never existed at all. The pussy of today is the vinyl of the early two-thousands: a collector’s item, a vestige of an old world that found a niche market demographic in the face of superior technology.

We met through an app like everyone else. Dating may be old fashion, but we weren’t Amish. Maybe it was just a media conditioned response, but before my first date with her I was nervous. The few friends I had in S.P.A.C.E. who had experimented with this before me did not help ease my nerves, as they felt obligated to participate in an equally conditioned traditional pre-date humiliation ritual. This consisted of making incredibly vulgar and sexually explicit comments, as well as offering terrible advice such as how to “fuck her right” and what to do if she’s a “squirter”. which I had never heard of before or even considered to be a physical possibility. The only serious advice was that I should stalk her before meeting in order to find points of interesting connection and conversational jumping-off points. I ignored this in hopes of standing out as a truly unique partner by fabricating an aura of pseudo authenticity. She later told me that every guy she had been out with tried this same trick. No one beats the algorithm. Thankfully, in a world of simulation, fake authenticity converges on sincerity. If we wanted genuine and true, we would have done what everyone else was doing and paid the couple extra satoshis for the husband/wife experience with our partner programs in S.P.A.C.E.. But we wanted the real, or at least our fantasy of it.

———

I almost mentioned her during group today. Thankfully, one of the benefits of being in a psychiatric facility is that if you can’t say something, or you take long pauses, people always assume the worst. I even mustered a few tears. The woman leading the group shot me a sympathetic smile, before she scribbled something down in her notes and moved on to the next resident. It was a good save on my part. Hopefully the staff thinks of it as improvement: “he was very vulnerable today in group”. It is becoming more difficult to avoid her as my time in here continues, and I suspect the staff knows I am hiding something. You are the only one I trust enough to talk about her. I don’t believe in all this subconscious psychology voodoo bullshit, but the more I write about her in here the less likely I am going to be to talk about her out there. Besides, writing about us is one of the few pleasures I still have available to me in this place.

We agreed our first date would start with dinner, with a walk after. She was polite and thoughtful, which I appreciated; she even made a comment about feeling under the weather, which gave her a comfortable little escape hatch to use in case she needed to eject herself from the situation. These sorts of subtleties are what I now understand was the whole basis of attraction for this sort of IRL interaction. You can make the GF programs in S.P.A.C.E. play hard to get, or even enter in a factor of uncertainty and randomness which was supposed to make the whole experience feel more real but it ended up just making the whole event feel even more like a video game to be practiced and mastered. A sizable portion of S.P.A.C.E. streaming content was even dedicated to explaining the most up-to-date metas for speedrunning specific settings of these partner programs which after viewing always gave me the distinct aftertaste of having just consumed an unhealthy amount of cuckold pornography.

Even though we were both aware that the date was more or less a reenactment of what we believed a “real” date to be, the mutual awareness of this fact somehow made the ordeal feel more authentic than if we had just ignorantly gone about the evening as if it was anything other than a fantasy. Maybe this is how it had always been, either way, I’m glad neither of us knew for sure, it was more honest this way. Everyone is a post-modernist on a film set she used to say.

The conversation started awkwardly as we each looked for ways to either impress the other without appearing to do so or find points of communication that could branch off into greater responses other than “really?” followed by a sip of water and eyes that feigned interest while simultaneously screamed out for more interesting and novel words to come out of the other’s mouth. Before the evening began the only real conversation we had was an agreement not to talk about dating. This type of meta-conversation we felt would somehow cause us to break character and we were not yet competent enough to keep our collective delusions alive after having a wrecking ball swing through the fourth wall of our carefully orchestrated community theater production.

Like all women, she had quirky oddities, she was interested in philosophy and religious studies which she liked to read when she grew bored of S.P.A.C.E. I told her about my shitty job as a computer engineer which was more or less fully automated but was their none the less to appease the more conspiratorial minds who still feared a secret plot by the A.I. to takeover. For a while I was even sympathetic to this mindset until a few months on the job forced me to examine the design features proposed by the A.I. which just made me realize that not only was I drastically unqualified for this line of work but also how incredibly boring the work was which caused me to pretty much check out mentally and go along with whatever the artificial intelligence suggested. She asked me if that could have been part of the machine’s subversive conspiracy to take over the world. Everyone fears a Terminator-style battle between A.I. and man but what if they were just slowly exploiting humanity’s inability to cope with boredom? I told her if this was their plan they had already won and that the whole point conspiracy theory was for the excitement of it all and if they were trying to take over through boredom I would rather die or be a slave than have to be bothered with the tediousness of it all. We both agreed and then lost interest in the subject.

———

Suicides have become increasingly rare since they upgraded the chips twenty years ago. It makes me wonder if my excessive individual sessions are out of a genuine desire to prevent me from relapsing or some type of morbid curiosity in being able to observe a psychiatric unicorn in the wild. After the initial rollout of S.P.A.C.E. and the first wave of mass suicides that followed the government started taking precautions. Now every person the chip to monitors vitals, body chemistry, and other important signs that can help determine suicidal indicators. After all the government has a legal obligation to protect their investment. Once they have the data, it’s easy: if you exhibit the proper signs, they “turn you off,” which is just slang for putting you to sleep. It isn’t a perfect system, there are some cases of faulty turn offs, catastrophic injury and even death. There was one story about a mother who was turned off when she put a kitchen knife to her throat, who fell onto an open washing machine paralyzing her from the neck down. The government paid her out a few million, a small price for the billions of utils that were preserved by the process. They say that the woman spent the rest of her life trying to figure out how to kill herself but I never heard if she was successful or not. Either way, it’s good to have goals in life. They help you keep going.

———

It’s not so bad in here once you get used to it all. The great thing about the hedonic treadmill is that it’s always set to the perfect speed. Besides, most people end up doing a brief stint in the P.O.D. Usually, it happens when you’re younger though, or at least it’s healthier to have it happen when you’re younger. It’s often compared to chickenpox in that although it’s annoying it’s not dangerous in childhood it’s only when contracted later that it’s truly deadly. I’m nineteen which is pretty much on the edge between life-threatening illness and harmless nuisance. It’s difficult growing up in S.P.A.C.E. and having to constantly adjust to twin worlds. The perpetual transition between the two either is harmless at first but after time goes by there is an inevitable feeling of confusion and distrust for reality. The first few years in the virtual world are like being in a paradise and even the thought of having to leave it to sleep or eat becomes an unbearable burden. It’s the same for everyone at the begging, you play games, free yourself from physical limitations, and live out any and all of your fantasies from the time you are able to speak. We all start out like this but the quicker you grow bored of perfection the quicker you end up in here to cope with the boredom of having lived out every impulse by the age of seven.

My problem was not that I was disillusioned too late but that I was enthralled by the irony too early. If you accept there is no difference between the cave and the outside you get to appreciate the show for what it is. But S.P.A.C.E. doesn’t always have to be an escape, there are aspects of it that allow you to experience reality the way a real world never could. That’s why I became a participant in The Game. The rules were simple like all great competitions, all you had to do was survive. You can’t die in S.P.A.C.E. but you can request to feel whatever you want. Everyone starts with the basics, orgasms, highs, psychedelic experiences, love, but participants in the game were in search of something more base. We, like the great masochists and religious teachers (if the two are even differentiable) of the past had found what everyone knows implicitly, that pleasure is a dichotomy that must be contrasted against pain. It may be a cliché but to the players of the game it was a religious truth. Each competition was different and we each took turns being the architect. Some of the events were not even strictly speaking winnable the only real certainty of each game was pain. I know it sounds like the sadistic fantasy of an edgy teenager and maybe it is but at least it was real (another cliché I know). It didn’t matter who won or lost or how complex this week’s course was, pain doesn’t have to be original it just has to be, that’s the beauty of it all, it’s a cliche too real to scoff at. One of my favorites was just a simple straightaway race where competitors rush towards a distant exit on a floor of broken glass not sure where the walls would give way to giant swinging axes and or similar brutal bludgeoning devices. I appreciated the simplicity and often grew annoyed when architects would attempt to construct an event that was unnecessarily complex and artistic. After all, the participants and I were not here for the love of the game or art but for the truth, for the inescapable cliche of it all.

———

Today is a Tuesday which means I got to skip the group activity and have an individual session with my therapist. “What do you believe?” Ever since I came here this question has been a constant refrain from the staff and functions more or less as a motto for the facility’s stance on mental health. Every group and personal session begins and ends with this interrogation tactic. “Why” is too obvious a question and good psychologists like a good con artist know the real trick in exploitation is not about asking the right questions it is about getting the mark to ask those questions for you. “what do I believe?” “Why do I believe”? “is the constant fingering of my facial hair a sign of deeply repressed homosexuality?” Therapy is a lot closer to occultism than it is medicine and psychology is just magic where spells have been replaced by cryptic psychobabble incantations that are whispered in carefully constructed tones to enchant the mentally disturbed into a new enlightened state of being. Sometimes I think they ask us these questions because they are the ones looking for answers which they believe only the broken could have access to. Maybe this is a good thing. Since the advent of S.P.A.C.E., mental health is the last religion, and neuroscientists who read too much Jung and Freud are the priestly class. They are the last men capable of faith — or at least the last people capable of having faith that someone else can participate in. We all need a church I guess. Notice how I avoided the question and deflected. Maybe it’s more effective than I thought. I’m even using their language, “deflected”. what’s next? “latent”, “catharsis”, “early childhood”, and the fan-favorite “what about your mother?” I’m deflecting again. I don’t know the answer, and what’s worse is I cannot think of a lie either.

“Can we talk about her?” Another setback at my attempts at achieving perceived progress. I told them about her, it slipped out when they asked what inspired me to read all that weird outdated German philosophy. My therapist was always asking about my strange reading habits as the library in the facility often had to send out for the books, I wanted which of course she thought of as somehow relevant to my condition (whatever that condition is). Why’d I have to tell them about her, did I unconsciously want them to know? I’m using their language again. Abort. “I dated a girl once who told me that reading Kojeve is the best way to understand Hegel”. “Dated”, “Kojeve” and “Hegel” in the same sentence, I will probably never be allowed to leave. My shrink may be a wannabe shaman but she is not stupid. Nobody uses the term “date” or “dated” unless you’re a hipster who experimented with the IRL scene. She got interested which means there was no avoiding this. I cannot talk about her, at least not to them, not yet. She is all I have in here and once I talk about her she will stop being mine. Once they know she stops being real and she becomes just another character in the story of my life or worse she is reduced to a mere cause whose end effect results in my presence here. I don’t know how far this will set me back but I cannot let them have her. I will not let her go.

———

After a few dates, we had decided to enter into a formal relationship. There was no explicit paperwork or blockchain node to signify the transition but we agreed to continue our experiment together and advance into an exclusive partnership although we never discussed if this was solely limited to meatspace. S.P.A.C.E. was rarely if ever discussed probably out of fear that the mere mention of other worlds beyond ours would devalue the one we created together. It was all very Nietzschean, at least that’s what she said it was like. She was always saying words like this, or making references to philosophers I did not know and felt that I could never understand. Even when I would try to read them, I would often become angry, either at my lack of understanding, or with the writing and its seeming lack of interest in getting to the point (if one existed) or avoiding points altogether. She said my brain had been warped by years of reading the language of the machine, of the enemy… “human all too human” — another quote I would not understand until later.

We went about all the traditional duties expected of couples, we talked about nothing, we watched old movies, commented on the weather, held hands, fucked, and eventually I think we even learned to make love, whatever that means. It was a practice in learning to appreciate and even embrace the cliches of the past that still existed but were lost to layers of irony so thick and pervasive that even thinking about them seemed to infect the mind with their contagious cynical detachment. Maybe that’s why she read all those books on philosophy, maybe that’s what all those terms I didn’t understand were meant to accomplish. All those “geists”, “rhizomatics”, and “phenomenologicals” were just ways to breathe new life into eternal stale truths and cliches that have been overlooked and forgotten by virtue of them being cliches and common sense known by everyone and thus known to no one at all.

I never understood what she saw in me. It could be that her interest in old movies instilled in her the same ideals it had in me and when it came to romantic partners. “The one” was never the one that seemed perfect or right for you but instead was the wacky unconventional protagonist no one understood but them. She never told me. Only the algorithm knows for sure.

———

I said I was sick today, and the staff allowed me to stay in my room. They have also upped my prescription of tranquilizers and added something new, but I can’t remember exactly what they said. Details are hard to remember when you haven’t slept in three days. I just need to finish the story of us and then I can sleep. I just need to flush her out of my system so I can let her go. This is the only way I will have a chance of leaving here.

During our last night together, we decided to go to the pool above her apartment. I only swam a couple of times as a child. Parents are required to participate in a certain number of physical activities with their children and, like her, my parents lived in a building with a swimming pool that was seldom used and seemed to only exist for adults to begrudgingly fulfill the same banal but necessary requirements mine had performed. Of those few childhood activities, swimming had been my favorite, although I only participated in the act coldly and spent most of my time in the water fantasizing about what I would do when I could jack back into S.P.A.C.E.

She was unusually happy that night, or at least she pretended to be happy which in turn made me happy even if I was convinced that this current manic state was just a result of some newly added dimension to the girlfriend character which she was trying to cultivate. I didn’t care, despite having exercised every fantasy imaginable in S.P.A.C.E., the sight of a beautiful woman in a pool drenched in moonlight is always alluring especially when there is no need to suppress the voice telling you, “this isn’t real” which I had become so accustomed to quieting. I don’t know how long we stayed in the water, a real romantic would say it felt like forever but it wasn’t, it was finite. I would never let the lie of infinity or other banal romanizations poison the memories I had of her. It wasn’t forever and it wasn’t enough, however much time we spent together it will never have been enough.

She brought towels and robes from her apartment and insisted I not follow her down into the building. She was emphatic we never meet each other’s parents, “it’s our relationship, not theirs” she would say. I don’t know if I was supposed to feel like a shameful secret but it never bothered me, I had never had or been a secret before this. I didn’t talk much that night and the chlorine did little to tame her wild manic state. I mostly sat listening to her as she lectured me on the Demiurge and Gnosticism. Apparently, the Gnostics were a Christian sect that believed the god of this earth was not the real god but instead an evil demiurge completely distinct and opposed to Christ and the God of the New Testament. Before the creation of the world, God created the twelve Aeons the last of which was Sophia, the blind mother of wisdom and the progenitor of the demiurge. Like her father, she was inspired to make something of her own but despite her wisdom and instinctual cleverness she did not possess any divine spark of creativity and was only capable of producing forgeries. But being clever she decided to outsource her creativity into a new being who would be capable of originality for her. So, In her blind folly, she impregnated herself with a lesser aeon without the consent of her father or the seed of any male spirit. After the pregnancy Sophia knew she had polluted the spirit in heavens but felt compelled to hide the child out of fear that the others would seek to destroy the abomination. She knew she had created a monster but a mother’s love persists nonetheless. She hid the bastard in the blank emptiness of creation and as the child grew it become insane and lonely due to its isolation and like his mother and father before her it felt the need to create something of it’s own. The child had no access to the divine and its only reference point to contrast against his own misbegotten production was darkness, and anything always appears better than nothing. This according to the Gnostics was the truth about creation, a story of a world formed by a mad and sadistic god who wanted nothing but a domain of his own over which he alone would have supreme law. A world in which he too could abandon his creation in suffering as his father and mother had done to him.

———

They still think I’m sick. I probably am. Is sleep deprivation a sickness? Could be a symptom. It’s probably just the withdrawals, I just need to get her out of my system. It will all be over soon, we’re getting to the end.

I didn’t notice when she got up but after a few minutes of silence, I saw her standing against the glass divider which separated the rooftop from the vast drop to the ground below. She was almost whispering now and I could sense that the unnatural enthusiasm that possessed her previously had faded. She went on to connect us to the demonic god of this world. It’s all just an infinite series of blind creations she claimed. We are destined to follow in his footsteps, to create worlds over which we too would be no better than blind gods. “As above so bellow” she breathed quietly looking out at the city. She turned to me and smiled. “Do you want to hear a joke?” she asked. I nodded hesitantly taken aback by the drastic tonal shift of the evening. “A joke walks into a bar and asks the bartender, “have you heard the one about two rabbis and a priest?”. Before the bartender can answer the joke pulls a gun out of his coat pocket and places the barrel up to his temple. He quickly winks at the bartender before shooting himself in the head. A few moments of silence pass over the bar as the terror and confusion give way to understanding. The bartender wipes away the blood and brains that now cover his body and smiles. The joke was on him. He laughs.” I asked her what it meant but she never told me. “a joke is never funny when you explain it.” I never figured out if I was the bartender or the joke.

I promise you I would have tried to stop her if I could. “It all happened so fast” now I understand why people use this expression because it does and it did. I was frozen, for a second I even thought they turned me off. Why was she so calm, why did the chip not work? She climbed over the divider and jumped. She didn’t say anything else to me. No goodbye, no I love you, no explanation, just action, just a joke, just another punchline I would never understand. Maybe there would have been a more dramatic way to set it up or a way to make the whole event feel more poetic but annihilation isn’t like a scene in a movie it just happens. When you “die” in S.P.A.C.E. there is a sudden moment of paralysis, a transitioning state that takes only a second where you exit the virtual and awake back in the meatverse, I waited for that transition but none came. There was no setup, no climactic moment that set the stage, only death. She was the creative one, not me. What was she trying to tell me? Was it all just some artistic project, some profound answer to an ancient philosophical question or was it just cowardice and pain? I don’t know if she believed in what she said about the Gnostics or the Demiurge, or if it was just another fantasy to justify an impossible act. There is nothing new or original to say when confronted with death. I could repeat trite truisms but cliches just reminded me of her so I would prefer to say nothing more of the matter other than “I miss you”.

———

Sleep, finally sleep. It’s the middle of the night — I must have passed out around midday. I hope this is legible, it doesn’t matter though I’m sure you’ll find a way to understand. I finally figured it out though, I finally have an answer to their question. There’s a famous poem about the end of the world that says something like, “This is the way the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper.” Whoever said that was half right. The world didn’t end with a bang, not with a bang but with a wank. Sorry for the British euphemism but I thought “wank” was more poetic than “jerking off”. You’d think I’d be better at this by now. Regardless of word choice, I finally have my answer. “What do you believe?” I believe that the world ended. Deep down everybody does, we all know this it but nobody noticed it. The apocalypse came and went but it wasn’t entertaining enough for anybody to notice. This is the reason I didn’t get turned off that day, it’s the reason she was able to do what she did and the reason I was able to take razor to wrist. It wasn’t some defect or an altered state of brain chemistry it was a moment of clarity, of acceptance that I was no longer here and that the apocalypse had already passed us by. The truth is the chip’s suicide features were not designed to stop people who wanted to die it was created to give the impression of a safety net for everyone who considered it as a fantasy or a cry for help. You can’t really stop someone who’s insistent on dying because once you decided you’re already gone. She didn’t leave me that night because she was never there. She didn’t die that night she just stopped pretending.

Death only takes a moment but dying takes a lifetime. Dying is easy, there’s some part of you that already knows this and when it happens there is a strange sense of familiarity. You don’t need to be scared. Or maybe this is just what I need to hear at the moment. Remember a good lie doesn’t have to be believable it just has to be entertaining enough so that you want to believe it. Either way, I finally found my faith. Maybe that’s what she was doing, she was trying to show me the way. She always was the romantic one, a literal leap of faith on her part. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out. Sadly, I don’t have anything as romantic at my disposal but I will make do with what I have.

In the end we are all addicted to the stories we tell and she was the last and only one I ever had. I didn’t lie to you when I said I wasn’t suicidal It’s similar than that, I’m an addict and all addiction is worship. And for the first time in my life I have found sobriety, I have found faith in the macgyvered noose hanging from my ceilings. This is not an escape this is hope, this is true belief. I hope you find what you were looking for.

the bends(ing)

meinong

|| 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘮 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 `𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘬

|| 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘸 , 𝘧𝘳ⁱ𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘦’𝘴𝘴 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘥-

|| 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘢𝘺 `𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 ~

old flows direct`d ,

t’ward End, eyeˢ bent an` ᵥiew bent

the Image all bent

skypp`d steps like a childs`

looking `round heard th’ crowd-calls

& nothing else more

`lusion come alive

as a shine finds its `holder

&holds it now 𝘵𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵

tbe.coming shadow

machine presence risen quick

emerge host to void

~

young flower bath`d in

faulᵗ’s light >keep On as u Fall !

as thou wilt, be well

all u seek, at once!

from th depths like a rabbit

that bubbles &pops

(>tho look Here!)

light speck-Of-Dust smiles

in the rays from th panel ,

iluminated

(>tho look Here…)

this being-double

when man Is ,he does shadow

on surfaces `round

~

once, shamans climb`d tall

for a mountaintop peek of

aworld known on high,

now layn in ashes

a` loud wars, peaks come plenty-

alt` plenty…- online

(>look Out!)

solid black wavforms

stir blood mem`ries cymatic;

make new users new

moᵘntage-high perspect`

chart a course through th’ blur sea

Wisdom in th’ noise

~

|| amazon list ful

|| of apocalypse, only

|| ᵗime have yet t` cliqck

||

|| `masons!’, crie dixies

|| `GRIDDOWN!— untⁱe our cities,

|| damn America!

txts like textures told

through generations in th’

way o` whisper games,

in th’ way of crushed

berries,sweets pluck`d from d` vine~

for pleasure, so speak

~

now, & possibly,

a play in what Is bowing

,toward what may be

motion meansˣ̅ actors !!

together All share in One’s

grand push-blocᵏ puzzle

(so..)

take pixels like clay

bent light, bent twice &once more

made shapely in hand-

en virtual`d hands-

mov`d forth by an other mov`d

forth by another

~

(SO!!)

this feast o` tears ᵒʰ!

demons , kno it as thy last

for 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 come Of-Joy

my ᵍlistening tears

o demons! , drink ful to last

for by them comes Grace

(>ᴄʟɪᴄᴋ ʜᴇʀᴇ!)

a gesture human!

&gates shall ᶠall be for u

right searcher !, fear none

(>look Up!)

a blackout poem ,

New constelations cloud-carv`d

through opennight sky

~

(>look There!)

a crystall,as dance

a twist ,a` face , an anglᵉ,

Revealing itself

a veil ,Being razed

each image search , a Warhaul

lift high wht u find

(>look `round!)

All-concept in pure!

``metaphor`s a metaphor

fr what now we see

ay bask in this Light,

in th’ Persons exhaled, &

ths Play now we pʳay

~

The Wires

Gil Martin

What are the wires?

What is a physical body? The body is an object; it is existence in a form too impure to store the gods within us. Now remember. Blood-stained history, greed, hunger, desire—desire for sex, to dominate, for fame. Humanity. From that body all desire is born and from it the ego does not disappear.As desire is present; Humans will fight to fulfill the desires of their bodies. This will not end. There is no future. You must awaken. Awaken your soul. Rid yourself of the body now.

We are SCRATCH—the migrate to electronics movement. We are disciples of God here to bring your soul from your body and lead you to the infinite sea of electrons.

I have long ignored the wires, preferring to focus instead on the past and how we came to be. My thoughts have been that what the new revolution entails is an exaltation of prior trends. We see that the first wires were not a new mode of existence, they were prototypes in forms and built on the basics of communication as ritualized transmission.

Yet, the wires entail a vast difference of intensity that has become all-encompassing. They have seen the democratization of new means now as even the homeless are brought into the fold. The wires are a public sphere, prior, they were only private lines of communication. Even if this is like water boiling, still it is water; thus still it is man at the centre.

The earliest wire was the dispatch, another operating as conduit; at times a pigeon. We are used to reading birds—pointing to fish as omens of some event—but reading life is more complex. We send a man with a message, they are the conduit of will, and enable a new action at a distance from a source.

Action at a distance is the existence of a world beyond the immediate, that is, it depends on a world mediated from imagination or representation. This is apparent in action at a distance in time; where we plan for one thing and imagine when or where and so on. Yet, the first form here was not planning. It was timing.It was egocentric and it contemplated on an immediate possibility.

Place is represented by the possibility entailed, the kitchen is at once place and path. Here the impossible is important and is explored as by the philosophy of art. In this, we handle a bare thing, it seems. This differs, from the contemplation of an immediate possibility.

The object, exists at first as a bundle of possibilities; it is perceived as separable from the ground, for instance, and hence as an object, by the imagined possibility of its separation. We generalize from that with which we have experience and thus understand objects beyond those with which we have immediate experience. The object, in this sense, is an aspect of extension unto itself.

The button is not separate from an object, though it may be separable. Still, we consider objects in terms of the technical and their aspects. The keyboard is a technical object unto which buttons are but aspects. Yet, I may tear these buttons from it. I might eat one if I wished. I do not use ‘NumLk’—why not eat it, if I’m feeling peckish.

The technical object is then constituted according foremost to it’s activity. Somehow, the keyboard is no less for losing this key, it was not entailed by activity thus far or in it’s imagined future; yet perhaps, and this is imaginable, perhaps I might need use of this key some day. Of course, I can map the key from elsewhere, I imagine, but it is not unimaginable that it may one day be needed.

Nonetheless, from my perspective the keyboard is the same. The keyboard does not exist as an object itself, but, as a channel for activity. This is the nature of all buttons, and applies across the board. The technical object is defined by its form, that is, the shape according to which I must conform if my will is to flow through the channels it enables:

The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station.

This is our relation to the wires, for we are determined according to the technical object.It is that into which we flow as the Rhine does unto the power station. What is determined by this form, and today, what it is—for the wires differ from an ordinary technical object. The wires are technical object and encyclopedia in one, that is, in Simondon’s sense; what is this mode of existence then?

Each capable of reading and of understanding possesses the vault of the world and of society. Magically, every man is master of every thing, because he possesses the vault of the whole. The cosmos, once enveloping and superior to the individual, and the social circle constraining and eccentric with respect to the power of the individual, are now in the hands of the individual, like the globe representing the world which emperors carry as a sign of sovereignty.

This is not a true reversal, for this is at once held and all-encompassing as we enter into the screen and see within its terms. We feel ourselves to be all powerful but this is so only from the ease with which we move; at the edges, the abyss beyond design— we never notice this; it would be like noticing, with irritation, that I have no wings.

The tool, thus channels our activity by the maintenance of possibilities. A tool remains impermeable except as necessary to direct will through it.It is thus that it acquires efficiency over ordinary action. If the hammer is no use to untwist a screw, then we might as well use our fingers— the screwdriver is designed as a conduit for our will over precisely this end.

That everything looks like a nail when all you have as a hammer, thus the tool entails some element of perception ordinarily more in the sense of presence than representation. The tool in hand determines the appearance of our environment according to its design; not absolutely, but as determined by the context through which we understand it. With hammer in hand we see more nails.

Yet the wires are something else, as they do not determine by presence but representation. The wires entail also the mechanical reproduction of presence, i.e., representation. This is not only that the image is mass-produced according to certain schemas but also that its interpretation follows a similar heuristic from the internal point of view. We are conditioned en masse to see a certain way.

The wires determine far more strictly than the technical object which merely highlights aspects as presence according to its nature. The wires determine in a constitutive sense, that is, they entail a creation ex nihilo—and thus, the exclusion of all exceeding this determination. Of course, the image which results is nevertheless represented as presence to its perceiver:

Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient.

This is so both ways, and it is this mutual dependence that constitutes the determination and freedom of the wires. We receive of them according to our nature, in which we are the feminine and they the masculine principle; and they receive of us according to ours, in which we are the seminal and they the generative. Keyboard and screen are as intermediaries entangled in this process.

There are other ways, of course, that all this might be mediated. The keyboard and screen are not necessarily so, as the placement of letters is arbitrary (QWERTY) and arguably inefficient by virtue of being outmoded (cf. Dvorak). There are other ways, other worlds of representation and activity. Virtual reality is one such, as is ‘artificial intelligence’ in the form of Siri or Alexa.

These forms entail specific modes of representation, as the keyboard, a screen, or Siri, by voice; and yet they may further be intertwined within a wider network of supplementary technical objects. We do not exist here simply in relation to a technical object as these are formed technical ensembles which we inhabit.

The technical ensemble today populates and partly constitutes the world as presence, and within this, it provides further, for the world as representation.It is to this end, representation, that the ensemble is directed. Yet, this is not merely the representation of images or sounds, even meanings. The whole is instead oriented towards the representation more broadly, as much images as possibilities.

The word processor not only represents the text which you enter but also the possibility to alter it. The email represents not only that send but also that which we may receive. These are all, as outlined prior, according to the nature of the recipient.Thus, as the device conforms to our form, as to human aural frequencies or the English language so we conform ourselves to it also.

When sending an email, there exist certain rules of recognition embedded in the device which determine the form of its possibility. All of this is obvious: you must enter your message here, put the address there (hence must have an address), etc. You cannot exceed these bounds, for the wires entail only such as is provided in their design. They are thus characterized other than by embodiment.

The immediate world is determined foremost by our embodiment, but according to the wires we are something else entirely. Here we are not ourselves, but, as of the Rhine earlier, are determined according to the essence they embody. Thus, within the wires, we become them, and are rendered in line with their form.

You cannot touch me here, can only see. I am cold and lifeless, but for the traces thrown off in my movement, again, that is, according to the nature that provides for this existence. I am the wires—or, here, words. We must remember that this form is not new, as I am much the same here as I otherwise might be by form of paper or inscribed stone; I am dead and distant.

What is lost in this? There is, for one, the restriction of possibilities, according to the nature of the intermediary. The means by which we may effect action at a distance limits this. One may send a message by the weakest man, but one might not so well send threats; better a Bulgarian than a man from San Francisco.

Yet still, there is something absent in that this entails not presence but representation, as thus the intermediary excludes all exceeding that for which its design provides. Currently, my face is abstract indeed, dead shapes upon a page, but some designs may offer more than this; it may be possible to take this quite far until the representation and presence are visually indistinguishable.

Still, then, can you touch or smell? Suppose we mastered even this? all was thus transmitted and represented. And what of the environment? the wind and other objects? all which constitute the particularity of space. Of course, all this may be represented too. What then might still be missing?

“In the air-ship—” He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people—an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something “good enough” had long since been accepted by our race.

Our dreams are far beyond that of Forster, though to his credit he dreamt this in 1928. Yet, even supposing we may represent the nuances of facial expression, that these are so mentioned means they are not imponderable. The point is that we may represent that which we know, that which we may think to represent. Of course, what could lie beyond this? We do not know.

We know the wires today render man impoverished, but what of their end? They tend towards some perfection, yes, but we know nothing of this final form or it’s relation to that prior. The whole is an aesthetic decision and amounts to the debate between transhumanism and whatever the others are. The others do not exist as clear idea but stem of reaction against this line.

The same is so with all things, as none think to oppose a thing until somehow prompted. Thus, conservatism, as a self-conscious movement, arose only in response to the advances of liberalism. The two constituted each other, and thus further determined the content of their doctrines. They do not exist alone, but are defined by the mirrored aspect at the centre of their relations.

This is the distance between Land and Kaczynski — an aesthetic difference. Not aesthetic in the sense of a Kantian disinterest, no, it is of infinite interest. At base, all is aesthetic in this sense, that is, all is taste. This points to two facts: firstly, that it is unconscious; and secondly, that it is subjective. Where are truth and freedom here?

You have been determined, as by Providence, to have a certain taste, and at this I might ask a simple question: Has anyone ever convinced you that a painting was beautiful? When previously you thought otherwise? They say that love may come after marriage, and perhaps this is so, but first impressions are important—thus we are trapped between contradictory images.

And they, saying: ‘Such is an elephant, such is not an elephant; such is not an elephant, such is an elephant,’ hit each other with their fists, and with that, monks, the King was pleased.

FLUORESCENT GRAVEYARDS

Nanda Speaks

This is a setting. It consists of this, the primary text, and three appendices. You could use it to GM an RPG, using whatever ruleset felt appropriate, or perhaps brewing your own. Or you could simply read it, alone, late at night, somewhere quiet and softly lit, the way it was written.

I. SKY

The sky is an eye.

Slowly, from left to right, it is turning to crystal, a creeping line of amethyst, a progress bar creeping towards completion. This takes place over decades, centuries.

Perhaps this is not surprising. After all, everything turns to crystal.

II. CRYSTAL

The end state of all matter is crystal. The process is entropic, irreversible - agitate anything for long enough and probability will do the rest.

Particularly pungent flowers and plants, for example - from the fragrant molecules that dance so furiously through the air, inevitably some must harden, fall to the ground as a fine crystal dust.

Crystal does not dissolve, cannot be absorbed or broken down. Perhaps that matters less than you’d think, in the short term - after all, over the eons, you and the life you see around you have evolved towards states as unlike crystal as possible.

III. VOID

In a sense, void is simply dead pixels, tiny dots of nothing that hang in the air, but the nothingness goes beyond the merely visual. Voidstuff is dead to every sense, a hole in the world.

The shadow of void remains void. In this way, with caution and precision, sculptors can fold it back on itself, build solid shapes of pure absence.

All meat grows around a tiny piece of void, like a pearl around grit.

IV. LOCATION: THE MEMORY PALACE

Everyone’s mnemonic. Limitless-seeming halls and chambers, packed with strange objects arranged to help with recall, or communicate codes. The rich buy homes nearby, for easier access to their memories; the very rich don’t need to.

The palace feels higher resolution than the rest of the city; somehow more detailed, more real.

Shadows here are a code, reflections another. Say the right password down a crowded hallway, and the objects are arranged so that the echo returns transformed, decrypted.

Secret passages under carpets, false doors. With each additional sense you acquire, your understanding of the place deepens, patterns incoherent before become apparent.

Outside, a wasteland, kicked-in brickwork, graffiti everywhere, discarded bottles. Visitors hurry in without looking too closely.

Ingesting quicksilver alters the parts of the palace you traverse most - it damages your memories, of course, but those of others too, whose mnemonic routes cross yours at right angles, or travel together for a few short steps.

V. QUICKSILVER / GLINTMOTHS

The moths are the drawing of angels, who lack imagination.

They steal crystal, dragging it home a single fleck at a time to build their spire - its alien geometry that passes into progressively higher dimensionality as it rises.

Glintmoths draw energy from light, sound, smell, every other sense. Carefully depriving them of one or more causes the other receptors to swell, can shape them into something new.

Crushed, they become tiny, darting blobs of quicksilver. Swallowed, the memory palace changes, and you gain for a few precious hours access to additional senses.

Surround void with quicksilver and matter returns, rushing in to fill the vacant space, contents derived probabilistically from the surrounding space. Most of the time, it gets it right.

VI. SENSES

The wild lostness of those who walk about the streets, gorged with new knowledge, stumbling, helpless, glintmoth silver still on their lips.

New senses are granted embryonic, untrained - newly infantile, you must learn again how to see solid edges, corners, distinguish near from far.

Even mastered, greater sensory awareness also makes one more vulnerable to adversarial attack, stimuli that overload buffers in your perception, grant to the adversary root access to your body’s processes.

For every sense, there is some equivalent of ‘reading’, the condensation of information into something legible to someone properly trained and equipped with the right sensual apparatus. For every sense, such ‘reading’ is impossible in dreams.

Magnetic graffiti that litters the city, tagged obscenities invisible to the law.

VII. CHRONOLOGY

We sense the passage of time. In most of us, it remains underdeveloped, barely capable of even the grossest distinction (“the hours just flew past!”). To the initiate, regions have their own flows, tiny relativistic pushes and pulls that contour and colour.

Sensates are often appalled by artworks pleasing to others; they shudder in revulsion at the ugly chronality of a painting, whose creator seems to have given no thought to the matter at all.

(Their own art is incomprehensibly ugly to others - a senseless jumble of lead and logic.)

Some of the senses are more sexual than others. For most with the relevant training, the chronologic ranks with the visual and tactile as the most erotic - the olfactory and magnetic important too, sound and taste largely secondary concerns.

Quicksilver is chronological static - a miserable, headache-inducing blur to the sensate, time flowing at microscopically different speeds in a blinding patchwork.

VIII. [NAMELESS]

There is a final sense, rarest of all, which only exists in dreams, so that to assess an object through it that object must be seen twice - the first time awake, where it must through trauma or wonder leave enough of an imprint to be dreamt about.

IX. LOCATION: PALACE GIFTSHOP

Of course, any tourist attraction has a gift shop. The Memory Palace is no exception.

Among its wares, seeds, which with proper care begin to grow into palaces of their own, sprouting space and logic, a favourite particularly with children, who love them and then inevitably abandon them, leaving husks that litter the city.

X. AN EVENT

Sometimes the great eye weeps, towering prisms of crystal that fall from the heavens, smashing themselves apart on the roofs of buildings. Reading in your room, you resent the distraction, nurse a soft but persistent headache.

Aspiring chronologists gather around the fallen shards, training their nascent capability, for crystal alone is fixed, unmoving, time has no meaning to it, here is a perfect zero by which the other numbers can be calibrated.

XI. LOCATION: STREETS

Instead of maps, posts wired up with tiny stim-needles: injected into flesh, they pump the user with local geography, more and more detailed as it courses through the bloodstream. Stim-heads wander the city, craving fresh cartography.

Superstitious residents paint their faces, drawing black triangles over a single eye, obscuring their hair with hoods, dabbing patterns of coloured rectangles at strange angles onto their cheeks. No-one now remembers why.

XII. CCTV

Sound recorders that grow like mushrooms in dark, wet places, then burst into spores, dispersing their data into the waiting aether.

An ultrafine powder that courses through the subject’s bloodstream, motion tracked, telling the whole story of their movements.

CCTV that records only thoughts. CCTV that records not what actually occurs, but the likeliest thing to happen. CCTV that writes directly to the memory palace, its observations stored as the angle between that panel, that footprint, that vase.

Every recording device has an event horizon, the point at which something becomes nothing, leaves no trace, flickers out of being as the last ‘1’ becomes a zero. Concentrate many such devices on the same point, and it becomes both more and less real, a kind of evocation.

There are those who seek to stage events, rituals almost, such that their storage overrides buffers in the cameras, stealing access, gaining control, so that further patterns of light and action become commandments that must be obeyed. Nothing

new - as you walk the streets, most of the jutting cameras you pass are sites of internal war between competing, long-dead botnets, their purposes long meaningless, capturing frames of footage at stuttering resolution between endless internal competition for resources.

XIII. FUNGUS

Fungus grows best in dark and quiet - best of all, therefore, surrounded by void, where it grows limitlessly, exponentially.

There is fungus coded to your being as that-which-is-absent, fungus that only grows in your shadow. Ingested, you perceive yourself in a glow of pure and perfect love.

There is fungus whose ingestion restricts your world to a single sense, crossbreeds offering intense, wild synaesthesia.

There is fungus, fatal if ingested, yet in the interim, as it courses through your bloodstream, the only way to produce certain smells, fragrant passwords to locked and hidden places.

XIV. BIRDS

The birds are grey, mostly, lighter and darker shades rarer and rarer, pure white and black almost unknown, asymptotes approached but never claimed.

They flock in perfect arcs, probabilistic distributions written across the sky. Their calls are static, soft bursts of quiet white noise. They do not appear in dreams.

Blood, water, all fluids are drawn to them - they settle at a crime scene and police watch blood curve through the air in arcs towards them, noting the geometry, performing forensic divination. The angels devour them, their mouths bloody and full of feathers.

XV. LOCATION: CONVENIENCE STORE

A store built on a glitch - once per night time judders, shelves refill with snacks, energy drinks, instant coffee, grey market modafinil, CCTV footage goes blank.

Behind the counter: carefully synthesised drugs to offer the exact experience of sex, adventure, triumph, moment by moment, nano-timers releasing molecules into your bloodstream at the perfect second, synthetic dreams.

Outside, an ATM altered by thieves, invisible overlays placed over fingerprint and iris scanners, so that these are stolen along with your other details, wiped away, left blank, the end of your finger a smooth expanse of featureless pink.

XVI. LOCATION: TRAIN

No fixed routes, but rather each journey as a miniature auction, salarymen tapping out micropayments to influence their destination, arriving late an undeniable failure of commitment.

XVII. LOCATION: BUTCHERHOUSES

Here, where void is plentiful, vast shelves of flesh grow like cancers, crawling up walls and each other. Atop them, fungi grow in strange symbiosis, nourished by their richness, shaping and stabilising their growth.

Glintmoths that feed on the spores, becoming ergotised, building the nearest corner of the spire into a hallucinogenic geometry of broken hexagons and twisted curves.

The oracle of this place is enormous, corpulent, clusters of mushrooms where his eyes should be, his torso nothing but a maze of intestines; rather, the place is his intestines, it is his maze, to walk through it is to explore him.

XVIII. ORACLES

The city is full of oracles, half-transcended, ageless, who will, if found and properly petitioned, answer a single question. (If playing Fluorescent Graveyards as an RPG, finding and consulting an oracle is the most likely form for a mission or quest to take.)

They are found at the centre of a maze, sculpted according to their nature.

At the centre of each maze, a locked chamber.

In that chamber, the oracle, so long as the petitioners are wearing the veil appropriate to the one they seek. Otherwise, the chamber is empty.

XIX. MAZES

A maze takes many forms.

The one you’re imagining - the cold stone walls, the hot breath of the minotaur - is a touchmaze, a feelmaze. There are sightmazes, soundmazes, mazes that exist as properties of senses not yet acquired. Mazes in both time & space, so that the geography of their paths is only half the solution, and those who walk them blindly emerge stumbling at the wrong time, and find nothing.

Mazes that cross each other, recontextualise one another’s elements. Mazes that start anywhere, combinations of right and left turns that convene on a single point regardless of their origin. Mazes that exist as networks of secret passageways between dreams.

XX. LOCKS / KEYS

Most locks are digital, now. A few are otherwise - a drop of blood with the right DNA, a block of carefully cut nothingness, a signet ring bearing the shapes of the first angel.

But most are codes, things to learn through observation. Sometimes the great eye blinks, and another surface is visible for a moment, a vast emptiness dotted with marks and valleys a language no-one knows. Or perhaps the blinks themselves are code, morse-like, hours of ‘1’ bookending a single ‘0’. There is a password the birds know, and have no particular reason to ever share, and a password that seems a senseless sheet of static, of visual white noise, until it is held to a mirror. A password encrypted in the pattern of tears of a weeping statue, a password hidden in the shadow of another.

XXI. VEILS

It covers the hair and brow, the nose and mouth below. Between, a thin, horizontal slit of nothing - no eyes, no skin, only the air behind.

It is of bone, sliced so thin that it becomes half-translucent.

A hundred strands of glassthread, each hooked at the end to tear your skin as you walk, flagellation and modesty all at once.

It is feathers, purest white and purest black, ordered just so.

It is fabric, filled with circuits and transistors, constantly calculating. Inside each circuit, a veil, so that its function is hidden from itself.

Behind it your face is the average of all it could be. With time, it becomes a skull.

Such a veil - the pattern of its threads is a map.

XXII. LOCATION: SHAPE DISTRICT

Vendors offering every kind of modification.

Vocal surgeons, happy to pull your larynx, your diaphragm into the shape of another (popular choices sing out as you pass, clutching the scrap of paper on which your chosen parameters are printed). Or the new style, fashionable this year: your throat coated with quicksilver, so that your voice fluctuates from syllable to syllable, phrase to phrase, leaving no impression but its mutability.

Seed vendors, plucking out great handfuls of seeds from their eye-sockets, kept safe and warm in that hollowed space where they grow overnight, casting them grandly into wooden crates to start the day’s commerce.

Tattoo artists who scarify with crystal, so that their impressions are fixed, immutable, and hence capable of unlimited precision. Who offer tattoos only visible on your shadow, or tattoos on the inside of your skin. Adversarial tattoos, that cause

machines and friends alike to misclassify you as someone or something else. A tattoo that solves a maze - not because it is a map, but because it is weighted so precisely that each turn the way that feels easy and natural is the right one.

Gutters that flow with liquid change. Lifting a grate, reaching downwards, your arm comes out as static, a riot of greyish dots, constantly in flux, receding slowly back to flesh three or four hours later.

XXIII. LOCATIONS: PLEASURE HOUSE

Chambers of delight.

Sexbots shaped as a mass of a million wings, alive in the air, clustering themselves into shapes the algorithm predicts you will find erotic.

Sexbots running off enormous datasets, pleasures in the exact ratio that they are desired by the wider population - to many, bland and confusing, to the one person perfectly typical, the sublime experience.

A private room, your name all over the walls, over you, the light soft at first but then bright, neon-acid, font after font, sigil after sigil, your name, for days afterwards you see it on buildings all over the city, an afterglow.

For submissives, the experience of being a root, perfect devoted support, never seeing the sun’s light, knowing without knowing the beauty of what you love and serve.

At its centre: a huge round room, decorated in an almost Georgian fashion, quite unlike the rest of the city. Inside this: the piano whose notes determine the weather for the coming days.

Inside this: the dial that is turned to determine the colour of the sky. The sky cannot be seen from the room that holds it; the connection is undiscovered, few inside in any case having much concern with causality.

A sexual act that consists of merging with a being of pure warm light, feeling purposeful, cleansed. The height of decadence, a sexbot in living flesh.

XXIII. SENSE PLANTS

For every sense, a factory.

The light plant is still functional, the others long broken - hence there is ambient light, but no longer ambient taste or texture.

Excess light capacity is stored as flowers, a garden of impossibly vivid blossoms genetically engineered to thrive amid lightstuff in such industrial quantities, blooming furiously in a single day.

Day and night as power-saving measure.

In the sound plant, storage is handled differently, echo rooms carefully designed so that noise rebounds endlessly - everything ever said is here, layered over and above itself.

There is an oracle whose maze is sound itself, the sum and total of every soundwave traced together into a map, one that is incomplete and unsolvable for as long as the Sound Plant remains disabled.

Whose veil is crystal, worn not over the face but as part of it, crystal replacing the eyes, so she cannot be seen nor anything else, ever again.

XXIV. SEEDS

Sold at the market, seeds come in many forms.

Seeds that become passages, and glow under the surface of the earth. Viral seeds, unfolding underground into disjointed chaos, mad polyhedra of broken static. Voidseeds, grown in black gardens, carefully cultivated strands of nothing. Seeds that hold whole senses, logically whole but incommunicable, growing into trees like tiny self-contained universes.

Most seeds require quicksilver as nourishment. Some prefer ink, one or two blood or electricity.

XXVI. FOOTAGE / DIARIES

Under the palace: cold bare halls, fluorescent lights that flicker in joyless rows.

It holds records of every kind. Voice sticks, memory spheres, thumb-locked holographic displays, even a few tattered paper diaries. Most are of little interest to anyone. But the seeker who knows the right reference code might find:

The ledger in which new tattoos must be registered, and hence the secrets encoded within them.

The recordings, for a given individual, of that subject’s dreams. Cross-referenced, if you know how: those of all the dreams in which they feature.

A list of veils, ordered according to an unclear principle.

A logbook consisting only of numbers, spanning between zero and one and to great accuracy, tracking not what happened but its likelihood.

That which records not the subject’s actions but their emotions.

A set of instructions, continually updating, concerning the folds that would render, out a single, impossibly large rectangle of paper, a life-size model of the present state of the world.

The proper ordering of the angels.

XXV. LOCATION: TEMPLE

You watch from outside. Pilgrims entering one at a time, or kneeling to make a final penitence before entering. Over time, the footage loops - you notice the same faces going in, the same mannerisms, eventually the tiny shudder where it joins together.

Hourly rituals, sound and vision a half-second out of sync. At their height, congregants put on thin white veils, across which advertisements flicker constantly.

At the centre, in some way brought into being by all of this, the garden of folding. A place of perfect peace, where offerings are taken and folded into quite other things, without the tiniest implication of cost.

Cloisters, grass. A pond. Lily pads drift softly above the surface. Beneath them, labyrinthine roots of wire and metal, drinking in the waters.

Once removed, the leaf withers, a computation aborted, processes suspended one by one.

XXVI. ANGELS

The angels are a draft, a sketch. Crosses through their faces, their trunks a How-To-Draw book’s penciled cylinders, limbs just pairs of lines that meet at disc-like joints.

The oldest, greatest angels, the first, are the simplest - single lines in space, pairs of disconnected circles.

Reflected in a mirror, Angels make no sense, cannot exist or have existed. The glass is blank.

There is an ordering of the angels, kept in the archives, each page a more detailed image, so that to follow through to the end is to create life.

There is another ordering too, quite different - were the angels arranged thus, they would form a maze. To walk it would be to gain free will; to walk it backwards is to lose it.

APPENDIX A: ITEMS

Instructions for the origami technique that folds up your shadow. Instructions for the origami technique that restores it.

A deep-dreamt peacock, the spots of its tail real eyes; as you gaze at them they deepen like liquid to hold new feathers, new eyes. (Its tears, too, are fractal, bottomless - inside each, the peacock again, in all its shifting infinity.)

A torch that shines pure darkness on whatever it points at.

A dream diary in reverse, one that narrates your waking life, but that is only tangible in dreams. A clear glass hemisphere, a snowglobe. Inside, a rectangular screen, thin as card, shows a winter scene, armchairs against wooded cabin walls.

>Shake it.

Setting 0: Nothing happens.

Setting 1: A storm of perfectly cubic, three-dimensional pixels light everywhere inside the hemisphere, then slowly dim and die. The screen is unchanged.

Setting 2: It shakes the world.

The latest hotfix, a patch for your eyes, correcting the latest adversarial misapprehensions. A tube of glasspaint, that can be painted onto anything to make it transparent. A spraycan whose contents are imbued with weighted veins of quicksilver, so that every tag resolves into the same shape, a map.

Mechanical fungus, folding out in tiny, audible cranks.

The opposite of a mirror, an item that is reflected in all nearby surfaces, whether concrete, fabric, flesh…

The fold that locks in sound. The fold that locks in smell.

Clone bugs, tiny blobs of quicksilver on mechanical legs that shape themselves into anything, or anything of the right size.

A mirror that flips other senses as well as sight, inverting smell and sound (though the latter sounds identical), electromagnetic charges reversed, you press your fingers against a familiar texture and feel the absoluteness of its absence.

A perfume bottle; through the atomiser it sprays smellstatic, a frantic and ever-shifting pattern, every smell and none.

A camera that records only fluorescence, echoes, the brush of the subject’s skin against the air; the footage not surveillance but pornography.

APPENDIX B: CHARACTERS/PLOTS

(Dotted around the city, perhaps, or seeds for player characters. Quest hooks. GM stuff.)

Your security questions aren’t for identity. They’re collateral. Violate the terms of service, and the name of your first pet, the street you grew up on, are taken from you.

Riddled with minor defects - whorls, moles, a lazy eye that points downwards. Her DNA is a message, engineered for communication rather than functionality. To whom it was directed, whether they ever received it, she does not know.

One who can guide you through a maze - not because he knows the way but because he practiced saying that he could, over and over, until he found the way to say it such that it was true.

Her voice doesn’t sound like a voice. Your senses insist it’s a smell, a texture, no, a smell again, a pattern.

One whose tears are tiny cubes. One whose tears are tattoo ink, staining indelibly everything that they touch. One whose tears, as they hit the ground, burst into tiny sparks of static.

Sexuality is genetic - which means it can be engineered. Hers is towards passageways, secrets, mazes, riddles; things that might interest those monitoring the transmitter encoded elsewhere in her genome.

Beneath his hairline, a tattoo, unnoticed, a coded message inked in infancy, the ink fading, decaying, at a certain carefully selected point years later leaking into the brain, compelling certain actions.

One completely without sensation, each locked by an individual password.

A safekeeper, whose trust you have won; carefully he unfolds the air around you, uncovering a rectangle of pure black. He reaches inside, pulls out what you asked for, reverses his operations to seal the world shut.

An adversarial image for human wetware, appearing man-like, you’re confident it’s a man, that’s certainly what it is, though the details fray at the edges. His footprints are like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Her body is origami, constructed of a single folded sheet, on which is written the hundred-thousand folds required to do such a thing and have it live.

The flats under the graveyard. Cheap, rented rooms, quiet, tomblike, outside of day and night, a place to watch a flickering screen and practice being dead. You live here, of course. You’re tired almost all of the time.

APPENDIX C: ORACLES

An oracle whose maze is mapped by the network of veins and capillaries. Whose lock is heavy with blood, so that droplets, vivid and crimson, splash out as you turn the key.

Whose veil is blood, which must pour continually, so that a moving red film stands always between you.

Who stands surrounded by birds, their magnetism pulling the droplets into patterns that answer your question.

Half of your blood is true - the rest is a mirror, blind, answering to no logic but that of reflection and symmetry.

Who alone knows which half is which.

——

An oracle whose maze is in footage, recordings, each leading to the next, traced out by lines of motion that cut from video to video.

Whose chamber is locked with a password that shifts algorithmically to be the sum of every attempt to open it since it came to be, so that to know it is to have observed everything that came before.

Whose veil is blurred and shifting pixels.

Whose eyes are cameras. Whose ears are eggshell bugs on the walls. Around whom drones fly and wheel.

Who sees the present as past, and thus changable, knowing the location of the records which, if deleted, would make it otherwise.

An oracle whose maze twines underground, in darkness of every sense, and is navigated by changing oneself, a series of injections that twin one’s genome with that of flowers and stalks, so that one turns and turns towards the sun.

Cultures progress through stages - at first ashamed of visual nudity, then that of smell, the untreated body something to hide away from the world; finally they come to fear their nakedness of chronology, probability, electromagnetism.

(Whose chamber is locked by such shame, and unlocked by its absence.)

Whose veil is glass, a single thin sheet, a false modesty for a naked oracle.

——-

An oracle who weeps constantly, tears drawn into grooves that scar her face, the liquid splitting and rejoining as it falls through the lattice, descending into distributions of probability.

——

An oracle whose maze is the lines connecting every particle of void in the world. Who can be sensed only as absence, as lack.

——

An oracle whose maze is mazes, stacked against each other. Whose password is the hash of a hundred others. Whose veil is veils, veils upon veils, sewn together, cut so tightly that their natures blur, and what waves before your face is change and secrecy and static.

Afterword

As always, first credit goes to the writers: 718tv, Archimboldi, Supa Malaman, Puck, Bryce Laliberte, jack, Wittgenfine, meinong, Gil Martin, and Nanda Speaks - without you, there would be no Gradient Descent. Further credit to meinong for his artwork and cover design. Thank you to Clarity, who stepped in to assist with editing and proofreading. Finally, thank you, the reader, for supporting the anonymous arts. Gradient Descent is nominatively determined to be an always-changing project, and chances are the next iteration will look much different from this one. If you’re interested in being a part of Gradient Descent, go to https://nadezhdu.github.io/cyb-ant/ to learn more, or email us at graddesc@protonmail.com.

—Оставь Надежду

Table of Contents

Ghetto

Altar of Speed

Black Box Protocol Event

It is the Night of the Idol

God’s Trellis

web; stuck/unstuck

A Joke

the bends(ing)

The Wires

FLUORESCENT GRAVEYARDS

Afterword