2 posts tagged “lies”

Mainframe
-tell story of the mainframe.  Purpose? To run society.  Character works on "anthropoidal exchange" program, which simulates all known DNA "constructs" in hyper-realistic test runs.  Determining what, writers of the program are unsure.
-at the end, narrator witnesses Elz's murder

Every Murder Needs a Murderer
-tell story of Elz's death, address narrator's later concern / suspicion of them copying her. 

State Sanctioned
I swipe my hand past the scanner.  The mechanized box-- plugged into the wall, the wall into a grid, the grid into the network-- lights up from black.  White light shines on my hand and a spinning gear whirs.  With a click, the door opens.  My door.  To my house.  Mine and everyone elses-- all the same box, lined up the same distance apart. 
I step inside my world, my prison, beyond the foyeur and into the living room.  Papers clutter the coffee table. The couch opposes the table, green with arm rests three times that of what you would need.  The home is the only place where excess is allowed.

Excess.  Like a wealthy class.  Like poverty.  We had enough of both to fill multiple Earths.  Maybe that's what they did, started Earth A: Upper Class, Earth B: Original Earth and Middle Class, and Earth C: The Forsaken.  It's not a big deal, space colonization.  My father, if you can really call those cold machines "paternal," showed me captures of the first lunar city.  His speech, staggered by contrived fragments, told me this was the beginning.  His prerogative was to, like all parental units, teach without compassion.  To train youth, detached.  As a boy, I believed in our ability to reach out into the universe and change.  Now I only see the reaching.    

Excess.  Like animals we don't eat.  They were pets.  No longer allowed.  Shipped off to the Sun, all of them. Launched, in missile caskets, to the depths of blanketed nothingness.  Maybe burned in a big heap, burried in a large ditch.  If it is possible for humans to sell out individuals from their own species, what makes dogs exempt?

Excess.  Like listing off another crime of permittance or domination, authored by the human race.

And here I am, standing at the edge of my living room, my suit still on.  There is a photo of some of my friends on the coffee table, hidden almost entirely by legal papers.  I grab it and head to the kitchen.  The papers slide over top of each other.  Some float to the floor behind me, reading "State Sanctioned" at the top.

I don't know one of the persons in this picture.  The one at the center, the one everyone crowds around.  That is me, that guy in the center, with black hair, grey eyes, and a smile like everyone else.  But I don't know him, because I've never really ever seen myself.  Not for who I am, anyway, just who I want to be.  But that's the same with everyone in this picture.  I don't really know them behind their grey and green eyes.  I just see them and interact how I feel I should.  It doesn't really go any deeper than that.  These people, my friends, are nothing more than fractal images, rearranging, shifting, combining to become absolute in their projection.

I set the staged smiles on the counter.  Eyes look back, but they don't see me.  I go to my refrigerator wall unit and type in a string of numbers.  My order to the machine is five-three-six, a rare strip with mashed red-skin potatoes.  And water.   It begins humming, replicating the biology of yeast. A molecular structure is laced within, and soon I will have a perfect copy of something delicious.  A perfect copy, just like Elz, this girl coworker of mine.  She's dead now, a copy in her place.  No one should know this, but I know this.  I am not sure why, but I know this.  Something in me, something separate from the deterministic circuits.  

I am a digital gene pasting associate for the Hub. I sit down at my desk and submit a new thinking code into the mainframe.  An evolving code.  It is telescoping, refining itself through failures, finding an efficient rhythm of progression.  Within an hour, this code will know simple addition.  Within days, it will know the self, have an ego, and think, perhaps, it should eat something.  I add a line for recognition.  If this contributes to the overall mainframe experience, maybe it will seek its creator.  My grin is brief. 

I take a break and breathe. I, God in exile, think of Elz, who left me shortly after we met.  I remember the first time I ever saw human skin on another body.  It is hers.  Inexcusable that she enter my home without express permission from the Hub! So she dies.  Assisted suicide.  She dies and they copy.  A replacement takes over and the syntax of society continues, missing not a single fabric of code.

My meal takes a few minutes for the processor to work out, so I head back to the bedroom.  I unzip my suit.  From head to toe, my body emerges from its Shell.  Shells, these suits we all wear, projecting what viewers want to see.  You might think I'm blonde, you might think I'm "white," or "black," but you'll never think wrong, because everyone is correct in perceiving.  Projections are always what you want to see.  Biologically, there's something we are most comfortable with seeing in other people.  Usually ourselves, sometimes the exact opposite.  Whatever restricted life conditions have created our desire for sensory comfort, these suits provide.  Neural pathways all networked, anchored to the shores of a bigger system.  The system of monitors and analyzation.  Assessments.  Assessments on what we need, relayed to all other suits.  In our hands, unique digital addresses bind to everything we do.  Our bodies, networked, like a microcosm of God's perfection.

The last of my suit drifts to my feet and I step out.  I look out the window, dust settling in the sunlight, and the world is everything I can imagine.  I see the steel walls that enclose this six block neighborhood.  Six houses each block.  Six neighborhoods every Trans exit. A perfect social dynamic.  Easy to witness. Easy to calculate.

My steak is done and my opaque water is cold. I set them down on some papers and pick up the important legal ones from the floor as I sit on my big couch.  It is comfortable and I am happy that this is my last meal.  A simple favorite of mine.  It feels false though.  There are no cows.

Just us. 

And them. 

I look at the last paper I pick up.  It reads "State Sanctioned."  There is a line for my signature at the bottom, right under the final letters.

Highly advanced, near-human intelligence automates information centers.  Computers.  Sorting, watching, reviewing.  Making sure everything is in place.  Make sure we make it through to reach further into the depths of blanketed, muted oblivion.  Safety and the progression of humanity is assured.  At least, for everyone that chooses to partake.  Treatments exist for those who don't.  All of them.

I sign the document with a finger-tip pen.  The LCD-paper processes my action and thus follows a delayed dance of lines and curves.  I look at my calligraphic identity under the last line.  It reads:    

"State Sanctioned Self-Termination."

Afterworld

I ride in my hearse.  It is a square cell.  My chest and upper back touch cold metal as I inhale.  The compartment hovers out of the neighborhood and down the street, passing smiling faces.  They see a maintenance vehicle.  Or a tour bus, ha!  Whatever it is, I am suffocating inside this tiny tortoise.  "Shells are there to protect you when you need them most.  Should you ever cross the road."  My unit teaches me this when I am a child.  

The hearse arrives in a large garage and rumbles.  My clamped feet and waist allow little movement.  I strain to twist my face to a grate. Shutters close behind the vehicle.  Darkness enchroaches.  One sense gone.  The hum of the undercarriage evaporates.  Two senses.  I feel a pinch in my spine.  I struggle to reach the small of my back as my arms go limp.  Three senses, and I fall to a helpless lean.  An acrid primer thins across my tongue.  A burning hair smell drifts up my nostrils.  Overwhelmed, they too shut down. My mind lingers for a moment.  I will see her light skin again, I think.  I pass into darkness.

I dream a floating conveyor in the sky, transporting my skeleton over the tip of an icy mountain.  The other side is a smeared blackness across an open canvas.  The world closes behind, consuming the conveyor, siphoning the sky.  A sutured wound.  Before me, a giant bipedal canine growls, "I am Surma.  You may never leave this place."  His tail, a hissing serpent, coils in my direction and stares. 

"You chose this chaosss, and now you will sssuffer.  Forever," Surma's tail licks, tasting the brittle air.  The belt ends and I descend into the gaping maw of God, screaming.    

I wake up naked, faint needles pushing at my back.  I open my eyes.  I look down and see my uncovered skin, dark against the hairy emerald earth.  I sit up, resting my hands by my side.  I am confused and squint in the brightness.  The sky is patchy.  In the distance, a great wall of clouds surge-- marching.  The air rumbles and vibrates from a distant wave of thunder.  I jump up and scramble for a nearby tree.  I am almost entirely exposed.  I gaze across the open field, the whole ground bent and moving in my direction.  No walls.  Nothing.  Just my tiny frame against a large tree, an open field, and a looming storm in the distance.

  Her suit unzipped and powered down, I could see through the tight translucent skin that she was pale.  She had blonde hair and blue eyes.  I had never seen such a pulchritudinous geometry.  I had never seen a nose, eyes.  I had never seen a face.

  "What's wrong," she sang, staring into my bright suit, her eyes hooked to the reel.

  "You're pale." My monotonous statement reverberated within my suit.

  "Oh, no.  This was a mistake.  Let's stop," she pleaded, her suit halfway down her chest.  Draped on one shoulder.

  "No! You. You're beautiful.  It's just that," I hesitated, but unziped my suit.  "I'm dark." 

She gasped, trembling, "You too."

  I asked her what she meant.

"You are beautiful."

At that moment, we shed our Shells and embraced.  No amount of Supplement could have enthralled us so.  Without Shells, the windows explained a crying world.  Rain pelted the window and thunder tiptoed across Earth's ceiling.  Neon flickers lit our bodies on the floor, illuminating unfettered smiles.  We became the children we would never have, elated and giggling.  Our heart beat rhythm matched-- we had never known the sinking drip of love as anything more than calculated lines and taboo.  Captures, screens, and noise. 

A round face swings into view, upside down.  It connects to a scrawny body.  The body to hands and feet.  Hands and feet to a branch. The face's tongue dangles.  Saliva oozes from the ringent gawk.  I yelp and scuttle around the tree.  Right into the trunk of a man-- two wide-spread sets of long, skeletal roots.  I stare at them for perhaps a moment longer than comfort allows.  He shifts his weight.

"They're toes," he sings.  I look to his mouth in awe.

"Dog!  It's a dog!  All fours!"  The swinging ghoul drops and waddles round the tree, hunched and panting.

"Don't mind him.  He doesn't recognize humans. This is why he is here."  He pauses, gazes across the open field, his khaki face airy and pleasant, relaxed and comfortable.  His gaze pierces the imposing storm and he frowns.  "Here.  In Afterworld.  The road to Neverwhere." 

His eyes nearly disappear in a fleshy trench as he squints.  A cone of hair drops with his chin.  And a sigh, "Come with us," he looks to me, "all iterations are of use to us.  Many are special.  But few, a handful, hold the truth."

"Seen your fur before, seen your fur," barks the ghoul.  "Seen hers too, seen hers." 

I ask what they mean.

"We will explain everything when we return to the Enclave.  We must go now."  He points to the sable clouds, "Today's test."

Alone and confused, I follow my only connections to this new world.   
 

Delirium Written

I inquire to their names.  One, the bearded watcher, is Gage.  The dog with visual form agnosia, that's Phin.  They do not ask for my name.  Instead, Gage tells me he was born here.  Born.  He was little.  No one in the mainframe is ever little.  This is why the Enclave allows Gage a name.  I ask him why Phin has a name.  Phin, who pants as we walk.  Gage looks at me and grins.  Phin bends, scratches behind his ears with his foot and continues trotting on all fours.  I nod to Gage, Phin is special. A hiccup in paradise.  

"Always hot when furry," Phin pants. 

"You don't have fur though.  You're free," I tell him.  Free from the wires. Thrall to nothing digital.  The weather here touches skin.  The wind.  Thin droplets wet my hair.  No facade.

Phin yelps, "My fur stands!  God pulls it!"  He gallops on all fours, passes Gage.

Looking over his shoulder, Gage agrees and quickens his pace, saying, "We waited too long."  Quickened pace becomes a full-on sprint.  I let them go and stare into the storm.  I am planted, transfixed.  "Newcomer!" I ignore.  Gage stomps to a stop, grabs my bare shoulder, and begins to run again.  This breaks the hex.  "Come, we run for the cave ahead!"

Behind and above, a groan mounts the air.  Charges it.    Fear floods my blood.  Each raindrop pelts against my naked body, stinging.  No protection.  I hold my genitalia lest it bounce and slow my pace.  Lest it suffer exposure. Like the tortoise, humans have a natural defense against the elements.  Logic and emotion.  We settled on only one ages ago.

A stream of light hammers the ground, blasting bits of earth in all directions.  The groaning air thins into something like a laugh and dissipates. Dust to water, smoke to air, the clouds retreat into themselves and disappear.  It reminds me of the sky in my dream, before arriving here.  A wound, stitching itself up.  The sky clears and the rumbles cease.  Nothing now but the sound of weeping. 

Phin cradles Gage in his arms, squeaking with tears.  "Why did he take him?"

"He?"

"God." 

"He refers to the Hub," a voice strains from behind.  A woman with grey lumps of hair on her head.  "We seek to destroy it.  Today."  She pauses. "Phin.  Take Gage to the burial grounds."  Desperation taints her voice for a moment.  She then composes herself and continues to speak with Phin as he passes, Gage in his arms.  "Are you ready for your job?"  She looks into Gage's eyes and closes them with a light press of her light, wrinkled hand.

"'Course, 'course I am, Elz-2," he barks.

"Elz? You work at the mainframe!  I have known you," I urge her to remember. 

Her eyebrows disagree, arched.

"Perhaps it was another iteration.  My model has failed numerous times in the system.  And look at me now.  I age.  I choose this.  Remove the chip in your hand.  Sever its ties to your brain, young one.  That is what I did, and now I see.  I age, but I see.  My eyes are free from the reel." She looks to her shoulder, her peripheral.  A crowd staggers from the darkness of the cave into the light, shielding their eyes, massaging them.  Elz-2 continues, "We plan to destroy the Bulwark first and then move into the mainframe.  From there, we will march to the Hub."  The crowd behind her, their eyes cleansed, stands fully erect, listening intently.  "Since Gage," she swallows, "cannot speak for your entrance into this realm, you must stay behind."

"I am looking for someone.  A girl.  A, uh," I hesitate,"an Elz.  She terminated herself.  Even if we are dead here, if this is a stage set for suffering, testing-- I will remain.  If it means I see her again."

She laughs, "Dead! Then you have no reason to protest, tyro.  Stay.  Find her.  I have known love, too."  She smiles, tears in her eyes, and nods to the cave.  She begins walking, passes me.  Phin returns from the cave and trots alongside. The crowd marches onward, a snake of humans from within the cave.  For a good hour of standard time, they emerge.  I sit next to the cave and watch their faceless backs.  I take a nap and awake to the tail rattling over a hill and beyond sight.  Soon, the head of the snake will reach its destination.  As this thought reaches my mind, they do. 

The ground trembles and little beams of light crack through the blue sky.  Clouds swirl to the top of a radiant blue ceiling, evaporate, and burst into water.  More and more clouds to the top.  A backward sink.  Up, up, up.  Rain begins to fall as the clouds burst.  They immediately rise passed the popped clouds and into the invisible sink.  Trees uproot.  Blades of green hair rip from the ground.  A fury of pastels reach upward.  Twisting, they blend.  A familiar groan expands and echoes through the air.  This time, there is no doubt this is a voice. 

"This is no beginning to revolution.  This is the final chapter in this world.  Stasis, all of you in stasis."  A blinding light detonates in the foothills of what could be the icy mountain range I passed on my way here. 

I rush into the cave for cover.  A rock separates from the rocky wall and knocks me out.  When I come to, I am on a flat plane of grey and white, welded panels.  They stretch into the distance, upward, into a dome.  In the distance, I see a man crawling toward me.  I squint, strain my eyes, reach out with my sight.  It is Phin. 

"Phin! What happened?" 

"Newcomer!"  he runs up, grunting.  "Elz-2 made me useful.  Let me defeat Surma."  Most of the inhabitants of Afterworld refuse to give up their agelessness, and thus, they will never see the truth, if lies project.  Elz-2 needed substantiation from someone else that Surma was, in fact, not a horrible monster.  "And they said they learned of a bitch.  Pregnant.  They can't terminate them, never do.  They all stay.  Your bitch.  Your bitch and now you're trapped in here!  They destroyed the bridge.  Prevented evil dogs from catching them."

"Bitch?"

"Girl dog.  Elz.  Elz twenty-one!"  He smiles and wags his butt in the air. 

I grind my ivory teeth.  "I don't need a bridge.  I need a computer," I tell him, adding that I once programmed for the mainframe.  "If you can climb a tree, if the rain here can soak us, if lightning can electrocute us, I don't need a bridge.  I'll write one."  

"Writers can tell any tale!  Tail, I have a tail!"

"But first.  I need something to cover my body with."

And As He Thought, He Did

-original narrator builds bridge in the sky, arcing over the mountain range. Hub authors a cataclysmic event in "Afterworld," and Surma's replacement, a grotesque hybrid(almost unfathomable being), tells [original narrator] this world is ending, that everyone who passed before died, that what he sees before him is truth(the hybrid is real and this is supposed to be confirmed by Phin, who is unsure as to what he is seeing). 

-plant the seed of doubt that this is all one mind, that maybe this person(the narrator for the first half, that is) is nothing more than one part of a whole.  Integral, yes, but simply a piece of what's actually going on.  Reveal true purpose of "Afterworld."   Narrator for second half is a mystery.

Grotesque Hybrid

-nightmarish chapter in which the [new narrator]  replays the countless victories of the grotesque hybrid.

-Fill with gore

    The past few days, everyone's been having the same conversation.  A fire alarm went off.  If you know anyone from the Cabaniss dorms down here at VCU, you know the story.  I hear the same fucking complaints about burnt soup everywhere I go.  On the bus.  In the dining hall.  In class. 
In the bathroom, two guys sit and converse through the blue panels surrounding their respective toilets.  They're talking about the goddamn fire alarm.  The fire alarm caused by soup.
 
    Some girl on an upper floor burns soup and causes this whole ordeal.  On the bus to class, some guy questioned the possibility of burning a liquid, as if all liquids share the same exact qualities found in water.  He doesn't understand the dire situation our nation is facing with such non-water-esque liquids.  He doesn't understand fire.  He doesn't understand fire like I do. 

    Waiting for the bus, I read my book, foolishly leaving my knuckles exposed for anyone to see.  Thomas walks by and asks me what happened to my hand. 
"Bloody knuckles," I tell him, dissmission coating my voice.  I find that straightforward answers held with little regard yield the best avoidance possibility when dealing with outsiders-- those not in the know, in my life, in my head.  The lesser tiers of my involvement.

    Earlier, I met Devon, the tall guy on my floor with the long hair, outside of my math lecture building.  I sit down next to him and ask him whether the imminent test is scantron. No, he says, not scantron.  No, I say, I guess it's just "papertron."  A failed jab at something clever.  The girl mirroring me on Devon's other side asks what happened to my hand.  Before I can bullshit her, she hands me a crutch to lean on--"'Bloody Knuckles' or somethin'?"
    "Yeah," I say, agreeing with her.  People like to think they're good at knowing what's going on in other people's lives.  If people speculate, I let them guess correctly every time.  You got in a fight? Yeah. You punched a wall? Yep, it looked at me funny.  You played "Bloody Knuckles"? Of course, it's my favorite game.  

    The truth is, though, that none of those are true.  I'm not bleeding, I'm pussing.  Pussing the ever living shit out of my unhealing hand and arm.  It looks like a battlefield, my arm.  My mind too, if it were visibly available to me.  No, I just feel it.  A dull roar of cognition.  A dull infrastructure of senses and reactions.  My system. Me. 

    My point is, if you keep your mouth shut and don't suggest things, hand over your ideas, people may be more willing, or more pressured to surrender the truth.  The truth is a self-generated understanding of the universe, and as soon as you have interfering factors, like a ditzy blonde who says "'Bloody Knuckles' or somethin'?"  you have a chance to skew that universe, to blur it.  To take an image and sodomize it with falsehood.  False enough to the point where I'm lying twice.  Bloody Knuckles?  I've never even played that game.  Great, blondy, now you have me lying about having played this sophomoric game TODAY and ever.  Thanks a lot, you genesis of lies. You sssserpent of deceit. 

    So, before it is questioned, I do stupid things when I'm drunk.  To myself.  Several times.  Again and again.  I'm fascinated by the utter lack of pain during intoxication.  A quick swipe of fire normally will not hurt you.  A longer duration of exposure to it, however, will.  And, if it doesn't feel like it's hurting, the scars and bulging skin balloons of puss will tell you otherwise the next day.  So, I'm sorry to You and Me both, for causing these second degree burns.

Also, fuck cigarettes.