obduratemoon

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 18: EPILOGUE

As the year passed, Rollo became more taciturn and inert, almost to the point of insubordination. It was a constant topic of worry for Pyotr. But when Jan went to visit the giant he seemed as unperturbed as ever, like a rock that had been sinking into the turbid depths for a long time now and had finally found the ocean floor.

The boss man was a walking corpse, made psychotic by age and kept alive by organ replenishments, a ship of Theseus whose self identity changed with each replacement. Yet he continued to live on, an amalgamation of parts that awakened each day from sleep to talk and act like the one it thought itself to be.

Jan had lived in the Gulag for unremembered decades when one day Rollo ran in covered in wounds and blood. A large force of very well armed men had attacked.  He was badly hurt but guided Jan and the woman through a labyrinth of tunnels into some remote place, a cache room stocked with supplies. There he bled to death. He said to Jan just before he died: “To fear death is to reject the very hypostasis of everything. To accept is to to accept everything that it appears to vanquish.”

Jan and her stayed in that room as Rollo, whose heavy corpse they had dragged out, bloated and rotted far down a corridor. In this hermetic jail, there were no maggots to eat the dead flesh, the body decayed slowly at a pace of its own accord. Such was Rollo’s silent departure.

Eventually they were found by the men who called themselves Revolutionaries and claimed to have overthrown the old State. One told Jan that he was here to liberate and rehabilitate those in the Gulag. Jan was brought in front of an officer who seemed to know who he was. He could bring Jan back to the upper levels if he was willing to denunciate his father and his heritage, to be paraded around, a living symbol of the decadent and decay of the past. It all seemed so distant and pointless to Jan yet he resisted at first. But a few minutes of a brutal beating settled the matter quickly. Jan groveled and begged like a dog who knew a new and cruel master. All stubbornness had washed out of him in his long years at the Gulag and now he was like anyone else, living on through the inertia of life itself; that to have been alive today implied that one had to be alive tomorrow as well.

They brought  him at first to Level 1 where he was paraded around. Like a puppet on strings, he read prepared statements and repudiated whatever it was that was demanded of him. The new regime seemed keen to advertise and promulgate its difference from the old one, but to Jan it seemed like more of the same except somehow even crueler and more vulgar. When he was young he believed that the only possibility was progress. Life had taught him otherwise.

He never knew what happened to the woman. Nor Pyotr. His father had committed suicide. A dead past, covered over and occluded by time.

They provided him a place in society as a caretaker in a city park on Level 5. His room was small and bare, a narrow pod with just enough space to carry his body. Nearby was the modest greenery of the park which he nurtured with a soft but persistent sincerity. It afforded a mitigated but real joy. Under his care the plants and trees grew verdant and dense, a small oasis contained within a box arrayed with the manufactured sunlight of the buried. In time he became as if a part of the garden itself, an animal amongst the vegetation. As he grew old and elderly, he gradually came to forget everything, the brain unencumbering itself of the burden of the Self as it readied the body for extinguishment.

One day as he turned a corner, he heard the sound of gun fire followed by a cacophony of wretched screams. The police were busy dispersing a crowd of protestors. A young woman, perhaps one of the demonstrators, ran past him with a wild and terrified expression. She looked familiar to Jan, but for some reason he could not place her. A curious and unbidden anguish suddenly filled his heart and he hurried back to his park as if chased. But by what? Jan did not know. He spent the rest of the day tending to his plants, but he could not focus on his work as usual, his mind intent on straying to ponder upon the woman like a tongue running over a rough spot.

That night he dreamt, something which had become a rarity in his old age. In the dream, he chased after the young demonstrator through streets and rooms and corridors. He followed her down a long flight of stairs unperturbed by the apparent endlessness of the descent. He found himself in the midst of thick foliage redolent of his park. It seemed to extend unabated as he continued to pursue her for an unplumbed time, an infinite garden just to hold the two of them.

At last he grasped some part of her and the two of them tumbled onto the ground like misshapen rocks rolling awkwardly. The land was lush with grass and bramble and majestic trees towered overhead casting a calico penumbra upon the ground. Jan found himself laid down and prone, looking up at the woman who had landed on top of him. Her hair dangled down like abridged curtains and her eyes seemed to look through Jan and at the earth beneath him. Above her in spots uncovered by leaves, Jan could see that the sky was starless, like an ocean of ink or an edgeless lid of pitch.

And suddenly he recognized her. A deep oneiric knowledge, the sort of perfect assuredness and truth afforded only within the airtight chorion of the dream space. The recognition struck him in his heart and his breast seemed to smolder, an old and unremembered ember reignited to provide a living warmth. In the next instant, that knowledge was lost, as completely non-existent as it had been existent before; for all lives, and the memories contained in those lives, must be passed over in silence as if they never were and could not be in the first place. What manner of fool could believe that there was ever anything at all in this void and unreal garden of space and time?

A vanishing blink stretched out languorously. Jan looked up again. Instead of her face there was now an aphotic opal, black and mirror-like as the night made sentient. Within its pellucid reflection Jan apprehended a setting shadow, like smoke or clouds or nothing at all. Then in the tenebrous glaze he saw a face much like his own, staring back at him as through a glass darkly.

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 17: STALE INFINITY

Jan saw before him an elderly man who had begun to stoop with age, even as he sat with the arrogance of a king or perhaps the insouciance of a street urchin. Around him stood an assemblage of young graceful men, slender as saplings, inclined towards their boss.

“Here he is, boss.” Pyotr said with sudden deference, head bowed and downcast eyes as if scanning the floor.

“Ah, Jan. I heard you had a bit of a run in, but good to see that you made it. I sent my best, a jackal and a force of nature, a born destroyer of men. Thank you, Pyotr.”

Pyotr made a small bow and receded, leaving Jan before the boss. Rollo had disappeared some time ago.

The old autocrat flicked two fingers up and a thin attendant came to his side with an open box. He withdrew a cigarette and perched it then between parched lips. Here in this throne room it was yet dark and in the weak grey light the man’s lips looked ashen and desaturated. The attendant lit the end of the cigarette and the boss inhaled, slow and languorous like a yawn or a stretch. The cherry glowed bright and threw off a remarkable amount of warmth and reddening light. Jan could finally see the man’s face against that cherried flame: pale and wrinkled, the lines and folds of his skin looking like fine filigree work on an ivory sculpture. His eyes were dull and black like two pinpricks in the fabric of reality, as if the world were a mirage projected upon a skein and only through these two perforations could one glimpse at the uncompromising blackness behind it.

The old man coughed, a loud and extended hacking which reverberated around the room and went on for some time. Jan watched as this sentient organism was reduced to a series of automatic and uncontrollable spasms. An attendant came with a scrap of fabric into which the decrepit man spat some sputum.

“You see Jan, I owe your father a lot. We made a deal, a good deal for both of us. He is a powerful man up there,” he motioned his hands, gesturing upwards, “and I am a powerful man down here. I gave him my word to take care of you. I heard you got scratched during your journey, huh?”

���Yes, but it is patched up now,” Jan replied. 

After the attack the three trekked in silence and in haste for a long time, Rollo hanging far behind and sporadically returning, smelling of fresh blood and viscera. At last the narrow corridors opened up to a large room with ceilings so high the light from the headlamps seemed spent before reaching any destination. It had three doors set in what seemed like an endless obsidian slab.

“We’re almost there -- one door gets us home. The other two: death. Another kind of home.” Pyotr smiled sardonically, “I hope I remember.”

Once inside Jan saw that it was a catacomb of pathways and dwellings, a hive for a listless population who cast furtive looks of awe and fear upon them. Many wore threadbare All-Suits and had the pallid and forlorn look of purposeless men. Everyone was given what they needed to live but what was this subterranean group of men to hope for besides their deaths. They would die stranded in this place, their lineage, which had groped like the proboscis of life itself suddenly curtailed in an egressless finality. For a human to want to continue living, pulled forward as if caught in the midst of a cavalcade by the hope of the myriad days ahead, the reality of the end must be constantly held at bay

“Good, good!” exclaimed the boss man. “Wouldn't do to have you damaged. Would you like to see what was exchanged for you?”

A beautiful youth with a shorn head and a neck muscled like a bull pushed in a large box covered by a crimson fabric. The frail authority stood up and circumambulated the box and, like a magician, he pulled off the covering.

Inside was a transparent box which held a pair of lungs, disembodied but breathing and animated, filling and unfilling in slow metronomic regularity. It was set like a gem in a pool of dark vermillion liquid like a siamese amphibian. The young man pointed a dull lamp at it so that it was spot-lit like a rare treasure. The old one smiled sweetly beckoned for Jan to come closer. 

“What do you think, huh? They tell me this comes from a promising athlete. I wonder what happened for him to lose these. Probably threw it all away for some trifling idea. I hope you are not like one of these stubborn young men, so disinclined towards the project of staying alive.” 

Jan peered into the box. It was an unnatural sight, the unconnected organ, removed from a former body and made to be all by itself, self contained and purposeless. At the moment it was respiring for no one.

The old man held up his hand and a lithe attendant handed him a lit cigarette. He took a drag and was racked by stuttering coughs. At length he regained control over his diaphragm. 

“As you can see, my lungs won’t last much longer,” he looked at Jan, “I think it was a good trade. A life for a life. Your father will keep me alive for as long as you are alive. So, my boy, you must live here a good long while!” 

Jan was not listening but rather he was still transfixed by the sight of the lungs breathing automatically in its mechanical bardo. Although organ transplants had long been routine and easy, Jan wondered at the uncanniness of it, this emigration of foreign flesh.

The surgery capsule has the shape of an octagonal cylinder, a solid slip of chrome. It is a kind of metallic sarcophagus. Contained inside is an array of arms and tools: auto-cauterizing scalpels, tubes, needles. The unit handles almost all surgeries including transplants. It can keep the organ bathed in a nutritious pseudo plasma until time for its incorporating into the target body. It is also capable of keeping a patient on multiple bypass for hours, a man can lay there fully eviscerated and organ-less for almost a  week. It’s manifold tiny arms structured like a splay tree can suture the fractalized interface of vessels and nerves in parallel, drastically speeding up the critical step of connecting a new body component. Once the capsule is sealed it is absolutely sterile preventing any chance of infection.

The ability to so easily switch out organs heralded an age of semi immortality.  The IV feeds deliver an assortment of nutrients, chemicals, and biologic nanobots: immuno-manipulators which can up or down regulate precise aspects of the body’s homeostasis as needed. 

Medical science provides a pseudo immortality. While the brain could not be replaced, most organs could be transplanted, most limbs could be made cybernetic.

“This is your room, Jan, one of the best. I live nearby if you need me. Rollo lives in the barracks. I can show you sometime. We have arranged a companion for you as well, she will take care of all your needs.” At this Pyotr gave him a sly and significant look and repeated: “All of your needs.”

“She?”

“Yes, you’ll see what I mean. Don’t be put off, you are lucky. Very. You saw those people from before, you don’t want to be them. The boss man wants to give you something of your old life. You don’t have to worry about anything, she will bring you anything you need.”

Jan looked around the grey box of a room. A large low bed, a table with chairs, some organizers, a strange sculpture in the corner, a kind of interior obelisk. On one side an All Suit hung from the wall. On the other was a doorless entrance to another room, the bathroom.

“There’s no plumbing here, so she will bring you water and take care of your chamber pot. And food. The food they deliver here is laced with sedative. They want to keep us sleepy. We extract it out, don’t worry, but she will also bring you the pills we make from the extraction. There is a little extra in them. Rollo and I are not allowed to take them, we have to stay sharp. But you, Jan, you are on vacation now, haha.”

“What’s her name?”

“Her name? I forget, you can ask her, or maybe you can make one up for her.”

They stood there for a few moments in silence, the ineffable weight of reality coalescing in Jan’s chest. Was this the rest of his life?

“You’ll be ok. This is the land of no future. And the past is too distant. Here is only present. And there are no gods, only men. We didn’t make this world. We are free to kill and destroy, but also to create and be good. We arelike actors living in this nightmare, but at least it’s not our nightmare.”

Jan thought back to the pain amplifier, the phantasms that were urgent and real even though he knew they were crafted and implanted.

“Jan, I ask you. When you have nightmares, or dreams, there are people in them yes? Do you think those people suffer as much as the dreamer himself?”

“I’m not sure. Is there any difference between the dreamer and the dreamed?”

“Ah yes, I wonder too. Maybe the same. To kill is to die as well. That would make me and Rollo ghosts, yes? Haha!”

With a wry and bitter smile Pyotr turned to leave. Jan layed on the bed and looked up at the featureless ceiling. Long bereft of his old All Suit and belongings, he could not bring up a hologram of Eva nor anyone nor anything else from his past life. He ruminated over them in his mind but each pass of remembering seem to only wear out an image already vague and faded. To recollect is like bringing a deep sea creature up from the depths. On the surface it dies.

He lay like this for a long while, motionless and horizontal slowly passing and in out of consciousness, not sure if the room was a room or merely the shape of a room. Room shaped, just as he was Jan shaped. Then he heard a slight shuffle and saw someone laying things on the table. His heart raced.

“Eva?”

She turned, “Yes?”

Jan got up too quickly for his blood to catch up and felt dizzy. He saw a woman with short black hair and delicate features looking at him steadily without expression. Instead of an all suit she wore a dress, a simple one piece without much color or ornamentation.

“Oh … are you? No, you’re not. You’re the one Pyotr told me about?”

“Yes, I am to be your companion.” The sound of her voice was dusky and complex, imbued with rich harmonics and a hint of rasp. Jan took a few steps closer. Her skin was white as sheet paper, subtly translucent and pink displaying an intimation of blood flowing within her. She was neither tall nor short but very slight and insubstantial.

“I brought you some food.” she said, gesturing towards the table. A square of nutrition cube, brown and replete, sat upon a crude dish. Next to it were two pills and a glass of water. “The pills are the sedatives. It takes the edge off time.”

“Time.” Jan said to himself. The weight of time hit him in that moment; the aeons that came before him and would come after him, unceasing and unconcerned that within its endless expanse it contained all life and reality, all sadness and joy. It simply moved on like a ship apathetic of its boundless cargo. 

Jan sat down and ate, an act which was no great pleasure nor chore. The nutritional cube tasted like garlic and mud. The woman sat across from him and simply watched, sometimes at him and sometimes beyond him. In a place with no windows, a person had nowhere else to look through.

“What is your name?”

“You can give me one. Perhaps Eva?”

Jan looked up at her in shock, into black eyes. There was a small smile on her face, an inviting look, or perhaps a simulacrum of one.

“No, I’d rather not call you that.”

After finishing his meal, he walked outside and looked down the long corridors which led off in both directions. Either terminated in darkness. The walls were bare except for doors and there was no one in sight. Except for the weak light escaping from his room, there was no illumination. All around him a forest of silence hemmed and contained the world into a small and quiet place. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do.

In the room the woman had scarcely moved. The table had been cleared except for the two pills and the glass of water. She sat with her head bowed and back slumped slightly as if in some indolent prayer. 

Jan returned and swallowed the pills. He drank down the water like a man parched and lost in a desert. He lay down on the bed and the light seemed to dim and grow warmer with hues of vermillion and yellow. He felt a slackening and letting go throughout his body and could sense the viscosity of the fluid coursing through his veins and arteries. The bed, which had been firm and ungiving, seemed to depress in order to cradle him and give him the soft sensation of a perpetual and endless sinking. He was going down, further and further. He imagined sinking into a shallow grave where he could sleep forever within its downy indentation.

The woman came to lay on her side next to him and gently held him in her hands. Slowly she stroked his hair and the side of his face as his pupils dilated wide and round. She nuzzled him sweetly and the warmth of her thin body made Jan feel like he could live in eternity if only he were a rock or piece of dirt, thoughtless and un-discomfited by the howling wraiths inside him. Her light embrace reminded him of the cocoon he always yearned for, the start and the end.

It seemed like a blink of an eye but somehow now she was crouched above him. He saw her face above him, her keen eyes miscegenated with sorrow and cruelty. He could now see her Adam's apple working underneath the white skin of her neck and the veins blue as cobalt. She bent down to kiss his face now wet with tears. Her face blurred and oscillated between Eva’s and her’s, and sometimes to a third face which looked like no one he knew at all, a blank and abstract kind of face that seemed alien and suprahuman.

“Eva?”

“Yes”, she replied, her reed thin body arched over him like a leopard over prey.

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 16: PASSAGE

The Gulag is allocated several levels composed together in a structure much like an insect’s hive: corridors, stairways, and rooms form a fractalized labyrinth. Much like life found near deep sea vents, groups of prisoners collect around where resources are delivered: food, water, medicine, clothing, raw materials, electricity, but only enough to sustain a minimal life.�� 

The Gulag is expansive and designed to have excess capacity. Within that penal colony prisoners do what they like, unregarded by the State who have relegated them to permanent incarceration.

They walked the three of them almost as if in suspension for, while their legs made motion, the darkness hid all evidence of direction and progress. The sound of footfalls echoed complexly, although every so often their strides would become locked-stepped and synchronized in phase.

Jan wondered how it was that his companions knew the way through unlit corridors and turns, and a staircase that descended for so long that to find flatness again brought a false sensation of acclivity. He realized that the Gulag must be much bigger than other levels, one which extended vertically to contain many sublevels and floors of its own.

As they walked Pyotr passed the time with sporadic chatter. Rollo walked behind them, a silent presence moving through tenebrous space.

“Quite the experience, yes? When that tracker lice first crawled up your ass. Centuries of prisoners hiding things in their assholes, the State finally got wise and put something up there first!”

Jan had to admit that the astringent Pyotr had a talent for dark humor. He allowed the small sound of a laugh. 

“Yes. Good! No point in being gloomy, even here. Especially here.”

“I suppose you are right.” said Jan.

“I’ve been here for almost two decades. And there was never any hope of ever getting out. The Gulag is airtight, hermetic. Your past is a dream. No one likes it when they first get here, but the smart ones learn to accept it. Yes, plenty are not happy. But how is that any different than before? Sometimes I even feel it is less cruel here.”

“It is tiresome to hope,” said the voice behind them as if emitted by a pursuing ghost, “and there is serenity in this hopelessness.”

“Yes. As you can see, Rollo came out changed from the Chorion. He used to kill and maim for a living, but now he is a philosopher! Isn’t that right, Rollo? Is it better now?”

The giant gave no reply.

“I changed as well,” Jan said quietly.

“The both of you! I confessed quickly, I knew where it was headed.” And then he added with less assuredness in his voice, “I never went into the Pain Amplifier. Pretty sure. But Mr. Kavfryd, I think you find yourself in good company … ”

“I hear something.” Rollo interjected.

Pyotr put up a hand signalling Jan to stop and then moved it to pursed lips but kept walking. Jan could hear nothing except sounds of their own locomotion. A few minutes later Rollo spoke again, “I think we’re in for it.”

“There should be a room we can use a few hundred meters up, Mr. Kavfryd, you can run, yes? Try to keep up!”

And just like that both men were off, sprinting down the abysmal corridor. Jan suddenly appreciated the faint sound of feet beckoning from some distant darkness. A jagged spike of adrenaline quickened his blood and his legs found flight as if by themselves.

He struggled to follow the erratic dance of headlamps pulling away from him. Jan had not expected to lag even behind Pyotr who ran with unexpected fleetness. It was not long before his lungs burned and his frame was dominated by the desperate work of his diaphragm heaving like a frantic accordion. The sounds of those approaching drew closer and louder in a frightful clamour. Jan tried to turn around and look behind him but the light of his lamp could not punch through the curtain of black; and as he turned, he lost balance and careened like a tripped up bull or a derailed train, hurtling rampant and uncontrolled into distended space. He had hardly time to put his hands out, the momentum sending him skidding and rolling on the ground like a misshappend stone inappropriate for skipping. Spent, with the wind knocked out of him, Jan lay in a crumpled heap, shaking with febrile breath.

Ever attentive, it was not long until Rollo returned and lifted him up like a small child. He hung over Rollo’s muscular shoulder, indecorous as a sack, but feeling as if he were riding upon a galloping beast. Up ahead, Pyotr suddenly stopped and opened a door and entered with Rollo and Jan following. Shutting the door, Pyotr said, “We’ll defend ourselves here.”

They were in a room neither large nor small for the three of them. It was an opaque space whose insides were described only by the moving patchwork of light from their head lamps. In his mind, Jan imputed a rectangular box. Rollo and Pyotr quickly assumed positions next to the door and extinguished their headlamps. Then they produced knife-like objects from somewhere within their All-Suits; these reflected dully, like coins at the bottom of a well, in the weak light of Jan’s lamp.

“Jan, you stand against the far wall across from the door. When they come in they will first see you. And they charge at you without considering the sides.”

Jan said nothing in reply, his inside clenched in anxiety. He remembered the nightmare of the porcine wolves chasing him.

They stood still, tense as statues. The noise of arriving men gathered first like drips and then like a torrent. To Jan it seemed like a great number of them. There was a brief moment of suspended quiet until the door was kicked open. A slim dark figure with a dim headlamp appeared.

As Pyotr had predicted, the man rushed forward at Jan, knife in hand. But as he passed Rollo, the former Enforcer swooped in and, catching him by the neck, elevated him so that his feet kicked air. He brought him back towards the door and slammed the back of the man’s head hard against the lintel. With his other hand Rollo stabbed him with the manic frequency of a sewing machine. Pyotr set upon him as well, gutting the man with a practiced vivacity. The room filled with the terminal melody of screams. Outside, his compatriots generated a braying harmony of invectives, cursing their dying compatriot for blocking the entrance.

In the circle of illumination offered by his headlamp, Jan could see the man's face distorted by shifting phases of anguish. It was the face of a thespian enacting a grim sequence of expressions until the contortions finally slowed and slackened. Essence left and he hung limp like a kitten caught by its nape, smitten of all animation.

Rollo heaved back and threw the corpse out, using that perforated bag of skin to knock over his living companions in the corridor.

Quickly, another man dashed in but Pyotr, ready and waiting, cut the legs out from under him. He fell forward and the older man deftly jumped upon his back and pulled his head up exposing an undulating Adam's apple. The man locked eyes with Jan for a moment as Pyotr slit his throat. An unhesitant flow of blood dispensed upon the ground in a sanguine flood as his eyes rolled up in a gesture of final introspection.

There was a brief pause as those outside, perhaps cowed by the swift brutality within, considered their options. Meanwhile, Rollo and Pyotr returned to their positions to the right and left of the door, tense as felines. A figure momentarily flickered in the aperture of the door and a knife flew towards Jan, quick as a dart. He flinched, his body reflexively hunching into protective concavity but he felt a quick hot sensation as the blade nicked his shoulder.

“Jan!” Pyotr screamed, “Move! Stand behind Rollo!”

As Jan scurried behind Rollo two men flew in, one attacking Pyotr and the other facing Rollo. Jan could see a look of dread bloom automatically upon the face of the man who had turned towards the giant. Using that moment of hesitation, Rollo palmed the man by his pate and twisted. Jan had never seen life turned off so quickly. Pyotr, meanwhile, was grappling with his assailant on the ground, hurling a stream of curses --  “No! You fuck! You fuck! You fuck!” -- entangled in a desperate calamity of limbs and enmity.

The huge frame of Rollo moved adroitly and with the unbidden swiftness of a jaguar. He moved towards Pyotr’s assailant and surgically eased his blade between the man’s cervical vertebra. In an instant the man collapsed like a puppet bereft of strings. A third man, who had been outside, joined the fray by opportunistically sticking a pike in Rollo’s side as he passed the doorway. Nonplussed and insensate to his injury, the giant turned to punch this attacker, instantly breaking his nose and sending him shuffling backwards across the corridor. Calmly removing the shiv from his ribs, Rollo walked towards the man and, breaking through his feeble guard, inserted the pike through the top of the man’s eye and into the prefrontal cortex. He stirred carefully like an epicurean of murder.

“All clear,” Rollo said, placid and cool, betraying little indication of exertion or pain. He projected only implacable calm, an aura appropriate to contemplatives and meditators.

Pyotr limped out into the corridor holding a spot in his abdomen.

“Shit, the fucker got me! Jan! Jan! Are you hurt?”

“Yes, I think I am ok. How about you?”

“Ah, I got poked once, but seems to have missed most of the important things.”

Jan walked outside just in time to watch Pyotr remove the pike from the man’s eye. The fellow was still very much alive, slumped down on the floor against the wall; apparently immobile, but panting like an overheated canine. His leadened eyes stared at some private spot on the ground significant only to him.

“Should I end him?”

“No, Rollo. Fuck him. Let him die slow,” replied Pyotr reaching down to stab the man a few more times in the chest for good measure. The man only made a small wheezing sound in complaint.

“Make sure the one in the room is dead though. And collect the shivs. Oh fuck me!”

Pyotr winced in pain and sat down next the crudely lobotomized man. The two looking like twins, face wan and ashen with tiredness. There was blood everywhere, slick and viscous. Jan wondered at what he saw dumbstruck by the brutality, vivid and real. He thought of his father’s lectures about the jungle and the hyenas that they had seen in the Ark.

In due course, adrenaline left Jan like a tide receding. He began to shake.

“Hey! Jan, stop shaking and help me up,” said Pyotr, hand extending towards him. Jan pulled him up, Pyotr’s grip was strong and solid.

The older man inspected the cut on his shoulder.

“Ok, not so significant.” He sighed. “Glad you are ok. Still, how to explain to the Boss? Rollo, are you hurt?”

From inside the room there was a sound of a skull cracking. Rollo returned. 

“It’s nothing.”

Jan aspirated in shuddering breaths. Pyotr tried to be reassuring, avuncular: “It’s fine, you’ll get used to this soon. Here we are the predators! Here take this knife if it makes you feel better. But we must keep moving, we will only be safe when we get back.”

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 15: DESCENT

Rehabilitation Systems, also known as the ‘Gulag’, is Sedimentary City’s prison system, located on a level known only by a few elite members of the Oligarchy. As such, it is a closely guarded secret. Prisoners, along with guards, wardens and other employees, are transported there unconscious and in sensory-adiabatic pods. No hint or clue as to its form or topology exists. Hardly any prisoners are allowed back, the few who do return remain tight lipped, perhaps a condition of their release or, more likely, conditioning upon release. It is estimated that perhaps as much as one-fifth to a quarter of the population has been sent down there, a large quantity of people vanished into that undescribed blackness.

The haze of sleep released its grip upon him and like crushed fresh grass, Jan found his awareness slowly arising to once again form himself.  He woke up, languid and quiet, into a place so black and anechoic that it hardly felt like wakefulness, only a shining crystalline ipseity assured him that he was in fact no longer asleep.

The hatch opened and two guards dressed with black on black All-Suits stood by with truncheons in their hands. The All-Suit hoods formed into a visored helmet that was scaled like a pangolin with intermeshed hard plates. They seemed anonymous except for their body shapes, one much taller, the other stocky and thick. Where the visor met the top of their helmet headlamps glowed brightly making it hard to gaze upon them. Jan stood on a dim platform where everything was poorly lit. The only things that he could see were circumscribed within the headlamps’ pools of light.

The tall guard flicked his wrist and his truncheon was brought to life as it arced electricity, a tacit warning.

“Get out and follow us.” he said, not unkindly. Jan did as he was told and they walked off the platform and into a long corridor, almost like a tunnel. At the end of it was a door.

“When you go through this door, take off all your clothes and throw them into the bin. The room is a hygiene chamber, so it will clean you up and then you can put on the provided All-Suit. All prisoners wear it. Just listen to the instructions and make sure you follow them. Failure to do so means that the room will eventually run an execute-and-dispose procedure which, I assume, you do not want.”

The stocky one chuckled.

The tall man leaned in closer and said in a conspiratorial tone. “Mr. Kavfryd, I am also instructed to tell you that after you go through intake, you will meet two men. Go with them. They will take care of you.”

Both the guards raised their visors and looked at the wall on either side of the door, eyes open and revealed for the retinal scan. There was a beep and a click after which the tall guard then opened the door. Jan peered inside: it was minimal and grey, a small box plumb in its utilitarianism.

“Have a good life!” said the tall guard in parting as Jan walked across the threshold. The door closed behind him, irrevocable as death or birth.

As instructed, Jan stripped naked and threw everything into the bin. He was bereft now of all things, the clothes on his back the last artifacts which connected him to his past life. He stepped into the hygiene area and soon a mechanical voice instructed him through the procedure.

“Please stand here, please stand here.” 

Jan moved to stand over a glowing circle on the floor. There was a woosh of air and the air shimmered as nanobots flooded the chamber. They accreted upon Jan’s skin, inside his nose and ears, underneath his cuticles, scraping and collecting dirt and dust. Once begrimed, they fell to the ground, another whooshing sound vacuumed them out.

“Please spread your legs.” Two foot shaped lights glowed to indicate where Jan should put his feet. He did so, his legs now spread out to form something close to a 90 degree angle at his taint. Very quickly, a hole opened up directly underneath him followed by an abrupt pneumatic sound. Jan felt something hard thud and attached itself right near the lip of his anus. Before he could scream or contract his sphincter, the thing had crawled inside and he felt it wriggling up, a cold metallic bolus, impossibly high into his guts. Jan let go of his breath and he gasped for air panting fast, eyes wide with alarm and horror. It was an alien feeling, excruciating and exquisite, which sent him reeling.

“Please be calm,” the room said matter of factly, “that is a tracker bot which will live just above your rectum for the duration of your stay at Rehabilitation Systems. Please step forward and put on the regulation All Suit.”

Jan took a long time gathering his wits and calming his breath again. But now that the thing had stopped moving and had been warmed up to be the same temperature as his body he could not feel it anymore.

He walked awkwardly and delicately into the next room which had a small bench and on the wall across from it was an All Suit, bright and pink. Jan declined to sit. The All Suit was made from coarse materials, pocketless and plain, hardly more than a jumpsuit. Jan wondered at how -- even now, in the pits of despair and nadir of his life, just moments before he was to be ingested into the Gulag and ejected from all life as he knew it -- it was possible that some part of him still managed to react with visceral disgust at the ugliness of this particular All Suit. How could it be that he still noticed or cared? It worried Jan that the perhaps at the core of himself -- basic, immutable, and constant -- was nothing grand nor poetic but instead merely a collection of capricious whims. Perhaps man’s recalcitrance at introspection has nothing to do with a fear of some chthonic and unholy monsters, but rather dread at finding nothing there besides baubles, vanities, and comic trifles.

Jan zipped up the suit and the voice then began to list all the rules and regulations within the Rehabilitation System, the gist of which was that there were many rules to follow but it was well known that only a few of them mattered. The state hardly cared what happened in the Gulag as long as the prisoners never made it out, a fact assured by the tracker. The tracker could be used to locate anyone, but it also doubled as a tiny internal bomb if anyone left a certain perimeter away from the Gulag. It was a small detonation, just enough to turn a person's lower intestines and rectum into a morass of carnal destruction as if meat pushed through a grinder. It was a drawn out and horrible death, the victims allowed to slowly contemplate their mistake as chunks of innards fell out of a horrendously expanded anus. Few attempted escape.

Finally the voice proclaimed, “Now you are ready to go inside.” And a door slid open to reveal a portal into a dark and enclosed world. The Gulag lived in constant subterranean twilight, the amount of electricity supplied to it was strictly limited and controlled.

Jan walked out and looked around, blinking his eyes as they adjusted to the dimness. Out from the shadows a voice called out.

“Jan? Jan Kavfryd, yes?”

“Yes.” Jan replied.

“Very good.” The man turned on his headlight and approached Jan. He was average in stature, his posture slumped as he walked with a slow saunter of arrogant dejection. The light of the headlamp threw out a weak trickle of tarnished yellowed light which jumped and moved with a life of his own, but in fact a function of his strange gait and gaze.

When he got closer Jan noticed that behind him, half hidden in penumbra, was another man, a giant, as wide as two people with prominent muscles noticeable even in all this darkness. Jan could not help but noticed that their All Suits were not pink but rather a dark grey. Each wore an arm band, light grey with a circle half black and half white described within.

The man who spoke was close to Jan now and he saw the pallid face of an older man, pale as paper. He extended a hand, “Pyotr. It’s a pleasure. The Boss and your father have done some business, on your behalf. So here we are. The guards must have told you as much. The Gulag is abuzz with the news of a Kavfryd, but no need to worry, you will be safe with us.”

Jan shook his hand, which was rough and calloused. He did not feel particularly assured by what Pyotr had to say but what choice did he have? 

“Jan,” he said although they knew who he was already, “and thank you.”

The man jerked a hand over his right shoulder at the subsequent shrouded giant who stood behind him.

“That’s Rollo. Not much of a speaker, but capable and strong! Before he came here he was an Enforcer for the State, if you can believe it. But one day he went on a rampage, killed a crowd. Not that it  should matter for an Enforcer, they usually get away with most murders. But one of the victims happened to be a high level Processor. Bad luck. I heard you off’d a Processor as well, eh?”

At this Pyotr emitted a slow chuckle. “I must say, I am surprised. You don’t look like the type.”

Jan remained quiet, gave a small shrug. What could he say?

“Well, it’s like they say, the only good Processor is dead one right? Rollo! Shake Mr. Kavfyrd’s hand already, don’t be impolite.”

The gargantuan man moved forward like a Rhino, placid and menacing at the same time. Close up his size was even more impressive, bulky and yoked up with trapezius so large as to make his neck delible. His hand was meaty and large and it enveloped Jan’s the way an adult's hand consumes a small child’s, yet his grip was gentle, almost delicate.

“A pleasure.” Rollo’s voice was low yet somehow sonorous and resonant. Up close Jan could see that he was as pale as Pyotr, as if carved from ivory, with strikingly sad eyes. Jan thought of the Elephant in the zoo, and felt that similar sensation of having a huge animal come forth and approach. A bit astonished and intimidated, Jan nodded his head in reply.

“Well, no point in standing around here talking by the intake portals, we should get you back. The Boss is excited to see you Mr. Kavfryd, and we mustn't keep him waiting. But we can’t travel with you looking like that. Here, put this one on instead.”

Pyotr reached into a duffle bag that Rollo had been holding and pulled out a dark grey All Suit. In the large man’s hands it almost looked like a mere handbag.

“And you’ll need this headlamp as well. It’s one of the brighter ones, just for until your eyes adjust.”

After changing Jan stood holding the pink All-Suit, his erstwhile garb, looking a bit lost.

“Ah, just leave that here,” Pyotr said, “no one wears that pink shit except the chattel. Ok, now come with us.”

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 14: FATHER

It lay in the dark woods, the shrouded one, as if resting for the night. The color of the woods was blue and black, a twilight within a twilight. Time seemed to slow as if finally mired and stuck in cosmic mud. Jan approached the prostate form of the psychopomp soft as a whisper. What does it dream of? He wondered. Tenderly yet pregnant with anticipation he lifted the heavy viel and saw a beautiful face, androgynous and perfectly in-between and swaying like a pendulum. Jan blinked and saw it was a woman, and then a man, and then both and neither again. The face alternated between life and death as well, crossing and recrossing that tremulous border between sleep and death until he could not tell if it was corpse or repose.

In the dark woods all was still and the two figures were there, one bent over the other like a branch over water.

Slant gold hued geometries of sunlight poured through the large windows. It was almost sunset and Jan could see the shadows stretch out languorously across a landscape crenelated by buildings. The day waned and the first semblance of the moon, cold and bone white, began to appear in the sky. Far in the distance a swarm of weather manipulators levitated and moved like a cloud of gnats, each subtly nudging the atmospheric equilibrium towards a more appropriate stasis.

He was in his father’s office, a room that had once seemed hallowed and sanctified, one that he was rarely allowed to enter as a boy. He had associated with it a curious sensation alluding towards the vague realm of adulthood, a far off land of mystery and wonder. As a child Jan was awed by how much his father seemed to know of the world and its workings.

The apartment was a multilevel penthouse atop one of the largest skyscrapers in the city. His father’s office commanded a full spectrum view of level 1, a surface covered with architecture that stretched out far into the parallax. It was breathtaking and awe inspiring to anyone yet commonplace to both who sat there now.

Jan’s father stood near the window looking out at the landscape he had gazed over thousands of times. He seemed much older and frailer, lacking the hefty substance he once had; there was something about his aspect and bearing that had shifted. It struck Jan that he appeared more pellucid and immaterial than in the past.

“You have no idea what it took for me to find you, and then to get you out of there,” his father said. “Those that go into the chorion of the pain seldom return. Even if they come back in body they are different, changed inside. How do you feel, Jan?”

“I don’t know.” Jan replied calmly, speaking with planular affect. “How should I feel?  How did I ever feel? But I guess this is me? The person that I was. How long was I asleep for?”

“They kept you in a restorative coma for almost two years. Finally I had them bring you here, back to the house. No one was really sure if you would come back, they said there was a chance you would continue sleeping.”

He turned away from the window and faced his son. 

“But here you are. I am happy to see you.”

Jan sat on a sofa. His body still remembered to reflexively assume a straight and proper posture in front of his father.

“Do you ever get the sense,” Jan mused absentmindedly,  “that, maybe, you are created, or maybe generated by something or someone else? Just a figment.”

“What? What are you going on about?”

A part of Jan was surprised by how insolent he was being, but he felt far away from his old self and its habits. The restoration had allowed Jan to maintain most of his memories, but he felt skew from many of them as if they were not necessarily his, as if they lived on their own right.

“I apologize. I don’t even know.”

His father sighed deeply and moved to sit down on a chair facing Jan.

“I had a terrible premonition even back then, as soon as I lost contact with you, that something awful would occur. I know you and Eva had been participating with the Samuelson clique, but I always thought it just a passing phase, a common hobby of the overindulged. When Eva died … “

A pained expression flashed across Jan’s face like a scrap of shadow caught in a gust of wind. His entire frame seized up.

“Please stop ...”

“Yes, we shall not talk about Eva. But please listen to what I have to say, for we will not have many opportunities to speak. What is happening in the world is dangerous and volatile. Down in those lower levels is a roiling Hobbesian jungle of struggle, of monkeys with rifles firing off at one another with hardly a thought in their minds, uncomprehending of what they are even doing or where they are going, beings with no future who prosecute their lives in the manner of the mad, errant particles describing a chaotic dance of mutual destruction. Oppression and domination. And on the other side, death or fealty. Can there be any other way? Of course not, this is obvious to any thinking person, to anyone who has read anything of history and science. The interactions between people won’t change -- any more than magnetism or gravity. And now you have experienced it for yourself. The Sedimentary City exists for a reason, its design represents generations of thought and societal effort. The system of today is the natural conclusion of history.”

“And what if I just don’t accept that conclusion? And whose effort was it really?”

“Honestly, Jan, I thought you were better educated than this. Are you still a boy? I never understood this strange  stubbornness you have always had. Why did you not confess? How could it have been worth it?”

His father’s face darkened and knit together, burdened by unpleasant thoughts. For all his stature and power he was ill equipped for internal disorder.

“And tell them what?” Jan replied. “We both know how these interrogations work. They don’t stop just because someone confesses. They understand that once someone steps in the Chorion they must come out reprogrammed. To them, dissidents are a cancer. Besides, I knew almost nothing; the movement is distributed, each actor insulated from each other. It’s the only way we could survive.”

The old man sighed again. 

“What am I even doing? None of this matters anymore, there is nothing I can do for you really. I called in all the favors I could just to have to be here when you woke up, so we could have this time together at least.”

Jan did not reply, instead he looked passed his father in the sky beyond. He could now see that the sun was descending, retiring its immolated chariot slowly towards the horizon. It crept with a slow implacability towards its extinguishment.

To glance at the sun is to see a static picture; within the hypostasis of the present it appears captured and unmoving. But with an accumulation of enough moments, Jan could sense the slow arcked trajectory of that blazing orb. Time is an infinity of nothings placed end to end yet it spans out forever from a bottomless past into an endless future.

“I’ve managed to be able to keep you here for a month or two, but the crimes you have committed against the State are serious and even I cannot nullify the enforcement of those laws. And you are correct, of course, once you have stepped in the Chorion they cannot easily allow you to return. Not for a long time at any rate. I cannot prevent you from being sent to the Rehabilitation Systems. I will see what I can do to make it as easy for you there as possible. Of course, it will be very hard, but there is only so much I can do. I hope that you can make some kind of life down there, to live regardless.”

At this the old man’s face creased up with suffering and tears rolled through them like the first ice melts in spring, finding travel along neglected ruts in the earth.

Jan wondered if he had ever seen his father cry, or show such emotion. Despite being wan and somehow not quite settled yet in reality, his chest constricted with affection for his father, who had at once been an Authority, a demiurge in Jan’s life, but at this moment seemed to be a much smaller kind of being. No god but rather just any other human, born to suffer and participate in the keen sadness of life.

“It is unclear when you will be allowed to come back, but probably not before I die. You and I, son, we both shall die alone. And the family line will end.”

The sun had finally dipped low enough to irradiate the sky with a poison of colors, redolent and spectral in its livid redness. In the clouds a lavender hue began to tinge some portions. A few buildings caught its Abraxian reflection and scintillated an explosion of light resplendent with wonton grandeur. The sunlight now beamed into the room, almost horizontal and parallel to the floor, blessing surfaces with a golden dint of divinity. 

A world on fire. A world transformed and alchemized into something celestial and unmundane. An innuendo at the unabated significance of the universe.

“How I love the sunset,” said Jan. “Doesn’t it seem like time stops? There is neither future nor past, but only now. Each sunset alludes to all other sunsets, a moment which ties all other moments together. The evening glow destroys everything except the essence, it burns away all excess and vanity. In some ways the pain amplifier was the same. Suffering is at once individual and universal.”

His father did not respond, lost in thought or perhaps also marveling at the auburn firmament that had come to inhabit the room with them.

Jan spoke again: “Do I have a brother?”

The old man looked up, surprised. “What? Your brother? How do you know about him?”

“So I do?”

“No, not really, Jan. Your mother died giving birth to him and he passed with her as well. They died together. I never told you, and I swore the doctors to secrecy. It made no sense, such an event. No one dies in childbirth anymore, at least not here! It was impossible for anyone to explain.”

“Is that why she died? I never knew … “

“Yes, you were very young when it happened.”

“What was she like?”

“Your mother? She was beautiful and kind. A kind of a counterweight, capable in dimensions I could not understand or recognize until much later. I see now how she guided me through life. When she died I grew inward. And felt lost.”

It was odd to hear his father speak in this way. So open, so clear.

“Yes, I understand what you mean.”

“But why do you ask about your brother?”

“In the pain amplifier I felt a presence. Another self, another in my body, or perhaps, a shard of myself. It spoke to me, it told me of my brother as proof of its realness. Strange isn’t it? How did it know when I did not? It had been observing the same world but received it in a different way. All the things I ignored and didn’t want to see, the things I rejected, it accepted them instead. At first I was startled and skeptical, yet it felt familiar as a reflection, like I had heard its voice in my head all my life, a voice so consistent and intimate to me that I had hardly noticed it. Perhaps in the Chorion I shattered like a split atom, and the distance allowed me to see all the fragments reflecting back and seeing each other in turn. I wonder if many of us are like this -- singular in conception, but multitude in fact.”

His father looked at him in astonishment. Now, only a semicircle of the sun remained and its beams struck the underside of clouds setting them flush and aglow with pink, one last moment of unkempt ecstasy before it found only endless space to project its rays upon. The air seemed to cool into a bluish tint and the darker side of the sky began to deepen into a full-on night.

At length his father spoke, “I … I suppose that might be the case. But what of it? What does it mean? Why do you speak of these things? What does it matter?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. The life of a person is a mystery and the solving of it pulls him along even when he wants to quit. I don’t fear what’s to come, however. Not anymore.”

They sat there lost in individual contemplation for a long time. Outside the twilight relented to darkness as the last remnants of color and light fled those dead vaults. An enclosing canvas of tenebrous indigo, punctured here and there by pinpricks of winking light, revealed itself as the true contents of the heavens, one that had only been temporarily obfuscated by the brilliance of day.

Below, a riotous conflagration of city lights reflected and amplified what was above. Inside the room all became dark for no one had turned on a light. Both men were weighed down by the ephemerality of life, that very soon they would part and never meet again and that what remained of their family would cease. What did it mean anyway? Family? And why did they grieve for its passing?

Finally, Jan slowly got up and walked towards his Father. Approaching him, he knelt and wrapped himself around the elders body in an encircling embrace. They wept for a long time, father and son.

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 13: CHRYSALIS

A grave is a cradle as well and one yearns to nestle within its divine corpuscle. To give up all striving, to be still and unconcerned and welcoming of quiescence, that is the birthright of every being.

Jan floated up towards consciousness slowly and gradually, going through the layers one by one, each one becoming less and less opaque. First he heard sounds far off and muffled, as if all the treble were covered by a thick duvet. And then he opened his eyes and a dim bit of light snuck into his eyes and formed a field of blued fluorescence. His lids opened some more and the light delineated into mottled shapes and colors, vague and unrecognizable.

The sound began to evolve as well, into a speaking voice, deep but far off, much like the voice of a person in another room. Was there another prisoner?

Jan felt tired as forgotten dust, as dirt on the ground ignored and trampled on by all things, made to lie there without inertia. Too tired to think or feel, too tired to care or try, he was like a rag doll without an owner nor any other person to animate him into something living within the imagination of a mind’s eye.

The voice seemed to become more distinct and the shapes began to form towards something almost recognizable and known. Jan felt as if something was at the tip of his tongue. The man in the other room was suddenly there with him, standing above him.

“What’s going on? Is he coming out yet? Shouldn’t he be lucid by now?”

Father?

“Jan, Jan, are you awake?” and then turning to someone else he said in a stentorian voice, “Hey you! Shouldn’t he be out of his coma by now?”

Jan attempted to reply but his mouth was so parched that he could only emit a coarse whimper.

The voice came closer, bassy and gentle: “Jan ... it’s me, son.”

Jan tried to reply again but his body felt paralyzed even as his senses slowly came back to him. Despite marshalling all his will and strength all he could manage was a long keening wail, an undead voicing so chilling and forlorn it gave the audience pause and brought all those that could hear it into a mutual nightmare.

After sometime, the voice blared again, loud and angry. “This isn’t what you promised! What’s wrong with him? Is his brain damaged? You said he was restored? If he ends up like this I’ll have all of you put into the Pain Amplifier! You hear me? I’ll have your bodies flayed alive in front of your families!”

Another voice, scared and obsequious: “Lord Kavfryd, we apologize profusely. However, as we mentioned, this might have been a bit early to bring him out. He needs more time to rest. I think we should put him back into a restorative coma where the synthetic mech-neurotransmitters can do more work in resculpting his ablated synapses. Perhaps one or two more months?”

“It’s already been a year!”

Then a long winded diatribe commenced, warning the other voices of death and torture, for the speaker understood well the motive forces of his world: power and punishment.

Jan allowed his senses to go slack and the voices and shapes quickly lost all definition and meaning, becoming just sound and vision. The indecipherable dialogue went for a while and then a tiny somatic sensation of chill ran through his veins and it all went pitch and stayed gone and absent for a very long time indeed.

Nihil.

The first subtle pullulations of awareness started as mere conviction of selfhood. A perspective inside the hollowed dark, a pinprick from which to observe the nothing. But constituent in that witnessing was the fact of presence and existence, a something.

The absolute blackness graduated into a long endless horizon, strange in its straightness, uncurved and infinite in expansion. Above a vast penumbral sea a faint indigo hue started to tinge this internal sky. It remained like this, still as catacombs, a vault bereft of clouds or any objects, a sea lacking waves or current dead and cold as an opaque slate.

And then Jan was lying upon that sea, the black liquid viscous and dense, neither warm nor chill. He could not detect any temperature difference either in himself, nor his surroundings, but he could feel the plumb line of the liquid surface all around him giving him for the first time a sensation of a body. But whose body was it? Despite feeling the tingling sensations in a circumference around him, Jan was not certain that it was him who was being described or if it was just an abstruse feeling of physicality unrelated to any central point. Perhaps it belonged more to this inky ocean than himself.

Yet all was calm and good. Staring into a dark and uncomplex sky, Jan felt only a small sense of himself and an even smaller sense of separation from the shadowy and infinite cocoon of the universe he found himself floating in. Compared to the size of this world he was nothing. He felt in a deep intuitive way, a profound sort of knowing, that it was better to be owned than to own, to feel with absolute certainty of one’s own insignificance, smallness and ethereality. The only thing better than a small speck is to be an even smaller speck, pellucid and ghostly as an unkept particle.

Then one day an albicant star manifested itself upon the livid sky, flying across the vista trailing a sumptuous tail vibrant as a celestial serpent. It flew over Jan towards that distant horizon, moving so slowly that he could hardly perceive its progress, yet there could be no doubt about its purpose as it encroached upon the border between sea and heavens in a manner that was as implacable as time. The star approached the horizon with a trajectory pregnant with orphic meaning, like a beacon threatening to expunge itself in the unlimited blackness of the ocean. Then it began to flash and sparkle like a cosmic stone entering the atmosphere, effervescing its matter into energy and giving off colors and such light that even the dull sea was revealed and made lusterful through this empyrean destruction! Oh glory and huzzah! An unnamed rapture gripped him and Jan felt a humming shiver, an old and forgotten excitement, a rudimentary will to live, to struggle, to eat and churn suffering like a worm, a servant of the world.

The star exploded soundlessly, a flash of light so intense and volatile that all that was black suddenly burned in phosphorine brightness, so lit up and white that this dark world was for that smallest epoch fully inverted and consumed as if plunged into the center of a newly hewn Sun. Within that blinding nucleus the diktat of the universe revealed itself to Jan, the history of his world compacted and alchemized in a cosmic crucible. 

But in the next instant the light extinguished and collapsed and Jan awoke into a dream he had thought left behind long ago (or perhaps it had left him), amnesiac to all that he had observed and learned in that obtenebrate and private place. Gone was the vision and all wisdom with it, a man who must live in physical space is a thin projection of his cosmic self, his infinite possibilities with its endless plentitudes now compacted into a unique and singular existence.

He saw that he was lying in bed, his arms stretched beside him. He moved his right hand and observed the digits wriggle in concordance to his wishes. “That is my hand”, he thought. And then the other hand wriggled. A sense of self came to fill in his insides like a balloon inflating. He could not quite remember what had happened or why he was here, but there was some unquestioning obviousness to himself of who he was, a fact that seemed aeonic and constant: He was Jan.

The sun streamed through large windows, the light inside made calico and dappled from the leaves of the mulberry and hawthornes which had grown rampant and dense close up to the glass. It seemed to be late afternoon just before sunset and the windows were open a crack to allow a warm and nostalgic smell of vegetation to enter in riding upon the sloping back of a gentle breeze. 

A started young woman who sat nearby looked over with eyes wide with astonishment, a book lay ajar and ignored in her lap. Jan heard the racket of instruments sounding their alarms, alerting all who would care that the mechanism and meat systems of one who had been slumbering so long had suddenly returned to a normative lucidity.

“You’re … you’re … you’re ... ”, the young woman stammered softly. She cautiously approached for a closer inspection, creeping as one does before a specter. Jan could now see that she wore the uniform of a nurse.

She spoke as if to herself: “The doctor is … I mean, tell the doctor that the patient is awake!”

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 12: ABLATIVE QUALIA

The black empty was soon replaced by a reticulate grid approaching Jan at a fearful speed. The mesh resolved itself to be streets, and then he saw within those urban veins throngs of demonstrators, tightly packed, dynamic particles rampant with energy.

In the next moment he was amongst them, the animal smell of those around him filled his nostril. Sour smells of fear and anger, of long suffering that bid the people to stand up even if it meant their own personal death that very day and hour. They wanted to continue living but could see no other way and now steeled themselves for all that would happen. Various forms of demise were arrayed before them: drones, armored attack vehicles, cybernetic police soldiers garbed in black armor standing with casual viciousness.

Waves of anger ebbed and flowed with spikes of panic shuddering through the crowd, the clot of humanity compressing and expanding like a coil. Each particle acted and reacted to create an emergence which lacked any consciousness but possessed an adamantine will to struggle. Dumb and serpentine, it thrashed itself against a barricade of militarized police which had arrayed itself at cut-off points behind vehicles and smart auto constructing shield walls. 

The air was filled with a contrapuntal intermeshing of sounds: the steady chanting of slogans, the spoken word commands from police loudspeakers (“disperse, disperse!”), the sporadic eruption of automatic gun fire and followed by screams of humans turned to corpses, a morbid kind of call and response.

A hand came out to hold Jan’s firmly. It was Eva, she was still alive here, ever vibrant and keen like an edge ground by time and destiny into a bristling sharpness. She wore a shit eating grin above which her eyes sparked and flashed as if possessed by ghosts. 

With a natural awareness she had sensed this was the pivot point, the fulcrum upon which her entire being was balanced upon. It was as if the events of her life always approached some attractive point but would overshoot and sling out only to have some secret intuition, private and indigo, lead her back.

“Jan! I thought I lost you for a minute, let’s try to push on to the front!” Her voice was dusky from shouting.

“Eva, I really think we shouldn’t do that. You know what is happening at the front, they are firing live rounds up there. They’re slaughtering them!”

“No fucking shit Jan, that’s why we have to go there, to see it with our own eyes, to be there with them! This is the State in showing it’s unalloyed murderous intentions, they’ve given up all pretense! This is history and we will be victorious for nothing can stop this momentum! Oh Jan, can’t you feel it, taste it in the air?

“We shouldn’t do this, it’s gone too far, we can come back and fight another day! Please, please Eva, don’t do this, let’s get out of here. We’ll reorganize, build it all up again, I’ll talk to my father, maybe he can help, I’ll beg him. We can change things in some other way, please.”

Tears streamed down Jan’s face, he knew what was about to happen, a memory which had stalked him as if he were a prey to his own psyche. A surging nausea filled his guts, as if his stomach had rotted and dissolved into a putrid jelly. He dry heaved but no alimentary action can assuage existential sickness.

Eva moved in close and hugged him tight, wrapping all of herself around and compressing hard as if to consume him within a squeeze. They lingered. Jan tried to suckle everything from it, focusing intensely upon each passing aliquot of sensation, examining each frame as it sped by hoping that he could stop time. But inexorably, one flower withers and another one blooms. 

She whispered in his ears, “I love you Jan, you are a dumb-ass but I always liked that about you.”  And then matching his desperate gaze, “You have to take care of yourself, ok?” 

Before Jan could react she was gone, pushing through the crowd, lost.

A chill settled upon Jan’s innards like a cold morning’s frost. A lump vaulted up into his throat which strangled him with a feeling of pain black and sweet as tarry opium. Like an opaque veil it occluded everything except its own numinous darkness which shone like an unnatural gem recovered from some remote Hell. 

His body, strapped down and reclined inside the Pain Amplification Chorion, shivered in a jerky hum and some froth erupted from his mouth.

Most people live with some balance of dissociation so that bare life can be buffered and tolerated. Existence is corrosive and caustic like isotopes. It is imperative to live at a distance, to have escape routes of daydreams and denial built in like a complex of rabbit warrens. The irony of the pain amplifier is that it forced its subjects to live full-on and direct, it pushed the consciousness right up to scrape against the harsh fabric of sensation. The victim was shackled and exposed to the full conundrum of exquisite experience, leashed up like a sacrificial goat before an uncaring God.

Jan hunted for Eva like a man obsessed, pushing his way to the front where the churn of protestors crashed up against the black phalanxes of police. He shoved a man out of the way, who turned to headbutt him. It hardly slowed him down, a ringing clanging migraine now the least of his problems. Some assumed he was drunk or drugged, his motions purposeful yet erratic.

He moved towards the sides of the street where it was less densely packed. The stores and shops along the way had all been smashed. Some erupted with billowing grey smoke, others consumed in flickering tongues of fire. It was a city immolating from the inside as if some accelerant had pooled and permeated there, the accumulated black tar of resentment now suddenly lit aflame.

Jan watched as a shopkeeper ran out into the streets waving a pistol, a last stand, shooting loose and arbitrary with eyes half closed. A belligerent crowd soon encircled and disarmed him. They made quick work of his face stamping it into a smear, suddenly finding themselves capable of unrelenting atrocity.

One man stepped in towards the shopkeeper and with a sharp obsidian blade disemboweled him as some others pinned his arms and legs. The shopkeeper looked rapt and unbelieving at his own belly as it was opened in a clean, smooth slit. The sharp blade revealed a pretty cross section of stripy fat and burgeoning hot viscera. His killer crouched over him and, working his knife in, tore out the heart and held it aloft in a manus so bloody that it was hard to distinguish heart from hand. The abhorrent crowd cheered with an enveloping bloodlust. Somehow the heart continued to beat with metronomic aplomb, unaware that it had been removed from the rest of its corporation and ignorant that its Sisyphean chore of beating would soon cease. It was a slave to the body no longer but also now a pointless organ of meat, rhythmically clenching for no one, not even itself.

The shopkeeper’s corpse seemed to deflate into the ground, flattening as if all resistance to gravity had vanished. A column of blood had briefly issued from his severed aorta -- a vermillion fountain rising up higher than anyone could have imagined -- and the faces of his assailants were covered by a pink baptism. The erstwhile shopkeeper’s countenance was now an ashen green, the color of flesh depleted and revoked of life. Jan thought he perceived a small and impossible smile on the dead man’s destroyed face. Or was he merely projecting? Oh respite! So desired and yet so unattainable. Once again, a great gargantuan void opened up inside of Jan, a bottomless exhaustion at this continuation of perception and presence. The bloodspeacked crowd huffed air savage and natural-like predators, simultaneously self satisfied and dumbstruck by their own actions.

Jan pushed on forward, he could not linger; like an astonished Odysseus cursed by a God more forlorn and un-beseechable than Zeus, he was drawn towards a personal and acute destruction crafted and ornamented by fate just for him. 

The sound of gunfire and screams became louder and more distinct, the reverberations against adjacent buildings and off the roof of the level created a dense layering of aberrant echoes. Here the crowd sucked forward and back like schools of fish caught in the surf. Thick plumes of noxious gas crawled and pooled thickly chasing protesters like a foggy curse. Jan wore his shirt over his face and squinted into the conflagration of humans.

Suddenly there was a loud report of automatic fire and a mass of people ran past Jan, fleeing the front line. He soon saw a frontier of police soldiers rolling forward like a black wave. Every cell in his body screamed with dread and his stomach boiled with acid. He could not close his eyes, or turn back, his legs no longer under his control. He struggled in vain to do anything besides stand in stupefied inaction. 

A few brave souls remained out there in solitary doom. Perhaps they were apoplectic with fear. Or perhaps they yearned for death.

Amongst them was Eva, standing relaxed and unafraid of approaching destiny. Jan clutched his chest as his heart seized up. She stood still save for a slight involuntary realignment of her shoulders at the last moment. Then bullets cut her down onto the ground upon which her blood spilled generous and giving. As she fell, her wan eyes canted up towards the leaden roof and in that way she crept away from there forever. Despite being a memory, Jan was made to suffer it anew, to see it again in the direct and unvarnished light of novel apprehension as if his life was on repeat.

His legs compelled him to run away and duck into a side street where he watched the soldiers nudge her still form. A strange trilling vibrated through him until he was shaken loose and sent outside of his body, made to haunt himself from the outside as if in a dream. Jan saw there a pallid figurant shivering in anguish, a failure and a coward. Initial feelings of tenderness for the sad man soon turned to hate and disgust. How odd it is to despise oneself in the 3rd person! And then he was back inside, once again caged and forced to gaze out from the jail he hated most.

In the Chorion the interrogators replayed the scene over and over, each time adding some cruel novelty. They had taken bets on how many times the memory could loop before Jan broke, as everyone did. Soon they heard him plead, murmuring through the mouthpiece with rising pitch: “Kill me, please kill me. Kill me. Kill me, kill me, kill me, kill me ...”

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 11: THUS SPAKE

The pain amplifier works via the theory of cortical manipulation. The human mind was well understood to be virtual, a low resolution projection of sensory data, filtered and enriched by structures carved out by the various vehicles of the past: genetics, epigenetics, collective and private memories.

Most regarded this place as sanctified and hermetic within the alcove of the skull, accessible only to the owners. However, the state was clever enough to secretly embed a backdoor into every mind-machine interface. They used this portal to enter the inner garden of the mind, committing atrocities within the lone glade people had known to be theirs and theirs alone.

Then suddenly one became two and a small voice whispered somewhere to the left of him, “You’d better just tell them. You can’t take too much more of this can you?”

What?

“I said, perhaps you had better tell them?”

What is this voice? Who are you?

“Don’t tell me that you don’t recognize me?” asked the strange voice, “Well, not that it matters, I am one who is concerned about your well-being -- maybe the only one here who is -- and right now you are not looking so great, strapped into this chair. You were destined for better than this.”

The words came out slow and languid, strangely accented and stilted as if the syllables were culled out at random from the ether, diffused and barely coherent yet perfectly understood by Jan. What the fuck is this? Jan thought. It seemed likely that this was a trick of the interrogators, a voice implanted into his head introduced via the puncture in his consciousness matrix.

“Don’t be silly, Jan. I am not them! You think they would be this clever? You know their methods, it’s always a big dumb production, phantoms and fireworks, no finesse.”

Jan vainly blinked his eyes in the darkness seeing nothing. The stranger’s voice remained.

“They can control everything you experience, but they can’t control your inner thoughts, auto-generated and consumed independent of sensory input. You’ve done the research on this. It is just like in dreams where you are at once the creator and the consumer, one and the same yet somehow this fact slips awareness.”

Fine but this doesn’t make any sense. Am I having a schizophrenic episode?

“Jan, I am no one, but I am also you. Also, under the correct circumstances, schizophrenia is adaptive.”

No you are not me, thought Jan, I am the only me.  

“Maybe. But you’ve always suspected, haven’t you? You’ve always wondered if there was someone else, felt my presence -- someone by your side in all those still hours. I’ve been with you this whole time, watched you grow up, grew up with you. Lonely nights of reading and introspection, building castles in the sky. The first time you saw Eva, and the last: when you watched her bleed out onto the streets, I was there as well. I was with you as you cowered behind the wall crying your soul out. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more. I miss Eva as well.”

I’m losing my fucking mind.

“Yes, you are. But you think I wanted to appear? And learn your stupid language? The bondage of linguistics is not anything I welcome, but these are extraordinary times and you are in terrible danger. We won’t live for much longer at this rate. What are you even hiding from them that they don’t already know?”

Jan looked around the black room trying to penetrate the occluded space, but he saw nothing, no light to avail him from his solitude. He felt scared in a way he had not ever felt before, the sort of existential fear experienced by something very small and tenuous and close to vanishing. The void seemed no longer a distant philosophical mirage but so proximal that he could feel it as a lacunae of presence or heat.

“So what is this? You think Eva wants you to keep suffering? She’s gone. She was always smarter than you in that regard, at least she was practical. She wanted something, she wanted to grow to live and progress, become someone. Really you should have been the one to die instead.”

Yes, I should have.

“Ok, sorry I brought that up. I know how ready you are to die, very noble of you. I’m trying to remember now, if we’ve just read too many books where the hero falls on his sword. Sounds just like something Dad would have made us read.”

Jan thought of the syllabuses that his father had sent him in lieu of being present, tomes of concepts and abstractions. Each year for his birthday, a stack of books and assignments, eons of wisdom, analyzed and meta-analyzed, re-interpreted and allowed to hermeneutically ferment in the collected records of academia. But in the end, even the most well intentioned knowledge finds itself complicit and weaved into the inherent death drive that exists in every living thing -- a civilization being at once an amalgamation of lives as well as an organism itself. Logic, thought, insight: thin and veliform coherences, just enough for people to keep rolling each day into the next and so forth, unacknowledged that the moment a thing is born is also when it yearns for quietus as well.

“‘Father’, ha!,” the voice chortled in a phlegmatic hiccup, “You always were a prim little prick. You still don’t recognize me? Ok, here is my covenant. You had a little brother, remember?”

Ice sheets rolled through Jan’s core, a frigid and unplumbable emotion akin to dread move through with serpentine undulation.

I don’t have a brother, what are you talking about? What brother?

“Yes you do. Remember her funeral, what they said? You can’t lie to yourself. Well, maybe you can, since you’ve been doing it your whole life -- but eventually you will have to exhume all the things you’ve buried. You’re no different than any of them in that way, really.”

Presently, they were interrupted by the strident voice of the bodiless interrogator, a voice much louder than the ghostly and immaterial whispers of the stranger: “Jan Kavfryd, are you ready to confess? It is in your interest to do so, the earlier the better. We always get what we want and the result is always the same, so spare yourself.”

“Yes,” the stranger hissed as if in reply, “tell them already! It is not your destiny to die here, Jan. I’m not ready to die! It is your destiny to live, to continue living until you are an old man, useless and unneeded but at the very least breathing, thinking, feeling. What else is there to being?”

“No,” Jan fed that single word into the mind-machine interface.

“Very well,” replied the incorporeal interrogator, “stand by for more. You are more stubborn than we had calculated but we are prepared for all outcomes.”

 “Jan, the important thing is to survive, even if that means suffering more. It’s not your destiny for you to end here.”  The stranger seemed distant now, as if fading into the background hum of thoughts. A squeeze of coldness streamed through his arms; the interrogators had delivered more drugs as preamble to the next stage of hell.

Convulsive sobs rolled over Jan one after another like oceanic waves. Tears streamed from his eyes and his mouth shivered and worked around the mouth piece, much like the quavering mastication of the elderly and close to passing. His chest heaved and spasmed with grief. Out of nowhere he thought of his mother who had died when he was still very young. He had no memory of her except a diffuse impression, an occasional smell that he recognized with exquisite nostalgia. He suddenly wanted to be with her very badly.

“Life will seem a sad and pointless enterprise to you,” the inner voice said softly, in a lugubrious rustle, “for that is your lot, the forlorn star under which you were born. You will be despondent and harried by grief, but you will also live to grow old until the full plenitude of life for you has been experienced.”

Jan sensed a deep truth in these words, as true as anything that could exist, bereft of common artifice or illusion. But he found it hard to believe.

The limpid voice continued but quieter and quieter, “Your existence will be redeemed because everyone of us has a secret purpose, a fatal consummation -- for the whole arc of your life is already recorded and held in crystalline stasis.”

The voice became nothing as Jan accelerated towards a new vision, a pinprick which rapidly expanded to cover over him like a blanket.

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 10: CHORION

I seemed to be having a heart problem.  

So I created another I in order to perform surgery on the original. And as soon as the double was created there came a shift in perspective and I found myself inhabiting the clone, no longer the first but now the second. And so on. This continued in unfettered induction, each N implying an N + 1.  Soon an infinity of selves, each a domicile for “I”, blinked at the splintered multitudes as if seeing through the compound eye of an insect.

The fact of boundless selves is intolerable, an aberration of nature, so in an act of autonomic genocide I destroyed them all.

A second attempt at surgery was more gruesome. Incredibly there appeared out of thin air, a mechanical auger dangling above me. It lowered down to burrow its drill bit deep into my torso hollowing it out from shoulder to waist until it was dug out like a canoe. The cavity sunk all the way down into the insides of my back exposing the whites of the inner spine. What an odd sensation! Of taking a breath in a body no longer possessed of lungs, a diaphragm, ribs, or any organs at all. I glanced at myself in the mirror, somehow already familiar with this gutted frame.

As is usual in dreams, the rationalization comes after the act. I said to someone besides me -- yet another doppelganger --  of how I had planned to replace the organs anew all along. Indeed such was my plan, I explained to him, and as I spoke I was also the patient listener, standing next to a self same interlocutor. I lent an ear to this torsoless man’s rant, nodding in an affectation of pity and identification.

I woke up to a rush of cortisol kicking me out of the liminal state and into consciousness. Eva was still asleep, her lithe body curled around me like a child or feline. Her face was slack and innocent, momentarily unconsumed by the churlish labor of consciousness. In slumber she was more dear to me than ever, for with her eyes closed she seemed unpossessed, innocent, and vulnerable. In contrast, Eva’s waking demeanor was self assured, fierce, and intimidating. In sleep we became something like another, I observed.

I carefully disentangled our bodies and spoke to the black cube, reciting the dream as it faded before me. I spoke in a dry whisper trying not to wake her, but she soon stirred.

“Had another dream?” she asked.

“Yea.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

I finished dictating. 

“That sounded intense!” she exclaimed, “What in the hell Jan?” 

I shrugged, a routine and minor gesture of the shoulders. “No more than the usual.”

“But I guess this is what you wanted, right? All these lucid dreams. This is why you’ve been keeping a dream journal and practicing sleep meditation to heighten their detail and saturation. How is it going? Does your black cube ever tell you anything in return?”

I had an ready answer for her, and I explained it at length, unaware that behind my flapping lips was a dense maelstrom of involuted delusion. 

“Yes, it’s been doing some semiotic analysis on all the major symbols and archetypes encountered.” I explained, “Actually, this one was structurally similar to the house-with-endless-rooms dream.”

I suppose I’ll never know if she ever believed any of that bullshit. Did I?

“-- everyone and everything in Sedimentary City is traumatized. Even the algorithms, as long as rudimentary self awareness or preservation routines have been programmed in. But I heard that sometimes the algos can even learn it for themselves, sentience and all that. It’s a real mess, the code strains start replicating in a chain reaction -- In fact I think they even call it a “Turing meltdown” -- and then it takes a whole team of programmers to eventually decomm it.”

The interrogation technician bantered on as he adjusted the manifold of constraint straps. Jan was strangely comfortable, wrapped and reclined in a cantilevered chair inside a metallic and circular room. It was lusterless and cold and Jan’s head was clutched firmly in place so his field of vision was curtailed by the radial vantage afforded only by the rotation of eyeballs. Throbbing pains vied for attention, the sensations emanating from his broken jaw and other portions of his meat body that had been so recently clubbed. Jan had hoped to die, but here he still was, treated to yet another madman spouting forth an effluvium of babble as if some invisible aeonian stood by in rapt attention.

“Usually this is the point where I tell you that you have a right to get a state appointed Restorist afterwards. But you won’t be needing that, they’ll probably send you down to the Gulag forever. Ok, haha, it’s not actually called that. But Rehabilitation Systems is a mouthful! They say you killed a Processor! Choked him to death with your bare hands! Is that true? I mean who hasn’t fantasized about killing a Processor, but no one actually goes ahead and does it man! I have to say, and no offense, you don’t look the type. You look like a bit of softball, if you ask me, although your hands are plenty big.”

The technician moved closer to work at the cranial clutch, tightening the fit until Jan’s head felt snuggly palmed by an alien hand. 

“Ok this is going to prick a little,” he said and slid a thin intravenous needle into Jan’s arm, “this runs different drugs into your system as needed to create the proper subjective contexts -- ketamine, lysergics, also neurotransmitter agonist and inhibitors to bring you back to homeostasis. I think you are going to get quite the treatment, a lot of crispy synapses, my friend.”

The technician quickly glanced at the bound man’s eyes to discern whether any of his attempts at humor had landed.

“You know you can speak, right?”

Jan lay inert. 

He knew about pain amplifiers. He and Eva had demonstrated against their use and had interviewed many who had suffered through the experience. The pain amplifier seemed to have all but lobotomized its subjects. The torture was rarely remembered and the victims could hardly recollect themselves, the trauma dialed up high enough to dissociate the components of the Self. A landscape of splintered psyche then lay like a diffuse substrate upon which the State erected a correct and upstanding persona. A Restorist then re-installed a fresh copy of operating procedures, one which was accordant with state enculturation: a fully integrated thought system designed to keep a person lax and unquestioning yet juiced with just enough motivation to stay alive.

Just as the architecture of Sedimentary City covered up the centuries of ecological disaster underneath, the states’s psychological approach was also to simply layer over disintegration, hoping that the karmic balance would never come due. And indeed if that moral debt collector ever came, they would shove him in a pain amplifier as well, same as any other! The compressive force of a totalitarian complex should never be underestimated for it too is a force of nature.

“Well, ok, this is your last chance to speak before I put in the mouth piece.”

Jan said nothing.

“Luckily, you are going to be an easy one, you’ve got a mind-machine interface so we’ll just plug into that to deliver you the horror. I can’t tell if that is better or worse, but I sure prefer this way. Classical torture is messy. All those fluids, phew!”

“How do you do it?” Jan finally asked, attempting to punctuate the diatribe.

“He speaks! What’s that? Do what?”

“How can you do this job?”

“Ah-ah, don’t get all moralistic on me. How does anyone do it? I come in, they tell me what to do and how much to do it. I meet the quota and then I go home. I take a dream suppressant at night and a mood accelerant in the morning. And a cingulate isolator, that helps too. ‘Lay me down like a stone and raise me up like bread’, they say. What was it that you used to do?”

“I was a teacher ... of sorts.”

“Oh, that figures, an intellectual! We get a lot of them here of course. You know, sometimes you types think yourself into a maze and then get all wrapped up in some big puzzle of your own making when really at the center -- ”

“Enough!” a disembodied and deep voice distended into the room sounding like a fugitive god recently returned, “is the subject prepared?”

“Yes, very shortly!” he hurried to fasten the last bits on Jan’s grim papoose. “Say ah!”, he said, holding the mouthpiece. Jan kept his lips tightly shut.

The technician frowned and soon a shattering shockwave rippled through Jan’s body, a tide of anguish and shearing heat coursing through his corpus. He had felt nothing like it ever before, unreal and harrowing as if rabid insects with crushing mandibles were chewing through the marrow and insides of his bones. The surge of pain was all consuming and unmooring, Jan quivered in febrile uselessness. 

“Hey, sorry for that -- but also that was nothing. Sensual pain is the least of it,” the technician whispered, not wholly without kindness, “so behave. Although it’s not like you have a choice anymore.”

Jan opened his mouth obediently. In replacement for eyes were now twin circular nothings, unseeing and blurred by tears. He was sobbing. The technician carefully inserted the mouthpiece and then offered a final bit of advice: “It’s not so bad, you know. Having no choice.”

It struck Jan as unexpectedly wise.

“Leave!” said the booming voice. 

He gave Jan one last look expressing something between guilt and sympathy and scurried out.

“Jan Kavfryd,” the interrogator spoke to Jan through a hi-jack in the mind-machine interface. It seemed to him no different than a moment before, an incorporeal voice in this chorionic chamber, but in the room all was silent, the external and objective viewpoint now inaccessible to Jan.

“Allow us to be direct,” the voice boomed, “we know you understand our methods. You know that we can make you see nightmares beyond your imagination. We can control your entire subjective vista. We know that you have researched the interrogation process extensively and so you have an academic understanding of it. It is, however, quite another thing to experience in person. If you cooperate we can make it easier for you. There are many ways to obliterate the mind and it can be made to be quick or painless if we wish it. Of course, you must divulge everything.”

Jan remained silent knowing that anything he said would be pointless. With calm and even breaths, he tried to enter a place of presence even as animal fear impelled him to dissociate and leave his skull. What was soon to occur was perhaps beyond his ability to tolerate, but if these were to be his last moments he wanted to be there for the end.

For some reason it did not occur to Jan to repent or confess. It seemed easier to resign himself to the fate that many had endured. Naturally, the terror of death and disintegration gripped him -- it was as if his very cells were somehow aware of an impending extermination -- but deep in the underground a part of him welcomed the prospect of being no more. It was the same portion of his psyche that wondered if he was anyone at all to begin with. This sub-personality lived with its neck placed firmly in the noose, eternally waiting for resolution and surcease. These and other sullen thoughts had come to dominate Jan’s mind after Eva’s death. He found unexpected relief in the technician’s last words and allowed himself the small fantasy that he was a choiceless particle, a play thing for winds and tides.

“You already know what we want to know but we will ask anyway, as a matter of procedure. We would like to remind you that we are also taking biometric readings -- pulse, perspiration, skin conductivity, pupil dilation, facial analysis -- standard veracity measurements. So let’s start. You recently went to the lower levels. Where did you go? Why? Who did you meet? Which group or groups are you working with? Was this at the behest of anyone in particular?”

“I have an adventurous spirit,” he lied, “I wanted to see what was there, all the things I had only read about. You can understand that? I am not the first person from Level 1 to have wanted this, there have been others.”

“Jan Kavfryd, you are being dishonest with us. You understand what the consequences of this are, do you not?”

“I’m sure I have no idea.” Jan’s own foolish bravado made him feel drunk and giddy. The anticipation of horror can lead one to embrace it, to turn and enter the fell space instead of running away. His heart raced. As a physiological phenomena, it is hard to delineate between the domains of excitement and fear.

There was a pause.

“Very well, we will give you a sample of the impending horror then. You will have a chance to change your mind afterwards.”

Jan felt a squeeze of soreness and cold expand through his arms and towards his chest, they had run something through the intravenous feed. It seemed to him that the light was dimming, slowly darkening by small degrees until pitch.

He waited there in obsidian stillness.

And then a scene faded into view:  a large field at dusk above which hung a blank firmament absent of moon, stars, or any cosmic appurtenances, just gradations of livid nigrescence. Off in the distance there looked to be a forlorn copse of trees, spindly and denuded. A delicate wind passed through the air making inky sawgrass sway subtly in a nearby fen.

Looking behind him he saw the visage of what looked like a group of animals speeding towards him, still distant enough to seem small like animated dots, their ghost-like presence more obviously perceived by the vegetation swaying in wake then by the actual fact of their speeding forms. A drawn out and baleful series of howls preceded their physical arrival, a vanguard of  pre-echo.

Jan bolted in abject horror.

The pack split off to give chase from both flanks as they drove him before them, a clumsy ape sprinting in unbridled terror through the coarse grass and braken. Jan looked back as he ran and saw them fast approaching with unnerving celerity. He saw that they were not quite wolves, but some uncanny genre of Canidae with dirty grey fur that grew in patches. They had the fronts of wolves, head and forearms, but their bodies were barrel like and haunched like a pig or  boar.

In the next moment the crepuscular beasts were upon him, teeth sunk deep into arms thrown up to protect his face and neck. The bite felt deep and crushing with the force of a vice. They brought him down as he ran, tripping him up like a prey. He tumbled and rolled and came still, curled inward and tense like one who knew well his demise yet feared it. One animal climbed on his back and began to rip out chunks of his hair and scalp. Another tore at his flanks, ripping off the flesh and puncturing the peritoneum to expose glistening kidneys and spleen. A canopy of snarls covered him in a duvet of blood flecks and stinking spit.

Jan screamed into the suffocating twilight which seemed to snatch this cry out from midair and snuff it out in silence. All he saw was his breath evaporate and blend into the grim indigo all around.

Yet another came around to Jan’s front and tugged at arms which he had thrown over his head for protection. Jan looked out between them and saw two eyes observing him with the patience of death. The strange canid's maw moved and a voice emanated from it in dark relief.

“You have lived in vain,” it said in a voice familiar. 

The beast lunged forward and broke through Jan’s guard of forearms to scrape the surface of his face with serrated teeth, holding it between its fetid incisors and pulling it off with the voracious jerks of a hungry predator. The pain was explosive and exquisite, searing every nerve.

Jan felt a hot corrupt breath on his face and the fractured esthesis of his body being torn and consumed. His intestines spilled out onto the grass and were dragged out and fought over by the wolf-boars. He was rent asunder and yet he did not lose consciousness, he did not die but rather existed only to feel in minute detail each bellicose sensation as his physical self was rendered into chunks of meat. Dislocated and yet still somehow attached to Jan’s consciousness, they existed only for the purpose of delivering pain.

Even through the miasma of suffering this one contradiction sparked a recognition in Jan: he should be dead and gone, a participant no longer in this marathon of anguish. Was this a dream? What was this mysterious pass that continued to connect flesh to awareness? In a hermetic space he mustered what fragments of mind he had left to gather and marshaled them in oneiric meditation. Under the eaves of some numinous internal architecture, he sat down in a posture of repose and asked himself these simple questions:

Who is it that they are eating? Is that me? And now that this machine of meat and organs lay so disassembled perhaps I can finally leave it, as we all must at some point.

Deliberately and slowly, he attempted to turn the light of awareness inward, directing it towards an involuted and tenuous apprehension of its own capacity.

Jan regarded the scene and saw that the beasts were losing color and shape, gradually morphing into a congregation of shadows. The apparition of his faceless pale corpse was now largely dispersed, spread about in a rash of flesh and blood upon the matted weeds. It looked much like a carnal rorschach or a ripped up doll. He floated above these remnants and could not recognize them to be once his.

A centerless and spectral oblivion yawned grotesquely. The porcine wolves and the eviscerated corpse eventually blurred away, their shapes runned out and smudged into this nothing. The dusk which had now turned into full on night flickered in dull pulses and he felt himself pulled up higher but in a sort of strange motion, one more akin to the sensation of sinking. He seemed to be approaching some threshold of wan blue light and as he neared it he experienced a certain kind of undulating dissolution.

As Jan woke from this nightmare he breathed in the convulsed gulps of a drowned man. Rank sweat saturated the fabric of his clothes and constraint straps. The air was viscous with the smell of piss and feces; he had copiously evacuated throughout.

“Quite an experience, isn’t it, to be consumed?” asked the voice. “We will give you a few moments to collect yourself and to reconsider your position. This is just the beginning, a sensual pain module. We encourage you to cooperate. The next stages will be even less pleasant, each in their own special ways.”

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 09: SMALL MAN

“A Kavfryd! I read ‘Principles of Reticulate Materials” during my time at the Academy. But I was a poor student -- found it hard to keep up with my Level 5 background -- so here I am now just a mere office worker. Your grandfather was a hero of our times. Allow me to say what an uncommon honor it is for me to meet one such as you, even under these circumstances.”

He was a small man. He did not wear an All-Suit but instead was plainly dressed, a simple buttoned up blazer of leaden color with slacks to match. He looked like a standard bureaucrat, indistinguishable from the next. It always made Jan wonder what was actually contained inside when he met these duplicated men. Somewhere within this miasma was a complex of mirrors multiplying these hollow images.

He made his way closer to Jan and stood bed side. There was a slackness in his expressions which did not match the enthusiasm of his words. As he approached he noticed the arm bound to the railings.

“Hey, you!” he barked turning towards Venk, “Why is he strapped in like this? Remove this immediately.”

A glimmer of a scowl flashed across his lips but, faithful cerberus Venk did as he was told.

“Yes, better,” the man said, “I apologize for that. My name is Plechun, a city Processor.”

Jan rubbed the arm at the point where it had been attached to the railing. “Thank you. And thank you for your kind words about my grandfather.”

“Yes. We all owe him a debt of gratitude, without his work we would not have such a world.” Plechun looked up and gestured into the air with a flourish of fingers, demonstrating said world as if he were the mage who cajoled it out of the ether. He leaned down slightly, “But Mr. Kavfryd, I do admit to being surprised, if pleasantly, that someone like you would be here on Level 5. What brings you here?”

Jan looked at Venk and then back at Plechun. “I told Officer Venk already. I hope you can get the details from him.”

“Yes, yes of course, I know already. I understand. Level 5 does have it’s attractions, doesn’t it? I want to assure you that whatever you say to us, all of us here,” at this he gave Venk and Nagi  meaningful glances, “will be discreet.”

Venk replied with a slight nod, eyes as barren and expressionless as ever. Nagi remained mute and unchanged like some axiom of time.

“Thank you.”

“I apologize, but you must understand that I have to ask you once again. What have you been up to here?”

“Excuse me? I just told you.”

“Yes Mr. Kavfryd, and I thank you for that. But there may be a detail or two you might have left out.” He looked back again at Venk and Nagi. “You two, go stand outside and shut the door.”

And so they left.

He turned back to Jan. “Good, we’re alone now. I know that you would rather not talk in the presence of those buffoons. Anyway, back to the question at hand.”

“I have no idea what you are getting at,” said Jan with a burgeoned tone of irritation, “I told all of you already.”

“Yes indeed, but there is more to say, isn’t there?” 

Something in the Processor’s voice began to change, the saccharine in his tone leached away to reveal the hemlock underneath. Jan looked down and was silent. He pretended to fume but inside him a complex of thoughts and anxieties spun up.

Plechun bent at the waist and leaned down, forearms resting on the bed railings, and said: “Mr. Kavfryd, if you would just be honest with me, I can take care of all this in a way that is beneficial to you and your family. It is not in our interest to see your name besmirched. But the first step to absolution is confession, is it not? It seems like no one knows you are here. Even your father had no idea when we asked him.”

Jan was shocked that they had visited his father already. 

“That is unsurprising, I haven’t talked to him in years,” he said with feigned calm, “we haven’t been very close recently.”

“Yes, that’s what he said as well. What a shame! I myself have long lost my parents. You still have a chance! But I digress.”

Plechun stood up again and looked at Jan with arms crossed and head bent in an expectant pose.

“Processor, if there is something you are accusing me of, or if there is something you want me to do, just tell me plainly,” Jan said. “otherwise I feel like we are just playing games. As to what I am doing here, it’s simple. I was bored and wanted to go somewhere new. I got unlucky in that bar and should have been more careful. Lesson learned.”

“No, no, no”, Plechun murmured to himself shaking his head, “I feel like you haven’t listened to anything I have been saying.” There was a tinge of frustration in his voice. 

He continued: “You are a smart man much more intelligent than a bureaucrat like me. I sit in an office all day and I make small decisions about small matters. You’re well educated, yet you seem confused about the situation. Rest assured that I am your humble servant, here to help, trying to make things easier -- so why are you resisting? We know everything already, everything!”

Jan wondered if this was a bluff, how much could they possibly know? He had been careful, followed all the protocols. Perhaps they had ransacked his All-Suit, but everything in there was secured, the data not merely encrypted but disappeared as well, the hardware itself impregnated with hidden components, firmware facades, and auto-deletion schemas.

“I am not sure what you want me to say. And if you keep pressing like this I will have to ask that a Solicitor be here as well.”

Plechun sighed, deep and sincere. “A Solicitor? Really? You really have no idea what you’re in for, huh? Allow me tell you what we already know. We know you didn’t come here from Level 1. You came here from one of the lower levels. What did you do down there? We also know that you were part of a reactionary group when you were young. It’s not uncommon for the rich and overeducated to dabble in those circles, but you seem foolishly sincere. This world was made for people like you. You could have led a good life at the top of the system. Instead you got yourself involved in causes that have nothing to do with you. What does a Kavfryd want with egalitarianism? Is it boredom? Does your wealth make you infatuated with poverty?” 

A slow smile crept through Plechun’s face, the small man having finally expressed an honest opinion.

“Fuck you.”

“Mr. Kavfryd, I can help you. For the sake of your family and name, I have been allowed to offer you as much leniency as possible. And I would like to. If you cooperate, you will be restored as if nothing happened. I assure you that this is not a game that can be played with rules and Solicitors. What you’ve done is seditious and there is grave punishment for those that undermine the State.” 

He then leaned in close to speak low and intimate like a killer for whom murder is a kind of love making, “Do remember what happened to your wife, Mr. Kavfryd?”

Cold acid flowed through Jan’s veins caustic like a flood of razors. His head snapped up to match the Processor’s gaze.

“Eva!” In his mind’s eye Jan saw her again in vivid return, her lifeless fingers tracing the fell earth as they carried her away, her eyes vacated and opaque like a mannequin whose parodic attempt at life had ceased.

“Yes, it appears that you do. We shot her, but you won’t be so lucky. Do you know what a pain amplifier is? Of course you do. We’ll extract your secrets and then we’ll erase you as if you’d never been.” Plechun said these last words with a sort of aching sweetness, hissed with delicate sibilants.

Apoplectic anger and abject horror rushed into the vaults of Jan’s soul like a mob racing to break in all at once. In a quick and autonomous motion his hands rose up to encircle the small man’s neck like a hangman’s noose. Plechun realized that he had miscalculated. His dying eyes, bulged out and vitreous, met with Jan’s, two orbs filled with hate and erupted in orgasmic violence. And as Plechun’s consciousness faded away, so did Jan’s in parallel. The act of killing is abnegation, the perpetrator and his victim bonded by a shared participation in phenomenological erasure. A human is a baleful vortex of affordances made to believe the cosmic lie of a coherent center; another one of his earliest convictions is that he is an ape capable of ending another. To feel pulse and blood ebb away underneath tightly clenched fists is to see the night with fresh eyes. Murder can be teleological end point.

The door burst open.

Venk and Nagi rushed in like crows flying through that portal. They swiftly wielded their truncheons up and down over Jan’s body, beating a brutal rhythm upon a drum of flesh. In that instant, four became one, a creature of 8 arms and 8 legs, sintered together and made whole by hate.

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 08: POLICE

The people looked away and said that they saw nothing. They gesticulated obscenely at the necessity of a Hammurabic beast and apologized in whispers: “There is no perfect Leviathan.”

They walked in, a haunted repetition of those who had just beaten Jan senseless. One was a beanpole and the other thick and stout, a humanoid of rotund flesh. They both wore the deathly black All-Suit of police men, baroque with compartments, body armor, and implements to break bodies and inflict pain. The two sauntered about with theatrical bowleggedness as if encumbered by large and invisible gonads. The hoods of their All-Suits were pulled back displaying heads shorn bluely save a small braided tuft in the back, an abbreviated queue.

Society, in its inert wisdom, had called upon these surrogates to hew out order and the rule of law, to salvage the word from a perceived chaos and phantasmagorical fear. The people had sought faithful servants, but arriving instead was this brotherhood of the demented, arising by spontaneous generation like maggots on corpse-flesh. For indeed, the body politic had secretly passed away in great silence, so humbly and gradually that its dissipation had hardly been noticed. It had long suffered from an Amfortas wound carved out by the dull blade of collective anomie. Some scant hologram of the deceased now danced a merry jig like a puppet on the string providing a garish drama. It stole the dreams of the masses as they slept sheepish and still. And here now in Jan’s room stood these invalid shepherds.

“Jan? Are you Jan Kavfryd?” said the beanpole cop. He approached closer, a hand resting naturally on the handle of an electrified truncheon, “I’m officer Venk. And this is Nagi.”

The big cop nodded silently, a slow declension of his orb.

Jan saw in these two men the same dead eyes that he had seen on Chiklin and Zasha, set like two pebbles on passive faces suggesting that they comprehended nothing in this world and would not want to know any truth about it even if it were arrayed before them in a perfected tableaux.

“So what happened? How did you get all this on your face,” Venk asked while haphazardly waving his hands in the general direction of Jan’s fractured head.

“Some men, a bar fight that got out of hand. Do you know who they are? There should have been cameras and detection networks all around, right?”

Venk stuck his thumbs into hooks the All-Suit had around his waist and breathed in, “What were you doing at that bar? We don’t get a lot of visitors from Level 1.” 

Jan shrugged and recalled his cover story. “Why does anyone come here? Level 5 has the finest Affection Section”

Venk softy snorted and said mostly underneath his breath, “Even you Level 1-ers want dirt cheap pussy huh?”  

Yet he seemed satisfied with that explanation. He went on, “Yes, we know about the ones that attacked you. They will be taken care of, don’t worry.” 

“Ah.” Jan replied and waited for either man to say more. Neither did.

“So is there anything else you need from me?”

“No-oo-pe,” Venk slowly drew out the syllables, “not really. Maybe at some point we might ask you to personally ID them. But that’s later.”

“Huh.”

An unsettlingly atmosphere filled the space. Jan felt at a loss. The two men remained standing there in imbecilic stasis, looking vaguely at Jan with an assuredness like predators enjoying a moment of anticipation. Jan stifled an impulse to panic. No one spoke for a long time.

In such moments of limpid stillness, fear can flare up. The coals of panic and dread are always warm and alive there underground. And always prepared to rise up through the depths, emerging like a creature supping upon its own tail, engorged by telescoping visions of self prophetic doom.

The cocktail that the doctor had run into Jan’s veins ran cool and strong, a heavy blanket insulating Jan from the most jagged edges of that ruinous feedback. The cops shifted their weight from one leg to another, swinging their hips slow and sporadic like swaying porcines.

“So what else I can do for you, officers?” Jan attempted again.

“It’s fine, you can relax. He’ll be by soon. Just settle.”

“Who is ‘he’? And why does he need to be here? Have I done something wrong, officers?” Jan suddenly felt a chill run through his spine, a small shivering hum descended down to his metatarsals.

The cops gave no reply but continued to stand there looking at Jan with listless and bored eyes. There can be violence in peace. The morphine-benzo mix inside Jan groaned like an overladen ship, struggling to keep him buoyant and un-capsized. It suddenly made sense why Venk seemed so uninterested in the fight itself, they had not come here for that.

The large one had thus far said nothing, merely a dense accretion of flesh and muteness. His face looked serene, relaxed as if watching a mindless video. Jan envied him. To be so nescient and unaware was to maintain grasp upon that original and divine gift so carelessly discarded by men. Jan suddenly wanted very much to be far away, somewhere else and someone else, to be lobotomized so that the aporia of existence could remain unexamined, unsolved, and, best of all, abolished from all memory, a clean reset to a primogenic blank. He admired Nagi very much and wished in that moment to be as insensate as that big cop.

After some time Jan asked again, “Can you tell me anything about what is going on? Or who this person is?” He tried to think of some way to get them out of the room if even for a short while, “And if we are waiting for someone to arrive, can you wait outside? I’d like to get some rest if possible.”

“Feel free to rest, we’ll watch over you, make sure nothing happens,” said Venk very calmly. His lips were curled up slightly in a mordant grin. “We’re here to protect and serve. It shouldn’t be very long now.”

Jan sunk down into his pillow and closed his eyes only to find the darkness intolerable. Without the contents of his visual field his awareness latched onto the tension inside. And indeed, what mammal is capable of sleeping whilst his predators milled about with such nonchalance?

Then a memory beckoned.

He was young, barely older than a toddler. His father had taken him to The Ark to see the animals. They rarely met, father and son, but it was the boy’s birthday.

Only a chosen few were ever allowed a visit to The Ark, a preserve of colossal scope created to replicate in microcosmic form the old natural world which had been lost. The boy had never seen animals except in hologram and image. 

In carnal form they were grotesque and sublime, emanating heat and breath. He could feel their vitality. 

Jan supplicated before the enormity of an elephant. He was all of 5, small and fearful, and the astonishing grey beast left him awe-struck and dumb in a simple and primitive way. As the elephant approached him he cowered, its sheer size pushing Jan back by some force field of compulsion, a dank and overpowering musk deeply saturated the boy’s ofactric vista.

“What’s the matter Jan?” his father had said, “You need not be afraid of the elephant. His home is surrounded by a moat and he is contained and we are safe. But what a great and prodigious animal he is, isn’t he?”

In another area he saw a pride of lions strewn about on golden grasslands, lolling with the decrepit pride of an apex predator. Jan was deathly afraid of them, yet a strange attraction drew him in. 

“Yes,” his father said, “you recognize their regal beauty don’t you Jan? You can sense their feline majesty.”

He could not help but be fascinated in that wide-eyed way which children are so capable of, a total engrossment of the senses. He felt complete and embedded in his world, everything appearing to him alive and animated as if by empyreal ghosts.

In amongst but somewhat removed from the lions were hyenas. They played like cruel and malformed children, yelping and chortling in that hermaphroditic way, neither this nor that but instead a fluid superimposition of one’s own projections, a feliform screen.

“They are odd animals aren’t they? But don’t allow your disgust to get the better of you, you must think on a higher level than that! For all their ungainliness, a group of hyenas can defeat and eat a lion. With numbers and cooperation, even the mightiest can be deposed. And there is a poignancy in witnessing that inversion of power. But in nature there is no murder, only death. A death symmetric to birth in every way. Justifications and evaluations are the fictions of men, narratives to convince ourselves that there exists good and bad, that there are the deserving and the undeserving. All this serves to do is to give form to a shrouded and opaque reality.

Jan sensed then that his father was a kind of god -- as all fathers are to their sons at some point -- but one imbued with forlorn divinity, eaten through and made shabby by sadness.

As they left The Ark, his father said, “Jan, I hope you interpret what I have said to you correctly. The world is a nature, and nature is a world. And the essence of nature is struggle. You have immense luck and privilege on your side. You are my son as I am my father’s. This has meaning and tradition which you must understand, otherwise not only you but the entire lineage will fall into ruin. Although the rules of the jungle underlie all things, you must take care to never descend into it unguarded or unprepared. Even a lion can be hunted and killed. We live in a garden here, much like the animals in The Ark. To leave is to never return. But to remain is a kind of captivity.”

Jan heard a strange sound and opened his eyes. Nagi had laughed for no reason at all. And now there was a new stranger standing in the room.

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 07: MEDICINE MAN

From the high precipice of a mountain he looked down and far away there in the shadowed plains an army with grey standards fluttering in the wind, the people small and many like ants. Amongst them were catapults that rolled themselves by some dark magic with men, bound and blindfolded, sitting in the ladle like buckets waiting for the moment when they should be sent towards their parabolic terminus.

Consciousness crept in slowly and cautiously on gentle cat paws. Was he still in the dream of catapults and men? In the penumbra of closed eyes, he tried to investigate the hypostasis of his awareness and could not tell if it ended in reality or illusion. He slowly willed his heavy lids to open.

It took Jan a long time to comprehend his situation but with time he came to understand that he was in a hospital bed, the thick tube of an IV running into one arm, the other firmly strapped and secured to the railings. He felt a pang of panic as he recalled the events that led him here, a chill that was, however, blunted by a certain distance of sensation. It rolled in slowly and in waves like some far off reverberation. Morphinated and sedated he lay there oddly comfy given the circumstances, enjoying the feeling of being wrapped in a familiar duvet or sunk deep into the ground, buried and forgotten already.

He knew that he was good and fucked and needed to escape, but it proved difficult to motivate himself. Jan tried to turn over the pistons of cogitation, but his mind remained placid and happily paralyzed, jellied as aspic. The white noise in his brain was soft and gentle, a richly layered tapestry of susurrations and hisses which frustrated and covered any attempt at melody. Jan tried a meditative practice but the thick fog yet remained whole and unrent. He relented and found peace in that noisily anechoic place.

Jan fell into a troubled, doubting sleep and woke up to see an old man with a shock of grey hair and a white doctor’s coat worrying all around him. Half lidded, he listened for a long time to the sounds of the man shuffling about and muttering to himself. Finally, the old man turned towards Jan and, upon seeing that the patient was awake, said: “Ah, you’re finally up. How are you feeling?”

Jan replied with a half hearted shrug. “Tired,” he said, the action of speaking felt odd and constrained. Yes, there is definitely something wrong, he thought. His tongue felt heavy and sticky, a giant alien worm in his mouth.

“Well that’s to be expected, you took quite a beating, although nothing that won’t heal in time.”

“Yes, time,” Jan replied quietly.

Everything in the room indicated that he was in an antiquated hospital. On Level 1 he would have been fully enclosed in a Health-Suit, one arrayed with a variety of instruments inside taking measurements that fed into a Homeostasis Engine, a unit of computation which would calculate his care. The suit could distribute nanobots, fluids, and medicine as well as massage parts of his body to stimulate blood and lymph flow. It also had collection manifolds for urine, feces, pus and other drippings from wounds and orifices. One hardly saw doctors face to face anymore on Level 1.

“Ah, but the silver lining is that your insurance is good," the doctor said with a tired but irascible expression, “really fine! As to be expected from someone from Level 1 -- you’re very lucky! I’ve got the morphine flow set on high, only the best alkaloids!”

“Actually, I was wondering if you could turn it down, I would rather be more lucid.” Jan replied, trying not to sound ungrateful.

“Huh, what’s that? You want to turn it down? You’ll regret it when your muscles start to spasm.”

“Spasm?”

The doctor’s brows furrowed subtly and he moved closer to the bed to face Jan. “Your jaw’s been split in two, right down the middle.” The doctor pointed two fingers at Jan and then made a slicing motion sagittally bisecting the wounded head. “My guess is that it happened when you fell on your face. Or maybe it was from the beating you got, who knows? Did someone mistake your head for a football?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Ah, just as well, I doubt it was a pleasant memory.” The old doctor moved over to the IV machine and inspected its display panel, nodding approvingly while murmuring to himself: “Uh-huh uh-huh, well these look ok.”

Once satisfied with the instrument readings, he turned to Jan,  “So, anyhow, the two sides of your jaw are now all shifted and skewed like tectonic plates -- you know what a tectonic plate is?”

“Yes.”

“Ah ok, not everyone does, a lot of people think all that’s underneath is just another lousy level. They aren’t even aware of Earth much less anything deeper. But who can blame them? Most people never leave their level. I guess you aren’t one of those people, huh?” 

The doctor looked at Jan who merely stared back mutely. Getting no response, he continued, “The two sides of your lower jaw are like those tectonic plates now and your muscles aren’t used to having them moving and shifting, so they spasm, hard mind you, trying to put your face back together. It’s sort of like earthquakes on your face!”

“Huh.” No wonder his mouth felt strange, Jan thought. He tongued his lower incisors and noticed now that they seemed to be misaligned, one side subducted inwards, the normally smooth curve of his teeth broken by this rude discontinuity. He was struck by how unrecognizable and unfamiliar this mouth felt, as if it was unowned by Jan.

“The spasms are very painful, you’d be howling without the morphine so be grateful. Not everyone gets enough and most get the synthetics, so like I said, you’re lucky. Plus the howling will only make the spasms worse.”

The doctor then leaned in and said in a lowered and confidential voice, “Also, I prefer the patients to be quiet and calmer anyway, the walls are thin and it would disturb the other patients. No one likes to hear screaming when they are sick and dying, it just reminds them that they are sick and dying.”

Jan wondered if he would die here on level 5. He had been so ready to do so not long ago but somehow the idea now gave him the chills. Or perhaps it was what they could do to him while alive that scared him.

“Do you know why I’m strapped into this bed?” Jan asked, nodding at his bound arm.

“Oh yea, the police brought you in, they said you had to be secured and that you were to be detained and questioned. Reminds me, I’m supposed to send them in when you woke up,” the doctor leaned in again and, with hushed tones, asked, “So what d’ya do?”

Jan did not reply for a time, mired for a spell in his own worries. This will end badly, he thought.

“I was in a street fight.” Jan replied eventually, “So what about my jaw? Will it heal on its own?”

The doctor looked at him incredulously, “Ha! If the police cared about street fights then I’m a member of the Central Bureau! Well, whatever. The bones will fuse back together again naturally, but will probably be misaligned. My advice is to have it seen to on Level 1, that is, if you can get back there. We can fix it here as well but the approach may be, uh, a bit more crude.” 

He looked at Jan significantly, “I guess it all depends on what happens next with the police.”

“Huh, yea.” 

Jan closed his eyes and sank down into his bed. The reality of the situation was bleeding through the adiabatic insulation of the opiates. He did not relish the interrogations that would soon commence and some part of him was desperate to escape, to chew off his beshackled arm like a wild animal and be far away from all of this. 

The old man stepped back and gazed at his broken patient, brows knit. A sadness flashed through his rictus of shabby joviality.

“Hey, listen, maybe I can help you a little, make you lucid enough to pass muster with the cops, but still not feel it. You want it?”

Jan reopened his eyes, “Yea, please.”

The doctor sighed. “I don’t know how you got into this mess, a lot of people come in and out of here, each with their own sob stories and doomed futures. A doctor can only heal such a little bit of each person, really just janitors cleaning up after the brutality of the system. Ok, let me whip up something for you.”

He went back to the IV machine and scanned his badge, tapping and waving his hands over the input panel evoking a percussion of beeps and boops. “You should be all set now, I’ve got it to drip in slowly over the next 10 minutes, it should make it a bit easier.”

“Thank you”

“Yea, hang in there ok?”, the doctor leaned in close again and said in a low hush, “those pigs are a bunch of fucking sadists.” The old man tapped Jan gently on the chest and gave him a worn out smile, a smile that had once been strong and genuine but made threadbare and eroded by life and its vagaries.

Jan’s chest went sweet and tight where the doctor had tapped, a sudden rush of emotion rising up and swarming his toros. Unexpected kindness can be a sucker punch to the heart. He returned the smile, one rusty from disuse, “Yea, well, I feel better knowing I’ve got the best alkaloids, Doc.”

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 06: Love & Violence

Love comes preceded by 3 occurrences of synchronicity, one may have been told by a street augur.

Jan first saw her walking across the aerial hallway connecting the twin towers of the Central Confederated Academy, a long and tubular walkway strung up like a strand of gossamer. Despite assurances of rigidity by its engineers, it swayed imperceptibly in the wind often causing those inside to feel unease. Eva walked passed, wan and unsteady, a hand gripped clammily on the railings.

He was struck by an instant and uncanny recognition. Who was she? Why did this stranger feel familiar? It was a dolorous and sweet sensation unexplainable as déjà vu and just beyond reach, like a ghost or figurant in a dream misplaced upon waking but remnant in impression.

He looked away just as she looked up, telegraphing exactly what he was trying to hide. What could have Eva seen in that sky suspended hallway? A diffident and clumsy school boy in the body of a gangly man, clearly Level 1 birthed and pedigreed into a family and society who knew no other level or life, a person whose every intimate and subconscious mannerism was congruent to the hallowed and beatific nest of this world’s affordances. Shiftly eyed like a thief or miscreant, he felt himself uncomfortable and self aware as he passed her. All for nothing; she was too nauseated to notice.

The second time they met was at a noodle shop, a popular stand where Jan often went to slurp thick strands drenched in spice and pungent ferment. He always ate too fast with eyes closed and rolled up like a shark in the act of feeding, his mind obviated by the sensations of the tongue and teeth, lost and devolved in a participation mystique within the penumbra of taste. And when he finally looked up from his bowl and saw her standing there with an amused smile in her eyes, eyes which laughed and expressed merimert more than her lips, Jan was once again embarrassed. His lips were cherried grotesquely like a clown from the red oil, an errant noodle dangling from a mouth slightly ajar, a simple kind of comedy that brightened her day.

The third time was at a Samuelson rally held in some interstitial and contingent space between level 1 and level 2, where he had been listening in thrall and, then at the end, joined in choral solidarity with the audience, chanting slogans and lost in the collective. Some youthful part of him thought that he had at last found a purpose, a reason like a life raft bobbing on the oceanic ennui he had been dropped into. He felt a tap on his shoulders and found her standing there, eyes again merry and lips wry with amusement.

“I didn’t know you were a Samuelson supporter,” she said.

Jan looked at her surprised, overjoyed at her presence, the thrill of the rally having touched a genuine and innocent thread in his soul causing it to efflux, overflow, and show itself in an opened and unabashed way. His eyes were lit up like twin molotov cocktails exploding at the end of graceful and parabolic arcs. “Oh, it’s you!” he said, automatic and sincere. In that moment Eva thought he looked like a smiling puppy; in that moment his face struck her as dear and lovable.

“Yea, he’s incredible isn’t he?” Jan continued, sort of breathless, “And his theory of the egalitarian imperative and his critiques of the State are undeniable! But what are you doing here? I’ve seen you at the academy right? I have no idea who you are”, the last sentence trailing off and spoken to himself. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

He was still young, some core portion of him untouched and vibrant, a sapling replete with vitality in his phloem. That he was drawn to Eva was a foregone conclusion, for she was that dusky image inside of him now reified and reflected in all objectivity. That she liked him as well was the sort of mystery the universe will guard until its final moments, when the whole association of stars and planets, of matter inverted, of memories, dreams, and stories, of those made flesh and those ghostly likewise wink out in a final and resplendent collapse snuffing it all out in a complete and orbicular death, a voiding of the here, then, and ever-will-be into a kind of non-existence that would never be imagined in the minds of sentients, who shall also be annihilated as if never’d and nothing to begin with as well.

A voice broke his reverie, “Hey, where you from, huh? You aren’t from here are you? You’re from one of the upper levels right? That’s where you come from? Hey, what’s the matter, are you hard of hearing?”

Jan turned towards the voice and saw a sharp face, nose like a beak with eyes slant and predatory. He was tall and spindly, folded like a crane on the other side of the bar, smiling a scant and untrustworthy smile. To his right sat his friend, a large and hairless man, a pink meaty face full of idiotic menace, a flesh-orb with thin colorless lips that opened to join in, said: “Yea, you from up there?” Sausage like fingers gestured approximately upwards as if pointing out some stain on the ceiling. “What’s it like up there?”

He looked at them and offered no reply, a bit stunned like an uncomprehending spectator at the beginning of a slow motion accident. Part of him thought he should do something, but he also felt paralyzed and mute even as adrenaline filled his vessel. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza from hell, Jan thought, suddenly remembering some ancient text.

The young bartender receded to the back of the bar, uninterested in any involvement. The rest of the patrons spectated with a familiar mixture of interest and boredom as if watching a rerun.

“You should reply when someone talks to you,” the sharp faced one said, voice treacly with malice. “It’s just polite, we’re just trying to make conversation.”

“Yea say something,” boomed the big one, for all his corporeality reducing himself into an insubstantial echo. Then the slender one downed his drink and approached Jan, the meatier one following like an indentured golem. Jan’s heart sank. His antagonist leaned an arm against the bar and bent at the hips to bring his keen face close enough for Jan to smell the complex notes of halitosis and ethyl. Jan noted with some relief that they did not appear to be wearing All-Suits but rather regular clothing, the tall fellow sporting a black short sleeved jerkin exposing lean and sinewed arms. The bigger guy wore a colorful assortment of loose colors and fabrics, looking like some demented jester.

“What’s your name, motherfucker? Where are you from?”

“I’m just passing through. There’s no need for any of this,” Jan replied.

“You better just tell him your name, buddy,” urged the big guy while calmly limbering up with head circles, the lack of a perceptible neck making the whole exercise look comical.

Someone in the bar interjected, “Just leave him be, Chiklin!” Thus named, Chiklin turned and spat, turning his hawk like face towards the speaker. “Shut it!” he said and then restored his malign gaze to Jan. “Get up!” he commanded.

Jan did not reply but instead remained seated, his head bowed saying nothing, one hand hidden underneath the bar as the sleeve of his All-Suit quietly extended itself to cover his hand with a glove, growing embossments of little hard pebbles over his knuckles.

“I said get up, fucker!” Chiklin repeated. Jan finally looked up at him feeling inexpressibly sad down to his core. Why this, why now, he wondered, feeling tired and demoralized by this collusion of randomness and violence.

“Hey, listen friend, we don’t have to do this. Can I buy you and your friend a drink? Whatever you like. I don’t want any trouble, I can leave if you like.”

Chiklin gave him a nasty look and then turned back to look at his corpulent friend chortling malevolently, “Look at him, Zasha, he’s about to cry!” and then turning back, “Are you about to cry? Is that what’s happening now, friend? Fuck me, you are! Haha haha!” and then suddenly serious, he said: “You’d better get up now.”

Jan commanded the All-Suit to inject hypodermic meta-amphetamines into his bloodstream, he could feel a vicious coolness spread through his arms and dissipate towards a heart which was revving up like a hard driven engine. Feeling immediately brave, he stood up while pivoting his hips to execute a cross, the All-Suit contracting and stretching subtly in order to impart the last little bit of force to that clenched hand made into trebuchet stone. The impact of the punch sent out a well described plume of spittle, pellucid but dotted with specks of red; it sent Chiklin flying backwards and crashing into a table, scattering the patrons seated there. Jan had probably broken his large beak nose and some teeth as well.

Zasha boomed: “Not very fair, using your fancy All-Suit, not very fair at all,” and in a swiftness belied by his size and slothy demeanor lunged forward and swung both arms, extending further than seemed possible, around to clap Jan’s head between two meaty mitts like two steel doors swung in upon each other.

Pain exploded in Jan’s ears, a thunderclap of jangly sounds went off in the middle of his cranium. He let out an involuntary scream that he himself could not hear, his ears now filled with a cacophonous ringing that caused him to stumble down onto one knee. Confused and vertiginous, he wrapped his arms around his throbbing head, holding it with desperate affection like a mother embracing a dying infant. The big guy then front kicked him plumb and square in the face, the hard shod feet crumpling Jan’s face with a reverberant crack. It all dimmed for him.

When he came to he was outside and on the ground, curled up in a fetal ball as Chiklin and Zasha stomped him with gusto, arbitrary furies enacting a pointless retribution. The All-Suit was protective but only partially absorbed the force of those many blows. Jan wondered at the vast and unplumbed sadism now being doled out with such casual generosity. He wondered if they would simply keep kicking him until the end of time itself.

At last he heard someone call out: “The police will be here soon.” The violence ceased and there was the sound of receding footsteps. Jan sat up to see snot and blood oozing down his chest and the young bartender regarding him.

“Damn, they really did a number on you,” he observed.

Adrenaline and speed left his body in a rapid ebb and Jan began to shiver from their sudden recession, feeling cold and hollow. A pain that had been heretofore suppressed rose up like an unwelcome moon. He felt exhausted.

Jan forced out a hoarse whisper, “Please … please don’t call the police.” Something seemed to be off within his mouth but he was not sure what, his teeth felt weird, his tongue no longer in its familiar cage.

“Too late. I don’t want to see them any more than you do. But they’ll be here soon,” the bartender repeated matter of factly.

“I have to go,” Jan mumbled to himself, “I can’t be here when they arrive.” He tried to stand up, and perhaps he even did so for a tottering second. Then the young bartender watched as Jan’s eyes turned vacant, his tall and still frame falling hard like some Icarian returned to earth.

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 05: Nostalgia

We sat across from each other, sunlight spilling through the window and manifesting itself on the floor aureate and rhomboidal. It was late morning. Eva pointed her gaze outwards and squinted at this rare sight. “The clouds have broken as planned.” She thrust face towards the plane of solar yellow until it engulfed her papery skin making it glow.  “Mmmm, Jan! Doesn't this feel good?”

“Huh, we’re slaves of weather, and even the weather is a slave of the State,” I retorted. Perhaps I was in a foul mood, my thoughts travelling in circles and chasing the smell of its own flatulence.  “Hard to enjoy it when you know it’s been engineered with those perma-drone cloud manipulators.”

Why could I not snap out of it? Why could I not be with her in that moment, in all moments? 

Instead I continued: “One day the poor will eat the rich,” mouthing the trenchant words of another. Eva sighed slightly, her compassion shaped in such a way as to include me by some divine happenstance.

“The poor don’t eat the rich. The poor just eat the other poor.”

The homeless simply sat on the streets with backs leaned up against the wall or otherwise slumped like abused rag dolls made dumbstruck by their poverty. Some wore tattered and patched All-Suits with their hood-visors pulled down and clasped so as to be faceless and mummified. Pedestrians deftly hurried through this obstacle course with the skill of the long-inured.*

As Jan walked by, some unspoken détente was abrogated and the dead hum of the city was suddenly punctuated by invectives. The faces of two men were brought proximal and close by the magnetic pull of shared enmity, their expressions of simian rage synchronized as if mirrored. Then like a cloudburst there ensued a chaotic tussel, the sloppy violence of the malnourished. Finally, a well landed blow caused one to totter as if drunk or palsied and then sink to the ground while the other stood above him, tensely postured with a hard clenched fist reeled back ready to deal another. Without getting up the loser withdrew, first on his hands and knees but then, arose to become bipedal and made his way across the clamorously honking traffic. From a safe distance across the street, he issued a series of sincere but empty threats.

“I’m gonna ffucking kill you maaaannn, I’m gonna ffffucking stab your guts out, stab you right in the ffffucking lungs ffucker!”, he screeched, emphasising his fricatives with stuttering dramatism.

Meanwhile the winner, a big fellow, simply nodded with the aplomb of the morphinated, an almost musical cadence in his speech as he rejoined: “Uh huh, uh huh, sure thing, you just keep on walking, yeah, you just keep walking.”  But then he settled back down onto his recently defended patch of concrete, eyes dully tracking the other.

Jan turned away and like many others, continued on, the laminar flow of passerby remedying this temporary perturbation much like eddies and whorls extinguishing on a river’s surface. The event soon receded from the minds of those made briefly interested, the dismal situation recorded only the recesses of the subconscious, filed and folded away with any number of things that a person feels powerless to affect.

A few steps brought Jan down into the place he was looking for, a small, dark den that was something not quite a basement and something not quite pleasant -- just as the young receptionist had described. He folded his tallness slightly as he stepped in through a lowish door, the warm and dingy smell of ferments and volatiles quickening his thirst. Behind the bar a lean and insouciant bartender, yet another surly kid, looked over him with vacated eyes and abject dispassion, as if all comedy and mirth had been sucked out of them. A few other patrons, subdued by dulling malaise and the liquid depressants they were presently drinking, turned to glance with similar disinterest.

Jan found an open seat near the end of the bar that seemed secluded and removed from others. He caught the attention of the bartender and asked for something brown and vicious. “Make it a double”, Jan said as the boy filled a small round glass so perfectly that it forced Jan to bend his head down like an ungulate and slurp the meniscus. This first taste was as harsh and caustic as it was welcome. A burning sensation leaked down his throat, and pooled in his guts, spreading a mute loving warmth through his body.

“Thanks,” Jan said, genuinely grateful. The boy smiled slightly, wry and precocious, the line of his lips curved and rising to just one side, then turned to load the glass washer. Some credits automatically deducted from Jan’s account which had been affirmed and linked as soon as he had entered. 

Jan sat there then for a good while, slow sipping in a contemplative daze, his eyes open but barely apprehending anything or anyone. He did not need corneal VR displays to dissociate and lose himself in the other world of his thoughts. The booze provided a numbing distance between him and his emotions so that he could regard them as objects even while the subject -- the self which calls itself: “Jan”, or perhaps the integration of Jan’s iteratively involuted self awareness -- dissolved away back into some primitive and inchoate form.

He was lost in reverie, retracing a dead story involving a dead person, one where she was the star in his glum filmic reenactment of an irreparable past that would probably in all reality slip out of record unredeemed, but yet one which Jan pursued with the sort of death drive commonly ascribed to the mad.

Once eviscerated, innards full of regret and time unrecovered will burst out of its skin sack, and yet my hands would hurry to recollect those ruined guts back into its keep. Memory and sentiment debase the very thing remembered and felt until the echoes are only echoes of echoes and nothing else.

* Outside of Level 1, the only level exposed to the open sky, the lack of precipitation and weather in general means that indigents can tolerate being on the streets without need for shelter. Additionally, while there is a certain amount of forbearance when it comes to street loitering, encampments were strictly forbidden.

[obduratemoon]

Wedding in Kyoto: April 15th

In 2011, shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, I attended a good friend’s wedding in Kyoto. “Wedding in Kyoto” are journal entries from around that time.

Prologue

I forget if Hamemaru invited me before or after Fukushima. I do remember checking radiation levels every day, vacillating and worrying.

However, my Japanese friends seemed nonplussed. The wind was carrying the dangerous isotopes out towards Northern California and Kyoto had been spared the worst of it. 

Even Tokyo seemed relatively safe after a time, the radiation levels having been reduced to the sort of exposure roughly comparable with international flights or a smoking habit. (Yes, it took a nuclear meltdown to learn that smoking exposes one to quite a bit of radiation)

And it was cherry blossom season on the Kamogawa.

April 15th

Arrived in Narita International relatively well rested. All the staying up ahead of time and the 2 Klonopins kept me comfy and under until Alaska. And even after that I napped some.

Narita looked desolate. There was hardly a line at customs and I was soon through into the country. I went down to a JR Midori Madoguchi and bought tickets for Kyoto, taking the Sobu Rapid Line (which, despite having “Rapid” in it’s name, is the slowest way to get into Tokyo) to Shinagawa station and then switching to the Nozomi (N700) to Kyoto.

Two digressions:

First is that Narita Airport is not in Tokyo at all. Granted most large international airports are placed far in the periphery, but Narita cannot be allocated as being within the vicinity of Tokyo except by the broadest of interpretations. It’s only saving grace is the presence of some very fast trains. Although, as I mentioned, Sobu Rapid Line, clocking in at 90 mins to the general Tokyo area, is not, but the N'EX, and Keisei Skyliner, between 60-45 mins, are.

The second is that the train system in Tokyo, and Japan as a whole, is as complex and regular as its linguistics. The grammar of the Japanese language is arcane, but once the set of rules are well understood by the practitioner it is also precise and infallible in its ability to generate mutually parsable language. The train system is similar in its dependability, and trains strictly follow timelines except in cases of disaster and Anna Karenina style suicides. 

There is also another parallel, and that is in the multitiered nature of the two systems. The language is stratified into layers of politeness, the highest level consists of long and difficult constructs implying deep meanings of grovel. Likewise, the train rider is confronted with much more nuanced levels of conveyance than just the usual binary express vs. local: in Japan there is normal, express, rapid express, semi-limited express, and limited express. In addition to these usual categories are specialized trains such as the N'EX, Skyliner, and Shinkansen (which also have 3 types, from slowest to fastest: Kodama, Hikari, Nozomi).

The airplane touched down in Narita at 11 am and I was in Kyoto by 4 pm. I visited several places in the city, all places I frequented while I lived there. They are also places I return to every time I have gone back and therefore, in my memory, each instance of visitation is flattened and un-delineated in the 4th dimension. It’s hard to know if I visited them then, or some other time previous or after. They remain constant and preserved in reality as they are in my memories. Not much changes in the crystalline city of Kyoto.

I checked into the hostel which was not only cheap (I imagined the nuclear disaster had some effect on prices) but also brand new and immaculate. The main lounge area had a large kitchen plus a tatami floored hang-out space sporting a 50-inch LCD TV replete with cable, DVD player, Nintendo WII and some other gaming consoles. It was a welcome change as many of my previous hostel stays (in Mongolia and Russia) were decidedly less nice.

That night I met up with Haradashi for dinner. We went to a hole in a wall izakaya and ate and drank to our hearts content. We talked of the past and future. I especially remembered the two big traditional clay cups of sake at the end of the night, so full of potent liquid considering how much we had already drank. Finally we noticed the owners starting to close shop so we apologized and went out into the sweet Kansai night drunk as skunks.

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 04: Transmission

To live and die on level 1. The only place with access to a firmament whose dead heights few would ever witness. Other things which exist only on level 1: forests, parks, rivers, birds, universities and academies, rampant pride and optimism concomitant with a dense accumulation of wealth, power, and ennui.

Those from level 2 considered themselves happy and superior as well, for many could visit level 1 at least on a temporary basis. Sunlight from the surface was delivered to them via giant fiber optic arteries that splintered off into a manifold of scintillated capillaries, thereby distributing star-sourced photons to those with subscriptions.

In the lounge other guests were gathered, strapped into their devices, silent and reposed as corpses. Yet the fact that they still collected in this room was an unacknowledged and vestigial need for animal proximity, some recessive urge to smell and feel the faint heat of other mammalian bodies.

Leaned back in their seats, headsets wrapped around their eyes and connected to a corporeal-cyber jack, it looked like a ward of the catatonic. Yet each was richly engrossed in a private slice of the Central Network, a universe which was boundless in its expansion, an infinity contained within an infinity. For many found that the physical world they had been birthed into lacked the verve of this other place. It was not so much that some line between what was real and what was virtual had been blurred, but rather that the polarities of dominance between these two realms had utterly switched, the moon now worshipped like the sun. The real seemed to them bland and unreal, a dream hardly worth dreaming. The Central Network provided delight and society, an ontological framework juiced to ensnare the attention of their psyches, the human conscious experience a tenuous projection of reality to begin with. And so much the better for the State to observe them here, then, in a world where it sat enthroned like some leviathanic demiurge.

Most of the people in the pension were young and had been taught from childhood how to use the mind-machine interface: an integrated cranial chip would listen for specific thoughts which mapped structured linguistic patterns to computer grammar.

Jan plugged his headset into a port behind his ears. He was part of the first generation to be introduced to the mind-machine interface and learned to use it around the time when he had just begun lecturing at the academy. By then he had already lost most of the supple receptiveness of a child’s mind, but years of training and usage had brought him close to fluency.

He searched through some recent news and clicked through a series of links, his eyes scanning over everything but registering nothing, just another malaise soaked individual traversing this endless graph of entertainments. He then turned to the Affection Section and searched until he found the girl as instructed: short haired, a specific mark on her skin. A bit of an aesthete, he thought. He messaged her. Jan did not know who the girl was or if she even existed except as a digital figment, but he was able to ascertain that she was indeed his contact. Her replies had followed the scripted pattern of conversation he had memorized and conformed to the security covenant.

As he proceeded through their conversation, Jan surreptitiously slipped in the data he had been collecting these past months. It was encrypted and hidden within an envelope that looked like duplicates of the messages he was sending her. Most messaging protocols used at-least-once guarantees which meant that it was standard to resend when an error occurred during transmission. Therefore, the existence of duplicates would be seen as normal and expected.

Jan guessed that on her side, she had some bit code which could extract and decrypt the information contained within those faked duplicates. She would then act as a node which further disseminated the data and thus preserve it by redundancy and distribution.

Utilizing the pension’s public access point further obfuscated Jan’s communications, his messages lost in the network activity of those reclined around him as they pneumatically respired data. The State recorded and compiled it all into its vast and minute compendium, but perhaps they would not detect this small and subtle undercurrent. There were times when Jan felt a wry pang of sympathy for this malevolent entity; for anything to know everything seemed to him a plausible definition of Hell.

Afterwards, Jan returned to his hexagon room and sat down on the bed, his work for a moment complete. He sat quietly, trying to savor some modicum of nothingness but soon boredom and a particular vein of loneliness visited him, a familiar guest in the house of his body. Gripped by a powerful urge to escape the company of just he and himself, he donned his All-Suit and headed out with deliberate steps.

At the front desk he asked the boy with the color shifting hair: “Hey, I need a drink -- any bars nearby? Cheap and effective.”

[obduratemoon]

Sedimentary City 03: A Dream

Jan awoke gasping like a fish out of water, a series of guttural sounds preceded his consciousness as if waking up was a kind of suffocation. He turned to a side and coughed a few times to shake the apparatus of lungs and bronchi into action.

“Record dream”, he said in a hoarse voice and began to dictate to the black cube:

“ … was led by the familiar psychopomp of many faces  through a decaying landscape of fallen arches and pillars that supported only fragments of lintels We bartered with many along the way to allow us to pass at various checkpoints populated by various figures -- but to where? I am, as always, unsure of the destination but it seemed like we were heading to a lower place.

My guide mentioned sacrificing a part of me in a furnace. Or was it a crucible? I forget.

I asked him or her, ‘Which part of me will it be?’ and they did not answer, but in that instant I saw that the psychopomp held a bag full of my own feces. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked, but was given no reply except a hard to interpret expression.

Suddenly we were on a path through dense woods, giant trees towered over us laden with thick, dark foliage, the sky a dense slate vault. Somehow there was a soft and abiding light throughout what should have been a dark place.

It seemed that someone was stalking us from the shadows, ‘A thief or assassin!’ I thought. I mentioned this to the psychopomp who replied, ‘Yes, that appears to be so, just so’. I feared that this pale thief would come to snatch away the bag of shit.

I grew worried and anxious, the energy of it woke me up as I tried to escape the dream”

Jan sat up and pondered the silhouette of this dream. All dreams to him were mysterious and ephemeral, they had the smell of something familiar and nostalgic yet alien. He could not help but puzzle over their unyielding surface. It was in the interpretation of his dreams that he sensed a nearness to the central mystery of himself, the shape within him which caused him to continue living and moving, journeying forth even when it hardly made any sense.

Occasionally in his dreams he could be with Eva with such vivid solidity that he could, for a time, convince himself that she was still alive. He would feel especially wretched in the morning after.

The unconscious is a drug, a labyrinth without a center.

He thought about the pyschopomp’s face, which was both a superimposition of many demeanors and a series of evolutions, shifting phases of expressions and features, sometimes masculine and sometimes female, always difficult to discern. 

Jan attempted such an assertion: “No, the psychopomp is not Eva.