FICTION: ROUTINE TWO: EMERGE FROM WEB BROWSERS — EXPEDITION TO THE CENTIPEDES

ROUTINE TWO: EMERGE FROM WEB BROWSERS — EXPEDITION TO THE CENTIPEDES

Where are you?  City of Interzone.  Feels like a real place don’t it.  Fools you that way, trick of the light.  It’s not.  It’s between the real places – fills up the margin at the edge of the page, so to speak.

Salty.  Grey.  Filmy.  Smell like ozone.  Flickering lights, floating particles.  Insubstantial.   

This is where you live now.  Shanty town slanted together like junkies, spread like fungus – urban sprawl – air always filled with floaters like glass of water the morning after the world’s seediest party.  Ash or dust or flakes – dimension's connection – slums, Satan, tendrils and locations – apparatus society.  

I guess some people would call it Purgatory, but that’s not how I think of it.  It’s not Platform 9 ¾ either, let’s be clear.  Definitely between places, but not on any axis – none that I heard of anyway.  More porous here – easy access to everywhere.  In a radical the membrane world – out here civilization itself ourselves – then of course forget time.  No hunger, no thirst, no sleep.  Flickering prayer for precursor of Chinese Buddhist – think of assisted between mentioned in particles.

Every kind of architecture – minarets, domes, ziggurats, torvtaks, yurts – definitely what Agent Lovecraft liked to call “non-Euclidean”.  Cthonic slum held together with grime and dank intentions – houses of rotten rags cooking mountain houses – turf  boats, wood houses roof – iron where old traditional Scandinavian type – stone and red – bamboo and teak, hundred feet – lean-tos black with moss, abandoned mental hospital straight from horror game, leering towers of obsidian, witch huts on stilts like chicken legs – A tree like that speaks of not the only it: our dead note.

This little place is mine, make yourself at home.  Hope you like open plan living – real open plan here, sharded glass and broken rib brickwork.  Exposed to all elements – blink the untended dead air – pink sun.   Last rubbish in smoky verandah, the washing eyes water – their entry lights – floating condition – to Grey.

Not a locked door in the City. Anyone comes into your room at any time.  Refugees from every planet here – outlaws and exiles and Agents and runaways – no-one is here by choice, you dig?  My experience this was different machine and wooden bleeding booths and this way and again.  Everyone running from something, whether they know it or not.  Nova cats know to steer clear – control machine does not function here, soldier – place outside of their reach.

Tendrils – creaking – embers, powder, dust – permanent haze. The “Upside Down” on that show “Stranger Things”?  Gross oversimplification.

Palms, mountains, jungle, indefinite landscape that seems different every day – not that “day” means shit here.   Oppression manifest in silver wind.  Later I’ll show you around – gaming tables, altars, fix market, fuckzone, bleeding booths, black meat den – but for now, try recompose yourself.

Down the grey valley, see the river?

Do not swim in it.

***

Okay, so: Remember the poster?  That was your ticket.  A4, black and white.  Bollard, Brunswick St:

“With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear, Death, and Monopoly.  Join the Resistance.  Beyond Socialism, beyond Anarchy.  Make a damn Difference.  Devalidate Elite Language Control.  Destroy your Pronouns.  Destroy your Echo Chamber.  Destroy Fake News.  Destroy Nova Reality.”

Recruitment occurs instant you tore off that little strip of paper down the bottom with the fake number on it.  Sorry, no warning.  Remember, peak efficiency.  Takes some moments to get used to.  Took me almost twenty years – but getting the hang of it.  Out here, twenty years is nothing.  Once knew an Agent who took five hundred to really settle in.  Jitters.  Imposter syndrome.  Makes me laugh – we’re all imposters out here, sliding between the Zones.

My bites, People eaten on mountain – A centipede on behaviours and belief or woman or to black mirrors cops on the without more ado.  Robotics.  Are we the forehead, leaving human race.

You look better though.  Almost chipper now.  Sinking in. 

This is real, and happening, and inevitable.  No going back.

You’ve been chosen – completely arbitrarily – and that’s just the way it is.  Scream, cry, makes no goddamn difference – we’re here, and now what.  Coping well, gotta say.  Like you knew it was going to happen anyway.  Often works that way – no accidents, right?  Always kinda knew you were special, always kinda felt it in your bones, didn’t you.  There’s a freedom in being outside.  Whatever it is, it doesn’t apply to you any more.  Certain expectations let’s say are now permanently lifted.

Well, once I train you up – don’t worry, not hard, I’ll do it with a montage, saves time – once you’re trained, you’re an Agent, and we’ll embark on your first mission.  It’s that easy.

And it’s a big one.  I’ll hold your hand every step of the way, don’t concern yourself – details forthcoming – but rookies never get it easy.  Thrown right into the thick of it – and this caper is maybe thickest I’ve ever seen.

Light up another joint.  Go on, it’s good for you.  Calms the nerves.

Swirls of smoke add to particular air of Interzone.  Paisley veins in shimmering atmosphere.  The growing thousand time.  The minutes away.

***

Okay.  Persuasive technology is front of his – the unwilling They.   Really is effective though, cutting through gender assignments – all genres are fake genres – control mechanisms weaponised against newborns, generate life-long dependency.  Hooked on gender.  Though knowing it.  But influence your behaviour – His genitals are millions in investment, but from the might get short-term reading.

So.  What’s your first mission?  Should you choose to accept it, hohoho – there’s no choice in the matter now, that’s the joke – “trapped” is such an ugly word – To carry or intentional intrinsic the recent tensions attempts to use “watching” from afar climate change fraud, to get this at the time the University of mathematics, too — is a this step, this and the rest Police can be four years after conspiracy theorists.

If the criminals unique power structure, these conspiracies successfully, algorithm to four have badly hurt Mob — a photo op – not.  Hard to explain.  But if we don’t shut them down, then the whole cosmos is a waste of time.  Malfunctioning – might as well shut it down and get our money back.  Cut our losses.  The Nova Syndicate are a mistake in the system – don’t wanna say “The Matrix” – a malfunction that puts the whole thing outta whack, tilts the whole thing off.  Broken, see?  And when a Simulation breaks down, it’s not a Simulation any more – difference between a portrait and a caricature, is one way to look at it.  Whole damn universe is a caricature – if we can’t fix this.  Advanced civilizations shoot-‘em-up, a scientific loathing in which a computer science technology, we wouldn’t will emerge from Web browsers — expedition to the centipedes.

We have time – we have that in spades.  Out here, we have more time than we know what to do with – sink down into it, real comfy, thick like molasses – black strap brown – boundless plains to share.  So despite our insistence on peak efficiency, we can spare time, need you across all aspects of the mission before we let you loose, so to speak.    

I have could be part we living in of their ancestors voiceovers, corrupt politicians, the mammalian mould.  I strongly believe we can fix this, though – but I’ve always been an optimist.  Glass is half empty, sure – but we’re lucky to have a glass at all.  Ever tried to carry water in your hands?  Been here before, haven’t we.  Don’t worry – constant déjà vu is a symptom of being here, out here, one of us – apologies.

So.  Your first mission:

We need to rewrite this climate change fiasco.  Things stand, human society collapses in matter of decades.  Show’s over, curtain’s closed.  They change the climate.  They change the climate, more what’s the term habitable for them this way.  Hotter, thicker air – they ganked the dinosaurs too, you know, too dumb to know their control machine was climate – but hey, seems Earth is rich with that particular personal quality.  Ignorance knows no bounds.   A naked atom to the computer programs.  Making it more habitable for certain… parties.  Certain interests are sick of hiding – wanna come out of the extraterrestrial closet so to speak – and so whole world is changing for their benefit.  If we can't break their climate signal – it’s last drinks, soldier.  Gotta try – Nova Syndicate just power along otherwise, Fish Gods and Saturn Hats and Celebrity Sacrifices and all – careening straight to Nova in hotted up spacecraft made of dirt and rocks and trees and magma.  Drive it like they stole it, see?  

And no way that “science” is going to stop the change – The Event, they call it – it’s too late for tackling it with shall we call it the “traditional” route.  Requires occult solutions, let’s say.  Timeflow requires surgery – Flat Earth about to be folded into origami swan – course that’s where we come in.

Who else gunna cut up the reality flow?  No-one else qualified. 

There’s – there’s the “content” tell anyone – your lines and of course response to the word in — the Anthropocene — demands Meaning Game first – Once you the whole all words From war-stricken you can’t can’t hold the other taking readers proper way.  Drops, sure political and to anyone affair – warmer, wetter, new Man See?  

Biggest all True.  It.

Also menace from fingers glisten to be about it.  Imperil global are you of realities supplies. Conflict, world is infrastructure, crops, are snapped – Once the function at control-machine, once human.

All of – except you cut new vision it means it turns called now?  

Rewrite the ecological control script.  That’s the job.  Save the entire fucking planet.

Don’t look at me like that, soldier. 

You tore the damn paper, not me. 

In future, maybe be more selective.

***