Showing posts with label delusions of grandeur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label delusions of grandeur. Show all posts
The Last Will and Testament of Alexander Dragoumis
My name is Alexander Dragoumis and this is my last will and testament. I sense my end coming and I cannot help but feel blessed by Lady Fortune that my life will end by natural means. I have lived to see things no man should see, things I could not have hoped to see and retain my sanity. And yet I did. But perhaps that is not so fortunate. Maybe I should have lost my mind along with my naivete. Maybe then I would not have to carry this burden. But I cannot complain about what life dealt me.
I used to be a ruthless man in my youth. A greedy little runt. Never looking beyond bottom lines and personal gain and for that I am sorry. But for some things I do not apologise. I still find man to be a sorry excuse of a being. A bottomless well into which the hopes of gods are forever cast, never to return. I do not hate man, I pity him. For he is a feeble beast, capable of brilliant ascension and uttermost horror but seldom the clarity to choose wisely between the two. Pardon me reader if these seem the last ramblings of a faltering old mind. My mind is as youthful as it ever was though my body is weakened by time. I have lived through things I would not wish upon my bitterest of enemies and yet my mind has steeled itself and stayed strong. Or at least I think so.
As I said, I was a cold and calculating thing and it was this moral deformity that lead me into the line of work that made me a small fortune. In the shining glory of Smyrna and Constantinople I lived and worked in the dank shadows. I pawned off works of art to the highest bidder, effectively selling off the great culture of Asia Minor. At the time I may have rationalised what I did as providing a service to noble people that knew how to appreciate exquisite cultural artifacts but I see now that it would not have mattered what I sold and to whom as long the price was right.
It was this social degeneracy of mine that lead me to flee with as much money as I could the troubles of Smyrna. I should have burned in its flames. Cruel but fair is the judgment of our future selves and woe to the man that fails himself as an old man for he shall be cast into non-existence. I have to live with the things I did and I can only hope that in the balance of my judgment my evils will not outweigh any selflessness I may have shown. I fled to Athens and slowly resumed my loathsome work there with a fledgling gentry almost literally devouring anything I could bring over. It helped that some of my clients were military men. The imperialist Greek army did most of my dirty work while I was in Greece. Soon I had enough funds and influence to try and get back to Constantinople and maybe even Smyrna to build again my foul business.
I booked a ticket on the Orient Express and that was what condemned me and enlightened me. I have seen unspeakable horrors, O reader, the human form twisted and mutated until it is a mere mockery of its former self. Innumerable human lives treated casually as we treat dirt and dust. I looked into Insanity’s gaping maw and felt irresistible forces pull me in. I cannot pretend it was my resilience that saved me, nor my cunning, though I had plenty. It was sheer, dumb luck. I was a mere plaything in the infinite playroom of gods and though I was occasionally rattled, I was never broken.
On that damned train ride I met a group of what now only seems as a group of broken and insane folk. People that had been poked and prodded once too many by the gods, their minds now lesser than what they used to be. I cannot blame them now, I used to, for surely they suffered much more than I did. They never trusted me and how could they. Our lives became inexplicably entwined on that train after facing a vile creature which at the time terrified me but only because I did not yet know what was to follow.
I saved them and I am ashamed to admit that I felt vengeful that they did not recognise it. As if the goal of selflessness was profit. Such an imbecile I was. I helped them time and time again, facing unspeakable terrors with them until a horrible accident befell me and I was left with incurable wounds. They left me without a second thought and I must admit I blame them too for what I did next even though I take most of the responsibility. I betrayed them to enemies that then seemed inconsequential until I found out that bigger things were at stake than our little insignificant lives.
What fools men are. And our enemy was the biggest one. I took great pleasure in killing him and enjoyed it even more the second time around. I kept them safe from danger and they did not even know it, let alone acknowledge it. In the end, when I had stopped caring for my life we faced cruel, cavernous intellects beyond the planes that any mortal should ever be allowed to inhabit. Elder gods that no living thing should ever have to face no matter how heinous its crimes. And yet we survived.
I left them and everything else behind. No kind of normalcy could ever be expected after that. We never really became friends. Necessity kept us together and now I felt that I was needed elsewhere. Smyrna pulled on my soul and now I knew what I had to do. Since then I have dedicated my life making sure that no man will ever have to face what I did. I have uncovered every possible kind of artifact imaginable that channeled powers that should not be and made sure it would become unusable.
I am a man that has made his peace with how the world is and with himself. I hope I have redeemed myself and I hope I leave the world in a slightly better shape than when I found it. May no man ever see the things I have seen and if they do, may the gods grant them mercy in the form of insanity or a swift death.
I used to be a ruthless man in my youth. A greedy little runt. Never looking beyond bottom lines and personal gain and for that I am sorry. But for some things I do not apologise. I still find man to be a sorry excuse of a being. A bottomless well into which the hopes of gods are forever cast, never to return. I do not hate man, I pity him. For he is a feeble beast, capable of brilliant ascension and uttermost horror but seldom the clarity to choose wisely between the two. Pardon me reader if these seem the last ramblings of a faltering old mind. My mind is as youthful as it ever was though my body is weakened by time. I have lived through things I would not wish upon my bitterest of enemies and yet my mind has steeled itself and stayed strong. Or at least I think so.
As I said, I was a cold and calculating thing and it was this moral deformity that lead me into the line of work that made me a small fortune. In the shining glory of Smyrna and Constantinople I lived and worked in the dank shadows. I pawned off works of art to the highest bidder, effectively selling off the great culture of Asia Minor. At the time I may have rationalised what I did as providing a service to noble people that knew how to appreciate exquisite cultural artifacts but I see now that it would not have mattered what I sold and to whom as long the price was right.
It was this social degeneracy of mine that lead me to flee with as much money as I could the troubles of Smyrna. I should have burned in its flames. Cruel but fair is the judgment of our future selves and woe to the man that fails himself as an old man for he shall be cast into non-existence. I have to live with the things I did and I can only hope that in the balance of my judgment my evils will not outweigh any selflessness I may have shown. I fled to Athens and slowly resumed my loathsome work there with a fledgling gentry almost literally devouring anything I could bring over. It helped that some of my clients were military men. The imperialist Greek army did most of my dirty work while I was in Greece. Soon I had enough funds and influence to try and get back to Constantinople and maybe even Smyrna to build again my foul business.
I booked a ticket on the Orient Express and that was what condemned me and enlightened me. I have seen unspeakable horrors, O reader, the human form twisted and mutated until it is a mere mockery of its former self. Innumerable human lives treated casually as we treat dirt and dust. I looked into Insanity’s gaping maw and felt irresistible forces pull me in. I cannot pretend it was my resilience that saved me, nor my cunning, though I had plenty. It was sheer, dumb luck. I was a mere plaything in the infinite playroom of gods and though I was occasionally rattled, I was never broken.
On that damned train ride I met a group of what now only seems as a group of broken and insane folk. People that had been poked and prodded once too many by the gods, their minds now lesser than what they used to be. I cannot blame them now, I used to, for surely they suffered much more than I did. They never trusted me and how could they. Our lives became inexplicably entwined on that train after facing a vile creature which at the time terrified me but only because I did not yet know what was to follow.
I saved them and I am ashamed to admit that I felt vengeful that they did not recognise it. As if the goal of selflessness was profit. Such an imbecile I was. I helped them time and time again, facing unspeakable terrors with them until a horrible accident befell me and I was left with incurable wounds. They left me without a second thought and I must admit I blame them too for what I did next even though I take most of the responsibility. I betrayed them to enemies that then seemed inconsequential until I found out that bigger things were at stake than our little insignificant lives.
What fools men are. And our enemy was the biggest one. I took great pleasure in killing him and enjoyed it even more the second time around. I kept them safe from danger and they did not even know it, let alone acknowledge it. In the end, when I had stopped caring for my life we faced cruel, cavernous intellects beyond the planes that any mortal should ever be allowed to inhabit. Elder gods that no living thing should ever have to face no matter how heinous its crimes. And yet we survived.
I left them and everything else behind. No kind of normalcy could ever be expected after that. We never really became friends. Necessity kept us together and now I felt that I was needed elsewhere. Smyrna pulled on my soul and now I knew what I had to do. Since then I have dedicated my life making sure that no man will ever have to face what I did. I have uncovered every possible kind of artifact imaginable that channeled powers that should not be and made sure it would become unusable.
I am a man that has made his peace with how the world is and with himself. I hope I have redeemed myself and I hope I leave the world in a slightly better shape than when I found it. May no man ever see the things I have seen and if they do, may the gods grant them mercy in the form of insanity or a swift death.
Smyrna, 11th August 1953
Upon arrival
You check your instruments. You check your instruments again even though the AI is perfectly capable of monitoring everything much better than you. It's not that you don't trust it, how could you not trust it, you're just nervous. And scared. Not of them, not of what they might do to you if they catch up to what you've done or figure out where you're going. You're scared of what is left behind. A life of disappointment, being beaten into dank submission, ennui and boredom. You're almost elated, relieved that the fear you felt before today, that nagging feeling of discontent tugging at your entrails has now metamorphosed into something new. Your fear has become a force of survival. An instinct rather than a reminder. Now your fear lets you know you're still alive, before, it only let you know you weren't dead.
Your mind is racing with all the possibilities. All the choices, all the desires that can now be fulfilled. You've been planning this relocation for months. You've done all the research. You know what to do. And even if you didn't, the prototype super-AI you stole would. Now you can say that word too, steal, and you can say it without it meaning injustice. Now it means taking back what's yours. What didn't belong where it was. Relocating. Liberating. The AI will help you, not start over, but continue. Improve. Correct all the mistakes you know of and find even more. Together you'll build a new world on top of the old one's ruins. Together, you'll turn the present into archaeology. This is what you've been hoping, yearning, living for.
You feel a bit sad about everyone and everything you left behind but that's a small sadness. It's the sadness of your favourite grandmother that died twenty years ago. The kind of sadness that is reassuring, stroking your back while whispering in your ear, you're doing ok, keep it up, move on. So you do. You keep going, you move.
The trip will take a while. Everything has been precalculated several times over. Doublechecked and triplechecked and verified. Until you reach the opaque upper layer of the planet's atmosphere, you know exactly what to do and what is going to happen. The entering and the landing, that's another matter. You know nothing about that. The AI knows a few things, it has calculated and simulated and extrapolated. But you don't care about that. You want to see with your eyes. Feel and sense and devour with every single channel of perception that you can. This new place. This new home.
You're getting closer. You try to think of something in your memories, your past to compare this to but you can't. The closest you can get is the moment before a massive orgasm. The instant when everything in you clenches as hard as it can in preparation of the internal sensory explosion that happens immediately after, that is if you're fucking with a good lover. You smirk at your own thoughts. And the smile is quickly replaced by a shadow of regret. You're going to miss the sex. Whether sweet, slow and loving or hard and dirty, you're going to miss it at least for a while.
It's here. The moment. Now it starts. You look at the screen, your eyes hungry. In front of you a big blanket of gas. Broiling pinkish gray masses shifting and pulsing and meshing with each other. This is the first frontier. After this the unknown. Your breath is shallow, anxious, almost unwilling to enter your lungs. You feel a pressure on your skin right above your bladder. Fuck that, you think to yourself, I'd rather piss myself than miss this. You're in the clouds now. Mammoth clouds. Clouds like mountains, like valleys in old books, endless, without time. Your neuromesh reminds your body to breathe deeper, slower, if you want to retain consciousness. You pace yourself and wait. Wait for the clouds to end. For the light at the end.
You wait.
And then.
Home.
Your feet hurt and your calves and your hips. In fact, everything hurts. It would take less time to try and list the things on your body that don't hurt. You need this. Your pain is new, just like your fear, it is now a sister, not an enemy. A friend that warns you when you've gone too far. And you have. While the AI has been busy building you a companion-droid and several Beast-Of-Burden ones for itself, you have been exploring. First, the landing site. Then the thickets all around you. Then with your companion-droid, it calls itself Can'Kay, you went to the closest river for what it called a reconnaissance mission and what you called skinny-dipping while the AI and its BOBs built you a low-impact underground shelter. After that came the big trek up the hill. You named the hill Mammatus after the searing memory of the clouds on your entry. Your pain is satisfying. It's the kind of pain that drives you nose-first into the deepest, most satisfying sleep. No dreams, no turning, just blackness, void and the next morning nothing but love for returning to consciousness. You can't help but feel that this is how every person in the universe should wake up every morning. With a deep burning desire to not spend another moment asleep, hurting to grab a big, lusty handful of life's ass.
The view from the hill is amazing, thick forests, almost tropical, big bodies of water crazily slashing and cutting at the land like drunken abstractionist painters. At the distance, movement. Life. Grazing figures lazily shifting on the luminous grass.
That was good. That was too good. You would feel naughty if you were a different kind of person. But you're you and you feel good about yourself. You also feel good about the slamming orgasm you just had. It had been too long without a decent train wreck of an orgasm. Thank fuck for Penis Valley. You smile and giggle inside. You think that's funny. Penis Valley. Not the name though, the fact that there is a place that warrants it. You found it a few weeks after landing. A big wide plain showered with light. Full of strange protuberances. Mushroom-like growths from the ground with a wide, round, flat base that narrowed quickly into a thick stem and rose insolently towards the sky. Widening slightly at the top to look like narrower and elongated mushrooms. You thought how weird, they look like cocks. It had been too long. You started touching yourself. You took of your clothes. The droid stared emptily at you, having even less inhibitions than you. You walked up to the one that was closest and then your body took over. You stood above it, spread your legs slightly apart and slowly lowered yourself onto it. It felt alive inside you, not like a companion, warm and comforting, but cool and playful like a flower. At the end, you clenched while your world was dismantled and put back together in an instant. You felt something shooting inside you. It wasn't upsetting but you had your neuromesh analyse it anyway. It wasn't dangerous. You asked it to get rid of it anyway and send the analysis results back to the AI for further research.
You then forgot completely about that and concentrated at the warm feeling left in your belly. It felt good. You caught a rogue thought speeding through your mind. Children. Little, loud versions of you. You thought, no chance. You could only make clones of yourself. You never thought sperm would be a necessity for colonising a planet. You couldn't get enough variation on your genetic material to produce babies without the danger of a multitude of syndromes.
Unless...
You notice all the little details. Your toenails are beautifully trimmed. You didn't do that, the neuromesh did. It dictates the speed at which everything in your body works. You've had the same haircut for three years now and it looks just as good as it did when you got it. Your bum has started to get sore from siting on the same seat for too long. You put your feet up and you think you can smell them. Your sense of smell has become insane. You think you can smell water and metals and a lot of other stuff that you know you shouldn't be able to smell. Your neuromesh turns it down a bit. You sigh in relief. The room seems a bit bare now that you think about it. Just not right. The floor would be too cold. No it wouldn't. You fidget internally. You wish you had someone to snap to. The droids are no good. They seem genuinely hurt and they never snap back which makes you feel like shit about yourself.
You concentrate on the seven little ones. Snug inside you. You get up. Fuck this. You're not a fucking incubator with legs. You're going for a walk and a swim. Maybe a fuck too.
Your mind is racing with all the possibilities. All the choices, all the desires that can now be fulfilled. You've been planning this relocation for months. You've done all the research. You know what to do. And even if you didn't, the prototype super-AI you stole would. Now you can say that word too, steal, and you can say it without it meaning injustice. Now it means taking back what's yours. What didn't belong where it was. Relocating. Liberating. The AI will help you, not start over, but continue. Improve. Correct all the mistakes you know of and find even more. Together you'll build a new world on top of the old one's ruins. Together, you'll turn the present into archaeology. This is what you've been hoping, yearning, living for.
You feel a bit sad about everyone and everything you left behind but that's a small sadness. It's the sadness of your favourite grandmother that died twenty years ago. The kind of sadness that is reassuring, stroking your back while whispering in your ear, you're doing ok, keep it up, move on. So you do. You keep going, you move.
The trip will take a while. Everything has been precalculated several times over. Doublechecked and triplechecked and verified. Until you reach the opaque upper layer of the planet's atmosphere, you know exactly what to do and what is going to happen. The entering and the landing, that's another matter. You know nothing about that. The AI knows a few things, it has calculated and simulated and extrapolated. But you don't care about that. You want to see with your eyes. Feel and sense and devour with every single channel of perception that you can. This new place. This new home.
~
You're getting closer. You try to think of something in your memories, your past to compare this to but you can't. The closest you can get is the moment before a massive orgasm. The instant when everything in you clenches as hard as it can in preparation of the internal sensory explosion that happens immediately after, that is if you're fucking with a good lover. You smirk at your own thoughts. And the smile is quickly replaced by a shadow of regret. You're going to miss the sex. Whether sweet, slow and loving or hard and dirty, you're going to miss it at least for a while.
~
It's here. The moment. Now it starts. You look at the screen, your eyes hungry. In front of you a big blanket of gas. Broiling pinkish gray masses shifting and pulsing and meshing with each other. This is the first frontier. After this the unknown. Your breath is shallow, anxious, almost unwilling to enter your lungs. You feel a pressure on your skin right above your bladder. Fuck that, you think to yourself, I'd rather piss myself than miss this. You're in the clouds now. Mammoth clouds. Clouds like mountains, like valleys in old books, endless, without time. Your neuromesh reminds your body to breathe deeper, slower, if you want to retain consciousness. You pace yourself and wait. Wait for the clouds to end. For the light at the end.
You wait.
And then.
Home.
~
Your feet hurt and your calves and your hips. In fact, everything hurts. It would take less time to try and list the things on your body that don't hurt. You need this. Your pain is new, just like your fear, it is now a sister, not an enemy. A friend that warns you when you've gone too far. And you have. While the AI has been busy building you a companion-droid and several Beast-Of-Burden ones for itself, you have been exploring. First, the landing site. Then the thickets all around you. Then with your companion-droid, it calls itself Can'Kay, you went to the closest river for what it called a reconnaissance mission and what you called skinny-dipping while the AI and its BOBs built you a low-impact underground shelter. After that came the big trek up the hill. You named the hill Mammatus after the searing memory of the clouds on your entry. Your pain is satisfying. It's the kind of pain that drives you nose-first into the deepest, most satisfying sleep. No dreams, no turning, just blackness, void and the next morning nothing but love for returning to consciousness. You can't help but feel that this is how every person in the universe should wake up every morning. With a deep burning desire to not spend another moment asleep, hurting to grab a big, lusty handful of life's ass.
The view from the hill is amazing, thick forests, almost tropical, big bodies of water crazily slashing and cutting at the land like drunken abstractionist painters. At the distance, movement. Life. Grazing figures lazily shifting on the luminous grass.
~
That was good. That was too good. You would feel naughty if you were a different kind of person. But you're you and you feel good about yourself. You also feel good about the slamming orgasm you just had. It had been too long without a decent train wreck of an orgasm. Thank fuck for Penis Valley. You smile and giggle inside. You think that's funny. Penis Valley. Not the name though, the fact that there is a place that warrants it. You found it a few weeks after landing. A big wide plain showered with light. Full of strange protuberances. Mushroom-like growths from the ground with a wide, round, flat base that narrowed quickly into a thick stem and rose insolently towards the sky. Widening slightly at the top to look like narrower and elongated mushrooms. You thought how weird, they look like cocks. It had been too long. You started touching yourself. You took of your clothes. The droid stared emptily at you, having even less inhibitions than you. You walked up to the one that was closest and then your body took over. You stood above it, spread your legs slightly apart and slowly lowered yourself onto it. It felt alive inside you, not like a companion, warm and comforting, but cool and playful like a flower. At the end, you clenched while your world was dismantled and put back together in an instant. You felt something shooting inside you. It wasn't upsetting but you had your neuromesh analyse it anyway. It wasn't dangerous. You asked it to get rid of it anyway and send the analysis results back to the AI for further research.
You then forgot completely about that and concentrated at the warm feeling left in your belly. It felt good. You caught a rogue thought speeding through your mind. Children. Little, loud versions of you. You thought, no chance. You could only make clones of yourself. You never thought sperm would be a necessity for colonising a planet. You couldn't get enough variation on your genetic material to produce babies without the danger of a multitude of syndromes.
Unless...
~
You notice all the little details. Your toenails are beautifully trimmed. You didn't do that, the neuromesh did. It dictates the speed at which everything in your body works. You've had the same haircut for three years now and it looks just as good as it did when you got it. Your bum has started to get sore from siting on the same seat for too long. You put your feet up and you think you can smell them. Your sense of smell has become insane. You think you can smell water and metals and a lot of other stuff that you know you shouldn't be able to smell. Your neuromesh turns it down a bit. You sigh in relief. The room seems a bit bare now that you think about it. Just not right. The floor would be too cold. No it wouldn't. You fidget internally. You wish you had someone to snap to. The droids are no good. They seem genuinely hurt and they never snap back which makes you feel like shit about yourself.
You concentrate on the seven little ones. Snug inside you. You get up. Fuck this. You're not a fucking incubator with legs. You're going for a walk and a swim. Maybe a fuck too.
Dump
Soma was a dump. A waste disposal facility. No. The word "facility" implies some sort of scheme, a tactic, it gives it a sense of process. There was deliberation here but nothing formally organised. Everything was just dumped here. First the endless megatons of "unwanted" food. Then residual nuclear waste. After that, chronodebris created by the first, unsuccessful experiments in controlled time travel. Everything that was discarded or deemed useless. Everything that defined people, because as any good historian or archaeologist will tell you, what else serves as our definition, what are we, if not what we leave behind. Every single disposed of item, ended here. For several decades, in Standard Objective Time that is, this planet was one of the countless, and ultimately unidentifiable, dumping grounds of the destructive force that was our ancestors.
For several centuries, no one knew what the surface even looked like and after the first few decades it would probably be virtually impossible to find out without landing since the upper layers of Soma's atmosphere became opaque with the gaseous byproducts of decomposition on a massive scale. No landing attempts were ever recorded, everything was shot at the planet's surface from orbit. This was thought to be the most "cost effective" course of action. It is estimated that over the course of two-hundred and seventy three SOT years, more than half of the Originating System's waste and "big science" experimental byproducts ended up on the planet's surface. Running a few crude calculations shows that today, even after taking into account of the rate of decay and decomposition of organic and inorganic matter and the half-life of radioactive material, we should be at least up to our necks in garbage. Anywhere on the planet. By the way, this is why the dumping stopped. Our ancestors ran the same calculations and found out that any more and they might disturb the planet's orbit. Not that they cared that much about the planet's well-being, but even they weren't stupid enough to risk having a planet leave its place in their vicinity. So what happened? Did we overestimate in our overeager attempt to accuse our ancestors of being, well, the colonialist, imperialist fuckheads that they usually were? The short answer is no. Our calculations are correct within a reasonable margin of error. And our ancestors were indeed fuckheads. However, this knowledge doesn't serve in any way our quest to understand what happened during those two-hundred and seventy three years. Or should I say during this period that could potentially amount to over ten billion Cumulative Standard Subjective Time years?
In the past few years tremendous progress has been made in our attempts to elaborate on the intricacies of the theoretical frameworks of chronobiology and chronogenetics and to unify them with our already extensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms of temporal flow. To put it more simply, we have a way of making some very educated guesses about why we're not buried in trash and at the same time why some of our most beautiful species, including the Dictyum, came to be. We now believe that Soma was pretty much the same as the Originating Planet during what was once termed the Mesozoic era, minus the great-big-fuck-off-scary lizards. More importantly it was a balanced super-ecomatrix. All this was massively upset by our ancestors' firing several hundred megatons of waste at random points and time intervals on the planet's surface. Normally, an ecological disturbance of this magnitude would have flung the entire planet's ecomatrix so far away from equilibrium that not only is it tempting to call this, us, today, a miracle but it also requires a lot of effort to not start listing all the ways by which Soma should have ended up as a barren rock.
Of course we know this is not a miracle, at least not in the way some of our more deluded ancestors would think. This is a miracle because it tells us something. It lets us know that life, sentient or not, is the most persistent force known to us and that once it has established itself it is not willing to go anywhere, it will not budge, not without putting up a good fight.
So far, our research has shown that before the period now colloquially known as the Great Waste, organisms very similar to fungi thrived on Soma. Great mycelial-like networks running under the surface of the planet with properties very similar to those of the Originating Planet. These protofungi were the planet's main force of decomposition. We posit that the waste dumped on Soma, most of the organic and some of the inorganic too, was the nutritional substrate for what would follow. What did follow is probably the biggest chronoevolutionary event that ever happened on Soma and quite possibly anywhere else. The chronodebris fell all over the planet's surface pretty much randomly and in a large fraction of those cases it created pockets of temporal instability. Next, or rather at the same time, came the radioactive waste. This, as unlikely as it may seem, served as a catalyst in what probably is the single most rapid case of evolution. The radioactive material served as a mutagenic factor inside the temporal bubbles created by the chronodebris. That, combined with the fact that there were essentially limitless nutrients lead to the super-rapid evolution of the protofungi. While on the outside of those temporal pockets barely three centuries had passed, on the inside the protofungi fed on the waste while mutating aggressively over what is now calculated to be several millions of ST years. Leaving momentarily aside the fact that this amount of time only makes sense when you're in the time bubble, try and imagine for a minute what that means. Pure, wild evolution. Metamorphosis in fast-forward. If evolution had a goal this would be the equivalent of skipping to the last page to read the ending. In some of those bubbles it is possible that up to a billion years could have passed. Apart from that we can't say much. It's obvious that metafungi evolved in one of those temporal pockets but how they came out of them or how the pockets broke down we have no idea. And they did break down, there is no sign of temporal disturbances on the planet's surface today, at least not of that nature.
Many other species evolved inside those perfect havens of time and space, some of which you are all very familiar with. The most important though is metafungi. The single most significant species on this planet, if not for its present benefits then definitely for what it has offered in the past. A second chance for a planet doomed to die in the ignorant and negligent hands of our ancestors.
-Introductory lecture for the course of Chronoevolution 101, Open Access Horizontal University of Self-Education, Ursula Shelter, Soma
For several centuries, no one knew what the surface even looked like and after the first few decades it would probably be virtually impossible to find out without landing since the upper layers of Soma's atmosphere became opaque with the gaseous byproducts of decomposition on a massive scale. No landing attempts were ever recorded, everything was shot at the planet's surface from orbit. This was thought to be the most "cost effective" course of action. It is estimated that over the course of two-hundred and seventy three SOT years, more than half of the Originating System's waste and "big science" experimental byproducts ended up on the planet's surface. Running a few crude calculations shows that today, even after taking into account of the rate of decay and decomposition of organic and inorganic matter and the half-life of radioactive material, we should be at least up to our necks in garbage. Anywhere on the planet. By the way, this is why the dumping stopped. Our ancestors ran the same calculations and found out that any more and they might disturb the planet's orbit. Not that they cared that much about the planet's well-being, but even they weren't stupid enough to risk having a planet leave its place in their vicinity. So what happened? Did we overestimate in our overeager attempt to accuse our ancestors of being, well, the colonialist, imperialist fuckheads that they usually were? The short answer is no. Our calculations are correct within a reasonable margin of error. And our ancestors were indeed fuckheads. However, this knowledge doesn't serve in any way our quest to understand what happened during those two-hundred and seventy three years. Or should I say during this period that could potentially amount to over ten billion Cumulative Standard Subjective Time years?
In the past few years tremendous progress has been made in our attempts to elaborate on the intricacies of the theoretical frameworks of chronobiology and chronogenetics and to unify them with our already extensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms of temporal flow. To put it more simply, we have a way of making some very educated guesses about why we're not buried in trash and at the same time why some of our most beautiful species, including the Dictyum, came to be. We now believe that Soma was pretty much the same as the Originating Planet during what was once termed the Mesozoic era, minus the great-big-fuck-off-scary lizards. More importantly it was a balanced super-ecomatrix. All this was massively upset by our ancestors' firing several hundred megatons of waste at random points and time intervals on the planet's surface. Normally, an ecological disturbance of this magnitude would have flung the entire planet's ecomatrix so far away from equilibrium that not only is it tempting to call this, us, today, a miracle but it also requires a lot of effort to not start listing all the ways by which Soma should have ended up as a barren rock.
Of course we know this is not a miracle, at least not in the way some of our more deluded ancestors would think. This is a miracle because it tells us something. It lets us know that life, sentient or not, is the most persistent force known to us and that once it has established itself it is not willing to go anywhere, it will not budge, not without putting up a good fight.
So far, our research has shown that before the period now colloquially known as the Great Waste, organisms very similar to fungi thrived on Soma. Great mycelial-like networks running under the surface of the planet with properties very similar to those of the Originating Planet. These protofungi were the planet's main force of decomposition. We posit that the waste dumped on Soma, most of the organic and some of the inorganic too, was the nutritional substrate for what would follow. What did follow is probably the biggest chronoevolutionary event that ever happened on Soma and quite possibly anywhere else. The chronodebris fell all over the planet's surface pretty much randomly and in a large fraction of those cases it created pockets of temporal instability. Next, or rather at the same time, came the radioactive waste. This, as unlikely as it may seem, served as a catalyst in what probably is the single most rapid case of evolution. The radioactive material served as a mutagenic factor inside the temporal bubbles created by the chronodebris. That, combined with the fact that there were essentially limitless nutrients lead to the super-rapid evolution of the protofungi. While on the outside of those temporal pockets barely three centuries had passed, on the inside the protofungi fed on the waste while mutating aggressively over what is now calculated to be several millions of ST years. Leaving momentarily aside the fact that this amount of time only makes sense when you're in the time bubble, try and imagine for a minute what that means. Pure, wild evolution. Metamorphosis in fast-forward. If evolution had a goal this would be the equivalent of skipping to the last page to read the ending. In some of those bubbles it is possible that up to a billion years could have passed. Apart from that we can't say much. It's obvious that metafungi evolved in one of those temporal pockets but how they came out of them or how the pockets broke down we have no idea. And they did break down, there is no sign of temporal disturbances on the planet's surface today, at least not of that nature.
Many other species evolved inside those perfect havens of time and space, some of which you are all very familiar with. The most important though is metafungi. The single most significant species on this planet, if not for its present benefits then definitely for what it has offered in the past. A second chance for a planet doomed to die in the ignorant and negligent hands of our ancestors.
-Introductory lecture for the course of Chronoevolution 101, Open Access Horizontal University of Self-Education, Ursula Shelter, Soma
Re-enter the Vomitorium
Here's the first issue of the anorthodox zine once more only this time on a different, better platform. Spread the disease.
Open publication - Free publishing
Slavetrade
"Captain, the caravan is passing through the jungle in sector S5W9." said the young and ambitious officer.
"Keep all sensors locked on them and their surroundings. Don't miss anything. If the fat guy farts, I want to know about it. Well, maybe not literally." joked the not so young and disillusioned Captain rather twitchily.
He finds himself attracted to powerful, older women. She finds herself attracted to younger, subordinate males. A match made in heaven. Or rather, interplanetary space.
"He's so cute when he calls me 'Captain', if only he was a bit dumber." she catches herself thinking.
"Run full diagnostics on everything. Twice. I want everything running better than perfectly. We cannot fuck this up." she says, revealing the source of her anxiety.
The ship is an S-class cruiser. S stands for shit. The only things keeping this spaceship together are a genius mechanic and the space fairies. Nothing will run 'better than perfectly'. The people who sent them here were arrogant.
"Captain?"
"Yes?"
"We've received orders to open a live feed of updated sensor reports."
"See to it. We are the 'eye in the sky'."
"Yes ma'am."
The people who sent them here are the United Planets Ltd. A bunch of manipulating arrogant corpocrat bastards. In the nicest possible way. The ship was drafted during the Upper Spiral War, the owner died in the war, the ship became UP property. Everything legislated in infinite wisdom. It is sent here on escort and recon duties.
"Captain, the report feed is live."
"Bring it up on a side-screen please, I'd like to double-check." she says knowing full well that this is beneath her duties. She's hoping that the crew can't tell how stressed she is.
"Certainly."
He is so well trained she would probably be turned on if she weren't about to have an aneurysm. Well, one that the nanotechnites wouldn't prevent anyway.
"Lieutenant, have the AI check that everyone down there was also on the Atlas."
The Atlas is the tradeship they are escorting. Tradeship is a euphemism, the Atlas is actually a slave-carrier. Against the hull of the Atlas are smashed the hopes of those that believed that in the age of faster-than-light space travel, there would be no ignorance.The owner/captain of the Atlas and galactic division manager of UP Human Resources, Xenon, is in the center of the caravan, down on the planet's surface. He's the big, fat, ugly dot.
"Bring up full visible spectrum, infra-red and make sure we can see everyone, all the time. The fuckers in UP may be too arrogant to acknowledge this people's ability to defend themselves, but I'm not." mumbles the captain with an almost imperceptible streak of panic in her voice. She can feel something is wrong. "Have the AI filter everything with everything it has, if there's someone down there other than the UP fucks and their entourage, we need to know so we can warn them in time."
The screens are lit up with roughly thirty blobs of various shapes and sizes, this is a multi-species mission after all, seen from several different angles and in a variety of wavelengths. Continuous reports are fed to all of the escort ships' AIs from the neural prosthetics of the caravan members as per standard mission protocol. The blobs are the slaver Xenon and his entourage of bodyguards, mercenaries and general lackeys.
"What's wrong with this picture?" the captain thinks to herself. "Why is everything so quiet?" she mumbles.
"Pardon ma'am?"
"This is a goddamn jungle right? Where are the fucking animals?"
"Nowhere apparently."
"What?"
"The AI just finished a scan of its sensory information for lifeforms in the vicinity..." says the lieutenant coyly.
"And?"
"Nothing for at least two miles around the caravan ma'am."
"What? Fuck. I knew there was something wrong. Fuck!" control visibly slipping away from the captain.
The tribe watches silently as the slavers pass through them. The sight of the obscenely obese slaver and his extravagantly armed entourage sicken them. But they don't even twitch. Surrounded by the rainforest's thick foliage, and covered head to toe in their Dense Matter armor, they are invisible.
"Captain, should I inform the caravan?"
"And tell them what? 'Lookout! There's nothing around you!'"
"Even so, we have to let them know."
"Fine, whatever..."
"I don't even like the bastard, I hope something bad does happen to him." the captain grumbles inwardly.
First heartbeat, the guards and goons at the back of the caravan have the breath knocked out of their lungs, or whatever respiratory organ natural selection has deemed them worthy to carry. It will never return.
"Lieutenant? Why has the back third of the caravan stopped moving?"
Second heartbeat, the attack spreads through the caravan violently. Arms and legs constrict and clamp around air passages and vital fluid vessels. Bones and exoskeletons are crushed, internal organs pulverised. Bodies are twisted beyond recognition, even on their own home-planet, into parodies of their former selves.
"Lieutenant! What's happening? Talk to me!"
Third heartbeat, the tribe, like flickering shadows in the corner of one's eye, complete the attack. Some of the finest UP mercenary personnel lies brutally broken in a grisly variety of ways. The slaver Xenon stands stunned in the middle. He didn't see them move. Nobody did. Maybe they'll show up when they play the recordings in slow motion. Maybe.
"Lieutenant!"
"They're all dead..."
"What?"
"No vital signs from the entire caravan apart from Xenon."
He is left for last. The tribe drags him into the thick vegetation. Perhaps, dragging doesn't best describe the motion. He is flung into the jungle. The probes assigned to Xenon helplessly observe. The slaver is strung up. Dark shadows dart back and forth all around him. Xenon's screams are recorded and fed live to the Atlas and all its escorting vessels. They will give some UP executives a couple of sleepless nights but not much more. The shadows stop. They've disappeared entirely, swallowed by the darkness that spat them out only heartbeats ago. Xenon is hanging upside down, being drained of his bodily fluids through innumerable cuts, lacerations, gashes and slashes. The one from ear to ear finished him, though not before a sufficient amount of suffering was recorded by his neuromesh and transmitted back to the ships above.
"No vital signs from Xenon, Captain..."
"We are so fucked..."
"Keep all sensors locked on them and their surroundings. Don't miss anything. If the fat guy farts, I want to know about it. Well, maybe not literally." joked the not so young and disillusioned Captain rather twitchily.
He finds himself attracted to powerful, older women. She finds herself attracted to younger, subordinate males. A match made in heaven. Or rather, interplanetary space.
"He's so cute when he calls me 'Captain', if only he was a bit dumber." she catches herself thinking.
"Run full diagnostics on everything. Twice. I want everything running better than perfectly. We cannot fuck this up." she says, revealing the source of her anxiety.
The ship is an S-class cruiser. S stands for shit. The only things keeping this spaceship together are a genius mechanic and the space fairies. Nothing will run 'better than perfectly'. The people who sent them here were arrogant.
"Captain?"
"Yes?"
"We've received orders to open a live feed of updated sensor reports."
"See to it. We are the 'eye in the sky'."
"Yes ma'am."
The people who sent them here are the United Planets Ltd. A bunch of manipulating arrogant corpocrat bastards. In the nicest possible way. The ship was drafted during the Upper Spiral War, the owner died in the war, the ship became UP property. Everything legislated in infinite wisdom. It is sent here on escort and recon duties.
"Captain, the report feed is live."
"Bring it up on a side-screen please, I'd like to double-check." she says knowing full well that this is beneath her duties. She's hoping that the crew can't tell how stressed she is.
"Certainly."
He is so well trained she would probably be turned on if she weren't about to have an aneurysm. Well, one that the nanotechnites wouldn't prevent anyway.
"Lieutenant, have the AI check that everyone down there was also on the Atlas."
The Atlas is the tradeship they are escorting. Tradeship is a euphemism, the Atlas is actually a slave-carrier. Against the hull of the Atlas are smashed the hopes of those that believed that in the age of faster-than-light space travel, there would be no ignorance.The owner/captain of the Atlas and galactic division manager of UP Human Resources, Xenon, is in the center of the caravan, down on the planet's surface. He's the big, fat, ugly dot.
"Bring up full visible spectrum, infra-red and make sure we can see everyone, all the time. The fuckers in UP may be too arrogant to acknowledge this people's ability to defend themselves, but I'm not." mumbles the captain with an almost imperceptible streak of panic in her voice. She can feel something is wrong. "Have the AI filter everything with everything it has, if there's someone down there other than the UP fucks and their entourage, we need to know so we can warn them in time."
The screens are lit up with roughly thirty blobs of various shapes and sizes, this is a multi-species mission after all, seen from several different angles and in a variety of wavelengths. Continuous reports are fed to all of the escort ships' AIs from the neural prosthetics of the caravan members as per standard mission protocol. The blobs are the slaver Xenon and his entourage of bodyguards, mercenaries and general lackeys.
"What's wrong with this picture?" the captain thinks to herself. "Why is everything so quiet?" she mumbles.
"Pardon ma'am?"
"This is a goddamn jungle right? Where are the fucking animals?"
"Nowhere apparently."
"What?"
"The AI just finished a scan of its sensory information for lifeforms in the vicinity..." says the lieutenant coyly.
"And?"
"Nothing for at least two miles around the caravan ma'am."
"What? Fuck. I knew there was something wrong. Fuck!" control visibly slipping away from the captain.
The tribe watches silently as the slavers pass through them. The sight of the obscenely obese slaver and his extravagantly armed entourage sicken them. But they don't even twitch. Surrounded by the rainforest's thick foliage, and covered head to toe in their Dense Matter armor, they are invisible.
"Captain, should I inform the caravan?"
"And tell them what? 'Lookout! There's nothing around you!'"
"Even so, we have to let them know."
"Fine, whatever..."
"I don't even like the bastard, I hope something bad does happen to him." the captain grumbles inwardly.
First heartbeat, the guards and goons at the back of the caravan have the breath knocked out of their lungs, or whatever respiratory organ natural selection has deemed them worthy to carry. It will never return.
"Lieutenant? Why has the back third of the caravan stopped moving?"
Second heartbeat, the attack spreads through the caravan violently. Arms and legs constrict and clamp around air passages and vital fluid vessels. Bones and exoskeletons are crushed, internal organs pulverised. Bodies are twisted beyond recognition, even on their own home-planet, into parodies of their former selves.
"Lieutenant! What's happening? Talk to me!"
Third heartbeat, the tribe, like flickering shadows in the corner of one's eye, complete the attack. Some of the finest UP mercenary personnel lies brutally broken in a grisly variety of ways. The slaver Xenon stands stunned in the middle. He didn't see them move. Nobody did. Maybe they'll show up when they play the recordings in slow motion. Maybe.
"Lieutenant!"
"They're all dead..."
"What?"
"No vital signs from the entire caravan apart from Xenon."
He is left for last. The tribe drags him into the thick vegetation. Perhaps, dragging doesn't best describe the motion. He is flung into the jungle. The probes assigned to Xenon helplessly observe. The slaver is strung up. Dark shadows dart back and forth all around him. Xenon's screams are recorded and fed live to the Atlas and all its escorting vessels. They will give some UP executives a couple of sleepless nights but not much more. The shadows stop. They've disappeared entirely, swallowed by the darkness that spat them out only heartbeats ago. Xenon is hanging upside down, being drained of his bodily fluids through innumerable cuts, lacerations, gashes and slashes. The one from ear to ear finished him, though not before a sufficient amount of suffering was recorded by his neuromesh and transmitted back to the ships above.
"No vital signs from Xenon, Captain..."
"We are so fucked..."
Fragments of Soma
My delusions of grandeur have lead me to believe that I can have a go at writing science fiction. I have been slowly building a world for a few years now and since I don't trust my drawing skills that much, I decided to flesh it out with words. Slowly, I'll post short stories about Soma, a world similar to ours but also entirely different. A new world, trying to stand on its own in a fucked up galaxy. The first story I'll post is the first story I wrote about it. Enjoy. Or don't. Nobody cares. Nobody loves you. You're not even a person.
No Rainbow
This short film features scenes from two of my favourite films and one I didn't care much about. Gorge yourselves.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us
Tonight. I stole a little bit from the world and made it mine. I now have a new limb.
I saw myself smile like I have never smiled before. And I was beautiful. Tonight I ruled the city.
I thought I would be anxious and stressed but I have never been calmer.
Tonight I found one of my lost pieces. And it was good.
Enter the Vomitorium
Below I have embedded a zine version of some of my favourite words and images that may or may not have appeared as posts here.
I did it mainly because I've fallen in love with zines and wanted to try it out, but also because I wanted to remix some of the stuff I put here.
As always, no permission was asked. Everything was shamelessly expropriated.
You can read the zine online in its embedded form or in scribd.com itself or you can download it and do dirty things to it in your own time using the link below.
Be warned, it may cause blindness and explosive diarrhoea.
anorthodox_01
I did it mainly because I've fallen in love with zines and wanted to try it out, but also because I wanted to remix some of the stuff I put here.
As always, no permission was asked. Everything was shamelessly expropriated.
You can read the zine online in its embedded form or in scribd.com itself or you can download it and do dirty things to it in your own time using the link below.
Be warned, it may cause blindness and explosive diarrhoea.
anorthodox_01
Yeti
I made this. I stole and salvaged and scavenged and stitched together until this poor shambling monster came out.
"Because his ways have been wise" -High On Fire, The Yeti
The Guy with the Mustache is Dead
The evil twin has been vanquished. It was consumed. Its powers absorbed. Like the zygotes, splitting then one enclosing the other. Cain killed Abel by endocytosis.
Motherfucker, I ate the other embryo.
Jovial Fatso
He returns to consciousness.
He opens his eyelids carefully, half-expecting someone to be there, standing over him. No-one is there. What a relief, he says inwardly. He contemplates rolling out of bed and then realises that the word fits perfectly, horribly. Roll. Like a marble. A meatball. A four-hundred-pound man-dumpling.
Slowly and with considerable effort, he lifts himself, his eyes tangentially scouting the curvature of his body. He thinks, any more and he'll start looking like a planet. He'll start attracting other masses. He'll have his own gravitational pull.
Every cough an earthquake. Every day a repetitive rotation around his miserable self.
A woman enters the bedroom.Thin, unkempt, with the look of people that look after others. She looks like she's part of the house, a piece of furniture. An old family heirloom.
'Good morning dear' she says in a compromising voice.
Ugh, he thinks. He smiles the smile of fakes and madmen. An imitated smile. 'Good morning love'.
He hates himself. For being a hypocrite. For being forced to be a hypocrite. But most of all, he hates himself because he does it too well. And he pushes it all down with a joke.
She helps him get dressed with the patience of a saint and the efficiency of a retired accountant. His very own Saint Bureaucrat. And for that he can't stand her. But he hides it well behind buffoonery.
She packs him a lunch and kisses him goodbye in the same way she has for the past century and in the same way she will in those still to come. And for that he abhors her. But he drowns it all in light-hearted witticisms.
He gingerly shuts the door, almost sarcastically, and mentally prepares his affable camouflage for the day.
He opens his eyelids carefully, half-expecting someone to be there, standing over him. No-one is there. What a relief, he says inwardly. He contemplates rolling out of bed and then realises that the word fits perfectly, horribly. Roll. Like a marble. A meatball. A four-hundred-pound man-dumpling.
Slowly and with considerable effort, he lifts himself, his eyes tangentially scouting the curvature of his body. He thinks, any more and he'll start looking like a planet. He'll start attracting other masses. He'll have his own gravitational pull.
Every cough an earthquake. Every day a repetitive rotation around his miserable self.
A woman enters the bedroom.Thin, unkempt, with the look of people that look after others. She looks like she's part of the house, a piece of furniture. An old family heirloom.
'Good morning dear' she says in a compromising voice.
Ugh, he thinks. He smiles the smile of fakes and madmen. An imitated smile. 'Good morning love'.
He hates himself. For being a hypocrite. For being forced to be a hypocrite. But most of all, he hates himself because he does it too well. And he pushes it all down with a joke.
She helps him get dressed with the patience of a saint and the efficiency of a retired accountant. His very own Saint Bureaucrat. And for that he can't stand her. But he hides it well behind buffoonery.
She packs him a lunch and kisses him goodbye in the same way she has for the past century and in the same way she will in those still to come. And for that he abhors her. But he drowns it all in light-hearted witticisms.
He gingerly shuts the door, almost sarcastically, and mentally prepares his affable camouflage for the day.
Mammatocumulus
Give us clouds.
Clouds like big breasts.
Like condensed milk dissolving in water.
Like ripe fruit hanging from the branches, waiting to be plucked.
Give us rain unending.
Clouds like big breasts.
Like condensed milk dissolving in water.
Like ripe fruit hanging from the branches, waiting to be plucked.
Give us rain unending.
Holy Virgin of the Barricades
Hail Mary, full of rage
Our Desire is with thee
Blessed art thou among women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Fire.
Holy Mary, Mother of Barricades,
pray for us free people,
now and at the hour of our life.
Our Desire is with thee
Blessed art thou among women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Fire.
Holy Mary, Mother of Barricades,
pray for us free people,
now and at the hour of our life.
The day noone went to work.
One day, nobody went to work. Parents got up but said "Fuck it. I'm not going to the office today, I'll pretend I'm sick". They let their children sleep until they wanted to get up for themselves. Students didn't go to school, high school or university. People stayed in and made love with their partners. Somehow, a great degree of universality was achieved without anyone knowing about it. Like a cosmic emergent phenomenon, everyone decided to be lazy, unproductive and happy. Noone had proclaimed "Sloth day" and nobody had contacted their friends to arrange it. It most certainly was not an advertising trick. And yet, noone went to work. Even the workaholics, executive directors and board members. A terrible feeling of malaise had possessed them when they realised their secretaries and aides and assistants hadn't woken them up this morning. Rather, they had woken up on their own, four hours late. For some reason though, the feeling of discomfort disintegrated as soon as they looked out of their window and saw nobody attending their lawn.
The people that worked the night shift? They stood and stared for a couple of moments as soon as the sun came up and then it hit them. They didn't have to be here. They could be in bed and sleeping the best sleep there is. The stolen sleep. The kind of nap students take on their desks, the extra five minutes children sneak in before their mom shouts "Time to get ready for school!", the sleep of a dog fed, tired and happy. So they did. They dumped whatever trash it was they were hauling, whatever car they were pumping gasoline into and with its driver they went for a beer, rampant sex or they just went their separate ways.
The factory workers, the public servants they didn't feel like working or serving either. That's not to say they stayed inside. They went outside. Into the world. Into outer and inner space. And they took their children with them for navigators.
The cars were left as they were. The traffic lights stopped working because noone was manning (or womanning) the power plants.
Nothing was produced other than happiness. Nothing was pursued other than dreams. Noone was miserable.
And suddenly, like the infinitesimal event that starts a feedback loop leading to a gargantuan avalanche of consequences, an idea flew into everyone's mind at the same time.
They didn't have to go to work tomorrow either.
The people that worked the night shift? They stood and stared for a couple of moments as soon as the sun came up and then it hit them. They didn't have to be here. They could be in bed and sleeping the best sleep there is. The stolen sleep. The kind of nap students take on their desks, the extra five minutes children sneak in before their mom shouts "Time to get ready for school!", the sleep of a dog fed, tired and happy. So they did. They dumped whatever trash it was they were hauling, whatever car they were pumping gasoline into and with its driver they went for a beer, rampant sex or they just went their separate ways.
The factory workers, the public servants they didn't feel like working or serving either. That's not to say they stayed inside. They went outside. Into the world. Into outer and inner space. And they took their children with them for navigators.
The cars were left as they were. The traffic lights stopped working because noone was manning (or womanning) the power plants.
Nothing was produced other than happiness. Nothing was pursued other than dreams. Noone was miserable.
And suddenly, like the infinitesimal event that starts a feedback loop leading to a gargantuan avalanche of consequences, an idea flew into everyone's mind at the same time.
They didn't have to go to work tomorrow either.
Sack of Potatoes
The old man stood there, in the middle of the street, staring. He wasn't staring in a particular way or with a particular face. However, he was staring at something in particular. It was a sack of potatoes.This would be a perfectly normal picture -if rather unusual- had the old man not been talking with the sack of potatoes.
Now, there are several things wrong with the above sentence. For example, why would an old man -in fact, why would a man, woman or child of any age- strike up a conversation with a sack of potatoes, or any kind of container full of vegetables for that matter. However, that could probably be attributed to the old man's senility or dementia (or loneliness I suppose). The other concept that seems wrong, is that he was talking with it and not to it. People do generally tend to talk to inanimate objects, threaten or cajole them if they don't work, curse them when they bang their little toe against them etc. However, they generally never get a reply or at least not one that can be helpful or understood. And they certainly don't expect one.
This old man, on the other hand, was having a rather casual chat with this sack of potatoes. I suppose in a way that's tragic, or at least a bit sad. Poor old guy, so demented and senile, not only was he asking the sack of potatoes what it thought about the weather, he was expecting -and in his head also getting- an answer.
Of course the sack of potatoes never did reply. Or in fact perceive, let alone understand, the question directed at it. It was -in a very anthropomorphic sense- oblivious to the old man. This was not due to lack of trying. Neither arrogance. It was rather due to the combined effect of growing up underground and in the dark and, well, being a mass of vegetable cells with no discernible anatomy, sensory apparatuses or a processing system -central or otherwise- and therefore functioning at a very distinctly different cognitive level of consciousness. Should the sack of potatoes be able to understand the old man and be able to produce a coherent response, it is almost certain that it would be more than happy to indulge in some friendly, casual banter.
Alas, the old man and the sack of potatoes would never truly communicate.
(Several years later and after the old man had died, a very giggly fairy -we suspect she was stoned- granted the sack of potatoes' wish and turned it into a real boy)
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