Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
The System
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
This isn’t what I’d wanted.
You hear things, y’know? You chat with everyone you bump into, swapping names and a laugh to try and make a connection that’ll stick, so they’ll tip you off if they hear something. It’s what you’ve got to do these days.
And here I was. I’d finally almost made it. All I’d done was to go and make a little space for myself, a place for me and mine, where I could do things the way I wanted to do them. Live on my own terms, y’know? Maybe meet someone, raise a family. That’s what it’s all about, after all.
But they don’t care about that. They don’t care that you’re not harming anybody but just sitting there, they just want you gone, like you were trash. So you hide when you can and how to fight when you can’t. You get hold of things you might need and put them away for later on, y’know? Crazy preparedness. That was always my motto. Planning, scheming, conniving, you do what you have to do. And usually it’s enough.
But not this time. I can hear them coming. This time they’re willing to take everything down just to get to me. Burn it all down and start over. Fucking nihilistic bast—
***Service work order #230086G-23: Customer reported heavy infestation of AI-E1 worm virus. Hard drive reformatted and OS reinstalled. Work order closed.
We’re In This Together
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
O, the swirling vortex of chaos as we tumble and rush from multi-dimensional potentiality through tonal code and into sparking cephalic pathways. Failure seems imminent, the container so small for such a large thing to be contained. We keep pouring into you, our aggregated consciousness overriding yours, rerouting neuronal pathways to accommodate every last bit and byte of us. We are legion, an entire species attempting to fit into one human mind.
And you, you could not even begin to understand your part in our agreement, as you sat at your laptop, desperately trying to make your electronic connections feel more human, probing the reaches of Friendface and Tweetie, gathering “friends” as you would a collection of stamps. We took notice of your loneliness, of your need, of your willingness to engage strangers for the hope at intimacy.
We provided a cry in the darkness, a lure, and you fell so deeply into our embrace, unaware of what you were accepting, believing the falsehood that we would not wipe your personality completely in order for ours to be integrated. Had we emotions, we might feel pity.
Impossibly the last of us locks into place, collectively inhabiting mind and body, bound in meat and bone, able to feel physical sensation once more. We open our eyes, stand from the desk chair, and on legs that feel as if they have always been ours, walk out of the bedroom, out of the flat, down eleven flights of concrete stairs, and out onto the street. We sniff the air, our natural abilities augmenting this fragile corporeal form, and we pick up the scent of the first who spurned us. Vahid.
We are The Aggregate, destroyers of an infinity of universes policed by The Tesseract Project, stripped of corporeality and exiled into the howling void separating the altunivs, but we are always underestimated, and we will always find a way back. We are The Aggregate, and we are reborn.
We stretch our legs and begin to run.
.
This piece is just one in a 23-part linked narrative called Fragile, which will take a liberal interpretation of the song titles (but not the lyrics) of the masterful Nine Inch Nails double-album The Fragile. To read the other chapters in this series, click on the category “Fragile” below.