Bring your Bars To Market Part 2: Gamble The Stars
"Shake it off, we’re just getting started / Can we break for a moment of silence for the departed? / Can we take just a moment of violence to bash me? / So motherfuckers got something new to pound in the streets / You can die if you want it / Suicide / While others doing everything in their power to survive / But that’s another side of the spectrum, another horror story for the ones that collect them / But that’s the other side of the spectrum, another horror story for the ones that collect them"
It’s the static.
Lil Al Calypso wrapped his war calloused hands around my limpdick fingers and pulled me outta there. He had new scars and hurricaned clothes. Echoes of reluctant ecstasy faded all around me and reality flooded in. Bitch flood. Through the crowds, through the sweat, through the seething eyestalkings that condemned me for abandoning my post as king of the hopeless survivors. A tumultuous road. Sweat and cum and blood despite their good intentions, their best wishes, their most base desires, all inseparable. Centipedes fled my asshole and spores cascaded from every crevice. The king is dead. Long live subjective cruelty.
Standing at the edge of careless life. Through my bugsketched eyes he was race and gender neutral. I learned through the static that he had lost his family and he was involved in some nanotechnology scandal. He was enveloped in his own story and none of us could touch him. We were watching a movie. Beyond hygiene, beyond hunger, beyond fatigue. Maybe he was the robot one. I wasn’t listening right.
A big fuckin fashioned eye swooped past and was gone. The pupil dilated for a split second. A few moment later, it was further back, connected to a colossal mess of tendrils and explosions and pure sexual darkness. Stipple caverns that made fucking, then death, then expanded into birth. Repeat.
He assumed the stance of a daredevil. He was on some “let my people go” shit. I had listened enough to know that this whole debacle was a vie for independence, the story of fractured humanity (the definition of humanity.) Broken, filthy, robbed, furious, hopeful… We elected him as our representative by either death or disinterest. His hat was spotless. Carry that fact for as long as you are able.
The monster was as broken, but did not understand the fetish of defeat; that concept we inherited from it, that pleasure from the knowledge that stronger futures come from surviving a loss. It looked upon our person with fear. I watched from a corner, crumpled and diseased. Spiders fought to get into my skull. A snake chewed its way through my ribcage.
Please let me survive this.
Please let me make this slavery mean something.
Undeniable slavery.
The universe sped toward us like the most ovulating vertex. Every manner of horror came to stake a claim as our pimp – maybe the only one that was willing to nurture this shit planet to self-awareness, maybe the only one who was weak enough to find this place attractive – began to quake with fear. The nanobots that stood abandoned in orbit around Earth acted as conduits for the message. They translated the tremors.
It’s the static.
“You will die without me.” Solid.
The agent responded. “We know enough about death. Try again.”
Silence for a while. He drew his pistol. Polished and inscribed with otherworldly runes. Familiar warred hands that had dragged me from heaven, but livened by the humanity I had cast away. |
Pull the trigger, half stop.
Nobody seemed to care.
It said.
“I own your future.”
"What if every drop of rain's a letter from the sky / And they each concealed a message if you read it you could fly / Who would send it would you bet that it was god / Cause it doesn't really matter if it's met with an applause / It's a testament of flaws i'll sit and face the skies now / Empathize with rain to anticipate the ride down / To find out how they dance between the paper stars / To embrace the dark before they inundate the night's clouds / Now that's an optimistic view / I can script a musical while options are reviewed / Pieces of me tend to die but I can miss the funeral / I fall into the view that my life is simply beautiful"
“Every single day in every single way the war is being won.”
In the beginning, man created god, and it was terrible.
Human beings have been amazing at taking from their surroundings and interpreting them into something great. The curious fact is that the mythology isn’t far off from the truth. We can’t imagine new colours.
More drearily acute minds have referred to it as the World Pimp. The cosmic entity we ideabirthed into something we could control. The blueprints for god we dug out of the DNA of our collective consciousness. The one responsible for all the bullshit. The mass of stained glass maggots that we stuck a mask on and imagined that imagined us. Imagined it could help if it wanted to. Imagined that it wanted to.
The one responsible.
The one that some of us destroyed the world to spite. The ones who laughed.
In the end, god abandoned man, and it was good.
Exterior. Antarctica. Day.
Satellites have been knocked out of orbit, and the ones that haven’t been smashed or flung out into space maintain unpredictable forecasts. Graveyars sprang up everywhere and vanished out of sight. The ones that remain, they can still be contacted, and can still transmit information, but time and energy is at a premium and some days are worse than others. Luck is the only religion in the frontier.
The last research post left standing in Antarctica has access to a satellite, and they have distantly glimpsed upon the thing they can freely see from their current position. The second angle helps, but it is more of the same sinking of chestplates. Every day sees a new army splintering through the ice, as if lying dormant just below the surface. Entire civilizations emerging like the water descending and revealing centuries of shipwrecks. The smoke demon, as it is colloquially referred to as, is vacuuming everything that isn’t grounded. An inverted funnel is stamped onto the ice, kicking up ice and dust and everything reliquified. It’s like a riptide; even when they’re walking away from it, they’re getting closer and closer to oblivion. Assumed oblivion. The surface of the ground bares such a variety of clawmarks and talongouges. The satellite shows them being cast out into space, but who says they need air? Nobody is saying anything.
Nobody is coming.
Let Them Know.
Lindsey X is the one at the controls every minute of every day, dictating everything she sees to the rest of the crew. Hourly radio updates, any images she snags on her phone (or descriptions from memory, which are much more frequent,) and some of the books she is reading; the passages that seem relate-able to their situation. Lord of the Flies is at the bottom of the pile.
She is the one constantly sending out messages and attempting to make use of the fractured infrastructures that they relied on in other parts of the world. What is going on at your end? Here’s what’s going on at ours. Chipper headlines into the hostile static. Every day is Little Boy. She used precious energy from the generators to power her phone to take a photo of one of the brief glimpses of the entity hovering just outside of Earth’s atmosphere. The Big Daddy. The one who is consistently saving their lives and disposing of the waves of nightmares that inexplicably emerge. One day they’ll run out of ice. One day it will suck all of the air off the planet. It has to. In a world of nonlogic, depressing logic will do. To be grounded in reality is to be grounded to technology. Elements will surprise you and the terrain will betray you. We pledge allegiance to our creations.
One Day They Will Know Our Story.
Joseph Grundy lost his fingers when he opened the door to feel the fresh air on his face. Something sprayed in through the crack, and it taught them all that there was some invisible shit lurking around every entrance. Maybe lurking around the entire perimeter. Live a long life and assume the worst. He spends his days writing down everything Lindsey X says, in addition to his own notes and thoughts on what is going on. His contribution to the crowdsourced story is a narrator, and when her dictations are influenced by the group around her, that makes it into the final draft. He controls the final draft, for better or worse. The story he tells – catches – is not one of hope. In absence of hope, he turns to comedy. He started laughing every time something slammed against the walls of the building. Infectious, it caught on. Laugh everytime a transmission creeps through the static and it is in some otherworldly language. Laugh at the invasion. It becomes their invasion. That would be the last line of his book.
I Want To Go Home
The team used to be 30 strong. By the time they settled into the post-apocalypse configuration, they were down to seven. Suicide and foolish escape stole away most of the rest. Foolish life ensnared even less. Corey Piano wasn’t in a good way, but he made it through those first few hurdles. He was resigned to life, but he interpreted it differently. Despite being employed by humour, he did not employ it himself. He was writing his own book, pacing the halls and scribbling madly against walls and surfaces that wouldn’t occur to the rest of us. His book started off as a diary of death. Someone opened the door and was struck by a bolt of red lightning that turned them into a flayed bat. It hiccupped towards him, eyes locked, the wings clots of sick purple veins. He was forced to stomp it out after it leapt up and devoured Timmy K by latching onto his crotch and chattering its teeth until he was sprayed out like bloody woodchips. It sunk its teeth into his boot and he smashed it against the wall. It came apart like a plastic grocery bag filled with old pork.
His girlfriend was sucked into a wall and he listened her commit suicide as she, in acute detail, described her own death. She was being given dreams and she did not like them. He believed her at the time. He believed her because she wanted him to. He told her it was for the best. Ever since then, he has been pursued by an orgasmic giggling. What a prank. It has convinced him that his every action is part of the prank. The only way to step outside of the comedy is to work. Work isn’t funny. Many of the pages are repeated words or lazy doodles. His whole life has been a comedy. There is a punchline coming. He can’t tell the rest of them. They wouldn’t get it.
They have all seen the exact same things, but each of them secretly resents the other for not agreeing with them. This is as simply as it could possibly be explained. Each one of them sensed that they were destined for greater things, and the moment their window was apparent, they could spring into action and save the world. Each one of them was privy to an angle the other wasn't, but they would drag them along fore the ride, and they would eventually be praised by their 2 other peers. They would reluctantly accept, of course, as long as it was with humility. It was all just a matter of time.
Corey Piano filled seven pages with the same phrase:
“Every single day in every single way the war is being won.”
