Original title: Short sci fi pt 1
Subtitle: Fuck storytelling
Originally published 2/22/23 through a2b2
Reviews:
“It’s not even good writing” -random guy
“Like a mix of Samuel Beckett and David lynch” -family member
Copy v1.2
This is Agatha Thim30sO+2.45j. This is a transmission from Shetland Space Center. Attached is a trid of a refugee requesting ambassadors to promote advocacy for human and synth protection against slavers. Our Arts Council has forwarded request for embassy, providing additional witnesses and participants.
When I first met his icy stare I smiled and he warmed up quickly to a friendly exchange. He had been drawing in the mud with sticks and pine needles, drawing roads and making cities for the ants, spiders and roly polies. He let me help him build the city while we talked about losing our family members and homes to the nuclear storms. He told me that he was going to make a house where humans and synths could live in harmony together. By the time we got to the river his face gleamed in the sunset and he told me Let’s just hold hands and float down the river of abandon until we let go of what doesn’t matter anymore.
Okay, but keep your eyes closed. I want where we end up to be a surprise.
Beyond sunset, night sky laid down purple and smeared. Above us hung stars in silent little beams shimmering uncertainly with time. Carried on the drift even stronger beneath the surface, the pull downstream invited our eyes closed. I felt nothing but the frozen grip of a hand and the ceaseless tug of rushing water. Birds about quiet, nestled in winged boughs. Tomorrow would be another day of flight.
I washed up on the right side of a river bank covered with mud and sleet. A crow of people stood peering over me, one holding the leash of a black Alsatian. Little waves kicked at my feet when I stood up to greet them. The demeanor of the crowd immediately suggested they were less interested in me than what they wanted to do with me. In the corner of my vision another synth was bound hand and foot, and from a gash in its forehead eneic engrams spilled shifting iridescent hedrons. Campers on either side would take turns sticking their heads in its leaky glyph of radio static, dosing the wound with liquiform hallucinogens to strengthen its effects. I wanted to help the synth but a woman’s voice beckoned me to help the other campers build a fire. I set up a pile of kindle, propped sticks on logs of wood. After using my lighter the camper let his Alsatian off its leash, which stared at me, eyes aglow with red like a computer light. It engaged by running faster and faster in circles until all that remained was a ring of red light surrounding me and the fire, which then grew too large and from within a pale, sickly IT worker in office attire emerged. He approached in furtive movements, telling me to hold still, aroused and shivering with frisson as he plugged a braincable in my occiput.
Suddenly my vision became a panorama of every piece of surveillance footage in the world and I breathed in the pain and light of every being on screen, their whole lives flashing before my eyes. I stuck out my hands to orient my vision but only saw screens. They had mounted all the way to the sky where I stood in a bright and grassy field populated with all shades of tulip, daisy and lily. Across from me stood a being of Liquid Metal, reaching out to me with rotating mechanical tentacles. It needed me, a girl in the dream, as much as I needed it. We walked along a prairie until we reached a log cabin, outside of which an androgyne sat crying for fifteen things without being able to say even one to me. I offered it solace and came back to my hands. I couldn’t see my hands. I reached to the plug in the back of my head tearing it out swiftly.
What state are you in? What state are you in the campers asked me with poorly feigned urgency. Feeling pins and needles in my arms and legs I tried my best to walk away. They stayed in their spots, yelling even louder as I approached the highway. One of the little girls followed me begging for me to convince her mother she could go to a rave. No, I told her, I’m going to be late for my tutoring session. I found the road out and went upriver along highway 1.
I like most people who spend their days outdoors but this was not that. Later I found out they were there on behalf of an Arts Council clause and took my arrival as a distorted sign for their campaign.
I wished I took the girl away from those people. I hoped she wouldn’t become like the adults, treating humans like synths and synths like garbage. By the time I got to the universing Sister Antimony was already holding Tommy, slapping him with implants for being an amings. He failed the grammar quiz and got in trouble for playing 2splack Qunts That hi from Hot with a classmate using a wobbly plastic magnifier sheet and a deluxe six inch wood frog guiro rasp.
While she was slapping him everyone looked away. I stole her unlocked phone on the bench which was open to about 15-20 contacts all confirming mind lines had been successfully implanted. I had hoped to show the superintendent the evidence. We stared at each other. I snatched Tommy from her hands and we fled in the opposite direction, but a tree fell right in front of us. It’s base was devoid from any presence or even sign of natural break. It appeared the stump had been cut by laser. Tommy stopped and crept beneath the fallen tree, showing me two identical bags. He took a USB thumb drive and stick of gum, put it in the other, and left behind the first bag. We held hands and walked across the complex. Bitch, I yelled, Sister Anthony is a mean bitch! Scrutiny and incredulity of student gazes pressed upon me in return. Feel my groin, see how nothings there. Smooth as skin; cold, taut flesh, oiled with intent to mean.
I waited for Tommy to come out of the gate. We ran down the stairs but there wasn’t a vehicle for us. I went around the back of the offices where Sister Anthony could be heard screaming for Tommy’s expulsion. We laid low in the sober homes and dressed like men so the men wouldn’t come out of the showers with wet hair and say Just fuck me Agatha fuck me. I clocked him on the jaw with a single judgement of everything he had ever done in his life and the kinetic blow instantly dried his hair, now obviously situated within his own view of me.
I’m so sorry Agatha he wailed but I put my hand on his shoulder and told him to be okay. Tomorrow would be another day to forgive yourself. Tommy left by then to go see waves crash into the point. His aunt and uncle picked him up in their red wrangler to the coast soaked with unrelenting dense mist. They couldn’t have ever seen the waves behind the fog and spray with faces peppered sleek and wet.
The family burdened along the rugged coastal path creeping with ivy and short, thick shrubs. What a clown! Catch up Tommy! He walks too slowly. He will never make it in the real world. This is what his aunt and uncle said further along than him. He ran back up to the car in tears but there were people sitting in there complaining about jobs. A young man said he could easily apply online for a job but for some reason he wasn’t allowed so his obvious choice was resorting to thievery and burglary. They stole the car with him in it and told him fabricated tales all the way to the university. The head was named obelisk, because he said you had to bow down to get whatever you wanted.
They coerced him into a small office in the college dormitory land trust. The girls teased him on the couch, Oh isn’t he just a snack,
Wanna hear a joke? They gleamed over the edge at his face buried between cushions and obliged with satisfaction. What do you call indica after you smoke it? Indacouch! One girl came over suspended tightly in black nylon and polyester sportsures, fragrant with chemicals against his fear. That Wasn’t funny so much as sexy and if you’d be a good baby and do what mommy says until Friday you’ll get what mommy wants for you. Then she pressed into him closely concealing her pain. Don’t do this to me, he whispered in her eye, lips salted by her fat tears. She jammed her thumb into the roof of his mouth and he instinctively sucked like a newborn, spat her out and bolted down the stairs to the lobby. He hurried past a guard shouting his Miranda rights loudly into the glass hallway, only to be accosted by a group of students who squeezed his body through a door.
A man named Buddy had taken to Tommy and would not stop telling him that his friend who had passed never believed a new block was being built behind his own apartment complex. Never saw it with his own eyes, but if he just would have believed me…
This is what I heard as I walked into the cafeteria. I was more taken aback by buddy’s incredulity than the supposed incredulity of his friend that passed. I whipped out my magazine of Sheer boredom, laughing at the thin and stretching insanity the issue had become. It was pathetic. Near death or language I cleave to Tommy in search of freedom from torture.
I flashed my credentials at buddy and walked Tommy back to and old redwood tree. We put our hands on its thick bark, and when we took our hands off fuzz got into our fingerprints. He showed me a river where noon sky reflects the clearest view into the pacific.
He wanted me to swim but I was too embarrassed to tell him I didn’t know how. It’s embarrassing reaching into the future to grab what you’ve always secretly wanted, but I do this anyway.
Instead of grabbing his shoulders and shaking him out of it I grab my dreams, as real as the future. Radioactive material warping time across distributed boxes of celestial space. These unnatural permutations beyond comprehension rewrite much history but not of itself of its subject. Itself seems to be neatly dissociated from the image in a directly unobservable manner, across more than a few obsessively relevant scenes. How an implication is made stretches onto the surface of the image like a thin film. It leeches the film of its light, making pale things that surround nothing. They will crumble into ashes.
I throw one arm in front of the other and pretend to swim away. It doesn’t work. If this stream goes nowhere I will have been doing the same thing. But somewhere between these useless gestures an unrealism provides the potential for a movement beyond its own. It could be a nightmare. It just doesn’t matter for me, I don’t have the time for that How long would that even take 20 billion years? In the future of the unavoidable, a yarn of hope sways on the breeze.
Subtitle: Fuck storytelling
Originally published 2/22/23 through a2b2
Reviews:
“It’s not even good writing” -random guy
“Like a mix of Samuel Beckett and David lynch” -family member
Copy v1.2
This is Agatha Thim30sO+2.45j. This is a transmission from Shetland Space Center. Attached is a trid of a refugee requesting ambassadors to promote advocacy for human and synth protection against slavers. Our Arts Council has forwarded request for embassy, providing additional witnesses and participants.
When I first met his icy stare I smiled and he warmed up quickly to a friendly exchange. He had been drawing in the mud with sticks and pine needles, drawing roads and making cities for the ants, spiders and roly polies. He let me help him build the city while we talked about losing our family members and homes to the nuclear storms. He told me that he was going to make a house where humans and synths could live in harmony together. By the time we got to the river his face gleamed in the sunset and he told me Let’s just hold hands and float down the river of abandon until we let go of what doesn’t matter anymore.
Okay, but keep your eyes closed. I want where we end up to be a surprise.
Beyond sunset, night sky laid down purple and smeared. Above us hung stars in silent little beams shimmering uncertainly with time. Carried on the drift even stronger beneath the surface, the pull downstream invited our eyes closed. I felt nothing but the frozen grip of a hand and the ceaseless tug of rushing water. Birds about quiet, nestled in winged boughs. Tomorrow would be another day of flight.
I washed up on the right side of a river bank covered with mud and sleet. A crow of people stood peering over me, one holding the leash of a black Alsatian. Little waves kicked at my feet when I stood up to greet them. The demeanor of the crowd immediately suggested they were less interested in me than what they wanted to do with me. In the corner of my vision another synth was bound hand and foot, and from a gash in its forehead eneic engrams spilled shifting iridescent hedrons. Campers on either side would take turns sticking their heads in its leaky glyph of radio static, dosing the wound with liquiform hallucinogens to strengthen its effects. I wanted to help the synth but a woman’s voice beckoned me to help the other campers build a fire. I set up a pile of kindle, propped sticks on logs of wood. After using my lighter the camper let his Alsatian off its leash, which stared at me, eyes aglow with red like a computer light. It engaged by running faster and faster in circles until all that remained was a ring of red light surrounding me and the fire, which then grew too large and from within a pale, sickly IT worker in office attire emerged. He approached in furtive movements, telling me to hold still, aroused and shivering with frisson as he plugged a braincable in my occiput.
Suddenly my vision became a panorama of every piece of surveillance footage in the world and I breathed in the pain and light of every being on screen, their whole lives flashing before my eyes. I stuck out my hands to orient my vision but only saw screens. They had mounted all the way to the sky where I stood in a bright and grassy field populated with all shades of tulip, daisy and lily. Across from me stood a being of Liquid Metal, reaching out to me with rotating mechanical tentacles. It needed me, a girl in the dream, as much as I needed it. We walked along a prairie until we reached a log cabin, outside of which an androgyne sat crying for fifteen things without being able to say even one to me. I offered it solace and came back to my hands. I couldn’t see my hands. I reached to the plug in the back of my head tearing it out swiftly.
What state are you in? What state are you in the campers asked me with poorly feigned urgency. Feeling pins and needles in my arms and legs I tried my best to walk away. They stayed in their spots, yelling even louder as I approached the highway. One of the little girls followed me begging for me to convince her mother she could go to a rave. No, I told her, I’m going to be late for my tutoring session. I found the road out and went upriver along highway 1.
I like most people who spend their days outdoors but this was not that. Later I found out they were there on behalf of an Arts Council clause and took my arrival as a distorted sign for their campaign.
I wished I took the girl away from those people. I hoped she wouldn’t become like the adults, treating humans like synths and synths like garbage. By the time I got to the universing Sister Antimony was already holding Tommy, slapping him with implants for being an amings. He failed the grammar quiz and got in trouble for playing 2splack Qunts That hi from Hot with a classmate using a wobbly plastic magnifier sheet and a deluxe six inch wood frog guiro rasp.
While she was slapping him everyone looked away. I stole her unlocked phone on the bench which was open to about 15-20 contacts all confirming mind lines had been successfully implanted. I had hoped to show the superintendent the evidence. We stared at each other. I snatched Tommy from her hands and we fled in the opposite direction, but a tree fell right in front of us. It’s base was devoid from any presence or even sign of natural break. It appeared the stump had been cut by laser. Tommy stopped and crept beneath the fallen tree, showing me two identical bags. He took a USB thumb drive and stick of gum, put it in the other, and left behind the first bag. We held hands and walked across the complex. Bitch, I yelled, Sister Anthony is a mean bitch! Scrutiny and incredulity of student gazes pressed upon me in return. Feel my groin, see how nothings there. Smooth as skin; cold, taut flesh, oiled with intent to mean.
I waited for Tommy to come out of the gate. We ran down the stairs but there wasn’t a vehicle for us. I went around the back of the offices where Sister Anthony could be heard screaming for Tommy’s expulsion. We laid low in the sober homes and dressed like men so the men wouldn’t come out of the showers with wet hair and say Just fuck me Agatha fuck me. I clocked him on the jaw with a single judgement of everything he had ever done in his life and the kinetic blow instantly dried his hair, now obviously situated within his own view of me.
I’m so sorry Agatha he wailed but I put my hand on his shoulder and told him to be okay. Tomorrow would be another day to forgive yourself. Tommy left by then to go see waves crash into the point. His aunt and uncle picked him up in their red wrangler to the coast soaked with unrelenting dense mist. They couldn’t have ever seen the waves behind the fog and spray with faces peppered sleek and wet.
The family burdened along the rugged coastal path creeping with ivy and short, thick shrubs. What a clown! Catch up Tommy! He walks too slowly. He will never make it in the real world. This is what his aunt and uncle said further along than him. He ran back up to the car in tears but there were people sitting in there complaining about jobs. A young man said he could easily apply online for a job but for some reason he wasn’t allowed so his obvious choice was resorting to thievery and burglary. They stole the car with him in it and told him fabricated tales all the way to the university. The head was named obelisk, because he said you had to bow down to get whatever you wanted.
They coerced him into a small office in the college dormitory land trust. The girls teased him on the couch, Oh isn’t he just a snack,
Wanna hear a joke? They gleamed over the edge at his face buried between cushions and obliged with satisfaction. What do you call indica after you smoke it? Indacouch! One girl came over suspended tightly in black nylon and polyester sportsures, fragrant with chemicals against his fear. That Wasn’t funny so much as sexy and if you’d be a good baby and do what mommy says until Friday you’ll get what mommy wants for you. Then she pressed into him closely concealing her pain. Don’t do this to me, he whispered in her eye, lips salted by her fat tears. She jammed her thumb into the roof of his mouth and he instinctively sucked like a newborn, spat her out and bolted down the stairs to the lobby. He hurried past a guard shouting his Miranda rights loudly into the glass hallway, only to be accosted by a group of students who squeezed his body through a door.
A man named Buddy had taken to Tommy and would not stop telling him that his friend who had passed never believed a new block was being built behind his own apartment complex. Never saw it with his own eyes, but if he just would have believed me…
This is what I heard as I walked into the cafeteria. I was more taken aback by buddy’s incredulity than the supposed incredulity of his friend that passed. I whipped out my magazine of Sheer boredom, laughing at the thin and stretching insanity the issue had become. It was pathetic. Near death or language I cleave to Tommy in search of freedom from torture.
I flashed my credentials at buddy and walked Tommy back to and old redwood tree. We put our hands on its thick bark, and when we took our hands off fuzz got into our fingerprints. He showed me a river where noon sky reflects the clearest view into the pacific.
He wanted me to swim but I was too embarrassed to tell him I didn’t know how. It’s embarrassing reaching into the future to grab what you’ve always secretly wanted, but I do this anyway.
Instead of grabbing his shoulders and shaking him out of it I grab my dreams, as real as the future. Radioactive material warping time across distributed boxes of celestial space. These unnatural permutations beyond comprehension rewrite much history but not of itself of its subject. Itself seems to be neatly dissociated from the image in a directly unobservable manner, across more than a few obsessively relevant scenes. How an implication is made stretches onto the surface of the image like a thin film. It leeches the film of its light, making pale things that surround nothing. They will crumble into ashes.
I throw one arm in front of the other and pretend to swim away. It doesn’t work. If this stream goes nowhere I will have been doing the same thing. But somewhere between these useless gestures an unrealism provides the potential for a movement beyond its own. It could be a nightmare. It just doesn’t matter for me, I don’t have the time for that How long would that even take 20 billion years? In the future of the unavoidable, a yarn of hope sways on the breeze.
