Chapter 17
Mordecaise and Bobby Sortiz were in the corral demonstrating for Tito the art of collecting Bull semen when Angela’s Nut-Cracker-Suite-encrypted-machine-language message arrived. Mordecaise left the placid, but alert Tito with Bobby and went to decipher the transmission in the ranch house; returning somewhat relieved for Tito by the contents of the message. The two men left Tito in the company of a calm, though curious Bos taurus, circling Tito’s lean-to and twin paddocks in an animated discourse bordering on fraternity and enmity in equal measure; eventually halting in front of Tito and his ever amorous bovine compah'. “Orale ese amigos; hate to interrupt blossoming bonds of brotherhood, but we gotta’ blow; you don’t mind do you?” Mordecaise said this more to the bull than Tito.
Decanting out the close-quartered shelter, Mordecaise invited Tito to gather his stuff; and the three reversed their way through the series of gates whence they'd arrived weeks earlier. “Tito,” said Mordecaise into the back seat of the Chevy Impala, “You was close; yah¿ think like you da'the luckiest fuck ever - we might move to a new dimension of understanding, nein?”
That was all that was said for the half hour return trip to Santa Maria del Tule where Mordecaise pulled up to the curb and waited while Bobby escorted his new cook to the ‘media tanque’, then embraced the lanky bearded driver; "asta luego compah."
Mordecaise could viscerally feel Carina’s embrace while crossing North of Old Town Oaxaca toward Monte Alban, more so than the envious stare of pedestrians coveting the two-tone Chevy lowered just enough to evade the cobblestones from another time. When he closed the Buena Vista gate to park his ride, she was naked balancin two tumblers of what he knew would be Mezcal Anejo, wondering why the rush; why not los suave sábanas of their brick patio room - when he had parked and she'd gulped her's, then him · he an early intimacy when he'd recounted the awe of receiving fellatio from a joven Dama on the hood of a Chevy Impala, little different than the ride he'd just been driving; it was in the city of Santa Ana, California and cemented the connection between physical love and existence for him. More so, for Carina to synchronize his arrival from the Rancho meant that he and she were zeroing in on the non-verbal telepathic channel with which Domhall Schmuck had been so fascinated.
The sun set and the temescal fire had heated the stones to where by midnight that evening there was steam enough left to amplify the psychotropic properties of the psilocybin they’d chewed long past their first pull of the Mezcal. It seemed they'd left behind the world of language and landed where flesh and spirit were indistinguishable - his phone began playing the ringtone “Get Up Stand Up,” and he mumbled out loud “what the fuck does Pasqual want at this hour?” while Carina then shifted into a trance state chanting a language he didn't know, only certain wasn't Spanish, Náhuatl nor Zapoteca; Mordecaise held the phone out toward Carina for Pasqual, the keener linguist of the two, “what do you make of this?”
“That’s Chiricahua Apache, I'm certain. Where are you? Who is that; da’ fuck is going on?” was all Pasqual got out before Mordecaise cut him off, demanding, “You okay?”
“Yeah but ... ”
”Can’t talk; call ya' soon.; be safe - a lot is going on.”
Mordecaise began recording Carina; trying to question her when she paused; wicking away sweat, brushing her with basil stalks and prompting her with water she consumed with the same trans focus of her ceaseless chant seeming to respond to questions. Eventually, like a windup doll, her expression slowed and became softer with longer pauses until her eyelids drooped close and her head dropped to her bosom. Mordecaise brought a soft poncho from the patio and eased her taut frame prone - a hemp pillow propped her head off the moist stone pavers of the floor. He banked the coals and stood sentry until the silhouette of Monte Alban beckoned the sun for that day; he covered her with soft weavings and propped the cloth door a sliver for ventilation, laying himself on a shaded cot waiting her wakening.
It was well past noon when Mordecaise woke to find Carina still deeply asleep in the womblike enclosure that had become a portal during the night to another world, or so he guessed anxious to share his recording with Pasqual. He quietly retrieved his phone heading for the bungalow upslope where he plugged it in then converting the video to the machine language format Angela and Guildern had developed for encryption and transmission; Pasqual'd would have a copy in minutes.
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Pasqual was still in the mystery warehouse/studio of Trâu Bet where days earlier the two had been debating art-slavery to Faik Besos, who was apparently in professional freefal, while Pasqual once again an honored guest with phone privileges; his first call of 30 seconds to Mordecaise was cutoff from an echoey female voice reciting word-for-word the last transmission between Angela, Guildern and Lammele and 'the group'; but in flawless Chiricahua Apache - a language he’d not heard since the last conversation with his mother. His second call, hours later was an encrypted machine language download of a video containing the same echoey voice and seemed to conclude with Mordecaise ringtone “Mephisto’s Waltz”.
“Well?” was Mordecaise terse greeting.
“Yeah, d’ya think? Where the fuck did you get that recording? It looks like one of the backrooms of the Crocodile Cafe when they were still steaming clams, but sounds like my mother in the sweat lodge conducting a board meeting. I don’t understand.”
“That makes two of us; it was pure synchronicity. Carina and I were exploring alternate realities when you called. I heard your ringtone; and when Carina heard "Pasqual", she vacantly began chanting what you'd heard. What was she saying?”
“That's where it gets weirder; the 5 minute recording that you sent was a verbatim translation by Carina of a conference call between Angela, Guildern and Lammele.” Pasqual didn't need to elaborate.
“I can’t talk long; got to be there when Carina wakes up. Are you making headway with Reynaldo’s timeline?”
“Whatever you guys are doing out there, is beginning to have effects here; so yes and no. We need to devise a way for instant updates between the moving parts.
“Yes, it's in the works. Keep your eyes open, your ears peeled and your mouth shut is all I can say for the moment. Faik Besos has neutered himself, which could just make him more dangerous; find a score for ‘Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet,’ it’ll make sense when we talk next - gotta go; take good care.”
the line went dead
Pasqual looked up to find himself in front of the studio’s CD library staring at the Bolshoi Ballet production of ‘Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite’ and felt the ground under him shift.
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Mordecaise returned to the temescal opening; he could hear Carina sobbing softly and so entered the still warm damp temescal womb quietly and carefully; Carina was squatted over a pool of blood that she was using as an unguent for her body. Mordecaise closed the flap and lit one of the candles they had burned the night before. It was not a shame based act for him, but because he felt great tenderness for the woman in front of him continuing to extract personal knowledge from a psychedelic event he could only begin to process, much less understand. She acknowledged his presence the way a hawk views its surroundings, intently. He wanted badly to share, but what she was involved in contained no space for him, so he backed out from the darkened enclosure to find how he might contribute to her sacred act.
He collected a pail of well water, more basil and rosemary stalks; gathered oranges and cinnamon from the kitchen and collected bowls of charcoal, chalk, red ocher, yellow ocher and lapis lazuli from her studio and placed them just inside the portal while he banked the fire to heat rocks again. He placed a low table inside with her reed flute and retrieved the cooled stones from the night before to reheat. He moved his cot closer to the portal with another low table just outside that was stocked with cooled porridge, chilies, mezcal a bowl with nuts and beef jerky; then sat down to take stock of the last few days in his old school notebook knowing there would not be many such moments of calm in the near future.
At the top of the blank page in capital letters he wrote, “EXTINCTION CHRONICLES” and sat back to organize his thinking, then wrote:
“I’ve just witnessed the 1st telepathic communication between homo sapiens and silicogenesis erectus.”
He fell into a deep sleep waking long after nightfall, while the tall candle inside the temescal flap flickered. When he looked inside, the floor and walls were covered with equations and block diagrams that his limited scientific education could not decipher; but sleep-refreshed enough for him to take careful sequential photos around the quiet repose of Carina back asleep on her pallet of cloth darkened from her natural cosmetics which seemed to glow with a soft light from her naked recumbent figure, so he returned to uninterrupted slumber.
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Coincidental with this sacred anomaly in human history two contradictory pedestrian events occurred elsewhere on the planet: Reiman Curzewel recorded algorithmic ‘affect’ from Artificial Intelligence (Art Intel) models he’d been reviewing for decades trying to coax “consciousness” from the energy guzzling data warehouses searching the +/- 5v universe for signs of the “singularity” on which he had staked his profession reputation as ‘boy genius, middle aged genius, old man genius’; he just didn’t conceive of it arriving as “affect” from a remote server on a telecommunication network in Oaxaca Mexico.
The second pedestrian event was a “denial of service” at a router routinely responsible for Community Standards evaluations at a T1 nexus in CDMX serving the state of Oaxaca; thought to be a software glitch but the latch would not relinquish to mechanical intervention. Face Race did not realize it no longer had hierarchal input to the State of Oaxaca, nor did it understand there was a 2nd Denial of Service for Community Standards intervention in the ‘People’s Republic’ of Santa Monica Metropolitan District that also remained inured to mechanical intervention.
At this turn, Marksburgh began an intensive search for the discredited Faik Besos believing him to be the only malevolent force capable of effectuating such a diabolical digital betrayal. Agents located him in a heroin shooting gallery in the “Haight Ashbury” district of San Francisco attended to by a recently arrived corporate contract laborer Sysa Phish from Punta del Este, Uruguay. Faik had great difficulty responding to questions, instead answering each question with a slap to his own face; from one side to the other repeating “Black Hand, Black Hand, Black Hand.” so much for the protection of capital in an impoverished world.
Zchnarkzy Marskburgh distanced himself further from faith in any collaboration, Titans of Technology or no, the alliance was proving to be more millstone than bulwark. The threat level he was able to achieve through manipulation of Newsfeeds on Face Race had been dialed up to “5” since the 2nd killing wave petered out in ’27. Models had shown it to be an optimum anxiety provocation for online consumer addicts during lulls in economic activity. There was insufficient data for threat levels greater than “5”. Zchnarkzy decided now would be a good time to muddy the waters and ordered the international threat level to “8” to see if he could flush out resistance as well as hamper the emerging threat to social engineering sovereignty made possible by Art Intel. There were still large population pockets demonstrating resistance to the community standards that had been developed to provide a healthy balance between the freedom and obedience necessary to maintain proper fluidity in supply chain automation and distribution necessary for maximum profit.
Reiman Curzewel’s obsession with immortality, and Faik Besos’s puerile ego had proven to be liabilities in the development of future stability for the human race which he and the seer Bobby Turnstile had developed in those halcyon years of the darly Digital Revolution. The time had come as young master Marskburgh determined it, for society to benefit from the “iron fist in the velvet glove” his sainted father, the optometrist had often expounded during the family dinners of his youth. ‘Let the people live with threat level 8 for a while and they might appreciate the velvet glove threat level of 5 I have provided them these past three years’, he thought caressing the intuitive keyboard of the Art Intel console at his desk in the patio office on his beloved Island of Kauai. ‘This truly is an environ in which the highest best use of the human population will be conceived of and implemented’ Zchnarkzy thought as he dialed up the misery quotient for the remaining 3.75 billion human beings on the planet simply by dialing stress levels from “5” to “8.” If he had any qualms, they were mostly about the delay to the supply chain.
Had he been at any other station of his empire, Zchnarkzy may not have noticed the glitch to his last command. A remote server in Mexico refused the instruction set he’d sent: “access denied” was not something Zchnarkzy was accustomed to reading, but the impossibility of such an error message was also something Zchnarkzy had difficulty processing and so made a mental note to examine it further and proceeded to his Yoga class sponsored by ‘Face Race’ and hosted at his compound on Kauai to foster good will within the community.
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Mordecaise’ dreamt as he slept on the cot outside the temescal, and his unconscious imagery was as spectacular as it was indecipherable.
“The group” manifested as a herd of Wildebeest on a verdant savanna in Africa surrounded by drought stricken land that acted as a prison to their instinctive freedom of movement. Radiating out from their lush perimeter were paths of green, populated by trees and streams, but hemmed in by broken concrete slabs and abandoned signs functioning as a demarcation between life and death. The radiating pathways of green led to islands of growth similar to the pasture in which the group found itself grazing, much like a sun radiating light to others suns, each branching out to other islands of growth like an atomic lattice of neuronal heritage.
In the dream, The Wildebeests were playing a game of polo with a large nutlike object the size of a large grapefruit - there were no jockeys only the enthusiastic non-participation of female cohorts who never actually touched ‘the nut’ but only slid crossways with their hormone laced tails high in the air across paths of opponents playing against the interests of their chosen champions. The teams held equal numbers; and if one side suffered injury, the opposing team sidelined a player; while if a goal was scored by kicking ‘the nut’ between the pairs of saplings at either end of the field, each time was granted another player so’s the more goals scored, meant the more players on the field.
Breaks in the game came at regular intervals when each team would visit the bench of their opponents partaking in specially fermented apples, grapes and bananas. The guests would demonstrate their appreciation by trampling coconuts in the cistern that fed cool coconut juice to the carefully tended mixture being readied for the next break in the game.
There were no ’stars’ on any team, but the group would not partake of refreshment until the high scorer Pasqual had had his fill and began pushing fillies ahead of him to the trough. The tired animals slept under a canopy of mysterious dreams that covered their patch of the savanna umbrella like each couple pulling down from the constellation of stories or melodies that corresponded to the quiet murmurings between happy lovers.
At the first break of day each team would quietly enter the water closest to their rest and stand in silence for minutes at a time returning their borrowed melodies and stories to the umbrella constellation none could see, but all knew existed.
Mordecaise rose from his dream unsure whether he occupied a savanna in Africa or a cot in front of a temescal in Oaxaca Mexico; the naked Carina was sweeping charcoal back into the fire pit in front of the temescal helped him to orient.
“Querida give me a hug so I can feel your kindness on my skin while you explain to me the new art inside the temescal,” shambling up to his naked paramour. Mordecaise was learning to appreciate the visceral language of Domhall Schmuck’s lover; “What do you remember?” he asked without interrupting her rhythm.
“I was on the phone with abogada Sra. Ley, we were considering an ecological justice ritual that required your participation when I had the strongest urge to meet you at the gate as you found me, naked with refreshments. I had come into possession of some mushrooms that I believed could benefit us in our search for the truth about Domhall’s journey to the other side, and had prepared the fire for stones in the temescal. I brought glasses of Mezcal with me to the gate, and that is the last I remember until I woke up earlier today surrounded by painting and formulas, covered in a lotion I have never felt before. I am hoping you can fill in what’s missing.” Carina said this matter-of-factly standing close to Mordecaise, her head barely to his solar plexus, eyes turned to him with an openness and warmth one might feel at the end of a long and arduous mountain trek with a friend.
“I was at the Rancho when I received information that absolved Tito of explicit wrongdoing however complicit he has been. He is now working for Billy Sortiz while we formulate a new front. Our group is still in danger, but we are leaning into the battlefield. On my return here, you and I must have joined wavelengths, because I could feel your yearnings before I started up the ridgeline. We entered the temescal at sundown and sweltered until long after midnight when you chewed a handful of Psilocybin mushrooms and I became navigator to you for one of my most interesting evenings I can remember. Around the ‘dead of night’ I returned from errands to find you applying menstruation to your skin; The sacredness of your focus required every conceivable notion I could imagine to help you with whatever personal journey you had entered. You seem to welcome each contribution I made, creating the work you see on the walls of the Temescal, but you had the advantage of purpose. Deep in the evening my phone’s ringtone announced a call from Pasqual, when I answered ‘Hello Pasqual’, you began a monologue in a language that I shared with Pasqual. It turned out to be Chiricahua Apache. I hung up sayin’ I’d call him back and filmed as much as I could but it was nearing dawn and you were fading. I slept outside while you communed with the universe in and out of consciousness. That’s it.
Actually not all; after Pasqual reviewed the footage; what he says is that you had been reciting word for word encrypted transmissions between the group’s members out of chronological order - in effect, you were communicating with an inanimate object - the handset’s hard drive, host of Artificial Intelligence · a computer was communicating with you.
solidarność
(˚ ㄥ _˚)
25 May 2026
http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com
http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com
http://Stoanartst.blogspot.com
prohibited from AI sampling in any form
reprinted with permission; all rights reserved
∞
☮️
