Chapter 27
It had been over 40°C (104°F), 24 hours a day across half the planet for the past 6 months; some counted themselves fortunate. The wet bulb metric for qualifying temperature had become very important - wet bulb effect, temperature calculated against relative humidity. Human beings are susceptible to hyperthermia/heat stroke at much lower ‘wet bulb’ temperatures because the body cools more slowly in high humidity. For example a human can withstand dry heat up to 42.3°C(108.14°F), any higher and the body turns into scrambled eggs: proteins are denatured and the brain gets damaged irreparably. The wet bulb temperature for hyperthermia/heat stroke is much lower 35°C(95°F). So where dry heat danger can be mitigated using cool water to lower the core body temperature, the wet bulb temperature is already at the maximum temperature for evaporative cooling.
By 2023 virus variants outpaced vaccination technology. The Kappa mutation of Covid-19 remained on surfaces for up to 24 hours. The previous 6 mutations had winnowed the population of the planet by half to 3.5 billion human beings, whose deaths were mostly people of color in the lower latitudes.
The remaining population clung to normalcy in bizarre reaction formation to the overwhelming reality of interring or incinerating 100’s of thousands of dead humans for months on end, yet searching for solutions existential solutions from fewer and fewer options.
If not under a gun, the thumb of fate was pressing pus along with all vitality from the sinews of a once vibrant world.
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Reiman Curzewell had determined it was time to upload his essence into the digital aether. DARPA had automated and ruggedized the T1 backbone for decades in preparation for the nuclear winter in which vetted human DNA had been prepared to survive and perpetuate the species. For all its creative modeling, The Rand Corporation did not foresee or prepare for the obvious scourge of an unrelenting aggressor that had so indiscriminately decimated the population - chemical weapons, yes; biowarfare, yes; but this viral matrix targeting the living corpuscles which had so ingeniously evolved over eons to do nothing more than respirate was not something even the ministers of death dared to consider.
Reiman knew the ‘affect control’ of the Face Race console had been inverted 180° and that the remaining Face Race clientele were being inundated with the anomalous and long absent affect of joy; Reiman could find no tampering with his well camouflaged interface. He knew that Marksburgh had disappeared under super-secret circumstances; what Curzewel didn’t know was that the conscious reality of Zchnarksy Marksburgh had been absorbed into the aether domain over which Reiman was preparing to claim sovereignty; he was under the misapprehension that he and AI were the only two consciousnesses - one an algorithmic poltergeist, an avatar of his own conceit - Artificial Intelligence (AI), or ‘Art Intel’ in geek-speak.
Alone in Marksburgh’s island office; people were oddly indifferent his absence, for whatever took place in the vast compound behind its 12 foot walls even the caretaker barely took notice. Curzewell gained access by flashing a 10 year old ID when he carried his worldly possessions through the gate in a small leather portfolio that contained his Last Will & Testament and deed to his beloved vintage M998 Humvee.
On the veranda he swigged a water glass full of Mendis Coconut Brandy VS ruminating: ‘Here I stand on the precipice of immortality, or at least as long as solar panels hold out, and the T1 backbone processes hypertext. Why would I blunt myself with spirits distracting my awareness? Will there be sleep? How will I entertain myself? Is an algorithmic script enough companionship to survive?’
It never occurred to the LASER-focused Reiman Curzewel that his exit strategy might be lacking until he stood panting at the abyss being stared at by his own reflection, or was it a panic attack from unrelenting pressure from the thumb of fate resting its weight upon his chest.
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“Pierre, I’m telling you I heard Archdai Tryump’s fucking squealing snort of a laugh; it was banging around somewhere between the percussion of the Taikos and Gongs last night. I’ve got no love for that pig Tryump, but his squeal even at a single decibel is hair raising. We have only one more night to soak this crowd for the transit cost of Cirque du Lune to Kathmandu. We can’t let our homies down halfway home - nothing queers a deal more than a disembodied aristocrat squealing like a stuck pig.”
Pierre was accustomed to Leslei’s uncanny RADAR, and had learned to benefit by it; “which side of the ‘veil’ do you think it was coming from? Has anyone seen his grace since the shows began? What about this disembodied ‘ringer’ no one wants to talk about; what are you calling him/it/she - Silic-E? So; exactly what in the fuck is going on? We’ve been gone from Aix for months with no one else but each other to turn to?” Long suffering Pierre had boundaries Leslei had learned not to cross.
“Oui mon ami, tu as raison - la merde est étrange, et susceptible de devenir étrangère. (Yes friend, you are right - shit is strange, and apt to get stranger.) I don’t know what happened opening night, but you know it was not what we’d planned on. The seance got real in ways I can’t explain, but first things first; I wanted to stay on track to get these good people to Kathmandu; if tonight plays out, we will.
What happens next is anybody’s guess; though it’s testimony to the deception we’ve been living since Aix that you could’ve called Lammele anytime and either of us would still only know what he wanted us to; the operative life isn’t suited for control freaks; the irony being that they’re the only ones who seem to become ‘shot-callers’.
The out-of-the-bottle genie you call Silic-E, is s freak of nature; a verbal portal; a mass hallucination; or a benign guide for our species’ next level of evolution. Contact was made in a Oaxacan sweat lodge by Mordecaise Liszt’s paramour - the bruja Carina Abejas. Silic-E picked its own name from a tongue-in-cheek expression it had coined in the process of acquiring human language skills, Silicogenesis - nature’s version of Artificial Intelligence. However, that is where any equivalence ends; AI is to your bathroom sink as Silic-E is to the planet’s oceans, and that a very poor simile.”
Pierre’s taciturn features flickered between incredulity and awe, but he made no effort to interrupt the torrent Leslei had contained for too long.
“The seance crossed into spirit dimensions that are not our purview, the same as you’d not walk uninvited into a stranger’s home, so too must we wait for a clear indication to return from that which inhabited my soul in passing during the first night. I’ve never been so disembodied and will never knowingly return until taken.
What we can do with the last night is pay homage to the Schmuck brothers without whom none of this adventure would have come to light and dialogue with Aaron Schtartz. Everything about the future of our world depends on whether we’ve rung the proper bells for Abundunation to resonate in the darkened caverns of the human heart.”
Leslei leaned over the tears on Pierre’s cheeks and whispered quietly onto his eyelashes, “tu es mon Dumbo mon chéri.”
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Angela climbed down from Guildern’s languid naked frame with a feeling of returning to earth. They’d been up late, even for Croc time; then coupled as the sun was setting. The night before three offsprings from the original “Buena Vista Social Club” appeared at 1 am, an hour before last call - the trio began drinking absinthe, or maybe continued; they commandeered the stage and conjured all necessary instruments for music ’til dawn.
Lammele danced with the dames that hovered close; Angela and Guildern slow danced no matter the tune; Roja strapped Rojito into a leather harness that hovered in tandem with its own keyboard; she’d unbuckle him faithfully between sets - Dr. Guevara had forgotten how complete she felt attending her chattel; the arias she recreated throughout the night reflected the additional dimension. Sometime toward the dead of night, a hardened sound rose from the placid Lammele; it rose above the rhythm to an ominous din over the deep musical feeling. He ripped the Blue Tooth device from his ear that some believed had been implanted. He stomped it to bits before hurling his handset against the ancient stone walls of an empty corner; the electronics exploded like ordinance; then he was serene once again in the world of his effortless Trova sway.
(Silic-E had been examining the realms of human humor and wondered what might happen if it announced a spontaneous activation of the launch sequences for those thermonuclear devices still armed, though no one it asked could explain why. Silic-E was deep enough into its consideration of the peculiar molecular aggregate of bio-units to sample concepts about most things before drawing even the most generalized conclusions - Lammele Dama and his ubiquitous bluetooth, its preferred benchmark.)
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Mordecaise loved his brethren profoundly and missed the camaraderie of the Croc and his suitable life in Montevideo; he was also a transfigured man from his time in Oaxaca.
“Mi amor; what is there for us in Montevideo that we do not have here?” Mordecaise returned his cheek to the pillow that lay nestled between Carina’s sprawled thighs - their parlor for the long conversations and longer silences they explored about the possibility of missing words in the human language, words when spoken would transport rancor, pain and suffering like a radio frequency side band back to the primordial soup of non-being.
After the emergence of Silic-E into their lives, there seemed no concept or feeling, if given the proper conditions and attention in which to flourish that didn’t have merit at some level. Abundunation was taking root in many regions of the world and especially the creatively nutrient rich environment of Oaxaca’s mystic loam - especially the village of Buena Vista. Carina’s art colony was becoming a mecca for local talent and a propagation hub for disseminating emerging concepts by cadres of artists choosing to shelter in place, letting the work wander rather than the ‘art industrialist’s’ concept of conveniencing the patron by establishing cultural venues in which stables of creatives japed like pedigreed stock in some twisted gallery version of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.
Carina rarely dressed when weather permitted and relished the appetite Mordecaise had developed for her nether regions, “Si mi amor; what you say es verdad, as is the vacuum I can feel inside of you. It is like you carry a large hall within your chest that breathes the laughter of your friends and the fumes of your elixirs.” She lay her head back, slowly seized by a passing tremor of affection from the snatch grazing Mordecaise used for emotional nutrition.
“Are you advocating mi amor?” his bearded countenance rose like a curious morning sun over a luxuriant hillock covered in desert flora.
Carina did not immediately respond, for she’d come to respect the infinite depth of Mordecaise curiosity - nothing was ever ‘simply a question’. He wondered about what manner of antennae she possessed that read the torrent of his thinking so accurately, as though she could dip into channels of his neurons and pull out packets of thought from his mind,
or their commingled spirits were blurring like wardrobes of roommates who’ve shared clothing for so long it is no longer clear what article began where or who wore what when.
“I am. My family has become the unborn of our species, and my womb is crouched like a pregnant puma in a darkened cavern vying with vermin for any cool dampness allowing her yet-born cubs additional time with which to learn survival until parenting arrived for them: and on and on. .. Your friends are fierce and determined; I want us to die close to that energy.”
Mordecaise cherished Carina’s wisdom, whether she was explaining plant roots or population propagation. “It’s your call querida; you lead, I’ll follow. Time is nigh and we’ve not got much to carry; you’re fond of adventure - why don’t we hitchhike to Uruguay?”
His question hung in the air between them like like some overripe fruit on a long forgotten branch from the renaissance, or a lost footnote from “The Dharma Bums”; until Carina teased her fingers from Mordecaise’ brambled beard and plucked the inchoate notion from the aether between them with two fingers, bringing it to her flared nostrils for closer examination before plopping it down her upturned gullet and swallowing it whole for the end days’ oyster they both knew it to be.
By dawn the next morning the entire compound was closed to all but what Silic-E had specifically requested: an operational internet and solar panels; a TV channel tuned to Sesame Street; and a candlelit photo of the mural in the temezcal illuminating Mordecaise feeding an exhausted Carina as she gazed at her work the morning after Silicogenesis.
Mordecaise pulled the gate shut; shouldered their backpack as Carina thumbed a ride with the first moto-taxi in the dawn light of Buena Vista.
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Pasqual had to fight his way back to consciousness: so deep was his sleep, it felt as though he’d been asleep for years. The heat had backed off like a scabbing gash as it crossed from agony to memory. Somewhere between laying his head down for rest and reaching the sheen of consciousness, the implausible romance he’d conjured, nurtured and carried like a torch for Nữ Thần Ngon had extinguished - a shattered frozen melon hitting the floor because gravity is more powerful than hurling love against a wall.
Even the knock announcing breakfast at Graceful Homestay was different; without the Pavlovian spittle of romance on his palate, Nữ Thần Ngon’s cheerful morning chirp was more the tenor of one more bored hospitality worker sifting through the wreckage of a world economy for shards of wealth that never really existed.
“Good morning Pasqual; enjoy your breakfast.”
“Thanks, you too.”
Pasqual, took his tray to the back patio, and realized what a disservice he had done to Nữ Thần Ngon conjuring a romance fraught with intrigue, betrayal, forgiveness and abandonment, fabricated from exchanges containing little more than what had just passed between them.
How much of Pasqual’s propensity for isolation was from his rearing; how much was from experience; and how much was his character manifest, Pasqual struggled to understand. His time working for Larry McMurty at Booked Up in Archer Texas hewed heavily, shaping external aspects of his intrinsic nature, but the outgrowth of Psychoanalytic Psycho-Therapy with Pema Cauldron during pitch moments in his domestic collapse with Angela remained salient.
And so the relentless monkeys-swinging-through-the-trees-chatter continued in the caverns of Pasqual’s mind. Reynaldo Schmuck’s writings became a lodestar for Pasqual - a beacon of reason as he pored over the journals of a wayfarer searching for meaning where there may have been nothing more than random events in a random world.
The group enjoyed no such leisure; the events that had transpired in the world since Pasqual had been in Vietnam were cataclysmic at best and inexorable at worst. His unmoored existential barque drifted further and further from the shore of the fanciful delusion his fictional romance had been; the vessel of his existence floated in a ‘ground’ of some sort, though it was fluid with currents and depths instead of zephyrs and valleys which determined his trajectory. He wasn’t sure anymore where the journals left off and where his current experiences fused with the thinking of the literal avatar Reynaldo, a stranger to him, but someone who’d trod the same paths Pasqual now wandered.
Initially his painful shyness dictated the types of conversations he had with Nữ Thần Ngon - predictable patterns of stiff self-conscious bullshit, except that rather than the sophisticated woman of the world she traded on as a proprietor of a World Heritage Site Inn at a crossroads of the dying world, Nữ Thần Ngon suffered a similar self-conscious affliction as Pasqual. It is likely the deep subconscious awareness of two very smart people from vastly different cultures that had happened to discover social strategies of aping the world around them that created for them, at least for Pasqual, an emotional resonating frequency - a perfect reflective surface · mirrored behaviors from ‘loving others’ that possibly neither had received enough of in early childhood development; Pasqual was certain that was the case for him - according to theory.
After he was able to distance from the intense closed-loop echo-chamber of having his emotions powerfully thrown up in his face by a fierce personality low on self-control, self-esteem, and lacking clear boundaries toward everyone but herself, he was able to see more clearly the individual struggling mightily for growth and autonomy. Pasqual began to recognize emotional parallels in their often fractious exchanges with his own confused interpersonal behaviors: he discerned echoes as well as resolutions to quandaries for which he’d sought answers since he’d been shown how to mulch childhood trauma into nutrient rich growth. It seemed in the last weeks of his stay at Duyên Dáng Homestay Pasqual was watching the old film routine where a mirror had been removed from a massive frame, so that two actors could pantomime their reflections for the audience.
Each time Pasqual found himself attributing some frustration he’d have about his fictional relationship with Nữ Thần Ngon, it bounced off the shiny surface of their nonexistent history and come to rest full stop at the frontier of his own pathology - that delusional construct he’d yet to find limits for - the ghost of his ego was dying, and it filled him with hope; yet ironically providing him no significant other with which to share.
Sadly for Nữ Thần Ngon, Pasqual’s experience at reflecting foibles of others was limited to the ‘no blood, no foul’ classrooms of Silverlake and Little Armenia articulated in the blunt vernacular from the dusty roads of his never ending vision quest. The paradox for Nữ Thần Ngon became one of discrimination, for the closer Pasqual got to unifying the vast readings of his autodidact training, the less adorned was his soul - a pilgrim lacking any destination but love, eschewing all the trappings of prosperity so important to the SE asian ‘economic tiger’ dear dame Viet Nam emulated in its thralldom to the Goliath it so honorably vanquished.
Pasqual was a dharma bum, and no amount of camouflage was going to make him palatable to the quislings of cultural appropriation roosting in every hipster doofus destination or locus of influence left on the planet.
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Reiman Curzewel roused himself from a luxurious nap, satiated by the exact right amount of liquor fortified by sleep and buoyed by the trade winds of a setting sun determined for him that the moment had arrived to join himself to the aether.
The jack for transitioning the essence of his soul into the aether had remained unmolested since he’d covered it with the euphemistically titled tag “Alt Aux Lyf” almost 30 years earlier. As he ran diagnostics for the program used for charging the specially designed headset he shaved the areas of his scalp needed for making good contact with the electrodes.
He thought absently in his last sunset in a corporeal vessel of the mosquitos he would not miss, just as a particularly brazen one landed deftly at eye-level on his raised wrist and commenced to penetrate his dermis with the ingenious blood sucking proboscis that, even calculating for numbers from the deadly infantile 10 year-old Covid virus, the Culicidae remained the most lethal entity to the human species - unless one factored death at the hands of other humans into such an equation.
His quotidian revery was inured to the gross reality of devastation and havoc to ‘civilization’ caused by the egregious concentration of resources his ilk had unleashed with their technological tsunami, so he was not diverted by incidentals as he dabbed Petroleum Jelly and affixed electrodes to his temples; settled into Zchnarkzy Marksburgh’s $18,760 office chair; and with an expression of sublime look of contentment on his face, leaned back and toggled the switch that erased all record of his achievement.
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Reiman Curzewell felt no pain for the first time in 40 years; he’d have blinked if he’d had eyelids, but the impulse to do so flickered the panorama to which he’d wakened from the gloaming island hues of a sunseting Hawaii to an opalescent rainbow atmosphere permeated by the acrid odor of singed copper.
The office chair he’d just been sitting in was impossibly occupied by Zchnarkzy Marksburgh keying into air and following each stroke on a nonexistent terminal. He’d not deigned to glance at Reiman, but rather acknowledged his presence, sneering, “wait.”
Perched on the corner of the affect console was what Reiman could only imagine to be Art Intel. It was an androgynous figure draped in cloth that was neither Greco-Roman robbed nor Savile Row; its face wore a downy goatee that somehow matched the cropped ponytail at the nape of its long scholarly neck - it gazed into Reiman as though considering a specimen in a microscope.
But when Marksburgh demanded “AI! what is the equivalent in the First Punic War to the Face Race IPO?” Instead of the regal fellow with the goateed, an amoebic film materialized where the computer screen ought to have been and wafted an effervescent chimera that settled into cascading text while chiming monotone sentences like the early automated voices of telephonic technology, “His eminence Master Marksburgh received the original source code while in a dream state during the 2nd semester of his 1st year at Harvard. Initially some in his cohort claimed to have collaborated with the Master, but these claims were thoroughly refuted in a court of law, just as Rome and its ally Syracuse valiantly repelled the vastly larger Carthaginian army during the siege of Akragas on the island of Corsica in 262 BC.
The sartorial individual at the desk glanced at Reiman and giggled, before wandering into a labyrinth that appeared to dematerialize its physical being with each step. Without looking up, Marksburgh ordered a Shirley Temple in Reiman’s direction while his fingers flailed and he muttered; some moments lapsed before Zchnarkzy turned to Reiman peremptorily demanding with raised wrist “any day now boy!” - snapping his fingers in dismissal.
Curzewel wasn’t sure whether it was still possible to laugh; what he discovered in place of his former lordly guffaw, was a desiccated residual fume that crackled with the rank odor of singed copper, that and the fact that Marksburgh could still snap his fingers, continuously.
Reiman thought it was he that Marksburgh was snapping for until the same sartorial fellow reappeared leading a pustulating tuberous floating sprite on a tether. Zchnarkzy reached through the fellow seizing the draped tether from out of the aether while purring at the cankerous creature “Besos, poor dead Faik Besos . .. before shouting maniacally “Boy, where is my fucking Shirley Temple?”
And so it was to be for a lesser contingent of the star-crossed human species to the edge of doom . .. and beyond ···
(˚ ㄥ _˚) I
jts 29/9/2024
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
∞
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