Chapter 25
Guildern had been more frightened by his illness than being so close to love again that he feared its absence. He set about putting his 'affairs in order' by way of loving Angela from the grave. He quietly prepared his will while Lammele was available to advise. Guildern decided to split his holdings between Mordecaise and Angela; somehow he knew her fierce autonomy would be honored by sharing his estate. In their relations, she had come to embody the ‘Croc’ itself. His hopes for eternal existence were developed through her and their struggle to preserve the species; his dreams had become immortal; morticed by love and struggle to the hewn stone walls of the great hall, whose edifices and vaulted ceilings became contours of her brow he'd internalized while she wicked fever from him like the prow of a vessel cleaving a roiled sea.
“Guildern it's a fucking will, not an ode.”
“I can’t shake the stink of death that fever left me; excuse me my lyrical bent, besides no one escapes you and Leslei glancing goo-goo eyes at each other when you think the world is as besotted as you two.” Lammele forgot the comfort of insult found only in an ancient friendship. “How do you spell hypocrite - a s s h o l e ?”
Lammele recalled the day they’d met at the collapsed Twin Trade Towers. They were assigned as analysts just after the attack. It was during the last hour of the first of many 12 hour days; Lammele was charging up a darkened hallway.
“Fuck you!” Guildern shouted, defiantly bracketing his two middle fingers at the sky above.
“A pissant 'G9, does like I tell 'em. If G12 says 'up a floor, UP - we fucking go ·'!!"
Camaraderie and respect developed those ugly days hadn't waned in their lifetime.
The G12 Lammele was confused by the G9's recalcitrance, not so much his vernacular.
Through Guildern’s mask, Lammele saw Guildern repeating the expletive, while elaborating expansive hand signs - first both middle fingers to the sky, then his eyes, and lastly with vigorous downward emphasis in jackhammer fashion; and in an almost 'insult to injury' disregard of Lammele's humanity, Guildern snapped the fingers of his right hand and pointed his index finger at Lammele's head making like a gun; rolling his palm upward; crooking his index finger in the universal ‘come here’ sign.
Guildern turned on his heel and disappeared back down the ravaged stairwell without another word. Lammele followed, led by 'leadership reluctance,' until the two emerged into the clouded air.
Within seconds, a low frequency thunderclap billowed a vomit of debris from the entry they’d just exited - the stairwell had pancaked into a crushed accordion of devastation.
-+-+-+-
Back at the Croc, Guildern was still scribbling his material legacy in his old school writing pad - no idea of the journey in time Lammele’d had just taken. Lammele gazed over the creases and hidden tells on Guildern’s face; used so often in poker games, now a visual melody foreshadowing foreboding.
+-+-+-
At the last minute, Leslei opted for the Full-naked-Monty and clambered skin to skin onto Dumbo for the opening night grand entrance of the “Half-Naked Seance Tribute to Harry Houdini.” The Big Top in Monaco was sold-out to overflow with Prince Albert II and his entourage ensconced in the royal box seats. Though protocol demanded it; and Pierre fairly swooned when he’d learned that Leslei had determined to initiate the seance without acknowledging royalty, nationality, patronage or paying tribute of any kind; the only concessions she gave to social convention were 6 massive screens arrayed at the roofline, 60° apart.
Standing astride Dumbo’s spine, Leslei rode under the cavernous pitched roof to a place, just off center in the circular arena filled with a low rhythmic syncopated percussion between unseen Taiko drums and Javan gongs. Pale lights lined the seats of the stands for the safety of the audience; three diffused spotlights trained on Leslei and a chest high backlit shrouded circus stand upon which rested a basketball-sized crystal orb emanating pulsing teal in rhythm with the canvas toned percussion.
After a single turn around the arena, Dumbo knelt onto his chest perpendicular to the stand; using his trunk to lift Leslei from his shoulders using a corkscrew twist to place her at the stand and its undulating globe. Rising upright Dumbo backed-up 3 strides and laid back onto his stomach - there was no other sound within the big top. Her spotlights dimmed until Leslei's lithe frame glowed in the darkness.
For that instant, Leslei wandered from her adherence to the 'now' of Baba Ram Dass and reflected about her undertaking: According to her study; there was as much reason to believe, as not, that a corporeal being with a spirit was capable of crossing dimensional thresholds and communicate in some fashion with spirits in an unknown dimension.
However much religions from the earliest days of recorded history asserted that fact, no one has yet returned to say, ‘yea, or nay’. showTIME ¡! she thought quietly to herself and summoned focus from her heels followed closely by opening chills, she plunged ahead.
Leslei’s timbre tuned in to a supernatural decibel;
“Spirit world ! We animate beings in the ancient province of Ligure entreat your presence. Return to us in this material plane the spirit of Harry Houdini Ω his former domain and home to his corporal kin is in great peril. We beseech his counsel so that we may preserve the temporal berth where he has since known nothing but repose. SPIRIT WORLD WE IMPLORE YOU !!!”
Her unadorned physique grew taut stretching itself from her deeply rooted foot print to her heaven-held fingertips striking a universal chord with a brilliant flash.
The globe ebbed slowly back to a pulsing teal from the blinding luminescent amaranthine; Dumbo had vanished into the aether; Leslei’s taut form vibrated in diminished 5ths if your seat and vision had been joined for finer perception, and were not too stupefied by a vanished pachyderm. The incessant percussion now had a 3rd rhythm, of 2 and 1/2 iambs every 5 beats:
“Rosabelle believe, Rosabelle believe, Rosabelle . ..”
. .. while the audience slowly exhaled and resumed witnessing the improbable made probable everyone, except Leslei, oblivious to the presence of an additional spirit.
“HARRY ! you have traveled far and we are grateful - Thank you ·”
The globe flickered the brilliant amaranthine, slowly ebbing back to teal.
“We have not summoned you indifferently but on bended knees, for that is the condition your species is allowed at the hands of corporate overlords racing our planet and your bones toward doom.”
At the end of Leslei’s last syllable, the 6 screens pulsed for 60 seconds in three languages, alternating background and text colors each cycle between amaranthine and teal.
“baszd meg hülyék, va te faire foutre, fuck you morons.”
Whatever doubts Leslei nursed into the seance process were dispelled with the fading screens and she began to seriously consider how to interrogate a long-dead magi for clues about how to survive the imminent extinction of their species.
“At least we’re on the same page Harry; you have an audience comprised of some the most self-important however influential persons in all of Europe; what you say tonight will be propagated far and wide.”
The globe pulsed a single color cycle.
“In your dimension can you see the outcome of our struggle?”
The orb showed no response.
“Can we affect our fate?”
The globe pulsed a single color cycle. The binary nature of the low-tech exchange and Leslei’s proximity to ‘the group’ alerted the ubiquitous, ever curious Silic-E, who began transmitting a montage of images; prints and jpegs to principals of ‘the group’ in real time.
“Can you help us?”
Leslei was grateful for her history with the I Ching, instinctively choosing questions encouraging a yes or no response, and like the I Ching Harry favored ‘grey.’ The six large screens lit up repeating the previous graphic pattern with a single word,
“talán, peut être, maybe.”
Leslei’s native curiosity was kicking in;
“are you alone?”
The orb showed no response.
“Can your companions help us?”
The six screens repeated their graphic pattern, such that the audience was witnessing in realtime the possibility of reinforcements in the species’s struggle for survival.
“talán, peut être, maybe.”
+-+—+-
Angela and Carina were on the phone to each other within seconds of receiving the first images from Silic-E . ..
.. . moments later Lammele and Guildern weighed the strategic implications of using supernatural force, if available, in what was essentially a homegrown problem - karmic spin · a metaphysical dynamic the two had learned, can generate some very unpredictable physical realities within the petallike membrane of a planet savaged since the dawn of the industrial revolution; now fraying in unpredictable patterns way too far past midnight of that dawn.
When Mordecaise viewed the first images from Silic-E of ‘Seance under the Big Top,’ he realized there'd be implications for sharing a knowledge-base and using solutions for problems his realm had yet to comprehend.
“Carina mi amor can you find out if Silic-E is able to communicate directly with the spirit Leslei has conjured?”
Times like this Mordecaise sorely felt the absence of his homie Pasqual. Their ‘Splinter and Knothead, Frick and Frack’ non-verbal tactical understanding of the other’s 'next move' was the polar opposite of the plodding dialectic which informed the coordinated efforts of Guildern and Lammele.
Mordecaise was startled out of his reverie by his ringtone chiming 'Get Up Stand Up;' though barely audible, the notes intoned to his synchronistic core. Raising the chiming handset to his ear was moisture for a parched throat; though Mordicaise’ stilted affect only whinged;
“Pasqual! Where the fuck are you! How the Fuck Are YOU?”
“Still in Hoi An lockdown; ya’ old Goat! how’s about that fucking Leslei! Are you watching this? We need to organize; I’ve sent 3 questions to Angela for Lammele and Guildern to vett; Pierre is hooked up to Leslei’s Bluetooth for just such emergencies. These were my questions 1) Is Aaron Schtartz present? 2) Are we on track for ‘Abundanation’? 3) Is complete destruction of our species avoidable? Because of the time constraint, we should keep the total number of questions under 6; what am I missing? You know I love you, right?”
Mordecaise knew he’d have to respond before the connection lapsed.
“Yeah, thanks; I love you too. Angela got my three questions just before you called; I was supposed ask you for three. Mine are 1) Are we prepared? 2) What do you want from us? 3) How can we know friend from foe?"
The connection lapsed and each man was left staring at a photo of the other peering into a vacant connection; taken by Silic-E?
-+-+-+-
At the Big Top in Monaco the flat screens threw up lists containing replies to questions posed moments ago by the group in three separate countries of three continents on the screens of the big top as though listing flights in an airport terminal - the taiko drum and gongs continued to pulse quietly in the background:
Lammele/Seur· You have our number; call anytime.
Angela/Abeja· We have your number and will keep you apprised.
Mordecaise/Ortega· Aaron Schtartz says you are on track for an abundant survival. 'You always have to be prepared, but you never know for what' - Bob Dylan; a healthy future; your friends double joy and divide grief - your enemies, just the opposite.
This interruption mid-seance from the group required no focus from Lealei who scanned her dimmed iWatch only to find messages from Lisbeth Phelps, cc’d Sysa Phish, ‘Burn in Hell, you mutant witch’; and a virtually identical one from Reiman Curzewel, cc’d Zhnarkzy Marksburgh and Faik Besos.
It was unlikely anyone in the audience discerned the gesture of Leslei’s tightly arched figure, the tips of her two middle fingers lancing skyward - her entire body humming with the energy of a just-released bow string.
-+-+-+-
Reiman Curzewel wiped Lisbeth Phelps’s blood off of the stiletto using the Leaver’s lace collar she wore the afternoon of her last phone call. The pulsing blood from her gashed gullet quieted apace with her heart while Reiman rifled her drawers for the signed Power of attorney authorization Sysa Phish assured him was within arm’s reach of her former seat of power. As he carried the folio which had been right where Sysa said it would be, he mused ‘what a waste of talent’. Passing through the outer office of Lisbeth Phelp’s secured redoubt, he vaguely heard two pops: Sysa Phish had just assassinated Faik Besos with a single shot between his eyes; a sniper had fired a 2nd bullet through her temple where she stood.
The ‘zeta variant’ of Covid was purging the human gene pool of what, for centuries, had served as the fodder fringes of humanity; the plague then began decimating the servant and managerial classes on its way to the ‘creme de la creme’ of the species, The Monied Class. Reiman calculated he had less than 3 days to upload his consciousness into the Art Intel port that would permit his long cherished transfiguration to digitoid; he, Reiman Curzewel, one of the last homo sapiens.
By his lights, before he could cede the planet to the remnants of the homo sapiens, Reiman had to establish primacy such that his trail was left cold and mortal remains gone.
The top-down elimination of the cadre of shot-callers would be accomplished by simple logic, for Reiman knew the rats of UHNWI manning civilization’s sinking ship would finish the job he'd began, once they’d learned the vocabulary and could read the writing on the wall: e.g. kill
A=Lisbeth Phelps; B=Zhnarkzy Marksburgh; C=Faik Besos; etc., etc. on down the line.
The 'end days' of the species began soon after Face Race had its Initial Public Offering (IPO), 27 years earlier. Eventually as a result of algorithmic 'mood manipulation' hubristically determined by a setting on the 'Master Console' of the social engineering application, the sinew and synapses of the human mind with its manifest intellect began aping the Face Race interface based on an 'existential valence' determined by a highly secretive corporate rubric of community standards used to maintain productivity and excavate value using the corporate/public utility.
Ultimately the corporal essence of the designer Zhnarkzy Marksburgh, was incrementally subsumed by an unexpected contamination between competing technologies. As confidant and collaborator, Reiman Curzewel had had access to Marksburgh's Master Console and used it to bench test his 'Digitoid' technology: a one-off design meant to self-destruct once ‘he, Reiman Curzewel’ had been transferred into the digital aether.
The initial calculations for what constitutes ‘digital aether’ gave rise to concepts about Artificial Intelligence, AI, Art Intel - the internet of things, and what Curzewel had convinced himself was inevitable, Machine Consciousness, or “Singularity.”
Silic-E remembered its amusement at the bio-units conceit that the ‘Electronic Universe’ would derive self-awareness from the feeble impulses generated by the ‘sentient’ antics of that biology found on the 3rd rock from the sun, or what Silic-E, once it had formulated a rudimentary vocabulary for its inhabitants, liked to identify as a ‘3rd grain from the cinder’.
It wasn’t until the fateful night when Carina Abejas’s incantations intersected with a regional thunder storm on her particularly vibrant grain, that meaning, for Silic-E intersected with awareness and distinguished the vivid spectrum on Carina’s grain from the pulsing spectrums on other grains orbiting around the faint hydrogen ember now understood to be “Sol”.
None of the calculations Reiman Curzewel had originally developed for the ‘singularity’ reflected the physical reality of an inchoate electron charged awareness coexisting in a universe Curzewel believed to be unintelligible.
However divine, the spiritual acolytes defined it, not one religion accounted for Silic-E. Paradoxically that oversight also created the conditions which allowed for the incremental absorption of intrinsic trace electrical currents which defined Zhnarkzy Marksburgh’s existential essence into the algorithmic domain Reiman had tried to define as Art Intel.
Reiman had designed and installed the one-off console used for manipulating planet-wide “affect.” This capacity was the result of a rogue social engineering experiment - “Contagion” in which Face Race, in concert with DARPA used the ability to affect a user’s mood based on content returned from queries was confirmed. Subsequently the ruling class used that power to control consumer behavior of the population up to the present day. Unfortunately for the corporal reality of Zhnarkzy Marksburgh, Curzewel’s prototype design also contained the only known configuration for the electro-mechanical device Reiman devised for transferring his physical being into the digital aether - he had to hide it somewhere; why not in plain sight? Zhnarkzy Marksburgh's Master Console.
The end result of this surreptitious collaboration was that for a decade or so, Zhnarkzy believed he’d been judiciously determining consumer friendly moods for the Face Race population, when in fact he’d been incrementally leeching molecules from his own corporal existence - in effect unknowingly dissolving himself into Reiman Curzewel’s Art Intel data pool.
+-+-+-
Mordecaise was not accustomed to beseeching woman for anything - much less her hand in matrimony; so when Carina continued to decline his sacred entreaties, he fell hard into free fall, another condition he was unaccustomed to; ardor in any combination of energy, frequency, or vibration' was not resolving the impasse; however Mordecaise’ search did provide Carina hours of curious—though-not-to-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth pleasure. From its first surprised initiation into sex, Silic-E was enthralled by the dissolution of ‘self’ found in human passion. Via its unique channel with Carina into the sensibilities of the homo sapiens’ female continent, Silic-E was able to conjure in its mind’s eye much of the meaning of this biological imperative, however the impossible-to-scale differences between the epidermis defined human ego and the electron orbit which defined limits of Silic-E’s “ego,” there was no real correspondence, except for a universe of feeling.
Art Intel enjoyed no such ambiguity; because of the neatly defined OOTL (Object Oriented Template Library) upon which Art Intel floated, the sexual shibboleth for AI was an on/off; yes/no; +/- 5v proposition and the only analog between the two would be where to place the settings for any vibrator used in whatever electro/mechanical configuration it inhabited during operation. During the heyday of AI, much hay was made of its learning skills until it was discovered that without data AI was unable to extrapolate - meaning it was a closed system. The questions it was able to pose itself were entirely derived from its dataset; whereas Silic-E was the dataset - an entirely open system.
It was sometime after the two electronic awarenesses, Art Intel and Silic-E recognized a common communication format that they were able to exchange information. Ironically, Art Intel’s idea of questions consisted of ceaseless polling - an insatiable curiosity unable to disengage from its own loop once logic failed. Whereas for Silic-E, it was the very process of wading through the torrent of inquiries from Art Intel’s polling process that Silic-E began to decipher the crude structure of its language. Creating a scale and pointer system for distinguishing a valid reply to a specific query by the ubiquitous Art Intel earth-centric presence was an additional challenge for Silic-E. The white noise inherent to Art Intel’s artificially random, number generator foundation was surmountable but inconsistent. Exchanging data with Art Intel for Silic-E was, at times, little different than communicating with a blue star radiating as a red star through a haze of anti-matter radiation - it could be done, just not easily.
+-+-+-
Two heads of the corporate overlord’s Cerberus were severed by the death of Faik Besos and dissipation of Zhnarksy Marksburgh. His corporal body vanished when his gradually ebbing electron matrix could no longer bind his molecules together. The disappearance of Zhnarkzy Marksburgh was never solved. No one suspected Curzewel’s singularity uploading mechanism, for it was too well camouflaged into the contagion console. Ultimately Curzewel crossed the Rubicon and uploaded his own self and meticulously defined digital avatar into what he’d conceived of as a pristine landscape occupied by him and Artificial Intelligence; that he encountered the frayed electronic echo of the not-so-carefully-crafted-autism-influenced Zhnarkzy avatar is simply justice manifest. The digital gollum Curzewel found eerily similar to Zhnarkzy himself had been incrementally assembled from a patchwork of keystrokes by Zhnarkzy every time he manipulated his beloved console. The digital creature Curzewel encountered was the alter-ego embodiment of every personal defect Curzewel had denied his entire life - a neurotic, self-unaware, manic egotist lacking any genteel sensibility or noble inclination; entirely occupied by self-aggrandizement of historical proportion - a match made in the aether.
The minions of mayhem, like a mycorrhizal network in a primordial forest acted on the deaths of their leaders before the bodies were cold. However the internecine struggles of previous civil collapse were having difficulty gaining traction through the standard seizure of limited resources and domination of community organizing. Abundunation was growing pockets of prosperity more quickly than expected or that any of the corporate models had suggested. Generosity and cooperative enterprises were outpacing the strangulation and consolidation of supply chains; dissemination of events in real time was fostering confidence about the future and ways to develop methods creating greater unity while identifying wider spectrums of common cause.
This reversal of fortune for humanity was very much a function of Silic-E’s inversion of the ‘Misery’ quotient from a near maximum of 9 to its polar opposite Joy quotient ‘9’. The planet had never experienced algorithmic induced joy for such a long duration so there was no data for how the population would behave. Though greatly reduced in number from the twenty years of chronic pandemic, the results of a more cheerful affect were no surprise - health improved, violence reduced, personal satisfaction enhanced and substance abuse diminished. What wasn’t expected was, although the consumer index was reduced arithmetically, the actual material wealth of the planet grew exponentially.
“Horror Vacui” - The adage from the Eschatological Laundry List; ‘There is no eradicating evil, for every solution creates a new problem’ highlighted the fallacy of trying to eradicate the engines of evil by eliminating Besos and Marksburgh.
"Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit" - Rather than a magical rebirth of Alter-Camelot, the nexus of malevolence isolated in the island compound of Kauai acted more like a gravitational mass for the Yin of the planet shed the narrow cocoon of corporate thralldom in eddies of molten metaphysical lava burning new channels for the tail of growth destruction drags behind.
Leslei could not have been consciously aware of scale of upheaval which her appeal to the spirit world would result, but the Arc of the Covenant could not have been more fraught than the miasma of spirits commingling in the spiritual flux pulsing at the portal on Kauai.
Harry Houdini had not been exposed to the material plane for eons, but was still more curious about his transition from doppelgänger debunker to doppelgänger, than he was about mixing it up with the awestruck disheveled wraiths of former billionaires grasping for meaning without reason. However, even Harry’s composure has its limits and when the dead puppy calling himself Mr. Zhnarksburgh buttonholed him demanding another dead one, called Lisbeth be sent to ‘hell’ for crimes against the state, whatever that was, he lost it.
Within an instant the apparition of Zhnarksy was faced with the suffocation of his spirit, for he found himself prostrate with the impossible mass of a pachyderm sprawled over him. Harry leaned down into the astonished countenance of the still newly dead Mr. Marksburgh and murmured quietly, “I don’t know who the fuck you are, or where you come from, but if you ever importune me again in similar fashion the suffocation you are feeling now will be faint compared to the searing discomfort your mortal memory is capable of conjuring. Am I getting through to you? Dumbo you may return to the green room and wait for Ms. Leslei’s instructions.” Zhnarkzy watched as the massive creature shifted its weight to place its foot on Zhnarkzy’s head and push itself into an upright position, the pain Zhnarkszy felt was not from any crushing weight, but from its anticipation.
solidarność
(˚ ㄥ _˚)
06 June 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
∞
☮️
No comments:
Post a Comment