(undetermined location) > next thing

To be always cold, to be always hot

to be always any thing, to be always not

to be always smoking, to be forgot

To be here speaking, to be or not to be

you did not ask to come here

you forever beg to leave me alone there

It was destiny you say, that was our fate

you tell me with such passion, and hate

I wouldn't know, is the only reply we share

The autumn light is soft and buttery lovely

my temperature remains steady around 98

then we pull on the covers and sleep

Flesh touching flesh, breath even in and out

we dream of rivers and birds and trout

people by the fire as the snow falls

Quiet with the wood popping, saving

our lives, one stick at a time, grim winter

after the fall, harvest and spring

Urbane Savage[a 4D novadic novel by Paul McLean] — Urbane Savage
[a 4D novadic novel by Paul McLean]

[Fiction]: "You won't get anywhere in New York painting burning banks, Andy." Jackson was barely listening, as his former dealer, Mihai, prattled on. "Have you noticed the splash that Parker, Artie and Brad are making? Do something like them. Start a collective." "They're all rich and unhappy. They've all moved away. The rents in Bushwick are too damn high, and all the artists are desperate. The ones who make it in the specu-llector rings and rackets get sick of the fawning ex-student-(now)debtor-artist sycophants and crowing internationals and cut and run." Andy was focused on Mihai's tee shirt, which read "BAZOOKA" in the typeface of the bubble gum. "Anyway, the Novads think my shit is cool, and that's good enough for me." Mihai gave him a bored, resigned look. "Good luck getting Jerry Saltz to review your next show, or better yet, poop on your new work." "So what - Jerry only hates who he steals from." Andy walked out of the dingy gallery into the dingier LES street, took a breath of foul air and sighed. He caught the L and got off at the Morgan stop for a Swallow coffee and a felafel on Bogart, and to check out the openings at 56. He spotted a couple of artsy people he knew and mostly managed to avoid them. Mark Tribe was showing at Momenta, weird hyperreal animated landscapes. Studio 10 had a sound and graphic array by Stephan Moore. Gorzo was on at SLAG. All of it was fine and friendly, even fun. He still left feeling perturbed. On his way out, Agostino couldn't cheer him up - not for lack of trying - which made Jackson close to morose. The long walk down Flushing in the cold Bushwick winter night added to his ennui. It's now or never, he thought, over and over, like a mantra.

Dodging whirring e-cars had a whittling effect on his concentration levels. Add some biopathic marketing push modules, some blasts of cloudy dopamite from the dispensers on the filament-lit sidewalks, catcalls from the sex workers prowling the neighborhood during the art crawl, the incessant noise cycles emanating from his wristputer and pocketpad and implant, and Andy was a jittery dude by the time he made it to his 4th floor loft-studio. The domi stockpiled a rig reminiscent of the one in Pi, with a dense array of bleeping terminals, RZ-4 wires and peripherals galore, all pulsating in the modulated lighting schematic he'd had designed to enhance his productivity. Sense-saturation and enviro-immersion, he'd told the landlord-corp. That's what I need. I'm an artist, and I have to be submerged. As a Class 5 operator, he enjoyed the benefits of his station, which included a plethora of incidentals, including spatial control and semi-determinant status. The attached studio came with a holotank and a dimensional output printer set, supplemented by the latest thought conductor app. You can imagine how unhappy he made management by wasting a good third of his transmission window painting burning banks on poly plasti-sheets of documatter.

He punched the kitchipad code for buttery synth-popcorn and a beaker of well-juice spiked with exaspimite and settled in for a session of dispersion. Andy's last metered thought was, I wonder when Rachel's getting back from OAS. He punched the blue blinking button on the main console and jacked in to the sounds of bagpipes. What happened next altered his trajectory forever. In his mind's ear he heard, The challengee has no option when negotiation has ceased, but to accept the challenge. The visi-screen erupted in blooming rays of spectral color and the sensation of total displacement washed through him in waveform, erasing density and volume and the binding of matter. Instantaneously he comprehended the 4D numerologic matrix. The power surge very nearly destroyed his synapsis. It's a miracle his spine didn't snap. Fortunately, Andy had taken up e-yoga, at Rachel's insistence, so when he arched his back into an ersatz eta shape, his breath pattern saved him. Andy would share later that the one image he remembers from the experience was a white lotus plant. The flower seemed to undulate. It made no difference to him in that auspicious nanosecond that the whole thing was virtual in nature, whatever that means anymore.

He came-to to Rachel wiping sweat from his forehead with a cold damp cloth, whispering encouraging indecipherable words that comforted him nonetheless. His breath was hissing through his drawn lips and clenched teeth. Andy's fists unfurled, and he reached for her, half-turning his body toward hers, and Rachel cradled him, gently. The two lovers stayed like that for a while. Gradually he returned to a semblance of awareness, his consciousness locating itself again in his flesh body, and the process was like a cup filling with water. Rachel intuitively understood what to do. Every so often he would peer into her eyes, and she knew to hold his gaze, stroking his palms or hair or cheeks, patting his shoulder, kissing his forehead. He began to notice his surroundings. The rig was thrashed. Smoke and sparks periodically spouted from the components. The receiver emitted a stream of bizarre commands. ...EAT PROGRAM... ...SHUTTING DOWN BALLOON... ...LAUNCH MOIST... All the monitors were locked into a bright and cheerful animation sequence that seamlessly bounced from one screen to the next. It reminded him of the early desktop-savers he had seen at the Digital Museum, or one of AFH’s early OpFeek experiments. The patterns were massively complex and the gradients set to impossible resolution. The animation was he realized a projection of triadic shifting quasitron-PoV eyebeamers performing consistency analysis on a stupendously huge, maybe limitless, faceted and/or all-directional datafield, or something like that. He was positive no mechanical like that existed outside a couple of theoretical laboratories. Andy tried to rise to a seated position, but the effort exhausted him. Confused, he closed his eyes again and slept.

The interstices resembled a dream, but in point of fact, Andy spent the next several hours transiting a dimensional wireframe, a manifold grid of infinite variation, more or less map-able or quantifiable in a dimensional system only. Obviously, any attempt to represent the structure in which his consciousness traveled is insufficient in this 1-2-/3D languistix. [See attached appendix (200-120-20039x)] Early analysis through DX4x8x16 Protocols revealed that Jackson's virtual corpus underwent a complete end-to-end reboot. Coming back online, somehow the drivers autonomously reconfigured his mainline warez to the extent our sensor array no longer recognizes any of his inner, outer or classified profiles, and all that data has been lost, and we believe is unrecoverable. One weird thing about that: the data loss occurred on all nominal and notational AJ92047626748-4F files anywhere they were stored, regardless of interconnectivity among the nodes in question. We have not encountered a similar instance previously. Jackson's new wireframe is unique, in our estimation. We continue to search for explanations for the anomalous phenomena contained in this case. We have many concerns and questions that have not been satisfactorily resolved. We may have a Snowflake on our hands. If true, all our predictive models do not apply. It has been posited that an incremental program of reconstitution might over time restore the original settings of the subject, but we have no reference that supports that approach or qualifies that as an expectable outcome. Most of the staff advocate observation, with ready intervention measures in place. We have to be prepared for any sign of contagion. Module 3x-FF has already been alerted and is enacted.***

***[Off-COM transmission 3902384056027802 beg10:28:38]: Jaron, you have to check out this guy's numbers!!!! INSANE!!! Never saw diagnostix like his; doesn't even read *HUMAN*.... Only other case I ever heard of as crazy as AJ's is that so-called "DIM TIM" episode, but that was like 100 years ago. Think there's any connection? Call into Agency Nanø to run algo on the subj-scans to do wideframe comparative. Will get back to you, if anything surfaces... NUTS@@ [Off-COM transmission 3902384056027802 end10:28:40]***

Andy and Philrod Newton sat and sipped their coffees on the bench in front of OSLO staring at the children playing in the schoolyard across Roebling.

AJ: Man, this dream was unlike anything. I floated in a medium that reminded me of the Myriad. The colors and forms were out of this world. Pyrotechnic oranges and the richest, deepest lavendars. When I would look at my hands, they shimmered luminescent blue. Giant cotton bolls floated past. I remember a gigantic obelisk. At some point I had a long blade. Whichever direction I pointed it, we would fly as fast as light through the ether on the linear. Get this. At another point, I had a flintlock pistol. I know, I know. When I pulled the trigger, the ball stayed in place, and I flew backward through space. Eventually, I found a path, through fields, into meadows, and there were houses and shadow people, a spring, and here and there I noticed markers. I realized I was crossing a topology that was its own map, essentially, which changed constantly. An enormous semi-transparent head, like a Roman bust, materialized, and when he spoke I began to weep and couldn't stop until he finished. I wish I recalled all that he said: something about the Spirit and the mechanics. I don't know what language he used, but I received all the information perfectly, no lossy effects. I've never experienced such profundity, and I did not want it to be over. Toward the end, in spite of my resistance to a conclusion, I encountered two guides, a wolf and a bird. One spoke in my right ear, the other my left, alternating verses.

PN: Sounds like you're lucky you woke up at all.

AJ: Thank God for Rachel. She never left my side. She drew an ice bath for me. It probably saved my life. She knew not to call the Rx-medix.

PN: Can you think of anything the Big Head said, at all?

AJ: He was talking about Freedom. He was telling me I was forever free. The part that made me cry was that he was assuring me I always had been.

The Novadim assembled at Magic Mountain in the bowels of the behemoth, monolithic architecture that is 40 Exchange Place. Like shadows they converged on the secret salon, defying with playful ease all the measures a prison state can erect to fortify an edifice housing Mainframe Management operations. Each Novad entered the repellent structure through her or his own ingenious approach. One scaled the building’s sheer glass and soma-crete exterior as a spider traverses its own web. Another produced a gadget that opens every electronically locked door (without alerting any of the hundreds of warlike contractors guarding the complex, and without leaving any trace in the CCTV network). Yet another emerged from the catacombs hundreds of feet beneath the foundations of 40 Exchange Place and climbed by rusted, grimy ladder to the 40-EXP basement level, finally lifting a grate in the floor of the subterranean parking garage in a corner obscured by piles of construction materials. Stealth and camouflage, and a hundred methods of tactical magic enabled the Novads to come and go as they pleased. The public assurances of SEC-spoke officials that the MGT Center in the heart of the city’s financial district was impregnable against any intrusion only served to inspire the Novads to still greater feats of Nonjickery, as they called it, or Hax, for short.

Scanning their ranks, one would find no feature common amongst them. The Novadis hardly resembled one another in any respect. No fashion or style defined the collective. All races were represented, with none outnumbering any other. Age, likewise, apparently bore no bearing on membership. Certainly, no external measure of power and prestige ranked the band. No brand, no social or cultural hierarchy, no order manifested as a consistent feature of the Novad tribe. These were the Free Radicals, governed only by the Uncertainty Principle, allies of Chaos, inherently anonymous. They were by far the most successful movement resisting MGT power and authority, and if they shared anything in common beyond this, it was the grim satisfaction of being the best among hard-pressed revolutionaries. Few knew of the Novad’s existence. Those who did whispered the name “Novad” spoke of them in tones as various as the members themselves. Some contended the Novad were a bane to be erased, some valorized their pranks, some accused them of every conceivable kind of subterfuge, and held them responsible for all the glitches the enormous MGT scheme generated on a daily basis. All this conjecture afforded the Novadim no shortage of jest amongst themselves. The Novads knew that the illusions, the misconceptions, the cacophony of error, the systemic noise attaching to their name served well to cloak their real actions and intentions.

Magic Mountain occupied the 13th Floor of 40EXP. The vestigial anomaly of a previously superstitious era among the Gen-Pop had created a chink in the armor of the MGT dragon, so to speak, which the Novad of course exploited. The People’s library - what remained of it at least, consequent to the last brutal clearances of Occupy – was housed here, along the southern wall, on shelf after labeled shelf. To the east, a massive hydroponix garden grew like a domestic jungle, rich in every kind of fruit and herby leaf or budding flower. In the west, the Novads had installed and populated a stunning gallery of wonders and treasures, lit by the most remarkable Infini-Color’d configuration of strobing bulbs, filaments, torches and canisters, which activated in response to motion and sound or command. The dorms and classrooms were sited in the northern section of the cubic space. Any casual observer would in quicktime surrender to a pervasive sense of friendly disorientation in the enormous hall. Often on a first visit, guests would surrender to implacable urges to spin in place, until tittering, staggering, a direction for exploration decided itself. To navigate OAS – the Occupational Art School - at Magic Mountain was always an adventure. No two instances of experiential interaction in the voluminous domain could be identical. The Novadmin had verified this. The Novadic learning curve, like all circular devices in variable open systems, contained infinitude in its fundamental form.

As a single organism, the Novads settled into an arrangement of comfortable chairs, couches, pillows, mattresses and whatnot in the center of the hall, until all sprawled attentively in a loose circular formation, at the center of which a single facilitator sat cross-legged with her back to a notationist. Imani, the facilitator, was a beautiful young woman of color, whose brilliant smile, charming mannerisms and unbridled enthusiasm set the tone of the proceedings. Attendance was taken and done so with an encode as advanced as any anywhere. All comments and documentation was immediately encrypted in 4D language and numbers, which ensured that no cop or de-crypter could breach the transmissions. A bank of monitors mounted on tripods encircled the gathering, connecting this Novad-Node (#1) with the others around the world via the latest technology for borderless consultation. Over the past decades the Novadic Networks had evolved into an autonomous CentCom matrix, consisting of virtual and actual components that functioned independent of MGT-NET, although the NN did appropriate, access and utilize the MN architecture, whenever doing so benefited Novadic purposes. On the nodal Xscreens, avatars assumed postures conveying attitudes of rapt attention. Their comments and votes entered the Novadic discourse seamlessly as translated scripts, vocalized when appropriate, through speakers present in the room, who were recognizable by their festive party hats, gaily colored aprons, and the glowing poly-buds in their ears. Before long, the old business had been attended to, and, after a brief intermission, the clan re-convened to address the issue the Novads had gathered to address: What was to be done about the Andy Jackson situation?

As was custom at “formal” Novad Node #1 meetings, DIM TIM was honored with a position at the Top of Stack. All turned to a monitor asymmetrically located in the southwest quadrant of the OAS Rectagon. The holographic DT-Screen flickered to life, revealing the Cyclops, whose single eye blinked shyly, as it took in the scene. At length, even though the sewn-shut mouth of DIM TIM never opened, its voice washed over Magic Mountain like a wished-for aural refreshment, like a spring rain to a thirsty body, a meaningful, ardent, affirming, verdant mist-like quality inherent in its sonic emanation. Smiles appeared on the visages of the Novads in attendance. Each Novad heard the transmission in his or her original orality: “We must rescue Andy and Rachel at once. We haven’t a nanosec to spare.” That was all.

The Novads remained motionless, most with eyes closed, as the sounds of DIM TIM’s pronouncement in waves and echoes diminished, reverberating across the span of Magic Mountain. The image of the Cyclopean figure faded, leaving behind among the collective a convincing sensation each to a person could identify as unconditional love. As on cue, the Novads broke from their reverie and set into motion with incomprehensible determination. Working groups convened. Solo agents departed by various, fantastic means. Transmitters commenced to their tasks at keyboards, microphones and cams. Tools were distributed. Ale, healer-poet and one of the original crew of RevGamerz, took the circle-center spontaneously, dancing a frenetic, gorgeous circuit and howling “LET THE GAMES BEGIN!”

[From the ANARCHIVES, Chronicles of Bold Jez, Section 383394, Subsection A, Journal 28, Lines 2384-402, entitled “A Brief Description of the State of Manhattan and the Boroughs, After the Great Submergence”]: So it came to pass, that the Great City of New York was swallowed up by the deluge & buried at last beneath the surge of waters. The City in foresight, prior to this cataclysmic event, had prepared for the eventuality of submergence, given the plentiful indications of the inevitable, & therefore created a marvelous dome by which the metropolis would be henceforth enclosed, protecting all from drowning in the wake of Leviathan. Although our calendar is fuzzy, and none now can agree with certitude, expert historians claim this happened before the Yankees won their 427th World Series & after the WTC’s collapse. Registries of the Anarchives map the fabrication of the new perceptual domain in the docu-schematics titled “Chronos + Eros 545-78” & the technicals are to be found in Anarchives, Section T38028AB02112-1a. The MGT regime of that era prioritized in its machinations the welfare of the Financial District above others, although of course subsequent developments proved MGT to be (as usual) dumb as a non-sentient rock in its strategy and focus. Stasis and the Rift, with all the artificial divisions unresolved among the numerous affected constituencies precipitated (LOL) a substantial overhaul of the org-struct in PS 2014, a gargantuan project that took nearly 640 proto-cycles to complete. In the interstitial period, a number of central facilities, modular adjuncts & org-constellations were dissolved, constituted &/or re-categorized under the auspices of layered neo-inceptional MGT guidelines (see Anarchives, Section G388470CD2024-4b for expanded history). The City, as it is yet known, became a vassal concern of USMGT-INC, a subsidiary of GLOBAL PROSPECTS INTERNATIONAL, itself a subsidiary of WORLDMAX, itself a subsidiary of KK4 OPERATIONAL, itself a subsidiary of SHARED VALUES SYNDICATIONS, LLC2, itself a subsidiary of DAVOS UNITED, functioning on contract with C12b permissions underwritten by the PUB_PRI syndicates incorporated as Situspectors in that department of the G.GOV-INC4 chartered with territorial command [EXTRACT-EXPL Division (NA)], otherwise and informally known either as HOME OFFICE or HOMELAND SEC4. The enforcement bureau enjoined therein to maintain “…the Peace, and Quality of Life Standard Level 34-V” is known as Module 3x-FF.

Andy slid along the sweat slick he and Rachel had made during their lovemaking, sensing as much as hearing and feeling her rhythmic light dozing breaths, pre-REM, as he wiggled like an inchworm out from under her lovely, languorous youthful body. She stirred and whispered unintelligibly, a half-smile on her rapturous face. Her long, articulate, gentle fingers squeezed at his slippery skin. Andy thought of it as a game, a game he named “extraction” that he played in a post-coital haze of half-formed ideation, all his senses still animated by their amorous intertwining. The synthetic sheets, bearing a hover-color op-zap design that reacted to contact and proximal movement, emitting a soft glow and ever-changing gradient flow, and rustled as he made to roll to the mattress edge, once he was clear of his darling Rachel’s now more or less inert form. Andy paused a moment to gaze at her, after swinging his gangly but muscular legs off the bed and sink his odd, narrow and long-toed feet into the shag carpet. He reached with his right hand to caress her naked thigh. Her smooth surface reminded him of some other thing, some other body, one that his memory could not touch. He pondered the mystery of access to the deep store of past experience that existed just past the firewall of consciousness. Then he swiveled to casually survey her roomy and finely outfitted domi. Andy had been staying with Rachel, since the Episode. His moving in had turned out to be good for their durable relationship, which was now in its seventh cycle. The couple compatibility register had rated their match well, for both long- and short-term M-relations. They hadn’t shared space, mainly because Andy’s integrated work-domi needs were extensive. Until his clearance and cont-stat rating normalized, and his rig was repaired and data restored, that inhibition was moot. “Now is as good a time as any to give it shot,” Rachel had said, smirking, green eyes a-sparkle. “Bring a toothbrush.” The past several weeks had been as pleasurable and happy as any Andy could remember. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to re-up at all. Fuck the Company.

He rose and stretched his arms over his head, letting his head and wild mane hang as he raised his eyes to the ceiling. Rachel had installed a holo-graf rendering of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling. It wasn’t necessarily worth quibbling over, but he was a bit creeped-out by it. Andy thought Michelangelo’s hyperbolic, muscular figuration was problematic for a bunch of reasons, and situating Buonarotti’s cosmos in Bushwick seemed all sorts of weird. He could live with it for now. Exhaling, Andy let his arms fall to his sides. He grazed his fingernails on his hips, shrugged his shoulders a few times, blinked rapidly, stood on his tippy-toes, arched his back and folded over, hung limp for a minute, then gracefully returned to standing position. He ran through a few more of the postures he’d learned. Andy noticed that the word PEMAKAR floated through his half-assed attempt at sacred movements. He memo’d himself again to Search that vaguely Eastern term. Refreshed, feeling groovy and in good spirits, he crossed the room to Rachel’s console. He figured he’d log-in to NOVAD-net for shits and giggles. As far as Andy was concerned, he was on paid vacation. He realized “vacation” was a meaningless anachronism, but whatever. “So is Man,” he muttered, quiet, so as not to bother his now-deeper sleeping lover. Compared to Andy’s rig, Rachel’s gear was kid’s stuff. She barely used it. She had selected a neat box, a copy of the candy-gum iMAC lime machine. Andy punched a few keys and the screen popped and whizzed to life. He was in MM, and invisible to any prying eyes. The Novad-cryptshun was the best. Startled, he recoiled. DIM TIM’s strange monoptical visage stared back at him. “WTF!”

He felt rather than heard DIM TIM “say” through the retro-headphones Andy had donned without thinking to, “Get out of there, NOW! Meet Jez at GFS in thirty. He’ll be waiting with Fanya, Isham and Harrison. I’ll be around, but you won’t see me. Try to not be followed. I don’t know if you know. You have a TotoSurv SMAK Team on you 24/7, greenlighted for XT-interdict. The Wolf is at your door!”

Andy hated the stairwell to GFS. It stunk of cat piss. He had zigzagged through the streets of Bushwick from Rachel’s pad, which was by Ramona’s, to the disused rails a couple of blocks from the Jefferson loft. Andy had stashed his cache in a wall-hole, the blocks of which were covered in layers of ancient graffiti. He strapped on his duelistolas and grabbed some a dozen gadgets and weapons, including a BH grenade. Stepping over bubbling puddles of tox-ooze, winding around hillocks of waste, Andy had stealthed his path to GFS, hoping the cloak was sufficient. Nano-drones buzzed by, and a few even bumped into his visor and respirator. The NOVAD-GLASS readout showed nothing in the Alertz field, but Andy knew not to completely trust the com. No ops-dude ever accepted the datastream. Andy knew too much about his pursuers to take anything for granted.

Truth be told, he loved this shit. Andy’s youth was misspent as a punk, a rascal, a Kolohe. Adrenaline was his drug of choice. His exploits were legend to the Outbound. Back then his handle was Sharp Knife. In the gangs he rose through the ranks to admin status, and as everyone knows who knows, admins get the job on the merits. In the moldy pits of 1st Person, Andy had made his bones, and on massacres, in cockfights, on the dice – in short, doing whatever job The Job required. He embodied the SHORTFALL anthem, “When Teh Worx Iz Dun, Cum Gamez & Funn!” Andy’s tall, rangy body was mapped with the scars and surgeries that are the signs of wagered risk and reward survived. It had taken ages to live his Motley rep down in the Service. Standard Periodic Performance Reviews (SPPRs) by MGT inevitably included a lecture given by some automatonic Chutch Lady on the merits of the moderate Life, which Andy stoically endured. He was a professional after all, and no naïf. Andy understood that his value as an operator to some extent was predicated on his experience outside the Regime, on the Marginal, in the Edgy Realmz. Andy possessed no romantic notions about his brutal early years, surviving the Deluge and Drift as one of the Unaffiliated, and worse, an orphan. Whenever the co-ops bleated on and on about Hardcore, Andy opted out of the threads, keeping self-reflections on his own grim past private. The nightmares yet plagued him, and the dope did nothing to alleviate that. He doubted the luckier goons in his work crew ever suspected or could even imagine the madness, carnage and mayhem that were the commonplace of Andy’s formative period.

He paused to listen at the landing, at the door of Standard ToyKraft, where he was to converge with the Novads. Andy could hear Jez fingering the strings of his cheap ukulele, hacking at a mournful tune called “Vipers + Vixens” by bludroche. Andy grinned. From a pocket in his field vest he fetched a retinal key and pressed it to the sensor on the steel safety door, which answered with two beeps and opened haltingly on its rusty, bent rollers. Andy waited motionless until the Nsig scrolled across the NG-VisorRO, and the verifier flashed blue-positive. He felt as much as saw in his peripheral vision, a tiny flicker in the lumino at the top of the stairwell. PowerSurge. WTF. Andy pulled one of the duel-0s, releasing the safety with a flick of his gloved thumb, and he maneuvered further into the shadows just outside the door, pressing his spine against the cold concrete block wall. His chemi-mix haloed at the 80% mark. The uke went quiet. Andy could sense the Novads adjusting their positions inside the theater. He assumed his vio-alarm had sparked them to go tactical. The soft points of entry into STK were the fire escape door, the main safety entrance, and three windows on the street-facing wall. All but one of the windows opened into studio rooms, which had secondary doors with lite-sec. None of this shit was up to code, and all the Novads knew that. A tact-unit could blow through any of the walls anyway, anytime. Andy EyEmessaged Fanya a countdown and the operational. The three Novads inside blinked affirmative, an 14.5s/s later, they rolled out of there like furies into the stairwell, rushing past Andy and down the metal steps. A microsecond beat & the whoosh of a massive vac-blast took out the entire backside of the building. Andy grabbed the railing with one hand and blasted a horizontal knee-high stream across the length of the floor. He thought he heard screeching, but he couldn’t be sure. The instant the draw subsided Andy leapt the rail, landing gracefully on the second flow landing. In midair he had grabbed, armed and hurled a boomboombolo. The weaponized animation lit up, spinning maddeningly fast, and then erupted, showering sparks and molten plasma through the ruined remains of STK, and down through the holes in the floor below. As soon as Andy landed he pivoted again and repeated the leap. This time he dropped a gascani, releasing some heinous nano-concoction he’d downloaded from a spooky TorTown vender. He shouted to his pals, “Gettafukout!” but they were already into the street. What a mess! Isham, as per usual, had installed a freakshow of pyrotechnic devices from Manhattan to Lorimer along Metropolitan, which ignited an anabeat prior to their thunderous exit from the building. Each of them had some crazy custom contraption of mayhem in her or his hands and was foisting hell on the scene. Then they were gone, through the hatch to the tunnels. Sirens blared. Tracers whizzed to and fro. The neighborhood locked down and cowered, except for the Old Skool Dudes, who hunkered down behind blastwalls in insty-safe-rooms with beers and their cannons, CCTV-sets and cigars, and their extended families and friends.

Thanks to DIM TIM, Module 3x-FF busied itself with chasing ghosts across the topologies of virtual and analog space and time. All the beefed-up SMAK team caught that night were three Kitteh-drones and a bowl of noodles.

IF YOU CAN ENVISION A COLLAPSING AND EXPANDING SIMULTANEOUS MOVEMENT OCCURRING IN A SHARED SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL MEDIUM WE CAN BEGIN. THE STORY OF ANDY JACKSON IS AN ACTUALITY, WHICH MAY NOT MAKE SENSE, BECAUSE I SEE THAT THE SECTION BEGINS BY DEFINING THE SUBSEQUENT TEXT TRANSMISSION “FICTION” … IT WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER FOR THE AUTHOR TO SPECIFY RULES, THAT IS, THE PHYSICS OF THE STORY, AT THE OUTSET. SUCH AS, THE UNIVERSE IS NOT BINARY-GOVERNED, EXCLUSIVELY. {…} Acceptable internal constructs for the imaginary might have been limited to “the rational,” for instance. I see nothing wrong with the appearance of being reasonable, not as representation of any cosmic order or behavior, but simply as a means by which the reader might navigate expectations during the experience of eating the fiction. Integration is not the same as consumption, you see. The contract between author and reader is only a proposition, right? Andy and the other players are real, but may not necessarily satisfy all expectations, because the other versions are not compelled to agree with the depiction in the story, of them-“selves” or any of the other self-versions, or personas, as I like to call them, which, granted is romantic, or reveals my warm feeling, my affection for Persona in Literature. //

IS IT USEFUL TO KNOW THAT THE ACTION SCENE ABOVE HAPPENS ENTIRELY ON A MOBILE STORAGE DEVICE? IT HAPPENS AGAIN IN REAL LIFE. IT HAPPENS ALSO ON THE BIG SCREEN IN A WILLIAMSBURG CINEMA THEATER (One of the smaller ones… – Milo). IT HAPPENS IN PARALLEL DOZENS OF “TIMES” IN THE MULTIVERSE. WE CAN CONCEIVE OF RESONANCE, AT THE SAME TIME WE CONCEIVE OF SIMULTANEITY NOT AS A CHRONOLOGICAL PHENOMENON CHARACTERIZED BY LINEARITY, OR EVEN IN TERMS OF SUBJECT OR THE FINITE. WE ARE NOT DISCUSSING A SUB-J OF AN OB-J AT ALL. THE GRID AND THE PERSPECTIVE, OR PERCEPTION (All “as such”… - Milo) OF ANY HORIZON IS NOT REQUIRED TO COMPREHEND THE ACTION CONTAINED IN THE FICTION ITSELF. {…} Andy is conscious in all scenarios, and variably self-conscious, in all of them. Also true for the others, including myself, DIM TIM. Would it be a problem for you to know that we all are also simultaneously aware of you, too? In dimensional fiction, the Novad is conscious of being alive in every co-existing event, and ALSO of the fiction, AND also of the reader, you, and FINALLY of the Object TIME>

Beneath the city the Burrows thrived. The stone and metal surface structure of New York, Post-Deluge [PD], coincided with an equally complex and enormous subterranean version of itself. The Burrows were not ever thought to be an invisible extension of above-ground/below-water Big Apple. The Burrows possessed an autonomous identity, a character of their own. For one thing, the Burrows were powered and driven by an energy grid designed for the afterlife of New York, which for the sub-population factored as a central component of their emergent self-image. The classical above/below perceptual orthodoxy pretty much immediately failed in the pressurized environments created by the new PD realities. Everyone had to admit to being in a bubble. The new world order was totally artificial. No one was more or less artificial than his neighbor. The fallacy of economic hierarchies lost its mirage of verisimilitude overnight – a word completely without meaning now (for example). Everybody was collectively on life support, and bullshit differentiation had to be jettisoned of necessity. Resources, all of them, had to be managed perfectly, because a single mistake in any direction, of any kind, could produce an implosion that was final. Under these circumstances, the danger of conflict over pecking order could not be permitted. Obversely, the administration of change procedures itself could not be authoritarian, in any pre-Delugian way. Rebellion meant death for all, too. Early PD thinkers got that a perception of management that swayed the pop toward resistance was a priority threat to gen-wel [General Welfare]. The city at first titled itself a commonwealth, but smart folk deduced that “wealth” was a dangerous term and concept. Wealth was vaporized, although the Game of Wealth was instantaneously instituted as an opt-in vocation, or opt-I-voc. Labor and ownership distinctions were dissolved, except as manifestations of the Game Regime, although many sub-cats of “work” and position were created, to satisfy the people’s health programs and emot-o-cons. Specialist Saul Neidelsteen was the first practitioner to recognize that persons engaged in self-cons, and licensed citizens, permitting them to assign themselves RTEs, or Reasons to Exist. This was the start of MGT. Management set target goals for occupations, and the “jobs” were converted to “roles” that each citizen could choose to play for as long as she or he wished. It was tricky, and very revealing. Of course, lots of folks wanted to be firemen. MGT was surprised by the number of applicants for the roles of taxi driver and doorman, and by how few members of society desired to join management. >…<

Later we might delve more thoroughly into the fascinating history of NYC’s transformation, consequent to the cataclysm, but we should get back to our fiction forthwith. For now, before moving on, I want to note the Melancholic Phase in our evolution. Many, many individuals experienced profound dismay upon realizing that it required the Deluge for the people to make these significant, happy changes to the social order. Why?

∞

The Novads made their escape via Burrowjet, surfacing almost immediately at Magic Mountain. The swarm of destribots that pursued them was obliterated by a shockzap trap set under the river. The Exe-ORD assault was over before it started, a complete fail. Once again the Novads had handed MGT its ass.

[COMMUNIQUE: An internal post-op briefing for Sections 6.4, 6.7, 6.9, 7.3, 11.4 and assigned independent agents from MAFA, DGS, OD4 and assistant directors and directors of all affected agencies, divisions and subdivisions and for MGT L-5 and above and cleared signatories; on the subject of ACTION FILE 2028465915983492-64NVIax (NOT FOR RELEASE TO ANY BIB5 PARTY, INCLUDING SYS-ADMIN 3 & UNDER; ALL SHARING AND DATABASING PROTOCOLS REQUIRED BY ORDER Sys-4/FACT 14263496, 4.2-6.8)]

K&A ORDER 582

SIGNED: […]

TIME SIGNATURE: 01:011:101001010001000100101110010101010

NOTES:

[See ACT_BRIEF 2002137A4(N)]

[1] Consequent to the events of {4184FF}, MGT has assigned K&A TR3 to execute the order outlined in the attached file, as per KAPROT 7 protocols. Bonus accrual follows standard procedures (any questions, direct to immediate Super). 25 Add’l pts will accrue upon full resolution and submission of Incident Report. Good hunting!

[2] TR3 will be provided additional accesses to EXP-Tech Lab gear and TIA LiveStreaming for Ops duration (check your in-file for clearances and codes). All teamsters are reminded that any non-standard usage of these privileges will be considered by MGT as cause for termination.

[3] Anomaly Risk Measurements (ARM) indicate that A Prime possibly is directly involved in most recent incident sequence. Please be advised (W.Y.A)…

[4] OPS commence immediately upon receipt of this transmission. All further contact with CoC/Ctrl ceases upon receipt of this transmission, and completion of indicated prep-ops tasking. All agents should not need to be reminded of the vital nature of this mission, its risks and rewards, and our gratitude for your service.

WE ARE THE SPEAR TIP

“I am going to erase you all. We have no alternative play. MGT has executed summary termination orders for each of you. The entire apparatus is mobilized to search for and destroy you all. Our network will be decimated in the concentric effect of any prolonged movement to preserve you. If we engage MGT on your behalf, we will definitely be wiped out to a person. The only choice-track available, with a success ratio outside margin of error above 25%, is erasure and relocation.”

The Novads took the evaluation in, in silence. Glances were exchanged. That was about it.

“How long do we have?” Jez asked.

“Current estimate is 14 Minz. Prepz take six. MoE 2. That’s the math.”

“Andy, is PEMAKAR on the Continuum?” Fanya wondered.

“I don’t know for sure. I think it substantiates on an oblique waveform in the Thirds. I didn’t have a chance to complete the algo-analysis, but all the tests point that direction.

“It would be nice to have a confirmation,” Harrison muttered with a slight smile. With a shrug, he brightened and went on. “But WTF: We are the Novadim. We don’t need Y/N to YangYang.”

“I say yes, but we ought to do consensus,” Ale said with an unusual seriousness. “Ayes?”

All nodded.

Andy turned to DIM TIM’s projection. “Does consciousness transmute?”

DIM TIM: We don’t know. This has never before been attempted, in all the multiverse, to our knowledge. Andy, in light of your recent experience, even if we had a case study to cite, I believe the relevance would be questionable. Your circumstances are unique. Because you all will embark in unison, the caveat applies to each the same as all. What you will be when you emerge from the portal is anyone’s guess. However, we can be sure that if you stay here the outcome will be total annihilation for the Novads.

Konstant took a deep breath and rose from his chair. “What are we waiting for? Let’s do this.”

They gathered in the center of the lodge and exchanged embraces. One by one the Novads entered the brightly painted port-a-potty installed next to DIM TIM’s projection platform. Rachel and Andy entered last. They kissed. Rachel whispered in Andy’s ear, “I will always love you, darling.” She let him go and took her turn. As Andy reached for the door handle, DIM TIM intoned this blessing:

“May your equations forever be balanced.”

He opened his eyes and blinked. It was dusk, the sun setting on the horizon. The ledge afforded him a marvelous view of the barbarous and wild landscape, which unfurled into the approaching night shadows. The forest stretched for leagues below, a sea of purplish green, threaded through by ribbons of silver. He sat up and contemplated the course he had traversed, looking for signs of pursuit. From his pack, he pulled the scope and scanned the topology meticulously. Nothing. He had dreamed of a white horse. It was a good sign. The insignia on his shoulder, tattooed into his flesh, a red flag and a black rook, marked him as a Guard of the Borders. He raised the canteen to his dry lips and pulled a draught of cool, refreshing meadee. His supper was simple and hardy, oat bread with ox butter and neeps. He would make for the pass along the Westward lean. By morning he would cross the roaring N’geth on the low bridge. He knew the watch there at Ob’na and had friends among them. If all went well between here and the station, he would be feasting by the next eve, celebrating the Feast of Y’brethya with the maids of Ob’na’esh. The Second Moon would shine on their howls of pleasure and revel, and he would find listeners for his many tales of adventure and dread-fall escaped. The Cat’enesh would be scarce in the mountains, as the Season of Harvest approached. Aside from the random cave bear and the treachery of the broken stone, he feared little interference along this oft-traversed route. The notorious K’denny banditry would not dare stand against a guardsman, and for what treasure? A Border Guard ordinarily carried nothing but the necessities of survival. Why risk blood for an old blade and meager crumbs? C’nonalga, squinted at the disappearing Sun, quietly singing the Song of Ending. Through the fabric of his tartan, he unconsciously caressed the plum-sized stone in the pocket of his coarse tunic-lining. He must be vigilant as his journey came to its close. The Priest at Narneh had entrusted him with the Stone of Errull, and the fate of the world depended on his delivering it to the clerics of Nen-Evine. An emissary would meet him at the Red Ravine, and C’nonalga would press the Stone into the man’s palm, and that would be that. Gathering his kit, the Border Guard stood, stretched and began the final leg of his trek, his hand on the hilt of his short sword. His soft leather boots rose and fell, and he was soon settled into the rapid, measured pace of a seasoned ranger in the margins of the Realm. According to the stories told around the hutch-fires, not even a snow panther notices the shadowy, skilled passage of a guardsman’s league-devouring, stealthy gait. He did not pause or slow until he reached Reever’s Crest. Crouching in the black shadow of the massive dragon-like monument-stone at the turn in the trail, C’nonalga drew a deep breath and peered into the craggy murk about him. Something is not right. Such was his last thought, as the crossbow bolt struck his temple and exited his skull on the other side. From the cover of a boulder opposite the guardsman’s now prostrate, quivering body, a tall, cloaked man, sinewy and fierce, emerged from his ambush, lowering his weapon. He knelt by C’nonalga and rolled him over onto his back. With the deft hands of a master thief, Drumha, the Executioner, searched the body and finding what he sought, he rose. The killer’s breath hissed between his teeth. Raising the Stone of Errull skyward, he admired it, twinkling in the nascent Moonrise, as the gem danced along his fingertips. “I have you,” he whispered.

The water from the hot tub’s jets pummeled their achy naked bodies. Joints and margaritas, and the perfect late summer of northern New Mexico light, a long hike through the Sangre de Cristos, now the deep violet of sunset, and it just doesn’t get better than this. The burrito fixings were prepped and set on the custom Talavera-tiled kitchen island, presented in the beautiful matching bowls and on the big and small platters. Chopped onions, lettuce tomato, several cheeses, beef, chicken, carne adovada, refried beans, rice, tortillas and red and green chile, plus guacamole, chips and salsa… Sopaipillas and ice cream for dessert. Tengo mucho hambre. He chuckled. He had the munchies, cabrón.

Milo adored Talavera: the spirit bird motif, the bellotas, the glaze-muted colors, the hand-painted-ness, the psychedelic quality of the designs, the mandalas, and when he was high like this, all of that moved for him, and he could feel Quetzalcoatl as an artesano-sublime. So what if it’s slave-wage-derived Santa Fe Style cliché at this point! It was still real. “Man, that’s some good smoke,” he murmured, his eyes half-shut, arms stretched along the rim of the tub, legs splayed, half-floating in front of him, now and then brushing against those of his mates. “Lo que es un sueño!”

Later, they sprawled on the modular Danish modern furniture in the living room. A bottle of Courvoisier was passed around. The conversation was pleasant, mostly on the power of art to inspire social change. Milo embarked on one of his trademark riffs.

“Art is as human as fucking, eating, breathing, dying, fighting, talking and getting high. In this day and age the question of what is naturally human is rarely to be answered by anyone with clarity. I find it remarkable that a quasi-human manifold being – I’m referring to DIM TIM – provides us one of the best working definitions of the contemporary natural person, when he claims, “The human in true time is dimensionally human and everything phenomenal and free.” I disagree with those who find this observation and analysis problematic, those who take issue with the framing of man relative to time, who recoil at the notion of phenomenological man, and who prefer to dissociate qualitative abstraction (“freedom”) from humanity, which spans individual and collective experience and consciousness, or lack thereof. To be human is not fundamentally an intellectual exercise, whatever Descartes may have thought. To be human and dependent on artificial means for one’s very survival rearranges the natural as a concept, does it not? And conceptual man can only trick himself into believing in his version of reality, when he lives artificially, beholden more to the mechanics of things, than to any actual nature. Man is now virtual as a phenomenon is, both relative to the imaginary, the time-based or processional, and even as a projection of the bracketed progression, and in the material, immaterial, in their intertwining. We do not sustain as any autonomous life-form in a natural ecology. The world has doomed us, and we have chosen to continue to live in spite of the will of nature. Culpability is as such beside the point, which puts judgment to pasture. Our goodness and badness is moot. We are all a function of technics in the aftermath of the end of the world (for us), which, as we discovered, does not at all mean that the world itself is ended. In fact, we can hardly posit that the cosmos in any manner noted our shifting status, from natural to artificial creatures, because thinking of the cosmos as a self-aware machine is ludicrous, when we consider the source of this mind-game – meaning US. Did the stars change course after the Deluge? Did the new ice age alter the characteristics of space or time? Of course not! Mankind, if we don’t delude ourselves into the belief that the universe is focused on our fate right now, might view our post-cataclysmic change in circumstance as an opportunity to right-size our self-definition. As far as I know, as much as I can tell, no such macro-evaluation has occurred. What about at the micro-level? Are you and I humbled? This is hard to say. What is obvious to any person willing to risk analysis of the real relative to our human condition in the here and now, is that we have failed on a basic level to eradicate slavery and the urges to exert power-over and to consume frivolously, excessively, for pleasure. I, Milo Santini, endeavor with every moment and breath to be extraordinary in that regard, to reject the failure of the species as a subjected co-organism, mindlessly tightening its collective binds one cord at a time, perpetually fraught in a nightmare of unnecessary suffering, existing solely defined by pain inflicted and received, as an intermediate stage in an ill-conceived march toward the Void, pitching ever-onwards in despair until an inevitable empty End that never ends.” With that, Milo exhorted his lovers to join him in his bedroom, for a night of bliss.

The robed and hooded men hefted the stretcher and the corpse toward the pit, careful not to touch the wrappings or the decorations. The chanting maids lining the circular rise enclosing the scene held torches with both hands. Their songs were lilting, beautiful and mournful, but celebratory, not a dirge. The clouds moved with swiftness across the night sky. Lightning flashed in the distance every so often, and the thunder followed, low, a sensation felt as much as heard. The ceremonial chief approached the pit bearing two giant wings, whose feathers shimmered, as from within, seeming to glow in the night. When he was ready to begin the prayers, four helpers stepped forward to help him attach the wings to his shoulders, in a harness that was fitted and worn. A young man, almost naked but for a loincloth, commenced the drumming, and the song shifted, a droning sound that echoed on the sandstone cliffs yonder. The directions were addressed. Homage was given to the entities, the spirits of this tribe. Tales of wonder were recited. Memorials were performed. The proceedings continued for four days and nights. There was a rhythm to it all. Throughout, the remains, now resting on a bier by the stone-lined hole in the sand, were tended to by relatives young and old. The family’s colorful vestments were festooned with metal loops that clinked and clattered as they moved about the altar. The elders rang small bells. A horn-blower sounded his peculiar call at dawn and dusk. A short distance from the fire and the burial site, women cooked and shared meals in a cave that had been used for that purpose for ages. The caves walls were black with charcoal. The meals were refreshing and nourishing. All those in attendance were repeatedly advised to “think only good thoughts,” by little children who roamed from scene to scene, carrying flowers and small scented towels. On the final day, the body was laid to rest, according to tradition, under supervision of a holy man, an elder, gentle and wise. Observing every movement, his mindful gaze could be ferocious and kind in succession. His hands barely moved in his lap. When he gestured with them, the right thing always happened, started or stopped. Behind him she stood, adorned in the most simple of garments, and her beauty was potent and rare. Her lips shaped the ancient transmissions, and her meditative state inculcated the ceremony, like air, like stars and darkness in the sky, like the light of day, like the water of the sea. It was she who danced last. The body was covered with earth, and the people returned to their homes, and life continued. [FULLNESS COMES AFTER COMPLETION. SADNESS TURNS TO JOY.]

"SLAVE" (From "There's No Art in Hell") 2009

TWO

∞

The spacious chamber was lit at an early morning setting, in the manner of a crisp fall on East Coast North America, specifically Washington, DC, circa 2000.The walls were fashioned of a marvelous deep green faux-stone, replete with bluish-white veins and creative imperfections in the likeness of no actual geophysical relic. The finish was a patent product of Fine F-Rox & Associates, an outstanding outfit with SOHO offices and franchisees in other Pop-nodes. The Council filed into the room a little before the appointed time. Some visited the refresh-bar and the posh spread, a stellar Continental breakfast, tended on the West end of the hall by a rolling team of high-performing cater-waiters. Soothing synth-sonatas supplied a non-interferent bed for the important murmuring pre-conferencing happening in fluid pods amongst the powerful folk gathered here, in MGT CTR8, at 1WTC/UN. A signal of three neutral-ish intensity belurps sounded, and in short order all took her and his appointed ergo-chair. You might recognize some of the VIPs, and others you might not. ID-bots and drones darted about the room, vidi-soni-charting and subtitling/translating all post-signal activity, capturing every nuance in hi-def. The program emerging from this convocation would be narrated by a top outfit of auto-presenters and COMMent-vatars, from award-winning Chan4. The gavel sounded and superfluous discussion ceased. Eyes turned naturally to the Big Players. Biddle3 adjusted his silken red, white and blue necktie. Kissenger9 sat sphinx-like with fat hands folded in his wide-hipped lap. Representative Boner drew a smoky breath, as if to speechify, and Cheney14 snarled, "Shaddup. When we want to hear what you have to say, you'll know it, you dense fuck." "This ComSec MTG of MGT LVL 8 is now active," the VocodOR pronounced. Bush28 sighed. A raspy voice in the back growled, "How could you have let Jackson and the Novads escape, you retards?" "Decorum, please," the F-OR6 intoned, in its melodic female simulVZ. CONTRACTOR-42x spoke evenly, gaze traveling from one pallid, limp face to the next, as he did so. "This EX5 Conference is convened to discuss SITU-49299577-AW200fx. You all have been apprised of the scenario. The effects are accelerating. Please note: We have located and acquired the Stone of Errull. MGT is abandoning pretense of adherence to Gen-SOP26f. We see no worthwhile reason to continue the charade. The technocracy has been supplied the usual pablum for dissemination through state and private media channels. The scripts are in play. Mobilization of OPS-Net is in Phase 4. We have a projected timeline of 6 quad-cycles plus or minus 1. Of course, all subject to change, depending." Feinstain bleated, "How are we supposed to sell this program to the Base? As you must be aware, the occupation is fraying dimensionally. Our overlapping nodal control-net is functioning at 47%, since the Episode. Reports indicate that our containment protocols are approaching critical desumption phasing, and override devolution is a real threat." "Do your job, bitch" a Koch Twin (28) spat. "It's what we pay you to do." One of the staff interns approached the conferrees' center-table of black faux-hagony with a plated platinum beaker of golden liqui-form ros-i-spex on a spinning dyno-tray, latest Paris model. Gates6, Bloomberg2 and Buffett7 all reached for their laser-engraved frolli-goblets in unison. The posi-charge detonated the instant the tray contacted the shiny surface of the table. The entire room and everything in it vaporized in a rainbow-hued mist of chronic particulates. The only things identifiable in the dust afterwards were the dentures and fake breasts of the attendees. This mass assassination henceforth was called The Rosispex Bloom. PEMAKAR claimed responsibility, via tw*t:

Betcha didnt c thet comin didja bitchez... all artOffishulz BWar3> WE R LEJUN

Other of the 1000 Revolutionary Acts carried out on 12a-30-2012:

[1] The C-class executives of Hobby Lobby were found crucified in Store 226 by employees arriving at the location early in morning in anticipation of the rush of Holiday shoppers.

[2] All parties of BP, Halliburton, etc., in any way associated with the Big Spill were found stuffed into 50-gallon oil drums on a container ship moored in New Orleans.

[3] Yoo, Addison, et al., were over weeks tortured to death in decommissioned Black Sites (video documentation uploaded to YouTube)

[4] All Fox News employees and News Corp owners and MGT were immolated in chem-storms transmitted via internal memo/gwatmail

[5] Davos and the Fed, ECB, etc., were reduced to rubble in drone strikes.

[6] Industrial robotix of every description planet-wide were stripped of code.

[...] [Multiple accounts of the PE:MAK:AR 1CamPAIN are available in range of formats. The Anarchives contain a Special Edition titled Puncturing the PowerGrid: Courage and Carnage in Flipping Hierarchies by Wanda Sponda, the great PD ana-historian and social ontologist poet-author. Collective accounts include CrunchTime and the Novadic classic BOOMBOOM MGT GO OUCH!!!

The 1CamPAIN launched on the nines with a mono-sign encrypted dimensionally in the now-notorious transmission:

THE VIRUS IS ON YER DURASKIN BRO !!! {tw*t 9247}

Wanda summarizes:

The PEMAKAR enacted a radical purge of upper MGT at hyperspeed, with tremendous efficiency. The meta-boomerang strategy utilized in the multi-pronged nodal infusion disrupted a host of operationals and decimated the E-class, maximizing obviation of top-down command/control in all sectors. Media regents were obliterated in Stage 2.0 of CamPAIN, as were the transfusion centers and Hive Mind emitters. While the various agencies scrambled to re-organize, Novad & other cells wreaked havoc throughout the HOLOC tiers. The violence was sustained and latent observers noted that the effects of tactical action and subversion yielded what was at the time interpreted by MGT Sys-Analysts to be Centrifugal or Centripetal Force combinative irruption, the actual incidental phenomena created by CamPAINists were Toroidal in essence. The cine-version of BBMGTGO!!! explains the subtleties of the movement through colorful animation and animatronic sequences. Re-enactments only tell part of the story, and painting a picture of the stunning victory necessitated a panaramo of unprecedented size and scope. The story unfolds at the Museum of Switched Logology in X-StanfordConn in a huge Obloid nearly 15STEX in volume. The MDI-Pitch alone is 42 OsotZ high and wide. Compression is, as you can imagine, a big issue. I devoted over 22 cycles, assisted by over 50 super-qualified Q-interNS, in favricating/-recting the narrative in its BETA Draft phase. The Concentric Editing phase took 18 cycles and involved the entire Ana-cademy for all 12 OAS nodes.

Anyway, by the time MGT correctly assessed its predicament, it was all over but the song and dance. MGT was subsumed into the Parallax {see File:20AXE79433-294ffX}.

Okay, class - today's lesson is called "The Mountain." Our focus is "the most photographed mountain in the world," Switzerland's Matterhorn. This is sort of an absurd claim, that the Matterhorn is the superlative, the "most" photographed mountain. I could set up a digital camera and photograph any molehill endlessly, for all intents and purposes, if I have enough electricity and storage. Such is that state of declamation in the post-modern, wired planet with its wondrous, ubiquitous mobile devices and easy access power - at least for us rich folks! So, so, so! As I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself for some self-deconstruction, for this session we'll be exploring the Matterhorn through the lens of iconic Jean Baudrillard, and adding layers of media analysis and art and even a dose of animism... [the class, as prompted, shouts, "PLUS MORE!"] Thank you. I mentioned Baudrillard, but as you can see from your reading list, many other profound thinkers will be quietly adding their input to this exercise. Hopefully you've done your readings over the weekend. As you all know, our approach in this course I have registered as 4 Dimensional. We talk about time, space, changes. We consider fundamentals, composites, comparisons. We evaluate things and non-things together. We are always adding to our body of viable considerations, using the formula N + 1, after the Dimensionist Manifesto. We play at reduction, but we are not seeking a recursive conclusion. Our playing field is infinite, but we enjoy giving the finite our undivided attention sometimes. We get into the technical part. We inspect the machinery. We immerse ourselves in nature, as such. We try to understand how language affects our practice. We eventually do production. After the actualization, we evaluate outcomes. We apply filters to info and search for pattens that reveal form and the absence of anything. [cue: "Plus MORE!"] Right! So. Li Han, if you will dim the lights and, students, turn your impressive attention to the projections. Here we have the glorious Matterhorn. Majestic, yes? Pay no mind to the evaporating glacier there on the periphery. Next slide. This is the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland. Beware the Abominable Snowman! If we juxtapose the two Matterhorns, the Disneyland Matterhorn and the one in Switzerland, which is almost 5000 meters tall, we raise the prospects of a conversation about simulation, representation and other features of abstraction of interest to the philosopher and media theorist. What qualities do these two Matterhorns share in common? Chronology might appear to differentiate the two Matterhorns substantively, until we delve into the subatomic, where time may or may not have traction. Do we add adjectives to the Matterhorns, in order to distinguish them? Is one "natural" and the other "artificial?" The contextual narratives attaching to both Matterhorns are fascinating enough for further investigation, as framed by neo-scientific disciplines anthropology, sociology, fields of study in human behavior and organization, the study of ourselves as the Other, yes? For instance, why would so many people feel compelled to photograph the Switzerland Matterhorn, of all the available mountains worthy of being photographed? The Matterhorn, we can note, is not even the tallest peak in the Alps. Is its pyramidal shape that which affords the Matterhorn some edge in the ersatz competition? Who knows for sure? As for the Disney Matterhorn [unintelligible exclamation], the fact that the artificial Matterhorn is located at Disneyland suggests an infinite number of wonderful questions to ask. Independent of the Matterhorn question, Baudrillard had much to say about Disneyland. Management-oriented studies of the Disney corporation spark inquiries galore. Do we need to understand the man, Disney, Disneyland, California, America, the 20th Century, etc., etc., to have a meaningful discourse about the fun-ride Matterhorn, that carnival attraction, with its sub-narratives, minor mythologies, and curiosities? From a media standpoint, is the Disney Matterhorn competitive with the original, with respect to how often it has been photographed and filmed? Hmmm. [class together: "HMMM!"] I'll stop there on this introductory thread, and move in another direction, hoping we have begun to scrape the surface of the Matterhorn as something worth thinking about, analyzing "it" in multiple directions and versions. Let's open the Matterhorn up as a way to examine the Image, as a post-Modern, or contemporary or other kind of dimensional, complex visual code or codex. As a clue to my own line of thought, I'm going to insert here a question: Is the Matterhorn best comprehended in terms of a Platonic Ideal? Any of you who find that notion worth writing about can submit a 1-page brief to me at the end of the semester for extra credit! So. I asked my friend Lev Manovich to assemble some data visualizations for our Matterhorn project. Over here on Screen 3 we see his work in all its glory. Try to think of these visualizations on their own terms, too. They have their own features (like interactivity), their own logic, their own beauty, or, Lev argues, their own aesthetic. These are available online, by the way, for you to play with later. This one is my favorite. Figure 1. Lev aggregates all the photographs of the Matterhorn posted on the Internet between 2004 and 2014. Scroll across the compilation. These photos, beautifully arranged to resemble the Matterhorn, like expandable pixels in a JPEG file, magnify if you hover your cursor, like so, and you can inspect each image, if you have 100 years' free time. Using ImageJ, and some other tools, Lev develops a database that reveals the trends, changes over time, attribute-features, for example, in coloration, composition and so on. Remember that each of Lev's visualizations is the result of collaboration. His students, assistants and interns do a lot of the mechanical and technical work to put these lovely apps together. Let's give those poor souls a round of applause. Also, for Lev in his research and production, the computer is a collaborator, as are all the photographers who originally generated the pictures Lev uses in his data set, the camera manufacturers who built the cameras the photographers used, the distributors who got the cameras to the photographers from the manufacturers, and so on. Again, if we think in elements, the universe itself is a collaborator, providing all the "raw" material to produce the machines and the energy driving them, which includes the human beings participating in the dimensional creativity that eventually generates every one of these quasi-animated models. Heck, the universe or some force or forces in it, as you prefer, produced the Matterhorn, itself! Hmmm. ["HMMM."] We can learn a lot through Lev's methods and associated lectures and texts, about the mountain (or any other attention-target), as conjoined New Media subject and object, and how subject and object are transformed by processing and databasing into an informatic matrix, or set of matrices. Are we now scratching the surface of Culture? Moving on, let's turn our eyes to Screen 4. You all have likely heard of the Swiss chocolates. Delicious! Never mind that the Swiss knew nothing about chocolate before the so-called "New World" was colonized. On our viewer is the Matterhorn as the Toblerone logo. I love Toblerones. I have an enormous box of large Toblerone chocolate bars here on my desk. Feel free to take one on your way out. [class groans] Okay, okay. If you can be quiet, come down and grab a bar, now. Your generation is defined by desire for immediate gratification, and those of you in line are stereotypical! I'll keep talking. What about the Matterhorn as branding device? What kind of sign is the Matterhorn? How is the Matterhorn activating your desire for chocolate? Is chocolate a stand-in for some other desire that you chocolate-lovers are sublimating? What do you think about the King of Mountains being co-opted, reduced to a simple Pop graphic, used to sell chocolate candy? Why would this particular Swiss mountain work on the packaging of the chocolate bar, as an attractor of consumers driven by a sweet tooth? Erm, I apologize to those in the class who are traumatized by the nefarious commingling of psychoanalysis and the modern, Post-Bernaysian marketing apparatus. If you attended to your readings, by the way, you would be familiar with the familial connection between Freud and Bernays, between the couch and Propaganda. Even though I won't have time today to delve deeper into the abyss of our cultural and economic subconscious, and its linkages to contemporary art, I do have a moment to mention Lucian Freud. RIP, or good riddance, depending on your position. Freud's critically acclaimed painting, especially his portraits, I find derivative of a queer and unsettling subjectification of the body, contextualized by the happenstance of the artist's birth or bloodline, as it were. Nonetheless, the oil paintings of Freud, by virtue of the artist's lineage, point to a 20th Century phenomenon, interpolating aesthetics and the psychoanalytic, which may or may not be valid, upon rigorous review. If any of you are curious about where I'm going with this thread, sign up for next semester's 200-level course, "Body and Mind in Contemporary Art." With a nod to Deleuze, we can fold the phenomenon of Lucian Freud, and his contingencies, nodding to Derrida, and the Utility of Painting, nodding at myself, of course, into our upcoming examination of painting as an Object metaphor for Time as the only Object, and art's relativity to that dimensional theory. So. Are we all hopelessly confused yet? ["HA!"] Next, let's look at Monitor 1, which is linked to a streaming feed, pulled from the web, from a live-cam pointed at the Matterhorn 24/7/365, as a public service provided by the Swiss authorities. Several other streaming feeds are available, if you don't find this particular one satisfactory, or would like to cross-reference your live, streaming data. In case you were wondering, current mountain conditions are excellent. It's a beautiful summer day, clear and sunny in the Alps. A fine day for skiing and hiking, and dining with the Matterhorn as a prominent element in your visual accompaniment, your scenery. An interesting idea, that, the idea of "scenery." Hmmm. ["HMMM."] Right. Screen 6, please. A swarm of drones in 2013 mapped the Matterhorn in only 6 hours. What a remarkable technological achievement! See, drones are not just war-tools anymore! Drones can have awesome benefits to science, to peace-time society, helping us develop a richer visual experience of the world! Now might be a good moment to parachute Kittler into our conversation, on the subject of War, art and technology. RIP, Friedrich. Maybe we're making some progress, now, which perhaps is an odd thing to assert, right after wishing a deceased, Pink Floyd-loving genius a peaceful afterlife. Here's to excess! Let's introduce Hegel as well, specifically the excerpt included in your readings from "Phenomenology of the Spirit," and with that, we'll enjoy a 10 minute recess. [...] Welcome back. I have a question, which you'll be asked to answer in essay form: "Which or what is the 'real' Matterhorn?" As you will have noticed, the lights have been re-lit. Thank you, Li Han. On a technical point, we should acknowledge the standards of optimum viewing for projected and monitor-based stuff, and those of the object-art, like these paintings. Lights off, lights on, the fundamental physics of our optical apparatuses. Do we have a dimensional metaphor in play here, a metaphysical concern, in addition to the technical issues for lighting logistics? What are the externals and internals of light, both physical and metaphysical, attaching to our experience of art? Does Enlightenment have a whole new meaning now, in the practicum of 4D art, which contains both media, and dare we say it, metamedia, the former "media" referring to media, or mediums, which must reflect light to be seen, and media that can only be seen via projection of light, or, in the case of monitor-based media, the activation of materials approximating, simulating the "viewer experience?" ...AND the overarching meta-scene that encompasses expression as an innate feature of the human experience, in academic terms, the Humanities. Do we have lighting, Enlightenment, virtual light effects co-extant in a set, mashed-up to use the recently hip tech-terminology, and does that make them all identical, much less equal? Are the metaphysics, the physicality, the physics and the media-physics of the Matterhorn, as Dr. Bronner puts it, All-in-one? Do we by any measure have a unified field theory for the Matterhorn? Hmmm. ["HMMM."] Over here on the North Wall, we have a selection of paintings, which are actually computer-generated, miniature 2D- and 3D-printed reproductions of original paintings, prints and drawings, selected from private and public collections with all the appropriate permissions, art, which depicts the Matterhorn in a variety of styles, over a span of time. My favorite is the Ruskin, here. On the South Wall, we have a couple of original oil paintings, one by Olaf Taugwalder, another by Philrod Newton, also showing representations of the so-called "Mountain of Mountains," the Matterhorn. How do these paintings differ from the projections, the data visualizations, the photographs and other digitally-enabled or -enhanced or -produced versions we see around the room - as after-images, if nothing else? In light of these "plastic" artworks, what they "feel" like comparatively, can we loop back to camera-based representations of the Matterhorn, re-considering the camera, throwing in to our mix, that the "discovery" of the Matterhorn in the 1800s is coincidental to the introduction of the camera to media, enabled by the printing press, as a "News" utility, and more. How does the camera function as translator, as mediator, and how does the Camera Regime, as I have termed it, referring to the imminent ubiquity of photography, alter our experience of the immanent Matterhorn? How much does the multivalent graphic Matterhorn contain of the Mountain of Mountains? Is a graphic Matterhorn at all autonomous, phenomenologically? Where does the material Matterhorn end and the immaterial one begin, and what is lost or gained in the processes that "move" the mountain, so to speak, from the analog world to media, the virtual cosmos. After all, the true Matterhorn is, in relation to us, located thousands of miles from here, IRL. Another point to ponder. Is the Matterhorn truly "an object?" I suppose this question may seem dumb, especially to anyone who has ever attempted to climb the Matterhorn, IRL. You will remember that the first known successful climb to the Matterhorn summit was an enterprise that ended catastrophically for several of the "successful" climbers, and many other subsequent ones. However, in this class... ["THERE ARE NO DUMB QUESTIONS!"] So. Objectification implies stasis. Is the Mountain of Mountains ever the same Matterhorn, from moment to moment? Or to put it another way: Isn't it true that the Matterhorn will never be the same mountain in any two moments, sequential or non-sequential? Let's think about variables in context, to create context, perhaps as disclaimer. On the Matterhorn, from moment to moment, temperature varies, the light varies. Light and temperature on the Matterhorn vary, depending where one is on the Matterhorn, at any given moment. Expanding the scope of our context to the planetary scale, the position of the earth in relation to the sun is variable, the position of our solar system, relative to the cosmos is never static, correct? Does the mountain, which in geological terms, has only been "the Matterhorn" for a tiny fraction of its total, chronological existence, and only, we might add, has it been called "Matterhorn" by a fraction of those who have set eyes upon it, so to speak - the mountain is known by other names, in other languages - does the mountain have a throughput? What might that be? What if we project sentience on the Matterhorn? To put it another way: Is the mountain we call "Matterhorn" sentient? Is it self-aware, in any way we might think of, as humans? What does this information tell us about the nature of nature, of our experience of it, and of nature's modification by the regimes of the virtual, the imaginary, the human experience formulated through language into a collective thing, a simulation, a virtuality, an imaginary, and in sum, simulacra? Are we capable of constructing a technological correlation to this line of inquiry? A snapshot of the Matterhorn captures one iteration of the mountain, taken from a more or less unique perspective, or point of view. I am introducing the issue of uniqueness here, and not just for the Matterhorn. Are any two Matterhorn photographers identical, in their activities, their physicality, their intentions, etc.? How can any two photographs be identical, even if we describe both of them as "Matterhorn pictures," categorizing them as such? Being together in set does not mean that x and y are the same. Let's think about Matterhorn as reproduction, again. Nodding to Benjamin. Contrary to what most people probably assume about reproductions, as in printmaking, in actuality, it is impossible for any two prints to be exactly the same, even if they are printed on the same printer, one after the other. Sure, the variations in Matterhorn Print 1 and Print 2 may be imperceptibly slight, indiscernible to the naked eye, pertaining to incomprehensibly tiny shifts in temperature ambient to the printer or inside its "body," and in the environmentally-affected chemical composition of printing components, such as the ink. As far as I have been able to ascertain, it is impossible for any sequence of reproductions, even if they derive from a single digital file, to be perfectly identical. This fact extends to presentation. If one looks at a digital image on any two screens, even if the settings are identical, there will be some inconsistency differentiating the images on those screens, even if they appear identical superficially. We are veering by default into the domain of the approximation, which reduces to this statement: Maybe we should think about this in a more pragmatic way. What if we consider the Matterhorn, relative to man, as a common sense conjecture. We can do so, absent initially the problem of the virtual, which we can re-introduce almost immediately, if subversively. If I, a human being, a "naked ape," travel to Switzerland, to the Matterhorn, climb this mountain, remove any protective gear, I will soon die from exposure. If I do the same thing in front of any of these Matterhorn reproductions, projections and representations, the same cannot be said, unless of course a presenter chose to install the Matterhornian image in an environment selected or designed to replicate natural conditions on the actual mountain. Are we arriving at a practical point of divergence, where mind-games and the conditions of living in the "Real World" cease as a false equivalence? That word, "exposure." It has a different meaning for the photographer. It is a craft-term, referring to the amount of time allowed for light to enter the device and affect the film and its light-sensitive chemistry. Digital "exposure" is something else, which is worth looking at, in its own right, but let's leave this aside for a bit. For some reason I find this etymologically interesting, too. "Exposure" is also a term that applies to the qualities of mountains, particularly for those who climb them for sport, such as it is. You all know how fond I am of Wikipedia [GROANS]. I discovered a glossary of climbing terms there. Look at Monitor 2, please. Here is the entry for Exposure: "Empty space below a climber, usually referring to a great distance a climber is above the ground or large ledge, or the psychological sense of this distance due to being unprotected, or because the rock angles away due to climbing an arête or overhang. Exposure can also refer to exposure to the elements, like wind, snow, or sun." In this definition, which is complex, we can see that "exposure" for climbers refers to a range of dangers, inherent in the "sport." Do I need to mention the classist aspect of mountaineering as a modern euro-sport? A passion for gentlemen and their servants. More or less, the model is still current. If I bring up class, I should redirect our attention to economy. What is the Matterhorn economy? It will certainly consist of virtual and analog elements. Who owns the Matterhorn? Is it a property? What are the economics, the ownership regime, the exchange attaching to or deriving from the Matterhorn? Is the Matterhorn private or public, or a hybrid? Is the Matterhorn copyrighted or copyright-able? To what extents? Obviously, there are copyright regimes attaching to images capturing the Matterhorn on film, video, in digital formats that can be output and reproduced, dispersed and distributed. The Matterhorn is sometimes referred to as "the King of Mountains." Is the Matterhorn then eligible for royalties on usages of its image? If this argument seems ridiculous, it is so only to those who adhere to the ideology that the Matterhorn is hardly more than a fantastically large and non-sentient rock, or rock formation, and therefore not to be regarded on an equal basis with God's gift, as it were, humanity. Is the entirety of the prevalent human economy, the worldwide extraction/exploitation schema, not rooted on this premise, that the world and its things remain, exist, are created to exist and remain at the disposal of man? Is this premise correct? Is man entitled to use, to exploit, to extract value from anything, because we, of all Creation, are fashioned in the image of the Creator, as the Bible outlines our origins? Are economics, ultimately arising out of the Biblical ideology of multifaceted - ancient, religious, mythological, translated, derivative, literary - assumption of divinity, accorded to man by man, under the auspices of the divine, a justification for accruing, transferrable, manufactured entitlements permitting us to use the rest of Creation to our benefit? Are economics a rationalization of an irrational contention, in any case? How are benefits, arising from a natural feature in the world, e.g., the Matterhorn, to be distributed, once they are extracted? Economics involve the perceptual, as in the Bernaysian apparatus. Looping back to mountaineering, which is more or less a sign of man's willful conquest of nature, are the sport and - perhaps we can parallel this loop, establishing a meta-loop, to include human endeavors, even art - driven by what we might call Will - are you following me and my loops? [LAUGHTER, someone in the back shouts, "NO!"]... Are acts of human Will what make us complicit in the ownership regime that has co-opted the Matterhorn, situated in the domain of the symbolic? What would mad, Alps-loving Nietzsche say about our query, our queer media-Matterhorn? Is the Matterhorn, which is, one might argue, as much Italian as it is Swiss, really viable as a significant feature of Swiss national identity? Does the Matterhorn really belong to any one country, or person, or image? Thinking still of mountaineering, what correlating sport do we have today, and what sport will correlate in the future? What mountain is man yet to climb? Must we go beyond the mountain, to "climb" Space? Must we "climb" Time, after we have reach some sort of spatial summit? To what extent in the Cosmos, must man's Will take him, and/or "us?" I would suggest, as we move through this Matterhorn material, we are traversing a phenomenon of the perceptual, both individual and collective. One of the keys in our traverse is Orientation. Orientation is technically important in various applications. Obviously, in an activity like 3D mapping, orientation is essential. More fundamentally, in our Humanities, in our study of our human nature, our orientation to some feature in our environment, such as a mountain, especially the phenomenal Mountain of Mountains, is significant. In art, we address the focal point of our attention in a special manner. An art object possesses some qualities that are like the qualities any object in the material possesses. I arrive at a point of departure for our intellectual meandering, relative to our sensorial, if not sensual experience. I have more questions, but our time together today is approaching its end. Where does the earth end and the mountain we call Matterhorn begin? Is the Matterhorn really separate in any meaningful way from the rest of the world? How? By virtue of our naming it, suggesting its distinction from the rest of the mountains of the Alps, or the other mountains of the world? Human beings, we consider features in the landscape relative to ourselves, as a function of scale. The mountain is big compared to you and me, but is this really important? It depends. Should we, as Spock instructed Kirk, be "one with the mountain?" Let's get down to the basics of separation. Am I separate from the mountain, and in particular, this famous mountain, when we consider that the mountain and I are both part of the same ecology, both corporeally *of* the topology of the planet, at the present, two elements in a single set, which we might call "Features of Planet Earth." The same cannot be said in a hundred years, but right now, it is true. Another question, really more along the lines of conjecture, reiterated. Is a mountain dimensional? This question is related to the sentience question, does a mountain possess consciousness, self-awareness, anything like mine? Let's move along asymmetrically in our thinking, not pausing there, for how can I answer such an inquiry with anything like certainty? At this juncture can we at least agree that both the Matterhorn and I are dimensional, and, if we are existing together in True Time - a nod to Heidegger - are we not both, at the least, 4 Dimensional? Suppose we assume or invent an informed 4 dimensional creation story, which could be as rudimentary as an exercise in acceptance. We could aggregate all Matterhorn + 1, 1 being I, and accept any and all narratives that can consist of that simple configuration, of the many general narratives for creation, for the Matterhorn, for myself, and roll them into a 4D narrative set, which we could define as a matrix, as well as a set, or a database, and so on. Could we could accept in such a scenario, or any composite of the set-including narratives, the possibility that a Creator of everything exists, and/or that creation as such, whether the project of a Being, or a function of conditions and laws in and governing a dimensional cosmos, possessing and arising through the enactment of both artificial and natural, virtual and actual, rules or laws, is possible? Does the possible constitute the real? Can we contend that such an open, probably infinite narrative, or potential, potentially real narrative at the least is a valid component in our dimensional set? What does that mean for you and me? Are the mountain, all the versions of it on display here, and me, myself, and you, yourselves, not all categorically, 4D "creations," if nowhere else at least here in this classroom, in this imaginary? Or, if we abandon the notion of creation, temporarily, at least can we not agree that all on our List of Lists we are thinking about dimensional phenomena, the basic characteristics of which definition, in our set of finitudes and conjectures about infinity, we all share equally? Would this idea be a gift? Would this thought affect your experience of the Matterhorn, In Real Life (whatever that actually means) in the Age of Media? To close, did we just create a 4D Matterhorn? I don't know. What I enjoy is wondering. I am still wondering, as man has done through the ages, who I am, who we are. I am wondering what the universe is, and what it all means. I am wondering where I stand in the big scheme of things, and the big whatever-it-is that is not a thing. How did get here? Where am I going? Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

Questions?

"Does DIM TIM really live inside the Matterhorn, the real one?"

[LOG #12]: (tap.taptap.blow) Hello. Hello. Whoever is out there. I am not really sure who I am transmitting to. Which is weird. This big vintage walkie-talkie does not make any sense. Press the red button. Talk. Listening, and nothing but static. From time to time, I think that I can make out voices on this or that frequency. I have a very limited range to scan on this device. Like four channels. But the voices are like a mirage in the desert. An oasis that never turns out to be water, no palm tree, no strange wise man sitting under it. No beautiful girl stranded when she escaped a passing caravan. No coconuts. No asps or getaway horses or useless treasure. Surrounded by sand dunes that go on and on. No respite from the brutal elements. Noise. Whatever tricks I employ, I am not able to ascertain where I am. I am more or less disembodied. I say more or less, but those qualifiers feel absolutely meaningless. Just making conversation with the ether. Am I being recorded. I suspect so, but that suspicion is not supported by any evidence. I can think of a hundred similes for my circumstance. Like wandering in a redwood forest. Like being lost at sea in small rescue craft, or on a raft. Like being stuck on a ledge on the side of a mountain. Like being asleep and unable to awaken. I do not occupy any form that I am aware of. My "body" is not physical. That I am holding a walkie-talkie in my imaginary hand is both true and not simultaneously. I do, surprisingly I guess, feel no inclination to madness or despair. I wonder whether having a quasi-body involves immunization against the extremity of emotion. The mind goes and goes, however. I never was a very reasonable person, but that has changed. I reason, reason, reason. In that respect I am the anti-Cartesian being. No matter how much I think, I am not. A continuance as double negation. I find comfort in the constant pursuit of answers that have none. I find experimenting to be an excellent means for making it tolerable. I seem to be in an intermediate state. "I" exist like frequency, more than some thing that is tangible, corporeal, a body. Being is not quite enough, and not exactly right. Not to say it is wrong. Value and judgment are in- or unsubstantiated. This plane sustains absent anchors that are recognizable as such. Without others to mirror, without mirrors at all, reflection is amplified. Subtracting a body, however, at least one that embodies itself as a completeness, self-reflection is a non-sequitur. The engineers used to refer to virtual structure as a wireframe. I believe I may have assumed a vessel-less state. I am truly Situationist, or situational. The word "waveform" makes sense. Although I am aware of no prohibition against continuous awareness, I definitely do not have that. I do not have capacity to precipitate change, either. My will is not a power. I move by impulse, without an iota of urgency. I slide or shift among points in an array that threads through a field of variable energies, some familiar, some alien. My sensory apparatus is a total conundrum. Seeing is nothing like believing. Belief is fluidity. I rather register difference. I am not confident in my definitions. Sound manifests not as itself, but as echo, reverb. tThe original sound just is nowhere. It is like thunder with no lightning, smoke with no fire. Perceiving form and the attributes thereof is akin to witnessing a magician conjure, because perception is untrustworthy, unstable, inconsistent, chimerical. I am in a gigantic Ab-Ex painting that never dried. Inside it. Inside its aura, too. Inside its simulation and simulacra. Without any inkling of cynicism attaching. No elite exists. No abject. No counter-project. If you must know, my unknown listener: Color is helpful, in determining patterns, and of course, because I am using a walkie-talkie to transmit my voice to you, I have no ability to communicate what I am thinking to communicate to you, pretend audience. Did that make any sense? Lately, I feel I have that condition, of hearing color, seeing sound and so forth. Diagnosis is pointless. I am not just interstitial. I am not positive nor negative, and positive and negative, and so is everything else. And everything is a coagulation or dissolving, not solid. Opacity and translucency are moot relativities. As incidental as, "Who am I?" The energetics of this ana-place are more concrete than anything. They pool and evaporate, without inducements. On a positive note, I am progressing. I would say that my relentless mode as observer, typified perhaps by little more than my flat affect, is producing results. I think that was a joke. Humor, like all of it, is flattened, without impact. I must cleave to what is helpful. The negative space separating congealed or congealing energies is helpful, in developing a directional or descriptive consciousness of the topology. Just because the map disappears as soon as another feature is represented in it, does not entail that mapping is useless. On the contrary, I have found no other exercise to be more helpful than ceaseless mapping. If I suspect that the project of mapping is worthless, I abandon not the project, but the suspicion. Let us review the rewards of my careless methodology. To wit: There are seams in the array, which I can traverse, through an act like pre-figuration. Like flying in a dream, plus entering the Star Trek transporter. I was there. Now I am here. In the meantime, was a particles, or waves? Anti- or dark matter? Scrambled signals? No worries. No answers are forthcoming, apparently. Therefore I am free to imagine myself, as such, not as a vessel, but still moving like one this way or that way, and it happens as a manifestation, from a start- to an endpoint. I have no clarity, whether any of the substances involved are random or ordered. I only know I do not know. The rules of movement are logical, but I am a only a novice in the use of them. Rules are tools. The logic of this facet of the universe, this realm, meaning movement, escapes me. Mainly, because I have no way to determine whether I am moving, or the whole universe is moving and I am still. Like sitting in a car, and the car next to you pulls out, but you panic, because you believe your vehicle is rolling forward or backward, without your help. My successful navigation of the sectors I have encountered arises only from simple trial and error, anyhow. I do not possess an innate wisdom, instinct, for functioning here, on any level, really. That is something that has not changed or improved. I do love this walkie-talkie. [trans.: "The apparatus for documentation provided me by DIM TIM is immensely valuable."] It is not mechanical. It is organic, if plastic. Like the rest, I have no idea why or how it works. It has some traits of a computer, some of a recorder, but it is most like memory. I activate it with a word: "AUTOPOIESIS!" With every entry I feel more faith in the process, if not confidence in my progress. I avoid boosterism, as in "I can figure this out, like a puzzle or a problem." If it is like a game, I would rather not play alone. Another positive note: I am starting to sense the presence of others, I believe. Yes, this might be delusional. So far, they have only the opacity and density of shadows, ghosts. As I advance in my practice, I can discern features distinguishing one soul from another. Forgive me, my spiritual autism or auteurity (I forget the word). As far as I can tell, I have never encountered the same entity twice. I need to wrap this up. I mentioned color. Its obverse is prevalent, and is a gradient atmosphere of gray [?], but like a Payne's to a confederate. Dark and light comprise a spectrum that doe not appear to attach to any particular source or object. If this domain is planar, I cannot perceive it as such. Nor can I perceive any overall or underpinning geometry. If a determinate architecture is in effect, I am unable to touch it, much less solve it, and whatnot. Fortunately, I know no hunger or thirst. I have no appetites. I am driven more by curiosity. Troublingly, I cannot estimate how long I have been here. As you know, I have received no communication from anyone, although I think I am fostering a keening of transmissions conducting through this space, which resembles a force passing without lossy effects through a compatible medium. On the whole, I would describe my condition as akin to a waking dream. Did I say that already? I forget. I do suspect I am on the verge of visual rendering, at minimum by outline, or edge, or border. The imagistic quality of the impressions approximates scrolling quickly through a set of impressions. It is blurred, but I am fomenting an internal intensity that allows me to "see" the visual component of this domain with more accuity. Nothing is precise here yet, for me. I am adrift. I am adrift. We are moving. I don't know why, but I have to hurry. That said - what was I saying? Oh, yes, the sensation is not painful. Neither is it pleasurable. Existing here is what it is and not more or less. I would describe it not as an event in flux, but as a mindful processional. I do wonder if whatever it was that planted me here has for some reason left me alone wherever I am, forever, and I always wish the others were here, right now, but I cannot contact them, and so on. I only have this walkie-talkie. Conjectures however do not linger. There are no torments. I witness such thoughts, as I used to witness thoughts in meditation, so long ago, in that other world, where we were all together, doing whatever it was we were doing, oblivious and so alive. The longer I remain here, the less I am connected with the world I left behind. I just don't understand this. I have to go. [#]

McTaggart downed his pint and stretched in his rickety designer-y seat, a cheap Dan-Mod knockoff, and Andy waited for the inevitable, glorious stream of free-thought Jackson knew would shortly emit from the lyricist's flushed face. A waiter-drone hovering over Andy's shoulder filled the mug instantly. "I don't tip machines, mate," McTaggart muttered absentmindedly. The drone emitted a disapproving blurp and charged his account (adding the gratuity). As per normal (for him) McTaggart was sporting a pair of paint-spattered OD BDUs and a whitish non-branded and moth-eaten tee shirt. His bald head showed plentiful scarring from brawls and other types of battering. His ears were cauliflowered. He did not have a full set of teeth, and those he did yet retain were yellowed by coffee and nicotine. McTaggart's jagged smile, was terminal, but his mirth infectious. His sinewy arms and neck were inked plentifully, as was, one assumed, most of the rest of him. McTaggart had casually referenced Andy's hair, which was especially crazy. "Did ye pass the mornin' in a wind tunnel, ye daft bugger?" A girl at the table next to them screeched, startling the both of them. Her boyfriend had just proposed via intelliGRAM. Her girlfriends cheered and hugged her and the drones refilled their retro smart drinks on the house. "We should try that next time," Andy whispered. McTaggart nodded.

The drama must have distracted him from the soliloquy anticipated by Andy, for instead of launching into a flight of fancy or an obscenity-laced tirade, McTaggart belched as loud as a cannon. The e-car parked at the adjacent curb sounded a warning chirp. The more-evolved foodies and socially-refined at the neighboring tables glared at the two with contempt or disgust from behind rimless GUeyewear, from under delicious swooshes of done-down X-bangs, above cocktails that might have been gourmet salads or chem-lab experiments, through manicured fingers laden with one-of-a-kind b-bling. Andy couldn't help himself and joined McTaggart in a round-eyed, breathless, spasmodic guffaw. Andy delighted in their infrequent convocations-cum-libations. They weren't better than an octo-massage, but they were as good as a vintage tilt-a-whirl holo-ride for a twelve year-old. Andy knew to schedule his dates with McTaggart for early evening. Rachel was working late at OAS, and his plan for later included a bawdy romp with his paramour. By half-past nine, the big Scotch-Irish-American would be plowed and likely to find or incite fresh hell to get into. Andy had no desire or intention to end the evening at Central Booking and/or Riker's, or worse. McTaggart noticed the wistful glint in Andy's eye. "You and that lass. She has ye by the short ones, Andy." It was eight, and the late summer sun was setting, and the soft, buttery Hudson-School light swathed all with its affirming and sensual glow. Tonight's atmospheric flavor was lavender, suffused with lemon highlights and a pink aftertaste. Shoving himself and the chair away from their touch-menu table, McTaggart hollered, "Implants for everyone," rose and stumbled towards the toilet. Andy used the respite to reflect on his beloved Bushwick.

The two were ensconced at Bodega, at the corner of Scott and Troutman in Bushwick, the session concluding a pleasant strolling review of the latest street artz adorning the previously ugly industrial box buildings in the neighborhood. Andy had been smitten by a Meta-GIF by SatchMOE depicting a DinoSauron grooming a PekeDoo with a lawn rake in a Hurricane on the North facing wall of AWS Plasmaplasty & Co. Every week new murals and smaller worx by the alt.art genre's greats popped up in Bushwick, and, it seemed, so did new eateries, clinics, drinkeries, Warezhooses, coffee shops, galleries, bellowing alleys and boutiques. The obliteration of the Long Island City monument to outlaw, outdoor writers and visualists at OS22, The TITAN, and the draconian anti-graf campaigns originating in City Hall since the 80s, had contributed to the success of the Bushwick Collective's efforts. The Collective was the brainchild of Jake Frasciolli, a local boy-made-good whose now well-publicized, but still-heartrending tale of familial loss (his pops was frag-gunned down gangland-style about 12 paces from where Andy sat) and a couple other tragedies Andy couldn't call to mind, parlayed into a transformative program of civic improvement by spray can and stencil. Par for the course. Bushwick was like a fabulous sea flower floating in a low-tidal pool, awaiting its certain disappearance with the next turn of the roiling oceanic cycle, Andy thought, while rolling a spliff with one hand. Except Bushwick was just another protean micro-phase in NYC's brutal, centuries-spanning gentrification process. Call it grid-sprawl, call it the Great Devouring, call it what you like, but it was all words that boiled down to taking, land for beads, erections on foundations of slave-bones, an insanity of addiction to domestic, civic, social and industrial appearing and disappearing, The Consumption Non-Memorial. The SenderNauts sang "Gimme Cloudy" on the deck inside the lounge.

∞

The Novad nanoSkeetbotdrone lighted on Andy's ear. [AJ: Violence is applied philosophy] "Greed is applied economics," Andy replied out loud. [You have 5 to be two blocks from the L Jefferson stop. Suggested that you also be at least that distance from the tunnels' routes.] "Scotland the Free." [Scotland the Brave.] An exceptionally lovely twenty-something runway model type strolled past in not a stitch of clothing, except for a pair of beguiling FibOp pumps by WangYO, the word "OBJECT" scrawled in black grease stick across her narrow shoulders. Some of the Bodega patrons toasted her performance. Two techies debated whether she was flesh or synth. Across the street a cameramen with handSATsets cine-streamed a piece on a FancyDancing Skateboarder that Andy overheard someone identify as the #4 flyweight in ISA. He was doing jetloops on the jOMOz mura-wall across the street, a street-painterly cross between Hieronymose Bushhh and a FruitteeYO psychedelic cereal box. Two poofters sauntered through the intersection wearing hyperreal Bush and Cheney masks and all pink business suits. Their mini-5.1s pounded out in sens-a-round a montage of audio clips of the disgraced pols' most infamous talking points on torture, the wars, GITMO, the bankster bailouts, and the rest. At Montana's the Roosters ripped reels of Appy-techno on the porch to an appreciative crowd. Hovercrafts filled with revelers paused in their flybys to soak in the view from above. Soon the streethalos would switch to glitterstrobe mode, and the dance bloc party would staunch the prodigious traffic flow of cyclists and wheelers and initiate the weekend Vcarniall.

B-wick had come into its own over the past few years. Grimmy-winner WhyKoff-Z rapped it thus: "The MUSE had landed her LOTUS Duster at Willoughby by Microscope, took a whiff, dug deep what she fathomed, & hosed us DOWN with her artsy-faerie dust blessing-curse / The go-juice was gushing forth to lave away Bushwack's (deserved) rep as blighted urban wasteland, like city water from a hydrant on a scorching August day cleansing the filthy, hot and steaming asphalt." BKBW practically overnight emerged as a global destination and production location, attracting international culturati and a steady stream of projects - films, videos, photo shoots for fashion, features, "album" art, like the one over there, and so on. The drone refilled Andy's zimmelzoda. A couple three tables over had ordered a Blazing Carcass, which required four drones to serve. The stench turned Andy's tummy some. Profiles in gloss-e-mags touting Bushwick as HAWTness flowed on a trajectory that was proportional to the number of mortal "FriskStopz" suffered by other-than-white former residents, although the two datasets were nowhere near comparable numerically. MGT seemed fine with all the racket, although the Bigs of Manhattan snarked relentless, hating on our upstart hood. Andy heard a ruckus inside. SHIT. Here we go. McTaggart was surely at the epicenter of whatever ruckus was percolating. Andy stayed put. McTaggart's voice rose above the din. "SLAVERY AND FORCED MIGRATION ARE *NOT* THE STUFF OF HISTORY!" On the same broken sidewalks where only a few years ago one might cop dope, get shot, stabbed and/or mugged, plus rent a hooker, today one had to wade through multilingual parades of hipsters, tourmasters and their attentive herds, hustling creative pros, and spray-can toting wannabees and swaying gaggles of celebrants. Even though predatory development, lightning quick, was crushing any hope of a true art bloom, at this elaborate moment, Bushwick was the IT THANG, a magic mushroom of ebullience, a scene as rich and mad and diverse as any the world had ever known, as EPIC as Hemingway's Paris, some romantics proclaimed. The waft of realization was heady. The boys and girls were beautiful. It was photo-op heaven. Ambition and the outlaw urge pervaded. Salons sprouted in every spare room in the quarter, with the skyline as a backdrop. The Big Apple glittered on a horizon viewable from almost every rooftop, so close you could taste it. Neo-Bohemia MadCAP named it, Vogue put in on the Top Ten Coolest list, Newd parties brought voyeurs from Jersey, E, V, I & Gblogs, smart phones, inside jokes, BwiK got the complete soc-med avalanche treatment. When the Nets moved to Brooklyn, that sealed the deal. BK was a monstrous big worldwide brand, and Bushwick was its wild child. Andy heard crashes and thuds, as McTaggart did his whirlygig routine. Two cops in Deniluscent stormtrooper unis hoisting Brattapopperz were making their way briskly up St. Nicholas. Andy pressed a red button on his hip-i-cator, and McTaggart blew past him in a rush, disappearing into the shadows under the arti-treez lit like Xmas, lining the alley separating the block-long creative class tenaments of Troutman and Jefferson. The cops took up pursuit, chasing McTaggart's holo-version down Troutman toward Wyckoff. Andy stood and headed back to his pad. "Effin' performative." The BOS tour was the spectacle that best encompassed the best of Bushwick's exuberant DIY rebelliousness, especially when one juxtaposed it with the now-banal Chelsea markets and the corporatized pap peddled in the white cubes and black boxes of Manhattan proper. Bushwick was young and nuts and sexy. Manhattan was rich, old and limp. Where B-wick got trashy, Manhattan recycled. The Muse is not a luxury item. She favored Bushwick, and Bushwick revered her, worshipped her, sacrificed tens of thousands of American kids' dreams to her, and the Times wrote about Venice and Koons and Gago/Gaga. The pampered princes and princesses of the Ivory Tower couldn't be bothered or shook, and that was a blade that cut both ways on the other side of the river, in BK. Here, the artsy Dark Matter refrain was distributed between boisterous Fuck'ms and WTFs.

Ask any- and everybody how he or she is doing. BUSY. So busy. Crazy busy. Effing busy. Stupid busy. Andy hated and loved the loony pace, and hated it to, like everyone else. If you were into diversity, this was your kind of demo-swirl. B*Wow was an enclave of upended majority-minority mixes. If BlooBluds were still relatively scarce, immigrants from all the corners of the earth ruled the side streets. They were copious, of all colors, shapes and sizes, configurations and styles. Sirens wailed by the Rookery. Cop tanks mounted with bunker-rockahs patrolled Flushing and Cypress. At the border of Queens, the ethnic and class striations ranged from Chinese and other Asiatic gene pools, to the African diaspora, some Polynesians and plenty of representatives from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean island-nations, the Irish, the Central and South Americans, East Europeans, a few proud and scary holdout Italians, and loads of Creative Classers, from a spectrum of histories and bloodlines, the latter mostly occupying the rentals and converted warehouse-lofts. Andy stepped aside for a gang of Congolese oil tycs in a V wedge. Some W.A.S.Ps. The proverbial Melting Pot. Stir-fry. Gumbo. Whatever. All subject to "The New York Fist." All breathing the same shitty air. Plumes of dust rising from the huge concrete companies' fortified compounds. Fumes from a hundred thousand diesel engines, conjoining with a thousand-thousand-thousand other recognizable and unknown heinous odors from unidentifiable sources. All side-stepping in their glitzy footwear, expensive and not, puddles and rot and ooze. All puffing cigars, cigarettes and e-cigarettes, or, if non-smoking, grimacing and cursing at the smokers. All eyes darting to and fro, anticipating the next confrontation. All or mostly all striding from train stop to multi-locked door like gunslingers or streetfighters. This last attribute was generative of a grim and petty humor in some desperate circles, since the true predators could distinguish pretenders with ease. The whole population was armed to the teeth. Bloomberg failed. But because this was New York City, one was always on the lookout for the miraculous anomaly, the spontaneous gesture of warmth and kindness, the flash of eye-popping, jaw-dropping beauty, the freshest and most innocent expressions of unadulterated, -pilfered, -filtered, -disguised, -perverted, -besmirched, -sodden, -tainted love and joy. And they were there to be had. As Andy closed the door behind him, saying hi to the doorbot, he felt as much as heard the roar and rumble, as the charge lit and the explosion tore through the L at Jefferson like Smaug's immolating breath.

[Here's his journal entry from later that night]:

High Population Density. Dog-walkers. Mixed-use. The subtext was the old American tale of slavery, escape from bondage, forced migration, homogenization and forgetting. Property Uber Alles. Most of the worst of the gang-warfare, organized crime, random attacks and defacements, larceny and sex-for-sale had either moved deeper into the nethers or into other regions of the outer Boroughs. Still, the garbage reeked, the rats ran from pile to pile, the cockroaches survived. Broken auto-glass littered the ground. Gunfire sounded in the distance, and sometimes close by. Drunks and junkies wandered aimlessly, hollering at passersby and the sky. Punks lounged on weathered steps. Raucous, alien song blared from tinted-windowed customized roadsters and speakers mounted in windows. Bushwick still had "authenticity," according to the effervescent tourists. The Jews in black and white raced from meeting to meeting, caught up in the property boom and bonanza, although their minivans, beamers, Rovers and Mercedes comprised only a fraction of the opportunity-hunting racers' dodging each other and the cyclists, pedestrians, bikers and host of logo and graffiti-covered trucks clogging the barely navigable roads of the district. It was a Real Estate feeding frenzy, and it was strangling the nascent cultural happening in 9/11 + 10 Bushwick. Brooklyn was in most ways supplanting Manhattan as NYC's arts incubator, but the skyrocketing rents threatened almost immediately to destroy the flowering Borough's momentum, at a pace that made what transpired in SOHO, Chelsea or Williamsburg seem glacial. Like comparing Peckinpah action sequences to any CGI-enabled Spidey flick's. One heard grumbling about it everywhere, and the artists, writers, models, designers, apps inventors, websters, actors, comedians, poets, musicians, etc., who had colored the bleak cityscape of barbed wire, cracking stone, crime, poverty, malaise and desolation in Bushwick in luminescent hues, infusing the polyracial weave that was into a dynamic effulgence of convergent exigencies, an all-directional irruption of possibility, where already scattering. Some were moving upstate to Hudson or further. Some to Pittsburgh, Baltimore or Philly. Others were heading West, planting in dystopian Rust Belt cities like Detroit and Cleveland, or continuing to the Rockies' college towns, or even the Left Coastal asylums. Still others chose the Expat route, seeking solace abroad in Europe, especially Berlin, but also in Asia. Dubai for a minute had been promoted as a haven of free-flowing cash and prizes, but that dream had largely been dashed. But it was all bullshit, really. Austerity was smothering the artists of the EU. Look at Greece. The Mideast was a total clusterfuck, thanks to the neocons and the mad Jihadists. Russia was on the march. China was lurching toward empire again, aided and abetted by globalist cunts. The international plutocracy and corporate syndicates were blithely sucking the world dry, using tools like the derivatives and hedge markets and weaponized credit/debt regimes to subvert all reality-based exchange. These psychopaths (in their "real" and artificial personhoods) were leveraging their invented, imaginary "wealth" into a sustained wealth- and power-redistribution scheme, pulling off the most massive and extensive redistribution of wealth, from the bottom to the top, the planet had ever seen. The 1-.01-.001% were Hoovering anything not nailed down and simultaneously paying armies of mercenaries, politicians, managers and minions princely sums to keep the rest of humanity from hunting them down and hanging them from the tallest nearby vertical. Civilization was on the verge of collapse. Tribal peoples, and millions of species of Earth dwellers of all descriptions were facing extinction. The ecology of Earth was teetering, due to centuries of out of control extraction/exploitation regimens. Democracy, the Great Rainbow Hope, the bane of tyrants, bred in the fevered aspirations of bootleggers, buccaneers and wastrels, was limping on its last legs, co-opted and corrupted 1001 ways by its Hydratic enemies at home and abroad, leaving the unwashed masses to the neo-robber barons and their jack-booted thugs, thieves of every stripe and the carrion-feeders.

[...]