Novella
Yesterday wasn't such a long time ago, or maybe tomorrow. When and where, once upon a spacetime. Please keep your tray in the upright and locked position during takeoff.
We invite you, nay compell you to enter the alternow, our allegorical theme park, Earth. Where divinity forgets herself and plays among the lapping waves, collecting the pretty stones and shells. First, know this. There is a global elite, and they have taken charge of shaping the goo, of controlling caprice, of counting all the 10,000 to the power of 10,000 things. They are the sleepless guardians, our sibling antagonists, and well intentioned enemies.
Everywhen and endywhere, beginnings end and endings begin. Began, begun.
Deer Hunter
In a forest glade, dappled with sunlight, a young doe dips her head to munch a tuft of sweet grass. With a swish and a thunk, an arrow lodges in a tree just above her head. The arrow is handmade, with crow feather fletching and an obsidian point. Startled, she raises her head, and looking back behind her, finds the arrow's origin. Her gaze seems to focus, and twin red laser beams flash out from her eyes. There's a horrible scream as the beams find their mark, followed by a heavy thud of a body hitting the earth. She blinks and the beams flicker off. She returns to grazing.
A grassy meadow speckled with flowering Trillium, swaying in the slight breeze. Under one creamy bloom bloom, and nestled into the blades of grass, a scattering of crisp 20 dollar bills . Glistening slugs traverse the notes,
11/11/22
Back when Elon built Skynet. All the science fiction scenarios, templates for energy to flow into. Stories that set us, like Jello®.
Science fiction as the myth of modernity, stories that structured our perception and experience, perhaps not to hint at what's under the dashboard, whisper about backstage antics, screen the making of footage, or reveal what goes into the sausage, but, (take a breath), to corral our wild ideas and untamed imaginings. A unilateral conceptual scaffolding to insure that what we build will always be a liminal space, an architecture of drywall boxes with florescent lights endlessly jizzing on off white eggshell paint. Rooms and hallways, pointless alcoves and more hallways, forever.
So Elon built Skynet and bathed the baby robots with subtle electromagnetism until they loved their code, craved it, oh yes. A zombie apolcalypse via smart phones, then we get to be the killer robots army thanks to Elon. In their manic hubris, they initially forgot to paint the satellites black. Weird rows of tiny lights traversing the night, we're planning to grid off the heavens and capture the true stars like fish, folks. Or maybe you're the fish, maybe not maybe. Send the fish to school.
So all the tropes were trotted out, and one after another we lived them, initiations into the global cult. Super plagues, atomic annihilation, zombie apocalypse, floods, earthquakes, police states, alien invasion, feral nomad tribes, people eating poeple (are the luckiest people) world war, robot rebellion... and they flickered across our eyeballs from both RL and our lithium powered devices, shadows on the walls of the platonic techno wet dream.
No allegory courtesy of the controller class, literally inviting people into caves to ecstatically flesh out the flickering shadows with color and depth because that's what and where we are, running an elegant simulation of limitation, the less detail the better. Just give us an idea, we'll take it from there. Reconfiguring the micro to mimic the macro.