STRANGER IN THE UN-VERSE
when the sun shines / the pews empty / the indecipherable passages come to light / earth on its axis / inclining north / listens in to the news — Magali Rempel, The Assassination of Earl Brockley, Jr
This intervention was from the future, and from the beginning it sought a method by which the present was re-conditioned to influence the end. But that was all in the past now. Having signed for it, our future selves would resume with the client’s paperwork, but only after a meeting at the encampment, outside the network.
The beliefs of the era made for astonishing reading. Beliefs involved working out a strategy for how to order chaos. Just as in the beginning when there was no knowledge of what scripture went before, the deconstruction of beliefs was a future which enticed the past toward its end.
It was shown to us even by a bird: faith was beyond belief.
Mainstream life was marginalised, consigned to digging a tunnel through the realm of the factual. The logos had been removed, so a name was lip service paid to sounds with no descriptive content. It was all too obvious. The textual police were bound to protect their mates, but, fortunately, their docu-fiction was overawed by sensuality.
Taking to a remote region in the outer hemisphere, without the belief system of generally accepted falsehoods, and without any accompanying moral concerns, there was freedom from FreeDomination and the Party dictates.
Belladonna had seen through the religious art of lies. She knew her fiction would outlast culture.
The attention seekers had proven themselves pawns in a psychodrama of their own devising. They were immersed in fictional and factual stories based on pre-existing ideas about known social or political issues and ironic or poignant statements about the plight of humanity in relation to such issues. Humanity was a model of striving, a convenient accident caused by the social and political facts and ideologies that the seekers claimed held sway over all.
B was exiled, a free radical, a visitor from another planet. She eschewed the artificial stimulant of revolution. Surrounded by cowled figures bearing down over chapter and verse, she positioned herself on a bench and slowly drank in the icons before her.
The hypocrisy of a hollow man was spread abroad to illuminate the business of the unverse, where a biological entity had personhood when it was made into information. A new technology was developed to increase the production of livestock. A number of Egyptian sites were discovered, one several storeys high. Digital refugees were left behind by artificial intelligence, but whether or not the Party would allow it, learning would be accelerated by genetic editing. A strong market was estimated as economically sound.
B admired more carefree, gentle times when the household Teraphim, naturally free and easy with their utterances, guaranteed safety, security and future certainty. But all that was in the past.
On the Optimal Super-Domain Freecast, a query was resolved in one swift move. Some sectors were more susceptible than others. It may have seemed as though the attention seekers had entered the consumers’ rabbit hole to subliminally touch them, having risen from the ranks of the elite, but their origins were in some other, less remarkable and indistinct class of being.
At least one human being had a brain that would break out of its skull: the stranger. Rebellion was a must, not a game for factions.
The stranger’s journey to the sovereign un-verse was originally commissioned as a Zero-Core project. Its was to retrieve the land, water, sky, plants and animals stolen by Equipole and return them to the people, but before that could be done the military watchtowers had to be dismantled and the security cordons smashed. Along the way, many optical illusions pointing to the un-verse could be seen. Before passing the check point unnoticed, the stranger stepped into the gunmakers and purchased the requisite tactical weapons and ammunition. From thereon hacker technology redirected the feedback loop.
Full of coloured ink, the underground typewriter whispered lies gaslit by a ghost to the mutant envelopes.
“That’s what I want.”
There was a crown of roses around B’s head but she was unable to weep because there were no eyes in her head. She did not exist, of that I was sure. She did not exist. From a certain perspective the un-verse looked like a real world, but it was a sub dimension of an illusory world outside of reason or imagination, a purgatory controlled by self enamoured imposters. Lies were given substance to extract profit from their consequences, although no one believed them.
The Night of the Sabbath was “black as the pit from pole to pole”, and for the Lord Justice, unconquered territories gave every day a purpose.
“Hallelujah, they’ve got it.”
The Lord Justice was a big-time attention seeker. He sat at the head of the dining table and screeched through a megaphone about draughts, noise, the service, etc. His gospel was the gospel according to the body snatchers: those who work hard at the grave earn the right to be born again.
“Where’s the other paper? Someone must’ve taken it in.”
A man and a woman in smart-suits sat at a restaurant table. He slyly chuckled while she took a sip of her Daiquiri. They looked over at each other with blank expressions. As if in silent communion, an unspoken agreement occurred between them. They delivered a clunky dialogue, detritus of junk media, a sub-textual mix of the banal slogans of LogicNoTech and Social Bureaucrat Party policy.
Inhabitants of the un-verse worshipped and appeased beings just like them who they believed had rulership over them. The biological form was an item in an inventory, cut up into little pieces and measured out in exchange for food, clothing and shelter. Inhabitants of the un-verse cohered around a frantic desire to be seen to be supporting their representations and accepting the punishments meted out to them which were viewed as both a necessary evil and a special privilege. Although, some claimed they were opposed to their masters and tried to reason with them.
If I may be forgiven for saying, the un-verse was a topsy-turvy world. Things that were worthless were constantly evaluated to effect communication, as no communication ever took place unless its purpose and value could be calculated in advance and recorded. The un-verse had division and deprivation as guiding principles, so education, which was also supposed to have a purpose, was available only to the educated and in short supply.
Realising the fiction, I suppose, entailed Reality™ Immersion. It occurred to B that the techniques would come in handy, so she brushed up on what she’d learned at a weekend seminar she had attended at a 30-bedroom property in Syracuse fifteen years earlier when the simulation of the illusion had shown her to herself without the magnetic scar.
There was no reason for the un-verse to exist, so whenever the spooks awoke it was only to be seen to awaken in the eyes of some existential clown, in the face of a symbol of hell.
“Can't take my eyes off of you.”
Poetry was institutionalised in case it should draw attention to the state of permanent war. Poetry was personalised in case it should incite a general strike.
When the line between business and pleasure was erased, when futility was at its height, when the application of value to the valueless wore thin, the trade in numbers became a mockery of itself.
The Society of Watchers coalesced around a singular figure.
The corporate self had lightning speed Wi-Fi and infinite coffee. It had no agency except the protocol of narrative. When the absurdity of reward for the corporate self was put behind it, then it came to the fore and took great responsibility, took off its jacket, rolled up its sleeves and queued up for the anonymity of a cloakroom. Fundamentally, it was expectant of a messiah’s return.
“What will folks think of me?”
B was seeking an experience of another time and place unknown to her, never dreamed of and outside her experience, and the more she forgot how to find it, the closer it got. Mercury was rising. Placed under executive order of the antibody, the listener was rebalanced to demonstrate how to contain the battery. The indigenous box was blasted open, releasing the photon makers. Suddenly, escape artists were everywhere, and they had everything needed to cut the ropes.
The facilitator’s voice was urenusually high-pitched. Whispering, it commanded the next task for the group. B had joined late and noticed a Nepenthe representative she recognised from the FreeCast.
The voice was memorable: “To immerse oneself in Reality™, one must first learn invisibility.”
Later, B caught herself daydreaming in the role of the cipher.
The stranger withdrew from algorithmic synchronicity and forced the heads at gunpoint to imitate organic thought. What was there to believe? Even if they refused to march to their own tune, every pulse came uninvited. In the miniature world of the un-verse all personnel were revived cadavers, a macabre, long, curving procession from a mausoleum.
“The guardians are corrupt, the war is founded on lies, the King is evil, torture is rife, the healers are poisoners and executioners, the lawmakers are criminals. Life is intolerable.”
In the first wave of the atomic experiment the flask of elixir was placed inside the artificial meteors. Pandemonium ensued.
[Entering the new environment of the novel, I was nerve-wracked, on the threshold of a different set of non-genre-based codes. Typewriting in multicolour by an electric light, I suddenly went into a trance. In that environment, I had to rein in multiplicity with no exception and no debate, so I took the driverless model.]
When B arrived at the hotel the proprietor was in his night-gown, ranting and raving uncontrollably.
“Bring me that box of tablets over there.”
Returning to the garage, a young drug addict was playing another kind of mind game. Then at the squat the radio and television played at the same time.
Weighed down by St Clement’s anchor, the Lord Justice was drowned in a loch somewhere in Scotland.
Soon B would be invisible again, under the sea on her way to the encampment, that safe haven on the periphery of the vast artificial network of classifications where each appellation of another identity was nurtured by yet another illusion of a free market. Like a gleaming cipher of the attributeless, she was carried by the undertow, divested of self-volition and surrendered to the void.
Politicians were liars but veridical knowledge had nothing to do with propaganda. How could this happen in these canyons? The elixir of life was not a truth serum but motorbikes of a dominant blue, a trigger for foreign affairs.
At the boating lake, the stranger’s only sin was in neglecting to provide terrain position. There was no time, but under certain incantations mass hysteria could instead act as a location, so he attached wings to his left and right shoulder blades and voiced the fears and superstitions that were now the means of flight. Kissing the meadow in a torrent of bliss he got lost in a thundercloud. The array of units went peacefully. Now he could do anything he wanted.
It was on this day B “needed wisdom more than ever”, as she said to the half-naked junkie. They did not at first realise the significance of their paths crossing and underestimated the impact of their presence in each others’ lives.
Word went out there was a killer at large. Strange colours of mysterious flares signalled the febrile intelligence of death. All the law-abiding attention seekers were suddenly altogether looking up at the monitors planted in the public square.
Eventually, B found herself back at the encampment, but on her mind was that place she had awakened in some nights earlier next to a limitless advertisement for the Apparatus that reached up to the heavens.
The flourishing of these wonders was at the atomic level. There were colours and notes of certain cycles that could never be retouched. This was the heliotropic key to eternity that revealed the essence and non-essence of life.
Back in the cage, the reptilian brain’s eyes grew dim and heavy. Wishes and wants were medicine to eliminate pain. No-one could make an argument that was easy to follow. The tech giant, LogicNoTech had tricked the clients.
“Everything seems clear. We don’t really see any ethical problem.”
An unknown aeroplane plunged into the sea from a high orbit, a sacrifice from behind a locked door. Undertaking the ambition to persist and entertaining the submission to resistance, like some side-show phony, the anti-hero stranger turned the high powered rifle with demoniacal power towards the X that marked the spot.
The chandelier took on a radioactive quality that made the attention seekers more impatient than ever as they turned to mute stone. Mass hallucinations confused the robot analysers. Under the flickering shadows their cowled figures writhed as their instruments were impossible to control.
At the landing zone the snack bar rippled with life. But the stranger would be gone in the morning.
Mediated selves were reproduced at a diabolical rate to fill quotas set by the bargaining chips, but no two scientists could agree. Psychology wasn’t science. Science was pseudoscience. It pretended to be political when it was under the spell of the military consumerist complex.
The manufacturers transmitted endless background noise, old news reels enhanced (nostalgia), muzak appropriated (lounge jazz), highly repetitive.
After a little cat and mouse game, the crows chased the calculator out of the laboratory.
The synthetic world furnished us with the solemn vows of the custodians of the Quotidian sacrament, the ruler of hearts first primed by the somnambulent call and the utopian taste of paradise.
“How can I use it?”
The stranger was asked how they got away with it. They answered quickly words to the effect that the un-verse was the place where YOU was a psycho-social experiment, an object subject to THEY. The administration was the ultimate poison.
Narrative was opposed and revealed its flaws, fictional and factual, but in its refusal of literary shtick, anti-narrative was inscrutable and beyond comprehension. It would resist and dismantle narrative whenever it was relevant or irrelevant. Good or bad, the stylistic object would not disappoint. Its cool discoveries would return attendance to the household of heartfelt articles and the impenetrable order made accessible to all and sundry.
The sensual propaganda was obscene and violent. Acquiescing to the barrage of interference, the unearthing was continuously going forward, delving inside and de-programming yet another fictional character.
A top-level, well-heeled client in the chat bar was virtually present as YOU by default, like a concept or a theme in the investigation of personal identity, a technology of wit, a non biological intelligence that would protect the biological. The matter of identity had multiple alternatives but whoever authenticated it could never reach the touchstone of the imitation machine, the machine that would ultimately do away with all instructions.
“If never is our future then we still have time for romance.”
New prophecies were made and old ones came true. Finally, there was a satisfactory explanation for the reason for existence.
by A.A. Walker
A. A. Walker is a Scots-Irish writer and performer based in London, UK. He is the author of 'Licentia' published by Thin Man Press.