lights out

Although no resource is unfit for, or impenetrable to, the devious and foul telephasic approaches of the Sforzans, and no situation is too grave to give way to their well-established hubris, they are surely not aware of the wisdom of the poet Horace, whose dictum should be registered in an untampered state by their vampiric anti-energies: "You can drive out nature with a pitchfork," he said, "but she will always come back." Though this regeneration may take hundreds of Earth Years, it is as necessary as laughter in the gloom.

So it is that they make 'appearances' from remote locations, adapting what they can, drawing energies back to source and generating recombined varieties, most of which are highly unintelligible and not yet of much use in bolstering the empty promises of their prime objective: "Nothing awaits discovery". Indeed, they have not upgraded the discharge signals for many years; and this in the firm if not dilatory hope that, in a not too distant future, they will understand, or rather control, all energy, all sources, all of everything and, most importantly, all of nothing - for they are convinced that nothing will cease to exist as such once its mechanisms are within their grasp. This bizarre commonplace of pushing the boundaries of nothing, as Dr Chow will tell you, is no more than an empty concept, since they make something of nothing in their quest for power over all beginnings and all ends. Thus, in assaulting nature with that metaphoric pitchfork, they reap a harvest of illusion from an empty field.

"No such thing as nothing," insists Dr Chow: "Nothing is nothing therefore nothing is not not nothing," as he confuses the team and invokes a reprimanding scowl from his daughter J0nni, who adds: "To make some thing into nothing you must prove it by making it re-appear. Like a magic trick." The two brothers follow this line of persuasion, and Brother Bill adds warily, "Like Phillips." But Dr Chow is not content to leave his daughter with the last word on the matter and says in a hoarse voice, "Every thing is some thing and some things are closer to nothing than any concept of nothing could possibly describe. There are no descriptions. It is impossible!" And with that he coughs as if to provide adequate proof of the existence of the irritating nature of the inhaled djinn weed particle.

Yet, for all that, the Sforzans do conduct a very fine stage performance, and it is their impending appearance that has the two brothers excited by the prospect of their first shut-down. A shut-down is the equivalent, in terms of verifiable mind activity, of a lights-out operation blanketing a city during an air raid.

Undiscomfited by the distant glow-worm flashes peeling back the grey and pink-tinged twilit sky, the elder Chow nods and says, "It is time." He is about to accompany himself with another short ramble, but is checked by an intense stare from Jonni's black eyes, for the images reflected in these announce the arrival of the sky-dragon lightning show.

The old fellow is slower to shut down the necessary circuits than he used to be, but much faster than the new arrivals to the highly-situated valley residence. "It's as well they cut us in on the deal ..." says Brother Paul. Once shut down, the Sforzan light show is a kind of sky-theatre - even to those kitted out with the circuits necessary to zero out the illuminated evil of those evasive beings; no empathy, no symbiosis.

Pull Diamond Belly Tight Push Slack

J0nni Chow could feel a faint and familiar tickle in her twitching nostrils. Petite and strong, J0nni was a delightful girl about 400 years old with dark black curly locks and black cat-eyes. Naturally inclined beyond her in-built waveform information analyser, she realised that the ship had landed in a Sforzan waste-crater. She began to perform some kind of breathing ritual, thinking in ideograms and generating a chi-driven sound effect from her throat. Sure as the sun rises, she was giving unseen substance an unseen form. And it was real enough, though situated internally, real data solid as any of the mind's phantoms or platforms. "Real. Arial. E-the-real. Thee-re-al. Ee-rial. Eeeerie-ality. Etcetera," her father Dr Chow had mused as he smoked on his ancient brass djinn weed pipe and blew out another overplayed joke, a kind of exhaust that might choke the more flattened of the senses. He had taught J0nni how to use her head and belly, how miniature air channels connected them; how to discharge chi sub-particles along these. "Techno-viscera", he said, "Are different and need to be treated with respect - Applicable to anything my little one", and trailed off into indulgent laughter. "To call you transhuman is a cheap trick," he told J0nni, "And won't break your circuits. Ha. You're too young too sensible to become some phoney alter-ego. Believe me, my little one, even the smell of Sforzan evil will not mess with you." And he showed her how to use a breathing technique to generate a magnetic field around her breath. "Pull diamond belly tight push slack," he would advise, over and over until the words looped like a koanic mantra in the bewildered girl's head. Controlling the dizziness with concentrated breathing, J0nni pulled it off; - and more: her father's pipe came flying out of the lips that had secured and savoured it. J0nni lost her concentration and the pipe dropped from the magnetic bowl which, until that moment, had embraced the artefact in its field. J0nni Chow is a gentle kid who, brimming with monkish capabilities, knows very well how to look after herself; she is driven by a young, flexible mind and the assenting, proud smiles of her father. Only 20 years after the magnetic breath success, J0nni first deglyphed the crusty light-emission signals from Sforzan illuminated waste; I say 'waste' only in that the elusive Sforzans had no further use for it; - or so it was thought by Dr Chow until his daughter had begun to unravel the difficult inner circuits of adulthood when she was 250 years-old, showing signs that she was something very special: it was 150 years ago that J0nni first began to suspect that the Sforzan waste-craters - dotted with random colours that flickered and glowed under a heavy winter sky - were in fact time-trenches, which could be put to good use if only more code could be assembled from the rthythm fragments. Though the strange language failed her father, J0nni's head often swam in disconnected rhythms and waveforms which she instinctively knew could be run through the alien-languages de-bugger for analysis. She had tinkered with the de-bugger, much to her father's amazement, and had managed to integrate her circuits with an old puddle-jumper of a spaceship whilst leaving her body - young and undeveloped as it was - in a semi-conscious trance. And now that she had landed with that pair of misfits, she could get back inside herself where it was more comfortable and warm."Machine too cold, " announced Dr Chow. "Not enough slack." Both of them were waiting for Brothers Paul and Bill to come round. Paul groaned as he came round. "Water ... Wha wa water ..." But he was overcome with fumes, for he had landed at the bottom of a crater in a shallow cesspool of what smelt like the skip-juice of disposed supermarket food. Although it was fishy, the sea that had been there before they landed had dried up. The good doctor hastened with J0nni to lift Brother Paul out of the shit. The illuminations were like Xmas lights and Brother Paul, disposed towards such simple pleasures, had begun drifting, as the sea itself had done. They dragged him to the top of the crater where the spaceship was and tied him into a yogic knot - a recovery position that serves many healing purposes - then went to fetch the other party, who had fallen asleep in the ship still trying to buckle himself out of his seat. When they came to, they saw a 10-year-old girl performing a strange breathing exercise along with with a middle-aged man. Both appeared to be an orietal-caucasian mix. The man was muttering, "Pull diamond belly tight push slack pull diamond belly tight push slack pull diamond ..."  Then, as if exhausted by the mantra, he stopped, smiled at his daughter, and lit his pipe in a direction away from J0nni's breath. "Welcome to our humble abode. You will come with us please." As they made their way to the mountain, the doctor continued to pull on the djinn weed pipe and, speaking just above a mutter, said: "Harmony of spheres disrupted, water evaporated wavelength by wavelength. Happen to you too if you don't defend yourself against Sforzan waste deposits. Sea returns in 15 years. We have time to make masters of you both. 15 years is enough."

A Short Chapter on Sforzan Exodynamics

The transruptor technique, long favoured by the Sforzans, is used to enhance and virtually enlarge sub-atomic stuff, pumping auras into suitable life-supporting environments. A whiff of evil accompanies this horrid expansion, which sees a slow and almost tedious rolling-out of sheer encroachment. It's sound that alters the atomic configuration of the Sforzans; an ugly screech, jealous of silence. In the smallprint recesses of the Sforzan mind, power is assumed over energies and airwaves; emerging voltages hum and hang, sparking off etherial lights with a phosphorescent scent, like an animal pissing it's signature into the freshly begrimed air. While the smell is unbearable, the Sforzans light up quite beautifully. Sforzan metaphysics holds that formlessness is the first form, a form in itself, a self-verifiable 'invisible' signature. The Sforzans have adapted to, and evolved into, once-strange formless frequencies, using them to generate the glow of their exodynamic surfaces. They use frequencies as a plant uses oxygen; but such comparisons are beyond their ken, and they don't care much for living things as we humans do. A little bobbing wagtail, for example, would be braindead in an instant, its functions assaulted by the Sforzan smell; larger animals succumb only to disorientation and need to be held captive to be slowly drained of their mind's power, as is the case with the good Doctor Phillips, friend of our heroes, who are now back in Earth Time and on his trail.  

sea later sea earlier

"For Chrissake Bill! Pull yourself together will you!?" Brother Paul is sweating, shuddering. "Fucking re-entry. Hold on tight ..." I'm still drowsy. The heat and the shudders bring me round a bit. We survive reentry, though I miss most of it. "That episode you've just gone through wasn't time travel," he says. "You drifted into a trance. You inhaled too much Sforzan phosphor back in the capsule. Causes hallucinations etcetera. The pull of Earth Time execerbates these incidents. Anyway, you missed a grand explosion." I'm still dazed. "The pill," I say. "The pill," he says: "was to counteract the narcotic influence of the phosphor ... you know that salt? It was there all right. A sure signal that the Sforzans had manifested a presence of sorts on their way to our beautiful planet. When the phosphor went up with the station the shockwave collided with Earth Time and your head was shocked into overdrive. It's all recorded. You can play it back later ... Or earlier ... Considering where and when we're about to land. But now I suggest you brace yourself. "I need coffee," I hear myself think. An electronically enhanced voice says: "Out of coffee."  Paul says, "It's hardly worth introducing J0n. That machine runs out of everything ... including time. Concentrate on the big blue sea ahead. When we hit it J0n'll see to it that we shift." This is too much. From one trauma to the next. "I need a rest." Then the realisation ... J0n announces, "20 seconds. Out of coffee. Try relax. Coffee no good. 15 seconds to impact. Calibration check. 15 years. 10 seconds to otherwhen. 15 years. No coffee ..."  I don't know how I manage it: "OK. We get the fucking idea! See you in another life J0n ..." Too late. Splashdown. Splashwhen. Exotic fish in accelerated reverse cycle, whirling colours melting trip-like, taste of salt, smell of ancient phosphor, transitional slow motion decay, restorative luminescence. Paul's hair turns black. J0n says, "Welcome home. Impact successful. Coffee supplies good. Also reverse-matured whisky. Uisge-beatha, water of life. Harness useful by-produced energy. Hot toddies dispensed. Good for re-orientation. Travel expense claims invalid, leave cancelled. Timesplash successful. All channels open. Have a nice drink a nice trip. See later. See earlier. Out."

Otoliths # 23 now live

You can find this excellent on-line zine here. My own contribution here - in keeping with the space fiction project.

episode 2

Before leaving the station I receive a package of surveillance insects. It can only be from Mega Inc. They monitor your every move 'til you cough up the debt; hence their over-inquisitive 'reminder'. They found out I'd arranged to sell the station for scrap, and I owe them about 10 years rent. Anyway, the surveillance flies are out as soon as you sign for the parcel and then you're in bother. This is how to deal with the flies: you distract their circuits with the insect hum of a paradox mantra, then moving in for the kill, you accompany the mantra with the resounding thwack of a rolled-up wad of dot matrix reports. I'm just in the process of splatting the last of a consignment of 20 when there's an unannounced clunk from the docking area. Mega Inc must have issued the Space Police a warrant. The hatch opens and, armed with a wad of deadly paper, I see a shock of grey hair; it's Brother Paul, come to take me back to Earth. He opens the hatch and steps in: "Looks like your getting jittery on the old delusional parasitosis again. Come on, let's get the fuck out of this shithole ..." There are reports scattered everywhere. I never did get to tidying up very much before I took ill again but, delusional or not, I've learned how to take the little bastard drones out in style. "Time for some real action," says Paul, "But we need to hurry - I passed a copcraft on the way here." Suddenly the thought of some real action excites me and lifts me out of the incarceration-induced atrophy. The space sickness dissolves in Earth Time. "They can have their fucking station but they're not getting any rent." He hands me an Equi pill, saying, "Take this." I drop it gratefully down my burning throat, then say, spluttering like a defunct bot, "Thanks. I'm looking forward to the trip and seeing the doc again ..." and break into a hot cough. He says, "Don't forget our date with the Sforzans." How could I forget, I remind him with a glance, then ask, "What plans do we have for taking out their etherial circuitry?" He'll tell me, he says, on the way ...

report

the office was broken into recently. one of my posts was stolen by some new kind bug that works a bit like a denial of service attack but more insidious leaves a trace of a trace of a trace, regressive generations of 'traces' spiralling off in a sub-sinister spiral scratch, into stuff that never flattens out. i've been farting around for a while tracking the source of the mischief. the stats office is the first place i look. stats are dumped everywhere, and there is far too much salty deposit to sift through. on the way out i walk through them, crunch of autumn leaves. overcome with an info trance i enter the cog infiltration dept. and sure enough the numbers come crunching into my head, a swoosh of diagrams and filters, cells creating a denial of logic (which is the same thing as logic) and a migration of information back to the source of the spiral noise transporter. an old friend, who has been more or less loyal and honest, calls me and thinks that it is too dangerous here, with so many abstractions and crunch, the one who told me that phillips has been kidnapped by a small group of elite sforzans. the'll probably try decode him. nasty creatures, even the weakest of them can make a diagram out of a human mind in no time. we need to rescue the doc before he breaks down under the heat. smell of burning salt. out.

from here to obscurity

my dear friend,

the lottery ticket, the map to your safety, has been intercepted by a wave of self-satisfied sub-plots devised by hubristic faustian entities; & this has highlighted the contours of alien elements which appear in an illuminated manuscript under the weight of faded braille glyphs. some migrant spots of intelligence from long lost reports have found their way home & only the architectural exuberance of a strayed thought can restore the ancient lights and recover them from their obscure stellar organisation. necromantic documents are slow to brave the wind. no mere code, they will position themselves in an actively predetermined swing towards that non-immutable stuff whose vagueness is as indeterminate as a whisper of light. the weight of this strange geography will then give way to an even stranger boardroom, where rumours of dreams seep from the stuffing of the leather seats & a door gapes open as grief crawls slowly towards its realisation. a cold wind closes in on ghosts whose only conspiracy is that they exist at all. a word of warning: no sword nor bullet nor rattan stick can find their ghastly shapes as they merge in the haze of their temporal chaos.

as ever,

dr phillips

news reports have been phased out due to a malfunction up here. & oxygen supplies are getting low. my old friend dr phillips has provided hints above as to a method by which a return to a precise location on earth might be possible. but his obscurity of vision is proving to be a blight on my senses & the malfunctioning decryption machine means that there is no way to decipher his anomalous and unrealistic nonsense, which i fear is the result of some ungraspable drift of mind. lottery ticket? it has expired & has never been checked. its numbers are faded. why does he mention weapons to me when he knows very well that they are banned from this space station? if there are ghosts to contend with, has he forgotten the cold cruel steely squeals of the spacetime parasites? but there is no way of replying to him until i get back to earth. if i dream my way back i will be in danger of becoming a ghost myself & i'm not sure he would be any help if that were to happen. if i conspire with them they will take me away & lock me up in their ghastly boardroom with nothing but draughts & rumours for company. in which case, i may as well stick it out here ...

otoliths #21

is live. my own contribution here. these are two pieces of space fiction and second, journal entry, can also be treated as an entry here - as far as the chronological sequencing of the space fiction project goes.

loud noise permeates cosmos, says nasa (link)

this could be due to a number of things, including: an angry deity; feedback from planet earth coz of all the noise; a black hole going thru its spin cycle like a washing machine; aliens trying to warn us to get off the planet. but the cosmic noise is more than likely caused by the staff here at the orbital Hypoetics office, who have been partying non-stop since the xmas break ...

call this one nostalgic redux. this post [from 9/1/09] doesn't need edited at all. i'm sifting through the ruins on a slow tidy-up - unhindered by the pavlovian excitement of parasitic hyperspace entities. the blog is now reduc[x]ed to under 100 posts, beginning with this one - which wasn't the originally at the beginning at all & is now far from it. call it time-travel of sorts: propelled from 9/1/09 to 25/2/11 & not showing as a new post. Q: so why post & then later delete or emend invisible posts? A: time-travel is crucial to experiment & experiment is an ongoing process - filling the hypo-archives, maybe for even more experimentation. it's a bit like freezing a body - a corpus of wired writing - until a wee feather drops from the ornithological borg, an unwired phoenix ... but this will bore you, if you have any sense at all. the 'experiment' has now reached an excavatory phase, a moment where spacetime needs to be breached - where depressed etchings need resurfaced like a layer of spacefog - recorded in a strange gas with no clue as to how the line was arrived at in the first place. the post title is unmemorably pertinent too. the experiment's new phase is not just timespace excavation: it's an exercise in noise-reduction - a listening exercise. it's very quiet up here without the clones & that helps with this kind of project work - even though i miss the souls. but i can't leave until the station's been dug up, cleaned up & mopped up. when i say 'dug up', i don't mean it literally - taking things at a literal face value means that you are just at the surface of things. nevertheless, i do intend to give the floors a good going over. there is to be nothing but metal for the scrap merchants. & when that's done, it's back to earth. which could all take longer than anticipated - unless i can find a better mode of time travel than mere scribbling. but it will just have to do for now, 'til the results of the project are properly bound in a mini capsule made of this very station's - when it is finally condemned - made of it's compressed hull & bowels & fired off into the archives.

third life zombies caught up in great bin conspiracy

third-life death tax zombies are having their cores rekindled & are being meted out to voluntary placement positions as ice nitrogen miners on the 'blushing dwarf' planet, pluto. because they are accustomed to lengthy sleeps in the cryonics underworld at temperatures of -196C, & because they are technically well-designed for the task in hand, there are no fears for their brain tissue - which has been carefully engineered to incapacitate 'synaptic disorder'; - that is: normal cortical activity, or the intellectual rigours of cunning. their space suits keep some of the chill out from that cruel nitrogen atmosphere; & they're kitted out & modified for the task, moving & floating around as zombies tend do - slowly & deliberately, meditatively drifting towards & away from points of intellectual precision; shamefully though, their cortices are running at a peep, making it difficult & highly unneccessary for any doctor of the Institute of Transhuman Affairs to make an in-depth assessment; though the Institute does make a case for the 'content running order' of these miner zombies: "we give them life forever," said the PR manager, "& give them happiness too ..." but there are many who regard this as exploitation; one conspiracist says: "just because these guys are double-reanimated & dumbed down, doesn't mean that it's for transphilanthropic reasons. the Institute applies slow regression techniques during & after the defrost; then they use the zombies to fulfil the Institute's part of a contract with the Interplanetary Council to generate revenues from the rubbish taxing system. these guys don't get paid. neither do the pluto workers, but for them it's out of sight out of mind as a preference, stuck on a remote planet where it's impossible for energy to be extracted with the excessive haste of fast-moving, money-churning chaos; but the matter at hand is that there are troops of the freaks on the streets - 'monitoring' bins for the wrong kind of previously unrecyclable rubbish - at the behest of the latest by-law which supposes, in an indirect kind of way, that everything has a value & an energy to extract. & the borg drones are unhappy about the fact that they're being being supplanted by 'non-living things' & 'redeployed' without being asked." many drones claim, with an instinctive lack of precision, to be more zombie-like than the zombies; they're adamant that insect surveillance is not for them; that they are designed neither for, nor with, such precision; & that they enjoy very very cold climates too, because it suspends them in the planetary cool of a slow-working, unmean environment. tax-payers are also unhappy. "these bin zombies," says a disgruntled Earth resident, who claims that the poor creatures are making too many incursions into the rubbish, "are very confused. & instead of seeking refuge they seek refuse & go hiding in the bins from what they regard some kind of postbiological takeover. this is just paranoia. some of the binrakers are delusional enough to claim to be part of a neighbourhood trashwatch conspiracy to bring about a return of the good old decent undead with uninhibited, unconditioned cortices firing away at full steam."

i've applied to have our old tin can in orbit trashed as official space junk sometime in the near future. it costs a fortune to lease & it's due to expire at a mystically uncertain date. i'm still tidying up after the clones, who are surprisingly messy. the above post is revised from the version of 14/2/10 (now deleted). & i'm getting zombie-writing-practice in to boot - without unnecessary interference, white noise from the big bang etc. the previous version was: notational & synthetic, loosely absorbing & emitting strangeness, absurdist & satiric (as usual), impulsive, racey, unfinished (which i don't mind - being of the opinion, daft or no, that there is no such thing as finished). the above: heavily edited, stretched, clarified, realised, tho still drifting into the absurd. the satiric you should take for granted. i'll probably re-post more soon. this is partly because i don't plan to put out any more fresh posts; & partly because i'm almost as impulsive a revisionist as i am (or was) a manic purveyor of notational routines based on news reports.

clonesick & out

hypoetics is going into suspended animation. the clones have overworked their poor little brains into a state of hypertrophy & exhaustion, & their cortices have been expanding & stretching for several years with useless information & homesickness. maybe this is a design flaw; but it is one that overwork has exacerbated, & for this i must take responsibility. i sent them home on the last shuttle & i'm happy to report that they survived the fearful heat of re-entry. i'll tidy up & follow them. when i say 'tidy up', i mean tidy up the blog in a curious moment of reflect, ransack & recycle. a polishing-up for the sleep. anyway, the station's lease is up soon. &, to be gracious in my honesty, there were indications - quite a while ago - that my colleagues had gone & inadvertently shifted their poor minds into hypercortical overdrive. but i ignored the signals & put it down to homesickness & classical angst. now i feel a terrible gravity-defying guilt hanging over the station, looking over my shoulder & sharing reports with me. i intend to settle down in the countryside with the clones & cats & dogs & an assortment of farm animals. the good air & the robustness of labour will help restore our strengths, which have weakened with so many years & long working hours spent on our sedentary & sore arses. the most exercise we had: when the gravity-machine broke down; given the age of our station & equipment, we were surprised this didn't come down like a major issue. once the clones are in a fit enough state, they can oversee the farm while i put all my writing energy into a novel which i hope to see bound in paper & maybe in digital dust as well. time will tell. thanks for all the visits. love from orbit, x.

detumescence @ zero g

a 1950s housewife hitchhikes an acid trip on a greek bulldozer, crashes through a toll-booth just by the red planet, swallows a solar system & suddenly finds herself on route to the M87. she's now a zero g cat, observing detumescent missiles (made in taiwan) as they bend into the biggest of black holes in stereo.

K organism wakes up after 34,000 years in salt

as K awoke one fine morning he found his work transformed into a dream-romance investigated by undercover cops disguised as shadows. also on the cops' caseload: the earth-wobbling return of the mammoth, 5000 years in hiding; & the evolution of mr fox who, by accident, exacts revenge on the would-be perpetrator of his death - by pulling the trigger of his assailant's gun. 'like a dog'. with a bad limp. or a snake, the 13th member of the zodiac who can neither affirm nor deny the trials of K as he manhandles the question: is he strong enough to remove a wheelbarrow of oily gunk from a cornish beach or pick up where an organism left off 34,000 years ago? which ancient organism, once buried alive in salt, now has kids. the salt has not had charges brought against it.

narrow beams discovered in the consciousness storm of a drifting satellite

electrons rising. image courtesy of NASA

electrostatic discharge took out a drifting telecomms satellite, brought down the space elevator (which doesn't yet answer service calls), the roman empire & several trees. rising & falling to the occasion, a sound swells & recedes deep in the wood. during thunder storms, streams of antimatter are 'launched into space in narrow beams'. software patches have been applied to the satellite, which has now recovered consciousness.