He finished his monologue, frantically asking more of me than I can provide. I waited a moment then responded, “Not sure, man. Want to go get some food? I’ve heard good things about that cute cafe we passed on the way out of town. What was it called? ‘Supulax Yunlaxthi’s’? Something like that? That touristy place that floats above the Furnace Sandfall. A hearty meal sounds good right now.”
I was not trying to upset him, but I also wasn’t sure how to explain the Resemblance to Ttott (pronounced "ta ta uh ah ta tuh"), the astounded man. He continued to stare at me. I knew he wasn’t lying about a single word, not only because of the truth commitment of his species, bound by truth within the technology of their clothing, but I could also see blue raindrops balled up on his goggles, which corroborated his story. In fact, the blue rain had changed his entire appearance since I last saw him that morning when I left for the Ion Sphinx. Previously, his skin was white as a cloud, as was his short sleeved ~Truth Teller Blouse~. Now, splotched and tainted in cyan, more blue sky than white cloud.
And I wondered to myself, “Once the blouse is tainted, can he lie? Are the bonds of ~Truth as Father~ broken?” But then again, I doubt the clothing is more than a symbol. He looked mad at me. He was about to speak. I interjected to ask, “This might be weird, but can you take the truth shirt off?”
His eyes opened wide, wider than before, wider than I thought was physically possible, and he pulled back his protective ~Truth Trilby~ in a gesture that I did not fully understand. The astounded man seemed overwhelmed by his astonishment. Or was this moment veering away from surprise and now pushing him into the territory of indignant offense? I couldn’t help myself because I thought it would be funny to see the pure white of his chest in contrast with the dyed blue of his rain-soaked arms.
He was mad at my last question and worked up about the fact that I casually strolled in and out of a sacred place, the action of which is anathema to his bioreligiosity. He was further furious that the aforementioned sacred Sphynx rewarded me by healing my injured leg.
"Are you mad at me?" I asked him.
It's a faux pas to ask one of his kind about how they're feeling. For his kind, it's a blatant fact that no being fully knows their feelings, so any response to how they feel necessitates a lie. I wasn't thinking before asking. He wasn’t used to such a question and impulsively responded with a lie. "No! I'm merely asking you questions!" A moment of panic flickered across his face. He clearly was mad at me. He lied about that, and then immediately realized it and realized he was doomed.
The Ion Sphinx opened its mouth and sent laser bees to null out Ttott's existence once he was tainted with the virus of ~Malevolent Untruth~.
As Ttott died, I thought about the onomatopoeia differences between me and Ttott. I’d describe the multiple stabbings as sounding like “tschee tschee”. But I know he wouldn’t have described it the same way. We were hearing the same thing. He’d have called it “cliss cliss” or something ridiculous. Can’t his kind hear “tshee” like me? Our worlds are strange but our words are stranger. The laser bees tschee-scheed across his skin, gashing, slicing, hitting veins, several severed, some severe.
I don't know why the Sphynx dictated that Ttott had to die and meanwhile I walked into its eye without fanfare. Not to mention that I frequently lie. In fact, someone caught me in a lie, broke my leg out of anger when they found out, and that was the only reason I limped towards the Sphynx to begin with. Laser sand Ionic bees didn't eviscerate my flesh like they did to Ttott's. I guess his bond truly was sacred, like he said. Did his religion precede reality? I feel a little lost, thinking about it. I could do what he could not do, because I don’t believe what he believed, and I got away with it, in spite of (or because of?) the fact that I do not care about the invisible dictums of the Ionic Sphynx. Rules are rules even if you don't know them (I know very few rules here (but I don't usually care (everyone's going to die sometime (I feel this way about my life, at least—but I [grieved-grieve-will grieve] Ttott)))).
How nasty it is that someone could die for so little. And that trivial accidents kill us every day. And that someone like me is alive when pristine patient pious people perish.
I barely knew Ttott but started feeling the weight of grief for the first time in years. I still feel guilty that I thought of onomatopoeia while watching his gruesome death. On the other hand, my brain took mercy on me with this distraction. 3 of his people solemnly arrived within an hour of his end, barely glancing at me, reinforcing their core belief that his death was his responsibility and his alone. I, on the other hand, know I directly precipitated his untruth. The 3 beings wore the pure white, untarnished clothing of truth, just as Ttott wore before the dyes of Pyunalush's storms stained his blouse, trilby, and pantaloons bright blue.
Later, when I got to the cute cafe for my wholesome meal, I ate something flavorless and then, unsatisfied, pointed aimlessly at the menu for more. The pre-colonial mechanized server brought me three colored beakers of liquid. A hornet-shaped being next to me had the same order. I watched it pour the red beaker into the yellow, wait, and then pour that mixture into the blue. It sizzled then calmed. The hornet drank and shivered with delight, then picked up a scroll to read the local news. I did the same with my beakers. The hornet watched me do this. Was it amused by my actions, hoping to witness me die if I drank what it drank? Such lawlessness in this world. When I drank the concoction, it burned my throat. The mechanized server vocalized, “This slow release is calmer than instant dose”, somehow in my mother’s voice, then wheeled away.
I felt the trance take ahold. It subdued all impulses and the sounds pinpoint-faded to a muted wobble as all thoughts vanished except “how could I survive an instant dose, how could anyone survive an instant dose, unless it was species specific but why would they serve this to me if I was clearly an incompatible being, but maybe they are used to euthanasia as much as pleasantries and pleasure”. I typically walk and run and shout and eat and defecate and sleep with Time as my constant companion, but I left her behind. I was in a perpendicular pocket and my parallel persona was perplexed. All my senses amorphic or gone. Yes, gone, in a chrysalis and replaced with new software to absorb the noumenon of the world as tingles underneath my tongue as a language I learned after years in a university I simultaneously invented within the hallucination to cope with the fact that no time has passed, and I never step foot in a classroom, yet I [know-knew-will always know] that I learned a new language via a new sense instinctively and instantly. Tongue as eyes that feel flavors and sense the ubiquity of a color I have never seen because it must not exist. Life is a rhythm and it's all that I have ever been, albeit materialized. I can deny the enjoyment of life but not the truth of the immense variety of its contents. And who knows the full extent of what insists itself onto existence that I will never sense. I'm conscious because of my thoughts but each thought is not conscious in-and-of-itself, so what about it is alive and what about me is alive and aware, save the pattern. Can a city be conscious if its patterns of movement are just so? What a trip we're on.
What I don't know could kill me. But, as luck would have it, it mellowed my grief with the gift of unconsciousness. I woke up in the same booth, unaware of how much time had passed, but with a full bladder and eyes crusted shut, the hornet creature shaking me awake. Unable to audibly communicate cross-species, it handed me a written segment that said something about how the uninitiated should always pour the contents of the blue beaker into the yellow, chug that, then casually sip on the red liquid after that. I didn’t thank the hornet for that new information. It stared at me in curiosity as I stared back in pained stubbornness. The mutual stare eventually broke as it sank to the floor and smoothly slipped out the front door. It left me alone there, trembling in a dusty booth as mechanisms in the kitchen shut themselves down and imparted an ambient silence throughout the empty cafe. I remembered how I sensed the world via tingles on my tongue, and how I could know the world better for it. The hangover of that memory hurt me in that moment as I realized that sense skill was gone. I assume the liquids I drank should have killed me, but I survived it like I survived the Sphynx, presumably accruing new untold long-term side effects that will nag me until death but whose symptom-causation relationship I will never piece together from the infinite abuses and symptoms along my history. The questions might kill me one day and I know some answer will be in the form of my death, but my death still hasn’t come yet.
My consciousness intrudes. Why did Ttott call it the Resemblance? What was it? I was in it but have no idea. Like my memory of the womb. Is it God? Is God subservient to rules? Rules undergird everything. Are rules God? What is God, and how many names does it have?
The furnace sandfall below the cafe cycles torrents of sand into the ground and naturally, constantly, pulls afresh from an above unknown source which no living being has understood. Live bodies have gone in, skeletons emerge around the globe in no discernible pattern. Cornucolpuria is indeed your first and last thought, despite desiring sandwiched thoughts of substance to support foundational equilibrium. However, is there much to be said of the root cause and its invocation of bodily surprises? Have you stopped making sense? We should not accuse one another, but cornucolpuria is not a translation you recognize.
A.I.rchivist Intervention #1: the neuro-input data was infrequently corrupted in small bits and impacting small sections of text. It must be remarked that the reader’s (i.e., your) co-authoring (which is, to remind, at least 90% of the content, filling in the gaps) is leaned upon more heavily in the words immediately preceding this intervention. Enough of the data has been preserved to satisfactorily connect the written thoughts, however, if a discerning reader is feeling particularly unfulfilled by the contents of this piece, the A.I. preservationist team here suggests that the reader[-as-writer] sleeps, eats, and/or drinks for refreshment before returning to the work, to incrementally improve the quality of the neuro output. Thank you for your understanding.
I am called a surveillant, but it means I'm a traveler, because I roam the everything of existence to find new things for my employer, Zero-Sum-Corporation (ZSC). I suspect they know I won't find anything. Still, I report back the occasional mystery they tell me to ignore. Over the past 12 years, they have never cared about the things I reported so they must already know everything I don't know, or they know how to know what should be known. I start to suspect that deep down at the root of everything not everything can be known. They’re looking for some answer to some mystery having to do with the activities of certain animals and how they know innately what to do with certain minerals and how all have been capable but dormant for eons and now they are moving rocks and shifting rivers and opening new possibilities that might be akin to portals, and glands that smell like cucumbers, refreshing but toxic like threatened copperheads with their hackles up. Inscrutable rules and disaster. Tell me about snake charmers. Are they onto something? Snakes will perk up for certain flute sounds? These are the sorts of manic thoughts my employer has programmed me to think about via pamphlet-pumps before launching me throughout the cosmic abyss I roam. I’ve never controlled my ship, it’s on a schedule. I get in the craft, it drops me off for surveying, I report findings on the world I visit, I get back in the ship before the time is up, I get told that my findings are irrelevant, I get my paycheck and benefits, I get pamphlet-pumped anew via ship comm system, I get dropped off in another world, and the cycle repeats. The in-flight entertainment is usually decent.
I am aware that ZSC is indifferent to my life, and this means they could be considered evil. They send surveillants into a hostile world, protecting themselves with disclaimed liability, preying on those of us willing to die to know and feel something new, or at least have their travel expenses paid. People die for less. I get messages from the corp via my skin, warm glowing tattoos that appear and disappear. I'm branded, my body is brand-name. Take one look at me and I'm literally franchised but figuratively disenfranchised with everything; I'm a useful tool for ZSC except for the people I encounter who know the look of a ZSC surveillant and treat me poorly. Some people want to kill me, others avoid me, but most have no idea what to make of me.
What brand of cow are you?
And would I hear it in your moo?
Or will I taste it in your meat
When you're dead and sold to me
When browsing channels on my ship’s audio comm, I heard this, somehow sung in my mom’s voice.
Last night, I dreamt vividly and knew the script. As I immersed myself into the movie of self, I whispered to the friends and family by my side how things would go. I assured them of the truth of each upcoming event until a bare-necked and antennaed stranger intruded on us in our hiding place under the bed and, startled, I stabbed them repeatedly in the throat with a dull and cumbersome tool. The dream remained a dream, however the script collapsed and the remainder of my sleep was spent in panicked wonderment as to what could possibly come next. Several scenes within the dream later, I saw a design, a hidden pattern, glowing underneath a sizable rock. The next day in my waking life, I recognized a cliffside, a time of day, a silhouetted reminiscence, and as I approached, I saw a familiar patch of ground. I lifted a rock there and saw the dream-pattern underneath. I have replicated the pattern in my journals and observed how my dreams, of my own invention, have become unpredictable, while reality, of another grand entity’s creation, have now become scripted and predictable. I am inverted within the self I call my own and the reality I call ours, although can I pose this as a dichotomy? I cannot recall if this has happened before or if I am on a new track, or if it is just my observation making it true, am I finally hearing what I couldn’t hear and seeing what I couldn’t taste before? It could be true that synesthesia contains the answer; if I can translate a flavor into a color and a color into a sensation, those things combined might solve a riddle that allow us to finally unshackle the bounds of reality. Maybe then all of life would be laid out flat on the table like a map rather than a frightful unspooling that happens day by day (a train on its tracks moving moment by moment to reveal itself and surprise us).
“This page unintentionally left blank”
The writing on the previous page was made by chance. It resulted from a series of random events that created a coherent statement, against all odds. I left my keystroke outside of the tent and when I grabbed it to leave, I observed pebbles from the cliff falling on its keys, apparently in order, flawlessly, to write its message. I'm keeping it as evidence to send to the corp but I suspected it would be rejected as irrelevant to the bout in the world I was visiting. Do they keep it all? Are there vaults of irrelevant content? Irrelevant to who? Gas bubbles shifted upward inside me and erupted as one loud ruckus from my mouth, a grounding burpquake reminder of my omnipresent physicality.
I sent the evidence to ZSC and within one minute the (my) arm tattoos lit up with a predictable statement that "Claim 4826b910-xy635ww7 Was Rejected" to which I rolled my eyes and swipe-dismissed the (my) arm notification clean. Immediately following, the (my) arm lit up again, saying "Tell Us How We Did With Your Recent Claim Rejection! Short Survey For Chance To Win Raffle!" to which I swiped and observed the regularity of that message has started to burn its words permanently into the (my) skin.
I opened my folk directory and opened the index to find instances of “chance messaging”. Under "chance" I found 56 pages of entries, and under messaging I found one. It told the story of a gurmpchin who, like me, left a manual keystroke mechanism, of an older model, exposed to alien weather. Hours later, when readying its campsite for departure, the gurmpchin observed the words "look behind you", to which, as stubborn as gurmpchins are, it refused to turn around and look. Instead, they soliloquized: “How like life to jest in my time of haste, in such a way as to insinuate a fearful pattern upon my countenance. Thusly, I refuse to consider the ways in which the world makes games of contracts and scoffs at all our facilities of being! And thus upon thusly, mine own head shall not turn.” Surveillance footage of the site showed that the wind’s velocity against foliage hit the letter keys randomly. The gurmpchin died one Gyripliax calendar year later, to the exact observed moonfall, and on its deathbed, it was said to have bemoaned the fact that it did not look behind itself to see what was there. I doubt something was there, but it killed the gurmpchin anyways. If it was nothing that killed someone then it's something. Regardless, “this page unintentionally left blank” is not a command and I feel no reason to dwell on it. I documented it. It might matter to someone, somewhere, someday. Maybe pebbles falling off cliff sides are always talking but there aren't keystrokes to catch them.
Do I sense you letting go of the mystery, like me? Aware of it as an aura but exhausted by its persistence. The richness of life like too many various decadent desserts when I all I eat is bland nutritional biscuits. The thingness of things is brimming all around us all but it’s too much to take in.
The sheer number of soliloquists I regularly encounter convince me life is not real, just as a matter of probability. I have no way to validate my solipsism. I have argued with myself, in my own many long-forgotten soliloquys, that if reality was my own creation, would I really include pain, grief, and the corp rejecting me ad nauseum? Do I crave that? Do I need antagonism? Maybe I need conflict like snowflakes need dust.
