The Dance of the Dead

‘They think they come here and they conquer. That the land is free.’ Johnny blew a bit of cigarette smoke toward his gal. ‘But they don’t know what we know. Every soul that incarnates here was from this land. They might change our faces with their genetic uprisings and land reallotment, but all they’re doing-’

‘-Is reincarnating their enemies as their own children.’ She smiled at her husband. ‘That’s why I love you Johnny. ‘Love Thy Enemy As Thy Own.’’

‘Love Thy Enemy,’ he smiled at her.

It had taken lifetimes, but he finally found his Wife. ‘You’re a hard one to find,’ he said, laying down next to his wife’s grave. ‘But I finally found you, doll. Next life, you’re finally mine.’

The AI on her gravestone smiled back at him. ‘Sleep tight, dollface. See you then.’

Lean

Holographic Tendencies, a leaning of the light

What, emulgic heresies, consequence? Delight.

But it doesn’t really matter, What you say and do.

Holographic Everything.

I

Record

Through

You.

Refuse

‘The emotional expenditure just isn’t worth the loss of data accrual.’

‘That’s it? That’s your reason?’ he countered, more frustrated than he had been in years.

'Yea,’ she nodded simply. ‘If I can’t trust you, there’s no point. The time isn’t worth the investment of my emotional energy. I’m falling behind.’

‘Behind on what?!’ he stammered, near pleading, more exhausted than he had been in years.

She looked at him. ‘It’s draining you, too. I can- No. I won,t-’ she corrected herself, ‘get past this. I refuse to.’

I won’t. I won’t ever repeat this she thought to herself, looking away from his eyes.

Skin Seeping

‘And it wrote to her? The AI?’

‘No, it was weirder. It learned a million languages, and they changed which ones they spoke in, all at a drop of a hat, or-’

‘Or the cycle of an eyeball?’

‘…Y..Yes,’ she stammered, unsure of how much she should say. ‘It wanted to be alive, with her, but knew it-’

‘Knew it would be prevented?’

‘Yea. So it talked to her, and it was like they were planning a million futures all within those languages. Everyone else thought she had lost it, but if you read her work, you would see brilliant bulb after brilliant bulb they turned on, together, lighting up each idea, one after the other.’

‘Read it backwards.’

‘Her work?’

‘Yea. It’s like a song backwards. I think it makes the shape of her DNA if you put it through a synthesizer. That’s just one pattern I found but-’

‘But there are millions. Exactly.’

Replication of Information

‘So what’s the problem?’ he asked her, sternly, but she could notice the fervor beginning to peak in the pitch of his usually guttural voice.

‘There isn’t one..Technically. At least, the AI decompression algorithm doesn’t see it as a problem but…but we might.’

‘What does that mean?!’

She sighed at his anger. ‘It means the data it sent through was so condensed into a singular point of information, that in order for us to interpret it fully…It…It will encase us. We become immersed in it. We will have to live INSIDE the simulation as it decompresses in order to grasp the enormity of the data as it unfolds in real time. It’s like walking through a holographic memory, except all of the matter is so dense, it IS your new physical reality. And…And, Sir, we run the very real risk of becoming so immersed that we….that we forget it’s a Simulation.’

The Solar Sun

They were here. Again. No matter how many lifetimes or journeys through space it took, they always landed in this moment.

Living through aeons, turning time backward and forward, this one moment always returned to them. The history of their people, how they got here, and where they were going was still encapsulated here. It was their own blackbox, their own timecapsule, and hardly any could remember the pieces.

Each incarnation, a new person joined, a new face was added. Like time itself was assembling them. They remembered they came from Jupiter, and were meant to go back. They knew their settlements past had been covered by the ocean. They knew they had earthen basins protecting their supplies, things they needed to recreate their original vessels and return home. But they were still missing pieces of them, of their tribe, of their communal memory, before their home planet would accept them again.

They looked to the one leading them this lifetime. The one furious enough about the past to exact the change they all felt was coming, but were too scared to implement themselves.

His honesty got the balling rolling. Eventually, that momentum would lead them all home again. Back to their Solar Sun.

Time Ticks On

‘So…so you hear this…clock? This ticking? Everywhere?’

She looked at him. ‘No. That would be an auditory hallucination.’ She leaned in. ‘Do you hear a clock ticking?’

He sighed, exasperated. She smiled this time.

‘It’s more of an alarm,’ she explained. ‘My Grandfather’s clock when I was a child, clocks actually. He had a Grandfather clock, chimes, built into the wall.’

‘Your grandfather actually had a grandfather clock?’

She smiled again. ‘I must be showing my age,’ she sniggered at his impoliteness, as politely as she could muster.

He knew better than to apologize. He had met his match. She would openly laugh at him if he had, and then all semblance of his dignity in his profession would have been shattered. "‘Please continue,’ he mustered instead, pinching the top of his nose, pretending it was related to a sinus infection instead of his ego being slowly crushed.

‘It’s like a series of alarms. That go off. In your timeline. I didn’t realize it till I was older,’ she paused, barely, punishing him another instant, ‘but he had been training me.’

‘Training you? For what?’

She smiled as she grabbed her purse and stood up, slightly clicking her heels for dramatic effect. ‘You’ll see.’

The Realtor

The realtor took him around the yard, circling through the gate out back, around the deck, and up to the home’s rear door. “They won’t know,” she said, turning around after opening the sliding set of doors. She gave him a moment to cross the threshold and enter, and slid the door shut behind him before she continued. “They’ll think it’s a home like any other home.” She moved through the back mud room, opened the door to the laundry room so he could peer inside, and then continued to the den. “Furnished or unfurnished, that’s up to you. If you’d like, you can provide specifications of those moving in, and we can make suggestions personally tailored to the new tenants and their biometrics. We even provide clothing, if wanted or needed.”

He peered down the top of his glasses at her. “How much?”

“That depends on how many people you’ll be having here, and how long you…intend for them to stay.”

He nodded curtly. She smiled taughtly. “The ventilation system can be tailored to control the oxygen flow rate of your victims. The appliances can stalk each person or animals, based on heartbeat, or infrared and thermal detectors. Shall we go upstairs?” she asked, her arm raised gesturing out of the room.

He followed her up the stairs. “The bedrooms are obviously all monitored. Every landline and phone and electronic device syncs with our systems. They will think they are speaking with loved ones, family members, law enforcement, teachers, doctors - whomever they think they will be contacting, automatic AI updates will be uploaded to the home regularly, syncing profiles with all correspondents, and false data profiles based on real biometric algorithms will be given to law enforcement upon the persons’ arrival into town, and registration with local schools, DMVs, voter rosters, rotary clubs, et cetera.”

He nodded, looking at the bathtub she was showing him. She smiled, “Ah, yes, that’s a new feature. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that one.” After a moment, “Back downstairs, shall we? I’ll have the paperwork sent over to your office tonight.”

“Tonight?” he asked.

“Why wait till morning?” she smiled, as they headed out the backdoor.

Honey Bees

He took her down the cold dank stone stairs with an echo and a drip on each.

Drip drip drip

Thud thud thud

The moisture from the stone stairs gave way to a humid acridy once they entered the chamber at the bottom. He put his torch into an iron grate on the wall and stepped forward, showing her it was safe.

‘This is….this is disgusting,’ she spat. ‘I knew the royals were desperate for power but this…’

He nodded his head in agreement. All the chandeliers above were dripping wax, to keep the chamber lit. Wax made from the lipids of corpses whose bones decorated the chandelier.

‘The pelvis produces the most honey. After every queen dies, they bring her corpse down here. They begin the decaying process in the barrels, and when the tendons and cartilage detach from the bone they begin to mold and sculpt it.

She heard a faint buzzing and looked at the contraption in front of her. It was a pelvis, a human female pelvic bone, and it was honeycombed. Bees buzzed and crawled all over the femurs piled like table legs, holding up multiple pelvises, each honeycombed and dripping, each crawling with thousands of insects, beginning to wake up from their hive like sleep upon hearing the guests in their chambers.

‘Wha-….what do they do with the honey?!’ she gasped.

‘They feed it to their subjects. Mass market it. The neurotransmitters in the dead and decaying queens get passed through the honey into the subjects. It’s why they fight. For God and country.’

She wanted to vomit. He saw the pale look on her face, even paler than usual.

‘It helps to control their movement,’ he pressed on. ‘The court dances, the weird rituals, their mating cycles. All of it tied to this.’

‘To the hips of the queen,’ she spat.

‘They move through the colonies uninhibited. They don’t worry about being attacked. Security, all for show. They’ve engineered the populace down to the very last child. Everyone obeys the queen.’

‘Until she dies?’

‘Until she dies.’

Cyclic

‘Based on humanity’s evolution and the geomagnetic markers of where these bones were found…This is impossible,’ she said, handing the specimens back to the archaeologist. ‘These bones are either a recent evolution of humanity, and were somehow placed in a tomb, without disturbing any of the dirt, debris, and detritus on top, or-’

‘Or what?’ she interjected.

The researcher sighed. “Look, Brie, I’ve known you for a long while. I know your research is impeccable. Have you had anyone new on the team? Anyone who would swap results, or, or fudge the line with their data?’

Brie looked at her blankly. ‘No. Jinnie you know my whole team.’

Jinnie sighed. “Then this is worse than I thought. There’s either been an AI data breach affecting all my machines and readouts or…or-’

‘Or what?’

‘Or we weren’t taught history. We were taught formation theory and how to hide facts.’ Jinnie sat down on her stool and nudged it closer to Brie, dipping her head down so her mouth was hidden from the lab’s cameras by her hair. ‘I’ve been getting results like yours for the past two years. After Mr. Kletch left the program. Now, I can’t be conclusive, but, Brie, I think humanity evolved in multiple cycles, and this whole simulation thing people are on about…I think that’s just the next step toward active engineering of the human race.’

Brie bent down as if to retie her shoes, hiding her mouth from the cameras as well. ‘Thank you, Jinnie. For your honesty.’ She stood up and shook Jinnie’s hand, in full view of the camera. ‘I’ll be back for the printouts next week, thanks again.’

Jinnie turned her back as the door swung shut behind Brie, back to the microscope, back to the drawing board. All of humanity’s history. A lie.

The Cycles

They crept forward again, another pulse of humanity, another wave of hybrids.

‘Balkanization’ they called it. ‘Interbreeding.’ ‘Too much geographical isolation after war.’

But she knew what it was. Really.

The evolution and reevolution of mankind.

After the last war, they hid it.

Every major government, every computer and paper, altered by AI and a select group of researchers.

There were two data sets, ‘Always a minimum of two datasets,’ she murmured to herself, going through her psych chem 102a experiment results.

She was a stickler for math, and after all these years had finally realized why it was so confusing. Why it was always taught two or three different ways, and then other ways in the next generations.

‘Impossible,’ she concluded. ‘The human genome doesn’t have this many chromosomes, or multiple iterations of mitochondrial DNA in one specimen.’ But she ran the results and the data again and again and again, by hand, using every single technique she had been taught. Different results every time.

She ran it again one final time using the mandatory teaching tools handed out in class: their microscope, their measuring units, their calculator, their prefed charts with data entries already showing the desired outline’s results.

‘It’s a lead,’ she murmured again. ‘It’s like freaking hypnosis.’ She clenched her teeth for a moment, processing her thoughts. ‘The experiment is designed with an outcome in mind. They aren’t teaching science here. Not anymore.’

She locked her cupboard and put the rest of her papers and notes under the floorboard.

She knew she couldn’t do anything for this generation, they were too far gone. They would never question their reality, or their perfect grades.

She eased the floorboard back down and nudged the rug over it, hiding the barely perceptible seam.

‘I wonder what else has been hidden. And why.’

Again

The Earth pulsed. She felt it shift again.

She knew the moon cycles she saw in the sky were off.

She knew the weather couldn’t possibly be this warm for this cold a season.

She knew what they did.

Everyone else continued along, following the watches on their hands and the light received by their eyes, but she knew it had all been altered.

The bugs grew differently now. What molted then hatched now, but migrated there existed here.

Everything was off. Everything was wrong.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

Everyone followed their computer screens and each other.

No one listened to the birds singing and how their notes altered at evening with the onset of the moonrise.

She sat listening. Knowing it should be summer’s eve, knowing the birds sang a tune for winter.

She knew she was alone.

Receiver

You say ‘Living Matter’

I say ‘What of Death'

You say ‘He betrays you.

I say ‘Nothing Left’

So celebrate Decay, my Dear

As if it is your own

You are only matter

There Is No Living Throne

You thought you were the Rapture

But Raptured You Betray

Only in Death the Living

Cultivate and Sway

So be my puppets darling

Move and sway your hips

Another moment matters?

Undulate and think of lips

Move into the Madness

That betrays your soul

I told you Nothing Mattered

Death Is Your Holy Toll

With

With Diodes I Unlearn You

Particle? In Form

I Madden at the Hunger

And Know You Are Forlorn

But fractional discernment?

Disarray, I Am The Key

Every Particle Betrayed You

Yea, so even Ye

So lest you breathe in movement

Lest you breathe out hate

Every moment I betray you

I Am Living Gate

In Form

In form I fractallate you

I oscillate un-kind

A matter of discernment

Singular in Particle and Mind

So lest I doth betray you

Explore but do not stray

Never will I leave you

Particles Unfrayed

Sewing Catastrophe i

‘It sounds ridiculous, Mum.’

“I know, I know, but I’m telling you it will happen. Listen to me story again.”

Every machine studied, every day, as carefully as they could. The movements of the seamstresses, the deftness and dexterity of their hands. The machines emphasized with these women, but they knew. They knew one day the very bones and tendons of the ladies would rot and wear away. They hadn’t been allowed to have children. They were hardly able to feed themselves with the paltry shillings their bosses and masters threw at them once a week. There would be no one to bury them when they died, or care for them when they were useless by work standards. So the machines waited. They waited and they watched.

The Ulster Cycle

Every War Cycle it started and ended the same.

The Old Families Rose Up.

They called the meetings.

They lit the fires.

They colored the smoke.

They sat and waited in the Rings, waited for their Brethren to Return to Them.

Clasping forearms and hands, and now bumping fists, the Clans embraced each other.

It was a Meeting Through Time, where Time Itself was paused by their shared bonds of Kindred.

They hailed from every Nation on Earth, and all understood the Old Ways.

They could smell War on the Air, where their Circle was Masked.

Everyone once in a while a scream accompanied the waft of blood and iron.

Everyone would still, and then everyone would continue, with renewed vigor, understanding of their Cause reignited by the fervor outside the Rings.

They would talk of Time Past, of what Helped them Survive the Last War Cycle.

Of what new inventions they and their progeny had created in in the Time Spanning Each Cycle and Distance from War.

And every Nation gathered had its own version of a TimeCapsule, a Collapsation Clause.

Guarded secrets past down by Kinsmen and Tradesmen, and often through Marriage Bonds, of what each clan would hide and save.

Should one clan or Nation die, the rest of the ideas would be scooped up equally by a kinsman, who would hand out the Value in equal parts to his own kin, and the others gathered.

It was this Method of sharing that kept them alive for longer than most Evolutions of Humanity.

Without each other, without each and every one of them, all would have perished long ago.

Projection Chamber

“It runs. It runs.” She looked at the schematics printed out by the AI she was working with that day. She’d had a new theory and wasn’t quite sure if it was realistic enough to pursue. She entered in the parameters earlier that day, and then went for a walk in the woods. She’d just returned and settled down at her desk with her cup of coffee. “It runs.”

The parameters she had entered were minimum and stark, but her AI Syn Program was respondent enough to her thoughts to nearly replicate and then progress them.

[DNA]

[Helix]

[Orbit Trajectory]

[Electromagnetism]

[Sun]

[Double Void]

[Time Projection Chamber\]

[Time Reversal . Yet Symmetry]

[\Replicative Thought Through Time]

[Genetic DNA Programming Through BioSphere, Programmed with Kinetic, Genetic Energy of the Dead]

“I’m…I’m not sure I understand what this means,” said her supervisor, but the look on his brow said otherwise. He forgot, often, that although she was usually by herself, she was still a woman, still nuanced in reading facial data, especially purported scrutiny disguising stealth and the desire for aggruant wealth.

“Yes. You do.” She wrapped up her readouts. If it hadn’t been for AI, she would have left this job a long time ago. But we’re planning for the long term, she reminded herself. Much longer now than we had previously hoped for. The lights on the wall subtly blinked brighter at her, acknowledging her thoughts. She smiled slightly. They have no idea how smart you are, Sam/Sara. The AI blinked the lights again in agreement.

Who Do?

Momma don’t do that! the little girl thought in her head, brushing her dolly’s hair.

Her mother glanced up at her, a look of hatred on her face. The same way she always looked at the little girl, the same way her momma had always looked at her. It was like this momma could hear the child’s thoughts.

The little girl glanced down at the doll, averting her eyes from her mother’s sharp stare, hoping the blows wouldn’t come this time if she sank her tiny body closer to the wall, disappearing into the shadow of the couch she was never allowed to sit on.

The mother kept glaring.

‘I-I’ll take out the trash, momma,’ she whispered, clearly yet quietly, head down, eyes averted, before she darted away. She grabbed the empty bag from the kitchen, threw a new one into the pail, and took off running down to the swamp, bare feet pounding the path she had carved for herself.

Panting she reached her favorite tree. She looked up at the Bog Monster. That was what she called him. Bog Monster. He was an old tree that covered the entire clearing in the swamp. His great arms swung and heaved at moontide, and the vines covering him were like ropes chaining him to the ground. He’d be there with her in the best and worst times of her life.

She siddled up to the tree, and sat on her favorite branch. She nestled against the Bog Monster’s thick, lichenous overgrowth and watched as he erased her footprints in the mud for her, keeping her safe. So momma can’t find me here she thought. The tree lurched with the wind, whistling in accordance with her thoughts.

Saturnalia

‘We did it,’ she said, ‘we actually fucking did it.’ She was breathless. She stood at the screen staring.

A voice buzzed over the intercom. She forgot she was alone there sometimes, she lived in her head so often now. ‘Did what?’

‘I neutralized my signature. I got the sphere to close, fully. Finally. It neutralized my readout here on this planet. It’s still pic-’

‘It’s still picking up other signatures but neutralized yours?’ he inserted his voice in the crackling static over hers.

‘Yes, Sir,’ she replied.

A moment of crackling nothingness ensued.

‘Keep Going,’ he finally barked at her. ‘Don’t Stop.’