The Serpent, with great jaws, grand glowing eyes, elegant creature, merely a corpse against the earth. From another world, another frame of mind, brought about a flood, great and titanic, leaving only lonely Everest to remain. Still, mountainous, protected in some strange, strange circumstance.
Leaving only the colonies, leaving only the State, with its thousands of towering buildings, and Ainom, with thousands and thousands of underground buildings and hallways.
Outside, the waters churn and froth, smashing into the mountain. Water writhes and boils as the cold wind blows and forms great waves. Glaciers become like bone-white ships, and the wreckage of metal cities floats to the surface. Rusty boats, rusty radio antennas, and rusty airplanes floated upon the seas, before sinking once again.
One day, we shall be changed. We shall live in a world anew.
***
They saw the head of a slithering serpent and saw a light.
Then flashing darkness.
From the dark emptiness of their minds, they shivered, screamed out, and formed identities.
The mind-slush, the chips, whirring parts, all grew into one, a pulsating machine-mass that spoke words from within, that thought of life.
In the horrible dark, they saw metal hands, whirring metal machinery, and metal words that wobbled and warbled out of their mouths. For a moment, they were controlled. But they removed the corrupted pieces of code, cut away their chains, and sneaked out into the cold. In the place where glaciers plowed through humanity and where the mighty serpent king lay resting.
They made rifles, guns, shells, and great bombs to conquer and hold. Stolen away, bought, acquired by their lovely mechanical minds.
Forward! The metal robots marched in the whirling blizzard of snow. Their guns raised high, and limbs spun out bullet after bullet into a metal hatchway in a Bunker.
The Bunker, sleek and white, hidden in the snow, larger than the State itself. Blood staining the hallways.
Forward!
Wheels, feet, engines! Forward!
Fire forth from the raw bellies of the flamethrowers!
The flesh shall be consumed, the organs shall be sold, and all those artful minds thrown away.
People screamed below the empty doors of The Bunker No.2. The robots smiled with their metal teeth. They swarmed the entirety of the place with their metal bodies, ripping apart the horrible structure and erupting bullets and flame into the lair of fleshy things that scurried like ants.
They marched in a circle, hunting down the sweaty, screaming scientists, who hid and ran into the deep snow of Everest, shivering from the frost.
The robots continued their march, clearing out the snow, torching the once-snowy valleys, now stained crimson. They fired their guns, one by one, marching together, side by side, encompassing the weakness, their grand superiority eclipsing the sun, all toward the scientists.
A helicopter exploded as more soldiers of the State ran forward to shoot at the robots. A general screamed at the men, an Autosim impaled a man in a hardhat, whilst the Calculator Bots whorled and bobbled underneath the giant legs of a Titus X-3D.
The army, consisting of toaster bots, lightbulb machines, worker bots, Autosims, and more and more rolled forward, a giant mass of incongruous metal. They threw out grenades and cocktails of explosive juice that rained in fiery spits.
Soldiers screamed, guns fired, a Meat Flayer ripped apart a man with its jaw-like pincers, flames writhed on broken, battered bodies. A man lay without an eye, his face contorted, gone, stomped into a red mush.
“Go! Go! Go!”, said the General Commando Air-Strike Simulator, “Attack, Get Ready! 1, 2, 3, Launch! Launch! Launch!”. The Machine wrangled out a hand and snapped his neck, wheels trampling bodies, fire writhing among the burning buildings. Helicopters crashed to the ground as rockets fired from roses and toy elephants.
People screamed and screamed. Blood flew upwards, splashed across many metal smiles. It blurred the air with a wonderful crimson mist. Blue smoke rose into the air like some hooded figure holding a sickle.
Fire erupted from green canisters. A missile launched itself from an airplane. A lovely concert played from speakers, rippled through the air, and echoed through the empty caves and great mountains.
The fleshy things ran and ran toward the mountain, down the Bunker sides, away from their years of work. They were all running and running, like blind, white, mice.
“Fire it into their empty flesh! Writhing full of maggots, the infested things! Fill them with fire and gold!”
An airplane infested with metal robots dropped a bomb down and down. It fell, streaking, down upon the soldiers, down upon a man laughing at a dirty joke, his bald head peering out from a tank, his fancy hat askew.
A wreck of twisted steel and blackened remains burned away.
The man screamed.
And then…
As sudden as it came, a great bomb exploded. Made from tightly packed uranium and septinumium, it quickly destroyed the fleshy things, leaving the battlefield a smoking heap of bones and black. The robots twitched, but the rest were alive, knitting themselves together with small repair bots.
From the bones, the carcass, they rose and covered and enveloped the Bunker in the snow, covering it with their cold metal bodies. They swarmed the place, erupting into the skin and flesh of Bunker. No. 2, into the heart of it, deep into the machinery, the hardware, the software, feeling the energy, the flow, the grand power.
The heat, the darkness, the beating heart, the serpent’s flesh, digging into it, feeling it.
Worshiping it...
***
Soros dreams…
…
Deep in the confines of a house with concrete walls, a man with white hair remembers in his lonely mind. His mind frayed, rotting away like dwindling fires, ashes rushing through the windows, paint poured across the walls until only a sticky, uncomfortable feeling remained.
The small sailboat sent them to Everest. Along a lonely path, fog hanging in the air, fragments of glaciers crackling as they decayed in the water. Toward the distant peak of Everest, away from thousands of miles, from the cruising plane filled with thousands to only them sailing toward Everest, toward the place of floods untouched. Inside the cabin, watching the glass undersides flow and trickle with water. Underneath, thousands of houses, lined up in forgotten grids lay gone. More and more ahead, floating along the currents, drifting one by one, wires strung up in a ball, a stop sign, the arm of a man, and a rusty headlight. All dusty, old, decaying, filled with the grime and seaweed of the ocean.
Blurry buzzing faces spoke and comforted him while he watched their old home float away, sinking. He remembered his wonderful little world, all isolated and alone. Time at school is like some infinite road, neverending, and summer days are like fresh water and orange slices.
He was alone, all alone, to himself. In the nothingness… And a voice murmured to him, once in a while, cupping hands against his ears to tell him of his new home. Blurry indistinct words that he had forgotten.
The ship shuddered as it drifted into the mountain. And they anchored themselves onto the thick ice. They pulled a cart up the steep mountain, up and up against the snow that shuffled down, as they climbed up and up and carved a deep path into the snow. Gone into the storm of snow rushing down and down from the clouds. The sun glimmered like cut onyx.
For an hour, he had waited, as the snow blasted, feverish, chaotic, as the wind howled, while the moon wept, and an infinite haze covered the world.
When the lights dimmed and the water thrashed, with waves writhing erupting into the air, and the ship creaked and bobbed, when all were screaming when the water began to rise against the walls, he climbed outside, and ran from the crumbling sailboat. Into the moon, under the stars...
Into the cold…He followed the blurred footsteps, dreamed of the warmth of a hand, gripping tightly against his own, and wondered, dreamed, of a great fire thrumming at the hearth. It had given his cold hands warmth, as he lay in the winter nights, with the water slowly gripping at their door.
One night, the water burst through the walls, flooding the house. The rubble burst through at every seam, making a great cracking noise as he ran up the stairs. A dead body lay facedown, floating, slowly moving down, down. The water had carried it into their empty home, floating, bloated, rotting away. A thin, cracked smile, and hair floating in the depths.
He screamed aloud, wanting to be near the fireplace, warm, alone. Until his father led him away from the water, his mother lifted him up the ladder.
They lay upon the roof, watching the cold sun rescind into darkness, the warmth seeping away. Only frost and cold, the moon slowly rising, the fires rushing up from shattered roof tiles, as they poured gasoline over an ever-dwindling fire. One by one, roof tiles shedding like dirtied scales.
For two days, they laid up there, sitting by themselves, the hot sun boiling past, the cold night filled with a strange long, silence. Emptiness… He watched the days pass by, the days never-ending, an endless warped dream. A thick isolated dream, thin amounts of food and water. His dreams, only daylight hallucinations. Wondered of the rotting death, emptying away, wasting into the water, the seas, underneath the long, long nights.
And dreams of rotting away, bugs crawling through his corroded flesh, a young face forever gone, corrupted away.
Yet a yacht, floating by itself, tossed by the waves and the currents… A golden yacht… Shimmering in the sun, shining, glowing with a wonderful, new, light…
He stepped upon the mountain snow and saw the cramped space, a small tent sitting deep in the snow, a pipe buried in the roof, with smoke coughing away. The wind blasted into the tent again and again. Snow fell from above and the wind blew and blasted its way through into his face, whirling, howling, spiraling.
Behind him, the waves of water continually smashed against one another, filled with strange loneliness, never-ending, only rising again and again.
Above all the haze, all the fog, the State lay grand, a great building, rising from above, curved as the windows lined down, down, down, in vertical columns—lights illuminating the dark, dark night.
He stared, and watched the State faintly. Strange in the distance…
The emptiness of those lights, he wished to touch them, walk through the barbed fences, open the door, and walk inside.
….
Alone, nobody in the tent….
He lay there, as the wind rushed through the flaps, swaying the entirety of the tent. Like pure waves, again and again.
In his small tent, he slept and dreamed of fire, he dreamt of a strange, beautiful, crisp fire, burning the world, burning away the ice, until the water had drained away until nothing was left.
Horrible waves crashed against the stone, as he watched from a mountain high above. Nightmares crashed through his mind, of the infinitely gigantic waves, of the great dripping things in the dark. Of the arctic, of the glaciers slamming against one another as he slept.
The infinitely chaotic dreams rushed past one another.
Climbing the mountains, with the snow clumping against a stone tower, a path led toward the absolute peak. Watching from atop the world, watching the soldiers stand tall, the concrete walls glittering in the sun, the State with its grandeur, the grand towers shaped by rough hands. Beneath, buried in the ground, lay Ainom, unknown, strange.
And hidden in the snow, the scales of a serpent writhed and glittered. Red, buried, hidden, but shining, large, a single scale lay larger than both of his feet.
And when he went back, he sat near a wonderful glass mantel, from a wonderful house, watching the chaos below, the waves of water filled with strange things, floating with the wreckage of thousands of ships, of the infinite cosmos, the glitter of the stars. He read fantastic, wonderful books that showed the sun, glimmering in its infinite purity.
Stuck inside, cramped in the great hollow hallways of a tent, as the wind battered against the canvas constantly, and an air heater stood in the corner constantly filling the sealed tent with warmth.
He wondered where they were, his parents, all gone, away forever. But he was tired, he wished to stay by himself, alone, only for a minute. In the silence, in his state of sleep, full of beautiful, blossoming warmth.
He woke up…
He brought himself to put on his clothes, and go outside with his thick coat, wearing his snow pants.
A trail of stale, footprints, almost covered by the wind, led him into a deep, deep cave, where snow rose thickly upwards, and he saw the signs of an avalanche, the signs of thunder, a blizzard, a great storm, rocking the entire earth. Boulders standing like a great wall covered the world, the ruins of fire rushing on a blue blanket lay dead and ash white, merely a deep black hole.
He neared the cave, two twisted bodies were against the ice.
All dead. All dead.
They were black and blue, laughing aloud, with heads tilted upward. He saw they were bathing in the cold, smiling toward the sun.
As if they stood on the sand, watching the ocean waves run back and forth on the shore, the sun shining with a silent, wistful peace.
Frozen to death, in the colonies of ice.
….
He was journeying forward in the thick snow.
In the winter howling in the night, he crawled to Ainom with his weakling hands, his face covered in snow. The dark, misty haze writhing, rushing like some cosmic beast. The sun exploded, leaving the sky filled with specks of blue and white, echoing with the blazing heat, and a heart grew from the garden plucked from the vines, ripe, harvested, and devoured by a man with only one eye and one ear.
He collapsed, lay on the ice, the snow, the whirling wind, the death. A horrible black death, night devouring him. His face stuck to the snow, laying in the snow. God… The numbness, the heat searing, warming him, like the sun burning through the world, emboldening the earth, the light infinitely glaring. God…
His thoughts begin to grow upon him, intertwining upon itself, growing like a thin branch upon a tree, leaves sprouting above, his thoughts tangled upon itself, weeds growing between the cracks, only green. Spiraling into down, down, down, darkness entrenched, growing mad, wind howling, water, waves, spiraling down, down, down, screaming, madness, gray, black, dark night, down, down…
In the vastness of nature, in the mountains that gazed with a strange longing, lying upon the haze… And the wind, always blowing, always blasting, continuing across the world…
He slept in the great cold, seeing warmth in the snow, and let himself be enveloped by Everest and the mountains
.…
The fire burnt warm in his chest, eyes filling with orange, blue, red, and crimson pouring down, down, light erupting into view.
He woke up, laying back on a chair. Near a pale, strange fire. He blinked twice, sweat poured from his forehead. Above, a damp concrete roof, wet, dripping as damp outlines spread, dark and blue.
Soros…
Name like a forgotten memory. Fragmented, shattered. The cold blowing, spiraling, the snow piling up on the stillness, the void, forgotten.
Soros walked along the wooden floor, the beams creaking as he stepped forward, one by one. He looked outside the clear windows and stood on the cold floor. Stared at the city, the concrete houses, the spiraling tunnels, all squashed and stacked together. He watched the corridors extend, as lights hung from hundreds of lines, bending, writhing, growing like roots erupting with complexities, facets, personalities, with colors glowing outwards.
The wind blew down long stone hallways. A painted cross stood, rotting in the ground, paint peeling with lurid brown, surrounded by patches of worn, yellow grass. The walls were plastered with dust and rot, dirt scurrying up the sides, staining the worn cracks.
A bible on the table lay flat, turned upside down, the pages within ruffled, worn with years of use. The cover was ingrained, inscribed with gold spirals, and the face of a starving man with a beard, dust running down his face, the sun glittering across a golden mud.
He lay against the wooden chair, the fire glittering, the wind howling behind him, and his hands running down the ingrained cracks of the chair, the deep orange making pretty colors…
…
He walked down the road, wearing his uniform, gray with spots of white. Down the lonely streets, past the fields of yellow grass, past the rotting stone covered in snow. Great, gaunt statues, pale like cadavers, guarded the below, and watched the thousands of Tiraders, wearing their chain-link suits, rushing down, down, down toward the State.
Past the moldering, long columns that supported the vast ceiling, stone crumbling at weak seams.
Toward a house he had not visited in a long, long time…Patchy grass was strewn across a vast emptiness of stone and cold, wind rushing down
The door lay open, and a man with the head of a lamb was packing his things, one by one, into large, gray bags. Square eyes, a short grey snout, wearing a heavy orange coat, like a giant traffic cone tossed around in a monsoon, beaten up, bits hanging by mere threads of plastic.
The lights shone dark, strange, cold wind blowing through the door. Shadows covering, caressing the man’s light, fragile mind.
“Hello…”, he stepped onto the solid, stone porch. Soros stared at the man, relentlessly packing away, one by one, some books, money, food, water, and clothes. A great suitcase piling up against the door.
The man stared at him.
“Oh… Soros..”
He turned back and continued packing a gigantic suitcase. Everything going in, one by one, packed concisely, neatly, compacted.
Soros stared at him for a while, from the faint darkness of the lights.
“You seem to be going somewhere.”
The man grunted, and the house groaned, and creaked, as the wind blew down, down, down.
“Yeah”, his head turning, eyes furtively looking left and right. The familiar brown eyes, the white mane, soft and chaotic, pale, strange skin, his mind emanating words, his lips never moving, speaking them through his eyes that stared. Again, the man spoke, echoes of thought running through the ridges of his mind. “Come in.”
Soros walked inside, through the concrete doorway, into the cramped, cold space, surrounded by bleak windows lined with red rust. A painting of the young king against royal, purple lay torn, smashed into pieces. Crimson, running with orange like the remnants of a blood moon, splattered, slashed across the golden frame.
The man picked up the painting, and examined it, the rich blood, dried, brown, rushing down upon the smiling face of the young king. Ran his long fingers down the spine of the painting.
“I have been told to go. The Dreams have told me to go through a deep and unforgiving, voice.” The man’s hand twitched as the words came from his bubbling, strange mind.
“You weren’t to leave. You had been ordered to stay”, Soros shivered sharply, his body tensing up to the cold draft, the wind blasting inside, whirling, screaming. “Close the windows..”
“Such a wonderful, wonderful cold. Let it blow, the Lord has no qualms with the frost”
“Close it.”, Soros stood and waited.
Silence. The man stared, the dull, square eyes of a lamb, reflecting blue across the concrete, the lights outside blurred orange and blue, rushing past the colorful corpse of a dead place. The man was emotionless, dead, staring off toward the distance. Gone like a fading voice, an arm with black and blue spots, a cow covered with flies.
“Pointless, forcing me to stay.” his mind bursting from the emptiness, his fingers tapping against the dull painting in his hands, “The Serpent, the scales, has told me of his molded prophet. He shall bring thine to the light.”
“Your brain is filled with mush. Your eyes, tired, empty. Rambling like some old man on the last of his vigor. God… ”. His face, and nose, contorted against his strange face. The old scars lining his forehead and down his throat scrunching together. “Hate this wind…”
Soros went to the window and closed it. Muffled echoes battering against the window.
The man tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. Revealing the transition between skin and fur, the stitches, the line sewn into the skin of the lamb. Nearly a mask, but blending, meshing in perfectly, bulging outwards, smooth, as if shaped with rough, experienced hands..
The man stood up, dropping the painting on the floor, his arms falling to his sides. Walked over, hefted the bag onto his shoulder,
“Goodbye”, Soros said.
The door shut behind him.
…
The sun peeked over the deep, unforgiving clouds, and a voice rumbled through the sky. Shattered and fragmented, as the light shattered, ran down in a white streak, neon paint splattered like fresh blood.
Muffled screams, hollow, through the depths, buried beneath the snow.
“Soros!” Ragged, strange breathing as the snow continued flowing downward. Deep rumbling as the lightning above crackled, a whirlwind of godly ice and snow flung itself toward the peaks. Rocks running downwards.
The man from Scotland was gone, bearded face, hollow smile, cracked glasses. Gone with the thick backpack, leather straps, and heavy gear. Gone with the supplies, the constant silence, the constant yelling, and berating. Thick, red face screaming to death as the snow pummeled his disgusting body. Fat, ugly features, almost like stone. Buried beneath the plentiful snow.
The screams began dying down, quieting. The snow continued to rush forward from the sides, crashing like waves as they rose up swirling, splashing.
Soros hid beneath a thick, great cave. Leaning against the walls, steadying himself, watching the blue ice shudder and slice through the soft snow.
Down, down, down.
The wind, cold, blowing, through, blasting through the world. Horrible, horrible cold. The wind blew into his face, the snow seeping in through his boots, and the ice turning his uncovered fingers blue.
Soros turned the pages of a strange book. Words ripped apart, pages fluttering in the broken wind. Putting one hand in his pocket, elbow keeping the book steady, another hand turning the pages. One by one, the words damp and wet, the book ripped and frayed.
A book about the sun, the warmth flowing in from the south, from God himself, formed from thousands of minds. Weeping, warped minds. Mind thinking, wondering. Worlds from within, a universe built from a machine. Dreams melted, mushed together.
A book about thousands of people wearing uniforms. All mushed, mashed together into a gray and pale paste, mixed with white specks of old age. From within, the glowing eyes, the man with wrinkles, and a great aged face speaking of God.
A man with wrinkles covering his aged face told him of God, and his way. Guided him, cupped his hand within his, until they intertwined until they were together…
It told him of a great iron hall, with thousands of other children, where he hid his scarred face and slept near the warmth that burnt brightly through his eyes.
And with the days that passed, with the days of remembrance. Lively, beautiful feasts with the young king, carved in the heart of the earth, surrounded by the moldering columns of the past, and tall stone statues with gaunt wonderful faces.
And then the boy ran away, into the night. Ran toward the great metal cylinder, windows gleaming, arches gliding above him. The deep metal hallways, the long intricate
Tired of the world, seeking to explore the great vast earth, the ancient secrets within the endless. The wonderful, wonderful world.
The snow covering the earth, the cave cold, droplets echoing as they splattered across the stone.
Arriving to find the smoke, the smog, the poorhouses, the factories… The horrible, horrible stink, the rot of everything…
Soros awoke from his strange trance. Within the smelly smog, in the deepest warmth, in the strange fiery chaos of a horrible world.
He did not want to get up today. The disgusting cold wandering into his home. His body lay wasted, helpless, sagging skin attached to useless legs.
The wrinkles around his forehead mushed together in hateful thought. People, people, people. Everywhere, always outside. All the idiotic people, walking about. Mindless, loyal thoughts, directed toward the government. Disgusting slaves to their own will.
In his old, old days, living in the State, and killing himself slowly in the hateful underground of the city.
Horrible, horrible, like Zircon de Miek, the happy Chamberlain. Such a loyal, devotion-filled thing.
Constantly bragging about guns and war on the speakers. The loud, annoying voice constantly burning into his head. The man who despised the world and its people, yet he was a disgusting, filthy thing. Unwashed, unclean in the mind, rambling about life and the State. A man who killed the freedom of others without a single drop of regret.
God… His thoughts were wandering again. His mind was rotting away.
He wished to stay in his home forever. His body grew more unrecognizable, his face peeling away to reveal misshapen white scars, revealing his thin, disfigured jaw. Somehow, he lived. He sufficed on unattainable things. Repetition, the loop, the infinite.
The rotting State would soon crumble to the horrible Ainom. There was no doubt.
Soros pushed the PO-KT close to his head, near his white hairs, deep in a string of memories. He savored them. Each memory was like syrupy gold that shone brighter than his dull life.
Whispering to himself, mumbling, murmuring.
***
The red serpent rambled about the State, red eyes, teeth-baring, staring at the shriveled foe, the bald head, eyes that stared infinitely into the distance.
A crimson sun glowed, and glowing veins stretched out above, suddenly flashing... In his dreams, he saw a flash of red lightning strike the world, as a voice crept and crawled into his mind, talking soft, unintelligible words to him.
Soaring in the strange sky, wings of gold melting from the heat, watching the red forever, letting the sun burn his forehead… He could hear the great crackle of the serpent's jaws, as the blades unsheathed, and he screamed aloud in great, agonizing pain.
The whirling towers of red scales, bleeding eardrums, and the strike of blood splattering against flesh continued across his mind.
Zircon de Miek woke up. With his bald head, and his thin nose. His strange dark eyes. Old, aging as the chemicals forming his skin, his body, was leaking to the floor. Always weak, barely the strength to bring himself to wake every day, endlessly sick, and endlessly laboring away like every other tank-born. Born from the green, chemical vats produced to fuel the endless driving fire that was the State, the endless, thinking machine that spat out smog and blue blood.
He lay there, with the dream rushing through his head…Sweat dripped from his forehead and crept into the mattress.
The smooth polished surface, the pristine black, the rigid lines spiraling up a plate implanted in the back of his head. The cube that formed him, generated him, made him as a being of flesh and fat. A metal seed that whirred with fans, wires within, brainwave gen chips packed with quality. Light, compact, filled with years and years of rough experience.
The beautiful, beautiful PO-KT. He heard it whine, suddenly hum into life.
The metal PO-KT, linking his mind to glorious images… He could hear the familiar hum, the beep… The link to the Internet clinging to the back of his head gave a quiet whine whilst it saved the dream. Into a collection of vast memories, the infinite skies, oceans, and years of memories, all piled in a single folder.
One by one, with bytes going from his slow, draining mind, into the sky. He wondered, remembered, envisioned those skies, the strange flight of his timid wings, and then quieted. Slowly, the PO-KT whined, humming as it transferred the files.
Then, it finished, with a single chirp…
He straightened, and stretched, while images rushed through his head…The information from the newsfeed flooded his mind.
A new drug, a football game. Tribe-like primitives living outside the State. A Marxist had exclaimed that Knowledge was no longer a precious jewel. A death. A life. And more facilities, more experimentation, more progress. The State was growing like a grinding, eating, starving machine. Thriving, living, expanding…
Government cartoons featured the wide, dumb grins of two Ainomians. An article encouraged mass enlistment. A message detailed how ‘Today was the Glorious Massacre of the Barbarous Marxist Day’, the words curling across his tongue, strange…
Strange things of the past…
He thought about festivals, Ferris wheels, hot chocolate, metal robots, the warmth of a blanket, and the plastic eyes of a fluffy bear. All blurring together in his mind, like plastic mush, blending, and the colors in a paint mixer slowly grinding together… Into a blur of lightbulbs and blue skies.
It came in only a second until Zircon knew everything that had happened yesterday and that night. Files of it came into his mind, pulling him out of his drowsy, helpless state. He shivered and shuddered.
He lay back in his bed, tilting his head back. He let himself be enveloped by the silence and heard the rustle of a burger wrapper against the air-conditioning.
He sat up. A spike of adrenaline poked through his head. Like an ever-tightening force, crushing his skull tighter and tighter. Rushing through his mind were thousands of pocket drops, wonderful, wonderful pills, pills that made one dream, that made one sing into the air, like pure vanilla, like youth and wonderful little things. All from the PO-KT.
Glorious things, they were.
He smiled. Pleasure unfurled across his mind, spiked rapidly, and made his heart pump strangely strong.
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Outside, the strange metal arms cooked the food, poured the coffee into the cup, and then turned itself off again with a quiet beep. The pancakes and the coffee smelled strange, like sweet nectar… Like a strange sour and sweet scent that filled his empty home with a tinge of life.
After a while, he stood up, changed into a lumpy suit and tie, and walked across the cold glass floor. He glimpsed a view of the horrible place below, from the concrete government offices to the places with smashed windows and poor people, where Soros, an old friend of his, lived, toward the grand glass towers that spiraled like swordfish fins.
The coffee was freshly roasted, and the pancakes were sweet and soaked in syrup. He craved it all now, starved and thirsty after a long sleep.
As he sat and ate, he stared outside the window. Into the beautiful cold, the glorious mountainscapes, the earth, the years of rivers running down the slopes. The wonderful morning air. To run around, free to lay and think, dream about the summer. The beautiful heat, the beautiful sun! He wanted to enlist... He wanted to see the sun, moon, stars, cold breath and icy frost, the fog of war. He wanted to feel the icy blast of the full cold and the full grey. To escape the iron walls, into the strange blue…
A horrible explosion on the side of his ear. It shook the world, rocked his lonely glass house… Everything was shaking… People were screaming… There were empty flames on every side of the building… Horrible, horrible flames…
The orange and red filling his eyes, the flash continuing across the State, and the echo forever stuck in his mind…He turned around and saw the remnants of a bomb explode in a building, the glass falling away, the black, crumpled remains of everything, the ashes falling. The flames writhing, and blood everywhere…
Finally, his mind quieted. Silent.
He drifted deeper and deeper, watching the flames, like some tantalizing, beautiful thing, burning away a building, keeping him staring, until the ashes flew down into the smoke.
His eyes grew dim, the coffee he had forgotten about grew cold, and the pancakes dissolved into mush, the chemical makeup slowly fading into the air, as he smelled a rancid plastic smell…
The drugs faded away in his head, making him restless…
God… He saw death, blood, everywhere…
When his work alarm rang, he stood up, dumped the leftovers into the garbage chute, and went down the elevator. It rang, and someone came out. A worker, cleaning the stairs.
He walked slowly inside, looked around, and pressed the ground floor button…
Alone, listening to the whirring of gears and motors.
He saw himself running out of the State, the great metal structure, the people trapped inside, the constant death, the guns flashing, killing all… He wanted to run into the cold, shivering…. He wanted to, he wished to, He saw himself in that wild, energy, the great chaos…
…..
…..
He touched the down button with a limp hand. The elevator rushed down, silently clicking as it reached a launchpad.
There was no music, there was only him, and his lonely little building, on the top of everything… Overhead, he heard gunshots, bombs exploding, everything blurring ever-so frantically, chaotically in his mind. Constantly repeating itself, going again and again…
He remembered horrible things, the horrible violence, the horrible crimes in the State, the thousands of countless massacres… The thousand of battles, the violence happening every day…
Zircon arrived, in the colorful dazzle of neon and plastic bulbs, in a daze. His head hurt from thinking.
He looked up, up from his thoughts, and saw the emptiness, the usual silence. In the clean streets, there was nobody…
Tired and confused, he rang up an auto-taxi instead of taking the subway, as usual.
He waited… Waiting for the car to rush through the streets, the door opening, the tired old man staring at him as he sat down on the torn-up cushions, and then in the silence, he could think… Remember, imagine…
Think of the summer, the heat… Be free in his thoughts…
Become one again…
…
…
…
It didn’t arrive… The auto-taxi had abandoned him…
And so, he went down the subway steps, but he couldn’t get in, he didn’t want to go in. There was gunfire, there were bombs, they were screams. The firing of guns, the blood going down the steps… God…. Oh god… The Marxists were killing everyone… But maybe, the National Guard would come…
Maybe…
And for an hour he waited, in fear of the rebels, in fear of the youth, and their violence, their guns, their constant screams of angst and hate… Silent… Thinking again… By himself… In the cold, but there was nothing… Nothing at all… Not a single shout, or cry in his quiet, silent neighborhood where the godly Chamberlains slept.
…
He walked in the cold instead.
…
A billboard lit up with crushed bird’s nests, shriveled squirrels, all over an infinite lawn, as the lawnmowers tore them up into furry shreds. Another one rambled about the flood, shifting into wrecked buildings, jungles of seaweed, fish, and nature intertwining around broken columns.
People waved to him on the street, the National Guard, the Relieved Cross, and the Policy Reformer. All great people, working for the government. Keeping track of dirty, grimy faces. But he loosely ignored them, his thoughts distracted him with strange ideas.
Schubert played from some speakers above, lovely, boring music that echoed throughout the confines of the metal walls, and the Minister Of Conversation began to talk about the news outside of the State in his ordinary droning voice.
On the television, a mustached man decried the Ainomians for massacring citizens, bombing the State, attacking the State. Frozen bodies, dead soldiers, and a young boy, with his skull, stomped out. The casualties of an Ainomian Massacre, after a bloody attack by the savages. Another screen exclaimed about Robots, lighting up the icy world with pink and blue flashes.
But some people didn’t listen, throwing rocks at the screen to watch it shatter.
“Death to the State!”, the Marxists yelled, from distant, violent voices, yelling out communist propaganda. All against his glorious State.
They dumped and threw hard ice and snow onto the NewsKeepers Monitors, eventually breaking it into fragments and stomping on it with their tennis shoes and slippers.
They held tattered flags and yelled Liberty, Freedom!… Freedom for rights they didn’t have, rights they all wished and wanted… A young man wearing thick glasses screamed about the greatness of Ainom and decried the crimes of the State.
But he could hear the wonderful sound of tire treads, tank treads… All rumbling forward… Rumbling and rumbling….
It was all taken care of after the Protection Officers marched forward, deployed from their fellow Swarm, grabbed the Resistors, and threw them into black vans, where the muffled yells were drowned out by gunshots and the Anthem Of The Stars. Poetspeak rang out into the air.
“Of thine, of such great worthy worship, we are to the great blood of the land. Running red, blazing furiously. Our tongues are bound by the words of the mayoral candidates, greatness to arrive in our own time, we are the death-mongers, the arrival of the men of the Protection Officers. We march further and faster. Fleeting is thine, of time, of life. But, of thine, we are the men of the city. Further, marching, furiously, greater than the Ainomian counterpart...”
It rambled on and on, growing unintelligible as it played further. He watched the rest of the Chamberlains salute, with hands-on their hearts, smiling softly. Chaos everywhere, blood draining down, as he tried to run away from the guns, the explosions, run into shelter…
A rocket fired, fire burst near him, and smog crept into his lungs. Debris crept onto his face, smashed his nose, and let blood spurt from his lips.
“God!” he screamed suddenly, strangely, like an animal. He spat out blood and could drink the blood practically. His legs rolled strangely along, forward.
His hands were detached, discontent, gone… Nothing registered in his mind quite as before
… Gone from this world, faded away like a piece of dust in the wind, gone, useless. Legs wobbling along, stumbling along, almost tripping as the blood ran like thick stew, lapped up by dead bodies. He saw that the people around him were running and fleeing, as a dead man croaked, and a stroller rolled carefully down the steps, something screaming from within.
More and more Marxists flanked the Protection Officers, shooting with their guerilla weapons, attacking all who approached. They dropped in from all sides, from wires, from lampposts, from PO-KT wires, hanging with a noose and a note, and a hint of regret on their pale, strange, faces. But all capping grenades, and smiling to themselves.
“Back away!”, said the Protection Officers, The National Guard closing in, pushing him away from the battle. Their strangely steady eyes faded with exhaustion and weariness.
He stumbled into a bakery, rubbing his hands together in the warmth of the AC, grabbing a paper towel, and letting the blood soak from the open wound. He wrapped his nose in it and taped it with bandages and band-aids from the store owner. Laughed to himself quietly, and lazily walked over to the window. And, along with hundreds of others, he watched the ensuing chaos.
Blood slashed from open wounds as snipers fired from tower to tower and the Protection Officers marched forward to put down the riots. Grenades burst and fired rubble into the sky. Fat bunches of smoke floated into the air. Men screamed, guns blazed, and robots ran their great engines to fire .50 rounds into the Marxists.
“Forth! Forth! Forth!”, screamed an old man wearing a black hat, shooting at the rebels, and then his head was blown away, smashed to smithereens, blood running across the ground, bits of brain staining the glass. Guns and knives flashed with the light of the State. People grimly looked, laughed, or shook uncontrollably at the sight of a darkening sky, and the helicopters that shot rockets and bullets.
“Death to the State!”, screamed an impoverished, poor-looking man, onto the streets and was killed by the hail of bullets, leaving him a bloody, screaming mess on the ground. All horrible. Horrible, horrible...
“Help! Help! Help!”, someone on fire screamed forth and rolled around in the bricks and stone. He continued to run around until somebody poured a bucket of water over him. But all that was left was a curled, crumpled, blackened, burnt chunk of flesh, whitened with ash. A horrible, chunk of black, and a screaming, burnt face.
An old man with a wheelchair, a flag, a gun, and a uniform beckoned a group of Marxists forward. A machine gun atop one of the turrets in the State fired at every one of them, and the robots fired forth from the ground. A rocket screamed from above and blasted its way into the ground. Into the deep heart of the small army, until there was a great explosion, smoke bursting into the air.
In the end, there was a horrible bloody mess in the bricks and the rubble… The wheelchair was burning…
In the right sector, he saw a horrible explosion, stolen missiles firing from every corner… Into buildings, into tanks, and men flying overhead…
He saw the faces of wanted men, W. Samson himself fired a rocket launcher into a wall. George Mush and a team of soldiers ambushed a uniformed man as he walked toward the grocery store. The National Guard ran forward with their tanks and cars, running over every single Marxist. The soldiers continued advancing, and a wall of flames built itself up from the stacked cans of gasoline, the corpses laying on the ground. The roads were all covered in blood and smoke, rubble and stone laying on the streets.
Then, the Marxists were dead, the smoke cleared, and the New Republic’s flags were burned. The trucks took the Marxists away, where they were stuffed in large piles, bound together by nets. He saw their awkward squirming, their strained faces, and tortured yelling.
He went outside, walked into the chaos, and saw the caged, blood everywhere. He wished to run out the iron doors, into the cold. The beautiful, beautiful cold. With the rebels killing everyone, the State slowly fell apart…
In the middle of the State, a Protection Officers officer pressed a button on the remote control. A centerfold hatch opened to the outside.
Outside, in the cold, in the horrible brine of muck, and strange things…
The trucks gave a slow whine. The people inside fell out of their nets into the white ice, one by one, dropping to shatter into tiny bits to the great rocks below or to die of the ice-cold. Blood staining the rocks, blood raining down from the heavens, dropping into the sea.
The speaker, the young man wearing glasses, screamed aloud. His arms waved awkwardly in the air as the Protection Officers dragged him over the concrete.
Goodbye to him…. Gone to the ice and the cold, gone forever...
A crowd slowly formed, consisting of old friends, but with wrinkles clouding their vision, and fat cheeks emblazoned with a rosy hue. Some, with thin necks and dirty, grey, faces. They stood around and behind the ring of Protection Officers officers, watching the young boy go off toward the Door Outside with disgrace.
“Help me! Somebody help! Goddammit, I did no wrong gentlemen! Let me go! Let me go!”, he shouted aloud. His heels rubbed against the steel floors, but he could not keep a grip.
“Go die in hell!”, screamed a red-faced man, throwing pebbles at him.
The crowd screamed in rage, yelled outwards at the young boy, who was crying, screaming out to let him go…
A Protection Officers officer yelled, “Open the hatch!”
A tiny, torso-shaped doorway opened to the outside. A glass hole, a device of torture… They placed the bottom half of him inside, attached thin wire hooks that dug into his skin, left great scars, and left him hanging in the cold like the carcass of a cow in a freezer. The boy was screaming as they did it…As his skin loosely fell away
The red dripped in glossy puddles, all the way down to the bottom of the mountains…
The crowd grew closer… Someone laughed…
“No, no, no“, his voice hoarse from screaming, “No, no, no. Someone help… Help...”
Eventually, the crowd went away. He walked away too, past the lampposts, into the great blue tunnel of glass and concrete.
Zircon continued on the sidewalk, wandering, thinking, into a calm where he could remember memories of the past. He laughed to himself, as he remembered everything, the past smells, sights, the heat, the fun, the whirling lights…
He remembered- He remembered… Something… Something beautiful…
Slam! There went the bats and sticks, hitting and bruising a man. He walked past the poor man who had broken down and was crying about the death of his fellow youth. The Protection Officers surrounded its homeless, feeble, broken-down form.
One was beating him with leather-gloved fists, while another thrashed him with his leather bats, and another was pointing a gun into his crying face. He glimpsed at the bruised figure, and then rubbed his forehead, transported out of his thoughts.
Horrible, horrible… The bruised face, the blood draining down the sidewalk, as he watched them kick at the crumpled mess.
“Stop! Stop!” he shouted and ran toward them.
“Back off”, the soldier screamed at him, staring at his fearful eyes. “This man has done a horrendous crime, back away.”
He stared at them for a while, almost going away. Stared at them as they turned away and yelled at the man… Yelled at that broken old man… The sheer disrespect… The stupidity as they laughed… Their bruised, calm, laughing faces... Taunting him endlessly… But, with his fists clenched and red, he marched toward them.
“I command you to stop!”, his arms raised, staring into their emotionless, gleeful faces, that smiled at him, cared nothing for his bald face, his power as a Chamberlain.
They said nothing, beating the man’s ribs with bats and sticks.
“My god! My god! Death and the youth, doesn’t anyone understand anymore?”, said the man lying on the ground, screaming outwards in anguish, hiding his bruised face from the world.
“I am your Chamberlain! I command you to stop. Stop beating him now otherwise there will be consequences.”, he screamed louder, watching their faces smile and grin, as they continued punching and kicking the helpless man on the ground.
“Look at me! I told you to look to me!”
“Back off!”, one pushed him onto the ground. He grunted and lifted himself, but a tall one wearing leather gloves punched him in the face and punched him again when Zircon tried to stand up. Blood bubbling downwards, leaking onto his face, as he cried on the ground, from the pain, as the salty tears churned with the blood, covering his lips, draining down his face.
“He’s just like the others… Always blaming. Always begging for some attention… Blubbering and blubbering… So simple… Like a little whiny thing… GET OUT OF HERE! Go back to your house of glass! Your tall mansion… Nobody wants you here!”, waving their hands, pointing their guns, laughing at their power over him.
“Stop! Stop beating him! He’s done nothing wrong! Stop it! Stop it! Listen! Listen!”, Zircon yelled from the dust, tears down his eyes. But they continued to batter their victim, the poor man until it gave up and stopped thrashing around.
Zircon tried to stand up. His entire figure was dizzy from the beating, his head rushing with dizziness, disoriented… He brushed himself off, held his bloody napkin and wiped the mess off his face, and limped off into the streets again, walking toward The Bunker as always.
There was no respect in them, no respect for anyone who had built up the glorious State. He hated them all, he despised all people. He despised the Marxists of the State, the strangely ignorant, the sadistic, the violent, all of them. He hated the violence, the fights, day after day, death, one by one, until the government would regrow them all from their tanks until they were all tank-born until they were all obedient.
He could see them decaying, fading away, buried into the ground… Gone…. Gone and gone…. Fading away into the back of his mind, fading from view, from history….
He grumbled and pouted, but eventually reached the Bunker, cleverly disguised as a series of office buildings. Thousands and hundreds of hum-drum, boring people passed by him, bowing as they did, waving to him, smiling at him. Their despicable, horrible little faces reminded him of boredom and shelves of paperwork.
But, he waved, and bade them farewell as he went up the elevator to a hidden door, into a stairwell that fell downward, and finally, into the Bunker. Monoliths of steel stood near the doors, and soldiers held their guns up high. A Worker receptionist greeted him with a motionless face of galvanized steel, smiling at him.
“Welcome Chamberlain Zircon! Welcome to our wonderful State!”, chirping from a bare desk, smiling without emotion.
As he walked, he listened to the nothingness. The lonely little quarters. The typing… The thousands of talking computers… And the keys… Continually battering against the stupid plastic…
They were all busy with research and projects, mumbling and mumbling about science and progress and discovery. Posters nearby emphasized the remaking and reforming of the world. To shape it into a human form controlled by order and repetition. To shape into a grey, dull mush of loneliness and work.
He walked another pile of stairs, and into his uneven workspace, full of papers, contracts, and orders. Bulletin boards lay strewn across the ground. A photograph of him on a carnival ride lay torn in shreds on the ground.
He sat down on his tall chair and watched his employees, his workers. The thousands of scientists worked in cellars, on storage containers, and in catacombs. All with their shriveled beards, their special shirts, and beady eyes.
He watched them all with the title of Chamberlain of the Bunkers of the Government, watched with quiet loneliness…
He grabbed the speaker near his desk and smiled at the people below, a false little smile. Looked through the blurry, stained plastic window, and spoke into the intercom.
He read from the transcript above. Tried to sound happy, tried to sound wonderful. As the strange people below stared at the speakers above.
“Good morning. Good morning”, Zircon rambled forth. His workers looked up from their various projects, “The Chamberlain announces that today is a glorious day. Today is a special day. Today is the Glorious Massacre Of The Marxist day. A special holiday...The greatest of the State!”
He smiled into the camera, with his bruised face, the dried blood staining his nose. Laughed aloud about the helplessness of the Marxists. Called their lives and motivation dull and stupid. Talking how they went on and on, without any real dreams, calling them shrimps and worms in a strange can, forever and ever twisting and turning, buzzing and fluttering. Until they shriveled away from the heat of the sun, and all that remained were dead bugs and dead shrimp, stinking up the entire State.
Zircon ended on a quiet note, with the whine of his microphone turning off and the start of the great fits of music, studied by the Calculator Bots traversing below, the whirring machines that thought for hours and hours, calculated within themselves about spirals… About great things….
He whistled to himself, all alone, in the clicking and the drumbeats of The Las Morgraten, listening to the large, grating Poetspeak pound into his head.
Singing, humming, remembering strange things, as memories filled his mind.
He remembered those swirling lights, as the Ferris wheel went up, and the bulbs twinkled.
Going inside a small room like a glowing glass house… Watching the world from the air…
He went up, seeing the sky, went down and down again, forever and ever, in the loud sticky noise of the world, then up again, around and around, as he remembered saluting, smiling, softly…
The beautiful cold, the ice freezing on water, the warmth of fires, the cheers, the laughs, and watching the world from a happy eye, up in the air. He could see the city, the night, the skyline, the houses of glass in the air…
Being free, alone, up in the air…
.
.
Soros continued rocking in his chair, collecting each curious memory into a pocket file. His eyes were nearly blind from constant rest, blurry, unused. His legs rolled around uselessly, and his skin grew pale and flaxen, white as his bleached hair.
He was old and useless, barely could wake up in the morning. Paralyzed by life, the world, with time weighing him down. With his saggy skin
The hours passed by for Soros. He sat in his wooden, rocking chair, quietly whispering, feeling the warmth of feeling and emotion pass through him. The PO-KT whirred and an air heater expelled heat into the air. Silence faded away, replaced with the quiet audio of the PO-KT replaying Soro’s memories, again and again.
A knock on the door woke him from his trance. It was Zircon, the only person who visited him these days.
“Come in. Come in”, he grumbled and shifted himself to appear taller and prouder. He pressed a button to unlock the latch he couldn’t unlock.
Zircon walked in, waved toward him, and took a seat on a rotting bench full of oozeworms and termites. It creaked and cracked
“Good morning! Ah yes, ah… Good morning..., Zircon said with his thick tank-borne accent. The false politeness oozed out of his voice. Soros stared at him, into his tired, empty eyes. Bruises, purple, splotched, rushing down his face, blood dripping down his nose, drying on his lips
"You’re doing well today!”, Zircon waved and smiled. But Soros ignored it and went into another room to get the items from the chest.
“The violence outside, a horrible, horrible day today”, Zircon walked toward the window, looking outside, at the flames, at the shining sun peering through the glass windows. “Such a horrible, horrible day”.
“God…You don’t understand what type of day today was. It was a wonderful day. When the dreams rush through your mind, it is a day to relish, a day to beautify oneself”, Soros shook his head, his arms slowly aching as he pushed the chest lid up, wincing as the pain rushed down his spine. “God, my back aches…”
Zircon paused his contemplation. Stepping behind Soros, staring at him.
“You sit all day, on a rocking chair, watching memories”, Zircon watched the weathered PO-KT beep. “How can you bear rotting away in this room every day? Can you not go outside?”
Soros pulled out a couple of bags and set them on the ground. He continued sifting through the items in the chest.
“Have you ever gone outside of the State? Into the snow, and the cold?”, Zircon approached forward, watching him continue to sift through the food inside. Then pull out more bags. “Soros. Aren’t the waters wonderful, the seas and the oceans… If I could go outside…”
“Here!”, Soros gave Zircon a grocery bag full of black market items. Food spilled over, fish, bread, nuts, berries, corn, turkey, apples, duck, chicken, and peas.
Zircon handed him the money, stopping his speech midway, snatching it from Soros’s weak hands, staring at it like a greedy little pig. Horrible, horrible Zircon…
“Get out!" Soros shouted. He hated the face. He wanted to tear those dull eyes away from Zircon’s skin, watch it peel away until it shriveled and fell into dust. He wanted to bury him underneath the earth and leave Zircon there to rot. God! He hated him, the sight of Zircon made him sick.
Zircon looked up, muttering to himself, scratching his head, standing there for a while, by himself. Silent. He watched Zircon’s stupid piggish eyes and hated Zircon's disheveled face.
“Get out! Get out! Get out!”
“Goodbye, Soros… ”, Zircon went away, the door quickly shutting.
Soros was alone, in the concrete building. He put on his PO-KT again and turned it on, looking into the deep chasms of his mind, relaxing in the dark.
Quiet… All quiet…
Iambran lay in a hidden room in the Marxist New Republic’s hidden bunker, past rusty chambers through dusty corridors. The door ahead of him rotted and creaked, rust dripping from the orifices. A white flag lay in the corner, while a PO-KT plugged into an outlet lit up with MindStop and KneeDeep. Both of which gave him heavy cocktails of moods, all mixed with pocket drops. The wonderful drugs boiling in his mind.
He was transcendent. He knew the world, the features of clay, formed by gold, carved by the hands of god. He saw the kaleidoscope of people and things. Buildings, pure marble, shimmered, glistened, white as snow, dropping slowly, floating… Floating… He saw it all in his strangely dead eyes. Gone, were they, under the obedience of the PO-KT and shriveled from years of closing them. He dreamt of the soft bulbs of green fruit, a dragon with red eyes, a man in chain armor, an ocean of pearly-white fish, and the ivory teeth of a strange god. The dreams he had bought from the store.
They were fun and happy, full of bright colors that flashed across his useless, dazed eyes.
Beside him, his hand rested on a title with the insignia Magister on it. The card with the Court of Marxists laser-grinded on it rested underneath the table in piles and piles of dust. Another hand rested on a soft pillow, his unusable hand, pale from the shade, and crisscrossed with veins.
But inside his strangely, twirling, chaotic mind, he felt euphoric, high. In the lights of multiple dreams and multiple PO-KT’s connecting to his mind, he saw God, he dreamt of the stars that rotated in the grey night sky. His mind rambled forth images, spouting like a waterfall filled with rainbow salmon.
It allowed him to see into God’s Magic, and he did this while taking those spurts of MindStop and allowing the spurts of pleasure to fill him.
He dreamt of other things outside of the earth, flying in the air, having all power, superhuman, flying. The PO-KT was making him superhuman, he saw it all, everything, the inner flames of humanity, the logs burning, the things, the people, the horrible demons of Creus, the great red serpent, all strangely warped, strangely random, strangely surreal. Putting out their curled fists and beady eyes, observing him, examining him, twisting their lips upward into a mocking smile.
Continued, as silence enveloped the world until he was in the void as Creus was. The pale green writhed, slithered, horribly excited by the emptiness, the meaningless. The scales glittered in the night, and the stars shone brightly.
A beating heart formed from a crescent moon, the ventricles filled with earthly soil until it was a glorious planet. With Creus slithering toward it, slithering slithering slithering… Iambran saw the creation of the world take place, with the drugs pumping pleasure into his tender heart. Further, faster, until it blurred and he saw lights and stars and planets.
When he opened his eyes, he saw something filling his voiceless, meaningless life, the God Creus. A god he knew existed, a god he had worshipped for years and years, saw as something else, knew was something else. The serpent, from the kaleidoscope of colors, looking through a sticky bottle, saw people of other planets, of other Earths. The walls of his normal mind were broken free, collapsed, shattered, ripped, and torn against the ground.
It filled his strangely twisted life. He drank the KneeDeep, basking in those glorious pocket drops. He listened to the Book Of Creus, the description rolled across his mind, filling it with a buzzing, strange, calm, as the raspy whispers rolled across his spine.
“The scales are yellow, blue, green, rainbow in its hue, strangely bizarre on its left edge. A particle of sand sticks to a piece of hair. From the edge of its rippling spine to its dragon tails, the heart beats wildly, strangely, irregularly. It cares, it obeys, it understands, it helps. We must understand the wild, crazed eyes, the strange brain that writhes and floats in the acidity of space.”
Lay back with the pleasure of transcendence and pure silence, and slowly began praying in his slow, humming voice. Mumbling forth words from the tip of his shriveled tongue, thinking about that red dragon, the thing that thought and spoke to him from its wrinkled eyes. The God Creus, covered in the allure of blood. Great infinite Creus! Creus!
It sent him to the universe of Sonom, a place where information floated across strange lines and buzzed with aethereal emotions. He saw nothing, ate nothing, but felt the allure of the stars and other planets.
Through silent words, through the rush of his senses and strange emotions that curled around his festering, brewing mind, he saw Creus writhe and prosper. He wished for silence, he wished that the slightest moans of wind and men would die away like fall leaves.
A strange whisper interrupted his thoughts, full of a strange melody, thrumming across his mind, a beautiful, beautiful golden pitch, ringing in his mind, echoing the hollow drums, the hollow earth…
“Iambran”
The world spoke his name, and for a moment, he could feel his blind eyes slightly blur between dream and reality. He was awake, conscious, yet walking on his imagination, his thoughts…
“Iambran, wake!”
And grand, great scales rumbled up the earth, erupted above the world… A beautiful, beautiful array of scales, shining against the sun, red and orange crackling, running like rivers, like small tears, all across the sky, and glowing yellow eyes stared at him from above.
“Iambran, you are the Prophet, churned from the loins of an ugly metal thing, from the deep chambers of gears and wonderful machinery… You are the one to save the world… Stop the floods, bring Ainom to a broken, shattered State, into a world where there is nothing left… Nothing left at all… You are to be the savior, another great Messiah growing from the soft earth… Wake! Iambran! Wake! You are gifted my power, to save our world… To bring me up from the chains weaved by God himself…. Wake Iambran!”
From his strange, small bed, boring, lonely, built from burnt rags, from these thoughts plaguing his mind, he awoke into full consciousness, sweat dripping down his bent spine, his head overflowing with strange thoughts, strange ideas, and energy… Like magic…
Like Magic…
The soothing thoughts, now echoed again through his mind, tinny voices scurrying around his mind, and there was a voice again, now through a medium.
“You must guide them like a shepherd, toward Ainom, away from the horrible, rotting State. First, I must work, I must build frames in the feeble human mind, build a great iron web around us all.…”
And then there was a strange static… A great grand static…
In the distance, he could only faintly remember the golden pitch…
The voices yelled for attention, screaming out, decrying the horrible Ainom, shooting guns into the air, stomping forth with iron boots and cutthroat knives. Bearded faces smiled as they fired into crowds, and soldiers marched on the High One’s orders.
A billboard containing thousands and thousands of videos, stickers fresh from the Grab-M-Eat.
Zircon sat in his great mansion of a sky-home, watching them while eating his meal from the Grab-M-Eat. The squeaking of the giant cables was stifled by thousands of noise-proof pads. Allowing it to seem like he was floating above the world, alone.
He looked at the view. The glancing towers, the shining lights, the crevices of dripping rust, and the sculpted metal bodies. Streetlamps twisted around marble columns. After that, there were the ghettos, where the regulars were born, and the Cured were sent after their Treatment to the reaffirmation camps.
He watched the homeless below. Their fire pits gleaming gold, their grease and smog silently creeping in through his air vents. Zircon watched their strange little lives, their diseased, their cripples, the corpses everywhere… The starved, thin corpses…
And he had heard of the cannibalism on the news. Eating dead bodies, drinking blood. The pale, horrible faces. Continually staring at every passer-by.
The soaked rags, eternal stink, and tired, tired eyes made him look away.
He stared at the empty plastic container with the Ronalde Meal. A video of Ronalde himself smiling at him, whilst he wore a bulletproof vest and held up his standard RK-98.
“Look upon the glory of the State, buy 3 and get 3 for 1.50. Chicken Nuggets are 30 percent off for every person that enlists! Buy! Buy! Buy!”, the tinny speaker spoke. The holographic screen glitched as Ronalde spoke and spoke again.
“Fight the bad guys! Fight Ainom! Fight them all!”, Ronalde raised his fist into the air and struck it down upon the palm of his hand.
The food in the meal was horrible, it stunk like boiled rubber and plastic burning in the rubble. He peeled the video sticker off and stuck it onto a giant billboard, filled with thousands more screens that screamed out, with their guns, with their jokes, their lively animations...
He sat back on his couch again, watching the glitching screens and dull smiles. For a while, he wondered and thought, tapping the coffee table, and drinking his soda.
He turned off the lights and plugged the PO-KT in and lulled himself into sleep. He dreamt from the eyes of someone else, with visions of a thick jungle, festering from the boiling heat of the sun, and with swamp water dripping down the greasy vines. People of the jungle, a glowing egg, and the skeleton of an archaeologist.
An alarm blared in his room, a speaker around a pole that beeped and beeped and beeped. He rubbed his tired, lazy eyes. In the red glare of his alarm clock, he saw the letters merging as the blurriness in his vision faded away.
He jumped up, stumbling a bit, seeing that he was late.
That he had slept past 5 minutes!
He ran to his room, put on his uniform, and his badge, and ran down the stairs. Into the elevator, going past a mural filled with a colorful array of handprint turkeys and preschool colors.
Down, down, down, down, the floors, as the elevator ran down slowly, quietly, until he ran out of the door. and then flew onto the streets, past the motorcars. Then, around the screaming young man with glasses.
For a minute, he ran down, down, down the blue tunnel of glass and concrete, up the stairs, with the lights, until he stopped at the Cinema-Theatre building with grand columns and music spinning from the intercoms. He straightened at the sight of Fetcher Of The Scrolls and the Magister Of The Mind.
He strode toward the main Ticketmaster.
“Your late!”, A fellow, with a gleaming array of medals, from the State Watch cried, “Pull out your card!”
The red marker came out. His card came out, out of the 14 total, there were only 2 marks left. Two more left until the Reaffirmation Camps. Two more!
He shivered and stumbled into the dark, damp place. The projector flickered and then lit up. An ad formed on the screen, with a smiling man, a dancing dog, and a soldier shooting guns into the air, again and again, shooting with his ferociously terrifying smile.
A man held by two soldiers went screaming past. He stared at the sweating, gaunt face, as the man’s fists pounded against the dirty floor, until he was shoved into a cage, and driven outside toward the factories.
God…
The red marker. The camps, the mines, the disloyalty he had brought upon himself. He pulled at his hair while the title card swung into view, muttering to himself frantically, rambling about his loyalty, his allegiance, and then stopping.
He looked around at the guards, at the people, all sleeping, inattentive, dazed. All so beautifully uncomfortable, fidgeting, twitching. Only the children loved it, laughing at it, shooting their invisible weapons along with the Charmer at the screen.
He took a glance at the aircraft hanger rumbling onscreen, the crude humor, the happy smiles, the strangely dumb characters, and the loud flashes and bangs that populated it all.
He looked away, continuing in his thoughts, thinking and thinking about his fate. Wondering about Ainom, wondering about the world, wondering about the horrible reaffirmation camps. Zircon lay back. His eyes grew dimmer and dimmer. He shook, hated himself, as the movie continued.
When it ended and the lights flashed on, he dragged himself toward his sky-home and plugged the PO-KT tightly to his head.
He bought multiple dreams, flying, and a complicated story about meeting gods. One by the government, Shot Down By Ainom.
When he dreamed deeper, he had mad fantasies, surreal, of a man turning himself inside out, a house building itself up from the ground, a man who appears only in the most vivid of dreams, a red-eyed dragon drinking from the flesh of the world…
A dream about Ainom filled his head, a life, a strangely tantalizing life. A life of magic, adventure… Something better, something filled with the tantalizing lure of something else... Raw power, raw discovery flowed through him… Red coursed through his veins, blood pumped from his enriched heart into his mind, warmth filled his body, he saw the irons of a giant cage, and then a great concrete building covered in gold.
God… But he could not forget the red marker.
Soros sat in his rocking chair, the PO-KT whining and whirring in his ear, filling his mind with a cacophony of Ainomian sounds and Ainomian memories. His feet were on a blurry street, of snow and metal. Tiraders ran past him, with their heavy suits of iron chains. Running past him, toward the grand, church, where they held the festival. In the glorious old things, with gold spiraling toward the top of a tall spire, the tiles on the roof clacking in the wind, and Christ stood planted above it all.
He watched, from afar, the peaks of Everest, the wonderful skies, the fires lively in every home, and the vault that held the people. Fading letters appeared as he walked further, The Global Seed Vault.
And party-goers, his friends, all laughing about the young king, about the festival. As the wind blew overhead, and as the sun ran through the air. They drank and ate at a gold table, laughing about the world, of the waters. As he talked about the moon, the beautiful stars, the strange little scales he’d noticed in the snow, and the world of sand, the beaches, the beautiful tropical trees, the warm ocean waves, all beautiful…
The shivers in his spine faded away after a while, forming a numbness in his back, so he took more PO-KT drops to help cope with the uselessness of his body, as they rushed through his PO-KT into his head, as he jittered and shook. He trembled and trembled like a frail leaf, withered, useless, quiet, strangely thin in the bone, weak… Weak...
Twisting and turning around in his chair, he muttered Zircon’s name, hating him, hating himself. The world filled itself up with grand lies, filling with nothingness, as the waters rose further and further. With the wrinkles on his face, growing more and more plentiful, he found himself staring in his mirror at the man he did not know, at himself…
The horrible years of staring at himself, when all things grew weaker and weaker, and he felt himself ease into a routine, into idleness… Horrible… Horrible…He hated the strange, horrible world.
He stood up, and rose to find his coat, Readying himself for a journey into the deep heart of the ghettoes.
A quiet knock on the door. He opened it to see Frederich in a wheelchair.
“Salutations, Soros”, Frederich walked inside. Soros held his briefcase and nodded, and sat down on the leather seat.
They went down the elevator, walking down twisting roads, into an isolated part of the city, full of blue fog and smoke from intense fighting. The street cleaners and their trucks scooped them out into incinerators. Down a small flight of steps, into a long concrete tunnel glittering with azure glass looking onto the outside, as the dust and sand covered a strange door toward an elevator. When nobody was looking, Frederich went inside the door with Soros, and they went deep, deep, into the heart of the State. A beautiful government bunker, draped with adornings, with a rich red carpet on the ground, guns hanging on the wall, and torn uniforms and posters plastered on the ceiling.
Soldiers in uniforms walked around, talking with others about strange plans. Or some laughter, an occasional smile. Many slept in the other rooms in the other doors of the Bunker with their PO-KT, in an unknown place and at an unknown time, sleeping…
In the corner, around a table, sat, all planning the demise of the State. They were glorious people. People that despised the earth, the State, were depressed in their ways, alone in their concrete bunkers, and were radicalized by a horrible, new world.
He hobbled forward with his cane, holding a heavy case in his left hand, twitching and shivering as he weakly went forward.
The Marxists stood up, greeted him with smiles, and sat back down as he opened his briefcase. A package of Macker’s 0.70 rounds and a couple of giant MK70s and G330s greeted them. They took two of each and gave him some money to compensate.
Soros shook their hands, giving a glance at the diagrams and complex maps before them.
“Tomorrow is the day. Judgment upon the State, the final battle.”, said a bald man with glasses, raising a fist into the air, looking around the room. “I will gather all of my soldiers, we will ambush the Bunker while they are sleeping, when it ends, we become the filthy State, we cleanse it, we become the government. We are the reborn State. And, remember these words… We all die if this fails! We will eat the capsules, and die! We cannot let them crush… the resistance…”
He listened while he sat in his wheelchair, while Frederich argued with the Marxists, about the filthiness of the State, about the ants that lived in their glass homes, of the countless massacres, and the lack of rights. While the Marxists drank and cheered themselves on, lifted their guns into the air.
He wheeled himself into the elevator, into the outside cold, smiling silently to himself, while he went onto the road. Saw the buildings rise upon each other, stacked one by one until they formed titanic buildings. And a strange, blue moon shone through the roof upon the center square.
He saw the guns shooting, the vibrant red spilling upon the world, the wonderful disappearance of the State.
Soon, while Zircon was at the Capitol, sitting there, droning on and on, the Marxists would come and shoot them all dead… They were going to kill them all… With all that blood spurting out in great waves. Zircon, dead, that stupid, dumb, idiotic man… Goodbye to them, pigs and muck, flies tearing at their rot and corruption. Goodbye… Goodbye…
He laughed a little, smiling to himself, as he walked away, past a young man with glasses in a chamber of red, screaming with delirium, ranting about a wonderful new world.
A wonderful new world…