#1: On Valuations and Voids


Pristine constructs once filled negative spaces and broken ledgers, accounting for a proportionate usage of human thoughts. This transfigured malignancy of consciousness lay in pieces of atomic sadness, strewn across the brain tissue of a dying world. The rotting logic of our time, taxing the minds of millions by way of computerized interactions, brain hackery, and twitter-polluted friendships wrapped together in newsfeeds of photographic amusement.

Any questions? I would ask, only to be answered by blank stares from the faceless crowd of distracted pupils and their little pocket daemons, advising and encouraging by means of a devilish cyber counsel. Billions of glowing eyes melded together to form images, pixelated fantasies of grotesque wonderment that slowly, but surely, contributed to the deteriorating transfer of consciousness from flesh to metal. As I looked further into the expanding blackness of space, humanities’ plastic existence. Even the stars, in their terrible grandeur, gathering along the great structures of gravitational webs, pulling vast swathes of dead mass; were unsure how to comprehend such an existential cosmic mutation metastasizing in their wake.

No commentary from the Void. Merely the unnatural light harnessed by ruinous memories. The light grew fainter and more distant as if was never even there. Nothing made sense anymore, like I was trapped in some cosmic fishbowl for the amusement of these juvenile gods of old, toying with my puddled neurons and willowed synapses. Their eyes, billions of tiny cyber pupils, leered from the darkness above as I scurried to my desk, feeling the fingers of entropy closing in on me.

Blink, throb, repeat. Came the only answer from the hungering blackness. Only deep, associative undertones of throbbing infrequent drumbeats against the backdrop of silent shadows, making my chest heavy and cold. Pristine constructs. Valuations and broken ledgers. Blink, throb, repeat. The undulating dark seemed to grow ever more as I felt the boundaries around my desk shrink with every flash of light, every twitch from those awful eyes whose colors made the rest of my body ache with a numbing paresthesia. Nothing made sense anymore. Pristine constructs once filled negative spaces and broken ledgers, accounting for a proportionate usage of my thoughts, a transfigured malignancy of consciousness lying in pieces of atomic sadness, strewn across the brain tissue of my world.


#2: Of Quanta and Quarantines

Gliding like shadows on the wall, barely visible, undetectable in the night I knew something was there, lidless and cold. Don’t blink, Professor Static would tell me. They move infinitely in the night, incomprehensible to the eye, entropic and immutable, twisting consciousness by the crackling noises of white voids through speckled lunacy. Perverse, contorted, and ruthless, uniquely defining the darkness that crawled underneath mass deceptions in the peripherals of our pathetic greyspaces. Gruesomely so, they slithered along the sewers of reality, undulating in palpable slang the ululations of shadow speech; electric and atomic in nature. He was a mysterious creature, though I found myself entranced by his words. The words of Static.

It was unavoidable, standing in the shadow of a fortress of night, unable to escape the thing that coiled around my mind, with visions so gripping and a voice so ugly. Beware the immense the most infinitesimal, he’d say; the Cyber-quanta which had infected every strata of my machinations down to the insignificant pragmatic microbial core. So, in dreams I confined myself, to the most isolated of worlds, where last night bizarre and wild constructs of color bled through my mind. Blues and greens blended together with pale amber tones, and even some new strains of light that were indescribable to the human eye illuminated my horizons. Surely it was some trickery wrought by the Static. Wandering through an ethereal portal, my body pushing against layers of space and time as if it were some grey electrified paste. I didn’t blink, not even once as I pressed onward. Beyond the bubbles of nothingness, where deteriorating structures of gravity sagged against the vacuous dark, quantum memories from my many pasts seemed to smash together in violent entropy as my eyes began to shut.

Gliding like shadows on the wall, barely visible, undetectable in the night, nothing made sense inside the borrowed rooms and old metaphors in my head. I knew what the Professor said, but that was his folly; for now, I move infinitely throughout loops of doomed histories and compressed singularities, like Static on the walls.


#3: Ruins and Rhizomes

Stellar corpses remained trapped in a graveyard of night, where black worms gnawed on their galactic flesh. Rotting with spark and flame, I saw the skeletal things twitch and fester by the glow of some neutron pulsar, whose blinding luminescence was sealed under an ancient mausoleum of stars. Twitching in my seat, the chalkboard covered in dust, Dr. Black blathered on, filling the place with yet another ignescent platitude about our dull existences. Fingers tapping on the surface of a cold, hollow reality, the wooden borders of my desk dropping off towards the Void where Dr. Black’s awful dullness began.

How long had I been here, listening to this? I often wondered to myself, though no true answer ever came. Only zombified notions of time, night, and stardust ground into a fine powder by the hands of an almighty judge, Dr. Black.

He liked to talk, lecture, institutionalize us, or so that was what I imagined it to be. The greyness of his splotchy, sticky voice spilling out into the hall as the dirt and grime of his bifocals, muddied with soot and stardust, slowly filled the air. Maybe that’s where they went, the stellar corpses, I mean. Unable to flee, but cowering, liberated under the feeling of some nihilistic truth by Dr. Black’s reason.

The wooden border of reality closed in, dullness and chalk blending easily with atoms and matter. Fingers tapping, stairways without end, and graveyards of stars. Dr Black’s detestations for those who don’t pay attention are truly vast, like shades towering in the night. Dr. Black detests them, me, as black worms gnawed at my flesh.


#4: On Loneliness and Languor

Walls of shadow and doubt masked behind lips and lamentations concealed any fragments of truth I had come to understand in a world where all the music had gone out. Languishing on a miserable bed of loathsome revelations, the pods of a new inquisition crammed in my head, bleeding ears, filled my mind with new thoughts, a new reality as I listened to them. Static and Black, their words and revels.

Pressing fingers against my ears I wondered, “Who else was listening? Were they always listening?”

Metal pods in my ears, plastic wires extrapolated from my chest, filled with the words of a new inquisition, cleansed my languor and bleached my solitude. The music had all gone out. The rhythm was dead, and all that remained were Static and Black, crouched behind walls of shadow and doubt masked behind lips and lamentations.


#5: Static and Black

Gliding like shadows along the walls, throbbing, blinking, culminating into a singular nightmarish abstraction of thought; two words trembled over bloodshot centers of the milky holes inside my head. Cracks, fuming with unanswered questions, two words, utterances by two grey souls flooded my brain. ‘Static and Black. Static and Black,’ they would chant, over and over again, in a tone so foul, the slippery moist sludge oozing from their lips curdled my every sensory perception. The lecture, I knew, would soon come to an end, the revelation, realization, wrought by my curiosities, drawn back into the horrid darkness. Twenty fingers, decrepit and bony, reached out from the shadows, musty and dank.

“Static and Black. Static and Black,” their voices continued to breathe, hungry and wretched.

There was nowhere to run, to hide, or flee as a massive chalkboard burst through the sandy ground, dusty white ash coating my body, those ancient fingers drawing closer.

“Please, let me alone. I’ve learned my lesson. I swear,” I pleaded as they ignored me.

“Static and Black. Static and Black. We are here, Static and Black,” they moaned, rhythm roiling, bodily terrors gestating under the platitudinous night.

Higher and higher the glassy teal wall rose, thick chalk congealing around my legs, making any movement nearly impossible. Crashing against the wall, broken nails scratched over the cracked teal sky, like bolts of electricity shocking my fractured neurons into submission. Laughter, sinister and cold, followed as if it were the thunder from a terrible storm, one finger after the other, scratching and laughing. Still, there was nowhere to run. Soon, even the dim shadows found their asphyxiation under the guise of Static and Black as the massive fingers coiled tighter around my neck. The fog of the teal sky became cloudier and muddier, where soon, two words trembled over bloodshot centers of the milky holes inside my head. Throbbing, blinking, repeating, “Static and Black. Static and Black. They’re finally here. Static and Black.”