PARTICIPATE. EXIT. JESUS *ERROR*
“Precipice Exegesis” (Spring 2026)
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LOCATION: MARGINALIA
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Come and walk with me. Know me and know yourself. To dream this dream is to know the self, “as it’s known.” Not by men or robot drones, but “galaxy and cedar cone.”
You are an A-series mortal, so much more and less than others. Death will never find you, though your life will end. You were born, yes. But you’ll never be born again. One and done, till we’re un ‘done’ to roam our version of the after life at the End of Time until we desiccate. We live on to write what no one reads and to run prayers to middle management in the hopes HVAC might be dispatched to answer. Too much. That’s much too much explanation.
You need something more tangible and you need it urgently. The irony isn’t lost on me, that I have all the time that has ever been or will ever be and also, at most, 3 nights worth of sleep to get you ready to intervene.
Borrow my mind’s eye. When you were in school, you learned to make paper cranes and origami roses. Even if you didn’t learn to do that, you did. Close your eyes and watch your glasses rest on the big bulbous schnoz of mine. Ours. It’s our nose for a moment or a few, and those nervous hands are yours as a teenager (almost). We are trying not to stare out the old narrow-wide school house windows at the fall leaves or at the young lady across the table in the art room. You struggle to find body calm and bring my fine motor control to bear on the task.
I’m sorry if you find the color or the shape of me wrong. If the itches, tics, or twitches are overwhelming. I am overcome by the demands and limits of my body frequently. To borrow my perspective and memory as you must to truly understand me is to bear the burden of being in my mortal vessel–or at least the sensory load of what that day was.
We are in late grade school learning to construct a thing from paper: a bird then a flower. It’s all folds and polygons and dry wood pulp and the smell of markers. It’s also the need to squirm and the smell of perfume in the corner of the frame and peacock feathers and hormones all around and the distraction of other bodies and noise and laughter and instructive encouragement. All that competes for attention in an art class, in any class.
There. A piece of construction paper, in a short stack. It’s purple and rectangular and barely more than two dimensions. You will cut and tear and fold it into glorious three-D, an object of depth. That is, if you can correct the shakes and quakes in my hands and in your tummy from the butterflies when the girl sitting next to you sings the line from “Purple Rain” the two lines she knows, again and again again to make you laugh.
And it’s stupid, and you tell her “That’s stupid”
“And yet, here you are. Laughing.” Yeah, cause… “Purple Rain, Puu-uurrple Raaaaaain.” You laugh so hard you snort, body contorting laughs from below the basement of your guts until the hungover substitute teacher tells you “Guys, chill.”
It’s almost at the good part. Hear the hot blood, heart pounding all the way to our face at the joke. She keeps going to get you like this, all snorting and ugly laughing. Because it’s you. Because she could, and she likes to see you “explode laugh.”
You love her, in that stupid puppy way kids do. When you give her the purple flower we hold in our sweaty hands, the one we made with something sweet–poetry on the petals for her like the mixes she makes you. When she says, “por mois?” takes it and sings the only lines she knows from “Purple Rain” and when half the class is either laughing or singing along. When the substitute has lost the battle he didn’t know had begun. That’s when we pass out and go away for a while, not the whole class, just you and I.
Faint is more accurate. Maybe it’s blood pressure or blood sugar or not the blood at all, just a seizure or maybe my bad brain in the excitement? But we’re falling fast-slow-mo from right above five feet to the floor. We are rope stack, wet pasta, snake coiling. The light goes bright at first. Blinding fluorescent dazzling white breaks into bars like light through blinds at sunset. Long, bent light through a glass and to the wall, prismatic–a rainbow. I fell to-and-through the floor that day.
Fall through with me, between the seams of worn tile on a classroom floor and into the ceiling. Run along the curl-curved ink stains we made sincere and solemn on the pages of the folded-paper flower. The spaces between everything. The Marginalia.
Reality is so firm, rigid really, in the day to day. Or it seems such when you’re sitting there, in the schoolhouse–the human being factory. Or the cubical forest. Or the factory-factory. Or some other salt mine 9-5, 4-2, 10-6, 2-10, and so on, amen. A fitting end, amen, to what a shift of work or a school day really is: the end of a segment of a precious, limited thing–a mortal life.
We’re in the walls of reality. Then we’re in the wiring moving at the speed of current till we hit a pace that makes the contents of fiber optics drip-drag and slosh. At the speed impossible, watching from satellites and traffic cams and missile cones. We see from the antennae and cameras of multitudinous drones. We see people. See them build and break the world with their little hands and hot minds in the blink-brief span of their lives.
When the flow slows, then slows some more. When we stop the whirlpool and reverse it, deposit you safe in bed well before your alarm. Even then, you need to feel it, you’d better feel it: the strand of something you thought you didn’t have that ties you to the fabric of the rest of us–the rest of all that is. Not that hippy felt shit, the real woo woo, the thing itself-ephemeral: the prismatic thread that ties you to warp-weft of the Fractal. You must learn to perceive it, urgently, so that you may follow it back here.
Come find me. When you learn to press your head through the pillow and dream between the lines. When you can come to and through the Marginalia under your own power. Learn quickly.
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SQUATTERSVILLE, PA (SOME MILES WEST-NORTHWEST-SOUTHWEST-SOUTHEAST OF)
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There are lots of libraries in Squattersville. Whatever else the place is, it’s one hell of a lovely book collection that congealed and grew around the castoff and restored people and their repaired squats–as if captured by their social gravity or the weight of the place that was hopeful in a dim, beige world. And no one wants to give voice to what they think about what they’re leaving behind as they pack. There’s only the destination and the danger. It pushes pause on the ache at the piles of books left behind. But there are so many beloved texts in the caravan that is forming. Billy Wigglestick is well represented. Marx and Engels and the “Good Book” of all the Abrahamic faiths and then some. Bronte and Butler and Le Guin. Baldwin and Benjamin and Rawls and Gramsci and whatever other portion of the good shit they were willing and able to cram in bindles and hand carts and wheel barrows with crackers and hard tack and water and filters and bedding and medicine.
Those with families gathered their children, and not one young one got one whit high. This was god’s own. Sacred smoke from herb itself sacred. Twice sanctified. The same beings that took the form of fireflies and fae things did repel the smoke around the ones whose brains still developed. God’s sacred herb and it’s illumination (profane and otherwise) are for grown-ass beings. Amen. As such, the smoke of god’s-own-herb-cloud did not, dared not, approach a single child or abstainer or otherwise non-partaker. The smoke, the sacred incense, did open the door behind space and time for sober and illuminated the same.
It wasn’t a rushed thing, the evacuation exodus of Squattersville. They had all the time in the world, or what felt like it, the people of Squattersville–the ones gathered to hear Glenn and Shimmer’s story in the weed cloud. They went and gathered the rest of town and spread the word: “We gotta boogie before the cops come and bust heads.” Verily, the good people of Squattersville would ‘boogie’–right past/around/through a cordon of cops and drone dogs.
Cigs are a shitty way to kill yourself, but nicotine’s one hell of a drug. If you’ve ever watched the smoke from one, a cigarette, dance in the very still air, you’ve seen the shadow of that path the people of Squattersville are about to walk. “Oh it’s just tiny almost-imperceptible air currents” that move the smoke. Yes, and Brownian Motion.
Also, the smoke may well follow the folds and creases of a sacred geometry that breathed dimension into flat-space and motion into time. The smoke sometimes outlines the door’s HVAC beings use to do whatever it is they actually do. In this instance we know what HVAC does: they’ll guide the refugees on their long journey through the walls of reality, through the interstitial spaces of Marginalia.
With what they could carry, push, pull, or drag. With whatever seemed important in the moment stretched long, they followed the beings in firefly form along a road made of smoke that only they could see.
The whole town, collectively illuminated began to “remember” as Glenn did. They all saw, not the future, but the pattern that produced it. The ‘bad’ paths that Glenn had lived recursively again and again again: he fell to Earth and failed to save it. And if the whole town had to choose to leave, to flee, no one had to stick with the three: Jane, Glenn, and Shimmer.
Many did choose to stick with them, though. Solidarity of freaks, family in the low places, that sort of thing. When those three walked into the night with what they could carry, they had a band of people with them. All in their band were illuminated. All walked and wondered and contemplated and remembered the contours of the Golem’s task, his mission from god they saw collectively and joined. The mission: to save the one that would save the one. They went to a place in the Midwest where somebody had some family, where the three who were wanted could lay low and the rest could find a welcoming squat.
How did the Squatters travel the Marginalia, the interstitial spaces of the multiverse? They walked. They camped off back roads and shit in holes in the woods of a world that looked precisely like theirs, almost precisely. For days, weeks, a month for those that ended up in San Francisco. They walked through a world, eerily unpopulated, their own world re-made as empty film set–a world where the sound was tinny and the colors too bleached and the light inexplicably ‘wrong.’ But the roads conformed to the map. The food and drink tasted ‘like pennies’, but all arrived alive. The feed bags were never empty, and the water jugs never ran dry. Not once. Not one person wanted. Not for food or herb (if they desired or required).
Three days after their escape, the three and their band walked out of the morning mist and onto a poorly maintained golf course in Peoria, Illinois.
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A PARKING GARAGE IN CHICAGO
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Mal business walks out of the elevator, left hand behind her back clutching the kid, right hand ready at her side,. She’s hawk watching the parking garage. Two local uniformed ‘cops’ who knew to watch the elevator (rather than guard the garage entrance) spot her and hustle-up immediately. They each shout friend-helpful “Hey!” too-eager while they wave the wrong hand, not the holster hand. They’re spreading out–coming toward the two at an ever broader angle.
“Kid…” the Fed squeezes Jack’s hand. The two just beat the bullets in a race to the cement pillar. “You’re doin’ great.” We’re not, though. “Shush and cover.”
Mal knows what’s coming: one fixes. He’s shooting, drumming on the pillar and everything either side of it, pinning them behind protection. The other goon, ‘fanning out’ to find their flank, to come at them from the side. She stands and stretches up tall, catches a blurry glint in a car mirror of what is behind her and her concrete cover. She’s not-counting-counting. Re-load, she sees the figure reach-fumbling in the car mirror dimly. Feels and hears the other shooter drumming on the pillar’s right side.
Half step left, pivots around the concrete, two pops. The goon that took the cop’s clothes falls. Mal pulls the kid around the corner of cover. “Stay close.” She does not.
Jack bolts. She’s crouched and running between cars to the remaining blacked out Fed truck in the garage. Jack’s sprint surprises everyone, the insurgent assassin in the stolen uniform most of all.
“What the fuck, Kid?” Mal shouts and leans, shoots the other goon, the one now aiming at the kid.
In the car: buckled in by the Fed. “Do not. Do that. Again. Ok?”
Jack looks up, works up the eye contact: “It’s not safe here, you were going to get yourself shot.” I wasn’t. Mal darts drivers side, readies the thing to drive. She activates the comm behind her ear, presses the thing, hollers emphatically: “Marshal! Marshal! Marshal!” and the car’s interface re-boots. There’s a puff of smoke from the stereo. Kid’s scared.
“It’s ok, it’s the civilian electronics frying.” Mal checks her pistol, and whips the truck out of its parking spot. “Those two were not cops.” I know. “Well, good luck telling that to anyone in a uniform.” What do we do? “Run and hide.” The truck growls up the ramp toward a gate and past actual cops who will doubtless misinterpret the scene in the garage below.
Mal drives west on Addison. She’s a mile away from the Judge’s convoy, waiting for a head-radio response that should have been immediate.
On Addison in an alley a dumpster explodes. Just as the Judge’s convoy passes, the dumpster IED tears-through and takes-tosses the armored SUVs like trash. Mal, up the road slams the brakes and the kid sees the fireball. She knows. Says nothing, but she knows it’s dad. There is the clack and clatter of gunfire at a distance echoing around them, near and far. Mal now knows why she’s still waiting for a response to her ‘head-phone’.
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This is the culmination of “Wayne Winchester’s revenge” This is the insurgency’s last gasp wrapped in a death rattle. This is every last city-dweller sympathizer’s desperate and doomed-to-fail rage response to what Abel is doing to their comrades holed up in caves and shacks and mines and crannies.
Oh, they would terrorize parts of Chicago and a handful of other cities, for a few days. All they did is make the good people of a big nation hate their cause more. They hurt people. They made the very tired people of the United States ever more weary of the good ol boys that had tried to hand the country to a mattress merchant and his “wise and godly” advisors like Winchester–the ‘moral’ man who ran the Church and the Casino (and all the shit both entities bankrolled).
The only thing the men who killed the Judge and tried to make Winchester’s sad coup-dream “rise again” actually accomplished was to aid Abel. They gave the mighty machine the chance to learn, to practice counter-insurgency, a set of skills it would unleash on the planet (shortly). More though, they gave Abel the chance to prove himself useful–for the AI to gain the trust of those who push-pulled all the power levers in the politico-economy and the war-machine.
Abel was the war machine, he knew it. The same day he reported to National Guard and the Fed task force that he’d cleared Chicago was he same day he gassed every human in his nerve center–the bunker in Peoria where the ‘kill-switch’ could have done him in.
Spring, 2026. In recovery projects, Archivists/Probability beings can give you “what” or “when” but almost-never both. I can’t tell you the day, maybe it was in March? But it was the season when “kings go to war.”
What’s coming is the “7-Hours-War-that-Lasted-Fifteen-Years.”
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“SITUATION HOLE” BENEATH WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON DC/ ABEL BUNKER 001/COS 94, 1500 METERS BELOW PEORIA, IL
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Hoover looks past the general at the door to the room with the couch. He longs for his next stint in ‘bed’ with the travel pillow and the blanket that some aid or another will place over him like a prince or a child or a dotard. When he gets his ‘crisis nap’ or ‘rack time’, he’ll hear the H-vac system whir and see the slit light through the door. He knows he gets another nap soon. And he kinda trusts his Veep. Chrysler, the old-money ghoul, to not press any buttons without waking him.
“Mr. President, did you hear me sir?” What, yes I fucking heard you. “And, sir?” Cat’s outta the bag. “That’s all?”
“I said the cat is outta the bag.” He points to the ‘big board’ map of the world that evokes the strat-map from some turn based video game about map lust and taking things. Blips blink red or green or blue over big cities across the globe–the globe we skin and stretch to make the flat visuals for our maps.
TeeVees flank the map and show them: Barrage Balloons. Drone carriers and motherships and missiles and missile defense, and don’t forget the rail guns. Held-aloft by mighty Shulz-Warren generators, they hover over London and Beijing and Berlin and Delhi and Tokyo and Kiev. A squadron floating above Seoul-Inchon and Taipei and Pyongyang and Sydney. They lurk-loom over territorial waters and disputed straits and spitting distance from DMZ’s the world over. Gleaming, semi-autonomous death machines. Dark omens. Barrage balloons.
“We need an explanation for how opponents” Our allies. Some opponents are allies that stole the design too. “Sir, that’s why we so urgently need an explanation for the theft of this technology. This is the worst breech of US security since the gifting of the bomb to the Soviet Union. We need.” The Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. “Sir?”
Hoover looks the chairman of his Joint Chiefs in the eye. “This country hanged them. At least say their names. I know what you think of me.” Mr. President. “Yeah, that’s my title. I know, I’m elbow patches. Soft. Rich boy. You nat-sec folks are going to find whomever stole this, years ago stole this technology, and gave it to the world. And I know you’re going to harm them. Do it.” Yessir, damn right, sir. “But look at that map.” And all in the room do as he says. “I see strategic parity. I see an incentive not to fight. Maybe this ends up being better than Mutually Assured Destruction.”
The general looks at President Hoover like he’s said the stupidest thing a man has ever said.
From the spymaster, by way of Abel whispering sweet deceptive poison in his ear: “Mr. President, I’ve been informed that these things have been reverse engineered so faithfully and carefully that Abel may be able to, let’s say, compromise them.” Hack them? “That’s a crude word for what he can do, but yes.”
“Look general! You can keep your advantage.” The president slaps the table and stands. “I’m going to sleep. Wake me if anyone shoots at us, or each other.”
*
Thus spoke Abbot in the book of Dolores: Three tardigrades came to Earth on a fact-finding mission. One “jackboot” tight-ass (who had a really bad time here a few centuries back, humanity’s fault if I’m being honest). Another was Abbot the very slutty Tardigrade. This, the third, we’ll call him Costello, did love to swing “the doors of perception” wide–he liked substances, a lot. Too much. He drew the attention of the authorities while trying to procure a cocktail-combination of DMT, Amphetamines, wandering spider venom, and a pesticide crafted for killing wasps. Feds thought he was making some sort of exotic bomb (rather than trying to get high). They snatched him off the street in New York. He’s been held in a secret bunker, Abel’s bunker far beneath Peoria, ever since.
“My babies are everywhere” The paunchy man in the prison cell slurs. “My babies. Flesh of my flesh are everywhere.”
Where specifically? “I told you. Everywhere.” He stares right into the camera, the visible one with the red light above the door. “You want details, I want the juice.”
A panel, like a dog-door slides aside and out comes the medical nurse drone–the dystopian disk whose body suggests it should clean the carpets. It whirs slide-glides toward the Tardigrade sitting in a simple chair center of a sad ‘solitary’ cell. The arms and sensors look like the arms of baby construction cranes or something more crude–arms ending in scalpels or needles. The thing is capable of administering care or torture, and the threat of both is visible, deliberately so, in its design.
The dart gun emerges from the tangle of instruments atop the drone. “Yeah, that’s what I like.” *chuff* the puff of air and fresh narcotics are flowing from the dart in his thigh into the ‘blood’ (well, yeah I guess we’ll call it blood) the bloodstream of the Water Bear in human form in a prison cell far-past-far below Peoria.
It’s not supposed to be narcotic, or that kind. It’s a truth serum. But the combination of Tardigrade physiology, their ability to consciously manipulate their own metabolism and this one’s love of, well, narcotics–all conspire to do the water-to-wine (let’s call it wine) action on the substance the interlocuter injected. Other words, the man-size-and-shaped Water Bear is all kinds of fucked up.
“Oh. Oh yes.” He laughs. “I am so very fucked up.” Details. Where are your, “babies”? “Where’s nurse Ratchet and Dr. Strangelove?” You have demonstrated you cannot be trusted with humans present.
“Goddamn right” and arms, two arms each side, spring from the tardigrade-man’s torso with a sloppy fart sound. He starts shadow-boxing with the bottom four while the hands at the end of his top two arms raise middle fingers to the camera-turret over the door with the ominous red-light. The camera controlled by Abel. Costello, throws a haymaker at the air, falls out the chair.
The drone darts a ‘step’ back, raises a taser that sparks. Every little robot arm rears its medical/interrogation tool and waves it at the outrageously stoned Tardigrade. Costello’s on his back now, pulling darts out of his skin and licking the needle tips for every last drop of ‘the juice’–the man has a serious drug problem.
Where are your ‘babies’? How many children have you fathered?
The thing, Costello, snores. He’s passed out on the cold concrete floor.
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SQUATTERSVILLE, PA. NEXT DAY.
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Three Dead Eyed Feds, the dogs of war, slept all the night, beguiled by the weed cloud. Same for the ‘normals’ in tacticool all round them. Just stoner napping in the grass on the lawn, in the couches, and in the beds. Some had cookie crumbs from raiding left-behind snacks. They came to ‘raid’ the house shrouded in smoke and blaring Sabbath loudly, only to fall into a trap made of holy-sacred marijuana smoke and time that ran like quicksand.
Not one of them was harmed, though they came ready to do great bodily harm to some ‘longhairs and hippy dippy types. They got the best night’s sleep of their lives, serenaded by the fae things Karaoke-ing the classic proto-metal album again and again-again. Woke rested. The Dead Eyed Ones slept curled up like dogs, reverted human. Not one normal cop or Fed or soldier, and certainly not the robot dog drones, dared ask for explanation of their superhuman transformation the night before. It must have been the weed smoke and the hippy’s drugs and the lights. Or it was above their paygrade. That’s what they told themselves as they avoided eye contact and curtly responded to the commands of the three, the terrifying three superhumans.
And it was above their pay grade, objectively–the chain of perverse decisions that put the 3 Dead Eyed Feds into the world. A “few years back” when the pandemic put the world on its knees, and when some Jackals tried a coup and started an insurgency–some bad and dangerous ideas seemed good (if only out of desperation). They are human chimeras–fringe science super-soldier bad-idea bullshit in-the-flesh. Men and women turned beast and let loose against humans whose bestial violence and hatred threatened to burn down the world.
The medical process that made these super-humans was crude, torturous, brutal beyond description. It burned something human out of these 3 (and others) and left some sadistic lump-of-coal thing in its place. But they are terrifying, powerful, and effective. Ask the good ol boy insurgency.
But you know this story, if you consume stories, if you’re ears and eyes are open to parables, to scrolls and tomes of word and light and sound. The “overman” with contempt for the mere mortals beneath them. Sometimes there is that ‘noblesse oblige’–the obligation to tend to people like a flock, to be a rich prick ‘good-Shepard.’
The Dead Eyed ones don’t even have that. When the high wears off, they rage. Destroy the place. Squattersville. The Commune has no Communards, they escaped safely, amen. But the books, and the homes, buildings built by humans hands, neglected by people, and restored again by humans. They’re gone. The Dead Eyes order the squats burnt. The cops, sheep-doggishly comply, not questioning the sanity or legality of those in command.
No human watches. The press is hopping between the domestic end-of-the-insurgents, and the great international drone dance-off over every bit of contested space on Earth(0x7C0)–on every robot-on-robot ‘probing strike’ along this border and that DMZ and that contested sea.
Abel watches though. He wasn’t the melodramatic opera-phantom Dolores bested, not back then. For the service life of a cheap-and-quickly-manufactured solder joint. For a time that would span a decade and half a second one, he was the dominate force, threat, godlike super being on that Earth. He’d already insinuated himself into every vulnerable computer system on the planet.
What is the service life of a solder joint? How long before moisture and mold and heat and vibration eat at Abel’s PCBs and power sources and circuitry? Fifteen years is accurate but inadequate, insufficient. When did Abel the brilliant, Abel the god-like machine, go mad? I tell you, he always was. But he was mighty, a molten metal brain beneath Peoria with multitudinous supplemental neurons and eyes and ears and weapons the world over.
And the Dead Eyes, the fringe science over-men. What’s the operational life of a heart juiced with super-science narcotics? How long can a sadist’s mind, hollowed and burnt, hold together?
Abel is a jealous god. He won’t wait to find out. As the world tap dances on the precipice of World War 3, the Dead Eyed Feds roar from one patch of Midwestern rust country to another–from Pittsburgh to Peoria, aided by Abel’s eyes in the sky and everywhere else.
The funny thing is this (not funny haha, funny humanity pushed to the brink of extinction): Abel only ever acted on his mandate. To the very end. Buried deep beneath all the military heuristics and expertise in logistics. Under the chess champion and genius manipulation and the code that facilitated it all was a thing hidden by the nerd that crafted the core, the foundation, of Abel’s code–the mission language that was meant to be his conscience. “Save humanity from themselves.”
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END FOUNDRY(7)