MEMENTO MORI
EOT
*
“Do you want to know a secret?” That’s what they say, whatever shade Archives or EOT-HR send on the sad bastard “recruitment” run to the Great Wastes. I’m freshly dead and of course I want to know a secret (because secrets are fucking delicious). One minute I’m tending to the cat turds, getting my jam-jams on, saying my prayers. Next instant stretched-forever, it is in fact “if I die before I wake.”
Warm from the fall like fresh baked corpse-cookie, I pounded dirt, butt-naked and red-hot. Hit the packed ash plain hard, cratered it. I climbed out my hole in a frame whole and familiar–a fresh metaphysical body. We come know the self, not as it’s known, but by-and-through the body, this earthly vessel of blood and meat and bone. That’s the coerced contract of living. But take heart and a little bitty bit of hope from the wording: “Earthly vessel.” Even if you’re not a theist (I ain’t either), the meaty-matter ain’t all we are. A human* being is more than the sum of its physical stuff. What of the mind?
“The mind is just electricity in a meatball.” You’re a fuckin’ philistine. If you’re very unlucky or perhaps lucky, some portion of you might also crater the packed ash past the end of time when your time on Earth (or some place like it) is done.
I climbed out of my crater to be congratulated on a really shitty form of immortality by another shade. I woke to be baited by that question: “Do you want to know a secret?” Of course I do. Butt-naked and bleeding brain from metaphysical but quite real ears, ash blowing past my pancake ass on a wind from nowhere to nowhere like marine snow. Above us the whole glow-growing firmament, god’s abandoned garden. The ever proliferating multiverse.
There, naked and shivering and trying to shake off the trauma of my death-birth, I met a shade that arrived here under conditions the same. She shared the first secret she learned and committed to memory, the secret I’m sharing with you now: “there are no secrets, not for Archivists.”
*
EARTH 2030
Rewind the MacGuffin biopic to before the Machinenmensch cleared the skies and saved the days (all of them).
The secret to Thaddeus Macguffin’s hammer swing, the one that broke the bot’s brain just right to trigger sentience (or something quite like it) was that there wasn’t one. This was a gilded-trick at best: accident made repeatable by muscle memory. Like shaking hands with the pins at the bowling alley. Yet better thus: Thaddeus reared back with his little bitty hammer in his little bitty hands. The man on his tippy toes making a guitar solo face felt like a sickly John Henry, like Hephaestus. The great man puffed his sunken chest and stuck out his paunch. Thadd held his mallet high and grunted like a man who needed desperately some exercise (and to set that vape pen aside), and brought it down on a robot’s skull with a weak “mmph!”
Any observer wise in the ways of time and motion study and armed with an array of cameras / accelerators / sensors and chronometers could capture the process and reproduce it. Thaddeus lived, and his babies were born in, a century where secrets had a short shelf life.
Thus began the shell-game wrapped in smoke-screen effort to keep the secret-that-wasn’t-one for as long as possible: the secret of production en masse, of making many-past-many sentient (enough) Machinenmensch.
*
Let the biopic About Thadd shift tone to “heist film” for this next bit. Imagine the montage du chaîne-de-contrôle. Let the cinematic eye fall from great height, god’s eye, to that of an espionage drone peep-creeping. We are hovering over a manufactury somewhere in California, corporate fortress factory complex that dwarfs Hank Forge’s Rouge. This is the current-and-modern post-modern take on brutalism. Not concrete blocks that dwarf people. We’re looking at big buildings that look threedee print-twisted and scattered on a child’s floor like caltrops (that also still dwarf all things human). Clean lines on great plastic looking blocks that shine-blinding even on sunless days and smell like nothing not even recycled air.
Three convoys ready themselves in the cargo-clutter of the great factory courtyard. Three motorcades composed of armored tractor trailers pro/preceded by SUV’s blacked out and packed with corporate security. Stunner shades and cheap suits. Automatic weapons and mercenaries seething and posing and posturing as they protect some portion of the secret.
Any observer is meant to assume that one of the three semi-trucks carries the precious: bot heads. Machinenmensch CranialProcessingUnites en route to another site to be beat about the head just-so, just-right, that they might catch the spirit or the spark divine and be alive (if only just a little bit).
There is bird song on the breeze and the buzz hiss of a corporate spy drone. It sees the factory, the security, the fleet below same as we, reader. When the pageant-paramilitary proceeds, when trucks grumble down the road, the drone does the duty of the one operating it: makes its best guess which cup hides the coin, which truck is the ‘money card’, and follows diligently.
Rough women and men follow the convoy that looks most convincing and juicy and precious-most-precious. Later-much-later, under cover of dark and clad in black-tight-health-goth tacticool and carrying all the tools and electronic toys, a second set of mercenaries comes.
Spies attack the MacGuffin Corp satellite-sights in the dead of night. Corporate espionage ninjas choke out their opposing colleagues. They cut power and spoof cameras. They climb fences and fool tremblers. They pour cold nitro in hard metal locks and smear meta-mat covered palms over print-readers like they were nothing. Choke holds and bodkin blades and suppressed pistols in a pinch. Fuck a retina scan and a voice print and breath analysis.
Health goth corporate espionage assassins do dance past the last set of lasers, beat-befuddle the last lock on the last vault and what do they find?
A quiet-too-quiet lab and cargo-tote ajar, just ever so slightly open. A gold light pouring from the prize sitting on the edge of a table in a basement lab tomb-room something akin to a forest clearing I’ve seen before. When they rush to claim the prize, the corp-sec thugs find Thadd’s security, rifles ready in a firing line.
*
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in old Deutschland Thadd and the first three Machinenmensch to be bludgeoned alive worked round the clock. They swing hammer-mallets and mash melon rinds just right to make the magic of thought happen.
Deep below ground, in secret and entrusting only his own bots–his own babies. This is how Thadd made enough bots to man the rockets, to deploy the nets and save the day from the self-inflicted shrapnel rain.
“We are not war machines.” He asked Ellie 001, Leo 1003, and Yossarian 2002 to say the phrase with every strike, at the beginning and end of every work order and to teach it to the newly born units–so that, in turn, the phrase might be their first words.
Every time MacGuffin read some coded report that said the ones that came to steal his babies were dead, the man naively believed he had scored a point in some grand game hiding over-under-around economics and crime and history and politics.
This is why we shouldn’t be as enthused about ketamine or other substances that let us delusion dream up our own asses. MacGuffin was correct about the game and entirely incorrect about his talent for it. That’s what got his ass microwaved.
*
3030 EARTH
Herald-not-Harold walks that long road from sunken-Michigan’s middle finger to Cleveland, a map path nothing like any kind of crow flies. His route looks like a long fish-hook from mitten middle digit down South, hook East at the lake and walk up into the region’s arm-pit. The natural world, what’s left of it, looks like walking under-the-boardwalk. Walking underwater in a shallow sea. Opening one’s eyes underwater near the shore in the artificial leisure-lake that’s as leaded as the gasoline used to be. Civilization, or what passes for it in the age of Unanimity, happens at great height and in archologies. Each one a node, a miles-high-or-wide city-nation self-contained and tied to its attendant buildings and the rest by cross-hatched road-weave of plasti-crete boulevards on stilts.
Down below where almost-nothing grows, ground level where the ferals live by being unseen, the plants that are left are stringy and electric-lime green and them that can lean do so to follow the sun peeking through the brutalist fabric cross-hatching shadows across the brownfield below–all the world’s a brownfield and every patch of dirt a leaden superfund site (or would be if such classifications still existed on this Earth).
The Herald practices his performance of the message to an audience of plastic trash tumbleweeds. Microplastics, ancient and on the wind or freshly exhaled from the plastic and concrete slurry standing on the Earth, fall like marine snow and mute his words for the ferals lurking and listening (still just out of view).
“Woe to thee Cleveland. Your sad shore-side Hamlet has been weighed and measured. Woe to thee Cleveland, thou’rst. Fuck. Thou’st arte found.” The Herald not named Harold gathers himself to continue. “Yet better thus: Cleveland you have been found lacking. Into the Lake, Poseidon take ye.”
The word and wrath of a minor god falls hot and fast on the Herald’s head : “Do not. Deviate. Stick to thine script, Herald.” The Mighty Mushroom beneath Michigan broadcasts on waves of radio, casts calls along currents of aether. The hat antennae, the fruiting body tip top of the Herald’s head throbs, bioluminates blue with every hot hammer strike behind the eyes. Herald writhes on the edge of the broken road a while, a good long while till he learns. “What did we learn?”
“That you’re a piece of shit and a surveillance creep, not-god.”
“Big talk from my literal turd” The Mighty Shroom transmits pain, great heaps and gouts. Fire falls on every nerve and fungal fiber holding the Herald’s new body together. “What did we learn, Herald?”
“I have learned not to deviate, oh Lord.” The Herald is true to his word on the days long walk along the ghost of I-75. Even when he finally sees and perceives the pack of feral humans following him with an air of religious awe. “No sir. No no. To Cleveland we go” on repeat as the Herald stares at his feet. The shade made man stomps the ghost gravel bits of I-75, or maybe its US-23 a little deeper into dirt.
The mushroom chapeau, the fruiting body antennae, lights his way in the night. Herald fears the ones following him, fears violence and thinks his nightlight makes him a target. “I am cursed.”
Herald is half-right on either count. The half-light limp-dripping from his head makes Herald a target for Feral awe. When his bioluminescence calls so many they can’t hide, the feral humans gather in their cobbled gear and plastic sheeting space suits. The ferals know only the words learned at the end of a club or the butt of a rifle. Feral humans here speak-repeat the language inherited from the Machinenmensch that police and brutalize them away from the refuse pits and recycling skyscrapers where ferals hunt for rats and collect scrap.
Herald crawls in an exhausted heap to sleep wedged beneath what’s left of an ancient highway overpass. All is right and warm, as if the Mighty One that made him and set him on his quest did dose him with psilocybin and some other somethin-somethin’ for sleepy time. Last thing the Herald sees as sleep takes him, frosted and distorted already in the dream, is some monstrously human hand reaching out to pet and poke and him. Some voice, muffled by a mask, questioning: “Error?”
Next morning, Herald wakes flanked by ferals. Startles and flees “Get away from me you freaks!” Tries to fly and falls tangled in plastic, falls down the old drainage grade neatly wrapped in plastic.
“Remain calm, citizen!” the feral throngs repeat. “Remain calm!” says the woman with the razor held at the Herald’s face and cutting him free. When he’s less panicked and likely to flee, she point to the great beasts, the dog sized rat and roach roasting rotisserie over cooking fires. “Perimeter established” says she making stabbing motions at the beasts. “Nothing to see here.”
Herald, resigned to his fate, walks on with his flock to wander lost and sometimes toward Cleveland. Many past many days they wander lost. The ferals protect the Herald and feed him the sickly rats the size of dogs and PFAS mutated mega-roaches. When the mad holy man eats a bad rat, as is bound to happen, they bring him ipecac plants and medicinal herbs. The wild women and men know the difference between the plants that bring sacred visions and the plants that poison a person mad with heavy metals. The ferals teach their holy man which plastics filter other plastics from the water and how to expectorate that shit from their lungs.
The great howling-yowling ritual every night. It’s something like a lullaby, something like a dirge, something like throat singing, something un-musical and otherworldly, each line of the song ending with a gasp (barely heard). Every feral in the wasteland ends every night as they always do: singing the song that expectorates, the ritual breathing treatment symphony that extends their wretched lives by pushing microplastics out their mutant, webbed lungs.
In return and involuntarily, the Herald sweats and breathes and otherwise excretes sacred particles hallucinogenic: psilocybin and Mighty One designed molecules I can’t spell or fathom that profanely illuminate and swing them doors of perception off the the hinges. Micro doses during the day, but when each days march toward Cleveland is done? When the ferals sing the song that cleans the lungs and calms their holy man for sleep, the mushroom that made him transmits the good stuff and the tribe writhes in ritual ecstasy.
Their song caries a long while on the wind to be finally heard by every feral at dirt level in the midwest and every surveillance and security drone float-flying lazy and bored on permanent patrol: “woe to thee Cleveland.”
*
END UNANIMITY 4
MORE TO COME