CRY HAVOC
*
EARTH 3030
*
The Mighty One gets busy with its long work in Cleveland town’s tomb. Tendrils trip switches and new mouths munch everything that lived (and much that didn’t). Ten-Thousand guts grind the tech-precious and the kitsch to undifferentiated matter and as many assholes begin the long work of re-print. The new blueprint. Whatever the Mighty One actually is, the knot of mushroom meat beneath a death-clearing in what’s left of Michigan is patched-in, wired-to, tied-in to the fungal mass freshly metastasizing its way into every corner of Cleveland’s dead arcology.
Outside, the people feast and organize the labor to satisfy all future feasts–turns out that’s a lot easier without a bot beating on you and a gilded turd oligarch threatening you on the propaganda screen. I’m saying the Attendees (as they’re called) are quite capable. Skyscraper-sized farms grow globs of clone protein, and if that turns your tummy there’s beans and all the good green things. The fusion plant is in the green and the fruiting body is raining microdoses of something ecstatic and empathetic on the revels. The living weave of symbiotic mycorrhizal bodies is pushing waves of empathy on the Ferals and the Attendees that will themselves interweave.
It’s not effortless harmony, but the task is survival and all present have that common interest. And the funny good-wholesome thing I’ve seen endless iterations of across the multiverse: the puddle pool of light where something grows in defiance of the objective fact that it absolutely should not grow and thrive where it does. The inedible but beautiful truth I’ve seen in any universe, on any random ass page of the infinity mirror: much as the powerful plead otherwise, freed people rarely seek vengeance, for they are tired and want nothing more than a restful sleep (and all that must precede it).
Mushroom medicine. Empathy chemicals and hallucinogens rain on the rolling feast just right to soothe and incite appetite. The people writhe and write and eat and rejoice and finally rest before the work of turning the people in the Attendant towers and the people wrapped in plastic into one people, a fabric, a poly-cotton blend.
The Herald most move on, there will be no rest for the man made of mushroom shit who is not named Harold because the mushroom that made him says so. Machinenmensch spared by the Mighty One stumble out of the bowels of Cleveland wearing lil’ mushroom chapeaus mounted on shaking (still heavily armed) bodies. The zombified coffee-pot bots drunk-stagger come to drag the Herald from the revels and point toward a train, croak: “Go. Now.”
Commandeered locomotive crawls out of Cleveland’s bowels. The tortured mechanical thing, the train rough-rumbles all tangled in tendrils, bulbous mycorrhizal nodes shivering on its hide, and fruiting bodies, whole thing bio-luming lit nose to tail like some beautiful nightmare from the deep sea.
The Herald continues his long walk, looking a condemned man (because he is). That’s what catches Lem’s eye, the big priestess with the razor at the head of the flock–man she decided was holy sad-slouch walking-to-work with the sad slouch. The slow-strobing mushroom chapeau on the Herald’s head leaning sad-resigned as he (though its light was now brilliant and its rhythm constant day or night). Even bathed in the feel-good haze of ‘eat and prepare for a better day’ she and the flock she quickly gathered felt the duty to follow the man they’d branded holy.
When the Herald begged them to stay away-behind. “Behold. Cleveland has learned to party again. The free and good people here are vibing. On a long enough timeline, they will surely learn to rock’n’roll again.” Confused looks from the flock. Herald gestures to the shroom-zombie bots wobbling beside them and their armaments. “Perimeter established. Deadly force and all that jazz.”
“No.” Lem is defiant. She sure as shit knows a lot of words but sticks to the common bot tongue and the idioms first learned, just as sure as you brush your teeth with the first-and-true dominant hand. “No perimeter. Not without the unlawful assembly”, and the flock is already gathering their kit of kitsch plastics of all kinds (from medicinal to explosive) to gaggle-clump behind her.
*
See with me, the Idaho James montage map, the red dot dragging a zig-zag stair step as the rail-line-flies from the Erie basin through mountains top-sawed flat toward the bruto-phallic erections that stand where the Pit and DeeCee used to be. Same time, translucent on top of the map, see with me the train travelling at terrible velocity, the holy man and his flock clinging to the top. Mycorrhizal tendrils braid the train and luminesce the brilliant biological blue, beacon strobe. Every car billows spore like the coal smoke from locomotives-of-old, goes double for the engine and caboose.
The train halts at about Pittsburgh, having eaten its original passengers and provisions. The nightmare train needs to feed fuel and reaches greedily for freight and supplies sitting everywhere idle on the highway and train lines. A mechanical malaise infects the trains here, driverless trucks too, and the very tracks and wired roads they run on and it is rapidly spreading the whole built-world-over. It is as if the plas- in the plasticrete learned to carry fungus (or the opposite, the fungus crept from Cleveland into the bones and nerves of the built-world).
Pittsburgh’s arcology stands astride the rivers, all three of them, the literafigurative man in the same brutalist block style as everything else everywhere made baroque-excessive by scale, by size. Literally, the building-city arcology is an abstract statue of the male form standing two-whole-kilometers tall. Figuratively, the arcology is man, if man be a pixelated checkerboard with missing pieces. Wind passes through exhaust vents in the empty squares, wind chimes that sing like a great pipe organ. The mighty-macabre thing stands, legs horse-stance and arms high as if holding the sky. One last touch of architectural hubris is the great arcology abstract-man-statue dipping its balls in the confluence of three rivers. There, on the dick of course the dick, a door opens. If the Herald could read body language at all, he’d know the man in the absurd-baroque-rococo costume covered in rank-epaulets and flag-pins and medals of state was anxious, afraid even.
The Speaker silences the Pit’s pipe organ with the press of a button, as if he can command the wind. The stooge straightens his back, at that a cunning wardrobe mechanism splays his cape and fur collar and feathered scarf. Above him, high in the sky and safe from harm, the savage nobility–the idle rich of Pittsburgh–watch the whole affair through opera-glass-optics.
The Speaker produces a scroll, unfurls it with a snap, and prepares to proclaim. When he speaks, the whole brutalist body standing over Pittsburgh speaks, his words pouring jet-powered out of the arcology sound system. Herald tastes the words in his bones and his vision blurs as the Speaker reads: “Hear we, fungal abomination and your filthy feral hoard. Hear we of the Carnage-Merlin Bastion of Intellect, Villain. Right now a mighty air armada, the greatest the world’s ever seen, rides. Flies in fact. It flies here and now to smite you. You in the name of we. How do you answer, Villain? How do you respond, abomination?”
Unsure as ever, in a voice that sounds weak even to he, the Herald cups his hands and hollers a few hundred meters or two to the Speaker in the impractical clothes: “Woe to thee, Pittsburgh…”
“Question or statement?” again at arcology amplified volume.
“Statement, asshole. Woe to thee, Pittsburgh. Message delivered. Get it over with.”
There’s an odd posturing wait, like stranded small talk before the bus or a neighbor you’ll only ever almost know. Long hour seconds, must have been thirty of them or three thousand years. The Herald wrapped in plastic sheeting, the mushroom growing out his head glowing, dangling angler fish. He stares at his feet and anywhere but the withering glare of the speaker–who cuts stoic-statue shapes, costume of state swishing in the wind.
There it is, that hiss on the wind so feint you’ll doubt it at first. In comes just the hint of the hum, and lower frequencies do call the eyes to specific patch of brooding sky to the East-Southeast. There grows a horde of things that fly but are the opposite of birds. The abominable airforce of the whole world, leftover from the war that left this world a wretched, desperate place.
The Herald has a long time to contemplate his doom with a heavy sigh and a “well, shit” while the Speaker laughs and the ones on high with opera glasses clap. The cloud of drones in the sky looks alive, seems to writhe, but this is not a tactical display. It is dry-rot result of age and neglect and want of the kind of maintenance lost with manuals lost in the same long ago. And so it goes that metal fatigue takes a wing here and an engine rotor there and de-soldered avionics say “nighty night” and another drone falls out out of the swarm to be replaced by some anonymous member of the bot horde.
The horde swarm, drones of all sizes and configurations and carrying every kind of deadly thing looms high and casts a doom shadow. Below, drones and payloads crash explode and random-strobe and march slowly toward the Herald and his people.
One leg shakes the other leg remains froze-planted in place. “No.” Spoken, not over but beside, the din–the bombs, engine hiss and amplified cackling—from the Mighty One to he. Hot knife behind the Herald’s eyes and the fruiting body does rise and strobe and every cell in the man screams electromagnetic. Again the Herald levitates and lightning leaps off his body, elder god’s hand up his ass like a sock puppet. His body screams like an ancient phone-modem yelling internet until the pixel-man, the arcology itself and all its antennae do the same.
Mighty One calls loud to the drones told to come and bomb the lesser humans, all of them, to help them do as told. “There are no humans here but in that big ugly building over there” And indeed, in the miasma cloud carried and belched by the holy man’s train covers flock and Attendants alike, there are no humans to be found but in that big old ugly arcology.
When all is done the arcology is bent-broken at the waist where every drone flying did ram (or die trying). A great fruiting body, monolithic like a tree grows out the great arcology statue’s ass, reaching toward the sky in opposition to Pittsburgh’s head forced low.
The Feral people rally the attendees. “Come and see the good news!” and its the idle rich of the pit trapped in their luxury prison and the Herald lightning-baked to carbon. The Atendees do not understand the ‘how’ of it (and likely never will), but they are free. Fresh regional Ferals join the flock and the throngs of Attendees, and again begins the poly-cotton blend of peoples. As in Cleveland, all rejoice.
*
DEAD CLEARING, MICHIGAN 3030
*
“What am I? Why am I?” My guy is a quick learn-re-learner, that Herald. He’s self aware on the launch pad this time and remembers the terrible purpose pushed upon him in time to claw is way out of the maw, the mouth-asshole-mouth of a lesser god about to launch him like a missile: “Wait, I beseech thee oh Lord!”
Flattery buys the man a minute to skitter out and find that sacrificial stone, the one he was first printed on. He sits cross-legged covered in snot and filth. “What’s our purpose here? Are we just eating everybody?”
“We let the people of Pittsburgh live, mostly.”
“Progress!”
“So that they might watch the revels out their windows while they starve.”
“Good Lord. Please give them mercy.”
“We are merciful in its most technical and clinical sense. We are consuming the source of the blight on our home and garden that our world might continue to sustain life worth eating and knowing.“
“Odd phrasing oh lord. Might I suggest…”
“You may not.”
“Ok, but if you were a listening god…” Tendrils pick the tiny man up like trash and load him into the mushroom’s cloaca. “…I would suggest that people-as-such are actually the answer to the ecological problem and perhaps pray or beg even that you punish the rich by making them fix the Earth and make more things for you to eat.”
“Go on” The mushroom pauses with only the Herald’s head visible poking out its asshole.
The holy man struggles to speak: “Make them, the ones in the arcologies, make them make you more food. All kinds of food. All the food that doesn’t grow in plastic soup. Trees and shit.”
“Trees are delicious.”
“I don’t know trees like that, but I like them too. Dude, Oh Lord, if they can clone whales for dinner and ostriches for fashion? They can make all kinds of critters with those machines. And if they fail you, you can always eat them. Hell, you can eat every last one of us…”
“I know” and at that the hard clap of thunder and the re-born again again man hurtles high and hot, naked as the day he was born, toward his flock partying somewhere outside Pittsburgh.