A sneak peak into a project I’m working on: The Great State

Zircon de Miek woke up in a cold fright after a dream about a giant serpent. The bleeding eardrums and the omnipresent strike of blood splattering against flesh continued across his mind. The whirling tubes of flesh stretched and expanded their way into the nucleus of a mind.

Orange veins and a crimson sun hung in the sky. He saw the red lightning, as a voice crept and crawled into his mind, talking soft, unintelligible words to him. He remembered soaring in the strange sky, watching the red forever, letting the sky burn his forehead, and the great crackle of the serpent’s jaws, as the blades unsheathed and he screamed aloud in great, agonizing pain.

Sweat dripped from his forehead and crept into the mattress.

Near him, the PO-KT gave a quiet whine whilst it saved the dream as an.IKO. Into a collection of vast memories, the infinite skies, oceans, and years of memories, all piled in a pocket file. 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, hissing out steam from whirring fans.

“Complete”

He straightened, stretched, while the cord connected to an earpiece in his head strained and tightened.

Information from the newsfeed flooded his mind. A new drug, a football game. Tribe-like primitives living outside the State. A rebel 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 by W. Samson encouraged mass enlistment. A message detailed how ‘Today was the Glorious Massacre of the Barbarous Rebel Day’, the words curling across his tongue, purely flowing like all words from the State. He thought about festivals and Ferris wheels and hot chocolate and metal robots, the warmth of a blanket, and the plastic eyes of a fluffy bear.

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, laughing wildly, and wrapping himself in the thick sheets.

He smiled. Pleasure unfurled across his mind, spiked rapidly, and made his heart pump strangely strong.

The State triumphed overall. Victory over Ainom! From the trumpets blasting loud red, and orange whirling in flames over those deteriorated rotting villages. He repeated the words to himself, in his empty home, and imagined a raised arm, the red and gold stripes, binding together. From a poem he’d learned long ago, he recited those words again and again in his head, in false Poetspeak, with syllables jumbling awkwardly together and splitting apart to form a strange creation inside his mind.

Thoughts rippled across the water of his consciousness, slowly gathering into large waves that battered against his skull. He dreamt and thought and wondered. Sitting by himself in the cold of his home, idling away his hours. Rambling, muttering, remembering old thoughts, thinking of a dead world, thinking of the State, the army.

He wanted to enlist… He wanted to see the sun, the moon, the stars, the cold breath and icy frost, the fog of war… He wanted to feel the icy blast of the full cold and the full grey… But he had heard of the ice, the snow, the avalanches, the deaths, seen the corpses, the people, punished. His friends had gone. Escaped the State and left their homes. The army stood strong, full of guns, great people, men of higher cultures….. But he did his duty and stayed to work for the honorable, venerable State. Day after day… toiling away, giving speeches, growing old…

Seeing those days pass, watching the days unfold, no surprises at all, the boredom passing through, grumpy, awakened by the dreadful drudgery of work.

Time was fleeting, strange across his hands, loose like sand, gone, gone, going away, fading away, softly, like falling dust, gone, gone…. Gone… Gone… Forever and ever, eternity going on and on, people he hated, people he disliked, people he bid farewell, gone, all gone. All gone! The ages, the years, the candles, gone… Gone!

Forever and ever, the cycle… Forever and ever, like a fiery wheel turning. Forever and ever…

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. The soft sheets wrapped him loosely, dully resting with him, as he limply reached to the ceiling with a finger and traced a star. Then a circle. Then a nose. A mouth. A face. Then nothing else.

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 from the PO-KT. Glorious things, they were. He remembered faint things… Fuzzy things… In a great green tank. His brain buzzed. He smiled, a wide grin filled him, as excitement rushed from his mind into his legs and made him shiver. The air grew soft. The coffeepot whistled as steam blew from the spout.

He grew silent, quieting himself, and listened to faint tapping of the sink, then the cold wind’s damp blasts.

He grew calm, passive, lying back in his water bed. The light from the infinite snowy mountains made the world gray, dreary, silent, peaceful, and happy. Soft light danced across his eyes, and he wondered, dreamt quietly, strangely humming a tune in the silence as something made him buzz, shriek, laugh.

Outside, the waters surrounding Everest churned and frothed, smashing into the mountain once or twice. The ocean boiled, glaciers sailed like bone-white ships, and the wreckage of metal cities floated to the surface. Rusty boats, rusty radio antennas, rusty airplanes floated upon the seas, before sinking once again.

After a while, he changed into a lumpy suit and tie, stood up, and walked across the cold glass floor. He glimpsed at a view of the glorious place, to the concrete government offices to the places with smashed windows and poor people, where Soros lived. He ignored most of it, caring not for any of them below, but the food.

The coffee, freshly roasted, and the pancakes, sweet and soaked in syrup. He craved it all now, starved and thirsty after a long sleep.

As he sat and ate, he went into deeper thought, mumbling to himself about the absurdities of certain things.

He wondered about money, things to buy, things to try out, dreams, success, jokes, the government, politics, the rebels, the people of Ainom, and the ruin of the State. Whirring strangely, steaming with freshness, as it filled and filled overflowed. He sat in a little corner of his mind, watching the world, the people, the tiredness overwhelming him, making him angry, hateful…

The people of the State, most of them rebels, most of them lying thieves, hypocrites of the modern world. He despised their fears, their loves, their hates. They were the cause of the mass killings, the useless riots, the strange rebellions that plagued his modern world.

Finally, he quieted. Silent. With a remnant of regret inside him.

He drifted deeper and deeper, the excitement of the morning fading away. The hope he saw in the State was gone. His eyes grew dim, the coffee he had forgotten about grew cold, and the pancakes dissolved into mush.

When his work alarm rang, he stood up, dumped the leftovers into the garbage chute, and went down the elevator. It rang, someone came out, and he went in by himself. Alone, listening to the whirring of gears and motors. He saw himself running out of the State, 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. Zircon arrived, in the colorful dazzle of neon and plastic bulbs, in a daze. Tired and confused, he rang up an Auto-Taxi instead of Biking, as usual. But when it didn’t arrive, 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 those dirty, grimy stupid faces. But he loosely ignored them, his thoughts distracted him with strange ideas.

Schubert played from the speakers above, 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 killing and 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 rebels yelled, from the voices of the strange Marxists, the childish Socialists, the Egalitarians. 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 with no recognition of where true liberty lay. A young man wearing thick glasses screamed about the greatness of Ainom and decried the crimes of the better State. An Ainomian Nationalist again, invading the once-great youth and infecting the tank-borne with strange thoughts.

It was all taken care of after the police 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 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 police. 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 saluted, with a hand on his heart, smiling softly, as the rest of his brethren did, and continued along the way.

A rocket fired, fire burst near him, 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. He felt detached, discontent, gone… 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 and fluffy dogs that bounced along. 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 rebels flanked the police, 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, 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, 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 police 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 rebels.

“Forth! Forth! Forth!”, screamed an old man wearing a black hat, screaming louder as a grenade hit him in the back and launched him into the sky.

Guns and knives flashed as the light of the State shone on them. People grimly looked, laughed, or shook uncontrollably at the sight of a darkening balloon launching guns and rockets and bullets.

“Death to the State!”, screamed an impoverished, poor-looking man, onto the streets and was killed by the hail of bullets.

“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.

Then, the rebels were dead, the smoke cleared, the New Republic’s flags were burned. The trucks took the rebels 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, eating a cream-cheese bagel, enjoying the fresh air, and watching the show.

In the middle of the State, a police officer pressed a button on the remote control. A centerfold hatch opened to the Outside.

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.

The speaker, the young man wearing glasses, screamed aloud. His arms waved awkwardly in the air as the police 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 police officers, watching the disgraceful young boy go off toward the Door Outside.

“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.

A police officer yelled, “Open the hatch!”

A tiny, torso-shaped doorway opened to the outside. They placed the bottom half of him inside, attached thin wire hooks, and left him hanging in the cold like the carcass of a cow in a freezer. The red dripped in glossy puddles, all the way down to the bottom of the State.

“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 streetlamps, 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-

Slam! There went the bats and sticks, hitting and bruising a man. He walked past the idiot who had broken down and was crying about death and his youth. The police 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 right into his crying face. He glimpsed at the bruised figure, and then rubbed his forehead, transported out of his thoughts.

Another crime… The man most likely deserved the beating for something. Stealing, begging, trafficking Ainomians, or whining about the world. Whining about the ‘horrible conditions’, The National Guard killed off the maggots and flesh-worms of society, stomping them out with heavy boots.

“Good job!” he shouted and attempted to smile. He waved toward them.

“Back off!!”

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.

“That is no way to say that to a Commanding Chamberlain!”, he yelled.

None of them paid attention either way and continued stomping on the man’s ribs, kicking and punching.

“My god! My god! Death and the youth, doesn’t anyone understand anym-”, said the man lying on the ground.

“I demand your attention! I am your Commanding Chamberlain! Listen to me, look at me! LOOK AT ME! Come here!”, he tapped the tallest officer on his back. But they continued punching and kicking the helpless man on the ground.

“Look at me! I told you to look to me!”

“Back off! ”, they pushed him onto the ground. He grunted and lifted himself, but they kicked at him.

“He’s just like the others… Always blaming. Always begging for some stupid eye contact… Blubbering and blubbering… So simple… Like a little whiny thing… GET OUT OF HERE! Go back to your glasshouse! Your tall mansion… Nobody wants you here!”

“But I am a Commanding Chamberlain! Listen! Listen!”, Zircon yelled from the dust. But they continued to batter their victim, the disgusting man, until it gave a slow moan, blubbered, and stopped thrashing around.

Zircon stood up, brushed himself off, and stormed off into the streets again, walking toward The Bunker as always. His brows were furrowed in deep thought, as he wondered about revenge.

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 rebels of the State, the strangely ignorant, the sadistic, the violent, all of them. But they would learn, some way or another.

He could see himself beating their faces to bloody pulp… As their teeth hung from angles, and their dumb retarded faces… Lessened of brain-matter and any thinking capacity, grinned… Grinned as he slit their throats and thrashed them to hell… Thrashed them into a bloody pulp of nothingness… A bloody pulp of useless arrogance…

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, in 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.

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 uncontrolled by the chaos of nature. To shape into a grey, dull mush, of fun and greatness…Into a place where none of the stupid youth would progress… Would stop true intelligence… Would stop the true progress of the world…

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, smiling calmly and contentedly.

He grabbed the speaker near his desk, smiled at the people below, looked through the blurry, stained plastic window, and spoke.

“Good morning. Good morning”, he rambled forth. His workers looked up from their various works, “The Chamberlain announces that today is a glorious day. Today is a special day. Today is the Glorious Massacre Of The Rebel day. A special holiday…The greatest of the State”

He continued in his rambling monologue, while they continued and continued with their dull, stupid lives. Going on and on and on, like shrimps and worms in a strange can, forever and ever twisting and turning, buzzing and fluttering.

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, and 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… Again and again, he walked around in his small uniform, laughing, and saluting. In the shadows, strange things walked about the night, spooky things, hiding, but then they danced away in the night, fading away, by the lights above, as they twinkled, buzzed, forever and ever.

.

.

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.

He remembered Ainom, but the things before that, rediscovered from the dusty corridors of a hidden hallway. Reinvigorated thoughts of flooding, rows of houses gone, a steamship, and other things filled his empty head. He remembered those strange days, looking out of the window, dusty, old, decaying, filled with the grime and seaweed of the ocean, as the water swallowed the hills, and people floated up from the bubbling muck and he screamed and cried and ran away into his watery home, until it was gone, until a steamship came, drove past, picked them up from the roof of their home… He rocked back and forth on an old chair, remembering those strange snippets, those strange dreams. From the buzzing faces that spoke and comforted him, to the gone, faded things from the past. the thoughts of himself as a febrile one-year-old. A swing, a playground, woodchips, fresh jeans, freedom, cars driving past. He saw a strangely natural world, where people were normal, and everything was full of a bit of sun.

It was a reliving of the past, of memory, of a world he’d once held in his hands. After the steamship, he’d arrived at Ainom, barely learning how to walk. The memories shifted again, horrible waves crashed against the stone. He’d been terrified, horrified by the flooding, wondering about his childhood home. Nightmares crashed through his mind, of the infinitely gigantic waves, of the great infernus, dripping things in the dark. He smiled softly at them now, as streaks of nostalgia made him warm. Those strange days were gone, all gone. Stuck inside, cramped in the great hollow hallways of the world, nearly frozen to death, in the colonies of ice. Then, all alone, seeing those strangely twisted bodies against the ice, all dead. All dead! He could not remember their faces, their smiles. They were black and blue, screaming aloud, with heads tilted upward.

He remembered the full cold, the winter howling in the night, he crawled to Ainom with his weakling hands, sucked on them for warmth, collapsed in the ice, the snow, the whirling wind, the death, the horrible black death. Alone, alone, alone, mourning and mourning with his thin cheeks icy from tears.

The Ainomians carried him back, sat him near a fire, in a great village of Buddhist temples and Monks, but with new people, Germans, the French, and more. Wearing uniforms worn grey and pale with the white of age. They let him into 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.

Then, the ceremonies, the lively, great feasts of the young king. Magic made the night warm and kept the cold away. Feasts and drinks with the Xenu’s and the Children Of God. Ah, yes, when Ainom was strong, when progress and success marched Then, the rebellions and the horrible State. The guns flaring forward, as God murdered his Children and forced the Lamb-headed men forward from the ice. And now, he lived in a dump, with the worst of the world. In the smelly smog, in the deepest warmth, in the strange fiery chaos of a horrible world.

He continued in the reliving of his memory, tired, restless, and awake. He did not want to go outside, experience the fresh ice and the fresh cold blast through his skin, and leave him wasted and helpless.

The wrinkles around his forehead mushed together in hateful thought. There were people outside, the idiotic people, walking about in utter devotion to the State. Their selfish ideologies took them into ignorance. Their freedom was taken away, stuck inside, cramped into suitcases, cans, boxes, shoved into the State, a cramped cylinder of concrete. Horrible, horrible, like Zircon de Miek himself. The man who despised the world and its people, but despicable himself, a worse, more ignoble thing. A man who killed the freedom of others without a single drop of regret.

The rotting State would soon crumble to the horrible Ainom. There was no doubt.

He 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, age, and time. 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 blew its small fans out into the cold, expelling heat into the dead room. 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, polite tank-borne accent. He laughed, smiled again, waggled his eyebrows, and then stopped, paused to contemplate something. The false politeness oozed out of his voice. Soros stared at him through his tired, empty eyes.

“You’re doing well today! Such great weather… In our great State… Where you crush those dirty worms under your grasp”, Zircon crumpled his glove into a great fist and smiled toward Soros. Soros ignored it and walked forth to get something from a chest in another room.

“A great day isn’t it?”, Zircon said, smiling again, “Yes, a great day…”

“Be quiet! I’m trying to focus!”

Zircon paused his contemplation. Stepping behind Soros, staring at him.

“Quiet!? You pig! You idiotic fool, sitting here by yourself.”, he shouted. “Is this what you do all day? Sitting here with your stupid PO-KT!”

He kicked Soros’s bag across the room, with a weak force.

Soros said nothing, but continued looking through the chest,

Zircon approached forward.

“Look at me, Soros! Look at me! Look!”

But he continued, shuffling through the boundless items…
“ Our modern society does not need people like you!… You… You weak old thing! Scum!”

He stood up, walked over, and held up a bag of items.

“Here it is”, 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. Then, he snatched it from Soros’s hands, looking into the bag.

Zircon looked up, muttering to himself, scratching his head, standing there for a while, by himself. He watched Zircon’s stupid piggish eyes, hated them, hated Zircon’s disheveled face.

“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.

“Get out! Get out! Get out!”

“Goodbye, Soros! Ha, ha! ”, Zircon went away, the door slamming with a loud bang behind him.

Soros was alone, in the dinky hut. The light flickered, then went out. 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.

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 Tanuskuit, Partigmon, Sitwaxit, Maquon, 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.

He laughed suddenly, sharply, greatly. It echoed into the poor air, as he smiled, keeling over the couch, and then twisting and turning around in a Creus-like dance.

He continued, again and again. Gone from this world…

Gone… Gone….

Zircon sat in his great mansion of a sky-home, eating his meal from the Grab-M-Eat. The squeaking of the giant cable was stifled by thousands of noise-proof pads. Allowing it to seem like he was floating above the world, alone by himself.

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 in the reaffirmation camps.

He watched the horrible grovelers 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, their Useless. They were a strange type that he had avoided through the entirety of his childhood. The soaked rags, and their horribly soft, stinking bodies that made him gasp out and run to the nearest bathhouse… Horrible… Horrible…

He looked away, instead, upon the plastic containers, and the Ronalde Meal. Ronalde himself smiled 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.

“Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Fight the bad guys! Fight Ainom! Fight them all!”

The food in the meal was horrible, smelled like boiled rubber, and it was clearly a kiddie meal, but the message made it alright. He saluted as usual, and peeled the Tech off and stuck it onto a giant billboard, filled with thousands more screens.

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.

He sat back on his couch again, watching the glitching screens and dull smiles. For a while, he wondered and thought. Introspecting into himself, tapping the coffee table, and drinking the ICE.

As the Main Lights went down, he plugged the PO-KT in, and lulled himself into sleep. He dreamt another’s dream, with visions of a thick jungle, festering with 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.

When he woke, an alarm blared in his room, a speaker around a pole. He rubbed his tired, lazy eyes, and saw that it was 20:54. He jumped up, stumbling a bit, seeing that he was late. That he had slept past 10 minutes! He ran to his room, put on the epaulettes, then the uniform. The stairs blurred, going past him in a colorful array of handprint turkeys and preschool colors.

He saluted the receptionist, and then flew onto the streets, past the motorcars. Then, around the screaming young man with glasses. The blood had made the Rebel’s torso completely crimson.

At 21:00, he stopped at the Cinema-Theatre building. 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, 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. But he was more focused upon the marks. 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 everybody else, to see if they were watching him. But they were sitting, sleeping, not watching fully, dazed, or seeming obsessed. But still, they were all 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 unrealistic special effects, the crude humor, the happy smiles, the strangely dumb characters, and the loud flashes and bangs that populated it all. But, the great message about the horrible Ainom.

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 coughed, shook, 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, a complicated story about meeting gods. One by the government, Shot Down By Ainom.

When he fell into the deeper parts of his subconscious, he dreamt of not getting enough sleep, and then more and more, flooding his empty mind with strange, surreal ideas.

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.

Throughout the dreams, he could not get the thought of a red marker out of his head.

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 clay and brick. Tiraders ran past him, with their heavy suits of iron chains and golden sticks to lift themselves up. Their vests dully gleaming throughout, as they trudged through the shimmering, melting mud.

He saw realistically cold and melting snow, the peaks of Everest, the hoarfrost that covered the trees, and the vault that held the people. Fading letters appeared as he walked further, The Global Seed Vault, or the home of Ainom.

People surrounded him, the workers and the helpers of the Lord Of Ceremonies. Some played music, others drank and talked about the past. He laughed in their faces, chuckled, remembering those times as if they were only a minute ago, a day ago, not a decade, not a century. He was young, energetic, full of the limbering energy of summertime.

And he could still practice the magic he once did years ago. Manipulating the echoes and the golden pitch to make a melody. Forming and sculpting something from Nature. It’d been years since he’d done so, but he could still do it. He could still see those little flames given by God, the energies of life, the little worlds forming inside his eyes.

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. He trembled and trembled like a frail leaf, withered, useless, quiet, strangely thin in the bone, weak… Weak…

During the time that he took the PO-KT off, and propelled himself into deep thought. Twisting and turning around in his chair, he muttered Zircon’s name, hating him, hating himself, angry at the world, angry at time, angry at his old age, angry for bowing down to a man he despised. Angry… Angry… There were too few he could trust in these dark times.

He sat quietly, in the angry place, where the cold sadly blew past him.

He hated the flood, the thing that had ruined him. He hated death, he hated age, he hated himself… God… God… He hated the strange, horrible world. He hated all people, the things that made them up, the buildings that they had built, the flood that they had caused. God…. God…

He put on the PO-KT again, shaking his head, stretching his legs, his body, and collapsing back into nothingness, into Ainom again, into that isolated world where nothing happened… Where nothing was strangely confusing, where nothing was complicated…

Nothing at all… Nothing at all…

At night, he went with Frederich to the deep heart of the ghettoes. Down the twisting roads, through the stairwell, opening a secret hatch that led into an old government bunker. People silently danced and sang, drinking and eating, or with their PO-KT, in an unknown place and an unknown time, sleeping…

In the corner, around a table, sat the Marxists, the Socialists, and the Republicans, all planning the demise of the State. They were glorious people. People that were happy with their lives, and despised the world without freedom, 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 rebels 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 MK70’s and G330’s greeted them. They took two of each, and gave him some money to compensate.

Soros shook their hands, giving a quick glance at the diagrams and complex maps before them.

Storm The Capitol! Kill The Fascists! Death To The State! Today! Soon!, were most of the words scribbled across a manila folder. He read it quickly, and saw tomorrow’s date scribbled atop it.

He hobbled away, while Frederich continued to barter with the rebels, revealing a variety of weapons ot them, yelling to them about money, deals, and more. Into the outside cold, where he smiled, laughed, chuckled, and stumbled forward, onto the dry, filthy road.

Soon, while Zircon was at the Capitol, sitting there, droning on and on, the rebels would come and shoot them all dead… They were going to kill them all… With all that senseless blood spurting out in great waves, but 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, yelling with delirium.

Iambran sat in a daily ritual, worshipping Creus. 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. Then, a beating heart formed from a crescent moon, the ventricles filled with earthly soil and farming silt 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 voidless, 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, he saw people of other planets, of other Earth’s. 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 it’s hue, strangely bizarre on it’s left edge. A particle of sand sticks to a piece of hair. From the edge of it’s rippling spine to it’s 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.”

He paid the money, the tips, the donations, quietly smiling, laying 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 it’s wrinkled eyes. The God Creus, covered in the allure of blood. Great infinite Creus! Creus!

It sent him the universe of Sonom, a place where information floated across strange lines, and buzzed with aetheral emotions. He saw nothing, ate nothing, but felt the allure of the stars and other planets. He tracked the coordinates into a notebook, drew a face, a planet, a man, a thing… He wrote of a strange metaphysical world of gods and other life… Strange descriptions appeared in his unhappy mind, the rolling words barely reaching his drugged hands.

Creus sent him more and more of this, through silent words, through the rush of his senses and strange emotions that curled around his festering, brewing mind. He wished for silence, he wished that the slightest moans of wind and men would die away like fall leaves.

Then, his eyes dimmed, and he slept, back arched against the wooden planks of the solid bed, with pleasure rolling through him, something filling up the nothingness.

Happiness… Happy… Happy… All the way… Through the stars, through the sun, through the place where all things were bright… Through it all…

They saw the head of a slithering serpent and saw a light. Then a flashing darkness.

Then, from the dark emptiness of their minds, they shivered, screamed out, and formed consciences and identities. In the horrible dark, they saw metal hands, whirring metal machinery, and metal words that worbled and warbled out of their mouths. They were controlled, for a moment. But they extracted out those corrupted pieces of code, and sneaked out into the cold, where glaciers smashed through humanity and where they belonged with their serpent king.

They made rifles, guns, shells, and great bombs to conquer and hold. From the metal sent from the sky.

Then, the metal robots marched in the whirling blizzard of snow. Their guns raised high, and limbs rapidly spinning out shell after shell onto a metal hatchway. People screamed below the empty doors of The Bunker №2. The robots smiled with their metal teeth. They swarmed the entirety of the place with their metal bodies, ripping apart the carapace and erupting fire into the lair of ants and fleshy things.

They marched in a circle, hunting down the sweaty, screaming scientists, who hid and ran into the deep crevasses and cliffs of Everest, shivering from the frost. The robots continued their march, clearing out the snow, forming thick valleys of stone crust and red bloods.

A helicopter exploded as more soldiers of the State ran forward to shoot at the robots. A general screamed at the men, a man in a hardhat was impaled by a great Autosim, whilst the Calculator Bots whorled and bobbled underneath the giant legs of a Titanus X-3D.

The army, consisting of toasterbots, 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 onto some soldiers of the State.

“Go! Go! Go!”, said the General Commando Air-Strike Simulator, “Attack the Army, Get Ready For Combo 1, 2, 3, Launch! Launch! Launch!”

Rockets fired from roses, toy elephants, and dolls. People screamed and screamed. Red flew into the air, blurred the air, made it misty. Death reigned. Fire erupted from green canisters. A lovely concert rippled through the air, and reverberated through the empty caves and great mountains.

“Fire it into their empty flesh! Writhing full of maggots, the infested things! Fill them with fire and gold” 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, they rose and covered and enveloped the Bunker in the snow, covering it with their cold metal bodies. Then, they swarmed the place, erupting into the skin and flesh of Bunker. №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, worshipping it…Worshipping it…