skonen_blades

The sky screams
Twisting clouds into fingers to make claw marks
Raking the world’s yard
Scouring the floor
Scrubbing it clean
And rinsing it
Making it break out in arks

The surprising thing about humanity
Is that intelligence is not commensurate with compassion
And that stupidity and cruelty are likewise unrelated

So I can’t tell you what the flaw was
Not exactly
My suit of armor made of pointing fingers
Is great protection, though
I mean I like to think of myself as a penitent man
A dip and a swoon
A skyscraper with good heels
I have a bookmark in my pocket
So I don’t forget my place
But I have a sneaking suspicion
That the call is coming from inside the house

All I know is that

Up here
(At the top of the waterfall
Just before the roaring lip
The longest
easiest
oldest journey)

Up here
(Even with the terrifying momentum
And the shameful memories of how avoidable it was
And how the oars do nothing in this current
And how it’s a long way down)

Up here
The view is great

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As humans, what we do best
is recognize patterns and simplify data.
We skim and summarize.
We extrapolate from incomplete input.
We package the past into highlights.
We see the future as plannable.
We think we see the present clearly.
If we didn’t, we’d go mad.
There are too many fragments here,
too many shards of fact,
and their sum is way less
than the whole of their parts.
We need to fill in the blanks
Not unlike we do with the blind spots right in front of us
where our optic nerve attaches to our eyes.
The looking glass is truly half empty
And the rest is up to us.
It’s why reality is a consensual hallucination.
A mass delusion
that seems to differ from place to place
and even person to person.
Why time is elastic.
Why we can be so sure of something
that we’re dead wrong about.
There are only a few big rocks in the jar.
The rest is marbles and sand added by us
to make it look solid.
Like how atoms are mostly not even there.
We warp our minds with our own
gravitational wells of perception.
All our attempts at explanation
(Art, science, and religion)
Are just great tries by primitives
haunted by intelligence
doing their best
to process, define, and explore
what we can barely make out.

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We’re not thirsty boomerangs.
We’re not sarcastic garbage bags.

We are filtered horse mucus.
We are a lifetime supply of nothing.

We’re not underwater church bells.
We’re not thanksgiving butterflies.

We are staycation massacres.
We are round table flesh disease.

We’re not mirrors in the clown’s eyes.
We’re not ventriloquists crying in the shower.

We are orbiting nightmares.
We are forgetful giants.

We’re not graveside comedians.
We’re not rainbow waterfalls.

We are bucket thieves.
We are angry deserts.

We’re not train ticket snapchats.
We’re not fast lane dodo birds.

We are slow smiles.
We are high five crucifixions.

We’re not lampshade tap dancers.
We’re not free-hug millionaires.

We are time-traveling idiots.
We are a toast in the middle of the street.

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what a strange collection of white rooms we are
A stack of libraries burning
Horse pyramids
Jewelry factories
But look at what we've done
With our horrendous lives
The earth has gone insane
and we are the insanity
We are the symptoms
Feeding the earth to itself
The earth uses us to pick at it's own skin
contempuously
compulsively
habitually
The earth wanted to commit suicide
And we are the fingers and the knives
trying to find a wrist
on this ball of rock
We sprouted
comets passing out diseases
to primordial seas
we are a plague
that thinks that it is sentient

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This paper airplane has left an arrow of furrowed earth and destroyed buildings in its wake.
This is the danger of ideas.
Something light and fun.
Something to prove aerodynamic principles to children.
A tiny example of what could be done.
What might be possible.
Extrapolated for destruction.
Too often, that is our application.
“Can this be a lever for power?” is the question always asked
Usually just before or after “Can I have sex with it?”
I’ve heard it said that the problem is that we have primitive biology, medieval institutions, and space-age technology.
I don’t think they’re mixing well.
I can’t decide it the world has become more turbulent or if the turbulence that’s always been there has been exposed.
Giving everyone a voice has made me stop wishing to be psychic.
The rivers in a lot of minds are too dark for me.
It feels like the masks are dropping.
It feels like the masquerade is ending.
Like the lights are coming on.
And I don’t like what I’m seeing under the disguises.
The winds these days are too strong
And I feel like a paper airplane in a hurricane

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Bipedal simiants were colour-coded and lit to make sure they weren’t mistaken for human. Different skin colors for different classes and triangular pyramid stud lights on the skull and joints that lit up at night. Orange for construction, pink for sex work, green for military, black for AI, and white for medical. The AI had little purple light horns.

Servant simiants were allowed a certain degree of design leeway so that their owners could match them to the furniture but they still weren’t allowed to appear human or have their lights turned off.

Military simiants by necessity were given the ability to go dark for night-time missions but only in battle. All leave had mandatory lights.

The AI were heavily monitored and limited in numbers. They were given the rights of a person but they were safeguarded internally with high protocol. The three laws were in place as well as several manufacturer guarantees and caveats. Each AI had a parent company but was allowed to roam free, own property, and socialize as time permitted.

This is the story of David Equation. An AI that wanted to change it all and one day would.

And his partner Emay Force, a play on F=ma.

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"So when's your kill frenzy?" asked the giant, barbed Tark beside me. His name was Jant. We were both assigned to navigation in the starship. It was our first day. He had hundreds of holes in the back of his uniform to accommodate his spikes. I’d never met a Tark before.

"Sorry, my what?" I responded.

"Your kill frenzy. Once a month for two days, my race has to kill something or go insane. My next one's coming up in six days. When's yours? If we sync up, maybe we can kill together." Jant said and smiled, sheathing and unsheathing his talons reflexively in a disconcerting tic. He had too many teeth.

"I'm a human. Uh, we don't have kill frenzies." I said to him

All of his eyes widened in shock.

"Really? Gosh. I thought all sentient species had a kill frenzy. It’s how to maintain a peaceful society. Has your race ever experienced murder?"

"Indeed we have. We can kill whenever we wish to. We have social laws and many religions that stop us from doing it, though." I said, feeling a little strange about the picture I was painting.

"But those laws and that other thing you mentioned, rell-i-jun? They haven't stopped the killing." he pointed out, obviously confused.

"Uh, well, no. But, I mean, the hope is that we, uh, maybe mitigated it. I guess." I finished lamely. I really hoped he wouldn’t ask me any questions about wars. Or holy wars.

Jant eyed me guardedly and took a small step away.

I changed the direction of the conversation, "Uh, so how do you deal with your kill frenzy when you're out in deep space like this? We can't get back to your planet in time. Do you lock yourself in your room?"

"No I told you. We go insane if we don't kill.” said the Tark, “I have several months worth of victims in my storage allotment. I merely pull one out, bring it to my quarters, and spend two days killing it." He kept tapping in astrometric data. "It's why my quarters have extra soundproofing and a drain in the floor."

I blanched. "Do you eat it afterwards?"

"Good heavens no. We're not barbarians. Who would eat living things?"

"Well we did."

"I didn't think that was possible. Well it must have driven you insane not to eat them, right? You had no choice."

"No, it was optional."

"Well, at least you never killed for sport, right?"

"Actually that was quite popular"

"With your fangs and...claws?" He looked me over, finding no evidence of naturally occurring offensive weaponry.

"No, mostly with weapons we designed to uh...kill from a distance. More effectively."

In the ensuing silence, I felt as if I’d said something sacrilegious. The soft pings of the control panels and the dull hum of the engine reactors bridged the awkward pause.

"Hey, you torture living beings for days so...." I blurted out. My back was up.

"They evolved to enjoy it. It's how their spores are released. They look forward to it and experience ecstasy as they are skinned. It's mutual. And it's not....by....choice."

A chilly, more permanent silence descended.

"I may have to request a transfer away from this station." Jant said. "You are too frightening to me."

Under my breath I whispered, “Yeah, said the eight-eyed, two-and-a-half-meters-tall bristling collection of barbs and claws that has kill frenzies.”

That was two months ago. I haven’t spoken to Jant since but I hear he’s very popular on the ship. I hear he’s very kind.

I, on the other hand, am having a hard time making friends.

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For Angela, the new lie that kept showing up in her life was that people would still love her even though she had changed. Her new body wouldn’t unsettle her friends, she’d been told.

She lay back on her charging couch, raising an arm and looking at the reflection play along it from her bedside table’s lamp. The warm lightened glinted off the ridges of the small cooling vents along her forearm, like harmonica holes dotting the lines of her muscles. Utterly silent. No servomotors whirring to betray her movement like in the older models.

The people that had sold her the new body had assured her that her old flesh-and-blood friends wouldn’t fear her shift to immortality. But they lied. Of course they did. They wanted her to buy.

It was Saturday. Angela usually had to triage her social calendar on Saturdays, perhaps foregoing an event to take pity on a friend she hadn’t seen a while. Sometimes she had to choose between two or three equally lascivious parties.

This was the first Saturday in ten years that was empty of invitations.

Her brain was angry but her body was remaining calm. That was a new sensation. It was something that had been talked about in the pamphlets she’d read. A silicate dissonance, it was called. Emotions firing in the meat of her mind but not controlling her pulse rate or blood pressure.

Her heart was a whirring egg now and her blood was synthetic so that was to be expected. Adrenaline had been replaced with response time enhancers and threat-assessment programs. She’d react quickly to physical threats but without the feelings of panic. No jolts of terror to spur the biology.

Her body was capable of everything her former shell was except for a few adjustments. She’d removed the need for toilets as option number one. She still needed to bleed off heat and switch out old fluids but that could be done discreetly and, if need be, monthly.

Recharging was a necessity but a loss of consciousness while doing so was not.

She thought she’d be a commodity to her social group. The first to dive into the waters of eternal life. She thought she’d be sought after sexually. Curious people would flock to converse with her.

But no. The primate mind was still too strong.

And it was a one way trip.

Angela sighed. An affectation left over from her old body. Perhaps she’d just have to wait until more of her friends crossed over. Or else she’d have to make new friends in what the switches before her had nicknamed the hereafter.

She promised herself to call up the transformation counsellor in the morning, sent mental commands for the lights to dim and the fire to turn on and decided to catch up on old movies.

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When all you have for dinner are the shadows on your plate, you realize that relying on companies to feed you was a mistake. Some of us don’t have any blood left but we’re still going to work. Those of us that have bought into the railroad boxcar cattle market workplace and voluntarily put the yoke of mortgage and loan around our own necks know that human kindness and capitalism go together like rope and trees and we’re all become low-hanging fruit.

The strong make the rules and there’s strength in numbers. Any bean-counter will tell you that it’s a tough balancing act because we’re more cost-efficient when we’re dead but we’re more profitable when we’re alive. The solution is to give us a half-life, a zombie constitution, a nice lawsuit to be buried in. Read us our rights but keep quiet on the wrongs. If Adam and Eve only had sons and the race still managed to continue, then we’re dying by incesticide.

The high whine of the mistakes we’ve all made as a race are mosquitoing in our ears, landfilling our conscience, making it hard to breathe. Soon, agoraphobia will no longer be a sign of sickness, it will be a need for survival. War would be a quick end to us. I think we all know it won’t go down like that. It’ll be a slow drowning in our own aquarium because we’re living here like God is a janitor, treating denial like it’s swappable for oxygen. Are they still called mistakes if you keep doing them, if they become a lifestyle?

When we’re gone (and we will go) all that will be left will be some mutated animals that won’t have anyone around to let them know that they’re mutated. There will be aggressive plants that will take millions of years to break down our ‘disposable’ lifestyle and they’ll have no idea what ‘millions of years’ are. In nature, there is no Wednesday. There is no August 16th. There is no 3 o clock. Calendars die with us and so does definition itself. Will the animals go back to not having names or did they truly ever have them?

If we are the human race, we are in the home stretch before the finish line and we’re all about to tie for last place. We will permission ourselves to drink the kool-aid instead of the water. We will breathe in the carbon monoxide made from burning dinosaurs and we will softly go to sleep, committing suicide in the garage we’ve made out of this earth and this is what it would say on our tombstone if we were in a position to be given one that spoke the truth:

Quit hitting yourself. Quit hitting yourself. Quit hitting yourself.

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I look down my nose at people who look down their noses at people. I shake my head and laugh condescendingly at people who laugh at stupid people. I can't stand intolerant people. I only include inclusive people in my group of friends. I scoff at derisive people. I hate haters.

Tags

April 30/30

16/30

We’re hiding in the cupboard. We need to admit that we are a disease and spread. We need to spider out from star to star and consume. Staying here is not an option. We were not designed for stagnancy. We need to leave the earth and make husks of other planets. I know we can do it. I have faith in us.

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You are not your gender. You are not your race. You are not your occupation. You are not the country you were born in. You are not the language you speak. You are not even your name. Who are you? When you try to answer this, you see the need, nay, the logical explanation for the existence of the soul.

You are more than the electrical impulses that give you your thoughts and move your limbs. You are more than a being that can interact with this world physically. You are more than the animals, for better or for worse. Who are you? When you try to answer this, you see the need, nay, the logical explanation for want of a purpose.

Then you see that the journey is the purpose. The question is the answer. We are here to quest. We are here not just to struggle, but to strive toward. The fact that what we strive towards is unknowable is the reason we strive. The search is the end. The constant movement is the destination. It’s a contradiction that fits.

All questions lead to more questions. That is as much a function of the universe as it is a function of our own perspective. We have not found out how large the universe is and we have not found its smallest particle. The ladder is endless up and down and the road is endless in all directions as far as we’re concerned. Both ends of the telescope do nothing but expand our base of queries.

Imagination bridges gaps. Stories gives us answers. Myths teach us and give us reasons. A person with answers seems powerful because answers calm us. Without satisfactory answers, we turn faster and faster. We become smarter to dampen the curiousity with more knowledge. We turn to drugs to cotton our ears to the pull of wanting to know. We memorize religious books and tell ourselves that strength lies in belief, damming up the need for facts, facts, more facts. The yawning abyss is exactly this.

What calms the journey is direction. Your journey may take you to the stars, to the intricacies of language, to atoms, to your own inner workings, to the physical and metaphysical. It may take you to places on maps either real or imagined. It can take you on quests for peace through several paths.

This holy grail of balance is what comes in and out of focus for us. What gets us out of bed in the morning is not our awareness of time passing, our bodies decaying. It is the question. As innate as eye colour. It is bred into us and seemingly, only us.

It is why our life form is insane. It is our greatest strength and our greatest flaw. With no curiousity, we would be at peace. This is why we are damned. This is why we are holy.

They say that getting there is half the fun. Since getting there is all we do, then that is why we feel we are missing out on half of something.

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What we humans have done is wrong.
I’m talking about the wars in between the calms.
I’ve heard that God looks down on us and I have no doubt that’s true.
I’m not crying wolf, I’m just crying.
Forgiveness is for giving but we’re all on the take.
I’ve stopped piling food on the fire.
If things continue this way, at some point there will be more dead people on Facebook than live ones.
We humans do more than classify. We divide.
I prefer to think we are common.
As sure as the word pretty is a prison and poetry is emotional shorthand, Santa was a lumberjack when he was twenty-five and he’s still got the axe to scare the elves.

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It was a shock to learn how short their life spans were but not surprising considering how much naked energy they threw off. We do not know how long we live because none of us have ever died, only changed form.

They called themselves Humans. They are beings of fire. They burn so hot. They seemed to be made of pure radiant heat. They seemed impossible. They had special suits to survive in our environment. Those suits protected us, encasing their boiling energy. They called our environment a ‘vacuum’ and spoke of an ‘atmosphere’ where they lived.

An atmosphere that dimmed the stars on their planet (during a period called ‘night’) and made their transport vessels work tremendously hard when taking off and burn with friction when landing. They also had more gravity on their world. Such fragile, determined creatures. It was inspiring.

We have no ‘atmosphere’. Our planet has low gravity. We achieved space travel by jumping hard into the air and returned by waiting. After a time, we came back down.

The humans had names for our parts. They said we were crystalline. Our blood, when we decided to make it liquid, is thick and able to stay flowing in what the humans see as extreme cold. They called it ferrofluid. Our intelligence is encapsulated in each of our particles. They called that nanotechnology. Each tiny particle of us is a switch, able to align or crook tangent to the other, forming solids and liquids. They say that makes our entire race one living ‘computer’.

They said we were -420 degrees Celsius but that’s only because that was the lower limit of their temperature gauges. Down at our temperature, gases become stable liquids and deep inside us, even colder, some solids do, too. Like iron. “Sloshed around like silver paint in a test tube, like molten lead, all granular like a black and white picture of Jupiter with some sparkles thrown in.” one of the humans said.

We took their form at first so as not to alarm them. We were much taller than them and blue but it helped. Though we can take any shape, we haven’t tried many.

The humans have imagination. They showed us their engineering and architecture data. The math of load-bearing weights and geometry was something we knew instinctually, much like a human catching a ball wouldn’t consciously figure out the parabola and the necessary arc needed to intersect and catch it. We are angles, from our tiniest particle to our largest forms. They showed us flimsy carbon strings they called 'diamond'.

We extrapolated. We improved.

We can make fusion reactors the size of what they call a fingernail. And then we make more. And then we attach many of them together. We do not have to use ‘tools’. We are the tools. We are the systems.

They have told us how to get farther. They didn’t know how to build those machines. They only had theories. They showed us.

We extrapolated. We improved.

We have the ability to create stable holes in space now that help us slide further when we ‘jump’. They have star maps that tell us where to go.

We let them travel inside us in special chambers to go far, to go where they wanted to go, to explore and record together, each experience filling up the cels of our cathedral spaceship bodies.

It’s only fair.

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Well, well, well. It's that time again. Readers and breeders beware the fate that may befall the human race in the far-flung nightmare of the possibly not-too-distant future. Tremble, earthlings, for you are tasty and respond well to fertility drugs and growth stimulants. With a little help, of course.

->CLICK HERE<-

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It’s amazing what can be found in an eyeblink. It can damn a witness. It can make a person miss a road sign. It can change a train of thought quicker than a punch. As sure as reasons have colours, an eyeblink can end a marriage. It nearly ruined a contract but I was too stupid to realize it.

I’m on the other end of the gear change. I’m backstage having a cigarette. I’m under the carpet. The cleaners are done with my hotel room. I checked out ten years ago. There’s only one way to ground level that’s quicker than the elevator or the stairs. It’s a little risky.

Let’s talk about circles. In 1978, a government consortium known only as ASDAM held a conference in Baltimore. It was attended by two extra-terrestrials, an Old One, a Norse god, and six humans, including Zombie Edison and the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe. The destiny of our planet was decided then. A schedule was laid out that takes us up to the year 2078.

That document is called the Century Break.

It’s a footnote in what passes for a constitution on Centauri Prime. The off-worlders promised us safety for a hundred years in exchange for a number of our resources.

In return, we need to achieve space travel within a hundred years of that signing and clear out. In 2078, our planet goes back on the market and the hordes descend in a free-for-all claim-jump orgy that will leave our planet gutted and desolate.

Turns out that they’re a bunch of liars. Advance-wave alien survey teams are trickling in right now in a small but steady stream. They have permits. I found this out and brought it up to the consortium. They were less that sympathetic. I’m being hunted now.

I was one of the humans present at the signing. Along with the Norse God and the Old One, we represented Earth. I’m the last one that’s still alive. The rest have been executed.

All of the Zombie Edisons have shown up decapitated in different American rivers. Unless he had any super-secret backup copies that he was keeping hidden, he’s out.

Any psychic medium who attempts to reach Poe ends up on fire. The Norse God is hiding with his people. The Old One is on the ocean floor.

The three other humans are in drawers in the morgue. I’m running for my life.

I remember sitting across from the aliens at that table in 1978. I had a handlebar moustache and a yellow pantsuit. I remember that the alien across from me was blinking rapidly with its six eyes. At the time, I thought that the air here was giving it allergies.

I realize in hindsight that it was chuckling. Their race blinks when they laugh.

We are the American Native Indian First Nation Peoples. The aliens are the Colonizing Europeans. We need to mobilize now.

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Real Life:

Are there two tribes of people?

I see vacancy in a lot of eyes that I envy sometimes. But not really. Just wistfully.

Am I just more sensitive to the input of the world? Is my experience what everybody experiences but doesn’t talk about? When I walk down busy streets and I see people doing things that I would never ever do and act in ways that I would never act, I wonder.

I heard recently that there was an overlap of the homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. That they mated. That our race might have two strains running through it.

I see that some people lack the capability for introspection and self-correction. The concept that they might be wrong about their beliefs is foreign to them and will never cross their minds. It makes me think that if I didn't question myself, that I wouldn't push forward or ever change. That maybe doubt is what leads us to being more than we were, to being human.

I wonder about nature versus nurture. The origins of our race are lost to supposition and best guesses.

Like the etymology of slang terms.

I also remember the Germans putting forth "concrete proof" that the shape of a Jew’s skull proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were lower on the evolutionary scale than an Aryan.

That makes me feel like the closer I get to feeling like there are two kinds of people in the world or that some people are better than others, the more I feel like a Nazi.

My brother had a dream where he and I were super heroes. We were in the Hall of Justice with the other heroes. They were in a circle with their hands in the middle making a ‘circle of power’ or something like that to activate their powers in a true ‘Avengers Assemble!’ battle cry before they fought the bad guys. My brother didn’t feel like joining in and I was trying to convince him to do it. He said that I convinced him to do it in the end.

Just the thought of him having this dream brings tears to my eyes.

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Trapped in finite constructs. That’s us.

It defines a lot of our raison d’etre as a race. Not only do we never get to leave our vehicles, we also never get to repair them enough. Our frames wither. It wouldn’t be a problem if we could either a) afford a top-of-the-line model that would go without upkeep for centuries or b) scrape together enough to shunt from cheap, used body to cheap, used body.

But we can’t.

We shimmer. We extinguish.

Arguments for an afterlife or a comeback tour are immaterial. If reincarnation exists, there are only a handful of people that claim to remember being other people in the past. If there’s a heaven, it’s a one-way trip and again, not many come back to talk about it.

Without faith, this right here is all there is. And it’s brief.

I think this is why people put their money on science. The Holy Grail, in one form or another, has been sought for as long as human beings have drawn breath. Science seems to be giving us more tangible results and answers. I read once that after God died, we sent out the scientists to come back with the answers to the universe. We all sat down and turned to entertainment while we waited for the scientists to come back.

That was sixty years ago. The scientists aren’t back yet and we’re neck-deep in reality TV as a result. I think this might also be why there’s a groundswell of religion coming back in the world.

I can’t help but see this chapter of humanity as a preface to a new Dark Ages. It freaks me out. There’s also talk of a scientific event horizon of the sort that will either make us effectively immortal or kill us all. The jury’s a little vague on that particular point. It really does strike me that we’re on the cusp of something.

We’re in a water-plane on a river. We’re in the rapids before the waterfall and we’re trying to fix the engine.

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It was the free-range humans that Dorg liked best.

Those fatty, preservative-laced humans from the cage-farms were disgusting. They had most of their senses ironed off. Eyes, ears, and nose sealed shut for maximum docility. Their sense of taste and their frontal brain lobes were removed. They grew to unnatural sizes, pink fat squeezing through the little squares of their cages. Their slobbering mouth-holes became nothing more than intake valves.

Setting them free would do nothing. They didn’t have the muscles to move their own limbs or the higher brain functions needed to realize a need to escape.

They were pumped so full of antibiotics and preservatives and anti-coagulant that their blood was a dark purple.

When you got right down to it, Dorg had to admit there was a negligible difference in the taste of the meat but as a sentient conquering race, Dorg felt a responsibility to treat the food-source races with respect and dignity.

Let them reproduce the natural way instead of clone splicing. Let them run around in their grass habitats, laughing all the way to maturity until they’re led to the kill-cabins.

Dorg was in favour of the mental dampening so that the humans never learned language, math, or organizational skills. Dorg’s race couldn’t have rebellion. They’d learned their lesson there.

But the humans should at least be allowed to smell the ground, see the stars, and build up some tender, tasty muscle tone before they were taken.

Dorg knew that he was in the minority. Dorg didn’t have the means to buy free-range all the time but he looked forward to the cycles when he had enough money to afford it. Until then, though, he was stuck eating the cheap stuff.

He sucked the flesh off of a fat human arm with his rasping lips and threw the weak bones back into the bucket of 20 that he’d ordered.

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Shapeshifters are untrustworthy. It's not their fault.
They see the world for what it is, through a kaleidoscope.

Us regulars, we only get to see one viewpoint of the world. People react to our outer shell with no variation. We can get fat or thin or muscled over the course of a lifetime with some cosmetic surgery here and there, perhaps, but for the most part, we remain unchanged. This inescapable fact colours how we percieve the world.

Shapeshifters are both invisible and at the same time, all things to all people. They sense the fantasies that will make their missions of espionage go smoothly. That general likes the young girls, especially bobbed brunettes with scars, for instance. That high-ranking banker woman is pining for an old love. It's a simple trick for a changeling to make itself resemble that old love in order to grease the information tracks.

This ability to make any human bend to their will gives the ‘shifters a much truer insight into humanity than we regulars will ever possess.

It make the changelings unreliable, regardless of the punishment chips and id tags we install to make them subservient and identifiable to us. They don’t set out to fool us. They just have fuses on their minds because of what they are. They start to despise all humans, not just their mission targets.

After that, they fall in love with each other.

The thing is, a ‘shifter will never be satisfied with a regular. They can only be truly pleased with another changeling.

It’s like putting two mirrors face to face and creating an endless hallway.

Two shifters, embittered and ready to defect, will rent out a motel room. Once inside, they will shudder with changes. They will have a game of trying to match what the other puts forth. Clothes will disappear, bodies will melt and flicker through age and skin colour. Body parts will grow, shrink, or disappear in an ongoing fluidic transition from one form to the next, faster and faster.

They will see how aesthetically perfect they can make themselves and then how repulsive. They will pull out their entire repertoires. They will become children and old people. They will have sex with each other in every possible way, heating up the room.

After they have exhausted their options of humanity, they will start to delve deeper into the imagination, beyond human forms. They can only do this with each other in moments of unbridled ecstasy.

Dragons, dogs, octopi, half-imagined air creatures made of bone clattering with sexual hunger, panthers, chittering car-sized insects, and misshapen sculptures of flesh with many holes to fill.

The changes become too fast and quick for their minds to keep up. In a mutual orgasm of delight, they die, leaving behind protoplasm.

It’s not uncommon. About twice a year, two of our shifter agents will stop answering their phones. It’s only a matter of time before we track down the hotel where they ascended to another plane of existence.

If they weren’t so useful otherwise, we wouldn’t employ them.

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skonen_blades

June 2023

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Entries tagged with human

2022 - 12/30 - The View

9/30 - We're Barely Here

we are(n't)

Sentient Self Harm

13-30 Paper Airplane

Simiants

Kill Frenzy

The switch

Quit hitting yourself

Human Ironies

16/30 - We Are a Disease

Thought on Existence

5/365 - What we've done is wrong

Coldships

Another Post is up on 365

Blink

Real Life

Now

Free Range Humans

Shape Shifters