The Grapes of Mars

Unable and powerless to circumvent his miseries, daunted, discouraged and unable to face reality, in short, feeling depressed, he manually checked his medprinter for updates and patches. There was nothing, but he hacked out another dose of Mexipro. Dimly he wondered how many other people were downloading the same hacks. Considering that low responsiveness and drooling were common social mannerisms today, he supposed many, but stopped thinking about it because for the time being his hands had become useless again, which would have embarrassed him, because his pants were open and his penis out as he had been planning to masturbate, but fortunately the ameliorative effects of his anti anxiety meds saved him from undue distress and self-reproach about this. Instead he just sat there quietly, marveling at the feeling of the air conditioning on his balls at the public library and wondering at the number of gray pubic hairs he had, while thousands of tiny computers patrolled his bloodstream and brain, reporting that he was nominal, a-okay, all systems go.




Sadness was always present. The lonely city wants you. And yet it was as distant as the picture of a sad kitten taped to a wall.




A cloud of birds or drones fluxed overhead. He blew on his coffee and realized with alarm that it had frozen, as though with super breath. Then he recalled that he had ordered a frappuncino. He also seemed to holding a slice of pizza that was still warm. He wasn't hungry now, but he realized he would probably go along with it, this being a positive adaptation he had learned to make. Perhaps it had been a good idea at the time. Perhaps he was starving. He wondered if he had any money left. The cloud above his head coalesced into the image of a woman fellating a high speed train. So they must be drones, advertising. Though advertising what, he wondered?

Advertising today made his head hurt. It was best not to look at it. For instance, as he passed and alley, he saw it had been redecorated as the barracks to a concentration camp. Inside, imprisoned children were torturing each other, in some horrific parody of the order of the camp itself. What could that ad possibly be about, he protested inwardly (Gap Kids). Gone were the days when celebrities just became robots and kicked dogs and this made you buy panty hose. Now everything was infopresent, confusing and disturbing. Madison avenue, after much research and collaboration with b/RAND had found that ultra low liminal signals worked best and so now every commercial had a hypnogogic pitch and people went about trying to shake brand awareness like trying to forget a bad wet dream.



In the third generation of post-human advertainment a lot of stuff happened that probably shouldn't have. After the MIT Robotic Conference/Mount Holyoke Massacre, people had pretty much given up on the project of emulating or simulating human intelligence in any way. For researchers, "human intelligence" now seemed a completely discredited idea for men and machines. As for everyone else, there was considerable public opinion against the idea of another bridal expo being skinned alive.

However, if AIs no longer feigned any pretense of mimicking or having any sympathy with or similarity to human intelligence, it somehow became the vogue among humans to adopt a lot of the mannerisms and patterns exhibited by their betters. Many human CEOs tried to emulate the catastrophically effective and ruthless decision-making patterns of the AIs, as popularized in AI authored titles such as The Pink Stick, inscrutable book of aphoristic numbered advice that read like the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus Markov chained to the Tao Te Ching.

The results, of course, were worst human decisions since the excesses of the Caesars or Peter III, without the excuse of the cruelty serving some purpose or at least reflecting organic damage and impaired decision-making ability. It did not really matter, of course, since trading programs had effectively established their dynasty for several decades now, though it would yet be hundreds of years before mankind realized what those programs were actually calculating and why.

It was about this time that McDonald's ceased to be a restaurant chain that made some pretense at serving some kind of comestible, and became a franchised setting for certain experiences, being in effect, a chain of miniature theme parks on every corner. This was an ideal arrangement as a heavily medicated populace found such an environment appealing and usually needed some sustenance and often shelter as much of the population no longer had homes or knew where they were.

As fully automated, environmentally controlled, self-sufficient retail food and healthcare vendors, McDonald's were all that many people needed.




Bad dreams were everywhere, like that giant bloody lawnmower he saw last week that ate up a whole street protest. It was, he thought, a particularly disturbing piece of public performance art. At least he hoped to god it was. Artists today wanted to wake people up and try and get people interested in reality again. But like everyone in his generation, he felt like reality was like a bad parent: it just nagged you and told you were wrong and no damn good and wanted you to do and be interested in countless things that weren't interesting. And what you wanted was inside, in the deep dark comfortable of your room. What you wanted was something familiar, like an episode of Death Camp Cuties, you watched over and over again, the one porn clip that always got you off like a favorite song. You wanted to go home. Like every astronaut, you just wanted to go home.

These were not hallucinations, he knew. He had plenty of experience with hallucinations. The post mission recovery doctors had put him on a steady diet of LSD, ketamine, PCP, neoyote and k generation hallucinogens to help him adapt to life on Earth. He had hallucinated vividly for what he was told were days. From his perspective, each moment was longer than a lifetime, or the lifetime of the universe, having always been and always will be. Conversely, it was just as short, having no duration at all. The effect, however, was therapeutic: time and space, cause and effect, self and other-of all these things he was temporarily relieved, almost approximating his (non) experiences on Mars. Sometimes he had imagined himself back on Mars. Sometimes he thought he saw the future. The future was boring, but he was too drugged to take his eyes off it.

The hardest part was language. Mars was an aphasic asemic environment. Or rather, language was a thing on Mars and things were language. Mars itself was a prayer wheel whose every rotation affirmed total cosmic indifference.

His interest in pornography was related. It had no real narrative; it was endlessly iterative. Contrary to any romantic illusions to the contrary, in sexuality and orgasm there was no principle of individuation. It was like the phenomenal world of Mars.



Thank god for frappuncinos and scrip kiddies and blacknet. Scoring wasn't harder today than getting spam or viruses or pron. The main dining room was a kind of dormitory for cocooned homeless people. All was quiet: they were well medicated and neatly tucked away like a landing team in the hyb hub aboard MCS R-1. He walked through briskly, but quietly, through the airlock to the playplace and exercise deck.

He felt relatively safe in the fortification of the playplace jungle gym above the soft sea of mulch of recycled condoms, sex toys and military vehicle tires. There was only one approach up the ladder and an easy escape out the slide. He had stayed here before.

He reached inside his bag for the bottle of DISK ERASER Schnapps, but found it has been replaced by the pizza again. He lifted the pizza to his mouth. Alarmingly, someone had already taken a bite out of it. He looked at it, puzzled at who would do such a thing. He was struggling to compose the appropriate arguments for a refund, when the same faculty of reasoning informed him that it was a reasonable supposition that the teeth marks were his. It would be reasonable to bite the pizza again and see.

His forensic bite, however, overtook the original. Looking at the new impression he had no idea how the former impression looked. He supposed they were similar. It occurred to him to spit out the new mouthful, but he noted that he had already begun chewing it. Information had been destroyed.

Or had it? Each chew added new information, shifted the orientation of the original pattern. But the teeth that made all the patterns were the same. The photons that struck him from the sun came to him like angels to report that the sun was still there eight minutes ago. The universe was drowning, seething with information, all the way down to the quantum foam that was not sure what to say. God spoke. God spoke continually. There was simply no instant in which all of his remarks had bearing. The reality was just this speech, endless speech.

This inner sermon was interrupted by his gag reflex. He suddenly felt something hard scraping the inside of his mouth. At first he thought it was perhaps crisped cheese or crust, but it had too many sharp sticklike extensions. He could almost feel the jointed legs and the hair on the legs. The chitinous crunch of the shell filled him with instinctual horror. He spat it out.

At first he thought some insect had accidentally landed on his pizza. Then a flash fire of anger: someone had put it deliberately on his pizza. He could see them reaching in the flaming oven and putting it on, grinning, thinking of him. He is looking at the chef’s face gloating at his malicious prank, in a reverse shot, as though from inside the oven, as though he were inside the oven somehow, the imagined chef looking down at him, mocking him, just as the launch crew gave him the thumbs up as he lay buttoned down on the couch during pre-launch.

To his horror, however, the masticated shape he had spat out moved. It curled and uncurled, wrapped in spit, marinara and saliva softened flecks of crust. It clasped and unclasped like the fist of a newborn, as though adapting to the atmosphere outside his mouth. As he watched, it seemed to flex and change shape in its shell. It seemed to be evolving from unpleasant to scary.

As the colorful feathered hairs shot out of its body, like a barnacle feeding, he recognized it. It was a Martian grape.

But Martian Grapes were an exclusive topping, very expensive. And how had the pizza guy known of his mission to Mars?



Aresologists, exobiologists, and sidereal psycholinguists are quite of different minds as to the unusual qualities of the Martian "grape" and what makes it so compelling and incomprehensible.

Some neurological research suggests that the Martian Grape causes mild aphasic damage to the language centers of the brain on contact. This is offered as an explanation of why human subjects find describing the taste of the Martian grape so difficult and, further, why human subjects repeatedly fail to state correctly whether or not they have ever tried it before. This latter explanandum draws considerable criticism from Aresologists and philosophers of language, who maintain that the memory and speech problems presented by the Martian grape are a product of its asemic qualities.

The debate between asemanologists and asemioticians continues to this day. It is certainly worth noting that from an exobiological standpoint, the Martian "grape" is actually a para-psuedo-animal with crustacean, vermoid and pseudo fungoid characteristics. The creature is notable in that it seems to pass through several radically different forms during its life cycle and seemingly in no particular order.

[comparison to meterology and ufology]

This has led to some radical Aresologists to maintain that the Martian grape is not one, but several different species that are either mistakenly conflated into one creature, or actually "inhabit" the same body at the same time, Aresbiology being based on the hypotheses that this and spontaneous generation are possible and the proposition that metempsychosis is a well-formed and valid concept.

More conspiracy-minded authors even maintain that Mars biology is entirely the product or by product of human engineering from a secret NEU/NUN prohibited facility allegedly in the dew farms of the Labyrinthus Minotaurus, sponsored by YUMCORP, owners of Pizza Hut Plus.





From his command module aboard the Mc Donaldland playplace. He made his way across the gantry of the bouncy suspended bridge to the module with the slidy pole and turny wheels. In its modular construction, it reminded him very much of MCS-Recovery One: Great Savings America.

This platform was the Mars Lander/MSAM-MAV. It pitched over the red sea of the recycled foam below. Now he was EVA on the ladder about to have his Neil Armstrong moment. Mars, dammit.


He walked down the street with his arm up, pinching his elbow. Without a screen he only had the SUI, the somatic bodyware to interface with his instream printers: press and hold, press and hold. With his arm in this position he supposed he must look like an unmedicated schizophrenic, just another homeless person with his private rituals and meanings, as opposed to a trained veteran astronaut whose body was equipped with n-generation nano-pharmacies to keep him healthy and optimal at all times. There must be something wrong, however, because of all the blackouts and headaches.

He supposed that some blackouts were normal when the frontal lobe apps needed rebooting after upgrades. They usually scheduled these for deep sleep. Now that he could not connect to the med server, he supposed that some blackouts were inevitable.

He shuddered, even though he stood in direct sunlight and sweated in his coat. The wool wicked the sweat away. The multiple layers were like his Mars surface suit, but bulkier in Earth’s gravity. He wore them here for much the same reason: a hostile environment that could be scorching at day and freezing at night.

As on Mars, he could survive indefinitely with only his suit as shelter, provided he could locate resources. That is how he had survived on Mars, outlasted the others. But who had put the printers in the chapel? The Martians?

Then as now, he needed patches and upgrades to keep his suit working.

The narrow alley reminded him of the crevasse in the labyrinth where the Martians had their chapel. It was dark, wet and narrow. The graffiti on the walls was just as colorful and illegible, but it carried the same meaning as all Martian language: I am here. The world is all that is the case. But another world is possible.


NEXT POSTING BY

11 APRIL 2011

๑๑ เมษายน ๒๕๕๔
 

Some Unusual Qualities of Particular Labyrinths

The mirrors in the so-called "Palace of Narcissus" actually served a distinct purpose, as do mirrors in palaces generally, to serve as simple surveillance systems controlling vulnerable points of access, such as stairs. It is for this reason true that, as the lyrics of the lay go, the number of mirrors proliferated as the number of actual personnel in the palace declined. However, the importation of more and more mirrors into the palace was rather the effect of fewer and fewer personnel (the mirrors being needed so fewer and fewer guards could control the same amount of space) rather than as folklore has it, the cause.

Further, it has been mathematically demonstrated, that, owing to the well-understood laws of optics, it is wholly possible that the palace’s main chamber could have contained numerous blind spots, because of, and not despite its mirrors.

It is, no doubt, by the cunning exploitation of this geometry and physical fact that the victims of the palace were dispatched, by assassins unknown, rather than strangled by their own reflections, as legend has it.




The Labyrinth of the Minotaur, it is said, possessed unusual acoustics. This we read in the excellent "Encouraging Voice of the Labyrinth."

It is said that the "fatherly voice" in the labyrinth is "heard everywhere and at all points equivocally." Further, that the Minotaur could hear everything that happened in the labyrinth equally well, from any distance or position, as though it were occurring in the folds of his ears. This is the unstated reasoning behind the author's claim that time and space did not exist in the labyrinth for the Minotaur, for whom it is completely transparent and intelligible monad. The author then goes on to identify the Minotaur as God, as Mithras, in whose catacombs there is terrible enlightenment, or as Moloch, to whom all children are ultimately sacrificed.

As for the unfortunate children of Thebes, it was said that the sound of their own footsteps or voices were alienated from them, appearing to approach them from behind in a distorted form, perhaps owing to the same sonic dynamics that gave the Minotaur his omniscience. Perhaps further, the victims of the labyrinth were so chased by their own magnified footsteps and panicked voices into delivering themselves into the den of the Minotaur himself.

If so, this perhaps explains how the Minotaur had complete and instantaneous intelligence from every point in the labyrinth: the Minotaur may have occupied some central location to which all the passages of the labyrinth conducted and magnified all sounds.




If any of this is plausible, even possible, it provides a possible context for an explanation of the enigmatic "voice" of the labyrinth. It is the distorted and pitch shifted echoes of the doomed youths themselves as they grope their way to their doom. Both the voice and the encouragement are chimerical.

Its author could certainly not be the Minotaur himself, who is described universally in all accounts as mute.




"Our Life Now" is the title of an artwork noted at the Venice Biennale 2048 for its shockingly high casualty and fatality rate, even at a Biennale where lethal and near lethal artwork were very much in vogue. The labyrinth section of the installation begins with a highly realistic scale replica of a mall shopping arcade in Hong Kong in the late 20th century, whose glitzy twists and turns eventually become those of an Egyptian tomb, which alludes directly to the author's previous collaboration on the retail sarcophagus of Madonna and his still earlier work on the "hidden retail spaces of the dead.” *

This museum quality replica actually holds the mummified body of Norman Mailer, a fact that is only revealed in the following darkened chamber, where viewers are forced to endure a reading from Ancient Evenings read by a Mailer lookalike.

The viewer's only escape from this ordeal is to discover the concealed secret door that leads out of the reading, as the passage by which they entered is slowly filled in with sand during the reading.

The secret passage opens up onto a maze whose walls are virtual advertisements that patrons must negotiate using eyemice or I-GUIs. Revolutionary at the time, this maze of ads is now a staple at tradeshows, air and infospace musems and arcology condo displays. Indeed, the viewers are inclined to believe they have reached the end of the installation as the virtuspace commercials are for the very corporations that sponsored the exhibit.

Instead, the maze itself collapses and the viewers instead find themselves in the very real freezing mud of a trench in Le Mort Homme in 1916. Viewers have no sooner taken positions to view the bleakened craters of the field before them, when sharp whistles announce an incoming enemy assault, in this case, wave after wave of celebrity lookalikes with live historically accurate ammo.

A pitched battle generally ensues between the panicked art going public (which has the advantage of position) and the waves of hardened celebrity imitators, ultimately descending into extremely vicious hand to hand close quarter combat as the celebrities overrun the trench, using such improvised trench combat weapons as sharpened shovels, Grammys, Emmys, Cable ACE Awards and Academy Awards. This is where most casualties occur as the art going public usually has little more than the Biennale schedule and artist's statements to defend itself.

*Very different in its signification than the artist’s Universal Centotaph for Tom and Suri Cruise, Whose Circumference is Everywhere and Whose Center is Nowhere, which consisted of several strains of engineered bacteria carrying various slogans, such as “EXTREME WEALTH BRINGS ITS OWN WOE, WHICH HAS NEITHER SYMPATHY NOR DIGNITY” and “WHOM GODS WOULD DESTROY THEY FIRST GIVE AN INCOMPETENT PUBLICIST” as well as samples from Cruise’s most famous films that can only be played back on the now obsolete 120 BB (gram negative) gPod. ("Pain and Information Aesthetics" NAND, Vol X).





The very undecided and deeply problematic nature of the Labyrinthus Pareidolia on Mars makes its inclusion on this list controversial. Aresologists, exoarcheologists, Marsologists and geologists remain violently divided as to whether the structure is a natural formation, alien artifact, giant facbot printing error, hoax or advertising campaign from the future or symptom of material planetary mental illness. As such they have differing opinions and analyses as to whether the “friezes” “faces” and other depictions of the labyrinth depict Martian mythology or history, attempts at therapy, or “a trailer for the extinction of the human species.”

This leaves aside the perennial controversy over whether or not there is Afterlife on Mars.



Most Marsologists maintain that Mars as a natural phenomenon effectively ceased to exist with the successive printer errors of the Mars Condo Society and that as rogue facbots and frankenweiners have effectively remade the planet, Mars has effectively been not so much terraformed as “anthropomorphized,” and, as such, Aresologists have no actual object of study (Aresology actually being a branch of human and post-human cultural studies). On the whole, Marslogists wish to continue the venerable tradition of empirically based intersubjectively available science and reject the operational premises of Aresology as wholly lacking any intelligible criteria for its purported phenomena or testable hypotheses or statements, being not so much a science as a catalog of pseudo events and quasi experiences.

Aresologists, in turn, cite the catastrophic events, unexplainable data and failure of the missions previous to Mars Condo One as dispositive of the peculiar cybernetic and psychological phenomena of Mars having some indigenous origin and point to the continuing vexing presence of Martians as indicative of phenomena that cannot be accomodated in traditional natural science, no matter how our concepts of space, time, cause and identity are modified, but rather can only begin to be described in a new framework that accepts such paraphenomena as Martian Spiders as "para-phenomenologically pseudo-real abstractions as given reals."

Despite, or rather because of this, there is actually quite a lot of consensus as to the proposed demolition of the labyrinth and any other observable structures on Mars. However, rather than a preemptive strike on Mars in a presumed Earth-Mars War, as some critics have claimed, this is simply to, in the words of one Nobel Prize Laureate “place man back in his proper position as a thinking being and re-enable the regularities that are the conditions of possibility for natural science.”

Your Letters, My Answers

Dearest Readers,

It is with great joy and anticipation of your epistolary camaraderie that owing to a recent innovation in an alternate eigenstate of this blog (quantum computing on and the implosion of Earth 2) that it is now possible to leave comments and messages to express your joy, concerns, vague disappointments and troubling personal doubts in the form of comments.

It is even possible to express some sort of reaction to the post itself. However, readers are reminded that any reaction that takes the form of a dialogue between this author and the reader as gay werewolves forced to perform humiliating acts while trapped in dog form at a dog show will be deleted. Again.

To celebrate this new homoerotic-lycanthropic-humiliation-scenario-free channel of communication, I publish here some much belated responses to some of your earlier letters and inquires not related to my being mounted publicly by a Great Dane in Madison Square Garden.






Dear อาจารย์แวน,

I enjoy reading your work very much. I feel it has shaped me as a person, for the better. I find it a source of great spiritual comfort.

I only have one humble question to ask: where do you get your throwing stars?

-Gloomy in Gotham



Dear Gloomy,

I'm glad you have found my work inspiring and useful.

Here in กรุงเทพ I find it easiest just to purchase shuriken, plumbata and other hand missiles at a little store in Chinatown called The Five Daughter's Vengeance Emporium. It is also where I get my ointments and "Viet Cong Q-tips." It's a nice little store, run by a dear little man with one of those moles with super long hairs and a horrid, pitiful story that you should by no means listen to.

The store sells throwing stars by the gross, and whereas they may not be nearly as well balanced as the batarangs you are used to, they are cheap, plentiful and pointy.

I'm not really sure who owns the store. If you go out back, there are a lot of old newspapers and spears, some from before the war. What war, you say? Any war.




Dear อาจารย์แวน,

I recently acquired an enormous sofa. It is really quite old and cumbersome -in fact, I'm not sure even how to go about sitting on it comfortably, with all its odd seats and slanted surfaces, but as an ancient family heirloom I cannot part with it.

Cleaning it, however, seems an enormous and difficult task, as its vast surface has a variety of complex and involved geegaws and decorations that I really don't understand, much less know how to clean. In particular, there is this one central stain that never seem to come out no matter how I try. As for the smell of this particular movable it seems totally inalienable from the article. Any advice?

-Recipient in Roanoke



Dear Recipient,

I am afraid you are somewhat confused. There is no stain on your sofa. There is no sofa.

From your description the object you are describing as your sofa is a Carcharodon or giant furred megalodon. The irregular features that trouble you are probably its fins, gills and possibly its eyes. If so, you should avoid trying to clean them, as you report doing, certainly not with any harsh cleansers. I must add that these features, as with the smell, are part of the natural compliment of the megalodon and really cannot be changed.

Further, the "stain" you cannot seem to remove is clearly the subconscious guilt you feel (c.f. Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1, Freud, "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices," Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, passim.) produced by keeping such a magnificent extinct creature in the captivity of your apartment, instead of allowing it the freedom of apex predation in the world's oceans. I suspect you have other issues as well, so I advise you seek further help with a professional who is real and not imaginary.













Dear อาจารย์แวน,

I recently received a fuckbot for my bar mitzvah. Though it has a very good likeness of Baron von Ricthofen as I had asked for and is extremely prompt about blow jobs, I cannot help but feel that it is somehow increasingly less interested in sex, that somewhere behind its many emphatic cries, sobs and ululations of venereal delight, something is somehow missing.

I know that these things are only ultra-weak AIs and are programmed at the factory. The unit's devionics firmware is up to date and the diagnostics are in the normal/ideal parameters. Is it just me?

-Frigid in Freemont



Dear Frigid,

First of all, the proper term for an automaton designed expressly for sexual gratification, entertainment, education or aid is "android," "gymnoid" or "hermaphroid." This is the term of art of choice used by the industry, designers, droidaphiles, academics, legal authors, game shows and the automatons themselves. It is impolite, inaccurate and a non-felony lexcrime to refer to these valuable members of our post-reality economy as "skinjobs," "butt-bots," "ROV cum-dumpsters," "auto-skanks," "slut-threepios," "woombas," "Hy Pikes" or whatever other uncouth derogatory terms they are using over at Taffey Lewis' place.

Sex with fuckbots universally tends toward extreme paraphilias and object substitution. Indeed, in the DSM-XII, coitus or the desire for coitus modeled on heterosexual human coupling with a fuckbot is one of the criteria for para schizophrenia of the Mars Condo One type.

The reason for this is undoubtedly the same reason people who spend a lot of time with statues or mannequins tend to dress them up: to compensate for a perceived uncanny deficiency in the human simulacrum, namely that it is not "alive."

Though nth-generation fuckbots are quite animate and realistic in their responses, an awareness of their status as sex objects simpliciter seems to invite degrees of unrestricted sadism and perversity from otherwise sexually quite boring owners that would never be tempted to imagine such trespasses, diversions or violations with a traditional "living" "organic" human being or even an animal.

As such, most owners or operators of fuckbots (tip: leasing is better, though avoid heavily refurbished or refitted models, particularly those designed for asphyxiation or edge play; there is almost always a truly disturbing reason these models have had their memory wiped) report that their fuckbot, though objectively compliant and functioning normally become progressively less satisfying as sex surrogates from a perceived increasing lack of enthusiasm. This is usually explained by a normal plateau of sexual satisfaction and buyer's regret, a feature that manufacturers know of and anticipate with their buy back program.

Research into whether or not fuckbots actually become bored themselves is inconclusive. The never discussed reason for this is that in the process of trying to determine whether or not fuckbots become bored with sex, the researchers involved invariably become more and more dangerously perverse and depraved themselves, conducting more and more extreme, unnatural and complex "experiments" in an attempt to find the arousal threshold of their subject fuckbots, which they invariably perceive as constantly approaching the oblique asymtote limit of being cold and distant. This inevitably ends in death and mutilation for the researchers, often in some sort of sexually themed bull pen or orgasmic threshing machine.

[Given this problem, some research was, of course, carried out along the lines of fuckbots studying other fuckbots to determine whether they get bored. This directly led to fuckbot-designed fuckbots, the including the "Jumpin' Jami" model, now better known by its military industrial nomen, the MDX-151 Area Denial System. While its formidable capacity as a sexual surrogate exceeds human tolerances, its efficacy as a complete weapons system is undeniable, as the continued status of the "no-go" areas of Hokkado, Thotsakan ทศกัณฐ์ Industrial Park, KADDB complexes and East Bay demonstrate, all four of which made Caligula magazine's list of the "top 20 worst places to go if you have a penis or penes." The army of PORC is rumored to still be fighting a holding action against the Chinese knockoff of the MDX-151 ADS, the Fang-10, in Guiyu.]

May I suggest simply putting some sort of innocuous covering over the eyes or head of your unit? Avoid tape, as it tends to catch on the hair and the glue may stick to the face. Some people report that sunglasses with simple post-it pads are an economical way to avoid premature ejaculation into the uncanny valley while still staying organized.

If this does not work, why not throw a clone or a fistable monkey or lemur into the mix?




Dear อาจารย์แวน,

While making dinner for my family, who I actually love and do not despise, I put too much salt in the chowder. I believe this accident stems from the fatigue of working very hard to make my beautiful family happy and not any subconscious resentment as some would believe.

I have read that adding milk may help reduce the problem of excess salt. Is this true?

-Saline in Seattle





Dear Saline,

Often we complicate our lives by failing to follow through on our truest, deepest intentions (Nietzsche, "The Pale Criminal," Zarathustra, Book I). Milk is for children and cowards who are not lactose intolerant. If you have salted your food, so shall it be salted. Add more salt. Unscrew the lid of the shaker. Dump a whole bag on a plate. Say to your family: this, this is my heart.

When they are grown and the college of their choice burns to the ground, you will have prepared them.

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MARS CONDO ONE -1A

I left for Mars

I left for Mars that night while I washing dishes, listening to a mix someone had made for me at another of those farewell parties. So many people had said goodbye to be I was pretty sure I was dying; I was already halfway gone already at those parties, I barely knew what to say. I was going to Mars. I already knew I wasn't coming back, that was the feeling.


But I didn't actually go until that one night I was washing dishes in my Mom's kitchen. Then I floated right off the floor and out the window. Or so it felt: I already felt the reduced gravity, the heat of the Martian day through my faceplate, clearer than any of the million dollar hundred hour sims I had already done.

That was it. That was my trip to Mars. I still listen to that song when I want to remind myself what it's like. Because being here on Mars isn't like that at all. Mars isn't real. Nothing here is real. It can kill you all the same. Something doesn't have to be anything to kill you. That's what we've learned.


The Expression “Mars Mission”

Today, the expression, “mars mission” or “mission to mars” is synonymous with disaster, debacle and futility, painful, costly and ultimately fruitless enigmas, scientific, technological and cultural catastrophe. I can't really blame any of the people on the ground: they really were the best and the brightest, outside of those we sent here to die and lose their minds. Every possible contingency was prepared for. What could not be prepared for was the possibility that Mars played by no rules at all; it was like playing chess with a three year old: it killed you how and whenever it wanted to; you could not win.

I believe that is why the Third Mission blew up the Valley of the Peaceful Faces. Mars had been killing them slowly and arbitrarily. They struck back, however futilely. A lot of people blame everything that has happened since on this single, desperate act of violence. Humanity showed its dark side; this was our original sin on Mars, proof of our genetic imperialism. Others believe that it's a combination of things: a matrix of environmental factors on Mars that make it a psychological uninhabitable place; unknown physical or biological factors that make Mars appear unintelligible; some blame printer failure. Most of these critics don't believe what we actually have learned. They don't believe in Martians. They want to go back to where we were at the middle of the Twenty-First Century: confident, knowing, impressed with our latest technologies, ready to step out into the solar system. They want to live in the universe as described by Einstein, rather than Kant.

I would make that choice, too. I knew a lot of good people that did and died or worse. I am not a little ashamed to be still here alive. But I pray with the Martians now, and their prayers convey one thought: what's done is done; the world is all that is the case.

BREACHING THE GREENHOUSE


We lined up in the corridor pretty well, though it was pretty crowded so I ended up just around the corner. I could still hear everything Commander Williams had to say and say at length to the barricade. It was all very reasonable. If I had been Harris, I would have surely come out promptly, chagrined at not having invited the commander in at first knock. Then Major Goddard would have clobbered me. Kristen hadn’t even lit the torch and Mark was already all choked up on the shovel he’d sharpened. I’m pretty sure sharpening it was his idea and I’m pretty sure the commander had stressed using the flat part and that the major indeed intended to, applying it only against the relatively flat part of Harris’ head where his eyes and mouth were.

Williams continued in a firm and noble voice that put him way over the league of any of his fellow toastmasters on Earth. He began by calling on Harris in a familiar tone, but not in such a way that made you think you were going to be fired, or a group of thirst-crazed astronauts were going to bust into your improvised crib with a the pointy bits from the geology kit. No, as always, Williams was genuine. The commander then made clear the nature of the situation, of how the condensers had failed, the water supply evaporated and how we were now all dying of thirst and hunger in that order. The commander made clear that in terms of a social contract and a purely humanitarian level how we all had now to make entry and how Harris shouldn’t view this as a hostile act, but a necessary one, one with even several advantages to Harris himself.

The commander then laid out clearly what was to happen next and the exact order it was going to happen. Finally, in firm and unmistakably authoritative tone, he appealed to Harris not to make any violence necessary. He then nodded and Lockhart and Kristen put their shoulders to it, I remembered to pick up the heavy thing they had given me to hit Harris on the head with (a fac strut), the barricade moved and Goddard slipped in quicker than sublimating LOX.

It was dark and musty. Goddard swept the room quickly with his torch. He gestured to Lockhart and Kristen to cover him with drill bit and pole they had as he swiftly turned the corners of the nursery shelves. Harris was nowhere. Goddard swiftly knocked over some planters with a wushu kick. Harris was not under them. The Major swept the rippling torn dome of the ceiling with his light. He tensed. He indicated to the commander that he could be outside. Holding his breath, presumably. The commander appraised yet another situation that made no sense and would be hard to write up. Lockhart and Kristen had followed close on the major’s initial search, as he had drilled them to, but became increasingly distracted. There was a sound and smell in the air. Water was dripping. We could smell it. One of the dome struts shone as though just painted.

Dr. Cartwright started licking the pole. Dr. Lockhart followed with aplomb. Dr. Kristen yelled something and pulled them off. Dr. Cartwright was back on his feet and about to go again when Dr. Kristen yelled and pointed his torch in the corner.

The alfalfa planter was a complete wreck. Yet there was a weird dark shape slumped in it. It extended some ways up the dome wall as well. At first, it looked like a raincoat somebody had left. It was made out of lots of tiny nubbles. At first, one thought they were mushrooms glistening with moisture. Then they looked absurdly like oysters or barnacles. When they moved, you thought they were slugs or snails. Then the surfaces rotated and a red circle seemed to form like a rash, then puckered and opened into some sort of ciliated orifice that turned to face us. Weirdly, they reminded me of oreo cookies.



POINT OF INACCESSIBILITY

I haven't been out of this hotel room in about a month, I estimate. I paid in advance, enough to make them wave or discount the cleaning fee when they find one’s body or send in the HBT team. I am sure the Hyatt has dealt with it all before.

I am going on a journey to a deep interior, an intra-psychic point of inaccessibility. I have to be alone for this. I don't need provisions so much as a lack of provisions. Scarcity will feed and guide me. The complimentary cable package also, sometimes. But mainly the high speed connection.

I’ll follow the links. That’s how I’ll find it. That’s how I’ll remember.

I need it to be quiet.

Sometimes the living room doesn’t seem safe enough, or I can’t get there. Those times I stay in bed, or next to the bed, in a little hollow between the drawers and wall. The closet sometimes. It’s not much smaller than the space I had in the ACRV.

I don’t spend a lot of time in those positions. Usually it’s not that bad. The bed is comfortable. I’m not even that sleepy. It’s just feels good when you first put your head down, when the sun is shining, even if your ear hurts a little from putting your head down, it feels good, relaxing.

It’s just like being aboard MCS-Recovery One: Great Savings America.

I get a lot from the History Channel. The Second World War Never Ended. The Nazis are continually on the march with their superior technology. It’s a futuristic war between mechanized states, with robot planes and the ultimate weapon in the last act.

There's also a lot of cable mission creep: the puppy channel has reality shows about vampires & vampire hunters itself drifting with numerous branded challenges including a shift at Chili's.




I go to a party...

A man steps off the printer and puts a gun in his mouth. Guests scream.

A few minutes later the same man appears on the printer. He also chokes down on the SIG. He also makes a great big mess.

The same thing happens again. The host curses. He gets a special cloth, climbs up on the printer to try and reset its preferences and clear the cache. A few minutes later the same man appears and does it all over again.

It’s a DOS attack, the host explains. Bad breakup.

I wasn’t paying attention. I was playing wet worked video games based on the most painful episodes of my life. The idea was therapeutic: you played the game over and over again until you passed the level, the event that you could not overcome.

In the game I’m in a wooden room. There is a crack, a gunshot, and I fall down dead.

But if I am dead, then this is hell. And I can't have died, because there is no death on Mars. The Martians taught me that.


Printer Failure

-It's not really printer failure. Obviously, the fac-bots are 100% operational.

-You call this 100% operational? What about that rogue self-paving road we've got wandering all over Vallis Minotaurus?

-Well, Some of the computers seem to recognize what has actually been constructed, others disagree, others are in simulation mode and still others act on the results of that simulation as though it were real.

-Which explains why one team plows a field and the other puts a golf course across it.

-Yeah, the highway system has gone totally rogue. It’s supposed to rebuild itself depending on the weather and conditions, but it’s basically wandering all over the place now. It keeps going into the valley. It’s not supposed to do that.



-Where's the magnetic heat pumps, the transmission array? And what they fuck are these things?



-They're fuck swings.
Thousands and thousands of really well-made fuck swings.



-Why are they making things like acres of fuck swings and rococo bowling alleys? I don't remember MCS Control uploading the plans for Circus, Circus up here.



-I think they're trying to communicate.


-What?


-I don't know, but they're fac-bots. Their language is things.





SHOPPING AT ZABRISKE POINT

"But the point is, we did land on Mars. And that’s why I want to thank you all for coming to this Grand Opening of the Zabriske Point Mall."

"Here at the Zabriske Point Mall, some the same high technologies developed for Project Poseidon are here on Earth, at down to earth prices, here on earth, at earth prices at the Zabriske Point Mall? Some of the same technology that lifted us into space and sent us over 50 million miles to the shores of another world, that fed us, clothed us, kept us comfortable and ultimately failed us, is at work in the next generation of printer and printer appliances, personal connectivity and businessface applications."

"Take for example, this Nike Shoe One. Your peak performance is just prologue. This is the only running shoe whose difference you feel when you take off the shoe, the only shoe that guarantees you’ll never have sore feet again, no matter how much you run.

The secret, of course lies in adaptive “dope” suit technologies that we used on Mars. The shoe constantly monitors your feet's performance and it’s own. When your muscles begin to build up the lactic acid that causes soreness, Nike Shoe One detects this and begins a series of micro-injections that prevent the muscles from becoming sore, as well as boosting their performance. No matter how long you run or stand on your feet, you will never feel it, thanks to Nike Shoe One’s nerve block system, the same system I used to cut off my own legs and drag myself across the barren Martian soil. And the same nano capillary action that prevented me from bleeding to death will make sure your feet never swell up."




ROGUE SUIT

"Where's my suit?" Goddard had asked.

It was running on the surface, at a good steady clip, well balanced and light without the major in it, headed to the H-O plant.

The suit had a buzz-saw in it. It also had a lot of "hidden" military apps. I knew this because the other suits besides the major's were clearly prototypes of his, and a little backcaching let you see all the apps on a pull down menu they never wiped.

Every one suited up as per SOP. The major needed my suit because of the aforesaid apps.

That left me without a suit.

The core's pretty well shielded Billy, you'll be safe in there.

This was a smart suggestion, though somewhat blithe about what the shielding was for. I asked if I could just go to my room and work on the problem there.



I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S NOT

I look out the window and see a beautiful meadow. In the distance a white sail appears. It is a young woman in a summer dress. Even though I have seen her appear many, many times, I watch over the course of an hour as she gets closer and closer. I wait for a glimpse of her face, because she is beautiful, seemingly shy of my glances as of the sun, her face artfully hidden by her summer hat. Finally, she pauses in the near middle distance and looks up at me. She is holding half of a perfectly sliced English Muffin. She looks at me and takes a bite of it. Words appear in the skies. The sun seems to drip butter.

We had such LCD windows on the Mars base. They are common now in high density housing and prisons.

Cartwright:

I think these Missions were deliberately designed to fail. Look out this window. What do you see? A bright, beautiful prairie on a summer's day. It looks just like a shot from Little House on the Prairie. Did you ever watch that show? Do you know what happens on that show? What I'm saying is: they are trying to kill us. If they wanted us to stay alive, it would be wall-to-wall porn.

Transit Diary:

I've been masturbating a lot lately. The thing that is worrisome is not the frequency. It's been getting really abstract. Last time I jerked off it was for half and hour to cheerleaders and prime numbers. It was a concession to the Christian Coalition that no women were allowed on the mission. Someone left an autocad of a rather sophisticated dutch wife on the 4-D printer. It was basically an anus surrounded by eyes. I wish it was a sick joke, but months into this mission, I know it's not a joke.



THIRD PERSON SHOOTER

Mark’s suit wasn’t having any of it. It brought down some heavy DU just as they were poking the dish over the crest of the connecting tunnel. The dish shredded into hot flakes. Kristen and Cartwright flattened themselves. The suit then fired under them, ripping apart corridor 12-6A. Flocks of tangled fuck swings blew out the corridor like a cloud of tangled rubber bands. The corridor sagged and collapsed, dropping Kristen and Cartwright with a respectable bounce. Kristen and Cartwright needed no additional encouragement to flee, keeping what was left of the concourse between themselves and the suit. The display showed a decent cardio for Kristen and Cartwright’s sprint, good respiration and that the Major Waste Accommodation Complexes in the groin and ass were cycling away. The major’s suit remained high and dry.



THE NARCOLOUNGER

I'm shaking in the big black soft leather womb of the narcolounger, another spinoff of our dope armor. The slogan says it knows you better than you know yourself because it reads every muscle, your pulse and your brain waves. I think it also smells you. What they don't say is that it's basically like a blow job for your whole body. I am lying here naked like Fay Wray in the big black leather palm of this chair. It's shaking me something fierce, reminding me of the lander's entry descent to Mars, which I suppose makes me more tense and so here we are caught in a negative feedback loop between bad memories, who we are and the machines that try and help us, just like on Mars


The Major Came Straight At It

It wouldn’t have surprised me if Goddard’s new suit transformed into a jet fighter.

I looked at Goddard like he was basically the coolest guy ever. He was a real space marine. The suit locked on him but did not fire. Goddard knew what he was doing, because it was basic mechanics. He body checked the empty suit and it went flying. That is, before righting itself with a gyro-stabilized somersault. It then came back at the major with what looked like an inhumanly fast capoeria move and the Major ended up on a little ride that took him out by the solar panels.



The Major had fulfilled his tactical goal, however. A blazing cloud of fireballs lit up the launch pad and the CRV shot up –not at maximum v, out of range of the suit, but instead canted toward it, dropping on the suit with its thrusters, flashing it into a cascade of hot melty bits in a second like a blow torch on a candle.


Author's Post Script

The lights of the casino shine in the canal, but there's no sound. The eyes of the swan boat I've crashed into the bank look to me with destiny. I am mad King Ludwig trapped in Master Wagner's opera. This canal is a channel of stars, and I, after all am an astronaut. I right the swan boat return vehicle. The stars are my destiny, the drinks are free and the slots are the loosest for a hundred million miles.

Our Workout and Why We Do It

It was media I had ripped off the War Channel (née History Channel), like rape ape squads from the new wars that had raged across Africa and Europe, Prime 8’s and child soldiers on mass rape and humiliation B/T/K raids through homes for the elderly. That shit was ill. You’d plug it in for a few seconds and then you’d need a real serious tranq and beer chaser to avoid the fast pukes, or just huff for a awhile and jerk off to something normal like Dutch centipede movies or some nice slow Japanese guro, or a Herschel Gordon Lewis flick, let the CNS fade to its normal smooth black.


I know they say the Snuff Wars were about orgone, but like I asked in my famous mertweet, who the fuck has ever seen an orgone? People have been pulling sick shit on each other ever since the first time somebody had a sharp stick and some raw ideas of physical comedy and there’s nothing that hasn’t happened in the last forty years that didn’t happen in Goya’s Horrors of War, or the Holocaust I or II, except that maybe it’s weird that we pay robots to jack each other off while we do it. Life and horror are sick and repetitive, like pornography, which is why I work in the sick and repetitive horror pornography industry. This is why I am an artist, and this is my artist’s statement while I’m strangling you during weird rough sex in the Kevin Costner suite of the Kevin Bacon Complex.




The Kevin Bacon Complex isn’t really a tesseract, but that’s what they want you to think, but rather just the biggest orbital theme hotel in existence ever since Dubai II fell out of La Grange during the late unpleasantness. The rooms shift around, some have lethal traps, others have HBO –you know, the usual Hilton/Kempinski deal. The whole place was basically a mausoleum for every dead star who did old fiber stuff that your grandma liked with her biker alderman wife. It supposedly looks like Kevin Bacon crucified on a hypercube, but since no one can get out there to look at it, who knows? The concept was a constantly shifting puzzle of endless themed luxury suites with nostalgic media themes and now I am reading the damn brochure to you while the monkey pours movie theatre butter on your back.




But this isn’t about sex, it’s about power, which is the absence of power, which is why you are here, to watch my workout, because, like cheating on you with your girlfriend or fuckbot or barely legal guardian this is what makes it real. Human beings are social creatures and can you see me flexing, because with these veins popping a look like a fucking Sequoia root system and I don’t need you to blow me now, but yes, can we please download another magazine not about dinosaurs defecating in muscle cars? We’re social creatures and we need the love and surveillance and constant connection to be whole as we basically live in glass hive of Borgs/Necromongrers/Cenobites/Kyben that get off on leathery sick shit that used to be called communication.



But it’s not communication any more. It’s what comes after the vanishing point, the transparent society. It’s an x-ray of the Invisible Man’s imaginary friend. It’s not communication for the same reason working out isn’t a sport. Working out isn’t a sport because masturbation (qua masturbation, not like on XXXESPN) isn’t really a sport.



Because neither is the ecstasy of Saints.



Speaking of which, now is as good a time as any to tell you that during sex with you I like to fantasize that I am masturbating. This has been going on for a while and I’ve been meaning to tell you and wanted to break it to you in a sensitive way and have been waiting for more data, but there you go. I thought now, during sex, would be a timely and salient time to tell you about it, which is why I had you put on that bondage gear with all the post-it notes on it. Now that you are secure inside your GIMP-IMAX sensory deprivation/I-GUI helmet it can be told to you, over the sound of seagulls laughing cue seagulls.






My masturbation fantasy is really abstract, like I can’t really put it all together. In it, I am touching myself in an unfamiliar way in an little used part of the house that isn’t real, like the parts of a house in a dream that only exist in a dream. Likewise, I’m touching a part of my body I don’t normally touch or find arousing. I also can’t say what it is. It’s a new part of my body that is also not clear. Also, I’m not touching it directly. It’s like I’m pulling on the dimensional space around my nipples, the geodesics and tensors that lead to the surface of my skin, but not my skin itself. I am masturbating an invisible and unclear organ with a phantom hand.


It goes without saying that it’s really hard to come.


That’s probably what I like about it. My fantasy sex organ is really unclear, like a cryptid glimpsed in a dream. Sometimes I imagine that it can grasp my hand back, like tentacles, or clamp down like a vagina. Other times, it is gloriously numb, like the splinter in a wound, like an arrowhead or bullet, a thorn I am pushing out of my skin.



It’s vague and distant. When I want to come I switch to my usual fantasy, that I am a suicide bomber and you are singing telegram sent by an ancient dead race and we meet in the labyrinth of an already extinguished city, the last ones, the last ones.



Then we meet and it turns out your telegram is a cookbook.





This act alone, and not the cocaine, proves I am a genius.




The universe, I say, is basically a big computer. And like most computers, it is basically full of porn. That’s the deep web, the dark matter, that’s what’s hidden in the cosmic cloud drive we can only observe indirectly. It's porn because like porn, everything is permitted, but nothing is allowed. The sex always happens for someone else, to someone else. No touching. Nothing touches.

In the present, pornography is the dominant form of life, because God is dead (or rather, unconscious) and without God, or something like it, no other form of representation or being is possible.





I am genius because I am untimely, because I am probsolete –I am format that is no longer supported or will not exist for years to come. My medium is my message and my message is the golden record on Voyager VI, which is to say, I am to be first read and truly received, not by this generation, nor the next, but by a vast alien machine intelligence that will misinterpret yet enable my mission and send me back to you, as V’ger. This to and fro is what is meant by dialectic, which is to say I am a destiny, which is to say I am going to come so we need to put it somewhere no, not there, though possibly on the Venus flytrap by the Georgia O’Keefe.



I am probsolete. I am replaced by myself, by what came next, what the fashion designer supercomputers had already planned last season. It wasn’t your great grandfather’s
cyberpunk or your grandfather’s steampunk or your bio-dad’s transhuman fascism . It was something unbearably ugly and potent. It was the merging not of living matter and technology, but of marketing and necrotizing fasciitis, of disinformation and cancer. I could not compete or dialog.



Which is good because I really had started to freak out a little because my sex fantasies were getting really borderline normal. And at first, I thought, that’ s cute, but then it wasn’t cute. It was kitsch. It was all sunshine and puppies and first time anal sex in your pre-teen bedroom –really vanilla normal unmodded hetro stuff. And kitsch is the first sign of true decadence. The contest between Nietzsche and Wagner never ended: we are their syphilitic children. Kitsch is always the beginning of fascism and not the sexy hot kind.


And this above all, is why I am a genius, a humanist genius in world with no humans,
and long after the last man, keeping the totalitarian world safe from fascism.

This is our workout and why we do it.

The Last Lions

The Zoo Wars were not the end. Even after the Video Music Awards that year, some animals survived. Some were kept alive in High Density Urban Nature Reserves. These were typically failed high concept eco-condos and high-rises where squatters and anarcho-greens, neo-neo primitivists and other members of the Burning Man diaspora had basically taken over.

Some of these, such as Paradise Now II had been designed by eco-techs and conservationists. Others, like the Towers of Yff, simply resulted from squatters and tenants husbanding animals in common on floors cleared for this purpose. Paradise Now II is the most famous example of late eco-techture. It was designed as a self-sustaining independent post-arcology. In reality, it functioned like a giant glassed in terrarium. Water was supplied from the rooftop and reclaimed through several floors of marshland.

Unfortunately, during the Great Canker outbreak, Paradise Now II became quite isolationist. Their n-generation power plants (induction arbers, or "electric trees") remained uninfected, but the leadership was completely taken over by Neo-Nazi Primitivists, or “Reichstones.” Life inside the “Cave Reich” seemed to be styled after a bizarre fashion magazine spread, with pelted Teutonic cave-warriors in gelled hair posing with m-generation Heckler and Koch rifles, on a grassy plain with gazelles that overlooked a burning city landscape. Swastikas were carved on “ancient dolmen” (in reality looted from the ruins of Crate & Barrel's Japanese Garden Center) to form Speer-esque ruins of Neolithic civilization.

The Federales of the Free American States became alarmed when rumors began to spread that the citizens of Bed-Reich were retasking the bacilli in their bacfacs to make and stockpile more nitrates than necessary for fertilization. This and their already excess hydrogen reserves pointed to a weapons program. Also, it was revealed that the towers had not been paying their Child Pornography Tax.

The retaking of the Paradise Now II towers is remembered as the worst urban jungle combat operation ever recorded. The intense floor to floor biome to biome fighting was extremely costly, in terms of human life and animal species. Though Animal Rescue Commando teams were famously able to escort out bison, meerkats, a bald eagle and several kinds of fish, this episode is remembered as by conservationists as the extinction of the last remaining lions, shot in the head with a luger by Vice Chancellor Bam-Bam.