#glinter

'Perfect Strangers' by @jack-of-crowns

Death was not at all what she had expected it to be.

Those constant currents of urgency; crackling static in the mind of one used to using logic to correct transmission drift across æons of shí kōng, gone altogether quiet in the neither here nor there.

Almost altogether. Every neuron firing away in a perfect crystalline clarity, yet her thoughts were dragonflies, darting erratically about in endless fields of iridescent distraction. So far apart, so far.

They could only watch from the bridge as Calliope decohered, her fractured selves become ghosts in overexposure glinting across the Tombs, each a perfect stranger to the other. A semantic untangler sent to decipher the whispered ripples of Calvera had instead fallen under the spell of the dead sun.

'Till Human Voices Wake Us' by @jack-of-crowns

An ocean; shimmering and silent, hard as diamond.

Their limbs; infinitely heavy, yet strangely hollow.

Leigh's bodies are her planes, whomping upon topographical seas only millimeters deep. Herselves remember the feel of the surf back on Earth; magnetic manipulation of a neutron star's crust is not that release into a rumbling conversation between cyclic rhythms of water and salt. It is a high-frequency shriek, a siren song as the mass of a billion suns grudgingly fractures, yielding secretive treasures to the glim lures of an operator's hooks.

But that is why she came to Calvera, because Earth's blighted oceans could no longer pacify her soul, could no longer drown out the grief from helplessly listening as everyone she had ever loved was swept away by the ravages of irreversible time.

Here in the Tombs, floating weightless in tanks of cold mercury, herselves together at once with ghosts and Glinter's guiding minds, a timeless now of harmonic frames; here she can lose herselves amid the shudders of shí kōng, let the neutrino blooms spread through the spirit's marrow, at peace as waves of stillness in the wake of that passage recrystallize the crust from strangelet extraction.

In the wénfáng of her mother's house, that was the room she first dreamed of somewhens and wheres.

Only after Leigh finished with all of the day's lessons would she be allowed into the study, and always found herself drawn to a camphor wood chest that sat underneath the threshold window. The lacquered reliefs caught a late afternoon glow, and her mind dazed as shadows danced upon the intricate figures carved into the central panel.

"The Eight Immortals cross the sea," and the lilt in her mother's voice every time she recited the first half of that chengyu was forever etched in memory, surely as the words she completed the saying with.

"Each reveals their divine powers." Then Leigh would tell her mother all that she had learned that day. If the glass-off in Liu'ao Bay was favourable, it was time for what they called the 'Fifth Art' - surfing.

The imagery of windless calm upon the East China Sea, the jing of patient waiting upon the next wave.

That was Calvera, a dying god dreaming in the depths of spacetime; quiescent crust belying the unfathomable forces beneath. That was why everyone came; to ride upon the ripples of dreams.

Or to not drown in the undertow of nightmares.

"Of paramount importance, hold focus on those mnemonic anchors, the ones with strong positive attachments. Operators, the urge to decohere under a neutron star's gravitational fields will be stronger than any noetic state of consciousness you've ever entered. Remember, 'Yi Dao, Qi Dao'."

The words from the station's chief artificer echo; how the best melds are a dance on the edge of ego dissolution. The electromagnets breaching the crust respond to an even flow of direction; pull too hard and the mind will shatter, too loose and self identity is cognitively crushed under near-infinite density.

The first shift; her heartbeat is Calvera's rotational spin, she tries to visualize catching a break but the sensation is more akin to the feeling of being ragdolled and never reaching the shore. Long rods of strange matter rise through the bubbling superfluids of the inner core, shivering up through the fractured surface in vibrant kaleidoscopic auras.

She has to keep herselves from hearing her parents' message from that final fatal day on the xiāo xi, keep herselves from hearing their voices in the torsional screams of magnetic flux as Glinter tears apart the dead sun beneath them into a neutrino haze. She holds fast to Immortals in the light of a threshold window, and lets go of the day Blightfall came to Lui'ao Bay, bringing death in a choke of red algae.

'All Was False And Hollow'

"True confession time," Leigh giggled, swirling a third snifter of aura around in her high tension spherical glass as though it were a crystal ball.

"What was the first song you ever fell in love to?"

Shamil leaned back in the console seat, took a sip of synth spirit himself and flashed that signature microdiamond smile, wondering silently how the game would play itself out this particular round.

"You go first, since you probably already know what my answer is going to be." Use his celebrity, and turn the line of questioning about. The more personal information she revealed, the better Glinter's personnel profiles could enhance what was clearly the greatest latent noetic talent that Earth's recruiters had yet to send out to Calvera Station.

A nervous swallow. "It was 'Göz Göze, Diz Dize.'"

Leigh couldn't believe she was confessing this to that same youthful face frozen in time from the iconogram hanging in her finishing school bedroom. A casual ruffle of the Marcel waves of her jet black hair with a free hand, managing the uncanniness.

He gave an easy laugh in response. "No need to be ashamed of a bit of fangirling. Dare I ask which icon it was?" Details. The devil advocated for details.

"You know the one." Casually, coyly as she dared.

"The 'Rolling Stone' cover right before your 'Last Republic Of The Heart' Tour. You in that tiger stripe kaftan with the gorgeous embroidery going full-on Zeki Müren, the unconquerable defender of love."

"And 'IJJE POP WILL SAVE THE WORLD' for the all-caps orange and black caption underneath. Allah korusun, I should have ever had to wear that again!" Something in his tone of voice didn't ring quite true.

She saw it then, behind the façade of stardom. A man who could never escape what his fans had demanded he become, becoming the man he had always wanted to be out here at the galaxy's edge. And yet, there was a questioning within him that she sensed he was desperate to avoid ever answering.

"So how about it then? I remember that dreary answer you gave in the interview, some bù zhēn shí about falling in love with the heroes of the People's Defence, planetary anthem playing after the victory over the rebels in the Promethean Incident- but that's not really when you first felt in love, was it?"

This one was going to be a hard case, he could see. Obviously, he had to be very careful how he responded. Truth was too precious a commodity to be given away casually, not when one was paid to lie.

"There is this great teras bar in Demirciköy, where I grew up, called the 'Emerald-360'. My bio says I went there on a dare one amateur night and was so good that Believe gave me a recording contract the very next day, right? Well, that is not exactly so."

It was his turn to stare down at the luminous gold of aura he held, feeling the snifter's engineered warmth that thermal mimicry was designed to bring, but taking no comfort from it. He took a deep draught, savoring the haunting metallicity; a taste of preserved apricots and crushed ozone. Looked up.

"The truth is, I was working there nights as a janitor. One day, the Central State rumour mills turned on the popular house band. They had been very vocal in their support of the Promethean cause, and now suddenly they were being accused of all manner of deviant behaviours. The whole affair tore the town apart. The manager knew I had a decent voice, so he hired some backing musicians to fill in. The love we felt from the crowd when we did that cover version of 'Once More'... and the rest, as we say, is history."

"Right place, right time sort of thing?" Leigh's arched eyebrow was not a good sign she believed his feel-good story of a working class man stepping up to sing an anthemic song of national unity amid the crisis of confidence the government had been in.

"It's pretty late. Thanks for buying a lady a drink."

'Send In Your Skeletons' by @jack-of-crowns

The Verity Pane was a one-way mirror, and truth was never on the dark side. Usually, that suited Shamil just fine. Shade the details of the past from memory when the official narrative needed editing; actual truth was what the people never need be reminded of. But this morning, the shifty business of being a frontman for the Central State agitprop factory had been anything but usual, and it had all started from what he had glimpsed in his reflection.

That was the problem, right there. There wasn't supposed to be a reflection, at least not an honest one. Everything had seemed fine at the line check; all scans green on his fidelity pass. A quick glance at the countdown. Three minutes to Verity Lock. Three minutes until every word in amber read in his smooth baritone became legally mandated reality, and the dark side of the glass gave him sanction.

"Yüreği pır pır etmek." Over and over to himself, a catchphrase used in front of the dressing room mirror backstage every night in the days when the unscripted risk of live performance had still been permitted, before the only rite of passage society had left was an inevitable neuroport implantation. He had used to worry about the flutterings of his own heart then, because his songs were supposed to make the audience forget about their own. Now all that Shamil Ijje fans cared about was the carefully curated persona shining into their receptive minds.

No audience shuffling in their seats in a content pod, only a suffocating silence hanging between the repetitions. The wet, rhythmic clicking of his salivary glands and the distant hum of a satellite transmission array. The pretext of the opening of the broadcast scrolling past, superimposed over his digitally enhanced reflection. And a name. Barış.

Two minutes to Verity Lock. A hoarseness rasps in his voice as the catchphrase sticks to his tongue. 'The traitor Barış Yılmaz was executed at dawn.' Amber words on the display seem tinged with red, or is it eyes reddened from a sudden burst of tears? He'd always wanted this, this platform of fame and all that went with it; but especially the way one was looked at when you stood up and spoke the truth with passion and purpose, making your voice heard.

Like a true star. Like his dear friend, Barış-çıgım.

Shamil's image reflected in the bright side was supposed to be a projection of everything the government portrayed itself as; calm and confident, self-controlled and in control. But his voice was cracking, and the lies he had repeated to himself over and over again about how everyone and everything had gotten exactly what they had deserved were spinning incoherent in his mind.

One minute to Verity Lock. The hydra in hand.

This was the last act of the play, the plugging into the Ministry and the purging of personal identity. The nine heads of the interface, delicate mycelium hyphæ at the ready to coil their way up the trunk of awareness and a sting that put to rest any residual individualism. They called it slate clearance, but Shamil knew to the depths of his soul no amount of nerull could erase those memories of Barış Yılmaz.

He took one last, long look deep into the mirror. Somewhere in the absolute darkness on the other side was a true monster, and sowing It's own lies against It would only succeed in seeding an army of troubles against the sower. He was only one man; Glinter was an entity at once everywhere and nowhere. But a brightness shone upon his side. He began to clear his throat and steady his reflection.

The wording of the pretext began to subtly shift.

He read it to himself once, then plugged in and went live. He would bury their secrets, hide their dead. The hydra would simply grow another head.

@flashfictionfridayofficial

'Fade Away And Radiate' by @jack-of-crowns

"In the place of the skull, they shall be released."

Not that Dzheyn or anyone had ever expected the clavicle, of all parts of a human's anatomy, would literally be a little key to unlocking mysteries of what happened to individual consciousness after death; but these final series of test runs were proving to be so conclusive, they had jarred free that obscure passage from an ancient grimoire in her memories.

"Doctor Bagryany?" Her assistant, loaded syringe of molecular assemblers poised for the injection.

"Musing aloud", Dzheyn replies, "about how so strangely parallel the lines of reasoning between faith and science are seen to run at moments of great discovery and insight." A breathless laugh somewhere between apprehension and awe. "If you hadn't completely shaved the hair on the back of my neck, it would all be standing on end right now."

It was indeed a strange series of insights which led the leading neurochemist at the prestigious Sechenov Institute to the discovery that the physical basis for metacognition lay not in the neurons of the brain, but rather within the subatomic structures found within the minerals of ossification as the bones began to harden in a developing embryo; and how oddly symmetrical that the first bone to ossify was the clavicle, the only one to run parallel to the earth upon which a person would eventually stand.

"I'm ready", Dzheyn says, and draws a deep breath.

A quick tingle as the microneedle taps into a supraclavicular nerve branch, and then the slow smouldering burn of biologic as the last remaining sensations before the mind's slow fade to black.

She is standing on the beach now; a stretch of calcite phosphorescence glintering between banks of tumid magnesium, and each crystal of sand beneath her holds an image of that endless beach. In every image there is every possible Dzheyn and they are all aware of herselves; and they are the light within the image, infinite variations of a perpetual radiance upon the mnemonic currents of spacetime.

"Doctor Bagryany?" Her assistant, loaded syringe of molecular assemblers poised for the injection.

Dzheyn returns to the sequence, wondering silently if the scintillant images of that final meeting of herselves will ever resolve into a more concise revelation of what lies beyond the beach, or is simultaneity the ultimate stage of consciousness?

The dissassociation of each clinical trial must surely be taking a toll on her cognition, as evidenced by the temporal distortion effects she is experiencing. Still, she has faith that there is more to be discovered; that there will be an eventuality to ultimately free her individualism from the cyclic deaths and rebirths that the solution in the syringe is bringing about. Her essence remembers grasping at a sinuous fluidity within the dark shadows which roil past the light's reach just before the bridge of this last trip. Her hand absently traces the lines of the clavicle bone across to the neuroport at the base of her skull.