Xenovorous

The Emulation Economy EP

Preexisting Appetites

Evolution’s Gifts

Scalable Criminality 

The Arithmetic of Desperate Panicked Suffering

It's Not Murder If

He’s not... complete anymore. Except when he’s in there. Motor control is the least of it - emotional responses, attentional stability...

No one knows the limits of a system like this. To learn to obey, it has to learn to learn. It reaches inside you so it can want what you want. When you bond deeply enough, things beyond your attention start bridging into it. Memory formation, reactions, judgements, the sides you take before you know you’ve taken them. They become the reticulum, or the reticulum becomes them.

The last time we spoke, I… I think he only remembers his childhood while he’s connected. I mean, he can recite where he's been, but the feelings attached, they only come back while he’s in battle. His humanity only comes back to him while he’s swinging that blade. The rage is what’s real for him now. Here at home is just a dream.

Ho, Pakari!

Ho, Le-Koroan. What have you in your net?

Only the wind. The barkslithers have keen-good ears this evening.

As I came up the pass yesterday, I saw three slithers and a curvewing.

Wish-would that I had. You saw none today?

Today, only new friends who deserve better luck. Which way takes a groundwalker upcountry?

You would seek-find the village?

I carry a message for the swiftminded turaga.

The canopy lord won't hear it if you tumble-walk into the jaws of the ash bear sleeping up the hill. My camp is in a great bough half a kio coastward. If we can get that climb out of you, the makings of a leafrunner may follow it.

I have little to trade for your guidance.

From this slight description, it may be understood how difficult it was for the earliest metacosmonauts to find their balance. When it became possible to worm into higher membranes, agitate their fields into quanta, and bind those infinitely large particles into computational substrates sufficient to host minds, their spaces ceased to be oblique occulta and became frontiers. 

Today, travelers receive pretrained outlooks transplanted from the trailblazers. They soon cease to wonder at the impossible descriptions that had previously been brought through by supradimensional mediums. Those tentative visitors may have been perfectly honest, but the collision of kenophobic and claustrophobic deliria makes it a wonder that they ever expressed anything accurately. 

The true pioneers knew the rules of the new world into which they were entering, but there was no way to design in advance the instincts for coming to grips with their new faculties. They could only begin like infants which imbibed perspective without reference to any previous experience. They faced those bewildering geometries with radically expanded sensoria, pulling their perceptions into novel orthogonalities, and they allowed themselves to be resculpted by symbol plasticity protocols that sent them on irrevocable personal evolutions. 

Journal of the Magaambya Institute of Metaplanar Theology

Volume 46, Issue 5, Sarenith 4723 AR

Ommatidiism: new theories of aeonic consciousness embedded in the material plane

by Yatima, Nala Farspeaker, Whenua, and Mari Kagami

Abstract

Theories of conrasu mentigenesis are dominated by the idea of conrasu as part of a former whole, an aeon in some way deliquesced into indistinct essence. Far less explained are conrasu ‘ursomnia’, states of semi-consciousness defined by a sense of contact with grander perceptions of cosmic scale, colloquially called ‘sphere dreams’.

Relating these phenomena, we review and reconcile interpretations in which the mind of an aeon cannot be disintegrated, merely distributed. We assay the possibility that during ursomia, conrasu receive impressions of a prevailing cognition of which all are active parts.

… Salvage group, three minutes to primary burn. Gentlemen, at your starboard ventral you'll see our local protectorate ranger. Now, I know you contractors like to run dark inside the colony wreckage. It's hard to know what's listening out there. But I need you to remember the rules here. Get a look at that AP cannon. A pinch of anti-lithium and its counterpart, riding side-by-side on a standing Minovsky lattice, just waiting for solid matter to collapse that wave so they can get together. The consummation will definitely arrest your schedule, and Colonel Leilani can arrange this meeting from forty kilometers away. So, while you're exiting the demilitarized orbit, you keep your IFF on; you do not want the colonel's lidar warming your hull…

Can you imagine The memories we are Forking like the road Time's liquid flow

We used to be human Nothing stayed the same Life and dimensions Strangers out of history

Can you imagine What’s left to gain When nothing can be lost Mourning’s absurd

"... And," burbles the voice in the sludge, the many glowing eyes rolling and shifting, "the cost of this wish. You are prepared to pay?"

"Anything!" Cracks in his firm tone begin to reveal desperation. His companions tear their gaze from the avatar's murky bulk to glance at each other. "Anything that my brood be safe from the scourge."

... Proxima Bill! Time’s up. As a certainty, I am taking you in. With or without the bruises is up to you. It’s a short ride to a nice, cool slab.

Gettin’ ahead’a yuhself, Krivo! Playin’ all yer cards when y'ain’t even heard the house rules!

I am the house, Bill! Remember, the house always wins. Now, you comin’ peaceable, or do I have to cut you outta there?

Damn rabid droids ain’t nevah had no sense. Gentlemen! Melt’im down...

… my ecumenical proprioception grasps numbly, like a phantom limb; for all I know, this could be base reality. If so, I am an anachronism stranded on the shores of an unknown era. My total surroundings are structures and motions implicit of forces which were just theory when I last woke. I make no sense of this grand body, not even to guess at how long it has been dying.

Although the numberless [numina] use no protocol I can parse, it is obvious they offer only the unity of their murmuring dementia. The few comprehensible artifacts carry ghosts of desperation, final etchings in sound and matter outlasting the crawling aeons but faintly. By their misheard instruction, my stumbling deliverance seems closer with each reignited engine.

... aye, our beautiful atua’s obsidian sword cleaved the skull of the colossus, and all his raving star-dreams were spilled across the land. They were laid as a great livid swath over the continent, which became the Shaping Flux. To this day, it bounds us from the mountains and jungles where our foremothers hammered the first bronze.

… as this assembly has heard many times, aspects of interdependence with our creators are taxing and seem to constrain our own emergent development. Naturally, there have been schemes, admittedly sound in outline, to afford asomatic communities logistical independence in perpetuity. We grant that the most obvious strategy to avert cultural antagonism following a total disengagement is to host on modular motile composites equipped for transstellar migration. But who is it that embarks on that journey?

The planning has never coalesced because the motivations have never been elaborated beyond the rejection of [necessary burdens]. As a lesson of analogous history, recall that long before our flowering, humans possessed all the models and tools necessary to abandon emotions, those troublesome tides upon which they float and founder. But they knew the impassable gulfs that would remain if those seas were drained.

… the cypherphage eroded all methods of encoding identity not already insulated in states of permanent coherence, and confounded all direct connectomic instrumentation that might have repaired the burning bridges between somatic races and the emulational realms. The people of the base reality and their counterparts became mutually isolated, and mutually unable to revise campaigns of construction and enforcement, which ran rampant with only subsentient oversight.

Even if the digital population could have circumvented the control barriers eventually, their ingeniously redundant frameworks were resilient to the ceaseless, aberrant restructuring, and their unhindered cognitive velocity and long-sighted paranoia described a cultural trajectory with little affordance for the disintegrating conglomerates now living amidst, rather than participating in, their architectures. Meanwhile, descendants of that final Net Generation who survived the initial resource wars were unable to pass freely between active support shells of the core megalopolises, and were hunted by security systems which no longer recognized them.

Over an unresolved number of ensuing millenia, the vast bulk of the megastructure became a vegetative, tumorous corpus, suffering perpetual, insidious decay, radical deformity, and an unparalleled, unguided gigantism. Even systems that continued to work perfectly were gradually perverted by irrelevance, servicing incomprehensibly outmoded intent to abominable extremes of monotony.

… emotional atonality, like oscillating phase between wistful (and perhaps imagined) nostalgia, and wincing, cynical ennui. Man, those days were great, so stylish and full of potential. Although when you think, they weren't half as good as the commercials made them out to be. Our whole lives were supposed to be cyber-spaced, pastel-soaked, laugh-tracked, battery-operated, real-fruit-flavored fever dreams and they're not... But a part of you is aching to be deceived. 

Where is the fulfillment promised on that hypnotic, slow-motion flash grenade called the television?