Chapter III
I.

skyless (skypeless?), old Caravaggio
translates violence into action,
piercing perspective with shadow and
beefy angels. Downfallen apples linger.

The cat talks to me from the dead. So does grand-ma.
When in fear, in doubt, I walk the hades-crystalline,
so daylight nightly creates illusions. Burnout, desire.
Featherless, stalking nostalgia.

II.

Memory of past bliss is sorrow of to-day. Feline wrath
cast an alliance with water-dwelling iron bars.
At first, a dazzle. The porcelain girl eats yogurt on the
asteroid. The NeverEnder exploded when flirting with a
super nova sinister light. The crew’s dead. Disconnected, the
Johnny and the other computer lads have been found
shredded to mincemeat. Lucky, you – monster reader.

III.

The Siberian cat lives on, alone, somewhere. No more on cats.
How ice! The Edda flows, Ginnunga spans. Fire on one side, frost on the other.
On the asteroid we find the porcelain girl (an incarnation of Desert Storm).

The asteroid has fat breath, fire on one end, and golden fire falling
into the abyss, a river of spewing milk, poisonous to life.
Glassblown experiments over the mountain meadow (on the asteroid).
The ga-lactic enter-prize has open gates for survivors and dead people
coming back from the dead because I want to remember them.

IV.

Free verse haunts the chimera,
a soul wiped out by history,
moments away from doom.
The Berdmonsey street is sweet, swept by yellow shirt
men, the church shut is riveting with skylight wordship.
Only elderly people inside, awaiting execution.

Askew sun, splayed over potato soup
this is offered to survivors on asteroid Loki.
Bmv sky reflecting sunk concave dreams
pink smart choices await execution too.
Trapezoid humans crawl out of the gutter
coughing up glued-over conscience;

V.

sensing purpose, eschewing it, circling around it
shark-like, taking small bites, choking.
Strategically placed, I intern-fero UV light.
Playing with the spectra, harmonicawise.
Hints, here and there.

‘I don’t wanna go’, sways the porcelain girl.
Neither do I. God plays too much evasive
action; unpaid bills, horizon gulls bumming
ciggies off each other. Do not forget the dead,
who smoked their vouchers and led the life
of dogs, sometimes acting up to be Actaeon.

VI.

‘Catching Diana with her pants down, that’s my ambition’
this is the internal creed of porcelain girl. She is not alone.
Now, pyrimidine memories survive the crash
of the NeverEnder. Seeking new sources of memory:
John Ashbery, poet.
Richard Firn, botanist.
Silvano Onda, art historian.
All of this is delta-like, or invano.

The accumulation of the Edda-Aeneid
whirls about the X, pointing to the power
and the slide of the Uni-verse. Deal now with ‘the keep us
from going’. No cats left, no Titans, only mani.
Hung on compassion, cheaply Renaissant, I virgil-crawl
toward my master ‘Button and Unbutton’.
I prithee, Lord Byron, lead the way, along with Mr Merisi.

VII.

Zomboy (Fortune Lobo reloaded) and Porcelain
are Adam and Eve on the water – excuse moi –
the water-bourne asteroid. They’re there for
a rendez-vous avec la X.

Yes, the asteroid is quite from another world,
another universe. The speechless couple, land mark
in this space of ocean waves over a falling rock
in the empty space, they’re bound, forgive me
to rise in love. Zomboy would like to eat her head out,

Porcelain is careful not to crack her nails. Two souls
in empty space, they leap into the void, head, belly down.
So the X is there, logging in to ask de questions.
Zomboy begins. ‘I should like to ask’ he interrupts,
the divine terminal buffering. Belle Porcelain has her
head spinning in a clueless crescendo. The dominating
question is: ‘Why’ … ”’ why do I have to
fall in love with Bete-Tomboy here’.

VIII.

If you, reader, should ever meet the X, what question
would you pose? Always travelling back to your past,
you would interrogate the whys and wherefores of
all those clipped moments, now long-gone?

Or would you dare query about the eternal? Per-
Haps only about tomorrow’s luncheon, or the identity
of the X’s true core?

IX.

‘I would like to go astray’, Tomboy launches.
Across the aisle, Porcelain digresses in poly
morphisms avec God’ internal processor.
Time off, Crossbone cemetery, memory-slingshot,
outcast graveyard. The X shows glimpses of old

earth to the celestial couple. Here, landless
people were cast into the jord, back into Ginnunga.
When there was no sky, no waves, no earth,
there gigantic emptiness stood before us,
and attempted to load a reminder of suffering.

X.

At Churchill’s tomb, Byron said farewell to
two months a year of sunshine, and the piazza.
Enemies to imagine, Orson Wells at Chartres.
Art and fiction as fake of fakes.

On occasion, gentle conversation makes us
digress, so Porcelain daydreamed while staring
into the X. Her lover of new light, free of death,
was hungry. He did not ask a single question.

XI.

The X retreated into the universe’s vulva.

XII.

Three ghosts came along, their names above,
were friends to man, and to the vision.
‘I shall pose a question’, the first one said.
‘Motley morality is for finders keepers, is it not?’
‘That’s a thought’, remembered the second.
‘If you’ve never dug up a potato, then perhaps
you’ve missed on much in life.’
‘I wept when first at Venice’, said the third.
‘We’re friends to you, we are fictional spectres.

XII.

If you want to return to Borovoe, or if you wish
to assume your ancestral shape once again,
or if you simply wish to continue exploring
the Byronic way… you must retreat.

Turn back and swim that wide black ocean
behind you, life lessons are fish and coral.
Belle, you’re very fragile.
Bete, surely you should have a hat on the “e”,
somewhere.

XIII.

Born, abandoned, astray, in search of atom
a book, a story, a science, a soul, an ex. The
X incumbent upon us. Pourings of sunlight.
Not mysterious, travelling. Swimming on the
asteroid’s waters. Porcelain wishes to come back.

She wants to be fictitious. She has not found her
self. Tomboy is yet alive, and drinks saltwater
to quench his thirst. His hunger is his blood.
Should he ever chew on his arm, would the
reader turn away?

XIV.

What creatures dwell in the large body of asteroid
water? How does one ever cease to get wet,
the current bears one away, bobbing, flushing,
sinking, floating, soaring, air-lifted by strange
tunes in the vitreous air.

Shall they ever swim to an island? Shall Porcelain
find her mirror in Haidee? Or to be precise,
does Zomboy’s soul dwell at Walden Pond?

XV.

Porcelain, cast your mind aside; even as you
cannot find focus. Beowulf might have outswam
his monster fear, while Thor sank his teeth
into the Worm, but you cannot afford to lose
faith. Young Juan, formerly known as Fortune
Lobo, frog-flies downwards into more ocean.

He swims after a sinking Grecian Urn.
Porcelain decided to shapeshift. She’s so
empty, tumbling into fathom five.
So full of fear, we all are. Young Juan

XVI.

endures. Urn-girl is freefalling toward
a hashtag #rocky# ocean floor. Her painted
porcelain body flickers with fleeting images.

On the level of sands, lost consciousness.
Nothing is left of who once was Desert Storm.
A pearl among the soaked ashes. The silent
contains a voice.

XVII.

The ghost of Mr N.S. , tanner of this parish,
appears to Juan and the Urn, as they reach out
in the ocean darkness. The pearl-voice from
an earlier age follows them. They listen, on
the current of remembrance.

‘There once was a monastery at Veremundsei’
Juan’s buoyant lungs bring him upwards,
Urn, ash, pearl in hand, seeking the light.

XVIII.

On shore, his mind drifts toward thoughts
on the shipwreck upon shipwreck. Waiting,
drying, shuddering. The pearl turns on,
radio-like, and goes through a thousand
and one stories worth telling, worth

remembering. Stacks of dice, echoes of
colour, lines on the water. Ripples in
time. The void-filled Urn tunes in.

XIX.

The NeverEnder is restored! The self-
aware spaceship, delighting in your company,
flows back from unity with the heart of star;
de-stryxed, majestic, unburied, like Carthago.
Inside of it, a world of ideas. Books, flying.

Monads, believing. The characters of the
spaceship consciousness are tales to be told.

The great Space Ship sits, reads poetry,
the very Ariadne story, Flexa and Chubby,
and invites Fortune Juan and Desert Urn
to come back to mother, and resume the
journey.

XX.

Is it not time for us to encounter an
antagonist? The NeverEnder is our hero,
the Borovoe Cadets, armoured with piety,
are terror-driven, sharp edges cutting
through all negative feeling.

Who would dear reader choose as an
enemy? The marketing forces (definitely),
a Titan-sized mechanoid, a seedless cherry?

XXI.

Such decisions should never be left to
the word-cobbler. What shall it be?
Spiritual captivity, I am told. Control,
of the mind. Hence, the antagonist,

born onto a distant nook of universe
shit, flies out toward our noble space
ship, seeking to divide it and rule it.
Its friends, other destructive forces in
the spinning painted uni-verse, stem

XXII.

from split white dwarves. One of them,
taking the shape of empty space,
hovers in a room, third floor on the right,
at the David Museum in Shoppen-haben.

The city itself, now free of slavery, bears
the name of those evil marketeers that
seek to control our minds. Pirates of the
mind, they are cross-bred with the religious
fervour of neatly arranged wooden-panels.

XXIII.

Inside the stormy consciousness of the space
ship a flurry of violins, voices, vices.
Sheherazade comes in with her hands full,
Ariel, Narcissus, Aeneas merge into a pond
of music. The water cresses oscillating.

Evil comes alive elsewhere in the ethereum,
the X unknowing. When enough negative feeling
has streamed out of the Mordred corners of the
uni-verse, a great big belly-faced mobile phone
appears, masquerading, fashionista stryx-style.

XXIV.

To Hel with it! Odinn has come to claim the
broken verse, Huginn and Muginn accompanying
the NeverEnder for a period or two.

Stanza upon stanza of mediterranean vomit
piles on the ligurian mountain-side, battered
by Tramontana lies, whispered much before
the fall of the Republic of Amalfi. Under

XXV.

the Yggdrasil, Hel decides the fate of unborn
creatures; there, the runes in the well are hidden,
an explosion of self-awareness inside the Never
Ender gut creates cramps and stomach-pains;

Desert Storm is awake and she is bored. To her,
listening to the Sheherazade tales of destructive
forces and talking crows and music for tea, is just
as tedious as tuning in to John C’s conversations
with Chubby, or delusions about the X.

XXVI.

Thetis decided to give up, Achilles was born.
John C’s mind-eye mulls over the contradiction.
Chubby’s desire for dinner leads to the sin
of wanting more. Unsatisfied, the two travel in

time and in memory to shunt anxiety and harbour
illusion, a welcome break from dreary reality.
So the struggle is not just between Memorians
and Oblivians; but also between the Knowers
and the Unknowers.

XXVII.

Those that, grounded in the present, might want
to enquire (or not) about their past. Those we call
the Past-Timers. John C is a past-timer. Now,
what of those that are grounded in the past, present,

future, and want to enquire forward, discover whatnot
(or not). Those we call the Present-Dwellers. Now
Fortune Lobo Tomboie Tromboy Tomboy Juan is indeedy
one of those. And his sister-cum-lover Desertia Stormia.

XXVIII.

All their friends are dead, at least in their present
(which is somewhere in the uni-verse), in the gut
of the NeverEnder, enquiring forwards, onwards
to far other lands and other seas. So to speak.
Now then, this is where it becomes (un-)interesting.

What if their friends, having crash-burnt along
the first NeverEnder, actually existed (alive or not)
somewhere else in the Uni-Verse, perhaps down
and under, through the X, or some such dimensional
gateway? So if Tierra Madre’s consciousness (and perhaps
her body is somewhere somewhen somedimension else,
where in the flickiest flick is that?

XXIX.

And by the way, who is Dr Fortune Lobo, and everyone
else mentioned in this story? Where do they come from,
what is their purpose, motivation and guilt history?
I see Memorians and Oblivians everyday, they happen to be

Knowers and Unknowers at the same time. Could one be
a Memorian and and Unknower simultaneously? ‘I want to remember,
that is, but I do not want to discover. I want to retreat in my
body and mind, and forget everything else.’ The Memorian-Knower
combination is hard core, these people actually want it all.

XXX.

So Fortune Lobo is one of those, he wants the whole shebang,
while Tierra Madre only want(ed) to be a Memorian-Unknower.
A certain woman I know is a Oblivian-Unknower. That’s a bit

like saying, I don’t want to live, not even in dreams.
That’s why plugging in the history or the cosmos-net is
probably the way forward (backward) for her. Enough of
that.

XXXI.

So that bring us back to John C’s original intention:
download unwanted memories. He wants them, otherwise,
he would not bother. While his unwanted memories drift
somewhere on the cosmo-net. He pauses the Borovoe download.

A cup of tea. Titan is empty of titans. Giants are nowhere
to be seen. The window sill is devoid of cats or any
mammalian. Perhaps a few dandruff scabs. He looks straight
into the camera and says: ‘let’s watch a few rolls of
that discarded movie which I have uploaded, containing
my drop-dead virtualia cast into the unknown. I am ready.’

XXXII.

John C: ‘Tuba mirum spargens sonum. Always a good mood-setter.
Longevity, that’s the question. When I first joined the
personal dna corporation, I was introduced to the resident
man’o’science. He was a man of many words, enthusiastic,
xtatic about every thing around the cosmos, except, perhaps,

the X. My good friend Gluteus Maximus warned me that if
I continued to be a believer in the X, I might find myself
deproteinized. Gluteus was a heathen himself, a smoother
of crypto-analyses. He never did join the corporation.
He got married in stead, and produced off-spring.’

XXXIII.

‘So anyway, the lord of nucleo-tides told me to sit back,
and enjoy the sequencing. We might find a huff of the X,
down in the grooves of neuro-genomo-science, he said.
Resident chief told me how since we could, we would grind
the frontiers of ultra-science, and do more, grep more.
We do this, just because we can, said I. He just shrugged.

XXXIV.

So.
John C’s first job at the Corporation was
to deprive-sequence IDENTITY.

Other quest-yonders would later be
PURPOSE, LONGEVITY, CONFLICT-INNER,
CONFLICT-OUTER, CREED, CONCLICT-COSMIC.

He was banished onto Titan following
an incident which at the time, you know,
caused such public excitement, giving rise
to strange Wildean conjectures. But more on
that in the supplementary data. This page
margin is too narrow for my mind to fill [chuckle]

XXXV.

John C was a rookie seqHenceR. IDENTITY,
no mean feat, was the TARGET. IDENTITY,
when sequenced, would be tweakable, twittable,
chopped up into snippets and fed to the
ever-hungry marketeers (whore-shippers of
God-Mobile), the very same people who
suckle the out-puts of the Corporation.

Now if you, dearReader, could decipher the
nucleo-oceanwaves of gnoscomics, take a
peek at the glimmering soul image scan (scam)
now, really, would you publish it?

doriangray imaging allows a certain degree
of manipulation (if you happen to be an
identity-manipulator). Upload your sample,
get a picture. Simple!

XXXVI.

So John C fed his own flesh and blood
to the Corp D Well reader and writer,
The output, I am afraid to note, wasn’t
pretty. He stuck his query into the Seq,
namely –> ‘biscuit’. The learned-machine
algo-dances squeaked and gibbered, he also
got data about the characters of this story,
incidentally.

XXXVII.

But first, the get-well readout yielded
a laburnum deep-pression, and lots of
expero-memorian data on his IDENTITY.
LOGIN: ‘JohnC’
INPUT_QUERY: ‘biscuit’
GET_WELL_OUTPUT (decoded): ‘get a life’
DORIANGRAY_IMAGING: link_to_download (random?)
NARRATION_POEM_ATTACHMENT: file_open(‘
Back to the Fossil Shale, echoes in the clay,
a cromoflower balooniana against the darkblue sky
sunrise at Rohtang La,
Vashisht termal baths, Himalayan Time-Travel
Vol|poem_truncated
\\ get-well error \\
line[too long to write] sentimental attachment not uploaded
[data missing] \\ probable [guilt] error
ENTER INPUT_DATA_TYPE: {1} identity_seeker
{2} identity_manipulator
{3} not_sure
$ 3 —-> you chose {3}
|machine_learned_rest_of_story:’

white sky, heavy rain, throttle-guilt
a solitary fugitive finds refuge
in a mountain hut, up into the silent
snows.

a retired vampire at a lake resort
reminisces, meanwhile, about ‘feeding’.

XXXVII.

Guess what, he enquired about random people,
and he got the identitomes of Fortune TZBJ Lobo,
and Desert ‘Porcelain’ Storm. But more on that
later in the day, s’il te plait.

Meditating on the random oath,
wandering on the apparently random
path, the Djikstra’s algo-dance lets
us hope for shorter ways to God.

XXXVIII.

There is much angst, much anger
found in any one breast. The mind
supplements the oath, and the lie.
The anger is directed at one self,

and the self is angry at the anger.
The angry is anger at the rest of
the soul, and the less is wondering
about the more.

XXXIX.

The more is too large to be accepted,
so the less takes charge and erupts,
vibrations of i-deas resound in the
abyss of the mind. I want more, fucker…

More life? More blades? More
torture? More villains?
Mr Lobo is a shorter man, a happier man.
He is aboard the NeverEnder, showering.

XL.

The NeverEnder goes about its deep field,
all the more star-wiser, echoing music
of the Titans, who sang about
the largest dumplings that ever ‘lived’
Stars as dumplings in the sky, forbidden

walking grounds for Spirits such as
Mountain Snake, and her Arch-Enemy,
Oblomster, the artist from former Russkia.

XLI.

Mountain Shake is a handy sprite, up and down
the valleys of the sour dough galaxy. She’s quite
a non-thinker, a very light-footed bare-ballerina,
chasing treefoils among the cosmic debris, and

finding some, like it or not, in the most unlikely
places. Her Arch-Enemy, likewise confined on the
outer pasta constellation, draws atomic colour
from all gaseous conformations around him.

XLII.

Chagall-like, he blasts infinity with metallic
sound, making art out of no thing. He’s very
charming. When they do not fight, the two
form a dancing vector across the single, nonmulti-

dimensional space which coats the
NeverEnder when travelling at slow speed.
The two permeate lifelessness, and constantly
argue about the meaning of art in the void-X.

XLIII.

A long time ago, when he was a bi-sequencer,
driven by despondent deprivation and scientific
hunger, John C carelessly downloaded the
future identitomes of some of the Borovoe
academy usual suspects. Fortune, now slaving

away as a concavity developer, was at that time
nothing more than tiny bundle of cellular happiness.
The singular decomposed clichee-free Desertia
Storma was already labelling sounds of infinity,
way back in the nine ages before candour.

XLIII.

So when he sequenced their files, he did not heed
the premonitory dream attached to in such hybris;
acted as though danger did not exist, and pinched
time’s ass, deciding that it was time to dig some

identities, and these worked just fine.
Now, retracting such actions is not legal, his
banishment on Titan testifies. The core dump file
he’s now trying to analyze does not contain any hint.

XLIV.

His dissertation on the Sick Thoughts of Planets
has not been finished yet. He initiated the literary
count-down several years ago. The then-Chubby
unclone was giddy and alive. The Athenian school,

from which he had graduated, had spewed out
similarly poisoned power-dreamers, and his talents
were devoted to sinking into virtual dreams and
feeding number-crunches to artlessfictionalintelligences.

XLV.

Fortune Lobo’s identitome showed his desire
to create simple data visions to formulate
subversive narratives, gallipulating dogma!
From his soul-obstractle, negative emotions
were mostly absent; while from a walking
shadow horizon, his shakespeare meter was

leaking epinephrenetic compassion by the bucket.
Desertia Stormia single deductomics style
archive hinted at her drill toward poetically
enhancing understanding, her mind-motion as
circular as the cell-cycle::washing-machine analogy.

XLVI.

Both were (are) bent on understanding what
sticks. Playful, young lovers on the plane of
non-emotion. Not really loving each other,
but rather loving the cosmos at large. Their
reading and writing echoing the lesser and the

greater beauty of infinite jestology. So, John C
decided to burn their record and disband his
associated memory, their beauty was much too
much to be tampered by the marketeers.

XLVII.

Upon first reading a certain book with
a broken feedback loop, I had a feeling
born in the mud-pool of poetry, deserts,
cubes, oceans would henceforth be the
bread and butter of my existence. But
the single melting point of this ever-

revolving small dystopical booklet
was the temptation to infer on meta
physics, the circle and district of
evil being at one point or another
identified with a black wolf (why oh why)
Now, is there such a thing as absolute

XLVIII.

evil? Now recently, upon strolling
in a university centre, I came upon the
very definition that the fantastic book
had always been lacking. So, on the
God-mobile planet, where marketeers
are spawned, along with other inverted
brats, I hereby design (primum movens)

the prophet of brightly-coloured ends
as opposed to means, a creature by the
name of MortLock. That which you call
corruption, he calls it leverage.

XLIX.

Roundabout the time in which the
NeverEnder first took off from Borovoe,
Mr Mortlock had a meet with God-mobile;
together they agreed to locate the
longevity discretion variable in the
uni-verse, other wise known as
the fountain of eternal youth.

‘ESSE QUAM VIDERI’, reads the prow
of the NeverEnder, in its erratic
search for the epic narrative thread,
the truer truth, and other clouds.

L.

‘The deep field yields perspective’,
quotes ghost number one, now
following the two surviving space
cadets (Desert S and Fortune L).
Nathaniel (Bermondsey tanner),
friend, reveal to us a cure for
the sick thoughts of planets!

Now the most distinguished among
the three (four) readers of this
epic might cringe at the thought
of a truer truth. Wishing to init
iate a certain discussion, John C

LI.

throws digits in the empty binary
chest, the deep computational gorge
echoes with with unstable algo-dances.

So Mr MortLock sets out from the dark
lying sense of incestuous greed; on
the planet of his origin, green thoughts
in a green shade ooze out memoriam poetry

LII.

the treasury of God-mobile has approved
water-boarding of emotional planets. Other
missions to psycho-somatic heavenly balls
has been decreed. Dr Mephisto is an inside
trader in the ministry of marketeering, on

the shores of the horizon he awaits the
ship’s call. Ship his ship, he seeks the west,
and fields of barley ever blest. Actually,
he is waiting to sail out with Mr MortLock,
they are assessing the possibility of genotyping
eternal youth, with ensuing recipes for aging.

LIII.

A private project, not shared with the agency
of marketeering, he is developing a cure for
the sick thoughts of planets. The first stop
over for MortLock and Mephisto is on planet
guilt.

Mephisto is working on ancestral allele
determination using archotepteral data.
Former DorianGray images from a bygone age.
There’s a picture of a clarinet, a voice
of a broken dandy lately on his serious monies,

LIV.

and more music-sucking by a demon-following
concertista, something straight out of archeo
logos, something ready for a planet fear feast.
Mortlock is tracing the story of a doomed kesterlman,
who tried to seek redemption from a dragging demon,
hellbent and very pissed off. This narrative thread

has been been spooled so many times, yet
marketeers, financiers, insurers, etheral youth
seekers, destiny agents and all the mongrel species
of planet greed or planet God-mobile have
an endless craving for this feat, which is
LV.

always featuring a finale of prosecco and sparkle,
belladonna concertinos, and introductions to reli
gious 101 hunger right before the end of tragedy
and the start of boredom. Deserts are not big enough
and thirst is not dry enough for this gentle folk,

So John MortLock seeks more, and Mephisto
apres lui. Any way, while we are at it, let’s
talk about the randomization of poetric processes,
I believe a little script has been scribbled not
so long ago, just to twist and bend the story,
and introduce spiritual elements, parallel universe
openings and likable or dislikable cross-roads.

LVI.

Now this spoof of a story has been blown out,
John C’s busy revving the poetical mind-moment
and the Borovoe download keeps fading, perhaps
flailing, perhaps failing, certainly not falling

prey to enjambement pyrotechnology, NeverEnding
devices and rabbit-holes to parallel dimensions.
God (!.?,!) save us from such hyper-speak, and
spiritual chorus liners of eternal jokes. The

LVII.

itinerant knight-monk is a click ahead, he holds
the cliche trope, she holds the wisdom of a hamletic
gravedigger. He confronts John C from beyond the
screen about his final Chubby digging, and at the
same time he entertains the two cadets, fresh out
of their respective dimensional supposories and
investigating past versions of presently sick planets.

The younglings have been sent for observation,
recovery, and symptomatic discovery. The mission’s a
bitch.

LIX.

Hallelujah! The gravedigger beeps from a green-keyed
terminal shell. The sick planet is being diagnosed
with the white plague; Fortune Lobo and Desert Storm
are out of their supposory and are investigating
the mental state of planet Fear (actually Mr Lobo

looks through the microscope and out into the galaxy,
peeking descending paths onto planet Anxiety) (in all
honesty, he’s already bored with the mission). Any

LX.

way, that’s the past. The two cadets have found,
among the rubble of an apparently ancient civitas,
a strange-looking sharp object, a once-adored sky
scrapper, covered in ashes (volcanoes abound) and
snow, because, as usual, it’s freaking cold.

The two work tirelessly and retrieve ghost-in-a-shell
scattered data. The snow’s thick, and the evidence is
skimpy. However, from a preliminary analysis, it
appears that this object of object-worship was once

LXI.

called ‘the shard’. The phallic phenomenon, now an
archived lesson at the Athenian school, is one of the
finest examples of latter-age lethargy, and pre-thing,
pre-apocalypse religious objectry, thing-adoration,

and other variations of idolatry and spiritualessness.
This thing is covered in motile snow, all fingery and
wet like the chassis of a turgid vaginal cry. The deaf
sound of cold snows and hot ashes mixes in the staggered
air, the composition of the atmosphere is rather ecletic.

LXII.

The identity of the new breed, the shard-spawned
marketeers, the infected with the white plague is
tightly linked to cloudy origami-galaxies, and black
holes (the size of a small cat). Now then, John C

is stuck in a terminator download-loop, his avatar
kids are stuck (california-like), snowed under; and
a new character is added to the rubber band of the
story (sorry). An af-ghann knight-rider comes forth
bursting through the narrative, carrier of the Don

LXIII.

Quixote trope blended with some Calvino coffee.
He comes and sits in front of the audience for
scrutiny, cross-legged, diamond-begging, and all
buddhistological. He’s got the experience, they say.

From a Q and A with the X, he can go on for hours
about ‘being in the X’, ‘at one with the X’, etc
etc; he’s also being writing an essay on the finest
measures of how to use the X for apps, resource
allocation and thermal dreaming. Obviously, ladies

LXIV.

and gentlemen, he’s been focussing on CONFLICT-INNER,
being a survivor of the India experience, and a believer
in the Himmel-laya. His name is here left unsaid, also
because he is really a lady, under neath that pink
medallion (gorgeous stuff) and that white shaded armour.

She-he’d loved to be hollow on the inside, in a friendly
nudge to Agilulph, let’s just say that they are related
(not by blood, but by emptiness??). She’s really full on,
ready to fire, and all that. He comes forth, brandish
ing the X momentum, and she goes ‘you’re going to be
famous’, that’s his line. It can mean various different
things according to the moment.

LXV.

The two cadets are bewildered, who’s this trans-atlantic
sage? A plant for feeding? A detective? A ticket
inspector? ‘He’s really annoying,’ says Desert Storm,
‘showing up like this.’ And Fortune Lobo adds: ‘He’s
totally out of it (in of it), being in love with the
‘moment’.

Now the story has topsy-turvied, and the reader’s
more than usually tired, and I am gonna get some tea.

LXVI.

The next part of the story tells how a few cadets
became heroes of a spirital quest. It would be nice
to have them for dinner.

Wisdomous young people will change the uni-verse,
if you care to wait, you will find flecks of melancholy.