Author Archives: asynonymous

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About asynonymous

An idle poet, here and there, Looks round him; but, for all the rest, The world, unfathomably fair, Is duller than a witling’s jest. Love wakes men, once a lifetime each; They lift their heavy lids, and look; And, lo, what one sweet page can teach, They read with joy, then shut the book. And some give thanks, and some blaspheme And most forget; but, either way, That and the Child’s unheeded dream Is all the light of all their day.

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An imperial trooper

The national anthem is sung with the low murmur of extra-terrestrial beetles, I feel my head spin. We are explorers on Mars; proud solid men cloud-bursting, wandering and confused by the spin of gravitational waves. A group of kids scurrying in the canyons; here and there we rush into a little skirmish with the local tribes. Five hundred years ago, a Conquistador explorer came here, looking for lost cities. He left a trail of little trinkets. Finders, keepers; losers, weepers. I guess that’s why we are here, really. Treasure.

My father entrusted me with the fate of the nation, as well as sperming-on the dynasty. I am a good soldier, I am. He was an archaeologist, in search of a Faith. He found a silver coin in a needle-cave on a spear-shaped island, and I have admired him ever since for his bravery, tomfoolery and audacity. I have been educated with she-books carrying images of Byronic scenes of battle: the losers and the lost, the Turkish and the Russian, the Persian and the Greek.

The traitorous Alp, a long way away from the twisted city surrounded by walls of water, Herodotus at Thermopylae, and all the rest. In victory, I have found that coal is a long-lost commodity on this side of the diamond-studded sky. In defeat, we empirical soldiers have followed the way of the Little Bighorn. But now I am a winner, a gold-showered recruit in the imperial troops, fresh from days of jubilant massacre.

The undead rebels may be wallowing in the basalt marshes, or rising in the wasteland, weathered in the alkaline dust of native tribes. The curse of the living carries on. I am as tense as violin string, that’s why in fifth grade my school-teacher chose yours truly as an ambassador of the Truth-nation. The eternal monkey stares at me through this thin carbon dioxide atmosphere (sprinkled with argon), and as we trek across the wide craters, the long valleys, the ginormous volcanoes towering, full many an imaginary gem bursts from the crust’s dread mouth.

As recruits, we walk in pairs, in utter silence, almost tip-toeing hand in hand. I am a sailor of the Empire’s Class-Xenophon Frigate, driven by guilt, fear and worthlessness. These are my favorite emotions. Everything I do, everything I own is tinged by the colour of these thinly scraped emotions. My space suit is replete with shame to the brim, my cosmic gait is somewhat slow and immodest at the same time as being irrelevant. Our black uniforms absorb the light of the not-so-distant star; inwardly we decry imperial meritocracy and corruption. But then we slither on, lacking the humour to complete this morning’s walkies, an unremarkable task unsuited for us superior centaurs of unremarkable prowess.

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A rebel

We had provisions enough to last a few days. We were boarded by a
clumsy deep-space galleon of some Galactic Conquistadores, needing
a fix of murder. The night of dark space was more loving than any
rising star. I was a young man, stupid and in awe of the multiverse.
Everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venturesome, so interesting.
After being captured, my consolation was that I formed ideas about
evil and wealth, and these will tell you everything you need to know
about what it means to be involved in imperial politics. But our ideal,
the revolutionary man, does not aspire to be a leader in a perished search.

The story goes also that within echo-memory, in my early days as a “Caelum
nostrum” sailor, I fought bravely. Those who have read any account of my
buccaneering this side of the Sulaco federation, will know that the
prevailing tone of those stories is far from calm, and that a vast gulf
was formed in my chest where once my heart might have been. Autres
gentilhommes! In a caustic tone my guilt hangs over my head, still.
All of what you think is made possible by class-conventions and settled
modes of thinking. When captured, we sailed past the Azuera belt,
a wild chaos of sharp asteroids and stony moons which were cut about
the time of the Carrero Blanco rule, and now, many years afterwards,
the ecological destruction of that part of the galaxy lingers on.

The Conquistadores had particle revolvers at their belts. They had started
to chop their way through strange gaseous self-energy coasts by the stars.
Ominous shadows lay in the sunken rocks and galactic particle tempests
seemed to assemble in the distance. On the quantumeous shores, the Sulaco
federation had found an artistic mine. They were digging for a bit of Anglo-Saxon
spirit, which would have allowed them to hang on their Conquistador dream.

But this is the idlest of dreams; for already then I understood perfectly well
that imperialists are just buccaneers in disguise, with an added touch
of Scalping philosophy, the latest stage of multiversal Capital worship,
which was taking shape across galaxies as ethnic cleansing of the Ute,
and many other outer frontier tribes.

A long becalmed photonic gale made us unable to move at all, and our galleon
would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on gravitons would exploit
the curvature of space-time and sail on. As a young man looking ahead in anger
I understood perfectly, if scornfully, the fate of rebels such as we were.

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a farmer growing rotifers

planets are wanderers in space, bright matter-wave
soliton trains whose long-standing question is
whether to tilt, elongate, compress, vacillate,
run out of course, spontaneously form or dissolve.

my job is to rapidly harness repulsive to attractive
quenched interactions from ultra-cold atomic gases,
grow a Rotifer farm, crystal vases from another sea,
transparently gliding, Leviathans from the deep.

I am a Leviathan farmer on Triton; we have been
captured by Poseidon in our quest for a better
ecology. My husband died while working the
cryovolcanic vents, sublimated nitrogen had him.

Like Io and Europa, Triton has an inner life, and
while we dream on a surface of frozen nitrogen,
sipping water-ice cocktails from ice-seven,
ice-eight and ice-ten crystalline forms, our

disordered hydrogen bonding has led our
Conochilus colonies to be to be ripe and
supple, and metastable ices made our
eco-farming techniques very sophisticated.

Kyniska and her solitary cosmographical
boy-friend are often far and away on their
Mount Meru metaphysical searches, or
relieving imperial ships of their dark matter.

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Arion

Look up in perfect silence at the intergalactic medium: dark matter, energy bundles, dust and gas scattered by the rocking and rolling of cosmic rays, stellar winds, gravitational fields. If you have the inclinations of a poet, you may be able to trace the flow of baryons in Zeus’s vomit. Sailing across the hydrogen and helium persisting from the fall of the Titans, we navigate various oceanic energy densities.
Our ship feeds on lapping thermal ocean waves, bulk kinetic space testosterone, cosmic ray beauty, magnetic devotion, and photonic energy.  That is what divides us from the brutes of the colonising empire, the jokes of the salesmen of the corporation, the plethora of advertising leer-seers and the marketeering agents. We space buccaneers bounce off the thin galaxy oscillating, scintillating at some indiscriminate speed across the shimmering kiloparsec distance. As I sit here at the intergalactic window and watch the cosmic microwave background, the far-infrared emission from dust, as I watch the starlight, I know every reflection bobs and ebbs toward the red, and I shift the ship’s cosmic gear to chase a thermodynamic nonequilibrium. Our efforts are not in vain, we like to think. In zero gravity flight, our candles burn all across, a hazy halo of fire. My love for Kyniska is undiminished. The ocean waves, the rain, and many earth days have lapped by and gone. We are still here. As the engine maintains a steady input of free energy from ultraviolet radiation emitted by naughty stars, there is a hefty contribution of kinetic energy from high velocity gas ejecta straight from supernovae’s mouths. I fight for a living, and anger is what drives me. I have been betrayed by comets and by aliens, by humans and by spacetime. A small telescope is not enough to chart my eroticosm. A black spot is upon me, I fret at the myriad ways we could shipwreck. Old songs waken from enclouded nebulae, tunes of death and defiance. Rich entanglements. Particle by particle, we are leaking freedom all over the multiverse. Stuck in my piratical ear, a tune most ominous and drear. Examining memory is the most critical skill for any Buccaneer hacking through space. Rare dreams beyond dreams. Empty space is hypnotic, a metaphysical hyperspace. The rare cosmos of our knowledge is routinely sucked back into the original jester’s bubble along with hydrogen, helium and the whole abundance of heavy elements in the interstellar medium: C, O, Mg, Si, and Fe. There is a declining function of distance from the Galactic Center, or God’s arsehole. The abundance of imperial and East India corporate twerps near the Sun (galactocentric radius R ≈ 8.5 kpc) being about half their foresaken abundance in the Galactic Center region. And of course, all is sucked back into the original jester’s bubble. That is what God is to me.

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the corporation’s interrogator

aboard this keepsake ship, torn between death and life you stand naked before the Emperor’s Truth. your rebel assault has failed, Xin. that was your name, was it not? i have been instructed to break you, and to give you a new name. i may choose to throw you overboard into the zero kelvin unknown. the cosmic freeze may yet force your tighest door. trust me, your perceptions are false. as your interrogator, i have a right to your requiem. for your transgendery, you will be punished with chechen relish – but the empire is merciful, and the corporation is only interested in your likes and dislikes. we have great use for people such as yourself. you may yet choose to join our chase, and aboard this ship complete the revelation. here are your ghosts, a flurry of hunger-like illusions. to begin with, all the relations between your particles, and your emotional ancestry. we shall carry out the test for you to join the corporation’s workforce: you may yet ascend to pinnacles of salesmanship still unknown. you do want to become successful,  do you not? my understading is that that is what drives you. you no longer wish to be a servant. but why, I wonder… this choice of transgendery? it does not seem to harmonize with your goals. something other than yourself is what gets in the way of getting what you want. you do want to be accepted, to be liked even. to be worshipped, perhaps?

Xin

The conqueror worm has you. Suffocate me, or force me to imitate the bear. I find comfort in my bad luck with the dice, with love, with my miserly parents. There’s nothing that you can witty out of me with your creative multi-screen, I have built the damn things. I know every withering silicate memory in the cycle, there are no tricks left that you can play on me.

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The spirit of Europa

Sunsets are blue on Ἄρης. Then Εὐρώπη
spouts bright water plumes, fountains
of ice from cracks in the shell, tidal
flexion from her daddy’s massive gravity field.

Ποσειδῶν has a dark cyclone, and bright
sister clouds, while Κρόνος sports
a shrinking superstorm spot. Hydrogen
nitride, not water. Oscillations, dissipating.

Jetting water 200 kilometers above its
surface, the icy moon probes the passing
space, while circling the castrating giant,
its silhouette squeezing past the bright light.

Astrophysical reflections on the broad-eyed
goddess from the perspective of a star-gazer.

She was the daughter of Agenor, a bull carried her
off into Crete to a cave on Mount Ida. And on her
disappearance from Earth, the Phœnicians

honoured her. She is a broad-faced Jovian moon. Some claim her sister Io is her
ancestor, a volcanic heifer, mythically hot.
Τηλέφασσα was her mother, herself daughter

of a sea-nymph, a soft cloud, a Nereid in the
sky. There are three thousand such daughters
in the sky; for every spring, river, sea, lake
pond, pasture, flower or cloud on mother Crete.

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A soldier

A 500 km diameter moon of Saturn, covered in fresh, clean ice. It shines, it sparkles. I’ve trained my algorithm by assaying pure, and mixtures of dehumanized cells. As an assassin, I’ve been trained to detect specific signatures, estimate them from unknown samples. Consequently, I wasted my youth as a soldier on Enceladus, its surface temperature at noon – an average fucking extra-cold. Terrorism is a cancer, and I am a terrorist, formerly working for the Empire. Now I don’t fucking know what I am doing, anymore. Immune signatures from diverse cell types. B cells, CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, neutrophils, macrophages, dendritic cells, I’ve identified weaknesses in the rebels’ immune system. I’ve been a foot soldier in the Empire cancer immunotherapy, targeting infiltrating fractions of rebellious blood. Deconvolving their Oscar Wildish subversion from apparently innocuous computational algorithms, I have frozen my butt off watching whiffs of molecular hydrogen fly off into space and joining the rings of Saturn. I’ve selected markers in space positively correlated with tumour purity, overlapping the rebels’ signature. An ingrate job. It was Earth evening when I arrived. The linearity of the plume in the sky watched me with an intensity of a fly-by as I disembarked the space-craft. The hamlet lay deep in the ice shell. The global ocean of Encelandus babbled, a lurking variable underneath. Gravitational capture of nebular gas was nil because of low gravity, yet nothing was to be seen of Castle Mount. Deep down, large hydrothermal vents, processing the rock core by tidal dissipation drove molecular hydrogen upwards and outwards: mist and brilliance surrounded me, and a blinding dazzle of light prevented my eyes from seeing where the castle lay. I stood on the path leading to the hamlet for what seemed Earth ages, and I looked up at my blindness, seeing the void, and its implications.

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Mother Superior

The work of a commercial propagandist revolves around giving rewards based on deep-seated wishes or fears. At this junction in time-space, the commercial, the political and behavioural psychologist have merged into one. The Emperor’s whims are cross-linked, liquified, diluted, recorded in the Twittering-Yahoo machine and broadcast across the multi-verse. The commericial propagandist aims at maximizing the drinking of each member of the UBER-populace. The niche markets are GPS-located, locked in and targeted for assimilation by the persuation units which go, ironically, by the name of Cherry Blossoms. One such unit, a team composed of four individuals, is at our door, ready for chemical, ionic, philosophical and psychological warfare.
Sisters, our job is to resist the pseudopods, continue regulating our osmotic pressure and meet every propagandist pH challenge by direct uptake or efflux of proton-truths. A major strategy for propaganda resistance and Truth-pH homeostasis is the use of transporters that catalyse active proton-truth transport. These transporters across our nunnery cell wall include primary proton-truth pumps, such as proton-pumping respiratory chain complexes which we routinely use for spiritual meditation. Also, we can use proton-coupled ATP-ases to actively energize active proton-truth uptake in exchange for external cation-lies such as the Emperor’s Naff+ or Key+ Twits. Sisters, we can produce energy and resist the propagandist acid challenge, all at the same time. If we work our osmolarity pumps well, the propagandists outside could fill with excess water, and, eventually, burst. That is our aim. We must resist the Empire’s attempt at suasion, control of the tonicity of our surronding spiritual waters. There is a scientific, as well as spiritual way out of this, sisters. But we must stand together and resist their commercial-political pinocytosis. Now I know that the appetite for distractions of the average woman and man at any point in time is almost boundless. You must know that they will bombard you with distractions, use them to gauge the barometer of your feelings, identify a key issue, and then strike a choride channel in spite of all the extreme acidic resistance tools we might have assembled. Do not allow for matters to arrive at this stage, for if your will is hydrolized by their distractions, there might never be a way to gather your integrity again, and you shall become food for their Thought. Do not let yourselves down, sisters, this is a battle for your survival, for our survivial as a collective. Truth and Beauty, in commerce, politics and in behavioural psychology – in spite of John Keats – are not one and the same. Remember that. In the 70th year of our Ford, Americanism and Fordism are not longer the essential threat to our well being.  Post-Fordism, aggression by salesmanship, perception-manipulation are all tools of various trades. For the pleasure of the imperial court, they will attempt control by reinforcement of desirable behaviour by rewards. For the besiegers outside our walls, fortune, fame and glory are for closers only. They will stop at nothing. And they will close, if we do not burst their ionic lies first.

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Big Sean
We are all assembled here before this monastery to put the old half-truths on siege. Between yours truly, Mr Lancashire, Dr Onegin, and you, young Cao Mei Zu – we should be able to provide service to the Emperor and gain a buck or two in the process. As you know, we have been ordered by the Admiral to rout the rebels; their enterprise has been gaining momentum in various pockets of the multi-verse. We must put an end to it.
Mr Lancashire (ironic)
We trust you, Big Sean. You are our shining light.
Cao Mei Zu
Just don’t give me any orders that I might dislike. And do not call me Miss Strawberry again. But, you are the leader, leader, leader, mon cher. And I idolize you.
Dr Onegin
You are so amusing, and so handsome. How can we go wrong? I know the Emperor’s not to everyone’s liking… but if one spends just one night drinking with you – one becomes the most hardened loyalist the world has every seen. Just let me do my calculations, and it will all be done in a jiffy.
Big Sean
Enough. Our work begins now.

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Carrero Blanco, Imperial Admiral

My name is my Excellency, Admiral Javier Carrero Blanco, Chief Operative Officer of Naval Intelligence and Rerouting of God’s Networks, Principal Information Gatherer under the rule of His Most Sublime Excellency His Majesty Emperor-Kernel John Milton Chivington, Developer of Futures, First Minister of Methodical Scalping, and Supreme Liberator of all living beings in this, and any other Multi-Verse.
The young dapper Emperor, in his most blessed days of blond-hood, has appointed me to oversee the flow of information between his subjects, the infinite screens in this multiverse, and, most notably, the other sycophants in his court. There’s Mr Spicey, the Confounder in Chief, his work relies in building reliable clouds of pseudo-knowledge, which people need to navigate in order to drink the Emperor’s Truth. There is Mr Millstone, grinding every bit of information through gristmills of denial, and of course he is the Chief Minister for Evidence-Checking. We are many, but our job is one. To alter the abundance of little truths, so that the expansion of the Empire may find its way across the Multi-Verse. My job is to accumulate people, extract information, join potentiates, exploit compromised senior figures, vilify depressives (and in so doing, avoid my own guilt-trips, and my past). I once was alone in the dark, and I fought my way to the top of the pack. Now is the time when my dark, conflictual, ETA-ridden, Mexican-haunted, Indian-plagued discontent has been made glorious by this sun of Penmynydd, descendant of Owain Tudur, and New-York real estate.