rev0

Originally published at The Revolution Will Be Monetized. You can comment here or there.

Large, proud, vulnerable.

Yeah, just like that. We registered. We breed. We collect.

Are we bitter? Shouldn’t we be? Should we be articulate about it — perhaps listing out in simplest form, one by one the crimes committed against our humble newly christened sub-species?

Yeah, the girl was mental. Put her off into the little room. Snuff her out early — push her further and further into the darkness and hopefully she’ll just slip away. Problem solved. The little girl will trouble unwanted parents no more.

The drama was common. That’s what the books say. The isolation was a result of modern living. A more connected sociopolitical environment lead to easy access of information. When Mommy’s head was buried in information and floating on chemicals, who then will notice little Shi’s pretty new hair? Or Shi’s pretty little bands or ribbons that she put on just for Mommy to notice? Or daddy?

Who was daddy? That was the nickname of the man who showed up late at night able to talk only of how tired he was and talk of some faraway world of a large organization unfathomable to a little girl.

He wouldn’t notice ribbons either. He would hug and then push her away to get at the keyboard and the information. It was an addiction. The pushing was just a side effect. We’d gotten used to it, all of us, the forgotten.

The pets had it worse. They didn’t have enough awareness to take a really nasty fucking fall, draw a little blood, and get those few moments of interaction — tribute of a sort, a brief psychic return of the mother or father to older times where children were unsafe and needed more protection. Children now weren’t vulnerable. There weren’t men out there who collected pictures of little fannies. No of course not.

Don’t be bitter, Shi.

We do all of this for you.

Several times they tried that response. Then they moved on to not caring. They accepted what the counselors told them — Shi was just too goddamn smart. What could she do about it? What could they do? This was how the world worked? One couldn’t step out of the world could they? Could they? Wouldn’t it be like a sailor encased in lead stepping off of a ship’s stern, descending into frigid night time water, black like the world of dreams and sleep, and like the finest sleep increasing in blackness and chill with each passing moment? How long outside of the proper world of air could that sailor live? How long could the parents?

No, better to play along and live within that world. The new breed of soldier was one who could adopt and absorb the flows of information in ever widening circles of knowledge. We, as a race, knew more with each flicker of a quantum clock. Or did it flicker? It did. It didn’t.

It’s all statistical.

Just like her parent’s parenting skillz.

She made it to sixteen. That was certainly worth some percentage points towards young Shi’s success ratio. She passed the right tests. There was something strange in the way she thought though.

The neurologists didn’t find any anomalies.

The psychiatrists however took her in for more study.

Sub-species — she decided it herself sitting in her own piss beside the hospital bed in the ward where they kept people like her. They shaved her head. They drugged the Christ out of her… not that a sensible family would’ve attempted to put the Christ into her in the first place. No, the only reason to instill Christ in the modern age was to prepare the child for a career as a professional panderer or politician as they’re occasionally called by the lesser more homey papers. That wasn’t her problem.

She was just too smart. The television didn’t numb her senses. She was too perceptive — Shi was! Too smart. Too quick. There were places for that, but the numbers had lied. Her parents were statistically wrong to provide the proper genetic makeup and intelligence potential to account for her success.

There was nothing worse in society than an anomaly. Do you know why? Because it makes the statistically average feel bad. Fuck Ayn Rand — this is real. Don’t invoke her name in this. She was really a man named Irving Mahkovich. This isn’t about Irving — this is Corporate America.

The sounds of her room, the dark room (why waste electricity on something that had a high probability of just being recycled anyway?), bounced and danced along the narrow black-bricked slime-covered walls of the tunnel that lead down to her head.

Mental.

Yeah. No shit.

Bitter.

You think?

Her hand in front of her face — Shi’s hand — a creaking set of long lines slowly dancing and spidering down to a filthy paw.  For days she watched it.  She found an answer there or at least solace. The dancing lines of fingers, moving rhythmically. She felt her heart, far below the tower holding her brain, beneath several layers of soil and then wrapped off its own cell of ancient granite blocks start to move in time with the hands. Faster faster. Slower slower.

How slow could I make it go? Shi wondered.

Slower. Slower.

Then she willed it to stop — little Shi’s heart buried down down down.

Stop!

It did.

The tower was quiet. The room was quiet. Her mouth stretched. It hurt a little. Who moved it. Teeth were exposed to cold bare air.

A gasp from somewhere underneath, miles deep, but inside.

Her lungs, hidden from her by centuries of planning and misdirection, filled. There was a flapping sound then as the linens of the lungs shuddered under the gust.

Cold concrete struck against her forehead. Hands slapped down beside head. Dark almond eyes, hidden always in shadow, moved of their own accord to show the Lady Shi what a hand was.

She remembered it. It wasn’t dancing now. No lines. No motion. Her heart was beating but she couldn’t hear it. She just knew. The hand in front of her was filthy. The smell of piss and shit and sweat filled her nostrils.

Her body shuddered, starting in the middle and running in equal waves out towards either end — top and bottom. Her neck twitched sending her view of the world up, down, around, then to concrete.

A heavy clang sounded off to one side of her. A click. She knew this. A creak and a small zephyr danced across her nose bearing the smell of ammonia, of clean.

“Welcome back, Shi,” said an anonymous male voice.

—-
Words: ship’s, pushing, collect, picture, several, gotten, week, registered, breed, prompted, early, tribute, mental, souls, diffuse, times, bitter, vulnerable, large, proud

Originally published at The Revolution Will Be Monetized. You can comment here or there.

When Shiva called a meeting, Shiva the leader among leaders, we would all find ourselves hoping for something nice, quiet, isolated. Shiva was like Les in that regard — passionate to the point of being utterly stupid. Unlike Les, she was smart. Les was not. He was just passionate.”Recognize” she said addressing the small circle one of many groups (or so she claimed), “that you are monitored for some percentage of any given day. That percentage may be 100%. The systematic patternization of movements and accepted behavior is organic. The machine is learning in the center (or so I’m told in the reports I’m spending our support money buying from leaders more concerned with money than with progress). The edits to the patterns are being done by hands with agendas.

“The diorama of government is crafted of thin cardboard damp with the sweat of the poor and rainfall urine of the rich high above. The systemic crushes of related agendas spawns…”

What? I zoned halfway through that. She was the queen of random revolutionary slogans. She didn’t need you to understand (she explained this once to me as she sized me up for deeper involvement) just follow orders. This group in particular — a walled off cell that had the job of infiltration. They were most like the norms, were recruited in some cases from those ranks, trained, and then prepared to send back. Most of the faces looking up at her now in our dark dusty subbasement lair had behind them in foolish heads crushes on the shaven-pated Shiva stirring their revolutionary zeal.

She was beautiful — don’t get me wrong. She was exactly the kind of foul evil leader that a group of art terrorists needed. Smarter than 99.99 percent of the population and more beautiful out to at least five nines. She didn’t wear makeup. Her eye lashes were naturally thick and beautiful. There was something east-asian maybe Indian about her mixed in with some teutonic stock. Her skin was dark, her eyes were light, her body perfect.

I’ve seen her naked.

She beat the shit out of me after that. “How’s your hard-on now, fucker??!” she yelled with each kick or punch. She didn’t put on any clothes while she did this. We ended up in front of a tiger team about to head out. They watched. “Harder” I said in replay to her repeated question. Neither of us knew whether I was demanding more punishment or I was answering her question regarding the rigidity of my dick. A little of both probably.

I broke a rib that day.

The tiger team bled off under the boss’s glare. They walked away facing her though. I could see it through a swollen right eye. They couldn’t take their eyes off of her. They were right. She walked off after spitting on me. On her lower back was a mechanical tiger pouncing outward, steampunk style, heavy tubes and dirty parts.

That was a great fucking day.

“We will spawn new cells using the information we obtain from each center we establish and then control. That is our source of income. You’re all cool in your own way. It’s time though to push out your art — subvert the easy listening corporate art world in small bits, one dab of paint at a time if necessary.”

She thinks she coined that phrase — easy listening art. Edits aside, she rarely comes up with anything.

“That went well,” Shiva said grinning next to me reading over my shoulder as I typed, then leaning down, t-shirt wrapped chest pressing into my back. “I’ve come up with some things,” she said letting out a little laugh at the end. “We should go for noodles before Les comes back.”

“Where did Les go?” I look over at his work table. The red armed-light is off and pushed away from the messy tabletop strewn with electronic components and a varied rainbow tangle of wires. “I didn’t see him leave.”

She grabbed my hand from the keyboard, her hand soft warm with a rough callused inner surface. “Come on, dummy, seriously — he’s going to show up and he loves noodles.”

She pulled me up out of the seat. I looked at her ass (everyone does). It was covered in an unflattering green canvas skirt today. It was short enough so that the edge danced buttock-ward and silky brown skin of the inner thigh screamed “hello stranger!”

[Sex appeal is not ranked very high among things to look for in leaders of revolutions historically — television has changed all of that.]

She giggled like a girl as she dragged me through the poured concrete tubes — seven feet in diameter dry as… well… without getting too sexist or revolting I’ll say that…

I stumbled on the lip of one of joints of our culvert hallways. I flew towards her. She gasped, her eyes bright. She showed her age — early twenties — no, she was younger still in that instant. I, circus clown, put on a show for her, flew past, and landed against unmoving concrete, knees and palms.

“You missed me,” she said. I flopped down on to my side, bony hip slapping against the aforementioned concrete.

A few of the local peons poked their heads into the hallway to see what was making the noise. Then they saw her. Then they didn’t care about the noise. I was looking up at her too. She was looking back at me smiling.

I didn’t turn away. I tried to look past it. Her reputation for sincerity preceded her (or rather her reputation for a lack of… you don’t run a war with sincerity she said once and that time even her brow furrowed into a huh?) Is this what the face of a praying mantis would look like as it went to pleasure her mate? Did she, in some insect way, look like this all sweet and sincere.

I heard some mumble (ears not yet ruined by regular trips to rock shows) from the hallway. They fled when I turned to them.

They were calling me “the boss’s special lady”…

—

Words: rice, monitored, nice, crushes, leaders, isolated, diorama, center, government, buying, groups, sensors, edits, related, spawn, systematic, sized, hoping, idea, astronaut

Originally published at The Revolution Will Be Monetized. You can comment here or there.

The interview lasted only a few minutes. They’d come from the other side of the Pacific having heard of us via various underground currents that we sent out but have since abandoned since the Shoeless incident. Actually, maybe it was the Shoeless incident that brought them — the converts trekking in boxes and cargo containers to descend upon the wasteland of western america. The hand of Leslie was in this. His photos, his endless spewing of fantasy requests, each meaningless unless the Rosetta stone was in hand and we could only make and send so many of those out at a time. Production problems were a bitch. So was Shiva. She was in charge, though, despite what the rhetoric and propaganda suggested. Never ever mistake figurehead for actual leadership. Rev was the figurehead, but in realilty, he was dumb as dirt. He’d bring in the troops — ready each of them for a competition of vague and foolish tests of guerilla artwork, and then Shiva’d take over.Isn’t that right Leslie?

“My name is Artt Bombe,” Leslie said, thin lips moving on a pasty dough-boy face, dull eyes looking me up and down before smiling. He was the most dangerous of all of us. He was the one that would end it all. His computing of size of explosions and volume of paint sprayed via his name-sake Artt Bombes was already enough to qualify us as terrorists.

Make Artt not Terror.

Explain that to the handless child with skin permanently made pink — why pink? Why the fuck did you have to use the pink paint, Leslie? What feature of your work was it that would blast the ink down into the subdermal of the child not just disfiguring but also coloring? We fucked up really bad on that one — you fucked up Leslie. Shiva fucked up for not watching you closely enough. I fucked up by not clearing the floor with the new troops. We weren’t ready for something inside. It shouldn’t have gone down like that.

You still have that news photo of that child. I could never tell if you were sad about it or if you kept as a trophy. You’re a sick little fuck, Leslie Smalls.

He could feel me typing about him, I think. He looked over at me from his workshop table. The wires, the timer, the eyeball sized spheres of paint rolling around at the edge of the cheap cracked wooden table. He smiled again, looking evil, his little brown buzzcut backlit by the robot-armed lamp pulled low to his work.

“Do you want to go out and grab some noodles, Rev?” he said.

I smiled back. “Let me finish this prop-piece and then we’ll head.”

We both really dug the noodles.

It made nary a difference that he had something to prove. Didn’t I have anything to prove? Why was I doing this?

Fuck, Les just did the look around crotch rub. He does practically the same thing when we’re out plotting Artt. If you look around before you do something, then people are going to notice you. We’ve told him that like a billion times. It’s like a rule or something. If you’re going to do it anyway (and Leslie always does), just do it. Reach down. Give it a tug. A scratch. There you go. Aaaaand done.

And now he’s back to the eponymous bombs of his…

He had one of them now in his little rounded fingers, sausages being overused but apt here. The wires were black, white, and one red. He looked at it like one would a new born child. It was his child. Not like he could ever get near a woman to make one any other way. Yeah, that was mean. Fucking Leslie. He bit into his lip and lifted the cylindrical piece closer to his face. The other hand came up holding a tiny silver screwdriver and poked at the inside of the piece.

Out in the hallway, I could hear the two new Filipinos talking at each other as they moved the crates up the hallway. Shiva said something to them. Her voice was commanding and deep. Somehow, she always knew enough of any language on whatever stragglers joined us to boss them around. It was like her fucking super power…

—

Words: interview, latest, converts, hand, floor, trek, nary, houses, computing, piece, competition, feature, photos, fantasy, request, bring, ready, meaningless, actually, pacific