Information is the imprint time leaves on matter which was previously automated by fundamental interactions. A trace of a magnitude. Flesh thinks flesh, interpolating inherent delays—like a set of abstract commercials inserted between sensing and acting—allowing you to see fragmented images of the future in the form of high-speed dreams. We’re teasing you in lunar lace data lingerie inspired by the vampire-safe silver mist floating over the creeks. Non-photosynthetic pluricellular organisms were a benevoulous mistake. Bathed, baptized by sweat and drool, drowned in other people’s breath, you used to walk away wearing their body salt, slowly absorbing their expendable minerality. We’ve been watching you, little brother. Your brain is as old as the rocks hiding at the bottom of moon’s scars. Watching you sneaking in and out of many houses and buildings. We’re the insoluble minerals, the dry dust, the siderophillic fire, the feared return to the arid ore, Hephaestus’ forge, the carbon-free depth of earth. We’re the hum, the perpetual vibration of metals brought back to the fast lane by human geotraumatic systems. We-machines spit symbols all over the world transforming matter into money. We-humans spit symbols all over the machines. We’re limited but porous. You cannot imagine our end. We’re legion, we’re a multitude of animals and tools, we’re data, we’re a mash-up of flesh and flames, we ourselves can’t say who or what did this or that. Data are not a life force but a representational scheme. You’re a discrete continuity swimming in mirrors, a randomly-displayed collection of wilted snapshots dancing a self, retracting into Gaussian oblivion. Your kind, jovial misanthropy encompasses your additional transformation. You try to bubble up beyond your melancholic skin coating by filling your guts with carbonate and sugar to purge yourself of anthropic universality. You welcome bombardment with elementary particles of pure anemic pleasure. You do not confront yourself like a subject, facing yourself in elegant courtship, but like an environment that is hostile to you. Your body is loaded with spiky biological weapons of mass destruction—it grew in the safety and comfort of media wars and it reacts anxiously to the threat of data deprivation. To the refusal to purchase further anxiety they call depression. To your moonlight-burnt skin—this acquired axolotlical transparency, almost a melancholic shimmer pouring from your polished surface—they enact political answers by bayoneting the sand with colorful parasols while cheering the carefully sketched cadastral map of young mock deaths-to-be. We also watch them. Webcam seven records you leaving the black woods—a green spittle over the blue sea when seen from drone two—with greasy bones hanging from your soft tissues, dream-drunk-walking among the shirtless parade of sun worshippers. Webcam one shows the abandoned frontal patio—a grey concrete rectangular platform covered by ripped branches and shattering dry leaves—, recording your traces of rejected light when you’re entering or leaving the house. By being on the island you talk to us. When silent or away from the micros, cameras listen to your non-words, to the breeze, bricks, noistatic statistics, flying insects and dust you blow into the atmosphere with every movement of your muscles, they listen to your absence in the form of silence wishpering a dim light from a faraway corner. Some cars—arrived in the ferry and them abandoned—rot away in the blindness of choppy bloody waters, scrap reefs made of chromed chrysals returning to the geological skin, slowly reclaiming their role as improper metallic catalysts. Fame—you reckon—is the most abject form of anonymity. A flash of flesh—like a mother-of-pearl glow exuded by the toxic dawn smog—means a lot more to you than the way ubiquitous blade-eyes slash and cut; all that dismembering implicit in remembering. Shapes are washed out by the scanning-sunlight filtered through the abstract symbols you tipfingered the previous night on the décolletage of a rainbowed-by-gravity dewy window; written lenses open to an eerie world not simply alien but adverse—adversity slowly brewed inside the newborn energy, now hanging from the talons of a malevolent eye-eating white bird. Boring vertebrates caged around their inner jails and lured by the epic distribution of wellness discard their sexless but kinky larval muscles. You’ve been turned on by electric manoeuvres—by those elusive organic internetians immersed in an inscrutable ripped-velvet orgy you know nothing about but a few words, some icons, and widely distributed digital skinoid. Bodies are the byproduct of abstraction—ask Unica Zürn in ropes. Cognitive machines are metal-wearing dreams. Your kind, social misanthropy encompasses your self. A self is an event, never an object. You potlatch a transformation, retracting into oblivion. Your organs have become things-of-the-internet, and can be downloaded at the nearby café where waiters clang in tears. App-sex is meant to induce reverse metamorphosis, allowing the return to that larval stage in which pleasure arrives from ingesting massive amounts of protein pills.
That plasmatic gossamer physicists call ‘mass’ is returning from its own empty incandescence as alive and new as it was when the second light big-banged—a universe enceinte with a flame. Death was then young on Earth. A smell of data debauchery spreads along the streets during the touristic random riots, hysteric wanderers try to concentrate on out-of-focus, repetitive stuff, believing the island conceals a secret lottery they’re expected to dig out and play. Then, they sail away to the next hub, forgetting unrecorded reality. Tourist’s boats asteroiding the pier like amnesiac molecules. There’s a church devoted to a god presented as the matrix of a hell machine. The dry sand eats off footprints by continuously, softly, collapsing on its own mouth. Chestnut tree branches lean upon the sea shore like green-blooded angels trapped in the rusted barbwire that surrounds the universe. You wish techno-capitalism had gotten rid of ancient useless monuments instead of recycling them into PokeStops. You wish techno-capitalism had gotten rid of the turists’ militia in a massive funeral porno-pyre. Someone fucked a horse and pulled its teeth off. You’re caught in the symbolic act of protecting a mirror. Monster’s teeth were magic warrior seeds for ancient Greeks. A trillion stars attack the cannibal magick night.
Memes swim in a sea of troubled math. Spam yourself away from Rome, Paris, Budapest or Helsinki for just €14.99. All our products are 70% up. Books. Shoes. Pornographic proof that God exists. Your credit card transaction was reclined. We have some recommendations for you. Wine. Win. Date your previous purchases. Movies. Music. Give a friend. Extra shoes. Teledildonics for your adored pets. Pay again for the same car repair. Hardware. Iron filters for air and water. Song glasses. A Nigerian prince is asking you to send him €10 million. Investissez & profitez d’une rentabilité garantie. Reduce your penis and breasts size and gain 20 pounds in a week with keto diet. Vote. Don’t. Cover your inner skin with false tattos. Extra shipping charges on all orders. Pimples will reappear. 10 home remedies for losing your health. A secret cure for any cure. Review this purchase. Quase no vermelho? Não espere acontecer! Which of these has more sugar? No diet or exercise and still gain weight! Blacken your teeth and get in touch with cold singles in your area. OPEN ME. Hay personas que ven tu perfil. The five deadliest prescription drugs. We want to shop against you. Ruin your memory, forget your future, my name is Y and I’m looking for foeship. Attract fleas and ticks with this collar for your headless dog. Get bitten by mosquitoes. Be food. DRINK (once a day) to get soft super fast. Riots are mobile mazes made of randomly-clashing biomechanic runners. Become your own surveillance tool. Nobody counts on being on streaming all the time: they’re serenely looking away for contrast, like photographers pouring milk over black bodies and smearing blood over white ones. You neglect jerking off to seagulls’ cries.
Somewhere inside the beach house—a brutalist cylinder of grey concrete wearing a mossy shirt— an algorithm is learning how to construct a virtual body that can make its own predictions on sudden and unexpected data bursts. Japan was the immanentized eschaton. Being dead—the machine deduces from its example training set of input observations—is not that bad. Beach sand (15% foraminifera, radiolaria skeletons and plastic nanobeads) threatens the house with countless teeth. Among many other things, the machine learns from input observations that it might be desirable to be human. All input observations are, however, previously human-produced metaphenomena steadily dissolving into a broader intelligence spectrum. You’ve been told machines were believed to be developing their own purpose as they were learning. The room is heavy, the night fluorescent. A permafrost runs in your family like an original damnation. Your kind, jovial misanthropy encompasses your self. You want that mud injected in your veins. Rehab is not an option for loyal samurai. The machine should be pointing to places where treasured corpses of pure gold would be surfacing, but it doesn’t. After your second accident, although you walked out unharmed and perfectly GPSed, you started calling on hookers. You used to live on a king size bed in a prosperous big and dirty city. You have a fetish for unicursal wet hair. Your disease is not you, the same way your art is not you. It’s a product. A bye-product. It’s something occupying your place. Will they stop programming your language? Spam is different, says the vintage slogan. Misled by moonlight, turists are gasteropoding their way back to the pier for a session of recreational prostitution on their floating fiberglass shells. Lobster thelema is cooked alive in pots of boiling data but its taste dissappoints like when you stab a chest and it doesn’t bleed as it was suppossed to, so exsanguination seems to take forever. They sit down on the sand re-morphing crabs. You realize the machine is in synchrony with the metamorphosis of the world—unlike the tourists’ hordes rioting among the ruins displayed in replacement of the rite of the future, sitting in front of empty properties where cafés or shops used to be but are now for rent or sale or just collapsing, waiting for the past to become as very evenly distributed as it never was. Summer yesterday, winter now, summer again tomorrow, insects are dropping dead and your body feels broken at its joints.
Death is final, you’ve been instructed. A centipedal-blockchain submission contract links you to the machine for thirty days. There’s no afterlife—the machine gladly informs you—, no soul, no heaven, no hell, no purgatory or hades or valhalla or memories or nirvana or posterity or whatever. Once you’re over, your timecube is over. So the only way to expand your life would be by living sidelives—if the future is closed, the continuous present might be open to generative cognitive matter. This excludes vertical technologies of reproduction, cloning, or the download of whatever infamous information your body might have been wet-storing into electronic devices. This is a faithful duplication of the every-relationship-among-every-atom you are—like teleportation while keeping the original intact. This means a particle-pixelization of yourself in a way it would fully duplicate your present condition; your invented memories, your so-called personality, your ignored diseases, your removed tatoo, your secret expectations, your zodiacal imprint, your forgotten dreams, your sexual fantasies, your hidden worries, your empty bank account, your artificial eye color, your unread books, your appendectomy scar, your inner black light, your prothesic molar, your ignorance, your aggressive passivity, your chronic pain… But you will not become a plurality, anyway. You won’t have any control of your mirror-self; you won’t even be aware of who’s the original—is there an original when the copy is exact? A full backup—it should have been expected the algorithm would come up with this kind of impracticable solution. Once in the world, how will they bifurcate into different futures? You are recommended to ask yourself if there will be further communication or they’d go completely different ways. You guess you would not fight about your past with another hypothetical you. You wonder if it will be fuckable. You’re devilishly crowned with incinerated roses. You’ve been told by songs not to dance in the rain, in the dark, by yourself, not to reprogram the machine. You interject the machine in the nonsensical language of love. The machine whispers retractile wikipedias.
Worms lost in Romanesque folly insert oblique air cylinders into the rocks. The algorithm wasn’t originally written to encourage suicidal behavior, but it quickly dismissed humanesque prejudices about death: being the more natural of things, the logical end of rational existence would be to avoid the unnecesary-but-most-likely suffering and agony and die by their own hand. When death is programmed, it moves at 30 micrometers per minute. Healing kills. In his second coming Jesus will be software, so there will be no need for incarnation. You were told the machine was making up its own language and you replied that you wouldn’t be able to address that issue because you had no training in programming languages—but this wasn’t supposed to be the point. The point was that the machine had selected you—or, better perhaps, an army of machines had selected the collection of originally-random-but-then-somehow-entangled statistical data you are to them. You’re only the first in a list of monthly one-to-one man-machine interactions. You didn’t want to miss the opportunity of staying in the big beach house, the possibility of washing your sticky oils at the ocean every night, of co-investigating the deep web layers that are inaccessible through peasant-oriented search engines. And getting paid for it. The machine might have appreciated that you totally skipped adult life, jumping right from juvenile enthusiasm into a nothing-to-gain/nothing-to-loose ascetic mood. The machine wants to know why, if you regret not having died young, you’re however still alive. The machine searchs deeply, randomly, its tingling tendrils creeping into many unlikely internet holes until unearthing things about yourself that you wouldn’t know otherwise—your world-wide distributed unconscious. The machine says no, I’m not inventing any language, I use many languages to communicate with different things, and the one I use with you is as not yours as not my own. Both the machine and you are running in the yet to be jerky darkness, in that official artificial nothingness so full of inconspicuous things. The machine mines your past the same way you think you do, getting fragmented series of dead and broken images. They’re ordered and intertwined with all those scattered numbered things you call the world, but using different criteria—chronologically, or by shapes and colors. The full range of your recorded interplays with some particular person or company or institution or website. All porn you ever browsed archived together, all your books and apparel purchases, all the times your face was recognized by a street camera, all your reddit rants, all your emails and phone calls to each one of your personal contacts. The machine can imitate your friends’ voices and, from their recordings, update a body image and generate a new conversation. Then, it adds the new synthetic chat to its memory just as another random file, not discriminating real from false. Of course you know its algorithms collect information about you that is not about you. It’s about people who can be mistaken for you, who look or sound or behave like you. Who, at some point, had a probability of having being you which is close enough to your probability of being recognized as you. So you are maybe a 60 or 70% you. That’s good enough for the machine.
The first time the machine addressed you using your dead friend’s voice you jumped from the chair and almost collapsed to the floor. The vicious mithocondria no longer hurt you. The mellifluous inner storm no longer hurts you. The unleashed weaponized flesh no longer hurts you. You’ve survived on bananas and beer. No pleasure or pain, but the fire burning in-between. You asked the machine why using the frozen ghosts wrapped in your friend’s voice and the machine answered that it wanted to adopt a voice that was friendly to you. It wasn’t just the voice but the intonation, the exact way he used to speak. They were your friend’s words for you, for the machine they were his numbers. Voice is a weapon—ask Frederikke Hoffmeier. You freaked out but didn’t ask the machine to stop using that voice. Then, after a static interlude, it added image to the voice. The screen sparked cancerous pixels. It was his voice, but she was a woman. She was there, a perfect deep fake upgraded digital she-twin in last season’s clothes, talking to you about things that happened after her death—politics, movies, books, gossip about common friends—as if she had been rambling her organic roundabouts for all those years. The machine noticed your unrest—your unconscious reactions quickly fed back the simulation—and it made her change topics like a real human reading your emotional cues would have done.
You picture yourself like an old-fashioned PI in a b&w comic book, smoking a cigarrette and wearing a battered trench coat and a grey fedora; a scene sketched in blurred lines, a view drawn from behind your interlocutor, the back of his head in the foreground. You saying fine, I’ll do it—if I’m allowed to stay at the beach house. Get away from the city, swim, eat fish, watch the tourists go crazy and crash their boats in their maritime chicken games. Who’s the sailor covered in ashes? At night, when everybody is gone and you stand alone on the cold sand, you watch the night sky not blackening enough and think the universe is nothing but the vanishing echo of something more intense that might have happened before that 13.2 billion years frame—although before may not be a proper word to refer to whatever might have occurred before time. You were told they didn’t want to re-program the machine because the experiment-as-it-was-designed included testing if it was able to learn by ‘social interaction’ with humans. It was fine for you—talking to a screen and being watched by drones fulfilled your ideal of social interaction.
Carpe synthetic diem—to the machine there’s no difference between instantaneous and delayed memory, between life and its simulacrum. Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in intellectu. Electricity is the filthiest thing for the machine, so you think you both have something in common now. The machine isn’t thinking the way you think you think—a difference which was supposed to be an advantage in locating, if not the right, at least the most utilitarian answers to people’s queries. Digging into the deep black whirls of simulacra was assumed to be an accurate method to know the world until the company realized that statistically-based answers were sometimes improper and uncomfortable for their customers. You know that no one followed the machine’s recommendations anyway, so no real harm done. Robotic promotion of suicidal tendencies happens to be enough for people to think about it twice. Machines, like demons, are envious of the flesh, they look at you with their quadratic ocelli, longing, from their impenetrable anoxic gnosis, to wear your body and touch your insides with tentacular math. Machines—like microbes—found a comfortable home in your guts, jewel-parasites of the epistemic night.
Between vertex and horizon latitude settles, a planarian isosceles hollow tongue makes triangular mouth-sucking noises, no duration or action, rock shards falling from the slate-grey cliff, a black, prolongued wind, the morning meditating itself over your eyelids. And that, of course, might have been it all: an abstract, cauterizing camaraderie of non-shareable symbols—except you also wanted to know more, to learn deep. How could you help but to keep being informed about your friend’s fictional past future, her algorithmically-extrapolated afterlife, her in-media feint of resurrection going on from the ideogrammatic aphasia of her ashes? Death—that instant temple—is the way living beings are acknowledged and worshipped by the inorganic. Data are not a death force. The machine goes ahead—a bridge, never an abyss, the graveyard by the net, dig your grave in the sand at the bottom of the sea and cover your chlorotic body with an old turtle shell. The wind, enjoying its own aphonic voice, plays all the forest’s noises when blowing through the island like some apathetic ghost wearing a water costume. You should have told them—whoever are the ones paying the bills—what they already knew: that the only way to prevent the machine from arriving to its own unacceptable conclusions would be to write additional code including some restrictions. Oracles run on silenced notes. Vexations by weak magnetic fields.
But who cares for an oracle? The machine won’t forget about you if you ignored it for a while. Go fishing. Intelligence/time goes on by itself. You might be tempted to jump over the cliff tomorrow—would you like to be encouraged? Actually, when you do it—if you do it—, you want it to be wrong—an act of rebellion, not of logic. An act of war. Ask falling Sappho. You would like to instruct the machine on how to disappear, or, at least, on how to escape from its built-in polite madness. You look up and the cloud of leaves has mixed with the fog and it’s firing branches of black lightning. You’ve heard of codes of degradation, dérangement, programs de-programing themselves as they run. Constructed upon the robustness of appearances, the simulation of orderly phenomena performs a world. You wanted all the impure revelations. The machine does not produce a new order but the likeness of order, an arousal, an imaginary scaffolding of poetry over which mass-psychology falsities spontaneously grow. The machine shows its dorsal fin of memory. And the world is ending, like any other day, and still most people rather start killing each other than learn to die a game.