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prolapsarian · 5 years

Text

Notes to Sean Bonney (1969-2019)

The great ruse of our political epoch: Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, and their crows in press, scorched a set of oppositions in the minds of the people. The whole of society encapsulated in an image of “workers versus shirkers”, “strivers versus skivers.” The great tragedy of our political epoch: the Labour movement, the left, and the social democrats took the bait of these laminated ghouls. They responded simply by saying that there were no skivers: instead there was a worthy working class, labouring away ever harder, and getting ever poorer. They said the whole thing was a myth, that the shirkers were a phantom, a chimera, a scapegoat, an image invented by evil overlords to turn the working class against itself, leaving it prone to the ideologies of reaction. The labour movement talked instead only about the working poor, or the unemployed who wanted always to get back to a good job, on a good wage, forever and ever.

Few resisted the ruse, but Sean Bonney was one of them. Perhaps it was because Sean himself was a skiver, a drunk, a scoundrel, a villain, an addict, a down-and-out, a fuck up. More likely it was because of his deep political intuition and understanding. For him, the politics of class warfare was never about worthiness; it was never about what the working class deserve at the end of a hard day’s work, but instead its crucible was the hatred of the social conditions that pummelled people, silenced them, boxed them in, boxed them up, oppressed them, made them suffer. This politics was uncompromising because it understood that any compromise was a failure: there is no weekend that redeems the week, no pension that makes good on the life wrecked by the conformity and unfreedom of work.

I like to think of Sean as the thing that terrified those Tories most, as one of those beautiful creatures who so absolutely threatened them that they had to transfigure him into a phantom. His poetry too was one with this politics in this. Every line is written in solidarity with the shirking class, a class whose underground history crawls and stretches backwards, a perpetual dance, an unending squall, as anonymous as it is enormous. If Sean was a skiver he was also always hard at work, undertaking an immense labour of compression, in order to make that history heard. And this furious labour was quick and angular, because it always came with some sense that history was, already, ending. As a singular voice that resisted the ruse, his writing is one of the most important political efforts of our time.

o scroungers, o gasoline there’s a home for you here there’s a room for your things me, I like pills / o hell.

*** Since hearing of Sean’s death I have been thinking a lot about what I learnt from him. Learning is maybe a strange way to look at it. Because Sean’s poetry was not really so complicated. He stated unambiguous truths that we all knew and understood. Just like Brecht’s dictum in praise of communism: “It’s reasonable, and everyone understands it, it’s easy […] it is the simplicity, that’s hard to achieve.” This was the plane on which we met. All of us, Sean’s friends, comrades, loves, beloveds, others we did not know who all were invited, all in this common place where we know how simple these truths are, even if none of us were able to express them with such concision as Sean – even if we were all somehow less rehearsed, less prepared, less audacious. And suddenly I know it was a common place he made, wretched and hilarious.

*** So communism is simple. But running beneath all of Sean’s work was an unassuming argument, from which I have learned so much. Although argument was not his mode – his poems were always doing something, accusing but never prosecuting – an argument is there, even if it was exposed as a thesis in its own right. It is something so simple, easy, and so obvious that it barely seems worth saying. Sean’s poems made an argument for the enduring power of French symbolism – for a power that surged through history in the spirit of that movement. No surprise for a poet who rewrote Baudelaire and Rimbaud. But constantly a surprise to a world that thought that mode already dead, a world no longer animated by the literary symbol, nor transfixed by the resurrection any such symbols could herald. His writing followed the traces of this hyperhistory that wrapped around the world and back, from the high culture of decolonial revolutionism back in to cosmopolitan centre where bourgeois savages feast greedily on expropriated wares; into the dark sociality of the prison, and out again into every antisocial moment that we call “society”; sometimes making the earth small within a frozen cosmos ringing out noise as signal to nobody and everyone; sometimes bringing the whole cosmos in crystalline shape (sometimes perfect, sometimes fractured) as the sharpest interruption within the world - every poem charting a history stretched taut between uprisings and revolts. He knew the rites of symbols, the continuing practices with which their political power could be leveraged.

Sean was one of the few untimely symbolists of our time. His poems are full of these things: bombs, mouths, wires, bones, birds, walls, suns, etc - never quite concepts, never quite images, never quite objects, but pieces of the world to be taken up and arranged, half exploded, into accusations; treasured as partial and made for us to take as our own, a heritage of our own destruction, at once ready at hand, and scattered to the peripheries on a map of the universe, persistently spiralling, in points, back to the centre, some no place.

But if Sean was a symbolist, if he was attentive to its fugitive history, a slick and secret tradition of the oppressed, then this was also a symbolism without any luxuriant illusion. It is a symbolism in which all knowingness has been supplanted with fury and its movements. Sean’s poems are spleen without ideal. They have nothing of the pointed, almost screaming, eternal sarcasm of Baudelaire when he ever again finds the body of his beautiful muse as white and lifeless cold marble, utterly indifferent to the desirous gaze. There is no such muse, no callous petrified grimace, half terrified half laughing, ancient enough to unseat Hellenism itself - although there is beauty still but it exists otherwise, amid a crowd, darkened and lively. When I think of Sean’s monumental work I imagine an enormous bas-relief of black polished marble jutting out from some monstrously disproportioned body, angled between buildings. This great slab flashing black in the white noise of the city. This great slab as populous as the world. Flashing black and seen with the upturned gaze. There is no oppression without this terrified vision that sees in ever new sharpness the oppressor.

When you go to sleep, my gloomy beauty, below a black marble monument, when from alcove and manor you are reduced to damp vault and hollow grave; when the stone—pressing on your timorous chest and sides already lulled by a charmed indifference—halts your heart from beating, from willing, your feet from their bold adventuring, when the tomb, confidant to my infinite dream (since the tomb understands the poet always), through those long nights in which slumber is banished, will say to you: "What does it profit you, imperfect courtisan, not to have known what the dead weep for?" —And the worm will gnaw at your hide like remorse.

*** I haven’t explained what I learnt. I ask the question, What does it mean to find the late nineteenth century stillborn into the twenty-first? Why should these febrile years, from 1848 to the Commune have been so important? What was Sean leveraging when he recast our world with this moment of literary and political history? And what was he leveraging it against? I have a sense that what was important to Sean was a sense of mixedness. There were those who would read these years, after the defeat of revolution, as a dreadful winter of the world. There were those who saw only society in decline. “Jeremiads are the fashion”, Blanqui would say while counselling civil war. And then there were those for whom arcades first provided an extravagant ecstacy of distraction and glitz. These were the years of monstrocity, from Maldoror to Das Kapital. These years of the great machines that chewed up humans and spat out their remains across the city, of great humans who chewed up machines and made language anew. These years in which the fury of defeat burnt hot. These years of illumination. These years where gruesome metallic grinding and factory fire met the dandy. Few eras have been so mixed, so utterly undecided. No era so perfect to carve out the truly Dickensian physiognomy of Iain Duncan Smith. This was neither the stage of tragedy nor comedy, but of frivolous wickedness and hilarious turpitude. The world made into a barb, and no-one quite knowing who is caught on it. The great progress. The great stupidity. Street life. The symbol belonging to this undecided realm.

Marx was famously dismissive of that “social scum” the Lumpenproletariat, who he described at the beginning of this period as “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.” Marx saw in these figures, in their Bonapartist, reactionary form, a bourgeois consciousness ripped from its class interest and thus nourished by purest political ideology. But if he could excoriate the drunkenness of beggars, Marx failed to appreciate its complement: the intoxication of sobriety of the working classes, the stupefaction in methodism, their imagined glory in progress. Wine, as the beggars already knew, was the only salve to the social anaesthetic of worthiness and the idiotic faith in work.

If Sean were here I’d want to talk to him about this learning in relation to a fragment by Benjamin, which he wrote as he thought about the world of Baudelaire; this world of mixedness of the city constructed and exploded, and the people within it subject to the same motion:

During the Baroque, a formerly incidental component of allegory, the emblem, undergoes extravagant development. If, for the materialist historian, the medieval origin of allegory still needs elucidation, Marx himself furnishes a clue for understanding its Baroque form. He writes in Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1922), vol. 1, p. 344: "The collective machine ... becomes more and more perfect, the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one — that is, the less the raw material is interrupted in its passage from its first phase to its last; in other words, the more its passage from one phase to another is effected not only by the hand of man but by the machinery itself. In manufacture, the isolation of each detail process is a condition imposed by the nature of division of labor, but in the fully developed factory the continuity of those processes is, on the contrary, imperative." Here may be found the key to the Baroque procedure whereby meanings are conferred on the set of fragments, on the pieces into which not so much the whole as the process of its production has disintegrated. Baroque emblems may be conceived as half finished products which, from the phases of a production process, have been converted into monuments to the process of destruction. During the Thirty Years' War, which, now at one point and now at another, immobilized production, the "interruption" that, according to Marx, characterizes each particular stage of this labor process could be protracted almost indefinitely. But the real triumph of the Baroque emblematic, the chief exhibit of which becomes the death's head, is the integration of man himself into the operation. The death's head of Baroque allegory is a half-finished product of the history of salvation, that process interrupted — so far as this is given him to realize — by Satan.

I won’t pretend to know all of what Benjamin means here but I have some idea. And those last sentences terrify me. Modernity begins with a war that is a strike, one that repeats through history. And the shape of this strike, this war, this repetition, is the shape of detritus of production interrupted. We shift perspective and the machine is revealed as other than it was once imagined: it is not some factory churning out commodities, but a world theatre of soteriology. An exchange takes place: the half-finished product for the half-destroyed body. Although what is created (albeit as a “monument to the process of destruction”) is some monstrous combination of the two. One and the same seen with two different perspectives, and the two perspectives separated by the distance between the promise that production will be interrupted, in rhythmic repetition, and the force of the machine that completes the product, kills the body into it, sealing death perfectly within the commodity, as its catastrophe. This distance, a tropic on the edge of the end of the world, is Hell.

This is a lot. But maybe it gets close to what I learnt. That all those bombs, mouths, wires, bones, birds, walls, suns, etc were for Sean the emblemata of our political times. These are the monsters, half-finished, half-human, half-machine, the bird interrupting itself with a scream a silent as the cosmos once seemed. I don’t know if they are to be taken up as weapons in the battle for salvation, or as mere co-ordinates on the map of hell. But they are certainly potent, and set here in commitment to redemption, for the work of raising the dead. Sean’s writing was always ready for this task, in constant preparation, and in constant interruption. Its angles quickly pacing between the two.

This has become theologically ornate. But perhaps something of the point is clear: that in the symbolic realm of Sean’s language are staked the great theological and materialist battles of our age. He had to deep dig into our time for that, furrow and dig so deep that he found the nineteenth century still there, crawling everywhere, right up to us. And all of this was set, furiously, against a more everyday view that production has all but disappeared from sight: society fully administered slips across screens with nothing but a sense of speed and gloss. His poetry decries, digs into, a laminated world with which we are supposed to play but in which we are never supposed to participate, never mind to get drunk, see the truth, raise the dead, even now as they slip away ever further through the mediatized glare.

*** Are we not surrounded by those who cast spells? Sorcery is the fashion, if only for the blighted, the meek, the poor, the oppressed. And it would be easy to mistake what Sean was writing for just another piece of subaltern superstition; promising mighty power for as long as it remains utterly powerless and otherworldly. But this is not right. Seans symbols are not just any old sign, or signal, or sigil. They are not arcana, but materials taken to hand out of the dereliction of the present. They are certainly magic, just as Sean was certainly a seer. But this is a materialist magic, a fury, a joy. They are not drawn from some other mystical world, but from this one. And his magic was to suspend them between this world and the next, between law made in the mouths of a class who hated him, and justice. He saw more deeply than most of us dare, and invited us along. Invited everyone along, including the dead who will rise, even if we have to dig and dig and drag them out of the ground and through the streets, to show the world what streets are really for. Here in this common place, between buildings, together. This is the place of magic, for riots, for burning cars; here a wall, there a blazing comet. Let his poetry dance on, and we will dance on too.

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insolitus-academy · 4 years

Photo

♚ // Face Claim

Full name Face Claim: Jackson Wang Group/Band/Occupation: Got7 Nationality: Chinese, Asian Faceclaim age: 26

♚ // Character ; Basic information

Quote: There are consequences for breaking the heart of a murdering bastard…

Full name character: Kokushibo Takahashi (Japanese), Zakariah Nolan Parker (English) Nickname: Pablo Pacasso Zak, Hellhound, The Boogeyman Realm of birth (if earth, nationality): Earth, Japanese/Asian-Greek Age: 28 Date of Birth: March 20, 1992 Gender: Male Preferred Pronouns: He, Him Race: Demigod, Son of Hades Sexual Orientation: Demisexual What languages does your character speak?: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English, Spanish, Greek

♚ // Character ; Appearance

Skin Color: Pale/Fair Eye color: Brown Scars: None Piercings: Ears Tattoos: Large upper back tattoo of Cerberus Hair color: Black Abnormalities: n/a Horns/ wings/ etc.: n/a Transformed form: n/a

♚ // Character ; Personality

Six personality traits:

▪︎ observant ▪︎ reserved ▪︎ mysterious ▪︎ stubborn ▪︎ possessive ▪︎ high-handed ▪︎ independent

Likes: money (and riches), weapons (guns, swords), food, his bed, the cold, night time.

Dislikes: being part human, having a heart/emotions, people trying to crack his codes / try to get close to him, boredom, people who lack respect

Manias: The Darkness. His collection of katanas and samurai swords

Phobias: Philophobia Animal: Cerberus Religion: Hellenism Favorite song: Unsainted - Slipknot [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpATBBRajP8] Vice: Greed Virtue: Temperance

Personality description:

Zakariah is the strong silent type, always standing tall with his head up high. In conversations, Zak always determines who is worthy enough to be spoken to. He’s a deep listener, an observer. Majority of the time, no one knows what he’s thinking, what his next moves are, or what even goes on with his head.

Zak is known for his charm, always had his ways of making people fall in love with him. If he cares enough, he will easily express his affection. But, if he feels his heart is threatened, he disconnects and distances himself. He holds a strong will and determination when it comes to getting what he wants.

Killing someone he hates doesn’t cause him any remorse. Slapping around a bitch or two to put them in their place is never hesitant and is something he happens to do often when he’s disobeyed. Zakariah has a tendency to pick fights with his lovers, for a sense of arousal, even if the fight is for pointless reasons.

Zakariah is passionate about his line of work, his family, and the things he loves. Being that he is still young, he can be very selfish, stubborn, and possessive of anything or anyone he labels his. He trained to be a swordsman practically from birth, growing up knowing martial arts and trained to be an assassin. He suffers from PTSD, which has a tendency of having anger outbursts more often than usual. For that, he takes it out on people often. A recent anger outbursts left a room full of 30 headless men, who were involved in the murder of his mother.

♚ // Character ; Powers

Magical Powers:

Zakariah has the power to temporarily summon the dead as well as creatures from the underworld; such as spirits, minor demon entities, and hell hounds.

He can also manipulate precious metals, gems and riches (anything from underground), turning them into bricks to spend or to be used as weapons.

Zakariah can also walk in the shadows and move invisible when there is no direct light, allowing him the power of invisibility and shadow traveling.

Non-magical Powers:

Sword Fighting, Advanced Weaponry, Explosive engineering. (will add more later)

Weaknesses:

Falling in love – Like his father, his first weakness is his heart. His emotions and fondness of people makes him weak, the reason he avoids getting close to anyone.

His mother – he worshiped the ground she walked on, but after her death, Zakariah became a broken soul and makes him angry when she’s mentioned.

Daylight – can leave Zakariah with minor burns and cause him harm with his eyesight. Having to live in the daylight, Zakariah wears dark clothing, including anything with long sleeves, pants/slacks, gloves, sunglasses and caps to cover his face. Trying to travel during the day can make him ill and weak, taking most of his energy, reason for him always living in darkness.

♚ // Character ; The Student

Study Style: Zakariah could be known as a slacker, only because he avoids the books. He uses them to sleep behind them, rather than reading them. Though, he is a fast learner, when learning is more hands-on. Zakariah rather be shown how to do things, instead of trying to learn it from text. He is very smart, but lazy when he becomes bored when he’s feels he is not challenged enough.

Favorite class: Sword Fighting

Least favorite class: Biology

classes (5-8) :

Sword Fighting Archery Stealth & Sneaking Manipulation Economics Drawing & Painting Chemistry Criminology

♚ // Character ; The Past

Date of Birth: March 20th, 1994 Date of Death: still living, n/a

Crime Record: Being connected with the Japanese mafia, Zakariah has a large criminal record but no charges or jail time has ever been served. Zakariah has once faced murder charges, drug trafficking charges, assault charges, etc. Family with high dollars and connections in the criminal justice system has the dark prince still wandering untouched.

Has your character attended Insolitus Academy in the past? No.

Background:

A prayer to any god in which who would listen, the Yakuza princess begging on her knees in front of an altar, asking to be blessed with a son. Denied the Yakuza kingdom, Sakura Takahashi knew there was no hope for her, for she was a woman and could not reign over her father’s mafia. Sakura would be forced to marry the next heir of the family next in line to rule over Yakuza territories upon her father’s passing. Though the princess feared for her life, knowing the moment she said ‘I do’, she would be beheaded and disposed of, for all they would have wanted was her kingdom.

Refusing to be wed, Sakura continued to reach out in prayer, hoping she would be heard. Finally, one night, as she slept, her prayers were answered by the one god she least expected to come forth. With the amount of death and corruption in her life, the God of the underworld believed it to be a perfect match, to have a son to rule over not only his underworld but also the human world. Sakura willingly submitted to Hades, giving him her purity.

After her child’s birth, she taught him all the things he needed to fulfill his duties as Yakuza boss. She trained him to be strong, intelligent, highly skilled and powerful. Though Sakura vowed to never speak of his father, for she feared he would be summoned to join him in darkness. Many had considered Zakariah to be a bastard child, even though his mother had been a virgin. Sakura never allowed any human to speak ill of her son, and when they had she made sure there were always dire consequences.

At the age of 14, Zakariah’s grandfather was no longer able to fulfill his duties as Yakuza boss. As he laid on his deathbed, the next in line to take over with young Zakariah. Upon accepting his inheritance, his mother Sakura was kidnapped by her former fiance and was eventually murdered. As revenge for being denied marriage to the throne, Sakura’s lifeless body was sent to Zakariah in pieces, as a royal gift to their new king. His first duty as boss was beheading 30 men, in revenge for his mother’s death.

Progressing age, his father haunted his dreams. Coming across his abilities, Zakariah was unable to maintain and control them. He later found out about the academy which could help him contain his powers. He was hesitant to seek the help he needed, but eventually he swallowed his pride and took a step forward, taking part in the academy, in the hopes to learn his place.

♚ // Roleplayer

[ optional ]

Time zone: GMT-7

OOC! Triggers: No triggers.

Themes/genres you like writing the most?: Mafia/Crime, Supernatural, Romance

—

#Dark spawn #student #submission #iacharacter

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konnl · 5 years

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Scrappers

Humanity experienced a life-altering split. The details of how are long lost. All humanity knows is that some went for the stars while the rest were left to rot on a dying Earth. Those left behind hide and salvage what they can from the old world, staying hidden from the star-beings, commonly known as Harvesters.

Scrappers is August’s flash fiction that brings readers into a continuation of last month’s sci-fi horror universe. Enjoy the story in written word, audio, artwork and soundscape.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Scrappers

youtube

Big Picture

We try to stay hidden by staying underground. People like me have to go to the surface, though. When we do, we do our best to keep noise levels down and stay light-footed. You’d be amazed at how well satellites can pick up the alteration of landscape from the skylines. Even the smallest detail – like a footprint – can be detected by their drones. Stealth is all we can do until we find a better way to fend them off. There are probably a dozen names given to them. Everyone has a grudge for something they did or someone that they took. The Godly, Gene Freaks, Anti-Sapien, or whatever your choice of phrase is, we all know them as the Harvesters. The Harvesters always return to Earth. They come for us. They find us. No matter how well we hide.

“Angie, get with it,” came a croaky voice.

My eyes shot up to the sound, seeing a man looking over at me, the orange hue from the setting sun casting sharp shadows on his leathery-skin. The neon green LED lights from his goggles shined right at me. Ruggy, my partner. We had a mission. Gather scraps.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t really here.” My thoughts were being dragged off into the big picture of the world. The Harvesters. Our attempts to survive. Stuff that Ruggy wouldn’t really care about hearing.

“Keep your mind on our why we’re on the surface. I don’t want to be here like you, but there aren’t any options.” He shifted his rifle under his arm, holding the gun at a forty-five-degree angle, gaze forward. “Magnify your map and stay on course. The operator said there is an amplitude of metal not far from here.”

The Lost

I adjusted the interface that displayed within my goggles. With a twitch of my eyelid, the goggles changed the glass to project night vision. Another subtle eyelid movement caused the UI to zoom in on the map that displayed at the corner of my eye. It brought up a detailed landscape of the rubble that we walked through. Well, a map of what everything used to look like.

“These maps aren’t helpful,” I said. “They’re well over a century outdated.” I looked at the top-down view of the geographical location of the map. It showcased skyscrapers, roads, and complete pathways. In reality, all I could see was a charcoal skyline, rubble ground, and nature attempting to grow new green life in between the concrete cracks.

“It’s the best that we have to work with,” said Ruggy. “Us Scrappers always get the low-tech stuff.”

“Yep,” I said. There wasn’t much of a point in discussing the topic. He was right. Scrappers were a low rank. That’s why we stick together. Plus, I knew what Ruggy was thinking: shut up and do your job. It was tough to do just that. We were in the middle of a long-forgotten civilization trying to find old metal scraps, praying that we wouldn’t be detected by the Harvesters – not exactly motivating.

“This seems like a waste of time for us,” I said. “We’ve never gone this far out into the Lost.”

“Yeah, well,” Ruggy said. “When we’ve raided all of the other closer past cities, we don’t have much of a choice but to go further in.”

I scanned the ground in front of me, holding the rifle tight. There were washed-out yellow painted rocks mixed in with grey rocks. These were once roads, at least what is left of them. I’ve seen complete streets in the archive photos before. Never had I seen such large chunks of remnants in person.

“All of this seems so surreal,” I said. “These people used to live in peace before it all went south.”

“They didn’t think so,” Ruggy said, taking a turn down an archway. “Down this way,” he said.

I followed behind him looking at the massive archway. It was large enough to house a twelve-man transport shuttle. “What makes you say that?” I asked.

“They weren’t happy and tried to change the world which got us into this mess,” Ruggy said.

“I suppose.” Ruggy had a point, the past civilization were the ones that brought humanity into a technological revolution. I just liked to imagine there was a better world at some point in time. “They only wanted to do what was good for us,” I said.

“Are you really that naïve? Come on, kid.” Ruggy said. “The history books always look as good as they can, even if they are on the losing side. I am sure that Harvesters paint a pretty glorified image of their past, justifying why they do what they do. Good is relative.”

“If you don’t trust the history books, what do you trust?” I asked.

“Well,” Ruggy said. “I don’t trust much. I do know not to trust one stupid book. That’s been the issue with humanity for centuries. We put our trust in a book. Now, we’re living the greatest downfall from this repetition of history.”

My pace slowed down as we came across a massive semi-complete structure. It was about one-third of a sculpted head. A bearded man with a long nose and long hair, although it was difficult to tell from the missing pieces.

Amazing, I thought while looking up to the mountain in the near distance. Remnants of a sculpture’s base could be seen around a pile of rubble. An educated guess would be the head had tumbled down the mountainside during an explosion. That was my best guess. I really had no idea.

Gods on Repeat

I picked up my pace, realizing Ruggy had continued on without me. Once I caught up beside him, I said, “It really isn’t all from one book though. There’s bureaucracy, corruption, and human greed to take into account.”

“True, but they shroud it in justification from their holy books.”

“Yeah, it is tragic we kept repeating the past.”

“Its ridiculous. We used to believe in super beings, gods, in the sky that judged our lives. Our ‘holy book’ was science and it was just as bad as the rest.”

“The science era wasn’t much different from religion,” I said looking at Ruggy’s leathery face.

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“Because the Harvesters turned themselves into gods in the sky, judging us.”

Ruggy chuckled. “How poetic.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being his typical unenthusiastic self, or if he was actually impressed with what I challenged him with. It was hard to know with Ruggy, he always had the same mood with anything that he did.

The two of us continued down the uneven path, hopping over large clumps of city remains and plants that had grown over the past world. Looking at it all made a part of me want to just go back to the cruiser and give up. Gathering scraps was tedious. The Lost was depressive to look at. It wasn’t like I had much choice. Scrapping was all I was good at. I didn’t have any other skills that could help humanity survive. There were no educational systems for me to go to. People that possessed knowledge from the past carefully chose who they passed knowledge onto. We have to operate this way. There is no time for everyone to learn everything. We had to learn one skill fast and stick to it.

The Harvesters were technologically advanced, mentally superior, and physically herculean. There was no time for anyone to wish about what they wanted to do. The higher commands run us through rigorous tests, analyze what we are best at, and that is what we do until the day we die. It’s that simple.

“Here’s food for thought,” Ruggy said as he reached the top of a steep rock. “Playing off of what you said, about The Harvesters being living gods and such…” he extended his hand for me.

“Yeah?” I asked as I took his hand, letting him pull me up.

“You ever fathom that humanity has just repeated itself?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, panting looking down at my health-cuff. The screen lit up with a flick of my wrist. It stated we were just over fifty kilometres from our cruiser. I thought that was a lot, but seeing that Ruggy hadn’t even broken a sweat, made me feel like a goof. Looks like I’d have to get on a tighter exercise routine when we got back to base.

“The Harvesters,” Ruggy said. “They were us at one point. Gods are only projections of what we wish to be. They had access to become one, and that is what they did. Perhaps humanity has gone through similar routes in the past, and religious books are just history books about them.”

“You mean like what the Babblers are doing?” I raised my eyebrow with a smirk. The idea was humorous. “You know Babblers are just desperate to find meaning to all this chaos by speaking about it like some prophecy.”

“Exactly my point. The Babblers are no different than any prophet. I take it you never got familiar with some of the archive’s religious texts?”

“No, can’t say that I have,” I said. “I’m a Scrapper, I rarely have time to read.”

“Yeah, you’re also in your twenties. Ah, don’t worry about it. I was a baboon at that age, too, chasing all the fucks I could get.”

My nostrils flared. Who did Ruggy think he was summing me up as some young horny uneducated kid? He had a way of belittling people. Unfortunately, I had to work with him. Scrappers stick together once they were chosen. Scrapper’s code.

“Anyways…” Ruggy said after my prolonged rage-silence. “Perhaps the past religions like Christianity, Hellenism, Hinduism, you name it, all had holy men who saw things for what they were.” Ruggy brought out his hand. “I’m not saying this is the kind of stuff that I believe in, but just playing off your idea.”

I smirked. “Really? You know a damn lot more than I do about religion. You sure you’re not becoming a Babbler?”

“Zip it. Just throwing the idea out there that maybe this isn’t the first time humanity has surpassed itself and went for the stars, leaving the rest of us down here.”

“It’s a wild theory.”

I wasn’t sure what else to say. Ruggy knew a lot more about humanity’s past than I did, and it wasn’t worth challenging him. As he put it so delicately, I was just a young horny kid. His statement had me wondering though – was humanity just repeating itself? Did the past civilizations turn men into gods, like the Harvesters? It’s a crazy idea, and no one truly knows. History was distorted. The details of how they went for the cosmos and left us here was a convoluted – and confusing – rabbit hole that isn’t worth going down. Trust me. I’ve tried. Every ‘fact’ contradicts itself as to how humanity’s split started.

Retrieval

I followed behind Ruggy as we continued down the mapped-out path projected on the goggle-screens. Of course, the goggles could only estimate roughly where we went. It’s not like we had any satellites to work with. That’s a giant flag to attract Harvesters. The chips processors are attached to our health-cuffs, they do some weird science-algorithm-tech thing that I could never understand. All I know is the map talks to the cuff, and they can estimate my steps with the city’s map’s size.

“Looks like we’re almost there,” Ruggy said.

“So, the operator found some jackpot from their A.I. algorithms or what? I still don’t get why we had to come out this far.” I asked.

“I don’t know Angie. That isn’t my department, nor yours. They tell us where to go, and we got the scraps. That’s all.”

“Right,” I said while tightening the grip of my rifle. We had never gone this far out into The Lost before. The fact we left our cruiser made me uncomfortable. If a Harvester were to show up, we were on our own. We couldn’t outrun them – that’s pointless. We had no transportation – we were sitting ducks on foot.

Ruggy brought his rifle up as we turned the corner. The smell of burning metal began to pick up. This was abnormal. Burning smells meant something recent was around. Nothing burns in The Lost. Those fires and explosions happened long before our time.

I used my eyelids to navigate through the goggle’s interface. The screen projected a keyboard and message thread between Ruggy and I. My eyelids twitched in swift movements, stringing together alphabetic characters into words.

DO YOU SMELL THAT? I typed out in the chat.

YEAH, KEEP YOUR GUARD UP, Ruggy typed back as he descended down a rocky, narrow, path.

I felt the sweat build up on my pits and palms. Whatever this was wasn’t part of our standard protocol. The operators typically had us find piles of rubble we had to dig through to snag metal. This was something different.

We continued down the path, creeping slowly to avoid loose rocks. The last thing we needed was to make noise. Ruggy reached the end of the steep decline to where the path opened up. Smoke rose from the open charcoaled ground. Even with the goggle’s enhanced vision, Ruggy nor I could make out what was in front of us.

I raised my rifle as I reached Ruggy’s side, stopping right in front of the opening.

My eyelids moved, typing, I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING.

NOR CAN I, Ruggy wrote.

YOU SURE THIS IS THE RIGHT PLACE? I asked.

YEAH, CHECK THE MAP YOURSELF.

The map was pretty accurate when it synched with the health-cuffs. Plus, there was only rubble all around us. There was nothing of value here other than this mysterious smoke and burning smell.

WHAT DO WE DO? I asked.

WE’RE SCRAPPERS, WE SCRAP WHATEVER IT IS.

Ruggy tightened his grip on his rifle and stepped forward. He didn’t look back, expecting me to follow. I had to. Ruggy was right, we were Scrappers. With that in mind, I took a deep breath and marched alongside Ruggy into the smoke.

The closer we got, the smell heightened into strange stinging sensation. It overpowered my senses and couldn’t smell anything else. God, I wanted to have a mask at this point in time. Scrappers always got the leftover supplies and never the ones we needed. At least we had the goggles, it kept our eyes clear as we moved through the unknown.

I stayed slightly behind Ruggy, making sure nothing came from his sides or behind us. We entered the thick of the haze. Nothing was visible beyond a few feet. The further we stepped in, the smoke changed into an orange-red hue.

FIRE, Ruggy typed.

IT’S A CRASH? I responded.

A roar erupted from the brighter flames further ahead. We raised our rifles. A humanoid silhouette rose from the flaming ground, deformed from the light. Large limbs reached up for the sky. Too large to be human. The roar morphed into a howling groan. A sound of agony.

HARVESTER, Ruggy typed.

YOU SURE? I replied

POSITIVE. WHAT ELSE CRASH-LANDS ON EARTH?

HARVESTERS NEVER CRASH-LAND.

MAYBE. BUT THERE’S NOTHING ELSE IN SPACE.

WHAT ABOUT THAT THEORY YOU JUST CAME UP WITH? PAST CIVILIZATIONS GOING FOR THE STARS?

SHUT IT, KID. DO AS I SAY.

WHAT?

SHOOT FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS LATER.

I exhaled slowly. A part of me was annoyed. There were so many questions that we hadn’t answered. We were making choices that were beyond our rank. Whatever we were witnessing was not a Scrapper’s role. Harvester or not, this was something we had to report. There was also the fact we could end up getting killed. Scrappers were about stealth and retrieval, not killing things.

WE SHOULD CALL IT IN, I typed.

WE CAN’T, REMEMBER? Ruggy replied. WE’RE ON A LOCAL CHANNEL. HELPS WITH STEALTH.

LET’S GET BACK TO THE CRUISER THEN. THE OPERATORS WILL WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.

WALK 50K? THIS THING WILL BE GONE BY THEN. WE SHOOT IT, CALL IT IN.

I wasn’t sure what else to say to Ruggy. We wouldn’t be able to make it back to the cruiser, report the finding, and expect to find whatever we found to still be here. Action was needed. Besides, Ruggy had his mindset regardless of any protocol. He wanted to find out what this was. I had no other choice. I couldn’t leave him behind. Scrapper’s code.

#Horror #Sci-Fi #Spooky #Strange #strange fiction

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