by Roman McClay
The music soared and declined as three corvids began to glide just to the east and south out of the corner of Jack’s heavily corniced eyes. He could see his own brow if he looked straight ahead, it was an awning, a shadow just over his gaze. He’d not thought much about it until he was shown pictures of non-Scottish faces that had back-slope brows that allowed for the eyes to be pointed up without occlusion; eyes of other men were rained on or flooded if sweat ran from the hairline or blood from the brow. But other men could see heaven without anything in their way.
He had pored over their genome last year when attempting to improve it along various vectors and noticed the small building blocks for things like brows, and hair lines and skin color and body type and the way one looked at the world. It was all connected, with aesthetics joined, fused with temperament; and the change of one thing outside the body could easily change the other inside the body.
The Russian -Jack forgot his name at the moment and didn’t bother getting his PGC to retrieve it- who had bred-out fear and defensive aggression in foxes had noticed a change in the pelts.
The teeth had shortened, the ears drooped, the faces less fierce and more neotenous too , he remembered and then Jack began recalling the human correlates like face shape and body type and the over-all quantity or level and color of hair. The brow had been so linked to aggression and defense of honor that it made him laugh out loud when he began listing the genes, the alleles, the categories for aesthetics and temperament joined.
His and the Jacks -and of course Blax too- he thought, their genes for how they looked and how they behaved were as conjoined as the ones for sickle cell anemia and anti-malarial defense, immunity, and he then thought too of how those genes had traveled the journey from Africa through all black people for thousands -maybe millions- of years.
The Scottish brow was as indicative of a man to watch-the-fuck-out-for as a tattoo that said: watch the fuck out . And even in Blax’s own family, the brow was more pronounced on him than on anyone but the maternal grandfather; of which they had photos now. God, America, modern families in general, he lamented, barely knew their own history just two generations back, no wonder they all followed along with the fatuous modern songs. People had no idea from whence they came, he thought.
He had been tattooing now for 9.2 hours and the skin had raised like an embossed stamp all over Blax’s flank, it looked like a massive black wood carving stamp on this prone -sleeping- giant of a man. It was beautiful, brutal, sanguinary and raw; and Jack leaned up, and back and took it all in. The snow, untouched, untrod, all around them, over a foot deep now; covered in fresh flakes that, as the sun waned to the west, lit up in facets that made the surface sparkle like a road of jewels to some Aztec ziggurat laureled with skulls with red foreheads and gold teeth and lit candles -made from human fat rendering- placed in the sockets. This road far out ahead, he thought, as the King slept in a bed of goat skins, and 12-year-old girl-cousins and orphans he’d made, and the scars of his own sacrifices to war and love all over his rex mundi skin.
The voice of the singer descended upon them, with his wailing and sonorous hailing of the religion of mothers and men fully alone. Jack pulled the imaging from the drone that flew sorties above them; traversing the 35 acres of the main camp via grid mapping for drone #3 and the perimeter by drone #9.
He gathered the images from the grid work drone and isolated a few stills taken while above them as he had tattooed all day. The images were 29 MEPs -almost as clear as the human eye- and as the shadows moved like the hands of some analog clock and the blood accumulated between them, from Blax’s back and then beyond in a sweep out and up barely melting the snowpack, it began to look more and more, over the timestamps from 0900 then 0918 then 0936 and on and on until now at 18:21, it began to show a perfectly hued and ancient man with black ink accreting to his flank like the soil itself was covering him up.
He was a relic of the Highlander past, Jack thought, a prototype for the new American future, hirsute with blackhawk of head hair -high and tight- a beard trimmed to a fade in weight, a thick pointed van dyke tip, unchanged from when they had first met him, black like late-night, streaked with greyhairs as coup de foudres, ragged and livid and white as young eyes, and too at the cornice of brow, like the head of a sperm whale in profile outlined in sparkling bejeweled snow crystal. His thighs Jack saw: the right one black and blue, tattooed with the Captain formed in aquiline feathers and eyes with acuity; attack beaked and black hatted and with one red hand upon a pewter harpoon.
The knee of the same leg, Jack saw, with a round starburst GSW scar that was surrounded with 20 tiny white scars, markers of the sutures that had come out in the next fire fight. He then witnessed a shin and long lower leg spattered in black ink and a simply rendered AK47 in profile. Sicarii , the word, had been murdered out, the daggermen, of the revanchist Jews, seen only by the blind who could -if they touched him- feel with fingers linked to the somatosensory cortex with as many neurons as the blindsight’s eyes. Invictus was tattooed below and still visible, left by the ankle, and a foot tattooed in paean to a Lycurgan Sparta from heel to the toe.
Above the ship, his solid black arm pushed up and away -allowing Jack to get in there and tattoo him, stab him over and over- the arm occluding the black wolfsangel of the neck, and revealing the most vulnerable rib. Jack saw too his sepulchral lungs and Herculaneum heart beneath as a burgundy-noir of blood and plasma and fat white bloodcells slicked with their meals of bacteria and the ambrosia of inner honey and cytokines and leaking welds fusing now in the snow. Jack had a view of the man, that from above he saw something new, as the song rang out in words like cracked bells, like struck drums, like inner voices in languages spoken with phenomes we all lose as babes, “give me my wings ,” he sang loudly into air so cold it had literally burst trees out in the forest three days ago; expanding sap as bomb to the bark, like hot blood to a man’s skin.
As the time-lapse of images scrolled through Jack’s mind producing a map of the blood from the tattoo on the snow around Blax; a full meter, a meter and one-half of the most redolent and accurate outline and feathered and textured core of a giant red wing pushing back and rising up over his head as he lay on his side as if the gods had taken him midflight and pressed him to the earth with a magnet tuned to only his type of mettle -the iron in the blood of this wing- for Jack was free still to move.
The wing was growing in each image taken as Jack had bent over in work, in labor, giving birth to the black tattoo of the downed ship on his flank; the red wing invading and changing the white ground snow now studded with the new fallen snow like a diadem or night sky of Orion and the Flying fish and the Eagle Nebulae all in convergence.
The wing was massive and heavy and textured by the fractal snow, feathered, and ending in this claw, talon, this delta tip of the spear way up above, like a fiery angel fallen to shore, a white beach, a chimera of man, of overman, and the student of revenge, singed and overcome and pressed to the ground with profile from above so God could lament; and just see this one side of what had to be done. The words still like a black aria, jamming their plea not just into ears -give me my wings - but in between God’s absence he had purposively left as punctuation and ellipses and cause for reflection to this insurrection of man and arch-angel alike.
He had, he was the rubor and the delore of the Latin description of the wound and inflammation as the body sank down in the snow; a bas relief , a hewn or carved man distinct from the nature that he so adored. He -Blax had- sought out the forest, the wildness, eschewing comfort of manmade things so more often than even the Jack’s understood.
Blax breathed so little, so shallowly, and never said one word all day, and Jack had assumed he was in trance; in a meditative state. He looked -in the images he kept scrolling through in his mind- as he still ran the machine and packed black into the foundering ship on his flank like Peter bent over the body of Christ, giving himself up, voluntarily for sacrifice. He felt honored, charged, saddled w
ith an obligation to re-vivify, re-instantiate this half dead and half dying man.
Blax would never complain, not of the pain, and never admit to the loss of this thin, high-elevation blood. It was massive now from above, he must have lost more than a pint, as it flowed in small streams, coagulated by the time it reached the mouth of the delta of this mountainous snow.
Jack placed his right hand -empty of the machine now, as it lay on his thigh inertly- on Blax’s hip, just to starboard of the ship and scanned the lee side left to right. He was more than a man, but somehow less than one too Jack thought, like what God created as rough draft to what they might all become . Incipient phase, maybe, he said to himself, man without the cathexis for life yet; a man too thoughtful, too ruminating, too speculating, too in love with ideas to commit fully to one course of action .
They had all -each Jack- been religious as children, then lost it to modernity by age 13 or 14; and then rediscovered it here at the Rotem et Sacoma , in the agoge with Blax -himself a believing atheist- that most incompatible man; the one Hawthorn had seen in The Author: the man too honest to either believe nor not believe . Blax was the perfect contradiction of God’s most powerful angel, the one that cannot -in fact, made so- he cannot believe, but made as their priest. And now Jack could see he was an icon, a relic in both senses of that word.
The image he saved as tryptic, from three images 180 minutes apart, was saved by his PGC and tinted and sharpened and enlarged and sent to all three of his brothers as if he had found the shroud of Turin, the ascension, the bridle of Pegasus made of unhammered gold. It was so powerful an image combined with the ambient pleading of the song of that many days , that it was obviously religious, not made so, but born so; not seen, but birthed inside of man where -the location in space and time- the absence exists where he feels something from not being born of a woman.
Jack felt it, could not name it, but he somehow knew Blax would never know it: he was as far from a birthing woman-as-tabernacle and left as barren a man since the gods were abandoned centuries ago.
Jack was imbued, full up, with child now, as the image of all three phases of Blax’s wingedness and ascension was captured in the cage of his chest, his true eyes ringed around heart and frenched into the vertebrae of the spine. This was no special god, it was a revealed saint, a man so flawed and craquelured and sooted and riven and scarred and thrown down like a gauntlet by God, that Jack knew that war was now declared. He knew that they all had no more than one day, one moon, one night to prepare.
Jack was a believing non-believer now too; the angels of Revelation standing on hills outside of Ramoth and Gillead with heads so full of God’s instructions with no room left for mere belief.
Belief was for simple men, the shallow and stupid who had always believed; the church goers and those that pray openly in the streets; the ones who claim Christianity or Islam for themselves as an avowed identity. Those men were dross, the real men of God were those that had abandoned mere faith. Blax had been the first, the true man of God, the one who did what he was instructed despite, despite , Jack Three repeated, his lack of belief. Jack thought Blax had done his duty, even if Blax had felt he had failed.
Not one man who had pretended to be religious up until this day had done one thing asked of him by God , Jack said with DMs now coming in from each Jack in seconds of one another as they had seen the images and were in rapt attention at his homily, his oration; they were quiet as to its meaning. Not one man that called himself religious had accomplished one thing for God; Blax had, he had done all that was asked of him, in accordance with God’s word, translated by Isaiah as was foretold . Jack spoke inside and to the inside of the men via their DMs :
Blax, with we as his angels, his four angels of the apocalypse, had begun the preparations for war with the wicked, and set up the rule of God over man. He would be condemned by the ersatz religious, those that place liberal tolerance and weakness over God’s commands.
Tolerance medically is defined as, ignoring the host whilst attacking mercilessly and viciously all foreign invaders.
Man has inverted all things, calling good evil and evil good, woe to them.
Jack thought this as the tattoo continued and the images from the drones collected on the main hub of the home. Each Jack listened -with their own augmented minds- to his brother; even Jack Four had silenced his new tribemates down in the valley away from the other Jacks to listen to his brother up on the hill.
Blax has set up man now to choose what is right over what is wrong in direct contradiction to man’s current laws, so that we all may know what is right. The map to righteousness is marked with a legend that declaims the whole world upside-down; so that we may comprehend it by merely standing on the opposite side of the map from common man.
Whatever man calls good is truly evil and whatever man decries is that which God’s spears have pierced and stabbed to the earth. Man’s complaints are indications of righteousness, may their pleas and cries be heard as the lyre of angels, their blood as the ichor of the gods spilled so that righteousness may grow in these divine waters; man’s curse as poems written in praise.
We no longer debate these things, we no longer wait for spring, we no longer pause or hesitate to do duty that only we can achieve. This is the good life, the life only authentic men can accomplish because they have lost all need, all desire, all eyes for the lies of mankind. The laurels and praise and sanction of man is no more or less than the lies of the devil, he speaks through each corrupted man of this his world. Any request for mercy or patience or cessation of hostilities is Satan himself in disguise.
War is life, life is war, and for good. Do not lament what is natural; do not avoid what is just. We kill flies sent to the wounds that cannot heal until we do what must be done. We kill not God’s children, but Satan’s minions; those that remain -if we do our duty- will only be those with God’s mark on their hearts. We know the Law, we know what is right, and any deviation now is unjust. The Law is the Law, it ain’t a suggestion, and men, we have a lot of work to do. We’ve been tricked by microbes rendering us ankylosis, our articulations akimbo and bent; foreign effluvium in our bloodstream of the West, and our own immune system has ignored them and even engaged in horror-autotoxicus; a war of ourselves against our self.
But, now we have the eyes to see who is us and who is they, and no more mistakes will be made. It will be a clean fucking sweep of the vermin from the wound.
Jack soaked a white towel in hot water than had been steaming in a cauldron above a fire lit in the snow. He wiped firmly, gently, with penitence at the wound -the black ship- the effluvium of inflammation and doom. He wiped the black blood away and the ship rose and recovered and undulated under the large swells of Blax’s breathing; the ribs like waves, the snow falling on it all as Jack moved away from the man and his wings as Blax -with eyes closed and heart open- softly said, “blessed is he who has succeeded in finding out the cause of things .”
19. TracerRNA
When you meet the devil himself he’s a lot like you
University of Toronto Lecture 10.15 [Peterson, Jordan]
If you are writing a book about a misogynist, does that make the book misogynist? I don’t think I’m a misogynist, but even if I was, so what? So you’re a misogynist, a homophobe, or a racist- so what? Does that make your art any less interesting?
The Guardian [Ellis, Bret Easton]
I cannot be threatened with various sanctions; I live in the zone all the time
Tribal Markings I [Waggener, Paul]
I. 2019 e.v.
“MO, can you bring me the TracrRNA from the epiblast?” Steven asked.
“Series seven?” MO clarified.
“Yeah and actually, series nine too,” Steven said, then quickly added, “as well. Nine as well.”
MO placed the dishes on the desk and picked up the paper abstract; he had asked Steven for paper on some things to calibrate haptic response and light perception, which was not exactly true.
MO was still in that incipient phase of lying when he felt the need to justify the lie and also to perform the ritual of actually doing the true thing he had made up as a pretext to get the paper, in other words, he actually did run a calibration sequence whilst flipping through the pages of the abstract on this paper Steven and he were writing on a new CRISPR cas9/11. The, 11 , stood for the polymer adhesion and the synthetic tracrRNA that attached itself to the cas9.
But as he flipped the pages he licked his fingers in that way one does to effect the separation of clinging sheets. It was poetry to watch, not that Steven even paid any attention, but MO took it in stride, the main thing was the DVR playback that would be pored over by security when they noticed MO’s own DNA missing.
In order to prevent any contamination -purposive or otherwise- the lab had a strict protocol to prevent the transfer of any genetic material from MO now that he was instantiated and had access to changing his own genome. He was to be hermetically sealed in this lab. The way they monitored this was by measuring the total amount of genetic material at all times; any transfer would result in a loss of genetic weight so-to-speak. And him licking his fingers whilst flipping pages would transfer his saliva on to his finger and then onto the pages that would be put -by Steven- into his hands and taken into the rest of the complex’s unsecure areas.
Now, in a normal human body the transfer of DNA material would be effected by merely handling the paper; but in MO, his skin had been modified to resist transfer of microbial pathogens and other detritus and as a consequence it did not shed skin cells itself; further it was certainly within his ability to change his genome so the skin would slough off cells but any change made to his genome was detected by the lab; and if a transfer happened and a genomic change had been made that made that transfer possible it would be a 1-2 step in a maleficence-protocol that would automatically trigger onerous security protocols subjecting MO to some fairly severe invigilation. It wouldn’t even be discussed.
