“Yes, that is precisely what I intend, Okida-San,” says Dr. Yoshida, his own heightened psychic capabilities snatching a sequence of thoughts from Ishiru’s cortex in; tentacle-firm grip.
“The perfect, chimerical marriage: the coupling of your species’ ideal female with the forebear of a new, evolutionary ascendancy is simply the first step. The product of this union shall provide the physical vehicle for a radically new form of intelligence; the mass-mind of BioMech, the literal soul of cyberorganic interface ....”
....He pauses briefly, savouring the moment, and then adds:
“HERE’S TO THE END OF HISTORY, GENTLEMEN–!!”
What happens next transcends the parameters that define the sequential perception of time and the Newtonian laws governing motion in three dimensional space. The Conservatory is a vast nervous system, vibrant with the fusion fall-out of a thousand million synchronicitous interactions, the dome resonating with the harmonic chaos of kaleidophonic cacophony like a bell struck on Judgement Day.
BioMech: the consciously directed, empathic union of two alien intelligences – one organic, the other cybernetic – precipitates parallel chain reactions of criticality along the convergent axis of the psychic plane and the sub-atomic level of quantum interactions. The sustained crisis generates neurospace, neurotime. The micro verse of dreaming, of becoming, folds the prosaic, Euclidean geometry of spatial and temporal perspectives in on itself .... There remains one reality. The Zen Continuum.
Dr. Yoshida, surrounded by rotating spheres of glowing, bio-electrical energy, an ascendant star at the centre of his own solar system. His pale, inexpressive face, the last apparent vestige of his humanity, melts like rancid cheese. His tight-lipped smile is corrupted by putrefaction into a parodic leer. The flesh and eyeballs; muscles and bone; wither before the onslaught of an insufferable, cosmic heat that generates from within.
His muscles and tendons knotted like damp, ineffectual rags, his body resembling a broken puppet that caricatures human form, Ishiru Okida is suspended in freefall while the liquid floor dissipates slowly into randomly floating globules. Echoes of possible futures collide in the improbable maze of his cerebral cortex, his super-stimulated pineal gland swollen with the psychic detritus of quantum decay, focusing the tangential disarray of matter and energy.
The Gene pool is whipped into a boiling maelstrom of activity as the Nanomachines initiate their programme. Its frothing surface is convulsed violently by snaking ropes of electric blue and blinding white bio-lightning while the Nanomachines simultaneously deconstruct and reinterpret the molecular structures of both BioHive’s amnio-seminal secretion and that of Mitsuko Hara, Virtuality Icon; object of desire; and now the proto-Eve of a new species whose lineage is yet being dreamed into existence by the process of BioMech.
Movement enhanced by static after-images of Kirlian radiation. Hineshi, cowering by the peculiar terrarium from which sprouts the strange bansai of stunted nervous systems, vanishes in a kaleidoscopic blur of colour and ai explosion of tiny, black, plasma-mass fragments. The shuddering bulk of the BioHive drags itself painfully frei of the gritty mire that has nourished and sustained its growth until this, the apothetical moment of maturity. Blind, endowed with senses a thousand times superior tc sight, it casts out ragged tentacles that ensnare the helpless Hineshi in an inescapable, tenebrous grip. The corrosive secretions that ooze from its scabrous flesh ea through the poly carbon fabric of Hineshi’s suit, dissolving skin, muscle and bone with the ease and efficiency of industrial-strength molecular acid.
The BioHive dedicates the merest fraction of its complex data-colonies to the deliberate and thorough dismemberment of Hineshi Sato. Conical structures on the BioHive’s corpulent flank glow with subcutaneous phosphorous. These organs serve as the BioHive’s equivalent of erogenous zones, and are clearly stimulated by the smouldering stumps of amputated limbs; the hot slurp of fragrant bowels bursting from their bony cradle; the gritty feel of charred flesh; the steaming broth of pulped lungs, melting cartilage and gristle.
Tanaka, meanwhile, staggers on stiff, faltering legs, eyes glassily vacant, as he vomits a bubbly froth of bright, oxygenated blood, his gaunt face leached of colour. Aiko stands behind him, her delicate, white hand buried in his back, right up to the elbow. Tanaka topples forward, his spine snapped like a dry twig. Blood spurts briefly from the gaping crater in his back, its ebbing flow eventually replaced by a hazy column of pungent vapour. In her soft, cupped palm the geisha holds a suppurating lump of visceral machinery to which there adhere ragged fragments of sinew and skin, segments of ruptured artery, squirting thickly. The geisha closes her fingers, forming a fist which reduces the tissue to sludge.
In excelsis Dr. Yoshida, transfigured at this, the critical moment of the BioMech event, holds sway. The luminous sap that runs through his veins – a metabolised solution of blood and the psychotropic aphrodisiac, Manta Red – rushes, pounding, into an elaborate network of vessels, causing the erogenal tendrils that sprout flaccidly from the slimy protoplasm of his flesh to grow hard and erect. They radiate from his body in the form of hardened quills – he is bloated enormously like the notoriously venomous puffer fish – vivid with glowing secretions.
Each of the lethal-looking spines ends in a hollow point. Glistening lubricant oozes from some; others are capped with a coagulating crust of stiff, seminal fluid.
Wave after wave of black static rushes through Ishiru Okida’s ravaged nervous system. The constant flux of thought-form fusion and psychic fission steadily destabilises the molecular integrity of his every physical process – from the autonomic functions of respiration, blood pressure and cellular reproduction, to the bio chemical interactions that produce consciousness itself.
Ishiru’s consciousness is downloaded onto the volatile plane of the kaleidophonic spectrum, he is reduced to the conceptual essence of thought itself: an undifferentiated soup of swirling electrons – subatomic cohesion bonding and dispersing constantly – the energy released by their complex interactions producing a stream of charged particles that propels him, a rogue element, deep into the atomic fabric of the BioMech interface. Microverse yields to microverse, each in turn assimilating the distilled essence of Ishiru’s being.
And then, at last, he finds it.......... Amid the spiralling vortices of gases and cascading showers of coloured lights, a regular crystalline structure whose rigid symmetry defies the impermanent miasma of matter and energy that surrounds it. The polyhedron cathedral.
The Zen Resonator’s logic/anti-logic drive is poised on the verge of criticality, its fragile geometry scarcely containing the constant chain reaction of kaleidophonic detonations, each of a greater, more devastating magnitude than the last.
Ishiru’s thought-form trajectory collides directly with tl structure’s central core, catalysing the ultimate fission reaction that sends individual fragments hurtling through every branch of the BioMech neural configuration like a cloud of fall-out, psychically contaminated shrapnel......... Matter and energy are redefined at the apex of critical mass.
Dual horizons of third and fourth dimension interface yield violent upheavals along the tectonic fault lines of the neurospace/neurotime continuum. The Zen Continuum’s geometric perspectives warp and refract, spatial and temporal stresses exerting unendurable pressure.
The kaleidosphere sheds its crust like a transfigured reptile, sloughing off the dead scales of its skin, to emerge reborn: a fabulous dragon with an iridescent hide of shining jewels. The world’s outer skins of atmosphere, oceans and variegated land masses dissolve in waves of psychotropic fog, shimmering nebulae light years wide. Rivers of molten lava and Lung Mei, the radiant dragonlines of geomancy, criss-cross the exposed mantle. They mesh in cosmic communion with the catastrophe of physics that hung the sterile vault of space with dead planets and decorously doomed stars, the biochemical folly of evolutions whose ultimate corollary is extinction: the inexhaustible crucible of Creation. A comet spawned in the broiling heart of a nascent
, conceptual cosmos, Ishiru Okida is reintegrated into the material world by the forces of gravity, billions of atoms re-establishing old molecular bonds – devising new ones. Re-imagined by the mass-mind of BioMech, he is hurtled, screaming, back into the sphere of physical being.
His literal reincarnation consecrated by a baptism of celestial fire, he is radically, almost inconceivably changed ...... Transfigured.
Several months pass before the Hakashi Corporation sends a second team of termination executives into the island estate of Dr. Akira Yoshida.
They encounter no resistance.
Inside the Conservatory, beneath its fractured, polycarbon dome, they discover a scene of incomprehensible devastation. The vast bulk of the BioHive – still-living, convulsed with the residual spasms of the motor-neurone cancer generated by the kaleidophonic disruption of the BioMech interface event; succumbing slowly to the rigours of starvation and hypothermia; its coarse hide caked with the congealed crust of its own excrement – totally defies their understanding. The Zen Resonator howls intermittently with bursts of atonal static; software erased, data banks wiped clean.
And then there are the corpses. Putrefaction has rendered them both unrecognisable. A bloated, eel-like creature -one of the sexual symbiotes spawned by the BioHive – feeds greedily upon the rotting flesh, honeyed with the nectar of corruption. Its head and gills buried deep in the gelatinous mire, it squirms and writhes violently as it gorges, a trail of congealed amnio-seminal fluid tracing its path from a shattered cocoon.
The assassins wonder if either of the cadavers might be that of their intended victim. They take tissue samples for genetic analysis that will later prove inconclusive. After a perfunctory search of the estate they depart, finding nothing.
Traces of organic sludge in a sunken pool. Puddles of raw polycarbon base containing the remains of Nanomachines so decayed that they defy technical analysis. All in all, an expensive and ill-advised adventure as far as the Hakashi Corporation is concerned. Meanwhile, deep in the earth beneath the remains of the Conservatory, something stirs ......
The spiralling ventilation shafts and maintenance tunnels surrounding the heart of the subterranean, matter/anti-matter reactor like the coils of an enormous snake, form a maze, inaccessible to the outside world; this is the spawning ground for a new life-form.
In the aftermath of the critical catastrophe event generated by Ishiru Okida’s kaleidophonic assault on the Zen Resonator’s logic/anti-logic drive – and through it the physical and metaphysical cohesion of the BioMech process – the entity which had once been both Mitsuko Hara and Ishiru Okida, the redefined, transfigured vehicle for the downloaded mass–mind of cyberorganic interface, had slithered free of the Gene Pool. Its primary directive was clear, unequivocal. Every iota of its being charged with a single imperative: the instinct to survive......
And mate.
And now s/he nestles secure in the embrace of endless night, basking in the carcinogenic warmth of matter/anti matter fall-out. S ix metres in length, two metres wide, Mitshiru’s vast, conical body resembles a pulsating dirigible of raw, moist, hairless flesh. Its translucent, pink skin, marbled with veins – arteries as thick as telephone cables, gossamer fine capillaries – swarms with active Nanomachines responsible for maintaining its lair and synthesising the vitamin and nutrient enriched Manta Red derivatives that form its staple diet. The tube-like body culminates in a wedge-shaped, hermaphroditic sex-organ, glutted with its virulently fertile amnio-seminal fluid and the Manta Red/blood plasma solution that courses through its veins. Its entire physiognomy is a ludicrous, phallic grotesquerie, spawned as the BioHive’s data-colonies succumbed to the crippling onslaught of kaleidophonically-accelerated motor neurone cancer.
Mitshiru’s mate, Dr. Akira Yoshida, adheres to the entity’s left flank. As helpless as a prehistoric insect encased in amber, his mutated body, metabolised by that of his dominant mate, is suspended permanently beneath layers of congealed, protoplasmic tissue. Mitshiru has reduced his nervous system to the most rudimentary of functions, capable of responding to nothing more than the most basic stimuli: the threat of pain, the promise of erogenal reward.
Dr. Yoshida’s spike-encrusted body has all but atrophied now; the vestiges of clearly discernible human features melting into the malformed mass of his re-evolved flesh. His continued existence is sustained by a form of osmotic nutrition. Shortly after he went insane – no longer able to tolerate the shrill cacophony that constantly shred his nervous system with such unendurable clarity, convulsing the defenceless matrix of the frontal cortex and the hypersensitised pineal gland – Mitshiru had casually burnt out the relevant synaptic circuitry and their corresponding neurological terminals. Dr. Yoshida now enjoys a level of consciousness comparable with that of a cockroach.
Buried deep in the entity’s throbbing flesh, a network of neo uterine sacs contains thousands of incubating eggs, fertilised by the seed of Dr. Yoshida’s repeated and relentless rape. The embryos are partially visible, blurry, indistinct. But the eyes – fiery green with feline, vertically elliptical pupils – are clearly defined, their unflinching glare piercing the thick, mucus membranes that enclose them.
Somewhere in the pheromone-scented darkness the little geisha continues to play. The sound of the koto, echoing through the labyrinth, will be the first sound Mitshiru s offspring hear as they emerge, fully formed and hungry. Poised between the arid land and the fertile sea, Mitshiru’s subterranean lair occupies the twilit realm of evolution and extinction, the eternal equinox. Soon its children – the new species dreamed of once by Dr. Akira Yoshida – will take to the air and the water and the land. The sterile topography of shifting desert dunes shall teem once more with life .....
Outside, the blood-red, nuclear sun sinks slowly beyond the horizon, its violent hues oozing into the placid waters of the silver sea. Tomorrow it rises on a bright, new, blood-red dawn.
804: AN EROTIC RENDEZVOUS
Reverend Paul Stevens
Through the revolving door looking dead ahead, you walk toward the reception desk. The young receptionist hands you an unsealed envelope. You neither meet her eyes nor utter a word. You simply turn and head toward the bank of elevators in the centre of the lobby. As you walk you open the envelope. Inside are a keycard, some loose hair, a razor blade and a folded piece of paper. As you reach the doors of the elevator car – you carefully open the note. The note reads “804 – blue – skin – ape – horse” You smile to yourself. The doors open. You enter and press the button for the eighth floor.
As the lift glides skywards you reflect. Paid well for this, not only the cash, the time, the endless phone calls to computerised impersonal answering services, the oblique messages in return sending you on and on in a vortex of non communication until finally the message, a hybrids rumbling tone detailing simply a hotel, a room number and a price to send you here.
You step out of the lift and onto the travelator, your digital heart beating 4.3 nanoseconds over the calibration value, your hydraulic genitalia whirring gently into life.
You’d heard rumours that there was flesh in this city, the last flesh in Europe. You’d spent the furtive months sniffing for signs like a beast of the old world. Your systems centre trawling the archives for images of pounding, sweating, living matter, long since outlawed by the hygiene council and its joyless minions down there in London, and you dreamed those long bitphased dreams where beast meets machine in total joyful erototronic union, till those dreams brought you, undercover of Total Winter(tm), to the free north, to consummation.
You pause outside the door... processing the ether, savouring it...
Oh mother manchine, beyond binary, who designed the new world, who analysed the darkness, who’s System (tm) removed the virus of the Ark, oh mother machine, consort of the great programmer.
Your code process is suddenly running into overdrive, animated images of bison herds piling through city streets, kicking up metallic dust, snorting out headfuls of deadl
y carbon dioxide, scattering pedestrians, congregating in the market square, haunting bitphase of fucking ancient beastflesh amongst the commerce...
GET A FUCKING GRIP, MAN!
This is what you are here for, to sense this for Real(tm),there is no returning, not now not ever, you know the danger, any contact with living organisms would be sure to kill a man within hours. Real Winter(tm) and Biograph(tm) would terminate and without those your systems centre would shut down, time to meet you programmer, monkeyboy.
You know its too late to pull out now, and smiling you take out the keycard and place it gently against the doorlock,the door stirs noislessly, you peer into the red glow of the hotel room, oh my girl, my beautiful one, my girl... you see her profile in the shadows, your hydraulic cock locks hard against the inside of your pod.
More beauty you have never seen, not in the archives, nor in dreams.
Her flanks shimmer in the half darkness, the cool blue beauty of her undulating muscle shudders in the shadows and here you realise that genetic memory is not a dangerous fallacy of the Ark like you were programmed to believe, but real and true and finally it has found you, child, and brought you home.
You step inside the room, and the door whirrs gently closed behind you.
Your optic sensors run appreciatively over her body.
Drugged and tethered she still possess more life in her malnourished equine body than in the rest of europe put together, what a miracle of nature she is. Nature, the virus of the Ark. You look into her deep brown eyes, her simian features watching you as you watch her, she knows, those eyes know more than we ever will.
My beautiful one, my lovely horse, my blue baboon, it is time.
The Starry Wisdom Page 28
