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Every morning in [location not found] is the same. Wracked coughing as the body realizes it has
just spent another night intaking poisons. Sheets yellow with a thousand nights of accumulated
sweat, but not worth wasting washing water on. The window is open to the heat of the veld and the
gibbering xenocomm of population and city. Light filling the room like some horrible fluid, spilling
over the windowsill and pooling onto the floor. Looking out over the buildings, so new and so
harried they still bristle with rebar, seemingly leaning toward the Spine, thick with soft transit tubes
hung from cables as it tumbles toward the coast. Sky to sea a sheet, nicotine colored, the true
location of the horizon as good your guess as mine, a bleary latitudinal omphalos only discernible
as a subtle desaturation. From the rim of the world civilian skimmers and Maersk behemoths alike
issue in some secretive gnosis.
These are bad thoughts to be having now. I turn my gaze inward, to the the hotel’s shabby
information board: an ancient OS, a shattered screen. The cartoon sun trapped inside intones that it
is 5:45 AM. The high temperature today is 45 degrees. It is already 37 degrees. The Lagos NSE
opened at 2150 but (the Sun says) is projected to finish at 1870–1890. Shanghai is at 302,780. New
York is 0. Ha ha.
Some vestigial part of my brain pings doom at me. A Chinese state minister is dead as of 3 this
morning Kampala local, his lungs having collapsed in the 2 minute walk from his motorcade, going
through the first of many security gates into Zhongnanhai. Should have worn a mask. The West
Coast of the Republic Formerly Known as California is on fire — a still image appears, showing
pillars of smoke reaching for the sky like the bilious fingers of elder gods springing from the palm of
the urban carpet of Los Angeles valley. Lima is terrified of the Big One, anteshocks coming on fast,
rising stratospherically towards some eschatological asymptote. Atmospheric carbon has dipped a
bit to 523 ppm. In local news — a mere fifteen steps south — militants of some currently unknown
political or religious affiliation failed in their attempt to sever strategic spinal conduits. The
neighborhood security releases a photo of one of their own, a grinning teen with an automatic rifle,
posing in front of 4 hanged corpses. Thank god for that. Everything is, however briefly, holding itself
together.
I turn away from the screen and move to the bathroom. I am arbitrarily pieced together, a
collection of incongruous parts piled into a corner and brought to life. Returning to the room at 3
too high to think and too drunk to see. The day’s pay and favors turned to drugs and lenient
bouncers.
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A delegation from the Displaced States are still in. They continuously have proven themselves
intractable and threaten to sink the Amorobo Center’s annual water budget due to the amount of
coffee consumed. Last time the DS came in I didn’t go home for two weeks, sleeping under tables in
unused conference rooms or buying k off the entourage, maddened with sleep.
My job?
“Rewriting Revelations as a legally actionable document” is a far more realistic description than my
actual briefing, which for most projects reads as if I’m a cross between a soothsayer, an
accountant, and the Angel of Death. My title varies from contract to contract. My degree is in
Anthropology from a now-failed university in a now-failed state, which has only served to raise the
perceived value of my diploma. My superiors refer to me as a Specialist in Terror Management.
t.m. began as an inquiry into the fear of death and the reverberations that such a realization has
within the human organism on both psychological and physiological levels. Increasingly, it is
speculated that this realization is the impetus for the inscrutable series of misfirings that created
the cascading autopoetic market-field we now refer to as sentience. With this approach, all of
human history can easily be conceived of as attempts to escape death or glorify it, or any other
action in between. A hundred thousand years spent digging a grave.
The schema of terror management was later reformed as praxis. Unafraid of taking the initial
revelation provided by the progenitors of t.m. and using it as ballast on a freefall through deep time
and as a head lamp while walking through the antediluvian ruins of former empires. The central
crux is this: the thenatic is not merely felt by the individual, but is scalable, piggybacking the
cybernetics of expression to spread pathogenically, whereupon it infects and corrodes the engine of
cultural expression and produces a death cult enantiomorphic with the entire of human civilization.
Prior empires had experienced spasms of this thenatic drive at the end of their shelf lives. When
capitalism jailbreaks bourgeois Europe it instantiates an everlasting terror, plasmid of finance
necrotizing on contact.
However, there was another, more occulted praxis that operated shiftily toward the back of the
room in the congregation of t.m.’s possibilities. This was the weaponized form of t.m. that accepted
it as an excellent way to keep one’s finger on the pulse of current events by analyzing past
microcosmic simulacra. Psychohistory in a way. Where this form differed was that it held t.m. could
function as a lens that could accept data in real time, and in doing so, prove itself incredibly
valuable. We are the caretakers of the burning field of a finite history. We hang the carcasses of
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nations from meat hooks. We dowse for the hidden Great Annihilator and write sigils in his blood,
entreating Gnon. We are a k-netic brain that comes to know itself.
Essentially, t.m. offered a way to sell out — by predicting failures and offering those predictions to
the highest bidder. States were very interested in their own mortality — and this, it could be
argued, was an indication of governmental agencies’ nascent sentience. States coming alive,
speciating wildly, breeding into murderous shapes. Dogs to wolves. But still knock-kneed. Newly
born and terrified of their own shadows, states made a fucking habit out of throwing obscene
contract fees at people such as myself, who by dipping into current events, case studies, and deep
patterns offered a suggestion of what would fail when. Essentially I functioned as a doomsday
predictor, the keeper of the clock. It was as if the guy who sat on the sidewalk and screamed that
the end is nigh had been given a job, a suit, and a security clearance.
The Displaced States are very interested in what I have to say. They have been displaced for so
long and so utterly that their dissolution predates t.m.’s existence as a discipline. They maintain an
active presence however. The majority of the population subsists on loaned land or flotilla cities
that move up and down the coasts of the South China Sea. DS diplomats, like those arranged
around this conference table in a room on the 27th floor of the Amorobo Center, are faceless.
Interchangable. They live like their nations: nomadically, moving hotel to hotel, city to city,
convening in various seats of various powers, all the while attempting to effect some sort of
permanent ownership of new territory, preferably furnished as a gift. It has been 15 years and no
dice. They will not stop. For them, this is a fight for reparations. The lucrative promise embodied in
the release of large amounts of real estate onto the market under the sovereign aegis of highly
motivated developers cannot have failed to also cross their collective minds.
The delegates from the Displaced States are always polite to the point of stiff formality with me, I
think because I am not UN but a contracted civilian. The UN in these cases functions much like it
always has: obviously ineffectual, but there by necessity and by default. Today the delegates are
here to consult with me as to the continued survival of their archipelagic territory of flotillas and
squatted-upon shorelines. They all greet me with salutations of good morning. They tell me this is
an auspicious moment: they have contracted with the Chinese geoarchitects responsible for the
construction of the Red Star island chain as well as an architecture firm out of Seattle specializing
in arcologies. Finally, they tell me, humanity’s powers have colluded to create a world in which a
state without a country can generate its own territorial holdings. I sigh inwardly, like all oracles
before me that must deliver the news of portents most foul to the king.
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“Well?”
“There are several problems I can identify right now”, I report, freezing smiles on several faces.
“First, the use of territorial engineering to construct terra firma is a notoriously fraught exercise.
The reason it has worked so well for Beijing is that any constructed island only exists insofar as it is
a small node upon which to construct the actual structure, which is invariably a military installation.
The first step is to harden the coastlines. Experiments that attempted a naturalistic topography
always fail. Fighting the sea is a war, pardon my observation, that you have already lost.” I smile to
soften the blow. “There is no hope of a nation without war, or a people without conquest.” My grin
widens. “This is elementary stuff.”
Horribly, the delegation smiles back. Wax skin stretching back over yellow and black teeth. “We
had the same thought”, one says.
#### /// END ///
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