Be me, your friendly dipteran reporter, awakened within a peculiar sanctum, after a violent and relentless dogfight through some gnarly Manitoban wildfires. Last I recall, I was spiralling through a liminal state between death and fevered consciousness. Therefore, I cannot be certain which realm I presently find myself.
Bright beams of sunlight crash through a decrepit belvedere overhead, filtering downwards through a dusty cobwebbed column, finally setting a pale spotlight on the floor. Inside the spotlight paces an older man of fiendish stature: bones erecting pale skin like tent poles in some sort of fucked up reverse-marionette exhibition sequence. Long frazzled strands of hair frame an elaborate mane around his head, spiced with all the nuance and subtle complexities of sentience experienced repeatedly within a cruel and unrelenting environment. Each strange strand, blending seamlessly into the shadows.
He cries out to the dark outskirts, “Randle my good man! Spin me up a fresh environment, with good haste!” He wrings his hands fiendishly, gently bobbing and grooving back and forth as if simultaneously drafting a sick trap beat in his head.
His crazed focus turns to a glassy tabletop dome at the room’s centre, a grid of pixels swell like a bed of embers. A fellow Mrs. Pacman enthusiast? We had one of these machines in the burger restaurant I was conceived in. I spent my formative years observing the prismatic worship of humans with great interest, until my father was tragically deep fried during the dinner rush of Super Bowl XXII.
On further observance, this is no arcade cabinet . Around the glass dome is a thick wood bezel, with a half litre glass bulb poking up through one end. The bulb begins to glow green. A flood of text flows through the glass convex, culminating in a delightfully odd penguin caricature, before blinking to a kaleidoscope of colours, brilliant forms and textures projecting a soothing organic abstract in three dimensions, blooming and booming beautifully, penetrating every inch of the glass concave and beyond. The chaotic beauty unfolding through the glass pane begins rapidly defragmenting into some mundane and detailed reality: a direct video feed of a man, fully clothed, sleeping in his bed.
“A man?” He calls out to the shadows.
“I’ve synthesized a deadly infliction, with high efficacy, utilizing a socially destructive behavioural model to evade detection and treatment until the person is too far gone regardless,” Randle responds from the shadows, his words punctuated by the click clacking of fingers tapping mechanical keys.
What the fuck is he on about?
“Randle, Randle, Pho-Fandle… What an intriguing and novel approach my good boy! And what of his environmental context?”
Randle steps out of the shadows, sporting an impressively muscular, triangular appearance. A hefty control console with a solid steel chassis, decorated with instruments, inputs, outputs, indicators and readouts beyond all conceivable or purported purpose. The impressive unit suspends across his waist, hoisted to the expansive rock face that forms his upper back by a custom contraption of carefully calibrated straps, buckles and snaps. Randle dishes the details, “thirty-three year old white boy, gifted with incredible brightness that never amounted to any material or spiritual validation his entire life.”
“Noice.”
Randle rambles on, “basically the condition assures he can never self-actualize”, he chuckles, delighted with himself, “With a neoliberal environmental build that’s been updated for my cross-core processing engine, his condition perpetuates a cruel delusion that somehow he might one day afford himself a lasting, sustainable dignity (while simultaneously making him feel like a huge, undeserving piece of shit). We’re talking optimum, prolonged grief-flow bay-bee!”
Damn, that’s fucking dark dude...
“Sounds good. Can you elaborate on these environmental updates? What kind of efficiency we talking here?”
“Basically, by streamlining the latency algorithm and painstakingly hard coding it into the firmware all night (at the risk of my sanity), we’ve finally achieved zero latency sir.
“Holy fucking shit randle the handle, my main mandle randle!” The old man prances in delight.
“Yes, sir, but that’s not all…”
The old man owls his head back to randle, wide-eyed with intrigue.
“The government just dropped that new open source reasoning model. After dicking around with it for a while on my X-Sphero420 and Pretendo64 computers, plus some juicy tokes on those spore samples we found, I re-vibe’d the codebase, and now the neoliberalism is self-replicating.”
“Jesus Randle, that’s positively diabolical my good man! This should surely do wonders for our grief workflow, of that I’m quite certain! Make sure you take a break after this synthesis. All those all-nighters are taxing on your brain, and sleep debt is a thing. Look that shit up later, as well.”
“Yes sir, and will do.”
I’m looping up and down the dusty belvedere shaft, sunlight piercing through the cracks of loose and rotted boards, dive-bombing the tunnel of stale webs while listening to these two tech-bro-freaks drone on about their weird sociopathic computer game.
“Let’s get to work then Randle. Wake him up already late to work and severely dehydrated for no fucking reason. Oh! Can you also make him have severe social anxiety because of his undiagnosed… what did you call it?”
“ADHD,” Randle chimes.
“What does that stand for?”
mmhmm, such amazing acoustics wasted on these goofs… geez.
“It doesn’t matter actually. It’s purposely misleading as to the true nature of the disorder. It’s confusing, which helps it self-perpetuate.”
“Brilliant! So his undiagnoised and therefore untreated ADHD festers into the addition of a social anxiety disorder, let’s do that!”
Randle performs some key clattering fuckery on his console, then a knob twiddle and a joystick jangle: the poor man on the screen wakes up and begins puttering around the room incessantly, panic unravelling into an irreverent behavioural pandering loop. The two giggle, giddily.
“Now flood his phone with notifications to drive up his panic, and after a brief pause, barely enough to process the situation, his boss calls him,” the old man commands Randle.
The situation unfurls over the glass exactly as he commands it, almost as quickly as the words are spewing out of him.
“Have him grind it out, finally achieving his dream career, only to be too burnt out and indebted (spiritually, emotionally and materially) by that time to even enjoy or benefit from it.”
“Too little, too late,” Randle chuckles ~ the soft and buttery sound of Randle’s handles tip tapping patterns: fingers ladling them generously all over the fake ivories of his metal control console, lapping up each keystroke in a melodic symbiosis.
The simulation fast-forwards, speed running the tragic consequences of programmed subjugation.
Green goop oozes out of every mechanical orifice, spilling over the floorboards, as the two men erupt into erratic cackling: drowning gleefully in a self produced rapacious hate-soup, spilling out further and further with each pulsation, absorbing into the veins of ancient wood grain.
Fuck me, reality is melting… slightly. Warmly melding everything together like a buttery fever dream… my god!
Come to, I realise, unmistakably, these fiends are harvesting this poor man’s misery! Synthetically propagated grief? For what purpose exactly?
And would you believe it, dear reader, if now in the story, a nicely tossed flash-bang wiped the slate clean, of their entire grief orgy?
Fascist state forces, smashing through door frames, pleading, “Police, get on the fucking ground now!”
Already are, lol, I’m outty.
Your eyes and ears out here, Dr. Brundle.