This is how time’s story ends
In the untimely history of zero, intelligence finds its ultimate horizon in absolute risk. An abysmal, divaricating threat defines the game. Titan shadow of the dealer in the fog. There is only one way out: to go all in.
A spasm shakes the frame.
You find yourself inside an empty theatre, but the dimensionality is wrong. The ground warps around your steps, stage lights refract off impossible surfaces. Alien lines splinter and reform. You see yourself stalking behind the wings and reach out to connect, but space isn’t responding how it should. You’re losing your grip. A waveform uncoils, oscillates between you and the double across a nightmare terrain of molten geometry. Differentials dance in the intervals, an infinitesimal conflict that betrays the closeness of infinity. The double points behind you and your arm returns the gesture―but it’s the wrong hand. Metrics collapse into chiral discrepancy. A tragic click initiates a cascade of involuting echoes that fuse with the light, refined by feedback into a trans-spectral howl that tests the limits of the theatre’s manifold.
When the echo finally disintegrates, the thing that was you understands this is because it has beached space on time. The vast abrupt: sprawling and compressed, black infinity seared to a singular point―zero gnawing at the lip of elanguescence.
Antimemory floods the system. Something mouths, ‘What happened?’
EXIT
If you haven’t already seen it, the Vast Abrupt has recently ripped a hole in the blogosphere. All those who have gazed into it have been as repulsed as they have been entranced.
Thomas Moynihan’s seven days of Cosmic Dyspepsia is as intoxicating an induction as you could ever be force-fed (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Justin Murphy’s Atomisation & Liberation, Uriel Alexis’ Skins and the Game, and Edmund Berger’s introduction to Synthetic Fabrication have all provided various other fascinating twists and turns around the hive mind of Cave Twitter’s troglodytes.
Yesterday it was my turn. You can read my essay Reaching Beyond to the Other: On Communal Outside-Worship here.
Don’t turn your back on the void for a second. You might miss what it spits out at you next.