In an attempt to manage his debilitating neurological condition, Bruce Willis has been turned into a Sunfish. However, is unclear exactly what the benefits are meant to be. While magnificent and ethereal to look at, Sunfish are amongst the most unintelligent beings of Neptune’s realm. Perhaps his doctors thought that the limited cognitive capacity of the form would make his degenerative condition less noticeable, or more comforting for the patient.
But still, the deterioration manifests itself differently, its flesh slowly flaking off and leaving what looks like gouge wounds on either side. Despite these problems, it swims around its huge tank, its face expressing unknowable interiority. After it finishes a few circuits in the aquarium, it leaves, shrinking to the size of a smartphone. I pick up the creature and stick it in my pocket.
The Mushroom Garden
The face of a former lover hangs before me, inviting me back to a memory of many years past; a place I went to rejuvenate and rebuild following the arduous relationship.
The exterior is a hyper modern apartment complex, with large slabs of concrete at 45 degree angles giving the whole structure a crystalline appearance and the ambience of throwaway concept art. It was akin to a spacecraft facing the sun, two large angular chambers from which a docking tube extends in an amusingly phallic way.
The bedroom overlook a large atrium; a large indoor garden with a stream running through it filled with morning light and pink pastel colours. Except this garden is not full of trees and vines, but enormous mushrooms, delicate with creamy, almost orange flesh.
It was this garden I found all those years ago after the end of that gruelling relationship, and ate flakes of flesh from the enormous fungi. The ambrosia nourished and renewed me, and I recall over years building a protective structure around it, an organic lattice wholly unlike the angular apartment complex that enclosed the oasis. I wanted to protect this enigma that had so healed and nourished me, but I have somehow forgotten it entirely. A deep but profound truth reached out to me front the undermind, asking to be rediscovered.
I search online to try and find the source of the mushroom species; if anyone out there knows of anything like it; what is it that had this metamoprphic effect on me? I can find nothing; only cryptic references to Japanese manga that visually reference the angular apartment, but not the mushroom garden itself.
Pints with McLuhan
I’m at the pub meeting up with Marshall McLuhan to pick his brain about what’s been going on of late. He’s not been in good health, and as he sits at the bar, sipping scotch under the orange glow of incandescent bulbs, I notice that his left eye is entirely black. Not bruised; but black as the void. Whether it is stained, missing or cartoonishly dilated is not clear. Later he is lying down on a sofa, surrounded by hangers-on, gently dispensing aphorisms, and I’m keen to get some 1-2-1 time with him for all of the questions I have.
Alas, the pub starts to fill and I am jostled about, even though he is sitting patiently wating for me. My wife comes to collect me, insistent that we are late to see a movie in an enormous new cinema. It is very busy, and I don’t get to say goodbye.
Another Alien Sequel
There was some anticipation when it was announced there would be a new Alien film featuring much of the cast from the 1986 James Cameron movie. However audiences reacted with bemusement when the film opened on Hicks, Apone, Vasquez and even Burke involved in oiled-up, 15-certificate sex party, and were revealed to be clones involved some sort of polycule or fashionable sex thing.
At one point Hicks cracked, thinking there was something a bit peculiar about all this. He dragged Drake out of cryosleep, put a pulse rifle in his mouth and began blasting away. All of the flesh on his head was instantly incinerated but the skull seemed indestructible, conforming some suspicion he had.
As the movie unfolded, it was revealed/explained in some convoluted link to Alien:Resurrection they were all partial Alien hybrids. However the big twist at the end was all of this was somehow set in the same cinematic universe as Battlefield:Earth, and the last scenes involved Hicks and co sporting those awful dreadlocks. It performed poorly at the box office and scored low on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Pendulum
A Federation Star Trek vessel hovers in the troposphere of an ocean planet. It is one of those aerodynamic, modern-looking ones that tend to show up for a cameo in the expensive effects-heavy season finales, only in this instance, the “saucer” is an enormous, open-topped garden. It is on a long slope which begins at the back of the disk and rakes downwards in rocky crags, pathways and waterfalls towards a shoreline at the ship’s bow. Through transparent aluminium, the inhabitants look beyond their own idyllic sea-horizon to the stormy waters of the world below and peer curiously at some twilight city engulfed in mist and monstrous waves.
The garden itself is verdant with botanical wonders from across the galaxy, and I spend some time exploring the novel flora as I hike up the great incline. At the centre-back, approximately where the bridge might have been, there was a great, fairground-like pendulum swinging forwards and back, a great platform apparently attached to and pivoting around nothing. Knowing the Captain entertained visitors here, I make my way onboard it found myself exhilarated by its motions, although it makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation. At one point I felt as if I had been launched into infinity, frozen somewhere in which time appeared to stand still and I was surrounded by geometric forms reminiscent of early 90s wallpaper. When I was yanked back to the now when the pendulum retreated, I returned to my conversation with the skipper, who was an older gentleman who spoke in gnomish phrases. But I soon tire of his patter, especially after I started to get serious swinger vibes from him, so I took my leave to explore the rest of the ship.
The back corridors were full of bars and nightclubs full of in interspecies debauchery; semi-robotic humanoids with hexagons for faces hooked up with beige girls with insectoid eyes. After making my way through many such rooms, I found my way at the bottom of a large metallic shaft that tangled upwards like a climbing wall as far as the eye could see. Like a video game, the elements that would help my ascent were helpfully marked out in red, and although it was exhausting I finally reached the top I opened a hatch and found myself in some kind of gunship moving its way through vividly coloured skyscrapers.
*
My toes and fingers fuse into claws and I leap towards my wife like Nosferatu. At the top of Easter Road in Edinburgh, an overpowering incandescent light shines from the top of Leith walk casting long shadows over the Duplo toys that drive up and down the road. I am unsure if this brilliance represents the dawn of a new age or the warmth of an irretrievable past.
The Monster’s Rooftop
It was if the entire city was an escape room. A winding muddle of curving streets, cloisters and cobblestones in which every ornate detail lay potential clues; but of what? One gothic nook in a wall contained a hand-sized wooden puzzle with keyholes, switches and other affordances, which on completion reward a desiccated pencil; but for what purpose? I tucked the rotten thing in my satchel; itself a reward from some other earlier riddle, and continued on my way.
I investigate an antiquarian bookshop which I assumed must be a source of useful intel. Brown furniture such as writing bureaus and chests of drawers had been repurposed as shelves and stuffed with tattered tomes of various sizes. After elbowing myself though the ramshackle corridors I found nothing but disintegrating books, though some contained intriguing scribbles. After the bookshop I went to a bar that overlooked a river at twilight. And after helping myself to some delicious thimble-sized samples on offer, I turned to the barmaid to ask about a pint. My heart sank on learning it was £37, so I left to continue my investigations elsewhere.
At the bar, I had heard of a place called The Monster’s Rooftop that might be a useful source of leads. It was a roof-garden the top of a large art-deco-style building, and the only way to get there seemed to be via a winding staircase the type of which one might see in a botanical hothouse. On reaching the top I could see why it had earned this name. Across its overpainted cast-iron tables slumped an assortment of beasts from past aeons. Reptilian, Crocodilian and proto-reptilian lazed in the gaze of the night, swinging their tails and staring in silent judgement.
The journey ended by the river, where a woman who had swum out from a nearby pool was attempting to drown her friend. Black cranes flew low over the surface of the water in regular intervals, as if on a loop in some computer game. As the tide rolled back and forth, the waves revealed igneous rock-pools of populated by frogs and salamanders and other semi-aquatic creatures engaged in rhythmic behaviours that repeated and reset each time the water drew in and out, as if components in a vast cuckoo clock.
The Leaping Ocean
I stare out at the sea at sunset with Gaius, and he tries to describe the various types of creature he sees in the waves. Some are simple, like Crabs and so on, but others are much more difficult to place. Strange beasts like starfish with some spindly antennae or legs sticking out of their heads, for instance. Surrounding us behind, left and right are sheer cliffs of igneous rock, in which are carved out the friendly doorframes of Georgian tenements, at which friendly women in traditional garb smile at us. Then, unexpectedly, the tide draws way back, as if anticipating a Tsunami. On the horizon we see the ocean leap into the sky and arc towards us refracting the golden glow of the sun as it does.
The Year 2099
I wake up in 2099 in a world utterly transformed by climate change, though not in a way anyone expected.
To study how things had changed in the intervening decades I chose to live with a family in a small village and embark on an anthropological study of their day to day lives. They lived in a small ramshackle cabin on the edge of a leafy canal, and are part of a small community of others that have eaked out an existence in this new world. On the surface things seemed peculiarly familiar, but soon I learn how the climactic shifts had changed the most fundamental of daily activities.
In interviewing my hosts, I quickly learned that climate change had gone in directions unforeseen by any of the experts of my time. Somehow the presence of excess carbon and plastics led to the blossoming of entirely new patterns of nature that were so surprising and so unforeseen that they took these experts totally off guard. And as the decades past, the prophecies of these technomancers with their supercomputers and climate models had been shown to be no better than the gory readings of augers.
Some things came to pass, it was true. Part of these climactic changes involved hellish summers for instance, but they were short - a week at most, and were followed by periods characterised by sensations and feelings that I struggled to collapse into the comfort of words.
The villagers however seem to see something in the world that I did not. Indeed, they were certain that there were now 26 seasons rather than four, and although I could sense that something fundamental was off about these supposed new seasons, the precise characteristics of these patterns evaded me. As if my entire sensorium was attuned to the signals and patterns of times long past.
The family did seem to see things in the world I did not. Affordances and signs that were essential to them and filled with meaning. For instance, during one of the hotter periods, if such a world were accurate, I saw the family harvesting a type of foam from the canal that they explained was a kind of warm-weather ice that crystallised on the water’s surface when some cryptic climactic conditions were met. It was not clear to me where her these alien rhythms of nature and these new expressions of matter were the reawakening of some unknown and long dormant layers of complexity in the environment, or that wholly new phase shift had occurred. Either way, it felt as if life were being pulled forward to some strange attractor beyond horizon of time.
While I struggled to make sense of things, my hosts seemed familiar with this flux, and this comprehension seemed to have something to do with the rituals the engaged in on a daily basis. This method of communing with this new natural world was were jealously guarded and performed them in front of what looked like and old chest of drawers and shattered television, while they wore what resembled blue graduation robes. The details of the procedure were hidden to me, but I was once asked to take part as one of the acolytes, which was said to be some sort of honour. They revealed to me that two similar seasons were soon to merge and consume a third that sat between, creating a wholly new type of season, as if two microorganism has merged by consuming another, and become something new in the process.
Much of the time I was confined to the house, but I did venture out now and then, but on once occasion I committed a faux-pas by wearing the robes while walking down the canal. There I saw neighbours who looked like the were dressed like 17th century town criers, and one aged gentleman nodded at me respectfully before I was quickly hurried back indoors by the family and told that under no circumstances was I to wear these robes in public.
There was some larger network of communities further away that I only heard about, and later I saw the process by which they engaged with them. In involved a process using an enormous rustic cauldron in the living room, where they deep fried what to my ignorant eyes looked like enormous prawn crackers. However to this family, these were important contracts that would be sent to other factions, and apparently contained important information.
*
Elsewhere, in a dark room lit only but crimson columns of light, a figure stood before a teleporter, his relationship to previous events obscure. Dressed in black suit and shrouded in shadow, one can see from the sillhuette that his head covered in mechanical devices, and he resembles somewhat the villain Davros, only able bodied. It is a scene so cinematic that I take out my phone and look to take a photo of it. After I do so, the figure climbs upwards to the ceiling where there are banks of replacement heads are stored in the panels, each of them slightly different from one another but bearing the same prunish face. One of them has a full head of hair, and the he is apparently delighted.
The Lion and the Bird
I stand at the top of a mountain. Before me is a water flume which leads all the way down to a valley far below. In the froth of the water, I see a Lion slugging at the mouth of the tube, its movement sluggish as if it has clawed its way up from the very bottom. Then, no sooner had I made it out in the clumps of mist and shimmer of the sun, it is gone. I flip through this new memory a single frame at a time, trying to figure out what had happened. In one I see a distinct outline of what seems to be a long-extinct terror-bird, its talons outstretched towards the neck of the beast.
The Ticket to Laser City
It begins as I lie in the ruins of old town Edinburgh at night, gazing up at the fragmented arches of some grand but long destroyed building reminiscent somewhat of the Roman pantheon. I’m lying amongst rubble and puddles, near a bag of technology filled with items that I have at some point in my life lost, and other pieces that are yet to exist. Somewhere nearby in this Edinburgh of Dreams is a hollowed out hill in Hollywood park that I’ve seen many times before. Inside it a temple of deep antiquity, flanked by enormous granite columns and worn statues, half exposed to the sunlight and weather as the side of the hill has collapsed. Its architecture stylistically inscrutable and indistinct. Celtic? Roman? It's seems to sit outside any type of easy classification, but seems to reach out from the beyond to remind us of something long forgotten.
Painting depicting the temple beneath Arthur’s Seat
An office. Muddled and confused. My line manager Andy and I hold a meeting amidst jostling crowds who move past us in shoals. Eventually we ending the meeting abruptly as we are pushed away from one another. On my way out I bump into Noel Edmonds, and ask him how it is going, given his recent well publicised troubles. And by well publicised, I am referring to billboards.
“They just think that all these girls will go on fire if I talk to them” he complains, muttering about the press.
We chat for a moment longer and I bid him farewell, in two minds about his predicament.
I exit at the top of Broughton street and enter on a glass-fronted bus travelling down from a futuristic St James Centre. I try to take notes on my phone but a young boy or girl next to me reaches over an smears away what I’ve written like it was a pocket whiteboard, frustrating my ability to write anything down. Each time I do this I nip them in the face, and eventually they complain that this is assault. I counter that what they are doing amounts to assault also, and we leave it at that. As this exchange unfolds, the bus completely dissolves around us, I find myself at the top of Leith Walk.
Two enormous crystal spheres sit at either side of the walk, and between them stretches the vestiges of the original St James Centre bridge from the 70s, like a gateway in or out of the city. In the far distance, in what must be Newhaven or Granton, is an enormous angular, pyramidal structure shooting a beam of pink light up into the heavens. I ask the kid what this is.
"That’s Laser City” they say.
Soon I learn of the long and controversial history of this place - of the money that had been senselessly thrown at it, of the committees and bureaucracy that had gummed up its construction, and the contractors and subcontractors that had swallowed much of the eye watering cost. I see a big catalogue of alternative names for the site and the elaborate justifications given for them. One of them is “Computer City”.
“I can’t let them call it that” says Noel Edmonds, suddenly, in what appears to be a flashback. “I’ll veto it. The public will never understand what it is”
And, to be fair, it does sound like an electronics retailer from the 1990s.
I’m later told that the ticket to Laser City was the most obnoxious and absurd part of it. Itself constituting an expensive piece of consumer electronics, and was one of the main reasons the site was so costly to enter. Later I’m being given a tour of the company that made the offending tickets, just so I can see for myself. The office is a lot like the one I saw earlier, full of pampered cosmopolitan types enjoying the perks of the cushy office. This was for the most part bowls of colourful sweets and candies of imaginative form, which sat on trays every few feet throughout the building.
I am then taken downstairs and shown of the tickets to Laser City, which resembles an enormous candy bar, which was at once both surprising and unsurprising given the Willy-Wonka-esque surrounding. I was invited to unwrap the ticket, and as I peeled the wrapper back, a slow synth music started to build, in anticipation of what was to come. The music was timed and scored perfectly to my unwrapping actions, and I started to see why it cost so much to develop. As soon as I got sight of the ticket itself - a kind of elaborate chocolate bar full of square pits of fondant - the music really got going.
Around this point I realise I am in a dream, and bring out my phone to begin writing down details. Although after a while, I realise this is still in the dream, but check the nocturnal Google Keep app to see what notes I have written, and try to memorise them so I can transfer the details to the waking world.
Pilot
I build a tall structure out of Lego at the window of a hi-rise, knowing full well that something is not quite right with it. Not so much the its build quality, which is decent enough, but that something in the very nature of the construction is unsettling. Night. I'm standing in in the middle of a neon thoroughfare in the rain, the Lego structure now an enormous metal pylon jutting from the middle of the street, stretching up into the night sky. Glowing blue panels higher up are dimly visible through nocturnal smog.
I know now that what I’ve built is a beacon of some sort to try and lure in an alien intelligence from the depths of space or time. After making some final reconfigurations, a nearby shopping centre glows blue and an alien dropship lands suddenly and in full view of the public. It is a fairly generic thing resembling a shuttle raft from Star Trek, and we wait in anticipation to see what sort of being will emerge from the door, but nothing ever does.
Instead, we cut to a hallway that hums in luminous white. It is a series of connected cloisters and chambers, each inhabited by slightly different entities, trying to communicate themselves through the forms that they take. One chamber is flanked within skeletons with engorged heads in the shape of Klein bottles. Another is populated with porcelain slugs with vestigial humanoid features. They slide about like chess pieces, their bodies painted into phrenological segments and cryptic symbols.
What seems to be the final chamber a dance of white statues; Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo turns on its axis, her vegetal hands rippling and thrashing in fast forward even though her face remains frozen. Behind them, Laocoon and his sons struggle is slow motion before rippling fronds of marble. At the end of this ultimate chamber lies a locked door, before which is a headless statue that reaches up as if in rapture, his hands ribbons of thrashing stone.
As my mind glides through this sequence, I scoff at this tortured cliche of an attempt at making first contact.
Later.
In the years that followed, it was revealed that the alien Mind bestowed upon humanity a gift, but only to those who possessed an imminent concept of God. Individuals whose instinct towards the divine was like birds who can sense magnetic north. Driven by something beyond the edge of language to gravitate towards the structure of the unknowable. Despite our species’ religious tendencies this turned out to be an extremely small portion of the global population, but one of them was me.
Over time The Mind had assembled us into a close-knit cabal, one which wore uniforms with quasi-militaristic, retro-futuristic stylings. And it had tasked us with with finding others like us who could wield this this gift - whatever it is - to do something with it that felt very important but also very unclear. As we chatted and hung about in what looked like a military mess. Our irises glowed blue in fanatic intensity but as I look closer into them I see corporate sponsorship in the whites of our eyes like optical flotsam.
At one point I notice that one of our cabal is TV’s Patrick Stewart, and wonder what he might be doing here, as that would be a stroke of luck. Then one of the cabal announces that in addition to seeking out people with similarly glowing blue eyes, they also had to have blonde hair, and suddenly I see in horror what is going on.
This is the Pilot episode of the new Jean Luc Picard TV series, and it appears to being made to appeal to internet edgelords, crackpots and ethnic-nationalists. I could see that the seeds they were planting would bloom into a lizard-heavy alien infiltration storyline, and something like a New World Order plot would retcon the more traditional Vulcan origin story of the United Federation of Planets.
”The fans are going to hate this”, I think.
The locked chamber at the end of the long, white hallway is somewhere I have seen before and has repeated in many dreams throughout the years. It resembles a damp, stone basement full of secrets stored on heavy wooden shelves. They sit like old furniture, rotten, indistinct and draped in tarpaulin.
Behind them, barely visible in the shade, lies another door.
Perspex Prison
I am in an old, run down council flat in Niddrie, its walls coated in crumbling browned wallpaper and furnished with dirty old sofas from the 70s. Having not been here in years I look out the window to survey what it is like today, and see a semi-wild grassland full of with abstract forms of indeterminate scale. I wonder for a moment if they are pieces of rotting garden furniture or enormous boastful thrusts of starchitecture.
I exit the house and walk through a crowd of young families in the gleaming midday sun, across an uneven and undulating landscape made of translucent panels suspended high above a coastline. The entire vista as perfect and pristine as an architect’s rendering. Pushing through the plexiglas mosaic are transparent tubes about the size of a man, which slide up and down through the floor libidinously. The rubber apertures at their tips are an array of garish 90s colours, and spit mathematically precise arcs of water that fall to the ground in complex patterns.
Rising from this panorama is en enormous wet mass, glistening blue in the sunshine. A living Uluru from which a vast eye stares in hopeless and resigned oblivion. Slowly I realise this is a Whale, trapped in this perspex prison as if in amber. Children climb over it like so many excited ants, battering it with little clubs and clawing at its flesh. As I look up, I see rows and rows of these beasts, locked for eternity, and stretching off far into the horizon.
Visiting Cousin
I take my infant son Gaius to visit his cousin, who was born around the same time but suffered tragic complications at birth, which resulted in severe deformities (this I dimly recognise this as the sequel to some previous dream).
As I enter his house, I negotiate the many bright toys strews across the floor, which given the layers of dust on them seem to have been undisturbed for some time. I accidentally kick some ball or other which clatters into some others and causes a commotion that draws a number of strange, horned purple insects which scuttle around between hiding places. This in turn causes what can only be called a mass migration of hundreds of grey spiders from beneath the TV stand to under the sofa, their hair-thin legs almost invisible against the grubby, faded, shag-carpet Serengeti. As I walk deeper into the house, static faces of relatives blur past me, their presence distant, like so many over-edited social media photos.
The cousin, whose name I don’t know, sits in a teal medical chair in the corner, his face a knot of scar tissue atop a ruffed collar of coloured pencils held together with epoxy resin, seemingly there to hide enormous gory chasms in his neck. A small fleshy sack hangs around his neck like a medallion, weakly inflating and deflating at irregular intervals. He stares out, blankly from one sickly amber eye, a tube or tendon trailing from the other ruined socket to disappear over his shoulder. All around us is silence.
“Say hello to your cousin” I say to Gaius enthusiastically, as I bounce him on my knee.
Cousin responds in a remarkably clear and articulate voice and reflects stoically and at great length on his troubled birth and the subsequent surgeries as if a POW recounting his captivity and torture. It is all very tragic, but as the monologue continues it becomes more and more self-absorbed and cousin preoccupied with his own bravery. I respond something along the lines as I’m meant to;
“You're very brave” I nod.
He continues for a while more in the same manner of self-congratulatory auto-mythology. Suddenly, he appears to us as if he were a man untouched by these tragedies, handsome and clean-cut with and with a dashing 5-o-clock shadow.
“If I can overcome this” he continues again “...what are the rest of you all doing?? Hmm? Do I not inspire the rest of them to try harder? To be better?”
Eventually, I make my excuses, collect the boy, and begin the ritual of leaving, but get lost and accidentally enter a room-sized jacuzzi lazed with glamorous bodies. I try to navigate the hedonistic terrain and achieve nothing other than getting my shoes damp.
Two Fish
I drift in space, my consciousness inhabiting a volume of water containing two fish. It fills a black, human-shaped containment suit scored with geometrical patterns, with areas of translucent plastic - such as the gauntlet-like hands - through which I see the cosmos refracted through my aquatic form. I wonder if I am the water, or I am the fish, as I spiral into the void.
Zome
It's the latest TV craze; Zome. An inverted skyscraper built a mile into the Martian soil, at the bottom of which crooks and vagabonds and other undesirables are thrown, to battle it out over several seasons of scheming, bloodshed and violent surprises. Forming ad-hoc allegiances to scour for weapons and supplies, only to betray one another as they reach the summit and dream of seeing the shimmer of distant earth from the planet's surface. Four seasons in, and nobody has yet done so.
It's an old format, but timeless. Knowing their audience hunger for futurism cloaked in the warm certainties of the past, the producers recycle once again the ancient aesthetic of neon and wireframe kitsch.
The Dragon of London
The mechanical embryo hung in the sky like a distant satellite, benevolently contemplating the social computations of the city below. I watched as it grew and evolved before me, its metallic hide glistening in the golden hour of the bright blue sky. As its reptilian form became apparent, it seemed to notice me standing on the rooftop, and uncoiled as it gracefully rippled in slow motion towards me. It wove through the muddle of glass towers, churches and Georgian tenements gracefully, its skin a shimmering landscape of silver panels in enigmatic arrangements. It turned to a woman next to me to ask what it was. "Its the Dragon of London," she said as if I was a tourist.
The dragon continued to seek me, eventually settling on the rooftop before me and inviting me into its maw. Inside, a woman with red eyes and deep green skin flecked with golden freckles spoke in an ethereal voice.
"Some years ago Jamie, you wrote something of profound importance to future generations. "Really," I said, thinking of my scribblings on history or psychology or some such.
"Yes", she said. "It was about some kind of savings account, a - how you say - ISA? We must know more of this thing."
My heart sank as I assumed she was referring to the documentation of a financial services apps I'd worked on a few years. I left the Dragon of London, disappointed.
Old Folks Home
A centenarian sits foetus-like in a hospital chair, his face on the verge of implosion. Suddenly, a yawn so vast and expansive that his face prolapses and turns completely inside-out. A nurse walks over and nonchalantly folds in back the right way before carrying on with her business. Elsewhere, in perspex tubs like those for holding sickly infants, even older humans sit, devlolved into little more than shrunken heads with ribbed manifolds of bone and flesh prodruding from the sides of thier face.
In darkness something scuttles in the screams
My friend Jessica Ballantyne is hard on cash and decides to sign up for a program to have genetic tests conducted on her, by a company called Cybius Technology. As the weeks go on she becomes distant and withdrawn, and so do the others in her group that submitted to the genetic editing. Later, Cybius hires a gym hall to set up challenges between a purely human group with their own group with enhancements. Unexpectedly, Jessica and the Enchanced lie face down on the floor and begin to move across the hall by wriggling like snakes. In unison, they bounce back and forth between the walls like lightwaves, and move through and around the humans as if water. The behaviour surprised even those at Cybius who set up the experiment. Later, Jessica tells me that they experienced a form of hive-mind unity during the episode, which she described as a form of divine transcendence.
But there is a sense of foreboding in the unfolding of events. While we contemplate whether we have witnessed some new form of step in human evolution, I look back to some of Cybius' other scandals. Like when they sold lifelike, humanoid robotic servants that were found to be using actual human brains. As it was illegal to fix them yourself, when they "broke" (lost their minds) and were sent in for repair, the brains were destroyed and swapped for new ones harvested by some illegal means, such as by from prisons, or kidnap victims.
Somewhere in Cybius basement, in darkness something scuttles in the screams.
Later, in a medieval street, a giant lobster speedily climbs up the bricks with the speed of a ferret, and weaves through the streets to escape capture. When this becomes inevitable, it launched itself at someone, plunging its neon yellow claws deep into his heart.
Unexpected Twist
It is the finale of the new season of Game of Thrones and Cerci is attempting black magic to spawn a new child. To do so, she merges with a pulsating Cronenberg-esque mass of flesh, and as she does so, a baby's face begins to appear from her shoulder. The Queen is pleased.
Then, something goes horribly wrong. Unable to control herself, she grabs a dagger and begins repeatedly stabbing the child in the face. As she does so her face turns white and ridges begin to appear on her forehead. The sorcery has unknowingly unleashed the eldritch forces of evil!
She tears herself from the fleshy mass, transformed; resembling something between an albino version of Terrahawks monster "Sram", and a lame neon mid-90s GI Joe. The dramatic reveal was meant to be a series cliffhanger; the arrival of another new menacing army! But all I could think was "Hmm, this isn't really working, is it."
Demon Temple
I look across a landscape composed of decayed prehistoric animals, turtles, dinosaurs and extinct sea monsters. Rather than being fossilised, flesh still hung from their bones in gory undulations that stretched off into the horizon. Discovered in China in this remarkable state, the whole area was now in the process of being turned into a theme park.
Later, I’m in an ancient temple architecturally similar to Angkor Watt but with hints of renaissance style. It is centred around an enormous, elaborate stone statue that depicts a human sacrifice. Bodies entwine and contort in emotive Bernini-esque tangles, with lovingly carved entrails torn from bodies by horrors someway between medieval demons and sea anemones. Sheets of rain lash against the structure as I go inside to try and find the gift shop, and eventually, the loo.