LIVING, BREEDING (ashcan edition)

Whoa! Nice. 🌊

My playthrough:

Sometimes, through everything, reality is happening.

“I don’t like that,” throats prothel, “noooo,” to an on-screen tech demo out-of-frame. It is the last video you said these words to, with the same glaze over the subject, the same immaterial swipe to clear it. It gracefully clears away, no hesitation.

When Zedeck posts, about storytelling some half rotation of earth back, a silence longer than it takes to stretch half of all muscles in the body passes, and someone comments, “do you have an example?” - it’s the perfect example of to what Zedeck is referring, the commenter has “br[oken] the spell,” after ever plea the post carries.

This sort of shattering silence is air, it is so common, people block, move on, share the block list, the question expunged from experience. Like acetomedaphen, and acorns before it, why go along with the pain?

In space, years from now and years ago, terra snot - that says “planetary ejecta” - settled, from pluto, from europa, from places the greek obsessions of the west haven’t touched, they mixed with cups of comet and with pus from the mantle.

So shaped the happy period you destined to be was warped, like hammers warping bronze, into a cup. Cup shape curved water into a cup, giving way to air pockets and jellyfish and you. Dashing through periods, rodent and trash. No notes.

Brains dream of the tech demo. You had blocked it, that was fucked. Bad brain. Complain. A reply - that sux - brings more. “Yeah, the robots were being pretty nasty,” you take the rest into a document, typing furiously about the dream.

How it could have gone and didn’t, as though the dream decided to. As though the dreams want-You close the document. You head back to the station. You sit on the bench, talking to someone there who missed their connection eating at a place you like.

You two talk for a time. This place is nice. All the people, how real they are, all the pictures, the voice chats. They all have slowly cleared the threshold - real, human, true - some still in quarentine, still a few kilobytes of fishy data, swuirming around, enfleshilating with a quip here, a memory there, prose, the occasional error, Are they worth knowing - never. Block.

Hungry for what is to collapse - like the end of a dwarf fortress movie where pets give the dwarves mental stability, fae moods are provided for, and those that leave become traders, but it’s living people. Where what bring that to the moment has not been cleared, still grows, grows every day bites. Itch it.

Itch cream. How enjoyable is it to hunt around for the flea that jumps from your neck to your groin as you scratch with your foot your jaw’s bottom line? Stress meds. How ignorable is a stomach growl (one to ten - lizard to bear)? How hungry dreams to need less.

Lost the ability to orgasm, hunt. Get fucked by everything, a side-scroller worth of hook-ups. They get off, you don’t. You start to fill the parts of your brain where your orgasms used to be with those of partners. Bringing them to orgasm is like bringing you there.

An entire order of people just like you form. They call you water. You go on strike. They scream for orgasms you deny. They kill, of course they do. You hold the line. Pets. Fae moods cared for. Beds and a home. Travel. Not easy, not soon, but eventually. They can’t orgasm without you. You were the bots all along. Eventually, you will be mitochondria, a life within their life. But, for now. You are a bed, warm sheets, and posters of places you’ve yet to bring someone to orgasm.

As you stare at an archway where witches were once burned, you imagine chaining someone to the far, brick structures of the arch spanning three arm spans across and four armspans up. You imagine tickling them, kissing them, stars above you, a bonfire to their back, they are suspended and dripping.

The viewcount is not a number. As you plant a seed in the dirt below their suspended form and piss on it and step back. As what grows towers the entire length of the structure, ropes of verdance fall over arms of the one chained, everything swelling accornding to what you two talked about, and printed the seed together.

Two hands over the connection, closing it like loops, like this was always what happens, like life is the loops we close along our way to where we are one another fulfilling fantasies. Eventually, the plant rots away from the tower. The fire burns the plant rot away.

The plant, using the tower as scaffold breaks the chains of the one you pleasure and finish them off in a warm inner sanctum the vines make over the bonfire, wrapping over limbs, making patterns over skin learned through journals and conversations and all of it negotiated out of a relationship with feeling nothing.

And as you walk by the tower later, on your way to the lake to feed ducks peas, you giggle their jean shorts turning a richer color, and none of you stop smiling. It hurts. You’ll dream about it later. For now, you’re off to pet a duck.