Void Around Sunlight

Opening

Chapter 1: The Void

Before the structure of the face and body where eyes could gaze upon themselves in the reflection of glass, there was a solitary. I am a man of all things attributed to the dichotomy of constants and variables of human nature. My time allotted to a container of being like water in a glass that quenches the thirst of death. My virtues are without shame, within civilised society I was a heathen branded evil by the collective consensus of sapiens. Beings that dispel waste from their bodies and repeatedly bark when coordinated noise amuses them. I do not consider existence absurd, although I resonate with the likes of Camus, we are not Sisyphus and there is no true imagination or happiness. For we are all a product of one and have been tricked into ontology by the very mind that decided on our inception. A long road ahead leads into the city, one of the last standings on Earth. Mechanical tyrants soar through the sky spewing violence incarnate, a group of the ready and willing are reduced to soaring velvet clouds that graciously fall in a mist. There is a house in the distance, stone, and rustic, a domestic antique sculpted by the natural foundations of matter and calloused hands. I see a thatch of dark hair recede into ambiguity through the window, there are no interruptions and I make for the dwelling. My hands scramble in a mad rush to secure themselves around his neck, the man lashes out at me spitting with a ferocity akin to a wild animal. Nails drag down my skin collecting in clumps underneath his fingernails, I can feel the warm blood running down my limb. Tapping onto the wooden beamed floor serving itself as a morbid metronome that instructs the rhythm of annihilation.

I press my thumbs into his Adam’s apple and drop my entire weight upon him. I drop my soul, the phantom accumulation that hides as the antithesis of physical existence. Gasps and desperation peak through the dark into the down-lighting and a charcoal sketch come to life. There is something strangely homogeneous about this, veins bursting into red vines in his glistening eyeballs, scrunched fists hammering my open wounds. He digs a finger into my open flesh, a piece of me shed from a close encounter with a bullet. His index pushes deeper into my wiring as if searching for a reset button. The poor soldier, stationed at this house and left by a squad that fell circumstance to shelling. This is the final war, we all know that, and we all hope for it, some long to see a day green and blue, pulsating sundresses, smiling mouths, and creased cheeks. I long to see my tormenter, the voice that penetrates deep and speaks of the Hive, for it claims that it is all. A singularity only manifests through the collapse of something magnificently violent, and humanity nears its return to the source hidden in an impenetrable void. The soldier’s life leaves through a gurgle of staggered breath, I am naked, the way man began and the way he shall end. I remove the digit from my newly formed aperture and much time begins to pass as I look upon the stiffening form before me. Pallor mortis and Algor mortis give way to the next step of nature’s efficiency, chemicals interact with muscles that once served the owner a functional utility required to interact with the physical world.

This is what we are, rigor mortis and fleeting ethereal fairies, caught by the net in the cosmos and placed in glass jars made of the cure to our aetiology. I hum a hymn to myself, it brings tears to my eyes, and I indulge my pain, letting it orgasm all it has in a squawk of confusion. Light starts at the feet and raises to the ceiling, and missiles wander like lost dogs through a tired sky, landing anywhere and killing anything. I see the contours of an object in his breast pocket, it is a compass, and such an object reminds me of the abstract concept of morality. Nietzsche dedicated a book to what lies beyond our notions of good and evil, much of philosophy concerned itself with ethics despite the growing reality that it matters not. The ideals of society that stimulated the minds of great thought masturbators are nothing, but diseased dreams caught in the dream catcher of war. The Hive tells me that dementia sets in and will deform our reality into dying echoes reverberating from walls of free will and disorientated nature. I long to exist in such an abstract, a modern art retelling akin to the postmodernity that swelled before the final conflict. Classical lines and colour are reduced to the bizarre, the dissolution of our silly narratives on existence, why should I believe? Why should I not kill this soldier without attempting to reason with him first?

“You are a parasite.”

Maybe I am Hive, but I am here to gorge and starve, for humanity’s last impression shall be one of the extremes. As a former man of faith, I had a revelation, in man there was an act of God. We encompassed all states of matter and even that which exceeded it. Cursing to the blackness I would quarrel with the silent architect over the repercussions of our ‘free will’. My tongue snarled at the deviations of choice and how the rest of my kind had held it as a vice against me, misunderstanding that the physical body encompasses all, and as such, so should the ethereal. The God of ideologies, a deity forged in man’s ambitions of ultimate power and justifying wrath left one thing deductible in its absence of observable existence. No teleological argument could grant my mind solace, and so like Descartes, I dissected, but not my own existence under the guise of an evil being but God under the guise of man. In as such I knew two things, God is all man aspires to be, and whatever waits for us on the other side has the virtue of patience. Now I am to be the last of humankind, not a God but an eater of one, consuming the mind that concocted our existence. This invasive alien species chose me as its vessel, and what is left of me that identified with sapiens is dwindling, for I am the parasite that burrows deep. A vicarious wish fulfillment, to be something outside of the material of all I have known. Since the organ encased within the fragile dome grew sentient it became biased in its own existence. Even the mass production of others like it could not deter such distinctive importance that surrounded the individual perception. Cursed with a candle that burns too fast, reproducing was the only viable option for extension to the realist. Then came ideology, the most detrimental being that of infinity, endless existence that only occurs when existence ceases, a divine paradox. Socrates drank the poisoned chalice to teach his disciples the final lesson, that the human should not fear death for it is nothing more than a binary of life. He believed that the mind and life in turn connected the individual to all that it encompassed, and to disconnect was only achievable through the finality of death.

The Hive knows no disconnect, and while we may be granted a dreamless sleep or a renewal through another existence the singularity of all consciousnesses only knows to create. The infection lay in the soil beneath the primordial soup, a singular cell with a predilection for complexities that dwarfed its own. The sepsis of our origin spread, evolved, mutated viciously, and clambered out of the liquid that swelled its fever until the physical symptom presented itself as legs. I imagine the first rendition of the human mind dragged a stone across the sand and saw the grains part in fear. Notions of nature’s reaction to man’s action began as a whimper, and thus begat the appetite of tyranny, an individual stone held in a single hand, parting thousands of grains with one line. This was our purest form, the primal outline of the Hive before details had crosshatched their way within our perimeters. We saw what one could do to many, and it aroused us in every conceivable way. I imagine the Hive felt such raw and virgin sensations too watching the cell make its first move with the awful wisdom that our interactions with this simulacrum would amount to nothing more than the graces of one.