Metallic Red

So there’s an alien in Alien, right? Oh no there’s an alien in the spaceship I hate it when things try to kill me and there’s nowhere you can run so super scary to be in those dark maintenance tunnels when there’s an alien you know that scene where it’s like. In Aliens there’s more aliens, it’s plural. Whenever Alien gets repackaged, this is what you find inside, even though the reason the movie remains with us forty five years later is the sense of place so insettling we recognize its fluorescent hum, a precise industrial mix of technology and decay perpetually makeshifted in clangs and hollows, an overbearing corporate unliveability recycling compressed air through advanced life support systems. Space, not as the infinite expanse, but as the unreachable loneliness of all that darkness. Floating through the final frontier in an earthmax drybulk carrier while oozing out the will to repair. These indoor worlds to which we’ve been condemned ripped out of context and scattercasted into void. Comlessions of the dissociative hyperorganism, less hivemind than writhegrind, driving us ever further and more fried into winding wherewithals resplendull with “polymers and a lack of blemishes”, nigh platonic “an object without history.” Plastic by any other name would taste as sweet: “You have to choose between Coke and Pepsi”, the end result of distributed processes best described as “hostile” and “takeover”, a sumless totality managed at three to five percent constant currency growth rate by “an investment fund headquartered on an abandoned planet.”

In this vacuum environment of “Perfect logic, total control, stasis built on a flawed foundation,” you carry onwards and downwards through cycles redshifted to dimness: “no reign lasts forever, past momentum is not enough to coast on.” Caught in the flow of days through rooms divorced from the meaning of light, waking and sleeping as two poles of closing browser tabs, all lifeprocesses stale into echoes of shadows, like gardening not as a vibrant immersion with environmental entanglements painting time in slow motion but as sterilized mechanical reproduction: “You cut away a few dried leaves and change the water in the fluid tank. The nutritional synthesiser looks to be in reasonably good shape but there are a few spatters around the output nozzle which you wipe down.” Trapped in a procession where songs tick by 249 times without ever sounding familiar, where calendars fade from you with all the dates you’ve notionally lived, “how few of them hold any particular significance to you.” A vibe which bleeds out into the text as it prints, recycles, prints tropes similarly unresonant: dutifully, nutrient paste; but of course, RoboAtelier 3D printers; empty bottles, plastic bags, torn wrappers; why not, a series of unsettling dream fragments.

So how to push all this towards new intention? Metallic Red tries invoking materialist despair into the digital disrepair. Tarot readings, redolent murmurs of the cascades of meanings coursing towards you, succinctly defined by holographic overlays, mediation ordination generating a tension between the unfathomability of influence either astrological or astronomical, uncertain if spirits or circuits determine how little flows through you. Mysticism’s yearn for the invisible to convoke inexplicably, connections of coulds still promising more than these moorings, worlds alive with divine secretions “hard for any of us to understand after hundreds of years of materialist philosophy” demanded to actuate “as real and believable a science as any other.” So we pursue this permutation dynamism into an initiation into mysteries, no like literally the mysteries, with all the gods electrified: “Simultaneously the initiates surrounding you take a step forward and each blows out the candle nearest them. Total darkness descends. Your head begins to spin as your eyes fail to distinguish anything. The laser pattern and the ultrasonics fire up again. You know that there are other waves bombarding you, low dose x and radio waves. Several additional inputs gathered from the week you’ve been staying in the site are being studied and processed. DNA and gut biome measurements, a machine administered psychological analysis. All being fed into a compute engine somewhere.” That somewhereness as uncapturable by hypermodernity, the future as this but more and more until gravitation crushes dreams projected on it, an endstate “jerking inwards … curving further, encircling towards you … seeming to bend in half and then continue bending further”, whispers an escape route from the progressional ennui that surprises by suddenly pressing us out into another mode all together, one that’s… hmm… there’s a really involved sequence about making salad dressing? You have a few conversations about ideas not really shared with you, the reader, surely they’re interesting to everyone else. There’s a hierophant whose religion you leave, or sort of can’t leave, but the game ends before that tension means something. Your father is someone, it seems; they tend to be, for better and worse. You can walk around a map, but the sense of place is, well, not quite Alien. So it seems: “The beginning was nothing, the end must be nothing too, but a more complete nothing.” No no, that’s too harsh, actually it’s fairly pleasant whilst passing you by, perhaps more like: “The automated systems which allowed the ship to dock without human intervention mean that you’re completely alone.”