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SeedComp 2023: Cozy Simulation 2999, April 1, 2023The problem with a job is that you’re paid. A series of rhetorical genuflections yielding to acts performed for the express purpose of being paid. Because you exist atop an irreducibly complex interdependence of abstractions that have costs, because maintaining your existence requires you to tend all debts public and private. Because, having been born, you wouldn’t mind also being warm: “Somewhere a fireplace is crackling. You are wrapped in an old quilt. Soft downy fuzz. You remember a patch of sunlight on the carpet. Your head feels languid with dreams.”
In the fuzz of enclosure believe you’re sufficient, continuance as easy as breathing in, out, in, out, persisting at perpetual equilibrium, living the dream… “It would be so easy to sleep here.” But you can’t, the alarm yelps, you are required, no, not you, but the work of you in the age of mechanical reproduction: “In front of me are numerous bodies. / Behind me are numerous bodies. / Each body is covered with a suckling angel. / Above and below me, the other conveyor belts carry other cargo. / Angels graft neuroregimen patches to vacant-eyed patients heaped on racks. / Angels snip and sew at piles of raw bleeding organs assembling them into fresh new lifeforms. / Angels jab tendrils into dry skeletons and inject them with nutritional sludge until they swell into healthy individuals ready to enter society. / Angels swarm through the air, radiant against the dark machinery.” Hyperstructures automating particulate response into actualizing forces you adopt to adapt to where nutrients await to feed itself, you.
Thence hence thence the perpetual motion machine that spins you out to spin it out to spin all of this out of control, no, there will be control, any anomalizing outside of useful whiplashes into industrial ultraviolence: “Beyond the window the bleak metal of rusty girders shining black and lurid in the haze. Wind whistles through jagged glass. / Huddled on the floor slick with mold and blood. The buzzing of the machinery outside is endless. Mechanical churn and clatter.” You can fight, sure, of course, with which resource? You have nothing, no fuel, you will go nowhere: “Need to run. Can’t muster the strength. Hear machinery buzzing beyond the broken window. Can’t muster the strength.” Listen, yes, it’s so exhausting, this whole, well, listen, I hear you, that’s totally normal, “The desire to curl up and close your eyes.” That’s a debt you can pay. Trust me, once you earn enough, you can cycle through activities purely for itself, yourself I mean, you can savor any uselessly manifest: “Go outside / Drink something / Watch the fire / Read a book / Watch the holoscreen / Eat something / Create art” Anything is possible thanks to these “Transmission towers bristling with frozen satellite dishes. Electric current humming through barbed wire.” Choose whichever delight you like, choose two, choose three, until the desire to sleep overtakes you, suddenly the alarm is screaming, you are gushing through “great churning machines and smokestacks shooting black plumes into the viridian haze and crowds of strange and beautiful things but I know none of it because we are born to the hive and we die to the hive. We swarm through the pipeways under the angelic harmony of a thousand others and we are never truly alone.” And you owe obligations to the others, don’t you? You don’t want to be a burden, do you?
Crawling your way back each and exhausted time as “Numbing tranquility fills you … Even as the mass of tendrils comes closer and you recognize vaguely the shape of blades. / Even as blood spurts from fresh wounds and is immediately licked up by our brethren nearby.” Rest assured, “You will be put to use in the best way possible. / All things are as they should be.” If your use wasn’t valuable, the currents wouldn’t flow through you. In each electrification assured you still map to the grid, oriented to the coursing, where you belong. In the alternating current of velvet and voltage. “You would be beautiful divided into your component parts, each individual part of your mind humming along in perfect beauty.”
