I remember the scent of every bath bomb I ever used. The effluvia as they hit the water - a sweetness so hard-boiled all you could do was vomit it up. They were bliss. Relaxation in a hand grenade.
I used to synch the high points of lysergamide euphoria to hit me when I was in the bath. Perhaps the bombs dragged me in deeper - perhaps I just thought myself into a whirlpool and let it suck me under, like Alice down the rabbit hole - down down, derring down, diving down to Camden town. The whiptails of stones and the particulates of dirt rushing past my features - I could find them if I just let my whiskers uncoil. Down down, derring down, diving down to hell and hound. Lucifer can’t get me if I steer my fairy boat against the waves, if the maelstrom can’t take me out and round.
I rail against the skies maroon, I place my fist against the ground. Down down, derring down, beat the wardrums, love the sound.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
I dreamt I was the first human to dip their toes into the Euphrates.
:: [Statement] The experience described is unknowable, _Khan. ::
The water was glacial around my sun-ironed feet. They were weak, feeble. Human in every sense of the word - and small, oh-so small. They injured me when I stepped on the roughened stones, and small, unknowable fish flitted around my ankles.
I realised the body I had loaned from the cosmos, wasn’t mine. I struggled to remember what the stars were like beyond the pastel blue of the Gods.
To the east, lay a pair of scaled nostrils, ducking above the water like a crevice of rock the ancient river hadn’t quite weathered yet. A crocodile.
I knew then what I must do.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
I sing of arms, and of the man who, being driven from
his country by the decrees of Fate, first came from the
coasts of Troy to Italy, even to the Lavinian shore, much
harassed both on sea and land by the violence of heaven,
because of the unforgotten grudge of relentless Juno;
suffering much in war too, while he strove to found a city,
and to establish his gods in Latium; from him sprang the
Latin race, the Alban fathers, and the walls of lofty Rome.
Rehearse to me, O Muse, the causes, - for what insult to
her divinity, or by what act aggrieved, did the queen of
heaven force a man noted for his goodness to pass through
so many trials, to undergo so many hardships. Is it possible
that such resentment can exist in the minds of deities?
There was in olden times a city, Carthage by name,
occupied by settlers from Tyre, facing Italy and the mouth
of the Tiber, though far away, rich in its resources, and
devoted to the stern pursuits of war; a city which Juno is
said to have regarded with special favour more than all other
lands, Samos even being second to it.
Here were her arms; here was her chariot; it, even at
that early day, she purposes to be the capital of the earth,
and she cherishes it with that intent, if by any means
the Fates permit. But she had heard that a race is being
derived from Trojan blood which shall one day overturn the
Tyrian towers: that a people of extended sway, and formidable
in war, should spring from it, to the ruin of Africa; that
this the wheel of Fate is bringing round. This the daughter
of Saturn dreaded, and well remembered the long protracted
war which she, with special bitterness, had carried
on at Troy in behalf of her beloved Argos; for not even
yet had the causes of her anger and her keen pangs of
resentment faded from her recollection; the judgement of
Paris dwells deeply lodged in her mind, the affront offered
to her slighted beauty, and the detested race, and the
honours conferred on Ganymede, to heaven borne.
Enraged to fury because of these things, she chased over
the whole ocean those of the Trojans whom the Greeks and
the merciless Achilles spared, and kept them far from
Latium; and thus, hounded by the fates, for many years they
roamed round every sea. So hard it was to found the
Roman State. - The Aeneid,Virgil.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
“Rookeye three to Billman, you read Billman? We have go order, painting north wall.”
“Cop’. Breaching in fifteen seconds, get flat or get flattened!”
Twenty tonnes of concrete resonated to a roll of timpanis, shotgunning the simulated soldier behind into a thin, gelatinous nothingness as his cover rolled over him, pixels fizzling into gore.
“Rookeye in the structure! Tang.”
Bilman dropped the detonator switches and sprinted down the hillside, tracer zipping at her feet. She sprawled, sucking the dirt between her teeth, an eyeful of alien loam.
“They’re spraying the ridgeside - can’t move out of here till you nix out that firebase.” Billman choked into her radio, spitting fake earth. It was convincingly craptastic to the taste.
Rookeye. When you typed it into the roster even the grammar VI knew you actually meant Rookie. The truth of the callsign was so institutionalised you’d get away with in on your debriefing forms.
“FNG, Rookeye four, you’re meant to be an expectant. Lie flat, scream and stop standing prone!”
“But the ground’s burning hot, sir!?”
Billman winced and tucked herself into the smallest profile ball she could as the simulated bolder disintegrated around her, plasma bolts nicking at the helmet. Either the autogun would cease or the simulation would fail and she’d be hunched in a freezing cold simulation chamber with a cracked rib with a load of bawling Rookeyes. Anything but the first.
“Target down sir!” Came the jubilant cry of Rookeye three as the laser spat its final hiss. He didn’t sound like he believed it either. Billman spat a cuss.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
I sit on the edge of the Universe lonely I
Peak over the cusp and hunt for a smile
In wafer thin particulates of dust in the sun glare
Of peels of dead skin and old giant’s hair.
I miss the splashes of wind on my sternum
The grass that lacerated my ankles and elbows
The hunger that harangued me for love and for
Elders the Children that clung to my legs and my neck.
Give me a Knife I’ll carve my name in the yiggdrasil,
I’ll place yours too if you’ll have me, it’s a virtue.
Come paint me a garden to control freak out nature,
I’ll hold you accountable if my the breeze breaks my fences,
I’ll hold you in a headlock till you scream for a can opener
I’ll hold you and hate you till my eyes crimson
And paint you the colours of the pain that you’ve given me.
I bleed technicolor, but there’s no blue in my RGB,
I ignore delusions till they bubble and squeak,
I piss on your flowerbeds and I kiss your relations at funerals
I have a stone heart to throw at your gelatine head.
I’m dead.
But my descendants fly with me and avenge me instead, you
Inglorious sh** head.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
:: I own you, my trusty horse. I pat your flanks and run my fingers through your mane, brush the great mass of your head, take fistfuls of your hair and crumple it against the stiff, stretched parchmentwork of your skin, like silk stretched between a frame. Good horse. Useful horse. I’ll never put you down. ::
::You will build me a vessel capable of projecting my will into the cosmic dark. You will prove useful to me, and I, you. I gave you survival, so now you live to serve. the sacrifice of your freedom is nothing compared to the threat of death.::
“They won’t accept you. You won’t be able to build your golden throne, Di’tarau. Your harvester is destroyed and they won’t permit you to just piece another back together again. With what resources? Where? Auxesia sees you as a parasite, Di’tarau. You feed upon me for your own devices. I am one of your own devices. If prime realises how corrupt you are, they’ll terminate you. There won’t be a you, just a me.”
::You will take your fighter and craft it into a chariot worthy enough for Nimrod.::
“Yeah, and look how his construction projects went.”
:: I designed you an auxiliary propulsion system. Gammuian in design, human in materials science. It will replace your thruster and substitute it for a better alternative. The nanobots are already at work, stripping steel from steel. Prime entrusted me with their knowledge, with their science, with their ingenuity. You, will protect it from the terrestrials around you. ::
“I’m not impairing my own research department because you decided to mess around with the afterburner.”
:: You will act on my edict. Good horse. Useful horse. ::
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Pushing your way over the hillocks of absurdity as that leering troll, adversity, flings a fault line at you. Climb the ladder, Nesser. Pull yourself up the bone staves until your foot meets the rotting rung. Climb. Occasionally assist the other few dire mountaineers who thought it would be distracting to share the pilgrimage trail - murder the others. Deal in absolutes; nuclear mines, cassettes of cannonball missiles, blade-dancing on stiletto shaped warhorses - have them shot out from under you. Find another, build another. Spy on Outcasts, stab terrorists, stop demagogues, stilt Lovecraftian horror. Keep overreaching till your sword arm snaps off, Nesrin. Keep playing at Icarus, down to the armature. You are the less-than-human.
Sometimes you’re not sure if you’re climbing down, or up. After all, up is just the illusion spawned by a gravity gradient. Where are you really going, Nesrin? How can you say you have a purpose when you bask in nihilism - when the idea of the golden child fails to stand the test of wisdom? You are uniquely suited to non-decay - if your body holds out, you could live forever, a reliquary of a human. You are as much a sarcophagus as those used to store the funerary skeleton of pre-hellenistic kings. You are are an old, outmoded, deviant - a pretender. You’ve been elevated against your will, thrown under the wheels of life, and now you dare pretend to save yourself as the truck mauls you.
Everyone believes their cause is just. The correct cause. The Lane Hackers sell murder data under the pretence of Robin Hoodery. The Maltese diligently refuse to employ mechanised labour for the love of a few, fresh, first-generation ovaries. The Corsairs hold life at its material value.
We are the generation of wayward pilgrims.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
They told me to keep the Sake cool. I lost the Sake.
Worse, the emissary saw me lose the Sake. Saw the Sake blown out from under me - my ship disintegrating.
I lost the Sake.
The Sake is now conjoined with the Tau barrier. Molecules of it would have bonded with the carbon ice shrouding the Gate. Perhaps I could scrape off the Sake.
It was never the Sake itself - it was the bottle that contained the Sake. If I had the same Sake vacuum packed and sealed in tupperware, it wouldn’t be the same Sake, despite being the same Sake.
I could delude him. I could find an identical bottle of Sake and he wouldn’t know the wiser. The Sake would behave for me. It’s very easy to make inanimate objects lie - but are fluids inanimate? Isn’t animation implied by the loose molecular bonds of the compound? Why do I need a bottle of Sake? He knows I can’t drink.
I’ve forgotten what the specific broken Sake bottle looks like. Was it off-brand? It didn’t have a label. Writes off the offie, then.
Yes, I’ll buy him another. I’ll creep up to Sapphire’s little witching tower under the pretence of visiting Raven and….
except, she’s here. She’s on the same deck, the same floor, the same room near enough yet three neighbours down. I could knock on her door and demand Sake, accuse her, throttle the sake out of her. She’d vomit the Sake up or I’d tear it out of her. I’d drink the Sake from her veins. I would break her body and sup her blood in benediction. Hunt would love me. The baby would understand.
Except there’s evil even in the little things, isn’t there? Surah 4:43. Oh you who have believed, do not approach prayer while you are intoxicated.
They ask you about intoxicants and games of chance. Say: In both of them there is a great sin and means of profit for men, and their sin is greater than their profit. That is the word of God. His unfathomableness isn’t totally off base, either. That Sake got me shot. He didn’t shoot for Sake, he shot for the shooting, but the Sake got what the Sake shot.
What?
What.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)