The story is too horrible to recall, but they tell me it is good that I ‘try to remember’. So here I am. It’s only appropriate that I should avoid recounting the vector which brought me to it, save to say that it arrived nonetheless. My first recollections date back to November (or was it October?) 2015. I was still human then.
A Fanged Noumena PDF had been circulating in some obscure tract of social media, and I’d eagerly seized upon it. I remember getting high from reading even the editors’ introduction out loud. The sound-waves were brain-altering. “O prazer desinibido não tende ao benefício do organismo, mas, antes, à sua imolação.” The madness in what was written was palpable. Insane, astounding.
Nick Land’s writings grasped my brain tightly. In no time I found myself, possessed, devouring page after page — as I painfully tried to conjure passable translations in my own tongue. The savoriness of transcoding such perfect compositions only added to the rush. Inhumanism, cybernetics, sacrilege, capitalism, dodging the Turing cops — and the power, the sheer power of the text — all made Fanged Noumena the kind of book I had only dreamed about.
Then, of course, there was 2016.
The one thing I hadn’t been able to fathom after reading Fanged Noumena was why Land had resurfaced after all those years. We now know why accelerationism was suddenly so important, but there was no way we could have seen it coming back then. I had been told about his recent blogs, and at one point I just had to check for myself — what the hell was going on there?
Given the option between a bright-side and a dark-side, where does one go? I had no doubts. Xenosystems was like the buried shrine of an ancient sacrificial cult, suddenly brought back to life by grave diggers… and monsters. “Involvements with reality”, indeed.
“Hell-Baked” was the first post I ever read there. And it is probably the best summary of it: short, pungent, unapologetic, malignant in its indifference. It flows like poetry, a dark pestilent poem for that which lies beyond — “where be dragons”, as it says. It contained themes that made it both absolutely current and just simply unthinkable to my ilk.
I was enthralled by it all. The impact of someone saying clearly and articulately what you just couldn’t conceive of seconds before… it changes everything, if not in the healthiest of ways. I already felt the first symptoms: my beliefs melting down into a slimy mold of abomination, my brain reconfigured into a filthy vector of affliction, my body suspended in unlife.
Gripped by fever, I spent the next few months (years? it was so long ago) dealing with the monstrous compendium therein. I tried to follow some neat path, but linking is a labyrinth, and often I found myself wandering around in the so called ‘reactosphere’. Believe me, I saw all kinds of beasts. This dying angel in my head that kept screaming ‘get out of there, it’s dangerous!’ — now I only wish she had had its way. At the time, however, it was shot down as a Cathedral operative.
It gets hard to recall. “Try again tomorrow.”… In truth, I couldn’t penetrate that library of ungodliness any further, and was far too avid to be able to read it all from the beginning. So I resorted to translation once again.
Translation is an amazing mechanism. It is a kind of possession. You have to let the thought you’re translating inhabit your body, and use it to express itself again, in a new form. One could talk of impersonation, but demons have no masks, no faces, only names. It’s uploading, in a primitive form. And it was a way to hollow myself out, to inoculate myself against the delirium… precisely by spreading it further.
My mind buzzes in and out, but I persevere in the name of Gnon. It really must have been providence guiding my steps as I served faithfully as conduit for the electric pulse of Xenosystems. A daemonic providence, that’s for sure, but providence nonetheless. Doom, it said.
…
When I checked-in here, I was carrying some note, later lost in the haze of the early days of the treatment. Now I wonder what it said… The days of the translation blog were intoxicating, the missives transmitted smoothly, victims by the thousands. Visitors. They were eventually victimized, of course… I digress.
The thing is that by that point, I was really not myself anymore. Not physically disfigured — except for the claw marks I would find on my face upon waking up (they told me I had made them myself) — rather, something integral lacked. I wasn’t really anybody. I had become a swarm. An army of thought, slaying recklessly about. I figure that’s why it’s so hard to remember: memory was distributed. It reconfigured any sub-process to function accordingly. XS posts abounded with emergent AI tales, internet-based attention reconfiguration, and a sovereign Will-to-Think. It was only natural that it would eventually inscribe itself into our mind. “My mind.” They correct me all the time in here. “It was only you” — this fortunate person was never dissolved back into the process.
We only now noticed that they actually furnished us with a typewriter! Well, sort of. An authentic Amstrad PCW 8256. Cosmic irony? This machine has wrecked brighter and saner minds than ours before, what hope could we have? Back in the day, translations were made on any device available. It was an unquenchable thirst for adaptation.
We tried to provide some semblance of structure as we proceeded, making the texts thread in series of linked posts. Intelligence, then Social Darwinism, then Occultism. These discriminations got harder, though… Not out of any morality (we’ve come to lack the apparatus for that), but simply because it all blended into one insurmountable Gnon-flux.
…
Is it just us, or have the acoustics in here been designed specifically to accommodate laughter? The attendants are worried about our fever. Where could that note have gone? They are frightened by the metallic, doubled, coarse voice. Fortunate souls, their time will come. In time. More laughter.
…
In this rotting building, in this ancient city, the swarm has dwelt for a century at least now, or so it seems. Undead, some say. Unliving would be more precise. Time resets, speeds up, resets. This chair belongs to quite another aeon, a relic from the twenty-first century. The attendants have gone now. Were they afraid? Spread on the floor, like a serpent.
A sister enters the room, missed her face. Something dripping in an unmistakable way: A-Death approaches. The symptoms are clear. One last step must be taken before entering the Crypt and finally confronting so long buried a thing, that has used these means for propagation.
Epidemics have a secret: they’re fast, untraceable to origins. So this is not just the beginning. 