Empire of the Senseless. Кэти Акер
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through the waters, sea-cruise missiles with two hundred kt. nuclear warheads swam like dolphins. Carrying at least twelve ALCMs on extended pylons and eight on internal rotary launchers, B-52 bombers rode on cars whose trunks held various nerve gases which seeped out through the city atmosphere at designated intervals. ‘Homing-and-kill’ vehicles, upon sensing the presence of any living thing with their infra-red sensors, unfurled two-metre-long metal ribs. Metallic weights studded the metal ribs. The insect life moved on. The cops’ faces, as they killed off the poor people, as they were supposed to, were masks of human beings. And the faces of the politicians are death. A young boy who lay in the street had hollowed-out eye sockets, skinless arms, and a smile due to the large amounts of acid rain in the air. Red and black deco staircases from the magenta tops of buildings bridged building to building.
Inside the library’s research department, the construct cunt inserted a sub-programme into that part of the video network. The sub-programme altered certain core custodial commands so that she could retrieve the code.
The code said: GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.
The code would lead me to the human construct who would lead me to, or allow me, my drug.
Dead Love
I must have passed out because I had a nightmare: that the world is full of people who no longer feel. They are carrying on their businesses as usual, in fact better than usual, because they no longer feel. In the dream I felt my whole being struck still, as if I had died.
The cunt was hurt. I realized that when I awoke. The terrorists said. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analogue, however, were coming, down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back, like a cat’s, was arching in convulsions. Pink warm waves were lapping her thighs.
Bodies were piled six deep in the library’s halls. The latest body, shot through the neck on Black’s road. But he is not dead …
I must have passed out because I had a nightmare: To my dead sister, dream somehow of paradise. It’s the only thing that can now keep us alive. The sweetness of your mouth. Coming while not being bruised by the hatred of the one who’s making you come. You no longer don’t have to not exist.
Look, my sister: the eyes are gone. The suns. No one’s looking. You can now do whatever you want: Crying out; teasing the thickness of thighs; smouldering by smiling. Since the world has disappeared: there’s nothing; no one looks at anyone.
Since the world has disappeared: rather than objects, there exists that smouldering within time where and when subject meets object. This voluptuousness of your thighs. Odours seeping out of cunt juice and semen. Since the only mirrors are distorted; all is secret. Please come back to my arms. Without you I am nothing.
It’s winter. Winter is dead time. I don’t have any life now that my sister is dead. Raise us from the dead.
Raze.
But no one looks like Abhor. Everyone looks like the female who ratted on me. The boss, the terrorist leader, the terrorists – they all had the face of the female who ratted on me. It was the dead of winter. Or it was the winter of us, dead. The code I had gotten read ‘WINTER’. It was the winter of death.
I was safe: outside. ‘What does WINTER mean?’ I asked the Modern Terrorist leader.
‘WINTER’S a recognition code for an AI. This particular AI is, that is his money is located in Berne. Money is a kind of citizenship. Americans are world citizens.’
‘Does my boss know about WINTER?’
‘Does a doctor know about death?’ the terrorist replied. ‘Let me tell you a story:
‘A certain fence was living, well, he was fencing off of the corner of Bowery and Houston Street. Around the corner from the bum bar in which the one-eyed Irish sang,
The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows
Have pulled …
and then cried into whatever whisky he could beg from someone. Life’s a waste of booze.’
I thought about dead cunts. ‘Life’s a waste.’
‘Some of the fences sold real clothing such as rubber jackets and army leather. Others, being less conventional, at least in their business, more like the bums who wipe windshields, dealt in prosynthetic limbs and other works of art. Mommy, the off-the-corner man, was an art dealer.
‘There was another art dealer who had once been a bum, but now was dealing in the junk for which the rich pay a lot of money. His name was Daddy.
‘Daddy came to Mommy to ask for a favour. New York City art dealers have their special codes.
‘Daddy said to Mommy: “My newest … supplier …”
‘ “Burglar.”
‘ “My newest burglar is a rat who goes by the name of Ratso. Since rats are very intelligent, Ratso has a fondness for art objects. The rat craves art. His latest work-of-art, his newest find, find-and-keep so-to-speak, is a head. Not any head. It’s a dead head and death is done up in pearls. Despite the obvious value of this work of art, its humanity, not being a humanist, I advised Ratso to get rid of it. These days times are so hard that heads are worthless.
‘ “At that moment I remembered I knew a head freak. A head freak who was rich. And liked to spend it.
‘ “I accepted the rat’s human head. Upon minute careful inspection, this head revealed the trademarks of the AI, American Intelligence, who’re backing the AMA. Next to the military, the American medical industry take in the largest amounts of legal profit in the western hemisphere. No wonder the head was dead.
‘ “At the very moment I realized this, a gulag came through my door. A block, a dunderhead, a lump of cement, a lobotomized mongoloid. A man who acted like he had all the muscle in the world because he owned everything in the world. A man who didn’t need to walk as if he owned the place because he owned the place. There are people like that. I don’t know them. I knew he was a real man because I knew I was staring into the eyes of death.
‘ “The weight-lifter carefully explained he had come for his head. I explained I don’t give head. He explained that he thought I might be able to give it to him.
‘ “Not having the desire to get closer to death, though I find lack of desire strange and inhuman, I produced my head.
““How much does a human head cost? These days?’ the owner of the world asked me.
‘ “I named the price of a masticated piece of bubble-gum. One piece, or stick; not two. I got what I asked for. On credit.
‘ “Two days later I learned the rat had gotten his price. Death.”
‘ “Extermination’s difficult.”
‘ “Death isn’t difficult. I don’t know why we fight each other since we’re all the same. Knowing this, I had nothing left but to understand.
“This’ why I’ve had to come to you, Mommy, even though I’m not used to turning to cunts. Mommy, I’m desperate.”
‘Out of the goodness of her heart Mommy did a little investigation. It just made her feel good to do good, especially for Daddy. But all she could learn was what she already knew: The AI control information. The AI control the medical mafia. Democracy controls its own death, its medical knowledge and praxis, just as we all control our own deaths,’ the terrorist said.
‘I know.’ My love, the cunt, was dead.
‘However,’ the terrorist told me, ‘there are particulars. Despite the media – not despite the media because the media exists to be wrong – democracy is an old quiet family. They don’t move around much. They’re stable. They’re so stable, they’ve now got their own genetic set-up.’
‘Who?