☈ 33: Omen-Coder issue

 Omen-Coder

by A. A. Attanasio

Kindred

by John Shirley

Soultide

by Vincent Daemon

The Worm in its Bed of Crimson Joy

by Shaun Lawton

Lost Light

by A. A. Attanasio

The Worm in its Bed of Crimson Joy

   by Shaun Lawton

                                                                                                                                          digital art by Shaun Lawton

      Jozzwen Lucidero woke up feeling like he was lying on top of an altar. His associates called him Jozz because of his four gold crowned canine teeth. In the line of work he was in, his flashing grin lent him an unnerving edge that more often than not worked to his advantage. At the moment of his rousing, the smell of burnt candlewicks and cooled off grilled fat hung in the air. Disoriented, he couldn't recall where he was. Barely opening his eyes to a squint, he saw blurred movement and heard a sort of breathless scurrying approaching. Elongated shadows fell upon him while hushed whispers drifted into the air. He peered through the narrowed slits of his eyelids at the assembly of figures that appeared to gather before him, doing his best to act as if he were still asleep. The impending outlines seemed to slowly inflate as they approached.

       By the time they crept up on him with their wavering bulbous fingers, they were enormous, stretched out and looming like fat human balloons. POP pop pop pop they went, sending shreds of translucent vinyl skin floating into the distance. What the Hell...? Before Jozzwen could process what was happening, a well-groomed black and white spotted dog wearing a golden-studded collar manifested before him, standing on its hind legs, offering a silver tray of…steaming lampreys? I really could use some coffee about now.

      Teardrops that had accumulated in his lashes began to smart his eyes. The dog stood at attention and gazed at him with a milky white stare. It resembled a cross between a Chihuahua and hyena but with Dalmatian spots. This all happened in micro-instants. Jozzwen considered choosing one of the long gray delicacies which was still coiling in on itself, emitting faint blue sparks on the silver platter. He reached in to pinch it between thumb and forefinger. As his eyelids opened a fraction wider, the canine apparition before him just winked out of existence.

      A galvanizing shock seemed to pass from his grasping fingertips to his tongue while he was under the impression that he dropped the sparkling hors d'oeuvre into his mouth, sending mild electric jolts down his throat. That is one hell of a dream, he thought to himself as he awoke into consciousness. At that moment he wanted to be reclined on a beach of clean white sand, drifting off to sleep to the sound of sea gulls crying in the wind. At least that was the original plan. Just as soon as his deposit went through, he would be able to do just that. Instead of the soothing sound of repeatedly incoming waves, a dizzying chorus of beetle wings thrummed in the distance, accompanied by a sort of low frequency electrical hum. The smell of ozone before a rainstorm began drifting in on the wind. Where in the Hell am I? He lifted himself onto his elbows and blearily looked around. Most of his vision was still swimming into focus.  

     The temperature dropped a couple of degrees and the evanescent lighting around him grew dimmer. It suddenly occurred to him that he may have run out of time. Something was not right about this. Somewhere in the back of his mind he realized there was going to be a tremendous force of vital energy released. He could tell by the crackling smell that lingered in the wind. He could taste it in the air. It had a slight coppery tang, slippery with a moldering pith. The visions upon waking had cleared from his head. His mouth was rank with accumulated bacteria. A shuddering sensation crawled along his scalp. He'd awakened to the mother of hangovers.

     With more effort than he was accustomed to, he managed to sit fully upright and look around him. Neither a candlelit sanctuary or ornate chancel met his gaze, nor did the stark and clinical features of a hospital room lay before him, as he was beginning to suspect may be the case. Instead he glimpsed nearby Christmas tree lights disappearing one by one while opening his gummed up eyelids. Instead of the sound of infusion pumps chiming and echoing off the walls, the humming of insects and sporadic birdsong was now reaching his ears. From the fresh air around him and the wet crinkly feel of grass beneath him, he realized he was sitting outside in someone’s back yard. Before he could get a grip on his situation, the world began spinning him backwards.

     His center of gravity lurched forward as if he were sitting on a playground carousel that had been given a good hard shove. Everything on both sides of him began slipping forward into the distance, and all that lay ahead shrank by the millisecond. It felt like he was being pulled straight back for an incommensurate period. It generated a real feeling of vertigo, as if the whole moment of existence were rushing past him. It felt like he was placed on a giant stereo turntable. The rosebushes and trees around him streaked into translucence, melding into the backdrop of the sky. It looked like a glitch of stretched out pixels in a virtual reality video. A harrowing storm of bat-winged shadows slipped soundlessly across an invisible dome above.

     Jozz felt like he was on a carnival merry-go-round at the state fair. The force of gravity increased until it made his insides feel way too heavy. His nostrils dilated as they inhaled the scent of impending rain. The birds had stopped singing and the susurrations of insects faded while the carousel motion that had taken him by surprise abruptly ceased. The sense of electric humming increased as the first fat rain drops fell, splattering against the hairs on his arm and onto the blades of grass. That's when he remembered having completed his mission the night before. With some unexpected luck, he'd succeeded in scoring a date at his mark's own home. Jozz had been loosely acquainted with her for many years. She was now the heiress to a tattoo emporium, and at the same time conducted a lot of shady business on the side. Well, so much for her legacy. The reign of the Vedma was over now.

     Jozz sat up and shook the morning dew from the ringlets of his hair. The bitch should've been lying right next to him, dead as a door nail, snails feeding on the insides of her eye sockets. He quickly scanned her back yard. The tool shed stood with its rusty door left open. She was nowhere to be seen. The poison he'd slipped into her rum and coke last night was enough to kill a horse. He laughed and spat in the grass. Serves her right for laundering at the races. How many times had he warned her to never cross the line with the Caldera Division? Some folk never listen. There's always another score just around the next corner, as he was reminded of all too well. Jozz sighed and forced himself up onto his feet, and began searching every square foot of her back yard. It really was a dog eat dog world.

     He found the Vedma's tattooed body sprawled out in the garden behind the shed. She must've staggered over to it during her final agonized moments. She'd dropped into a bed of garlic sprouts. She was sprawled out in the mud, green shoots thrust up between her armpits and legs. At least he'd brought her to one last good climax on the snow leopard rug she kept in the parlor, before the poison concluded his business with her. He'd been crushing on her for years now, from a safe distance of course. He could never tell if her occasional smiles were relegated for him, or if she just looked delighted at everyone. Well, now she'd be smiling permanently. For the beetles and worms.

     A sudden wave of dizziness swept through him. Phantom impressions of Spanish moss with glinting mica chips inside reflected the sunlight as clouds rolled by overhead. The rain diminished its intensity, leaving behind the scent of wet leaves, tree bark and grass. Pinpoints of light within the range view of hanging moss before him mirrored each other in stretched-out ribbons of an arboreal tapestry bleeding all the colors of the spectrum. Jozz began feeling dizzy and then sick to his stomach again. He bent over and threw up on a patch of star moss with slender brown mushrooms popping out of it. Spitting out bile, he kept thinking of the winter holiday season to come. The rain drops increased to a steady timpani pattering all about him.  The New Year could not come soon enough.

     An apparition of mist rose up from the ground before him. Within it he saw a thin network of gelatinous tentacles stretched out and threaded with what looked like miniature lightning displays manifesting frequently within them. They flowed upward in intricate forked directions, blending and disappearing into the air overhead, somehow assimilating into the vault of sky crackling high above. The smell of ozone brought Jozz back to his senses. He wiped the drool off his mouth and headed over toward the shed to look for a shovel. The sound of his own footsteps grew fainter to his ears until they began to get eclipsed as if a wine glass were being lowered over his life, snuffing out every consideration. What the Hell was he thinking? He couldn't just bury the bitch in her own back yard. What was wrong with him? They'd uncover the body for sure. Among his final coherent thoughts was that he needed to dispose of the body as quickly as he could and without any possible trace. For an uncomfortable moment he couldn't even breathe in. It felt like some hardened phlegm had gotten caught in his throat. He hocked it up and spat it out onto the Vedma's tattooed thigh. Pitiless, he observed as the last traces of falling rain washed the loogie away over the inked image of a vampire bat's fanged face.

     The rain stopped just as rapidly as it had arrived. Behind him the bloated sun popped up slowly as if from an indisposed jack-in-a-box. The echoes of what sounded like an old calliope faded into the distance. With another nauseating feeling growing around his solar plexus, the vestiges of the twisted melody's tempo increased as the conspicuously cranked refrain began turning faster in his mind until the dry crackling sounds of static merged into a metallic liquidity producing exquisite pinging harmonics that bled into each other in a rainbow of associated articulations. For a surreal moment this modulation cast a melodic sort of shadow across the surface of his hearing. A phantasmagorical resonance warped into shimmering intonations along his mind's cupped ear.  The sudden synesthesia caused his smile to widen and his lips curled back and rolled up along with his skin and muscle tissue in six plaited directions, as if his face were being opened like a can of sardines, revealing a hexagonal brain structure pulsing inside above the bracing armature of his jaw.

      The ordinary features he'd grown accustomed to from a lifelong habit of seeing them reflected on chrome surfaces and mirrors peeled away while the sound from within him cascaded upward in coruscating columns of electrical feedback mingling with shredding notes disintegrating around an E-minor chord. His spinal column vibrated and flexed and then began bending backwards into an arch which planted his hands and feet onto the earth, digging through the grass and sending them splitting into metamorphic root systems and tubers plunging effortlessly through the ground to reach down into a spreading network that encompassed an area below the lawn equivalent to that of a sixty year old Elm tree.

     The whole world flipped upside down during this process and he watched helplessly as the blue sky above pierced a halo through his left eye while a murder of crows flew by squawking up into a storm of wings. The Sun began lowering in the sky while dimming behind a roiling tide of piled up clouds turning blood red. The harmonics had lowered to unbelievable bass pitches of thrumming, shaking the Earth to an 8.0 on the Richter scale. Branches fell from the taller trees in the yard. The neighborhood lurched and rumbled while Jozz's black hair took on a life of its own, slithering into the dirt like the thinnest of root systems, where it began drinking up the moisture through every strand. His skin thickened and encrusted with bark then darkened as his skeletal semblance buckled and began cracking as it solidified into a flesh-like wood while his white blood cells transubstantiated into molecules of sap pulsing through.

     Although his viewpoint lost some of its focus, it settled onto a fixed scenario where the Vedma's sprawled out body appeared arched over backward like his, transformed into a twisted tree trunk with what used to be her arms and legs plunged into the dirt, and what was formerly her face turned on its side with a bulbous cheek mashed against the ground.  He could see a black widow spider perched across her wide open left eye. It was fiddling its hind legs, building its web over it. The pressure built up into his spine solidified into a dull state of lancing pain. There was no doubt left in him that he had lost his mind and gone completely insane.

     His torso transmuted into a bowed tree trunk without limbs or leaves; just a bent over rugged column with both ends grown into the earth. It felt like what used to be the top of his head now lay flat upon the ground with his hair merged into the grass. His old human form had been shed or transformed into a permanent tree-like installation there by the sundial in the witch's backyard garden. Three golden Fox squirrels scampered up what still felt like his thighs and then scrabbled their sharp little toenails across his exposed belly to stop, perched along his lower rib-cage, sniffing the breeze. A memory of being tickled faded away. The obsidian spider with the blurred red hourglass marking continued weaving its web over the Vedma's dead eye across from him. After an indeterminate period of time, the spider shuttled away, eventually revealing a spiral knot that only looked like an eye left staring from a gnarled tree trunk.

     Jozz could sense the slightest twitching of the squirrels' noses as they sniffed the wind on this strange neoteric tree he'd become. He could feel the tension and little talons in a bird's grip and hear the ruffling of feathers in the wind. The squirrels sensed some incoming ravens and scampered off. Ashes drifted in on the air, bringing with them the smell of charcoal. A murder of crows alighted atop the contorted human tree, straddling what used to be a navel and now looked like a swirled knot. Thunderclouds rose up behind the horizon, glowering with streaks of lightning flashing in their depths, ushering in a colder shade of darkness that would last for seven-thousand five-hundred and sixty years.

     During this period a wholly unfamiliar order of life emerged on Earth, while the planet locked into synchronous rotation with its central host star. Even as the older configurations were subsumed into the latest heaving architectures, the entire process took three months to complete itself. When it was over, there wasn't a single person left to wander the surface of this still familiar but much quieter planet. Within a single season a renewed dominion was established. The odd thing about it was that at least one sixth of humanity survived the process. They had merely lost their former autonomy and locomotive characteristic. The human race had mutated into a chimerical variety of deciduous oak trees. Homo sapiens had flowered, in an unexpected twist, into Homo Quercus. Not a single human being that could walk on two feet remained alive to witness this miracle of transformation.

     The majority of the human race, for a variety of reasons, just couldn't handle the grueling transition. Those in poor condition and suffering maladies gave up the ghost all too easily during the unexpected transfiguration. Others rode the shockwave and somehow withstood the transition. Those who died left husks that crumbled into the sediment of Earth's ancient record. The rest weathered the storm and transformed into mutated Trees, retaining some of their vivid memories. These took the shape of haunted dreams that served as a reminder of once having been anthropomorphic in a technological world. What was left of the race became a sort of menagerie receptor colony. A repository of awareness trapped like so many pockets of sap that had accumulated the highlights of humankind over untold generations.

     That old human dream was a closed loop system now locked into the circuitry of nocturnal life partitioned to flourish about them. The legacy of the human race was reduced to a  fantastical panopticon of fused memories interacting in a virtual theater of mycorrhizal networks. In short, a consensual mass hallucination was forged. It took shape like a blurry holographic image of all their memories blended together into a composite. The trick was learning how to field the impressions sent as chemical signals. Being able to visualize by implication took practice. Those who accepted the deciduous aspect of their metamorphosis over the formerly human autonomy found it easier to envision their dominion over the subterranean landscape and their own gnarled and twisted shapes. Whereas those giving in to their more humanistic penchants found themselves lost in the phantasmagorical pastiche of their recycled nightmares and dreams. It was not a pretty sight for them.

     The process occurred after an amalgamation of cosmic orbits in conjunction heretofore unimagined by a persnickety species who always thought itself superior to the lifeforms thriving around it. Suddenly it became evident there was a novel order of biological composites arisen. It wasn't quite like anything that had come before, except for the birds and several other species of multicellular eukaryotic organisms including most plants and the kingdom of fungi thriving along with a random host of other life forms that managed to survive into the new ecosystem. Different phyla reacted in their own manner. For example, certain types of insect merged into greater gestalts. Forty-eight-legged monstrosities became commonplace. The page in the book of evolution turned to an unprecedented chapter.

     The strand of DNA that ran through all life on Earth was always executing its program. Constantly shaping the stage for the remainder of life's realm and divergent kingdoms to be played out upon. One of the most ancient species in the galaxy would be accommodated with a newfound elegance. The avian renaissance would enjoy its resurgence with budding splendor. A new legion of nictitating membranes glimmered and blinked. A host of beaks preened their feathers. All of the birds in the world were about to experience an unprecedented liberation.

     The original parliament of owls was restored. All the raptors rose up to take over. It would be safe to say they filled in the niche left by humanity with its head now actually buried in the sand. The planet's pollution had cleared up in a fortnight. While all species of birds broke up into clades and were free to continue their lives, they did not even suspect that their obliterated anthropoid counterparts yet held the Earth in their collective grip, so to speak. Strangely do events twist in their turning. Still at about a billion strong, the proud creatures that transformed into Arch Trees planted their limbs into the thickening hide of the planet's crust and tranceived the electromagnetic energy still radiating from within its nickel iron core. The order and class of this newly mutated family conducted an exchange of energy with the magnetic dipole from the Sun, as they'd always done. Only this time, they would continue to do so without interruption for quite some time. The main difference now was that the remaining bandwidth of biodiversity on Earth was reduced to a narrow halo circumventing the edge of the planet's dark side, now locked in a position facing away from the solar system's bright center. A fringed oasis persisted like a patch of ringworm on the surface of the planet. A fertile crescent along the edge of penumbra’s shade. The tenacity of life over countless millennia was such that you could depend on it hanging on by the barest of threads. One could almost consider the definition of life as having traced back to that which survives on a razor's edge.

     The planet's interaction with its parent star sparks an electromagnetic conduction. This helps trigger an ionic induction where humanity's consciousness flows into whatever receptacles will have it. During this transitional phase reverberating through tectonic plates an underground network was fashioned where another virtual reality would take several years to coalesce into a shape reconstructed back from the agitated storm of frenzied particles which anterior consciousness had transformed into. It would take nearly the old average human lifespan to re-assimilate into something remotely analogous to the model they had abandoned. Although this advanced form would manifest into a totality not unlike that which had come before it, its resemblance to the old world would be minimal, at best. There would be traces of a holistic integrity formed of the recurring memories and impulses that only the strongest links could manifest. The rest would be wasted on a scattered multitude that would be forced to adapt to its new surrounds.

     The transmogrified land merged sluggishly across freshly composed panoramas. It fostered transient and exploratory connections between the human hybrid's expanded digital root systems and the surrounding ecology. Some contacts elicited sharp shocks and glaring sparks that burned and caused recoiling and withdrawal in an instant of panic and pain. Lightning struck from above and thunderheads rolled out to reveal soothing vistas and lush territories that invited creatures into the fold rather than warning them off. In tentative acceptance, occurring one at a time, the human tree behemoths ratified their novel substratospheric anatomical interior landscapes into an interconnected consciousness that melded into the painted dome of a topical amphitheater. A unique humanistic genome blossomed to appear amid the woodland and subterranean stage.

     Jozz meditated for a short while, dwelling on the feeling of a slow cascade of warming shades from lavender to pink slipping past his periphery. He anticipated what emotions it would lead to, turning over in his mind an effect that was generated from outside himself. It was a sound...something he'd forgotten he'd been capable of hearing before...only now it was more like the echo of an intonation somehow arriving to his attention and being received backwards. Like it was reflecting a model of that which had created it. It was a surreal reminder that there could be another. This unfamiliar presence was calling out to him. Jozzwen felt a slow dissolution of what must have been rigor mortis until, for the first time in an epoch, he realized it was what must’ve once passed for a smile.

     The world was reduced to a slung capstone of compressed darkness heated by a crown of sunlight. Sparks danced and bled through here and there, but mainly a reverberant coldness was contained beyond the perimeter of the oasis, with an unbearable inferno scorching the other side facing the Sun. The scattered heat from these intermittent crawling sparks felt like a colony of ants trying to work their way up what used to be his arms. Like they were headed toward the center of what would have been his heart. Only now the organ that had kept him alive since birth felt like a dead battery fused with rust, stuck in a rib-cage embedded within plaster encased in clay pottery buried in oak wood that barely clung to life. A knot of timber with packed sap that hummed with harmonic vibrations tuned to a melodious note struck in a sealed bell jar and sustained for an eternity.

     His whole world was now just half upside down sky and halfway compressed dirt full of earthworms and mycorrhizal networks.. They squirmed and slipped through the mud amid a variety of micro-structures branching out into the tightly packed compost he was half drowning in. Between the clumps of earth and rocks were micro-pockets of air where the tiniest organisms thrived, and bacteria vacillated through its life processes. A network of fungal embroidery glimmered in the shadows. A harmonic craquelure of ambient tonality encompassed Jozzwen's head like a halo of ever emanating bearing. A crown of earth attached to his skull and radiated out in all directions.

     Little did he know the aspect of the specter which lay before him. Captivated by his own transmogrification, Jozz could be said to be doing rather well, after all; considering he was holding up as a tree planted in the back yard of a crazy pagan woman. The thing about the apparition of her sprawled out corpse gazing across toward him from a patch beside him in the garden was how it gradually began blurring into the rest of the merging landscape about him. He noticed a lot of old familiar sounds drop away, leaving a disquieting silence. There were reasons for this, of course. The Vedma adapted to her transformation effortlessly. She was practiced in the arts of paying attention to the benefit of great dividends. Therefore, she wasted no time in probing her fresh underground realm in order to make new friends.

     Jozzwen could feel another world just beyond the straining tendrils of his mind. He could imagine he might even catch a glimpse of this kingdom if only it did not lay just past the spectrum to which he was attuned. He was focused on the polarity of death. Either he was already held captive in its clutches, or its agents were on their way to welcome him into their domain. He was sure of it. He thought he could hear the distant hissing of their approach. He could tell this sound was getting nearer. He had no choice but to give in to their oncoming inquisition. Then he was struck by an odd thought, as if it had come from someone else. This was indisputable proof of engrams. What once occurred was always fated to become. This thought would have left him paralyzed, once upon a time, were he capable of entertaining it. It now gelled in what was left of his consciousness until it triggered a recollection of laughter. Except the muscles of his face and throat remained petrified.

     Jozzwen's thoughts were cast out before him, which is to say, to the sky above in its up-to-date astral condition. He presumed the firmament to be stuck in midnight forevermore. Like a bad nightmare from a forgotten century. Cracked and discharging a seething viral load dropped into a fertile clutch of organisms. Sprouted and germinating into unprecedented manifestations. He ruminated over the grim reality that it was all that lay before him that had indeed been taken away. His upturned body interred within the earth twisted and distended his belly, looped out into the cool shuddering dark side of the night. Fishers and wildcats with glowering eyes scuttled under him in single file. Sniffing along the trails the ants left behind, following them to the carcasses left over for the banquet. Over there just beyond the tips of his very clutches lay the extended roots of her tree. Its contoured trunk reflected the darkened stains and imprints of her old tattoos. Little did he know she had already released extra tannins downwind to the greater colony as a warning to watch out for him. The poison he'd slipped into her drink once upon a time turned out to be ineffective, after all.

     Beneath him even further, behind his bowed over back, Jozzwen's arms and legs plunged deep within the garden. There the rocky ground lay, with all it had collected in time. The planet's orbit had undergone a sudden adjustment as an erratic gravitational flux from a nearby quasar adjusted its course. This powerful flux configured a permanent dark side of the Earth, which is how the mother planet was forced into a fresh synchronous rotation with the Sun. From what Jozz could tell during this stretched out moment, it appeared he had been planted within a short range of the darkened slash of shadow the planet was now half sunken into. The thought caused him to shiver. He felt the nearby discharge of energy and reveled in it. He imagined droplets of sweat beading across his brow. He blinked away the memory as a newfound stillness loomed over him.

     The Vedma-tree had whispered to her fungal network of the wicked deed the Jozzwenn-tree had done to her, no less, to whom it fell to process the poison he'd placed in her drink. What would they think of a character like that who accepted payment for murder without skipping a beat? He's a loner besides, she reported, already cut off from the tribe. She disclosed in hushed tones to the underbrush and all that would receive. Working to estrange him from mycorrhizal networks, she added emphasis to the spell she conducted by cursing him in longhand with a plague of caterpillars and beetles. She wrote the script that set the chain of events in motion, resulting in a host of eggs being deposited within his bark. The rest of the colony of trees stood in their circle and took notice. They'd received the news and understood the cruelty of his story. They shuddered to think they might have unwittingly let him become one of them.

     Just behind him over the horizon the fiery furnace of the Hell of creation awaited. Mercifully for Jozzwen, only its glowing edge could be detected. It could barely even be felt. In the rustling of the interior world about him, a slow flowering cloud of mushroom spores cultivated and spawned all manner of advancing life. Deep within the buried man'o'tree's dreaming mind a diversity of understanding bloomed. Jozz realized then that the underlying sense of gnawing disharmony he was adjusting to was like the hum of a refrigerator in a long lost apartment that he could barely recall. Only now it was the harrowing resonance from the celestial firestorm of never ending fury that licked fastidiously at the other side of the world. It felt as if he were getting more than just a blown kiss on the edge of his face by the burning salutation of a wrathful nemesis. If he could hear anything at all now it was the fading thought of a shrieking echo of mad laughter cackling out of the Vedma's lips, from beyond the grave.

     Little did he suspect how quickly beetles and caterpillars could lay waste to a tree. Nevertheless, he was beginning to feel at home here in this restored netherworld where he had hung upside down for what now seemed an incalculable period of time. Nourishment in the form of sugars that should have been streaming to him in greater torrents from the colony surrounding him was diminishing gradually, without elucidation nor a sound. If it was even possible to be darker or more silent. Closing what was left of the memories that once flooded his eyes very slowly, and lowering each dimly remembered lid down over this dreamlike moment of breaking dusk, he allowed the fading impressions of his face to go slack. He imagined reveling in the pleasant sensation of a final gust of wind licking his neck before succumbing to his inescapable petrification.

     The silence in this sylvan thicket was deafening. He shuddered as the altered world before him regenerated into a peripheral shadow allowing an oasis of ringed timberland to quietly thrive about him. What was left of his own shadow was but the reflection of a diminishing memory, an endlessly repeating gauge indicating an empty tank, now just a closed-circuit pathway to a dead end. Across from him just several feet away, another low hunched humanitree with darkened blots of iconography covering its bark poised gracefully over its bed of dandelions and garlic and quietly flourished. The Vedma-tree would now slowly grow to a very ripe old proportion within the helpful embrace of her newfound underground community. Meanwhile, what was left of Jozzwen Lucidero in the aftermath of being devoured by pine beetles, leaf hoppers and aphids gradually dimmed away and dusted into humus, sunken into the ground to be forgotten much quicker than the time it had taken for him to arrive on the scene. Beneath the twilit penumbra of a darkening garden, the underworld once again welcomed him into its embrace. 

Soultide

 by Vincent Daemon

                                                                                                     digital art by Shaun Lawton

“And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this:

Horrible, filthy, undone,

O sun of my nature and star of my eyes,

My passion, my angel in one!” 

– A Carcass, Baudelaire

Half drunk, he painted the circle on the floor, inscribing the sacred gematria appropriately within, in the hopes of attempting some occult fix to the decimation around him. His heart was blackened and lost, life now wearing down upon his soul like the flesh of some desiccated corpse, though he was still very much alive. Standing in the snow covered graveyard of yore, beneath the glowing pink sky of a year grey with dismay, he pondered the vortex of existence.

It all seemed like a stunningly designed Ouroboros of Pain, with no rhyme or reason as to it’s whys and wherefores. It merely seemed to permeate with a petulant and consistent static gravity, a weight disproportionate to that of the rest of existence. It was all very much a cosmic joke, a puzzle box of universal intelligence with sadistic intent to him. But who was laughing? Did the answer even really matter? Ultimately all there is in this consciousness is the flesh, and the systems that guide this flesh, as strange ethereal whispers almost indistinguishable from that of a love, a friend, or even sometimes a nightmare fiend. Holding you in a paralysis called existence. 

Existence meant you were alive, and life meant survival, a painful universal truth, unavoidable. Something he’d never been particularly good at, though somehow he’d made it this far. Primarily alone, at that. Meeting her changed all that. However, feeling he’d had a kindred soul made life at first that much more tolerable, and perhaps even enjoyable, though he’d had no clue as to how to properly show it. It was new. The whole of his life until that point had been filled with such an involuntary abject misery that it did come off as almost comical to those who were incapable of understanding.

To those who at least tried to understand, this pain was tangible, a thick lifelong angst smoldering his aura and locked parasitically into his psyche, eating through his life like a psychological cancer every chance it could get. It wasn’t depression, or schizophrenia, or any of the other usual suspects. Depression was involved, of course, and an almost inhumane level of anxiety, of the variety where the flesh feels like it’s burning from the inside out. To those who could see it, it was nothing less than tragic in the true Greek sense of the word. Whatever this was, it had no name. But it was there.

This nameless abominable thing, this Beast, grew more controlling each time it decided to regenerate, to recycle back around. It had become an all consuming force of para-nature, something plugged in from a place to only which he believed he was connected. It was a terrible way to live. 

Something was generally off the day she’d left. The air didn’t smell right, and the world around him, particularly outside, had taken on the strange appearance like that of a high quality matte painting, acting as the background to some deranged work of quasi-philosophical meta-crisis on celluloid. He’d been awake for a few days, his intuition in the red–but he wasn’t sure about what.

Regardless, he well knew that wasn’t the culprit. Everything about all of this seemed to be wrong. This matte world moved and functioned in a similar manner to the standard 3D world of two weeks or a year or even a yesterday ago, but it wasn’t that. No, this he felt was a manifestation of something beyond the grasp or understanding of the common person, or even himself. 

First and foremost, he’d previously considered the thick white trails left by grey jets in blue skies that spread out indefinitely throughout the day, eventually creating a kind of unnatural sepia-net skyline as the haze-veiled sun rolled under toward dusk. To even think such a thing out loud in the wrong (or sometimes even in the right) environment will often elicit reactions of disdain or even disgust from those it’s not meant for who may overhear, an obvious oh, another crazy person apparent in the roll of the eyes, in the inordinately loud sighing exhale of disapproval they’re bound to present.

But she didn’t, and that was just one of many things that made her so special to him, so endearing and genuine. She was the rarest of the rare, a dream being that many would long for but none would truly deserve, himself included. She understood, unlike any singular other being he’d ever come across, romantically entangled or not. The heart, honesty, mind, beauty and indeed strength of resolve and Will had drawn him in, eased him, like no other reality had.

There was a connection, like a cord, between them that grew into a spiritually inseparable bond of trust, intimacy, and a kind of love that humanity at large thinks is the stuff of fairy tales and horseshit, but for them it was a very real and intensely strong mechanism of soul by which they felt they’d be forever joined, connected on a level far beyond what the average Tinder-fucker could even conceive. It isn’t codependency, it isn’t insecurity, it is a true love in its most undiluted form, spiritual. They were, in fact soulmates. That much is certain. Or at the very least it seemed like it was. 

IT CAME BACK NOW TO REAP A STRANGE HARVEST ON THEIR SOULS. ONE OF THEM HAD DONE SOMETHING, SOUGHT SOME KIND OF DEAL, BECOMING INFECTED WITH THE SPIRIT-BLACK KARMA CULL OF WHATEVER DARK THING THIS WAS THAT LURCHED IN THE DOORWAYS. HE KNEW IT WASN’T HIM. 

But this Beast that haunted him so maliciously wanted nothing to do with any of that. As with the rest of life, it harangued, harassed, hissed obscenities of disillusionment and self-disinformation, clawing incessantly at the underside of his skull with talons of the blackest obsidian, ripping at the pink-turns-gray matter that constituted all of his thought, his rational behavior. They seemed to have always wanted to serve for the ruin of his existence in any way they could.

It was something that had been such an implacable portcullis to his life it actually almost ended it on more than one occasion. But he was too stubborn. The black nails were something of which he had to incessantly combat through alone, throughout the entirety of the course of his life. They’d perpetually been there as long as he could remember, abating only for periods shorter than that which yielded the opposite. The talons of the Beast cast endless doubt, self- loathing, and pains so deep as to be indescribable in words. 

And that day had come, when she’d just watched too much of this complicated oxymoronic Beast tightening its grip around the good soul that truly encompassed his inner and outer being. For as much as she loved him, it was something that scared the absolute hell out of her, to watch him become almost an animal from some hideous other place. His body would even seem to change when this would happen.

He’d look bigger, the color of his eyes would transmogrify from their usual oceanic greenish blue to becoming squinted and dark, a deep hazel with red hints setting in, his pupils constricting to laser-pins of finely focused rage thoroughly obliterating whatever caught his gaze. But she was going to run from it for the wrong reasons, her flight response based more on a series of sudden bizarre material wants she didn’t even understand, a sudden disdain for intellect she’d so long prided herself on. 

Even before his blow, her personality that day felt like reality had shifted, like two dimensions had overlapped, creating one awful menagerie of confusion, complication and stress. Like something was there that shouldn’t be. Perhaps there were others affected, everywhere, and others astonished that they woke up feeling as depressed or angry as they did, knowing only that they felt that way and not why, reacting to any one person or any particular thing with such a disdain or compressed inversion and ill focused rage that sharp words were dispersed like cheap hateful poetry, both parties equally guilty.

Though in his personal situation, his guilt was far more confusion regardless of whatever weirdness he occasionally believed the government or municipalities to be using. Fact is they didn’t create the situations they manipulated so much as seized them with opportunity when it presented itself, much like she’d just done, he felt his thoughts go wonky. Much like what the unnamable thing was doing inside his psyche as it consumed endlessly plans and progress and autonomous functionality, it’s hateful phrases spearing through his Will like some kind of javelin-lamprey.

Nothing new, this was the nature of the Beast. It nipped and chewed and burrowed and dug in like squatter-scabies, unseen at first, uncomfortable. But within no time you can see the tracks of burrowing that the scabies leave, like a fine little road map coarsening the length of your flesh wherever they may travel. It was different from lycanthropy, nor was it drug induced like Jekyll & Hyde. This was from places unknown.

She had seen it, this Beast, felt it with her own soul, and it still scared the living shit out of her. She took it quite personally when in fact that was never it’s intention. It just employed destruction randomly, insidiously. This was not what she had expected, not what she had wanted. This was a sickness, a possession, boiling him in esoteric oil and caging his true psyche every time it decided to allow. It was a Beast that fed on irrational mistrust and insecurity, feeding on whatever it could destroy and take from him in those horrible moments of psychic claustrophobia, including her.

Whatever strange dark thing she’d done, and at this point she wasn’t even sure as they’d been racking up, had tapped directly into this fury of darkness within him, and surrounded them both, connected so viscerally as to slightly alter his appearance, and slowly begin to drain something from her own. His Beast had attempted multiple and often successful attacks on his career and already stunted love life, but this time it was different.

When her intentions of destructive egotism hit the already charged air and engaged with his darkness, some horrible mutation of their beings had occurred. It actively messed with the future, the past, and even the real-time now, with those blackened and chipped-razor talons ripping everything they could from not only his mind but the foundation of his life, his guts, and beginning to tear into hers in a way she’d never understand.

She pulled away, his Muse, cutting like a guillotine everything they had worked for and put all of their hearts into for the past two years. There are things I want out of life, she’d said. The most beautiful and genuine thing either of them could’ve ever hoped for, crushed by the ill-communication and pleasurous torture-exhibit of his living sickness mixed with her ill-focused Will. I have to do this, I’m so sorry. Even she wasn’t sure how sorry she was at that moment. This new and thriving darkness seemed now at times in full control of him, and growing in her, yet still beyond both of their reach.

Her little games with forces she’d never understood were no help in any of this either. The depth of this existential horror was too much for either to outright accept, his mind veering to white-catatonia disbelief upon the mention, coupled with the constant feelings in his gut that this wasn’t over yet, nor should it be at all. Her mind and life veered into a downward spiraling shutdown of her soul as after the first few days, a horrific guilt draped over her once glowing lavender aura, now a sludge of halo turning a slick rotten gray. 

Most painful of all, she never really did stop loving him and full well knew that he was her Other, the true love of her life, yet was denying it to herself because of her own Unnamable Thing, this ancient hell of the human condition that warped lives and destroyed all. Its mere existence disturbed her greatly seeing it in others, in her mother, in him. But to think that she may be possessed of this was something her jittering mind couldn’t accept.

She cried often at night about it, or in her car on break at work. She did what she felt she had to do, but sickly came to the realization that it was for all the wrong reasons. She realized that it boiled down to nothing more than career advancement, and what she felt she had to be to fit into the world of scarred flesh. It was for an acceptance she was very bluntly learning was not genuine, not what she’d thought it had been. She had become something she loathed, a chameleon, but in no way could face up to or fully recognize it. 

And it crushed him, all of it. But it also showed him a mirror, and she unwittingly had given him a hidden key to defeat this Beast, so special as to find the esoteric puzzle and release it, bring it to the surface. Dispossess it. He had trusted her above all creatures, all sentient beings, he trusted her. And she’d betrayed that trust beyond all rational bounds, her panic over the direness of the situation she’d incurred turning to an inexplicable cruelty. Within that he’d found a certain new freedom, odd as that would seem, that freedom being the key to his release, the key that had released the Unnamable Thing from out of his soul and into the icy confines of hers. 

In the windy and abnormally cold snap on lonely winter nights she’d lay awake, alone, contemplating the odd lattices of soul and connection that seemed to extend out to all things. She’d play on her social media accounts and flirt with weirdos and practice surface piercings on her soft flesh to try and alleviate the dreadful sensation that, cosmically, there was something now coming for her, only she wasn’t so sure what, but she could feel it leering from black shadows in the darkness, and hear it calling in the whipped-ice winds outside.

What she thought would be so different in her days remained a rotational drudgery that brought even less happiness. There was no longer any reason to use her mind, as conversations with dolts and drones all day added up to more aggravation, and anyhow the piercing profession in and of itself was at its base a rather mechanical one. Only now did it begin to occur to her that this whole thing was beginning to amount to a crime of what’s perceived as Karma. Except this was much darker. 

In little ways she’d try to soften the situation, when not so tensed up she was involuntarily making it worse. She was staying with her mother, merely one hundred feet from where he still lived and she’d once resided. She did everything possible to avoid him most of the time, but in some ways still tried to help. It’d began to occur to her that she was slowly killing off the most important parts of another being while doing so with her own.

She watched from afar over the next couple of weeks as he prepared to move out, her heart equal parts hurt and anguish, and gazed silently as other parts of him fluctuated in a turmoil of which more growth could come. She realized his Beast had almost spontaneously lifted, and that his world was coming together around him without his even knowing it. She took a good and hard look at the situation again and a new feeling of reinvigorated stagnation kicked back in. Time, just the day, had become a long and arduous affair of endless repetition and a complete lack of ability to connect to anyone or anything, not like they had before. 

It was a day or two after she’d driven him to his new destination, the roadmap of his life developing on to great things. It was a tough drive, watching his wounded heart feign being just fine, being funny, her resisting the urge to scream out Don’t Go! and turn back around, to hold his hand. She cried violently on the way back home, his scent still in the car, and back at the apartment, in the bed, the clothes.

The two of them intended to remain friends, but they both knew distance and separation would resign that to most likely holiday communications over the internet. A chill set in as she realized there had been an inner warmth in her that was no longer there. She now felt alone. She drove back in silence.

Once back at her apartment, the silence was deafening. The still emptiness of her new existence didn’t feel right. There were things swirling in the shadows, slithering cool breezes casting profane judgements, wrapping around her body and soul, that weren’t just a draft. Looking exactly the same, this once caring home was now an unrecognizable hovel of her own creation, her own insecurities. Even she felt she didn’t belong in there. She laid down exhausted, fully clothed, and essentially passed right out into an almost catatonic sleep. 

At three in the morning she spontaneously, groggily awoke. She wasn’t entirely sure why, as her sleep was deep and rather dreamless. Her tongue felt like rugged sandpaper in her mouth, and she slowly arose to get herself a drink. She noticed then three immense figures of darkness surrounding her bed, one flanking either side and one at the foot. She jumped back and rubbed her eyes, a white stark terror infusing her being.

They looked down at her, wordless, faces seeming to be made of nothing more than formless shadow like the rest of them. There was a faint white light of yellow and blue hues emanating from the walk-in closet, and the shadows reached their cold solid hands to her, helping her gently up and off of the bed. She realized what this was, just what exactly was happening, and a sickness welled up inside of her like none other. 

They guided her to the glow in the closet, fully opened the door and stood her before it. As she looked in she realized there was no reason now to say sorry, that it was too late for any of that. In the closet was a stairway where there was none before, right there in the middle, almost hovering. The angles on it were off, as it seemed to swirl on forever, though neither up nor down nor to any particular side. It was just there, a bridge of stairs hole-punched out of the fabric of reality and connected right into another one. She looked at the shadow beings, not entirely sure why, almost hoping for some guidance. She was on her own with this one, and there was no choice to not go into the stairs. She inhaled, silent tears streaming down her high-set cheeks and around her artfully aligned sparkling dermal piercings, the eternal tears she’d had scarred into her face when this all began. 

In this moment and this moment alone, for a flash, she understood what this atonement was. That oft times the cosmos does have certain matters in place, certain inconsistencies and eccentricities, certain laws that pertain to the spirit more than numbers, to the soul more than logic. These shadow beings were the three essences conjured and invoked from the lower places of the cosmos, the Three Beasts: his, hers, and the awful mutation born from the inability to properly communicate or connect, to work the Wills in unison as opposed to imparting division. There was in fact a reason for them, and her rash decision did throw off the cosmos’ set line of action, not necessarily a fate as we usually think of it, but something of a purpose that humans could never comprehend. She then took three steps into the gateway and out of this place. 

           

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The Worm in its Bed

of Crimson Joy 

by Shaun Lawton 

Kindred

by John Shirley

                                                                                                           digital art by shaun lawton

   Harry brought Norris a golden knife. Norris had been Harry’s fence for twelve years, and they were, if not friends exactly, something close to it.

   Norris told him how his kids were doing and when his wife was getting out of the state pen for women and how to hide things from the IRS and how a person actually had to buy a house.

   Harry had figured he’d get a good price for that stolen knife. He’d got it when he went into someone’s house with a carpet cleaning crew—which he did mostly so he could steal things. Yes, he figured he’d get a good price because Norris loved gold: he had gold watches, six gold rings, a gold pendant, two gold chains, a gold painted car.

   Norris surprised him by offering him a low price for the knife. “That’s solid gold, man. Fine workmanship, solid gold. I checked it in an antiques register. Solid fourteen karat. Sharp and in mint condition. I want three times that.”

   Norris refused, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the knife. So Harry, still surprised, shrugged and put the knife back in the gym bag and said, “I’m outta here,” and he was even more surprised when Norris jerked the bag away, took out the knife, and stabbed him in the chest with it.

   Norris stood over him with tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry. I always liked you. I didn’t want to pay for that knife, though. It’s too good to pay for like that. It’s gold. It’s beautiful. But I had to have it. I wish you’d brought me ten silver spoons worth the same as you wanted. I would’ve bought them. But gold…and a knife perfect for killing, both. I could let the gold go, or the knife, but not both the gold and the knife.”

   Harry whispered, “I understand, man. I do.”

   Then he died, but he died understanding.

   I mean, it made complete sense. Totally.

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Soultide 

by Vincent Daemon

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Omen-Coder

by A. A. Attanasio

     15,000 years in our future – as far ahead as the hand prints on the cave walls of Lascaux are behind us – humanity occupies 100,000 galaxies among the immense galactic rivers of the Laniakea Supercluster.

   Civilization spans half a billion light years.

   Starsteeds, accelerated by warp drives to thousands of times the speed of light, connect all the teeming worlds within the star-systems of each galaxy.

   To traverse greater distances among galaxies, starsteeds plunge directly into black holes.

   Moving faster than light, paralux vehicles (such as starsteeds) navigate along 5-dimensional trajectories that open black holes into wormholes.

   These “jump-holes” make accessible even the most remote galactic frontiers of the supercluster.

   Intimately connected, millions of worlds and hundreds of millions of anthropic species cohere in a social system unimaginable to us: Protopia.

   The Laniakea Protopia assures that – across all 100,000 galaxies, on tens of millions of planets, and within the minds of quadrillions of human beings in a kaleidoscopic assortment of genetic and transbiotic forms – each day is better than the previous.

   That sounds ludicrously unrealistic to us – because we lack the omen-coder.

   An omen-coder is a human being who has been genetically designed to see the wave function.

   Since the previous century of our time, back in the 1920s, physicists have speculated that the wave function is more than just a subjective evaluation of probabilities but actually the Noumenon itself: the one objective reality hidden from us by the biological limits of our minds.

   What does it mean to perceive the wave function?

   The probability function reveals the Many Worlds, which are all the possible configurations of the atoms constituting our universe.

   The colossal but finite energy of the Big Bang has been divvied up among the Many Worlds, with the most probable worlds receiving the most energy and the largest number of variations.

   Omen-coders survey the sprawling landscape of the many possible worlds in any given environment, and they trace out harmonious energetic paths that progressively improve the lives of each and every biotic human in their care.

   15,000 years from now, what are the “improvements” and “progress” that the Protopia advances?

   These are cultural values decided variously among the enormous collection of human-types in the Protopia.

   In each locality, we find an omen-coder attuned to the type of humans living there.

   Omen-coders are shapeshifters; I won’t go into the nanotechnology that makes that possible.

   Sensitive to the wave function of their precinct, omen-coders influence the people around them with morfones.

   Similar to the pheromones that ants share, these chemical tags manipulate the moods and thoughts of everyone in the omen-coder’s morfonic community.

   Omen-coders move among the population, mostly unnoticed, distributing morfones that contour the lives they supervise and guide.

   Though they resonate with the most intimate feelings and ruminations of the people around them, their own psychology is wholly alien to us.

   Their minds are the objective fact of the wave function.

   At root, the wave function is T-zero, the initial instant of creation, when all the energy that would ever exist existed as a quantum event in a point far smaller than a proton.

   The psyche of the omen-coder penetrates the first light, T-zero, which illuminates every universe that can possibly cool out of that energy.

   The mind of the omen-coder is the sentience of light.

   Better yet, think of them as the human interface with pure energy, the E of E = mc^2.

   Omen-coders illuminate the night paths E followed into mc^2, down into hydrogen clouds, deeper into stars, and eventually outward to us, arrangements of atoms that think and feel.

   15,000 years from now, we will complete our pilgrimage to the stars – and to the light that built them.

   We will be changed, utterly, and we can debate if we will still be human.

   But we will still be atoms arranged to think and feel.

   So, then…

   What shadows will the omen-coder’s light wake in our future hearts?

 

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Kindred

by John Shirley

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