YOU V

Cool Cement...as if it just rained, in the night

The air is hardly present but breath is easy. Transparent medium filling you

with clarity. You are wandering again. A town square with only three sides. The fourth, where you came from, now a membrane beyond which is a space, altogether different.

You are wandering against form and for a moment she is a town square , streetlit from somewhere, a job

You wander like bacteria, or a moving tattoo, in dark recesses of complexity that often make you want to scream. Scream, cry, but this is survival. Veining territory, as appearance bleeds to overflow and moves you. For a moment you are here, watching. Everything is slightly too small, working on something which plays like a stage, not quite a stage. The three sidewalks are lined by shop fronts. Fronts for something illicit. Sue a few modes of being.

Glass cased dioramas, dropping into nothing behind ( which you imagine as arid white medium, more lost than lost). From this side they become almost planar, floating yet slicing through ground, with the violence of a diamond dispersed and reorganized into an icy clear sheet of guillotine. Looking still by weight of the cement, the incomplete square, appearing to be context. Dense color seeps into the haze of the street.

In each of the shallow spaces people act their merchant parts absolutely and perfectly. Smiles.

playing in the shallow space

Glittering garments surrounding themselves with dress sellers. She sees their lips bleeding and cracking from the pressure in their hermetic tanks. She always feels the invisible stuff. Love their magic. interior giggles supply and demand supply and demand supply and demand

Just like the full blown shops that have inventory and are encased in malls, here just encased, here, like you, to expose. with a heartbeat. change your skin for a fire or a snapshot or some looting

Total transparency. Illusion merchants are great for that. V consumes with vision, learns and moves. You buy illusion but you are artifice. She knows that everything is real.

Some one is here. Over there in the street near the far wall. It sweats without motion, thick and heavy, grimacing. Then it walks , trying to give itself gravity, mimicking mass, as if in a sand storm of soporific density. Movement agitated, abrubt. Frustration. you are standing right in front of it now and it is trying to strangle you you are a secret

It is named Tercom, after a military device, Terrain Contour Matching. Maintaining an inital design, it detects, by form only and destroys anything else. It is angry with the nature of this space. Matter exists in a precarious state in its mind, as a kind of apparition, its memory confirming only outlines with certainty. Substance fills the form for Com, preciseley in its moment of attack, as if to plead guilty and require destruction, leaving it with the feeling that its function is tragic yet neccessary. completing the circuit

Here, the floating shop fronts mock this memory, hinting at trickery, impractical, evoking for it accusations of falsity , as they continue with seamlessness and the appearance of efficiency. invisible infrastructure. More smiles. Com can only make it false. Never been given the intelligence to know artifice, to see itself in it. Thinks its been given extra sensory devices. Reality firmly strapped to its boots, it embodies humanitarian defense strategy which amounts to pounding the shit out of things because they aren¹t Œreal¹. an archetype that doesn¹t know it. Here it is in a box, can¹t do anything with the fourth side where the membrane is without any edges.

She ducks and scrabbles low to the ground performing acrobatics and a chase, around bollards, trying to keep it from getting into contact. You watch it lunge blindly at its form as she mutates to anaemic. Once there is a slip. Com¹s hand moves right through her arm as she moves sideways. heat rises. Not direct enough to force it to see, it blocks and gets angrier, closed in towards boiling point, short circuit, blow out.

She knows that if she allowed it to strangle her it would pass right through her neck.

Its hands, it will be clenching its own. clenching its own madness can¹t allow that V glares right into the apocalypse. Apocalypse was fine. She always liked things bright and dark and it didn¹t seem to be going away. History to you, long low wailing, her virulence, moving through things, going unnoticed, singing. Your facility to play dead or laugh won¹t work here. play dead laugh leave a false name If Com finds its madness by touching you it will transfer to an authority which will verify your lockup in their kind of oblivion, or suicide. Hers is still illegal, seeping witchcraft allegations. you are just atmosphere whose function is to denote feeding mute, intense, your fear pulsing with desire, you know other spaces where you feel turned here immensely strategic. It was beginning to feel like a job. Being numb means she may as well be dead use the matching, backwards elsewhere. tuned in to counter transparent desire She moves as phage ribbon, looking for its blind spot and sensing the space behind her, she rolls in.

There were four of them, or two or six, at a long low table. everything was tabled White collar bored room executives, led by shop fronts. fronts for computer. Ties and scarves in cold coffee. humming. She moves across the room and they smile distractedly without looking up. Moving to the comfortable chair, unseen. They didn¹t see such things. They were in Control.

They scratch at the backs of their necks to a viral rythym, detecting some dust in the atmosphere. Oblivion. Com moves in and stops. It shifts slightly as it sees them not see her, but wonder what it wants here, looking up in a bored sort of way- inquisitive gesture roots it to the halt. No longer can make sense of what it was attacking. And its heat drops as time slows and it tries to keep walking as the night becomes longer. somewhere. She watches it slowly go pale. blind machine, it begins to hear long low wails of desperation coming from inside. It hates them, in a way, but can¹t attack here. It glimpses you now having done something else, illicit and excessive, that looked like nothing at all.

what is this complicity here they are fair authorial suits. Why can¹t it act? front for illusion at the core of its being. Doesn¹t know what to do without a target. Can¹t attack an invisible target. frozen in front of acrobatics It is given a combat troops drug - supply and demand - supply and demand-urges. Doesn¹t know what to do with this weird pull from somewhere it has never touched a piece of slow shock wave. You sense signal moving through a hollow bone cavity and its muscle screamed impossible at first and it closed its eyes tight but dark shadows kept moving across as it tried to maintain panic - thought as its process melts into cavities. doesn¹t know what to do with becoming physical. another being within a gun. is this love ?

madness slips in. everyones madness.

They get so focused on the inventory, backed by malls, killing eachother, shooting rapidly. surrounding themsleves with dress. Are people acting their parts. absolute. Com becomes deniable. history to you in its wailing. It felt the transparency of the shallow space. Glittering garments of a star folding in on itself. You move back to the fourth side.