Oh My Gosh

Future begets plenty / Futurism regrets aplenty

Entry Interface

The outbound armada retroburned into parking orbit and surface skimmers started to deploy almost instantaneously. So many new colonists to get onto the Mars surface, so many enriched returnees to get back up to the armada, and the window for max-efficiency Earth-return Hohman burn closing by the hour.

So when Galen looked out over the orbiting chain of stations on the equatorial, he felt nothing but impatience to get dirtside. There was no appreciation for the stately dance of these great wonders, their glistening hab-rings slowly circling in the sunlight. Galen had had more than enough of space and all that spinning-in-place shit. It was time to be somewhere that was still and grounded.

As his surface skimmer deorbited toward sunrise, sparks and plasma pulsed by the viewing window: blue, green and purple ghost tongues lapped the wan dawn air.

Down below he could see prospectors’ trackbikes sheering through the desert, kicking up clouds of dust. He needed to be down there, now, staking out his patch, jacking in to the interworld mineral exchange, becoming a sky-high-pioneer. A worldboss instead of a nobody.

A flash-vision of centuries hence blipping into his tooishun implant, just as the skimmer cut into the thickest part of the atmosphere and passed through max-Q and max-temp. Green Mars. Terramade and terra-renewed.

Oceans, forests, wildlife, transplanted and newmade in this new world. Maybe he would get an Uplift and be in a new body, a robot host. Maybe he would be one of the new creatures wandering these fresh green savannahs: a proud duck-billed neodiplodocus, furred and sleek; or an urifant, web-footed in brackish swamp, plying his trunk through pondweeds big as parachutes…

- Time’s up! -

The attendant ripped the facerig off Galen and tore the drip from his arm, splashing a few drops of his watery blood on the vinyl upholstery. He was left slumped against the couch, shorn of dreamage paraphernalia, bereft of further dreamtime. Other dreamers, rigged or no, slouched over the wipe-clean sofas. Yet others lay hitherwise and yonder-scattered all across the drinkstained floor.

The remaining rigged-up dreamagers were humming and thrumming with joy. Some were murmuring softly. Landing in a cloudglitter of golden said one. My diplodocus neck cranes right the way to heaven said another. Signal bearer said a third.

Some of them had fouled themselves, others dribbled vomit and sputum, but all were blissful and transported for the full time the dreamage facerig and IV visionjuice were fastened to them. A blessed-out state of wonder now denied him.

Galen raised himself to his feet with great difficulty - though he was young, he lacked lower-body muscle mass thanks to a bout of summertime frogfever with untreated mid-term nerve sequels. He made his way slowly to the exit.

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新巴黎 - New Paris

Galen was gifted with one gift only in an otherwise cursed life: his albino condition made him a valuable asset to the 2442 Node Void Clique, who prized the unnaturally alabaster skin as a divining totem. When it was deemed the right time for the ceremony, they would transport him to the place under the Tower that served as the transmitting and receiving place. He was well paid for becoming the conduit for whatever current or signal they prized so much. They never told him what it was, and he never asked. It coursed through him and into them and made them fearless warriors, and that was enough.

Oh, he’d felt it throbbing through him during those moments at the center of the circle, but he wasn’t tuned to whatever ghost frequency it propagated on, and it passed on leaving no more lasting trace than a VR session in the dreamage pits.

Today he stood on the balcony of his fourteenth-floor squat as the sun rose, the bare brutal concrete of the towerblock dusty with time sparkling golden in the half-light. Something about that flickering glisten tweaked his brain with remembrance. But he shook off the glimmer of it and began to chant OLIGARCH! to the sun. His young neighbors all did the same, a high-pitched chorus of focus and intent. And if he didn’t join in, he’d get no broth today. What harm was there in it?

New Paris was once the glory of the PRC, but now the Middle Nation had once more fractured into bickering cliques and wildcat massacres. His neighbors, the many small warriors of the 2442 Node Void Clique, were probably the most feared clan in the Pearl River Subcountry. They defended the Half-Papal Territory around New Paris from encroachment by the 1313 Soapy Water and 555 Lowbody Cliques.

The Node Void children were energized by a formidable combination of jimsonweed juice brewed in industrial batches in the towerblock basements, a half-understood syncretic Catholicism preached by Half-Pope Julius in the Montmartre Ecumenical Cathedral, and a ferocious love of Subaru, Hyundai and Mitsubishi racers kept alive over a full century and venerated as saints.

Their martial arts skills were honed in daily sessions held under the Tower, channelling the martyred force of St Andrew and St Bruce through its girder antenna into their tiny fists and feet. When reaching the age of twelve, they would band together to capture new members on wildcat excursions before immolating themselves in holy rushes that took whole districts of their enemies to limbo. They had no fear of anything or anybody.

The crystal sky held great promise of transmission today, and Galen sensed that the Node Void leadership would summon him today. Sure enough, after a bracing draught of mystery broth, rustier than normal with a consistency of warm lard, he was braced by block boss Tsuo. The lad, brushing up against the self-termination limit at eleven years old, was dry and formal in mien.

“Ghostman, the Half-Pope has messaged me this morning by cormorant. The Papal Guard will send the Blue Impreza for you presently. I hope you are pure in heart, voided of any clogged jism in your testes, and have defecated fully this morning?”
”I have indeed.”
”This pleases me greatly, as a constipated conduit is of no use at all to us. Would you like a slug of jimsonweed hooch while we await the venerated vehicle?”

There was never any harm to be incurred indulging in a splash of jumpjuice before liftoff. Galen settled down with the short-time warrior in the burned-out towerblock lobby and they awaited the advent of a blue street racer, passing the datura bottle back and forth like old comrades.

Meanwhile massed columns of child soldiers formed up and then set off from the drill yards to sprint past the Cathedral in the distance and receive the Half-Pope’s holy blessing.

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Interstitial Insert

The three passengers in the car drowsed in the muggy heat, ancillary albinos jacked on jimsonjuice and bathtub baijiu. The driver goosed the engine once-twice-thrice, black clouds belching out the exhaust from raw potato fuel, the brash noise of it spooking a cluster of daybats in the lower reaches of the towerblocks.

This was all in order to accomplish the first station of the cross, The Revving. There would be another thirteen stations before the car deposited Galen at his destination. But Galen, like the flunkeys crammed into the clammy backseat, drowsed and paid no more heed to the driver’s strict adherence to the rites. Let him drive and make observance; the albinos would dream and gather force.

By the time he was there, at the Tower Struck By Lightning, he had dreamed himself into a planetary voyage and could only with great difficulty bring himself to return to this world. His weak legs hauled him out of the blue Impreza, which coughed in sympathy with its precious and sickly cargo and showed its unimaginable age. If the Impreza burned or blew up now, that could only bode well for the ritual, though a replacement would be hellishly difficult to acquire, involving much bloodshed.

He positioned himself at the center of the tower’s base, rust flakes and cockroach wingshells fluttering down on the focus of the ritual. The columns of 2442 Node Void warriors rushed up at full sprint to take up stations around him. Their sweat and peroxide, their polyester tracksuit ozone and crackle, tweaked Galen’s nostrils now as he stood eyes closed, attuned at last to receive the signal. The chant began, their stepsmart marches clockwise and again abruptly widdershins according to some rhythm and compass Galan couldn’t fathom.

But to him it happened, amid the scent of peroxide and antifreeze, cockroach and rustpowder. The carrierwave pulsed and throbbed as the boys circled and chanted, stomping their tiny feet. A rushing burn through the midafternoon haze. This stamping shudder through his soles was the throbbing beat of it all - all of it, out there, in here - and he was gone.

Galen lifted up through the space between the tower’s girded quad-splay and into a floatspace of observation. Fragments dispersed now. He was at once a hapless albino jacked into an incomprehensible ceremony in a depleted city and a diplodocus of the Martian savannah, a hate-juiced kung-fu punk and a drifting armada of majestic colonial ambition, a mystic saint and a suicidal fanatic ripping out his enemy’s throat as that enemy gouges through eyesockets.

He retroburned through time and sucked the big bang dry of energy. He skimmed over cosmic skin until he found its puncture wound for re-entry. He greened the planet and roamed its newborn fields of flowers grazing and weeping for the beauty.

He tilted sideways in the sky above the Tower. The mists clouding the sun were burning through. Now the sunlight would have its way and the dust of the concrete tower blocks would glisten in soft farewell to the traveller on his journey.

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NOTE

This whole thing is inspired by the Jamie xx track “Gosh” - basically an ethereal UK garage track with nostalgic airs of the 90s junglist-underground which ascends towards full-on visionary status. A mashup of both versions of the track and of the video gives a narrative that to my mind is part space opera in the mode of the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars Trilogy (which I don’t actually like) and part jagged post-apocalyptic tale in the J.G. Ballard mode (which I lap up greedily and love more than anything else in the last 60 years).

So it’s really a Ballard tribute as well as a fond wave to UK junglist sounds of the 90s.

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