Signal-to-Noise Down Below

Silence bursts over the world. Phosphorus umbrella of dispersing silence coats the city in blankness. Afterglow of shimmering silence like the snows of amnesia. Now the crystal quiet of eternity. An inaudible universe stirred by cold black currents. No-one has ever experienced such intense, predatory silence. The city is gripped by fear high in the throat. No-one can move for fear of being unable to break the spell. Then the children make a break for it, dashing to and fro, running about with the terror of wild innocence. They flail at the top of their lungs. Nothing. Furious lightning of motion but no thunder. Vision is overwhelming but the ears are starving. The more they close their eyes tinnitus wells up and engulfs everybody just for something to do. People permit the static any mischance, until they hear voices and growls in it, or strange machine code. Contagious voices — anything their unconscious does or does not want to secretly hear. The human world lags behind now, husked off like a snake skin that has betrayed them all. People are re-entering the world of nature. Or so they think. It is a different world of nature, their barely known inner nature, where the predators are once-dormant psychopathologies and fantasies that now liberate themselves unchecked. The prey are the surface identities and personalities the people once held dear as being all that they truly were. All that they would ever be. Their essences. But they were stories. Stories they told themselves to manage the meta-flux of their real selves, which only emerge in fits and starts as far as chance circumstances permit. All identity is itself a cover identity. But now the senses have been uncoupled. Utter confusion has thrown the world upside down, if only for a time. The innermost fantasies seize their chance. A coup. That is what they want. To sit upon the throne and rule, not via reason but desire. They want to make victims of the false and lying personalities that have sat upon all their vital inner resources all this time, choked them down, made civilized lies of their own selves. It is a type of creative revenge, they will argue. They want to show what freedom can really mean to the slaves of reason. Unchecked madness is the new way forward. To save civilization you must destroy it. Open the floodgates of the subterranean mind, empty a tidal poison.

Underage debutantes mix with well-mannered profanity disorders, kiss in frenzied silent motion. Signal flares of commuter orgasms. Spasms in the receiving agent of the nervous system. Faces emerge to spit curses in hideous dialect, the baboon citizens almost berserk. “Routine nations turn up psychic negatives.” Black scars petering out … broken arabesques of terror. A chair bursts into petals. Pixel ambergris blows by with the scent of yellowing dreams: a yellow charcoal of desiccated morphine dreams left behind. “Wise guy. Take off your dirty taboos. Go through your dirty limericks with a magnifying glass.” Guilty possession of alien sex practices. Condemned brains of the world unite. You'll find a monster gaze will eat any potent terror. This, you will find. Tonight. Your eyes a mist of Braille.

Way too late to guard against it. The algebra of neural breakdown is well advanced here, any misadventure firmly sanctioned. Too late. It is happening even now. Prepare yourself for contact.