'38 Rue Utopia ~ Ep.39

We know of an ancient radiation
That haunts dismembered constellations
~ Cake ‘Frank Sinatra’ 1996

Boris Pelcer

Ruby behind the bar tells her after the show that Giles’s taken Ellie into the Bunker.
Peye knows Ellie on the inside is way more dangerous than Ellie on the outside, she sighs, having to physically suppress the anxiety that eats at her solar plexus.
Downstairs she lays down on her bed, pulls up her menus and enters Bigmark’s domain through the backdoor that the AI choses to ignore, the backdoor she’d built in the Carny’s virtual space back when she was the golden girl and Giles was still starting fires in the street.
The public access area of Kulture’s domain is a labyrinth of data, collected by a miasma of code, cobbled together for the most part by aging Ayetee illuminati, most now dead, some of whom had been willing to coach the willing teenage Peye.
When looked at directly this perimeter is a thing of technical beauty; a bristling utilitarian work of art.
Somewhere within this labyrinth there is another door behind which there lives a ghost.
It is the ghost of a past that was eaten by its consumerist obsession.
It is the ghost of all of those lives lived online.
It is the ghost of the digital narcissist.

• The ghost haunts all who encounter it with: rogue popups selling advertising dreams or insurance nightmares
• animated gifs that combine words in a manner that defies comprehension: “What are you saying?”
• sanitised war reportage; the correspondent’s prematurely grey hair, windswept by helicopter or by cannon fire; breathless with the thrill of it all; delivering his lines for the machine.
• Un-sanitised war porn.
• Social networks; their members all dead; their AI begging you to join.
• Charity guilt appeals; flies in the eyes of the poor, a running total of donations from people who are years dead - perhaps their bank accounts live on.
• porn crusting the underside of the rim.
• Money!
• Guns!
• Money!
• Money!
• Money.

Peye sometimes plunders the ghost for inspiration but it’s usually just depressing.
Having grown up in the presence and within the interior of the AI, named Michael Caine by Peye after binge watch of Batman movies; she has an almost fraternal relationship with it. She’s probably the only one who really knows it; its little idiosyncrasies, its micro obsessions, the literal sense of humour it has long given up on cultivating.
Kulture’s private external corridors are rather neater and much more buttoned-down than the surrounding public access area; they present locked doorways to

• crypto mining cluster-minds
• projected power consumption vs production figures that nobody reads
• Kulturati financial records
• digital storerooms full of intelligence junk including but not exclusively:
• chip files on everyone

All powerful weapons.
Michael Caine’s personal files; also stored here but long ago hacked by Peye; allowing her unhindered network travel, and access to the surveillance feeds, all within the parameters of how far one can emotionally blackmail an AI.

Cake
Frank Sinatra