Them & Us

Bromley Pigeon

Photo by P.I.

'38 Rue Utopia ~ Ep.43

Exaggerations with nothing to show
The Empress has no clothes
~ Icarus Line ‘Dead Body’ 2013

Codex Seraphinianus ~ Luigi Serafini

Switching to the recorded feed, Peye witnesses the meeting with Ellie and realises that this is one of the rare occasions when Giles and Krystal simultaneously occupy the same room. Ellie’s tattoos have ensured that her face has been captured on the feed as a kind of shape-shifting blur of white noise; a water stain on the digital velvet surface of the feed’s reality.
It appears that her ugly leather dress is also somehow powering visual confusion as it projects a black leather-dress-shaped hole onto the cameras.
Peye watches Nikos escort the invisible Ellie to the guest room.
Peye watches the invisible Ellie check out the room for escape routes, her presence evident by the black hole dress; along with footprints in the super-pile carpet, the juggling of door handles, a shadow falling on a mirror.
Peye watches while the invisible Ellie takes a bath, a decidedly more pleasant view when compared to the black-hole dress, although the missing head is a little disconcerting.
Peye watches Krystal oversee the laying out of the dining room: table settings; lighting, cutlery and camera placement; all part of the domestic game.
Peye watches the dinner that ensues, cursing the invisible Ellie for the look of satisfaction that crawls across Krystal’s face, visible even on the crappy feed, as the deal is agreed
Peye watches as the recording ends in the present, all players scattered to their respective points on the map.
Peye watches as Giles loiters in the control room; a recess really; where the house’s aging AI lives; an independent but lesser offspring of Michael Caine.
It’s little screen flickers, presumably in raw colour, Giles’ weakness for late 20th century TV sitcoms plays out in the inevitable obedient laughter on cue in a world pretending to be dependable and cute. Peye gives the AI a DDoS nudge just to fuck with Giles’ head; the screen goes blank; the AI protests Denial of Rights (Non-human) to as many agencies as it can remember (most of which no longer exist, and those that do have long been occupied by cyber-squatters.) Old games that almost bring a smile to Peye’s face; the feed flickering in her eyes as she watches, hands behind her head, legs crossed at the ankles, her hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.
She is slowly overcome by sleep as the scenes within the house settle into an uncomfortable inactivity.

Icarus Line
Dead Body

Thanks be to L.C. for the sleepy golden storm.

Pillow Dust

The Third Policeman ~ Armando Veve

This story has no moral; why should it? It’s only here to take you away from the reality of the assault, from the laying of blame.
A mind-fuck of the darkest intent – perpetrated by mediocre bureaucrats without souls.
It catches in your teeth – spittle-strung from cheek to cotton.
Dream residue, like the gunk in the corner of your eye, mind reaching for lost meaning, the resonant truth that links unconnected daylight items to the sentience of your dreams.

Name And Shame

'38 Rue Utopia ~ Ep.42

All your life
Inside a chrysalis writhing
~ Shearwater ‘Insolence’ 2012

Studio 54, NY 1977-1985 ~ Willy Spiller

You’d think they’d spend a bit more on their surveillance feeds; all that money and the best they can do is black and white, no sound. Thing is, they rely so heavily on the chip-tracking system that they don’t care too much for the visual detail, using it only to confirm some physicality should the need arise.
Peye watches the live feed from Giles’ house; an activity she has performed regularly since ’38 when relations between brother and sister finally became untenable. She is therefore familiar with the avatar that Krystal so similarly presents both in private and in public.
Of course, this presumes that fraternising with the Kulturati constitutes ‘public’; Peye is reasonably certain that Krystal’s had no contact with the street for years; Giles however, is another story.
Her brother and his lovely wife spend a lot of time catching glimpses of themselves in reflective surfaces, as if to reassure themselves of their cool existence bathed in a steady warm stream of positive feedback.
Vampires, if ever there were such a thing.

Shearwater
Insolence

Through a Glass Half Empty

Monster Brains ~ Virgil Finley

The guy next to me on the Central Line is reading The Fountainhead.
His dress and demeanour has the fastidious blandness of a man who believes that his emptiness can be filled by Ayn Rand

40 Acres and a Mule

The Truth Behind '40 Acres and a Mule'

Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The Root

Phot courtesy of Black Light

"Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth."

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

'38 Rue Utopia ~ Ep.41

Mark these words
One day this chalk outline will circle this city
~ The Mars Volta ‘Televators’ 2003

Cyborg ~ Mery Moon

“They’ll have had to come in through the Trade Gate,” says Daniel, “There’s no other road that’ll support the tractor. We’ll need to hack in there”
“What if they’ve seized the tractor the boys’ll be…”
“Don’t think so Alec, Bigmark has nothing to gain by doing the dirty on three youngsters, they like to keep up at least the appearance of legitimacy. My bet is that the they’ll’ve let the boys in with a trade visa. But we need to make sure”
They reach the Trade Gate in the early hours. Its presence is a floodlit scar in the surrounding dark. They creep into its penumbral perimeter, on their bellies now.
Daniel let’s out a breath as he connects to the gate’s wifi; the ignorant fuckers haven’t changed the password since way back then, nd the gate’s registry is still easy meat for Ellie’s old hacks.
Daniel scrolls through the entries:
“They came through 5 days ago… Trade Visa for Mark… they’ve all been chipped”
Daniel transfers the boys’ chip-metadata to his hardware leaving Bigmark’s AI unaware of his intrusion; an intrusion that Michael Caine would no doubt regard as theft. Daniel loads Mark’s meta into a tracker which supplies him with a map-overlay of Bigmark; Mark’s position blinks blue towards the centre. The map overlay is dated May ’36 but how much could this place have changed since then? Daniel covers his eye so the light from display flickering on his retina doesn’t alert the gate’s visual sensors.
“They’re in Bigmark proper, looks like the warehouse district,” he whispers, “we need to head into town”

The Mars Volta
Televators

On The Fly

'38 Rue Utopia ~ Ep.40

The glassy dude
I'm the science of all that's wrong
~ Baxter Dury ‘Miami’ 2017

The Kulture holds on to what it had at the time; a large slice of the pie; all sources of power.
The Carny lies somewhere between two worlds, the then and now, the virtual and the actual.
Physically, it’s a post-collapse creation, but it hasn’t always been this presence, this lump, this oasis, this grubby circus located in one of the darker surface precincts of Bigmark. The Carny conceived as Carnivale, a sandbox; Peye’s virtual playground; a sanctuary for her creative urge.
In it she’d deposited a community of avatars coded from the last beta version of The Sims™: clunky but they served well enough as members of the audience. For the sound system she’d cobbled together bits and pieces from various mixers and Muzik Makrs whose code had long been penetrated by the military, no doubt looking for shit they could use to kill more people more efficiently.
At that age she had dreamed of programming a reality that would take her away from Bigmark, away from the hypocrisy she saw among the Kulturati, to an alternate reality that even as a young teenager she’d known better than to disclose to the family.
Her Tales were born in the Carnivale’s VR, honing her skills as a storyteller as performed before the avatars who reacted according to their programmed personality matrices, not always satisfying but at least she felt she wasn’t talking to herself.
Things are better now with live audiences...
When it comes to family, Peye’s family especially, nothing is free from exploitation.
Her mother’d somehow discovered her secret virtual sanctuary and immediately seen the potential, both for financial gain and as a tactical outpost topside in Bigmark. In addition, she saw it as a way of containing Peye, then in her twentieth year, a way of breaking the deadlock of Peye’s rebellion; her refusal to work for the family.
She’s proposed turning Peye’s dreams into reality.
“It’ll be all yours darling, to do with as you want; you will be the star of the show; only, can we call it something other than Carnivale; that’s just too pretentious”
The first compromise is the thin edge of the wedge.
Her family only had her best interests at heart; a belief they never bothered to share with her. She soon realised that you get nothing for nothing; it was a hard lesson for the sensitive Peye, her dream now a debt she cannot repay, no matter how hard she cries into her pillow.

Baxter Dury
Miami

Here We Go (around the sun) Again