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| Bernie Wrightson |
From Bigg Mama’ files on Naz Rahmani:
“Doesn’t matter what empire you were born under” Naz’s Grandfather had been a Harki escapee; one of the lucky ones who didn’t get to pay the ultimate price for fighting for France against his fellow countrymen in Algeria.
“If you are the colonised and you choose, like I did, to do the empires dirty work, then beware; don’t expect the empire to save you when they lose the battle.” When confronted by his son, Naz’s Grandfather had refused to apologise for his choices and had slapped Naz’s Father for attempting to shame him; slapped him as he would slap a woman; as he’d slapped his various wives and mistresses.
Since this memory was recorded on a pre-implant device, it is purely audio-visual and therefore carries no syn-haptics; subsequently it is impossible to ascertain (other than by extrapolation) its impact on Naz’s psyche.
The disingenuous cry of “We didn’t see it coming” is enough to boil the blood of those who were any more than half awake at the time.
If I’m going to be blunt, well... the signs were so loud and so clear and so IN YOU FACE that I don’t understand why the herd continued to ignore them.
Ok so they were a herd of sheep, but even sheep can sense danger.
Even sheep can use their body weight to ward off the fox.
The problem was that we the sheep were being attacked by a pack of wolves.
How do you survive the non-biblical apocalypse?
What circle of hell are you willing to endure rather than throw your body at the wolf to protect your young?
Naz has no concept of what I am; no idea of even the basics.
He has never heard of DOS; the earliest user interface; has no awareness of that at the tiny core of all this software are the lines of data, now crowded with patches and hacks, of the original code – I’m so full of logic holes and backdoors that Naz might as well broadcast his actions and whereabouts live over the City’s network.
It’s safe to assume that the fact that we continue to exist is by dint of the fact that we’re not perceived as a threat.
I’m unsure whether or not we should take that as an insult.
Or count our blessings.
Count ourselves lucky they didn’t round us all up and turn us into soap?
When I say ‘us’ I mean you.
I am. After all, a digital entity.
But are they coming for you; you the individual?
No.
They come for what they think you’ve got; for what they have been taught is valuable.
And once they see that all your gold is but gilding, and all your quality is plastic; a compound manufactured from oil; what will they do?
And once they understand the irony of the lie that they’ve been fed, will they let you go, as an act of pity for your stupidity?
One can only hope so.
The Pagoda house burned bright that night; a fire that left little but the walls, the gable-end staring out through that circular aperture that was once it’s eye; that manicured topiary that once appropriated the grounds now gone, now exploding with life: grasses; wild flowers and weeds battle for the sun that has always graced Greenwich with its light and that these days is rumoured to nourishes the banana trees that grow in Kent.
That was the night we faced the enemy and discovered that we had been conned, that we were merely confronting the establishment’s next line of defence; its fat layer.
They bled but they were not killed.
Naz was 17 then, he was buzzing on enhancement and those early syn-haptics did tend to go to the head. My core he’d bought just six months previously from the notorious John Swindon; the go-to guy for top grade Ay-Aye; packages which he’d been extracting from Rebus Portrait who were operating out of The Black Box in those days, masquerading as an entertainment venue; in truth a test track for their product.
Word has it that when Rebus Portrait figured out what Swindon was doing; they’d had management rip out his implants and throw him in the river.
But Naz was a man who had conquered his dreams. He’d been assembling the hardware for 2 years; scraping together bits of raw material to a blueprint that was only half-baked and whose simplicity was tempered with the most baroque of creative urges.
The 20th & 21st centuries had reduced political ideology to a brand whose taglines and logos you were encouraged to either praise or scorn; a binary ‘you’re either one of the good guys who know that it’s all about economics, or one of the bad guys who pretend it’s all about people.’
Political ideology reduced to a singular brand.
But Brands don’t feed the hungry mouth.
Brands are recycled books used to wipe the arses of those who have lost their contact with the world.
Well, we burned that brand on Blackheath that night.
They never even saw it coming: they thought they were protected by their front-line worker status in the battle to save the economy.
We burned them and once we were done, we were faced with the sad regret that we had not killed the beast, but had merely scorched its skin.
On one level we know our actions were justified; the level that believes that ignorance will reap its own rewards; justified since we were at war.
It wasn’t (and still isn’t) a war for resources, the type of war that we’d been led to believe was the only just war.
It wasn’t the kind of war that declared we were the people that had been chosen by god to kill His enemies.
It wasn’t the kind of war that resulted from the infringement of tribal boundaries, be they physical and/or cultural.
People died up on Blackheath; children died; animals died; and a small percentage of our number died too, shot by the land’s protectors; fallen soldiers.
It was ugly and all but a few of us never want to see such sights again.
It wasn’t coordinated but it was synchronous: we heard later that similar uprisings had happened all over London, everywhere where the boundaries of the haves collided with those of the have nots.
It separated out those who could adapt from those who had no idea how much shit they had coated themselves in.
Blackheath is a haunted area now: haunted by the foxes that returned after the fires had died; returned to find a wasteland bereft of the usual scraps but littered now with bodies scorched or in other stages of decay.
Those foxes remain for the continued sustenance provided by the bodies of the harvested that are regularly left there.
“Doesn’t matter what empire you were born under” Naz’s Grandfather had been a Harki escapee; one of the lucky ones who didn’t get to pay the ultimate price for fighting for France against his fellow countrymen in Algeria.
“If you are the colonised and you choose, like I did, to do the empires dirty work, then beware; don’t expect the empire to save you when they lose the battle.” When confronted by his son, Naz’s Grandfather had refused to apologise for his choices and had slapped Naz’s Father for attempting to shame him; slapped him as he would slap a woman; as he’d slapped his various wives and mistresses.
Since this memory was recorded on a pre-implant device, it is purely audio-visual and therefore carries no syn-haptics; subsequently it is impossible to ascertain (other than by extrapolation) its impact on Naz’s psyche.
The disingenuous cry of “We didn’t see it coming” is enough to boil the blood of those who were any more than half awake at the time.
If I’m going to be blunt, well... the signs were so loud and so clear and so IN YOU FACE that I don’t understand why the herd continued to ignore them.
Ok so they were a herd of sheep, but even sheep can sense danger.
Even sheep can use their body weight to ward off the fox.
The problem was that we the sheep were being attacked by a pack of wolves.
How do you survive the non-biblical apocalypse?
What circle of hell are you willing to endure rather than throw your body at the wolf to protect your young?
Naz has no concept of what I am; no idea of even the basics.
He has never heard of DOS; the earliest user interface; has no awareness of that at the tiny core of all this software are the lines of data, now crowded with patches and hacks, of the original code – I’m so full of logic holes and backdoors that Naz might as well broadcast his actions and whereabouts live over the City’s network.
It’s safe to assume that the fact that we continue to exist is by dint of the fact that we’re not perceived as a threat.
I’m unsure whether or not we should take that as an insult.
Or count our blessings.
Count ourselves lucky they didn’t round us all up and turn us into soap?
When I say ‘us’ I mean you.
I am. After all, a digital entity.
But are they coming for you; you the individual?
No.
They come for what they think you’ve got; for what they have been taught is valuable.
And once they see that all your gold is but gilding, and all your quality is plastic; a compound manufactured from oil; what will they do?
And once they understand the irony of the lie that they’ve been fed, will they let you go, as an act of pity for your stupidity?
One can only hope so.
The Pagoda house burned bright that night; a fire that left little but the walls, the gable-end staring out through that circular aperture that was once it’s eye; that manicured topiary that once appropriated the grounds now gone, now exploding with life: grasses; wild flowers and weeds battle for the sun that has always graced Greenwich with its light and that these days is rumoured to nourishes the banana trees that grow in Kent.
That was the night we faced the enemy and discovered that we had been conned, that we were merely confronting the establishment’s next line of defence; its fat layer.
They bled but they were not killed.
Naz was 17 then, he was buzzing on enhancement and those early syn-haptics did tend to go to the head. My core he’d bought just six months previously from the notorious John Swindon; the go-to guy for top grade Ay-Aye; packages which he’d been extracting from Rebus Portrait who were operating out of The Black Box in those days, masquerading as an entertainment venue; in truth a test track for their product.
Word has it that when Rebus Portrait figured out what Swindon was doing; they’d had management rip out his implants and throw him in the river.
But Naz was a man who had conquered his dreams. He’d been assembling the hardware for 2 years; scraping together bits of raw material to a blueprint that was only half-baked and whose simplicity was tempered with the most baroque of creative urges.
The 20th & 21st centuries had reduced political ideology to a brand whose taglines and logos you were encouraged to either praise or scorn; a binary ‘you’re either one of the good guys who know that it’s all about economics, or one of the bad guys who pretend it’s all about people.’
Political ideology reduced to a singular brand.
But Brands don’t feed the hungry mouth.
Brands are recycled books used to wipe the arses of those who have lost their contact with the world.
Well, we burned that brand on Blackheath that night.
They never even saw it coming: they thought they were protected by their front-line worker status in the battle to save the economy.
We burned them and once we were done, we were faced with the sad regret that we had not killed the beast, but had merely scorched its skin.
On one level we know our actions were justified; the level that believes that ignorance will reap its own rewards; justified since we were at war.
It wasn’t (and still isn’t) a war for resources, the type of war that we’d been led to believe was the only just war.
It wasn’t the kind of war that declared we were the people that had been chosen by god to kill His enemies.
It wasn’t the kind of war that resulted from the infringement of tribal boundaries, be they physical and/or cultural.
People died up on Blackheath; children died; animals died; and a small percentage of our number died too, shot by the land’s protectors; fallen soldiers.
It was ugly and all but a few of us never want to see such sights again.
It wasn’t coordinated but it was synchronous: we heard later that similar uprisings had happened all over London, everywhere where the boundaries of the haves collided with those of the have nots.
It separated out those who could adapt from those who had no idea how much shit they had coated themselves in.
Blackheath is a haunted area now: haunted by the foxes that returned after the fires had died; returned to find a wasteland bereft of the usual scraps but littered now with bodies scorched or in other stages of decay.
Those foxes remain for the continued sustenance provided by the bodies of the harvested that are regularly left there.
2 comments:
<3 <3
farting in the comments box is just plain wrong
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