“The Phenomena Inquiry Team (PIT) was an elite committee of scientists formed in 2016. They touted themselves as ‘dedicated to innovative research in the fields of biochemistry and neuroscience’ but were selling body parts to billionaires on the black market for alternative medicine.” — Ralph Lambrecht, Arkhaiologos, Ancient Science in Modern Times

The dictatorship of the factual was rule by the obvious. To attach power or control to facts was to submit to the obvious.

The ventriloquist was undone. The voice said murder and the sale of weaponry were incompatible with Art so the ventriloquist believed they would be doomed to peddling the methods of killing forever. They installed a mock funeral after pretending to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. A mysterious young woman arrived uninvited wearing a leather jacket with alchemical insignia on the back.

Everything commonplace had become commonplace.

Lakshmi turned over again and finally got some sleep in the motel.

It was said that there was nothing new under the sun so it was the personal responsibility of every citizen to recycle the past to save the future.

“Remember Summer ‘05? I blossomed like a flower. I’d overcome knowledge.”

Hungry cameras depicted 24 hour footage that copied ancient symbols, memorised hieroglyphics of what people thought they could read on the screens. A projection of a projection of a flimsy interior was swamped by unconscious blood and bone. Pottery shards with encoded bar lines were visual drugs or repetitive songs that flashed photocopied pages of handwriting.

A song about the beginning of time would galvanise its property and move it to paradise.

The institution was neutral. No view of the world was held in common there! Computational management made sure of that! Enclosure was its defining feature. Enclosure and compartmentalisation interred adherents and deterred non-adherents.

“We dropped the bomb. You got a problem with that?”

In these violent times, acquisition of aesthetic pleasure was admirable. Political or religious preaching would be no way out of the situation.

Taking the identity of the Lord Justice to mean for itself an asset consisting of defining qualities that exemplified the sort of being he had become, or otherwise could be, was an enterprise fueled by negative and positive propaganda designed to focus attention on the image of the leader, the super-hero vanquisher, a triumphant monarchical figure dressed in a clown’s suit with a sound byte for every interview.

The ice ran out.

Strikingly, a composite image of various unrelated persons was filtered through an interpretation of the world that was valid only when it could be shown that one part of it was worth more than another.

Pseudo-scientifically proven techniques were employed which convinced the public to buy into bogus sales talk about who the attention seekers were and what they represented.

The machinery was natural. Unintended action occurred, coinciding with unrelated, intended action and integrated within whatever was seen to be factual and containing a moral dimension.

“I swear you will profit.”

Lakshmi’s hands moved like lightning. Any detail of forestalling was deeply seasonal, like the affirmative occasion of a jovial assault with no cause other than to keep the brilliance of the peace.

The embodiment of the belief system contained both the artefact and artificer. Although it was contained by form the artefact was a malleable substance that did not exist in matter but nevertheless, due to its effect on action, had the capacity to change form.

The operation of the machinery was supernatural. The instrument invoked that law which determined that entities and related factors would generate survival, freedom of movement and moral and mortal protection. The interplay between different nodes on the network of situations and identities occurred according to predictable codes and customs. But when the instrument employed datasexual supernature, the usual turned unusual.

Running everywhere, an antiquated pursuit smiled into the ventriloquist whose teeth were extraordinarily interesting. In the evening they would strenuously attest to the utmost degree that all notions of energy, power and control were the wretches of false alarms, the forgotten devils of abject terror.

L crumbled to the ground, her reason impotent, her nature resigned, and disposed towards a hollow laugh.

“I don’t believe in good or evil.”

The interconnecting, pre-existing supernatural lines of contact underpinning the connections between the relevant identities or situations were revitalised, reconfigured and redirected. Forthwith a channel was created which made room for the instrument to take up a dynamic presence or position within the network. As a result, the worshippers of the original system, whether their beliefs were seemingly rational or fantastical, were moved to act upon or against their beliefs in ways that were unimaginable without the instrumental intervention.

A halo around a mountain was moving out of the way. Its departure sparked further excursions, and on that fabled morning the complainant’s nose started bleeding. At the trial they criticised the lifestyle. Raising the face of a gallant friend, inferences of safety were present but foreordained at a shockingly late hour. Suffice to say, the shedding of consternation lightly invited no villainous intent but predisposed us to the sorry plight of the apparition.

Unfortunately, unaccountability followed. I could think of no other percept I could reconcile. The ordinary course of events would require no instrumentation because the Lord Justice had taken too little medication in the morning to escape the dreadful shadow of the presence generator.

Electricalised mental motion, emotion, action and reaction occurred involuntarily in response to the injection of the attractive and repulsive flows of datasexual supernature.

The word sexual in this context did not necessarily denote the sexual act but rather more its associated effects, whether they were organic or inorganic products or the psycho-social results of business or other activities which in any case naturally included a sexual component. The data were the factors pertaining to such eventualities. Yet the datasexual process could at times involve one or another specific vulgar or refined sexual act, depending on the circumstances.

All this seemed counter-intuitive. Reward without threat was supernatural. L was useless against the supernatural but superstition would still comply. Faith in it was a lie that would evidence itself by supernatural means. But it wouldn’t confirm any truth, only prove it was a lie.

The energetic force emitting from the generative source of the data flow was an artificial construct. It was falsely regarded as factual or natural. The mere observation and analysis of the information it produced was more than enough to alter its composition and direction. The immaterial artefact was of a mental substance and could not be fixed or made real, but how it took form could be altered by simply looking at or changing its point of view. Thereby its course of action was changed.

The committee members were circling the farmyard like chickens at feeding time. They had some controversial opinions and there was a grab for power. Night and day were exacting upon the Lord Justice, bringing high resolution resolve. But for once, truth and dogma were not in conflict. Disobedience against both the secular and the religious brought no forgiveness without recompense. Karma lost its wheels.

The system of reward and punishment was enacted out of superstition and trickery. Power and control lay in the capacity to mete out reward or punishment. Its dynamic was the core belief that held the system in place. To step outside the system was to deny “relationship”, another illusion arising from the perception of power and control. The reasoning was circular but withdrawal from its boundaries made room for reward without threat.

Herald-Examiner: Now that you have achieved your goal in life where do you see yourself, when you have everything you could possibly want, in the future?

Lord Justice: I’m not sure I understand the question.

Herald-Examiner: You have amassed great wealth and achieved your aim in life which was to become a renowned author of spy novels —

Lord Justice: Yes, but I’m not finished yet! You are doing okay. Don’t worry, it’s fine. (pause) I have twenty minutes max but take your time. Don’t you take notes?

Facts got their factual appearance from datasexual supernature.

A psychiatrist who murdered his parents after lacing their toothpaste with cyanide was shot dead by police Wednesday morning.

Katusha noted in the mall that hamburgers and fixed metaphors for deluxe machine learning came before fleeing a war. Katusha, infiltrator, rebel agent, gathered context and pretext, reformulated and re-appropriated subtext.

Facts pertaining to abstract codes emerging from the atmosphere (as it was engendered by the continual flow of information) were drawn into a vortex engineered within the same spatial boundaries as outlined by related symbolic representations.

Observation of the fictional aspects of the factual spun outwards.

The Kill-Freak Syndicate was espousing its demented doctrine of salvation, stalking the land. The kill-freaks were revelationists with chaotic emotion flows, increasingly under threat from the authorities.

Supernature penetrated the flow of the network to enhance, reposition and re-possess it in both material and abstract form.

As the logos had only recently been removed it was with great weakness and heaviness that L took up her quest for faith after previously having consigned it to the pile of shaggy dog stories in the corner of the motel room. The massive TV screen showed a girl in a wig or suchlike.

L remembered on one occasion she was with a couple of friends, old colleagues from Equipole, as they waited at the entrance to the drive-in to see “The Yellow Patch Crusaders” (2012), some nondescript Hollywood rom-com aimed at teenagers. Violence came to the surface as L remarked in reference to a poster for a sci-fi movie that she would like to see the robots suffer. Throughout the evening she made similarly bitter remarks about various unrelated things, making Giles and Nora start to wonder if something was bugging her. Nevertheless, L would become emboldened, recognising she too was fictional.

Under “productivity”, the products of commercial industrial medicine were reproduced to create the need to enforce further reproduction. Products created products and the reproduction of products. Due to an extreme overabundance of surplus products this led to their redundancy or elimination, so they had to be replaced to replenish and perpetuate production. This was progress, evolution, and improvement by means of the continual effort towards more effort in the manufacture of products.

His social status reduced to that of a drug addict, a mental patient, a prisoner, a homeless or severely disabled person, Nasrul had been drawn to examine the institution in detail. It was abundantly clear what its methods of indoctrination involved but they were more varied and frequent than he had at first estimated. Biased as he was, he took an incisive and persuasive tone while lying on his side. He was investigating people who believed in meaningless things. When they tried to assert their views he mocked them for their insufferable nonsense. Perhaps Nas failed to appreciate that having involved himself in an argument with the institute he had merely justified his existence. But when he was barred he felt elated. Finally, he had inspired a revolution of sorts.

Glaring into the sunlit street with unearthly eyes, frozen and suspended for an instant, N observed his alienation from a distance, partly because from his point of view the costumes worn by the institute members were so austere in comparison to his.

Glorification of rational thought was effected through expansion of the aesthetic dimension. This was to demonstrate that through taste and decorum the most desirable things in life were the finer, like rationalism. Their value was in the evidence that their owners were living the dream, a fanciful notion about the rational world being a series of attainable prizes to be won fairly and squarely in a competition.

“Give me the key, I’ll unlock the screen and we’re done here.”

Pop music videos were played on repeat showing images of people in fluorescent leotards and permed hair doing aerobics and robot dances to the sounds of synthesised muzak. This provided light relief due to the ironical and comical effect.

Effort was measured and evaluated by how much more information about the effort involved could be produced. The more information it produced, the more effective it was in its purpose. The information was used to record and tabulate increase as a moral virtue as opposed to the perceived moral flaws of decrease. This was the system of production in which success was measured by the capacity to expand upon existing productive attitudes by engendering panic and anxiety and a general sense of lack.

Multilateral military forces guided the mediated self through a moral and cultural vacuum with extravagant promises of new recycling centres, space weaponry, new casinos, hi-tech pornography and better junk food. Maximal efficiency and optimality were obtained through domestic-industrial information warfare, which with much smoke and mirrors, was made to seem peaceful, natural, and desirable.

Enough was always never enough and too much was never enough.

The wound was rejected. It was vaudeville masquerading as opera but nevertheless integrated into the mechanism for effect.

The continual acceleration of the production and reproduction of production was to help those at the top of the processed food chain who already had more than enough to extract more products out of those who either never had enough or only just had nearly enough.

Identity-assassination was when a person’s ID records got wiped out for profit. The void left by the extermination of identity-performance automatically generated revenue to compensate for the lack, while the person still believed they existed, which they did, except not as an identifiable identity. They were forced to flee to remote places and scavenge for food in the wilds from where they would never return after dying of malnutrition. The kill-freaks who committed the assassinations were able to leech off a non-performative ID for a period of time until the person was reported missing due to their inability to prove a valid identity. However, the police started cracking down on the Syndicate because although their activities had been economically useful to the Party they ran counter to propaganda policy.

L looked like a helicopter or a hurricane. She blasted through the ozone on a yellow jumping beetle on a flying cloud in polyester strumming a Telecaster, her window open to a terrifyingly reassuring wonder.

N was being drawn down another rabbit hole. It was adjacent to another which he rejected, but as he was coerced into conforming with the inherently destructive and controlling influence of the institute, that being the general consensus of the social product, he was nevertheless the model of optimal social improvement. Perhaps he had deceived himself? It didn’t matter.

Propaganda was evoked here as a suggestion for a course of study.

Another repugnant attention seeker capitalised on misfortune. The traffic funnelled the faux innocence of a smart suit and tie and nervous feet, a dissimulator, parasite, deceiver.

After ID-assassination the murderer had to withstand the responsibility (otherwise PTSD and schizophrenia), and many devotees of the Syndicate, not being hardened criminals or fully fledged psychopaths, could not cope knowing the horrors they had committed. Most were naive, dogmatic believers in a perverse, pseudo-religious doctrine of circular reasoning. They justified their actions on the basis that God had told them it was ridding the nation of “freaks”, those they identified as degenerates just because they were opposed to the bizarre doctrine of salvation through ID assassination, most of their victims being those who protested against the cult.

The functionary was always in search of a task which was found to have its meaning in use value. Use values were structured and applied hierarchically but paradoxically, according, not to the value of their purpose, but the perceived importance of their different places within the hierarchy, which were dependent on numerical factors assigned to the various functionary positions. A functionary had a numerical position which had what seemed on the surface to be a more or less arbitrary value attached to its task. To determine the use value of a given functionary one had to be in the know as to which numbers were supposed to be of greater or lesser importance. To find this out, one had to observe very closely when or where a given numerical value appeared and when or where it was attributed a certain power or privilege or not. For instance, the number 27,389 was obviously higher than the number 857.67 but this did not actually mean it was higher. It could be equal or lower depending on which functionary or task it was said to represent.

Numbers which appeared to be meaningless codes were elaborate signs used to fix in time and space the place of a functionary within the hierarchy of values. Their symbolic value was hidden or arcane and disconnected from any actual numerical value.

As the revelationists became the targets, suddenly they altered their doctrine to make themselves the sacrifice. In the vain hope it would redeem them in the eyes of the cops, they embarked upon a suicide mission.

Photographs of séances from the 19th century were fed through a software programme as a mode of entertrainment and to stimulate the ghosts of the dead and alien spirits.

The functionary sought a task so as to state and re-affirm its hierarchical status. Any given task was an expression of status bound to numerical signs. A task that might in an ordinary sense appear to be of greater or lesser importance or significant or insignificant use within the larger scheme of things was not necessarily so within the hierarchy. This is why the numerical attributes were not so much values or codes as pseudo-symbols relating to the opaque hierarchy of functionaries.

A floral pattern was mounted on a notice board outside a makeshift tent-like structure to symbolise the flowering of future ironies and sarcasm, the gentle cynicism of oil paint on the surface of water. Sheets of aluminium foil and cellophane came flying over the brow of the hill. Shiny turquoise metal boxes floated down from the sky containing the requested encryptions, tokens of gratitude and praise. Large winged insects crawled across the watery lake, crying, “help me, forgive me.”

---

The Conversations | The Apparatus | text & image © A. A. Walker