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Wrote this for a text game I never published. You play as a mote of consciousness rediscovering her body as she undergoes surgery to become the pilot (human liaison) for a mech (sentient ecosystem).
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"Wall of lichen, or something rhizomatic. A malachite-pattern in teal, cyan, yellow. A ream of textural fibre-muscle, inspired by the wriggling neurology of certain mosses in the lightning precinct. But integrated into the spine like an epiphyte. The entropic organ?"
"Repurposed the hair. Orange, blue, shimmering; a colour close to what the underspace. They inset it with certain hologrit patterns, microcilial whorls and eddies. It was thick before but this is fur-like. Larger amounts of back hair, with such technical inscription it renders like a fresco. Certain swirls of it mark info like time period, memories, coordinatesâŠ"
"Claws, but small and silver. Similar to the sea urchin that handled the Pophys superameoba. Designed for delicate work, for both sewing and unseaming. The kind of tailoring the fox would require. The kind I want."
"Skin has the same mesmerising effect as the fur-hair, laced with psychadelia and fern-patterns, though that seems to be an aesthetic touch. Contain microbacteria, or perhaps elaborated memory cells, design upon to become their own set of organisms, which makes considering the job description. These bateria are part of the undergoing process, like the fox does it, attached to infradromist system, that secret organ."
"Smell of humidity, and nectar. Wet soil, bug-shell, and all of the ground-plants seeking light. The immensity of the scent, the texture, the heat. Canât tell if itâs being emitted from me or just inserted into my olfactory receptors. The fox prefers sight by smell, the more that I think of it."
"Muscles were reworked. Not that they needed much improvement, but becoming a pilot requires different reflexes, and different modes of movement."
"Watersun. The coast. The lurid shapes and description of coral, flotsam, shorewood.The smell of it, an early smell. The kind that touches. I remember this place. It was the first month in their second calendar, the month where the commune was taught biorigging by In-humus itself, the kind of biorigging you wouldnât find from LSC. The flounder-computers, the glassware, the atelier. I remember this place fondly. Itâs where I met her."
"The port-station was more populous than I expected, considering the distance of the journey. I flexed my finger-muscles, taking a seat. A bodega in the corner was selling coffee. Ships filtered in and out venting particle trails, off the outer trellises of the station. In the distance I saw an Yirusse wandering in their ghost-mode, and politely looked away. I took out my journal. The air was well-manicured here, probably to appease the officials behind me, embroidered ceremonial wear over their skinsuits. I put my pen to paper. Began the first layer of Passando por baixo: âHad I then dabbed masala and sambal onto my wrist, had I sullied myself with the scent of a candle, and approached a good circle of white like what the artists call the surrealâŠâ"
"In a grotto east to the heavy beaches of the coastal point, beneath its silken black rock, they keep one of their hospices. This suite is specialized for major, ecological surgery, and is where Figman and her team is working on my body, my body pontooned on shallow pool of primordial soup, of cyan fluid and soft kelp. sucker-fish keep me sterilized, take away excess blood. Siphonophores laud my body. The cave is trellised with jellyfish-flesh, soft, bioluminescent canopies imported from the lunar quarter, for climate control. The starfish is for ritual purposes."
"They stationed me as the expeditionâs undergoer. They needed my talents, they said, because of the obscurity, the difficulty of the journey. The anomalies on the actual planet itself. When they âdiscoveredâ the strange, pastoralism of In-humusâs ecocommune, they were surprised to not find the colony logged in the L'Ordonne archives. They panicked. Needed to discover more of it, to know of it. Which is to say, destroy it."
"The internal infradromist system, the secret organ that lets me undergo. Like any secret organ, itâs not entirely physical in composition; part of it is textual, psychic, which is why I have to write my Passando por baixo. The commune would describe it as long and antenna-like, black to luminous blue. Inscribed with whorls and eddies that record environmental data."
"They had all kinds of specialists on board: diplomats, biologists, surveyors. Planetary contact was a complicated affair, so I didnât question it, but the amount of people bothered me. A procedure seemed to require more finesse, more delicacy, and despite who was on board the corprostates and L'Ordonne still called it an expedition."
"Any wetware company would kill for the techniques they have here at the coast. The green-gold soups they cultivate in tidal pools, the intuitive designs of their biorigs; the commune beholds such an extension of corporal science it changes everything. Of course, one of those companies actually did kill for it. One of the biologists was a spy for LSC, and the diplomat-gefreitor wasnât any better, because L'Ordonne is terrifying. So I fled. Saved what I could. Got to the entropic, to the foxâs domain, though I wouldnât know who that was until later."
"Nose like a snout, but only like a snout. Theyâve increased my olfactory sense, my radial visualization. Added timestamps to that perception, coded it into rememberance, into my psychological abilities. To conceptualize, to abstract. Theyâve turned even scent into a kind of Passando por baixo, gave me a new langauge to write in."
"I wouldnât learnt until after Iâve left the entropic that most of the expedition members were dead, having killed each other or had been put down by the weapon-precinct. Out of the ones who survived, the ones deemed to not harm the health of In-humus, I was the only one who stayed. One of the natives, a steward from the entropic actually, helped undergo for the rest."
"The anomalies on this planet, the not-black shimmer youâd find in the underspace, were an ergoshperic excess. A kind of pockmarking on the worldâs skinâthinned reality where the underspace seeps through. They condensed most commonly in the entropic, actually, which might explain why I had gone there so instinctually. While this seems completely inhospitable, the entropic, or rather the commune itself held the belief that the underspace was capable of supporting and actually had life. Considering the vigour of that jungle I inclined to agree. Itâs said sometimes that thatâs where the fox was born, but that might be a joke."
"And of course she belonged to the coast. She looked like the coast, slender, skin textured like the sand but curved and slick. Her demeanor like a wave, at one moment calm and defining, and suddenly the passion of it would overwhelm me. Figman was always like that. Like at any coast, I want visit and feel. Like at any coast, I want to be taken."
"On the equator of In-humus coming in from the gulf, there is a lake cratered by the mountains, rounded and purpling. The warm air chases the cold, wound until becoming an eternal thunderstorm. The ecology here has evolved to sustain and carry that lightning, now consumed into food-molecules, stored in vacuole cells of bioelectricity. Crystalline spheres jingling, feeding and kiltering off and onto each other. It is what inspired the communeâs aviary system."
"The whale is organ zero. Their crown. Stationed in low-orbit, the whale was reformatted from spaceship into satellite port, ultraradio relay, aviary, underspace anchor, manufacturer... Cells of people course through its platforms, its bare, girdering ribs. Flare beetles and fireflies flit in and out. A thin film of biomatter billows within its circumference. Its chassis is collapsing open, into vessel-atriums, into shipyards. Its stewards look below and see coronal storms."
"In their language there is no difference between dead whale and hive whale. Whales when dead are fervid with organisms, alight with activity, offer microecosystems for as long as it decays. And so, dead-whale/hive-whale. The word shares no etymological roots. What we translate as dead is not dead; what we translate as whale is not whale. It is everything, it is cyclical, it feedsâŠ",
"The bionic, softstone alloy of the hive-whale's gel, slowly unfolding from its lining as the cycles pass since the zero month. The tunnels of its intestines the large, intricate atria of its organs. There's a lamellar grid of its skin, the dead-whale's blubber in whorls, contained in the slow hurricane of the station. As we descend long spools of barnacle shudder past, underspace-anomalies popping and dissipating in its slanted quality of light, even in orbit. Its bulkhead a metal cowry shell, the white, shore-visage irradiated by the sun. Its spine a recess of its biotech remnant, before the commune learnt at the coast."
"Haruspicy informs the third calendar. Imagine a miniscule observatory inside of you. Imagine its astronomers recording data on the frequency of your nerves firing, if its oxytocin or adrenaline flowing through your endocrine system. They deduce that these are the laws of physics, impeccable and meaningless. Outside, you are kissing your child, or swallowing water, or blood. What do we assume we already know? The commune knows the species of the year looking at its insides; knows itâs next movements."
"The angelbeast might on occasion join the snow-sand whiteness of the Vanya's ecomech, become its pilot for a while before leaving. His feathers are tawny though he might appear human, his beard dark, his nose large and ruddy-skinned. That sunset brown dipping into gold. His size shuffles, makes violin noises. His apricot-scent stays to haunt."
"Before the absorption by LSC, Juttison was in its corporate brightening-stage where it rapidly ate all it could in a sopping tantrum of success. They established a colony on Phaur, a marginally established system back then, and inset a violent campaign of economic dependencies and silverscaping. They bought out all the councillors on Phaur-3 and expanded their mining operations, zirconium in tonnes being sent back to their homeworld. All their baristas were terrific at smiling, and did not seem to leave their stations. Of course, by the time Juttison left, the Pophys system was ravaged resource-wise, and the overhaul of local governments kickstarted a chain of socioecological collapses later dubbed the deathstorm."
"Passando por baixo, the mental fortification/deliberate abstraction technique any undergoer devleops for themselves was basically already here, in the entropic. The stewards here held a more hymnal style, and spoke in a language which mimitated the vibrative chirruping of the jungle, and in the sheer size of that technique, undergoing, for them, was incredibly communal. I've been from L'Ordonne to QuaLi, and down to the Caliphate. None of them knew it like this, studied or did undergoing the way the fox had taught me to."