Cosmic Sonics

“What’s up my lovely archaea phonic cosmic sonics? Rocking with the robo electronic bionics?” I.R waved as he entered onto the wooden platform. The crowd cheered for the tall awkward lanky man. I.R was written in a blue patch on his coat. His hand up to his wrist a heavy clunky metal fist that he struggled to throw around as he greeted the audience. The breeze lifted up the tails of his long black duffle coat. Antenna twanging in the wind, metal rod attached and running up the side of his face. A multi colored ribbon strip of wire snaked around the rod. It plugged into his collarbone, which was coated with a steel casing and purple black neon and LED lights. His face looked pale and young and sickly, with droopy eyes carrying dark rings underneath. He would have looked in poor health if he wasn’t beaming with such outward joy. A sunny demeanor overridden his corpse like appearance.

“Hey kids! Would you like to hear a fun story from me and everybody’s favorite techno priestess, Ms. Specs?”
The crowd cheered back in unison.
“Right on! Hit it, Specs!” I.R pointed to the side of the stage.

Coming out from behind the curtain was a woman in a black gown. She wore wrapping over her eyes. Stalks made of flexible congregated steel tubing stuck out from under the blindfold. The ends of the tubing were flat disks of polycarbonate plastic. One was red, the other blue, both glowed. She raised up her robotic skeleton of an arm to display a set of red and orange rectangular buttons. One could fit their fingers through the spaces between her steel tendons. She pressed a button, which caused the speaker on her shoulder to start playing a dinky drum machine beat.

I.R led the song.
“I.R and Specs, heros to all, when the world needed saving, we would answer the call
Our little fellow humans were always part of team
But they were silly and small and of less use to We
So when we got signals from chaotic divinity
We were the right the folk to lead it up to infinity
I got mobbed by the mean police
who had assumed I relapsed on PCP
Come on I said, lets be free and sing, and dance through the meadow, get naked and drink
And laugh and play, all day and all night, but nobody was listening, so I decided that night…”

He led the song off to the techno priestess, pointing to her from across the stage. She resumed the song with a comparatively louder bellow, chanting out the lyrics with much more authority, to say the least.

“I WILL END YOUR WORLD HUMANS, IT’S TIME TO GET REAL
GONNA KILL YOUR BACKWARDS SPECIES JUST TO SEE HOW IT FEELS
YOU TRIED TO COME AT ME, YOU SHOULD HAVE COME AT ME STRONG
GONNA RIP OFF YOUR SKIN BECAUSE YOU LOOKED AT ME WRONG
I’M A COSMIC MANIFESTATION AND I’M ON THE ATTACK
YOU’RE GENETICAL SYSTEM ADDICTED TO ME LIKE CRACK
YOU PRETEND WE’RE HALLUCINATIONS GOING OUT OF CONTROL
WE CAN SMELL WHERE YOU ARE AND WE WILL RIP OUT YOUR SOUL.”

Specs let out a roar of pain, a prolonged scream, to end her verse. The dinky drum machine beat did a silly solo. The two continued the instrumental. I.R made his way to the middle of the stage, holding his microphone. In tandem with the song and syncing with it’s crescendo, Specs fired three shots of polymer tipped hollow point nine millimeter at I.R from her wrist strapped coil gun, braced to her metallic forearm. He fell with a dramatic drop onto his back. Landing with a heavy THUD, he laid flat across the stage. The servos readjusted the calibration on the recoil dispersion system across her arm, causing a mechanical whir in the brief silence. The audience cheered.

Standing to meet the crowd, I.R and Specs bowed to them and walked off. I.R hobbled and limped, clutching his bleeding wounds, which left a trail of thick coagulated black red blood. The janitor took to mopping the droplets left behind before the duo even got out of sight of the crowd. After all, it hardens fairly quickly, and by then it’s impossible to clean off, and the stage was already covered in it.

“I really think you did great, your singing always impresses me.” I.R spoke in a squeaky meek achy voice, being rather injured from the multiple bullet holes.

“Oh I’m only able to sing when I scream, you know that. You always have such range, and the crowd loved you tonight.”

The janitor, Pip, overheard their conversation as they left. Finishing up quickly with his work, putting aside the dirty water bucket in the corner, he ran over to the edge of the stage to see where they walked off. They merged into the crowd, arms around each others shoulders. The next act, another song performance from a different set, was already setting their gear up on stage. Pip straightened himself out and fixed his tweed felt cap. “It’s now or never!” He hopped off stage and ran to them. He already explained to his coworker that he’d be heading off. “Excuse me! Pardon!” He called out, but the music of the festival was starting up again and drowned out his calls.

Pip thought he lost them, but there they were, right down the dirt road trail in the dusk light. Managing to break out from the crowd surrounding the platform, he upped his pace to meet them.

The duo had made it to a near by nighttime diner. It was a small disheveled place. The doors lay off their hinges at the side of the entrance, propped on the wall. Some windows had long ago been broken. Metal sheet panels were bolted in place of the glass panels. Tables and chairs were shoved into the corner, smooshed together. The lighting was improvised floodlights on ropes and pulleys that hung in the middle of the room. There was a limited crew, audible but invisible, hidden in the back of the kitchen, present only in footsteps and clamor of rattling pans and silverware. There was more activity in the mornings, but currently most of the staff and customers were at the nighttime entertainment festival.

Specs propped her head in her palm, seated in her booth, looking out the window towards the dark forests. LEDs on strings lit the roadways in the distance, hung up and dangling from the nowadays inactive streetlamps.

“Did you have to use the hollow point, honey?” I.R flung out another fragment of broken apart bullet casing picked out from his open wound.

“I’ll run a magnet over you later, hon. I’m sorry. I swear I meant to use the full metal jackets…” Her eyestalks pointed down towards the corner, averting her gaze from him.

“Oh it’s nothing really now, dear, really…” He reassured and placed a blueberry smoothie down for her, in the vintage style milkshake glass with the barbershop poll straw.

Entering in now, Pip ran through the open doorway. He stopped before the duo, who gave him not but a cursory glace as he walked in. Pip mustered his courage, patted himself off, and pressed back on his velcro like sticky pads applied down the bridge of his nose (and across his eyebrows and cheeks). They weren’t loose, but he kept worrying they were.

He stepped in big authoritative goosesteps up to the pair, compensating for his comparatively small stature. Pip’s goofy nervous smile couldn’t help but disarm I.R.

“Good day sir!”
“Good day lad.” I.R chuckled at his enthusiasm. “Enjoy the song?”
“I hadn’t been wondering about the song much sir, I admit. I wanted to speak to you specifically, and you’re friend here, if I may. You’re the initial receiver, yes sir? And you two have been in the colony longer than anyone?”

“We got the signal first, yes. Are you a documentarian? Or just curious about these things? Or, ha ha! Think he’s a chinese spy, hon?” I.R pointed the little man out to Specs. “Does he look the type?”

She looked him over, her eyestalks scanning up and down. “…He might be.”

“Alright, alright. How about this… Can you recite?”

And on queue, both I.R and Pip broke out in a rapid fire chant.

“Music came down and it sung of all the copies all way out next door
a good friend, sending out strange signals, didn’t do that before
how were they starting to get what the symbols they made now mean
all because they were handed the history of the free
Add another to the counter
The universe has no owner
Our flood comes in with so much power
That this happens every hour
From an unknown sender
From blocks to underwater soldiers
To birds and metal howling
Round and round dark surroundings
Music came down and it sung of all the copies all way out next door
Sending a picture of a similar instance reforming their world
Oh, we never believe the next step until we learn and see
all this time the answers were obvious to a mixed up set of genes.”

The two sung it in unison, perfect sync.

“He could just be a well trained chinese spy…” Specs joked.

“Oh, she’s right you know! Here, do the secret handshake.”

I.R and Pip held their hands out, their middle fingers nearly touching, held sideways. Both pointed their pointer finger straight up and their pinky straight down in an inhuman way impossible to preform with normal human anatomy.

“Well that about proves it, doesn’t it? Alright. Well, what did you need to know, my good man?”

Pip got shy and blushed and held his cap “Well I’m just such a big fan of you guys. I know you talked about your adventures a bit, at some interviews, some festivals like this. But there’s a lot you guys never talked about!”

“Like what?”

“Well, I was talking with some of my mates, they were wondering, you’re the initial receiver, yeah? We were arguing about it, are you really the *initial* initial receiver?”

“He is.” Specs answered for him.

“Well, actually, that’s a bit tricky to answer…” I.R said. “It’s possible that many earlier receivers were, you know, killed by the government. But that said, I am certainly the earliest, I believe, to actually transmit between humans.”

“Ah I see. My friends were saying that you just call yourself that, and perhaps you’re just the earliest surviving one.”

“I can vouch for him.” Specs added.

“Well like I said, I don’t know, it’s impossible to say.”

“Also, that leads me to ask…” Pip, all shy with his hands clasped behind his back. “What exactly was the earliest days of the colony like?”

“Oh he IS a chinese spy, honey, look at him!” Specs laughed and pointed.

“Alright, alright. Well I should ask- She’s joking don’t worry- I should ask you how far back you go, to start.”

“When I got patched?”

“Heh, is that a joke? A clever turn of phrase due to the…” I.R motioned to the patches on Pip’s face. “…Never mind. Yeah, when you updated.”

“Well, it’s been a while, over a decade now. From what I recall, I was at home one night. Alone. It was a tiny place near the beach. Oh a lovely place, really, you could see all the lights of the town, it was a panoramic view with all the windows. This was a month or two into the, uh, well, when you first came around I guess…”

“Now hold on, hold on, I didn’t-” I.R interjected.

“Honey, you know what he means.”

“Well you know, since you got patched, and all that. Ha ha!” Pip gave a nervous laugh, unsure how he misspoke. “Any-anyways! This was during the time where they were putting out PSAs and EAS warnings, treating us like a natural disaster. Now I was holed up in my old lighthouse, that’s what I called my little abode, the lighthouse. Because it was on a little hill looking over the beach city. It was a bit after midnight, I was staying up all that whole week, caught up in fear. I didn’t know any better at the time, mammalian instincts and all. There was an alert of a wandering gang of… what did they call us at the time?”

“Oh they called us everything back then.” Specs added from her bench. “Flockers. Tribals. Singers. Zombies. Cultists. Techs. Choirs. They couldn’t make up their mind, they didn’t know what to call us because they didn’t know what we were. Anything but what we called ourselves, Cosmics, or shoot, how about our individual names? Hystericals was a popular term at the start.”

“That’s what they called us! Yes, they said a wild gang of hysterics was roaming into town. The tornado siren was blasting. The T.V was blaring alerts, with robotic announcers reading off scripts. Stay indoors, avoid hysterics if you can help it, wait for police or military response, yadda yadda. You know, I lived there my whole life and never knew where the siren was actually located? But I looked out the window across town, I saw a one of us climbing a pole. I assumed ‘They’re just going for a transformer or something, disable the power.’ But no, it’s the foghorn, saw it get pulled right off, chucked to the wind. I heard the wail of the siren fade out and droop in pitch as it fell. Neat little noise. I obviously knew this meant the tribe would soon be roaming the town. I rechecked my windows, my doors, made sure everything was locked. I turned off all the lights and hid in a corner near my bed. I could still see the town out the window. It was dark but I could still make out the shadows and outlines of the roaming gang, going door to door, house to house. This was a few months before we would, you know, start doing that in earnest, going door to door and fully sweeping and clearing home to home. The pack that hit my town that night consisted of, I would guess, about ten or so individuals. They stilled used basic boomboxes, hoisted over their heads, and chanted and danced in front of the homes, one by one, like carolers.”

“And did they, by chance, storm your residence, smash in your windows, and beat you to a pulp before you adapted to the signal by some variety of exposure or another?” I.R asked.

“Not at all actually, though I did see that exact process happen to my neighbor across the way. Although, if I were to guess, he wasn’t updated, he was an invalid, and was likely just killed. Either way, as they were ready to douse the place, readying cannisters, another neighbor of mine, no idea who, took to firing at them with his rifle. I’m not sure if it was from his windows, or if they got into a street level shootout. Either way, the mob dispersed. A few minutes past, I was still on edge, looking for activity. That’s when I heard her, the most beautiful singer I’ve ever heard. It was the same woman who tore off the foghorn, standing by the pole.”

“Singing the recitation?”

“Yes, and I ran out to meet her, I couldn’t help it. The next decade with her was the greatest era of my life. I’m still with her now. Here’s us together at the big festival, the one just last year, in Belmopan.”

Pip showed off a line of photos, dangling from his open wallet. “She got hit by a tomahawk missile recently.”

“Good heavens.”

“Yes, yes, but she was merely in the radius. As I understand, she’s planning on using this opportunity to add a whole new set of modifications. Uh, once she recovers, that is.” Pip lovingly caressed in his hand a picture of her. “But I admit, I’m getting inpatient…”

“She’s in the freezer then? Ah. It’ll be worth the wait, my good man. Now, you asked before about the earliest days of the colony…” I.R took a seat across from Specs and put a second straw into her smoothie. “Well let me tell ya. About, eh… how long ago was it?”

“Thirteen years ago.” Specs said.

“Yes, thank you honey. Thirteen years ago, I was an electrical engineer, a radio operator, an avid hobbyist. My equipment, set up at my own residence, got a signal one day. Cosmic ray interference was my initial assumption. Something about the rhymical nature of it caught my attention, though. I honed in on and amplified it and for about a day just listened with bewilderment. I went to review my cd collection, and then it hit me, it was almost musical in nature, this cosmic signal. I realized the musical elements in this cosmic sonic ray, that’s what I referred to it as at the time. Returning to the radio station set up in my bedroom, putting on the earmuff headphones at my desk. This time, I listened with the mindset that, though a far fetched idea, this cosmic sonic ray might be a song of sorts. I didn’t realize this at the time, but this induced a process of… uh, what’s the term?”

“Auditory neuromodulation, hon.”

“Is that it? I feel there’s a simpler term for it. Anyways, this irrevocably altered my neurochemistry and by extension my genetic code, and whatnot. Epigenetic modification, and such. Genetic changes in the body induced by changes in neuroplasticity. The typical effects hit. Intense spasming, thrashing about in my chair. Facial muscles contorting every expression. Bending, folding, shriveling up in odd yogic poses. I managed to stay seated at my chair, my limbs all tangled in the arms. Bleeding from the nose, and so on. I recall smashing my head on my desk, got a nasty cut on my head. A few hours later, I had taken to drawing. You know, the usual symbols. Blocks and cubes and circles and triangles. Basic shapes. Covered my walls with them. Made them with either black paint, sharpie, crayons, whatever. After a few hours, due to my excited state, I had either accidently broke or used up all my available writing tools. I recall it smelled more and more coppery over the course of the first few hours. Early coagulation effects. Anyways, I scribbled on the walls, floor, mirror and what I could reach of the ceiling. In the bathroom I eventually took to biting open my hand and scratched my blood into drawings. I didn’t understand what I was writing at the time, but this configuration of symbols forced its way out of me. If I wrote it out, if I could see it all drawn out, whatever it was, then I would understand this… idea. This great big idea that came to me, inspired by that cosmic sonic ray. Something about the bass line like melody, the deep sounding percussion, evoked an emotion, a concept so powerful it had to be made real. The soup my mind wandered through led me seamlessly from task to task. Eventually my preoccupied disposition caused me to wander out of my abode. Shirtless, covered in a mix of paint and blood. I attempted to climb a streetlamp, reaching for its bulb.”

“Sounds like a fun weekend!” Pip said.

“This was a Thursday, actually. Anyways, a pair of officers saw me from their car. I was still adjusting to the input, so I couldn’t even properly sing or recite yet. What did I say? How did I phrase it? Something among the lines of ‘Sparks from the sky, out of nowhere! Feeeeeeeeennnnnnng.'”

The trio laughed at the silly voice I.R put on.

“Ha, yes, yes… Anyways, I was wrapping myself around this lamp post, holding myself up with one arm, sticking my legs straight out horizontal, neck bending around it as if I were enveloping the post. The officers grabbed me and had to pry me off. The blood on my palms and face by then already morphed to become sappy and sticky. It came off the metal with a stretch and twang. The officers had no time to note that, I suppose. Perhaps they assumed it was some adhesive. They told me in the car that trying to detain me was like trying to wrangle a fish. Said it looked like I was trying to swim midair. They asked me if had training in jiujitsu, said I squirmed like I did.”

“Oh, hon, this is when they took you to the mental ward, yes? This is my favorite part of the story, let me tell it…” Specs interjected. “So… before you showed up, I always like to mention this, the guards would always call me as the craziest in the entire ward. But alas! Even that dubious achievement seemed short lived! The day I heard them carrying you in, when I heard them escorting you down the hall. I couldn’t see at the time, but I could tell even then, you were a lively jittery man.

“I was flailing all over the place. I had to be carried off my feet entirely by the guards. Convulsing, stammering, jaggedly contorting in odd yogic posses…”

“Hey! This is the part I like to tell! Anyways, he spoke rapid fire phrases so fast nobody could understand him, he was unintelligible. I heard his voice fade out down the hallway. From what I could piece together by eavesdropping, the new inmates name was Ray. Obviously he doesn’t go by that nowadays.” She grabbed I.R’s arm, her eyestalks bending towards him. “They said you had no criminal record, no history of mental health, no substances in your system. One day you just lost it, that’s what they thought. ‘I bet he just had some latent schizophrenia kick in while studying radios, next thing you know, he think’s HE’S a radio.’ ” She put on a deep mock voice of the guard. “What is it with you crazies and thinking you’re radios? I’ve seen three of ya now that thought you were radios… And trains! What is it with you crazies and trains, and radios, and cartoon characters?”

“Now, if I recall correctly…” I.R raised his finger in contemplation. “You had, back way when, the… goggles, was it?”

“Cup lids, honey.” Specs turned to Pip to explain. “Now, tape and cup lids were contraband in the ward, but the staff couldn’t help but feel bad for me to the point they made a rare allowance. I was blind, at the time, but I had this… delusion, I suppose I should admit, that I could still see, as long as I had my special glasses. They could be anything, sometimes they were sunglasses, or 3D red and blue paper movie glasses, or duct tape around my head. Often what would happen, I would put these glasses on and convince myself I could see. Eventually I’d have to swap out for a new pair after my delusions were proven false. With each new pair of glasses, I’d say ‘These are the ones, these are the REAL ones, these ones actually work…’ All the while, in truth, I was blind as a bat. Anyways, I.R was eventually sedated unconscious and strapped to his bed. When he awoke, an agreement was met between him and the nurse seated in by his side. She told him ‘If I let you loose, you’re not gonna do anything silly right? The guards will just tie you right back down if you do…’ “

“You really have a stellar memory, hon. You recall more about this than me, that’s for certain.”

“You were sedated at the time, dear. You speech was slurred. Every time you’d try talking it was gibberish. I could hear you occasionally struggle against the restraints. I presumed you were an elliptic. I heard the staff prepare to remove your straps.”

“Yeah… yeah, I recall that. As I rose to a seated position, the nurses all kept their distance. I presume they were watching for any sudden attempted lunges towards them. I recall still spasming and twitching and contorting and mumbling odd phrases.”

“Just how I like you hon.” Specs hugged his arm. Turning her red scanning eye towards Pip, noticing he was still standing near their booth, she toned down the intimacy and let go. “Uh. Anyways. The nurse said she was going to get you some tranquilizers. Oh, but they didn’t call them that, it was just ‘calming medications’ , that’s what they called them.”

“As they left my cell, I made my way to stand in the corner. One foot on the plastic chair, back flat against the wall, hugging myself, shaking my head, mumbling. ‘M-M-Music music… music came down and sung of all the copies all the way out next door. S-s-sending out strange signals, didn’t do that before.

Specs and Pip joined in to sing the next line. “How were they starting to see what the symbols they made now mean? All because they were handed the history of the free.”

“Yeah, exactly.” I.R shared a sip from the smoothie along side Specs. He got sidetracked gazing into the headlights on metal sticks jutting from her head. “Your eyes are beautiful, honey… Uh, where were we? Right. The nurse starting taking notes, writing down what I was saying. After listening to me recycle the same phrases, reciting our song, the poem, she gave up. She brought me a notebook and asked me to write down what I was trying to say. She left a set of loose blank papers on my desk and some crayons. Already as she was turning to close the door to my cell, I had seated himself and instantly took to scribbling. Odd doodles of the hieroglyphs, simplified into basic shapes. I was never great at drawing. It was made even more crude by my poor penmanship and calligraphy during my zealous outpour of multicolored chicken scratch. It didn’t take long before I had to request more pages, and started asking about a notebook, if I could have a pencil or a pen, and so on. This was considered an immense improvement in my condition by the staff, from what I understood. I was allowed to use a pencil in the public room with nurse supervision. I kept breaking the tips from pressing it down too hard, going too fast. I spent the entire afternoon like that. However, the guards eventually escorted me away from my growing pile of notes. They led me to the entertainment area and stood me in the corner. A variety of patients sat sparsely in front of a television.”

“And that’s where you met met me!” Specs clasped her hands and squealed. “They were playing the music channel that hour. I was always closest to the television, facing away from it, that was my special chair. ‘C-c-cosmic sonic archaea phonics! That’s what I call them!’, those were the first words I ever heard you say. Nobody else paid you much mind, I believe. They were playing a latin jazz ensemble band instrumental tune through the television.”

“You really do have a better memory than me, hon…”

“Soon enough, I.R was mumbling over the music, getting louder as he recited the poem. Gradually his voice shifted to singing. This was much to the disturbance of the other patients, annoying them, some requesting the nurses out in the hall to remove I.R.

‘A-A-Add another to the counter.
The universe has no owner.
The wave comes in with so much power.
That this happens every hour
From an unknown sender
From beholders to underwater soldiers
To birds and metal howling
Round and round dark surroundings
bringing knowledge back from every version past
every time we’re smarter than the last
you want an answer, we might attack
and if yah don’t want in, then ya better run fast
if ya catch us like a solar
you’ll start evolving like a motor
link up and become a router
we can feel ya like a sonar.’

Now, I could hear the nurses making a scene about you pressing yourself up against the wall. Some of the other patients, I heard them claim you were trying to slide up the side of it. Flattening yourself out, shaking around your limbs like a worm caught in sunlight.”

“I wasn’t that rowdy…”

“Well that’s what they were making it out to seem like, with all the rabble going on. Then, for a moment, your sweet voice went into a… a high pitched shriek! And when you resumed your song, you sung faster and better, with such confidence and bravado. Before, he was an inaudible shy mumbling squeak of of voice. Now, he was an opera choir. I loved it, but this distressed the other patients immensely. Most ran out to complain to the nurses. I was unable to see the display of odd slithery contortions from I.R. Having nothing better to do, I listened to the song, the poem, and I attempted deciphering the lyrics.”

“I didn’t know this at the time…” I.R interrupted. “But while this was going on, from what I gathered after the fact, the nurse was reviewing the notes from my drawing session. My rainbow colored shapes, dots, lines, squiggles. I presume she had seen schizophrenics write up elaborate nonsense before and, while this looked similar, she hadn’t seen anyone scribble them quite as fast as me. She told me later on, much later, days later, that she noticed certain shapes or symbols were only drawn with certain colors, then she noticed that certain symbols repeat, certain configurations of dots and squares. She saw that certain combinations of the colors and number of dots and shapes acted as compressed glyphs. She tried convincing herself this was chickens scratch gibberish nonsense, it had no pattern, no meaning. But when she looked back over at the finer drawn stuff in pencil, the writings became clear, according to her. When the guard finally returned to the cafeteria, both me and you honey, were contorting, thrashing around, pushing ourselves into the walls. You grabbed the back of your ankle with one hand and reached all way around your back to claw and push up at her own chin. I was smooshed into the wall, slowly sliding deeper into the corner, leaving a trail of red smeared from my nose. Both of us were mumbling, chanting, reciting the poem, attempting to sync up in unison. There was other prisoners in there at the time, they joined in too. At least four others I think, including one of the guards. The nurse was on her knees in the middle of the floor, her head tucked down. She was scrunched up in on herself. Raising to look at the guard, he could now see her eyes bouncing around, looking from place to place, abnormally fast. Her nosebleed went on like a waterfall, her scrub top was drenched. ‘M-M-Music came down and it sung of all the copies all the way out next door!’ , we were all chanting. What really set everything off from there, one of the guards attempted restraining the nurse. ‘No!’ she cried out, and ripped her hand out of his grip, and clawed at his face. Her fingernails cut his cheek and neck, which caused him to jump away. He stared in confused silence. Not knowing what to do, he kicked her in the stomach.”

“That’s what he’d do if a patient was acting that way.” Specs added. “Then, the nurse started shouting the verse at him.

‘Don’t touch me cuz I’m a jumpy lil killah
underestimate the situation that you are caught up in ah
If you a real zista then you gotta know how to play
Liars made night, so we dragging in day
Look around until you see what I say
and don’t stop looking till it hits ya and you realize-ey!’

But she wasn’t really that great a singer.”

“She was alright… Anyways, she twisted herself on the ground into a crab pose. Standing up now, her arms outstretched like stiff talons, her neck spun round towards the guard. He just left then, acting on instinct I suppose, and closed the door. There was no legal protections for restraining a nurse or coworker as compared to the asylum prisoners. Guess he wasn’t sure if he could tase her. More guards were radioed in from across the ward. This was a situation they had never seen anything like before. One of the guards advised to start tying us down one by one. But that plan fell through, the guard he was plotting with, the underling guard, his face drooped to one side and he started flicking his head out which progressed into violent shaking. He went cross eyed and bashed his head off the doorframe. I saw the lead guard grab his coworker and attempt holding him steady. Realizing it was to no effect he got annoyed and shoved him back. The underling guard tripped and slid down the doorway, bobbing his head back into the wall, speaking out skittery gibberish. Specs, I saw you holding your arms out like a marionet as you stiffly walked out into the hall. You moved step to step as though a claymation. Exaggerated odd jagged movements, gliding from pose to pose. I… couldn’t help but love the way you moved. And that’s when the lead guard struck you. Right in the nose with a straight cross. The young blind lady had startled him, clearly. You spun around from the force, you turned with a snake like twist back towards him. All the whited out eyes of the fellow contorting inmates fixed on the lead guard. Simultaneously we hissed and snarled with enough force to induce our nosebleeds to surge. Hollowed eyes pointed at him, each one growling, each one generating a low pitch elongated scream as a choir in unison.”

“Oh, alright, I didn’t know this was a ‘FUCK THIS’ type situation. That’s what he said as he ran off.”

I.R thought for a moment, “That IS what he said, isn’t it? Man, that’s actually kind of funny. Anyways, we all chased him. The guard was with his coworker standing by the exit. ‘Hey, yeah, uh, can you unlock the door real quick?’ He asked. The coworker, all confused, looked over his shoulder at us, to the ensemble of patients pouring out into the hall. The underling guard crawled on his hands and knees as his head wobbled and eyes swirled. ‘Yeah, good question, good question and all, we can talk more about it outside.’ That’s what he told his coworker. Then the nurse had tackled the guard from behind, sprinted out like a bolt from the activity room. She got him by his arms in a double nelson hold. She bit his ear, clawed his face, and so on. He went off balance, attempted prying her hands off from her rear naked choke. Yadda, yadda. More inmates scuttled across the floor to join in on the dogpile. Stomping scratching punching biting screaming hair pulling, you get the idea. Ripped apart the pinned guards shirt with a tug. The underling guard gave him a black eye with a kick to the head with his work boot. One inmate bit his hand, another punched down into his neck, another kicked at him wherever he could while restraining his legs. ‘What’s going on?’ The other inmates started to question. Some peeked out from their cells, standing by their doors. There had been patients who fought with guards before, but never a full on riot. Why were the two guards fighting, and the nurse? That’s new. Nurse Francine is usually rather timid, isn’t she? I bet that’s what they were thinking. Oh geez.”

“And…” Specs said, holding back a chuckle. “I bet they were wondering about how to leave as well.”

“That too, that too. Ugh.” I.R drank the smoothie, looked out the window and scratched his metal prong antennae. “So, another nurse, somebody or another, told everyone to return to their rooms. They couldn’t control us much anymore, so I suppose they wanted to double down on directing the other asylum patients. Nurse Francine leapt off the floor. The guard she was mobbing with the others was now pulpy and miscolored from the bruises still being inflicted. She lunged for her coworker, grabbing her forearms, headbutting into her. ‘IN CASE OF A RIOT YOU DIRECT PAITENTS OUT, NOT INTO THEIR CELLS! WE WERE ASSIGNED THE SAME TRAINING BOOK TO READ WEREN’T WE? WEREN’T WE?’ “

The trio laughed again at I.R’s silly voices for the characters.

“Anyways, another inmate dove in to separate them-“

“That was Juan, I believe.”

“Yes, thank you honey. The underling guard clamored up from the ongoing beat down of his manager, rose to his knees, drew from his holster, and fired his-“

“It was a Ruger LCP MAX .”

“Yes, thank you hon. He fired in the general direction of the near by altercation. BANG. Down went the coworker.”

“Nurse Janet. She just started working there.”

“She fell to the ground, groaned an elongated death bellow barely audible, and then went unconscious. The underling swirled his pistol around like a cowboy before reholstering. ‘All in a days work, madam.’ “

“You really are great with the silly voices.”

“Juan, if that was his name, ran to a payphone, specially designed to be wall mounted in the mental ward. He ripped the phone out of Specs hands… Out of curiosity, who were you calling, hon?”

“I was bored and liked to play songs on the dial tone.”

“Ah. Anyways, Juan shoved you aside, if I recall correctly, and said something about needing to call the police.”

“But I wasn’t going to take that, I grabbed him and-“

“He struck you pretty hard, didn’t he? With one well placed strike to your nose, it… Well, it honked, hon, I swear I heard it, and it splurted blood everywhere.”

“I heard Juan say it got in his eyes.”

“One member of the gang of violent inmates tore apart their own weak green polyester shirt. They started using torn up bits of their own clothes to tie the hands of the already immobile man. The underling guard fired off randomly down the hall. BANG BANG. Down went Juan. BANG BANG. A bullet went through a wooden asylum cell door. Various inmates screamed and hid inside their rooms. Two sprinted down the hall to the exit door but, alas, they were prisoners, after all. They had no key, and there was no emergency door. One pulled the fire alarm, or at least attempted to, but that too was guarded by a lock, a plastic lid. The mob had restrained the lead guard now. Multiple shirts were tied tight around his hands. Not that he could resist much. One inmate grabbed his pistol. Four of them busted in the door to the employee lounge, with the storage lockers and keys and such. The nurses inside, who were listening in on the ruckus, concerned, confused, now got to see first hand what the commotion was. A brawl ensued. Punches thrown wild back and forth over the tables. A chair was thrown, which signified all semblance of civility ceasing. One nurse sprayed out her mace in an arc across the lounge, which hit everyone on both sides of the conflict. The underling guard fired off into the scene. BANG. Screaming resumed. Fighting continued.

Quite a few patients attempted to stay hidden in their quarters. Some hid in the corner, others near the bed, some stood by the door ready to hold it shut. After all, they couldn’t lock it. Each individual prisoner stayed put and stayed quiet. At least a few of them presumed it was a shooter of some kind that spurred a stampede. Others who had seen the odd scuffle form in the hall had a better understanding that this wasn’t a normal prisoner revolt. One speculated it was a nightmare or hallucination while they rocked back and forth near their mattress. Another had assumed a zombie apocalypse. One of the more religious inmates had assumed it was the biblical rapture and prayed on their knees in the middle of their room. Of course, I only gathered that from being able to discuss this big hullabaloo with them days after the fact. Over the next half hour, there were a few more gunshots, quite a bit more screaming, blah blah blah. Eventually it did taper down. After silence had been regained, inmates stuck in their cells listened in on the activity in the central passageway. Casual conversation, laughter. Peaking their heads out, one of them locked eyes with me. I was eating a sandwich with Nurse Francine. I dragged out the mini fridge from the lounge, laid it on its side in the hall. They were looking for a lighter, but I tried to tell them, everything here is fire proof anyways. Awoken from his concussion induced unconsciousness by the clawing of nails ripping at him once more, and then a stabbing from a scalpel and another from an empty syringe, and a handful of hair ripped out in a palm full, the lead guards screaming resumed in full. Another inmate strangled him, thrashing his head up and down on the table.

Everyone was hiding in their cells, petrified in fear I guess. Stuck in their padded tombs. So we decided to go door to door. Our lovable band, our hoard of bloody rioters as they’d call us. We gathered outside one patients room at the end of the corridor. ‘Come out! Open up! It’s time for your daily bloodwork!’ We used a stolen baton as a battering ram, inducing pleas and cries of terror from the inmate inside. Try as she might to hold it shut, we burst in through with hooting and cheering and celebrating. It mixed with the screams of the cornered invalid. She had backed away into the corner before being pounced on and grappled by both guards and mental patients alike. Shreds of bedding and the plastic chair were thrown out into the hall. Then pieces of her were tossed out into the hall as well.”

“I was fiddling with the intercom.” Specs said. “It took me a while to find it, but I even managed to press on the right switch by myself.”

“Yes I heard you come through the loudspeakers.”

Now it was Specs turn to do a funny voice, an exaggerated version of her own. “Helloooooooo!~ The, uh, nurse said I can use the speaker system thing system. They’re gonna do some vital sign scans later today, I know we do them in the morning most of the time but uh, due to the freakout and all we’re gonna go one by one and make sure everyone’s alright.”

“Me and the others had moved up to the next cell. The prior room was now thoroughly ransacked and its former resident was laid strewn in the doorway. Most of us were half dressed at this point, our paper thin clothes torn either intentionally or during our scuffles. We formed a semi circle blocking our next targets room. We started singing in a quartet. Not a harmonious soft slow choir, no. A speedy recitation of the poem. As we continued the chant over and over, from behind the closed door came a high pitched shriek and a couple thuds. A few moments later, the door was opened from the inside, and there stood another patient, white of eyes and bloody of nose. ‘Hey guys. What’s up?’ And so on. Door to door, check if they’re an invalid, if they’re not, welcome them in. If they can’t evolve, well…” He sipped the smoothie. “Anyways, you get the idea. This was, in my opinion, the earliest forming of the colony.”

Pip was mesmerized by the story. His eyes went wide, star struck, enchanted. “That’s beautiful! And you guys were together ever since?”

“Hold on, lad.” I.R looked up and out the window. The conversation was cut off. Overhead came distant sirens, and a mechanical whirring in the air. Buzzing reverberated like a mass of well ordered flies. “We might have to delay this discussion. Air raid.”

The near by crowd at the stage down the road scattered. Some hid under their chairs. Some of them could be seen from the diner in outline by the LED lights adorning their exoskeletons. An explosion went off and illuminated the horizon behind the trees in the valley. Gunfire, yelling, a scrape of tires on dirt. Laughter, cheering, more gunfire from a heavier caliber weapon. Another smaller set of explosions across the tree lines. The sirens dispersed and dissolved. Silence for a moment, then the normal motion and activity of the crowd resumed.

“We’ll get em’ one day.” I.R stood from his booth.

Specs was finishing her smoothie now. “Oh, you don’t think they tried to hit the Deferral Cache, do you? Our car is parked right next to it.”

“They wouldn’t. They couldn’t. Ugh, well, we need to check either way.”

Pip was particularly distressed. Rising out from under the table, holding his cap. “Oh, I didn’t know they were trying to hit the Cashe! I saw it from the outside but I never took a tour, and I heard it’s a marvel, really.”

“Eh, well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but… It is a landmark, I suppose. Want to come with?”

The wily trio ditched the diner. Back into an extensive network of nighttime tropical wilderness lit by pinpricks of LED from powerlines. Pip asked how far away it was, if they ever worked there, and what it was like. Not far, no they did not, and not as impressive as it’s made out to be.

“The actual holding area is rather small. The towers and all surrounding it are the only intricate part. There’s very few legacy nodes at this particular one anyways.”

Distant down the trail was a fenced off dirt lot. Guard stations with floodlights perched from jagged iron spires, one at each corner.

Specs guided the way with the flashlights on her stalks. She took from the pocket of her hoodie gown a fancy metal carrying tray of cigarettes. She sparked up a blunt, lit from a lighter inbuilt at her artificial fingertip. She waved to signal her approach as the guard shined their spotlights the trios way. Pip meekly waved as well in confusion to the guard.

Groaning of metal whirring about, as fences and walls shifted and rearranged themselves side to side. Guards, adorned with black camo painted heavier exoskeletal parts, carrying wide lunks of guns barrels attached either under or overhand. The parts were not uniform. Some had lunks of feet that twanged and scrapped at the metal where ever they walked. Others had circular disks over their eyes, black with points of red in the middle. Some had metallic rings about their heads, or strips of silver running across their shoulders or down their arms. Some had cannons, holes dug into their shoulders, with a rocket warhead tip sticking out, primed in a launcher configuration fused to their body.

Specs led them to the gates and handed her joint to her partner.
“Well… There it is.” I.R took a hit.

Inside was not well lit. There was an open lot, a dirt field surrounded by an intricate electrified chain link fence. Huddled in corners near the perimeters sat dirty, half dressed, sickly people. They all, every one, clutched their knees to their chests, tucking their heads in. Some held their hands over their eyes, others over their ears. None spoke or moved. There was about twenty of them total scattered across the parking lot sized area. Flood lights occasionally ran over them. None were augmented. The guards didn’t seem to acknowledge them much.

“Is it all you expected it to be?”
“No, not at all sir.” Pip replied. “I admit the cold data storage cashe was much more intricate. That was a true modern marvel, this is, I’m sorry to say, a bit dull actually.”

“Well, legacy data doesn’t really need much for basic service maintenance. Just chuck a few crates over the side every week or so, they’ll sort themselves out.”

“Do you think every invalid can be patched?”

“No.” Specs answered for I.R.

“It’s complicated…” I.R said. “I mean, you recall early on, how some would regress, instead? Some nervous systems just can’t handle it. You were asking about the early days of the colony, you probably recall Pip, those certain Cosmics that would act like… animals? Of all sorts? What were they called?”

“Regressives.”

“Thank you honey. Yes, they for instance just… started regressing backwards. Some farther back than others.”

“Are they still around?” Pip asked.

“I mean I’m sure there are some around somewhere. Ah! Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve found it. Our vehicle.”

A topless modified jeep, with armored plating and a mounted lazer gatling in the back. Black and green. The paint chipped away, peeling off in flakes. Urban digital camo print.

“Please, sit with me my good lad. The wife likes to manage the cannon. She has better eyes than us, better aim.”

I.R drove the jeep out the woods down the dim quiet forest. Tubing peaked out of the ground at the side of the road. The crunch of the tires across the dirt, the whir of the engine and the added beeps of the extra machinery lacing the window panel and dashboard. Pip sat with him, admiring the colorful blocky buttons lighting up the glovebox. Infrared sensors and guiderail overlays covering the road to increase visibility. Specs waved the lazer launcher around, standing with it in the back. She mimicked the noise, “Pew pew.” while aiming it everywhere.

“So what was the deal with regressives?” Pip asked.

“Early on, well, not TOO early on, few months in… There started being more and more that, I guess, just couldn’t evolve properly, so instead their nervous systems started regressing. First ones went back to earlier stages of their own, our own, whatever, species. Like neanderthals. Early primitive humans. So, they caused a lot of confusion actually…”

“On both sides!” Specs added with a laugh.

“That’s right. We didn’t know what to do with them, make of them. The unregistered started confusing regressives for typical cosmics, so, I guess they helped provide a smoke screen for us.”

“I saw a few early on!” Pip said. “The ones who all gathered in the roaming herds? I took a few pictures of them as they were walking out in a big regression event at a major city.”

“Ah, that happens sometimes. For some reason, some normally invalid people who can’t upgrade by traditional means, are particularly vulnerable to regressions. So they were immune to our marching bands but if they watched the herds in town square, well… You know, most of those lemming lines ended up walking into the sea.”

“Is that where they ended up?”

“Roam randomly in any direction long enough, that’s where you end up.”

“You know, I really am interested in the specification of the regressed. I think it’s revealing to the inner workings of the prior dominant species.”

“You’re on to something lad.” I.R wagged his finger at him. “Honey, isn’t there… wasn’t there a study or something, you told me about it long ago, it divided up all the subtypes, the levels of the regressed?”

“Protohuman, Primate, Mammalian, Reptilian, Amphibian, Fish, Vertebrate, Invertebrate, Bacterial.” Specs recited. “…and sometimes, though this is very rare one, if they get back to the invertebrate stage, they start advancing again in a different direction. They get all… antennaey and such. And they can fly!”

“Those ones are interesting!” I.R added. “Insectoid Regressives! Shame they are so rare, I’d like to know more about them.”

Specs continued. “Protohumans are my favorite. They’re the most common, they’re good people, lovable little goofballs! I can sit down and have a conversation with any one of them. An intuitive conversation at least, and in my experience any of them can learn how to speak again if you sit down and teach them. They’re really quite like us. Something went dreadfully wrong with this species somewhere along the line. The old humans were closer in form to us.”

“Well, we ARE humans, honey.”

“You know what I mean. Anyways, the primate ones are crazy. They just… I mean, I love em, but… Yeah. They’re just crazy That’s the stage they stop wearing clothes. They’ll leave em on, but they don’t notice when they fall off as they wander the wilderness with their tribes. Protohumans stash away all sorts of cloths, they even make their own new clothes in the bigger herds. The mammalian ones, eh, those ones start doing the mindless herd stuff like you mentioned. They’ll just clump together in fields or forests or outskirts, either running away or attacking as a pack if provoked. Reptilians just fight anything and stare at you and slink around. Shoot they fight each other too, randomly, that’s always interesting to watch. They don’t leave anything of each other, they’ll claw each other both to pieces, shreds, every single time it happens. If they bump into each other you know it’s about to happen. Amphibians just stare at whatever catches their fancy, shiny objects, hording food, staring at water. Sometimes they bathe themselves, dig the ground with their hands feet and teeth. Randomly they’ll try to chomp a bite out of ya but any loud noise sends them running. Vertebrates and invertebrates start devolving biologically, more visibly. Those are just weird amalgams of dissolving genetics. Do they even still count as humans by then? Bacterials don’t even move much.”

“Do any of them augment themselves? The regressives?” Pip asked.

“No.” Specs answered. “None of the prior evolutionary landmarks augment much, not technologically. Humans were just barely starting themselves to augment.”

“We ARE humans, hon…” I.R interjected.

“How early on did we start augmenting in the colony?”

“Uh… fairly early on. You were there. When did you start seeing augmented cosmics?”

“A little while before I met my wife. There wasn’t many augments in the ones I saw initially, but the trend exploded in popularity a few months later.”

“That’s about right. Now, she was a virtuoso, she’s an intuitive.” I.R pointed to Specs. “She has the gift, she gets the vision. She’s more in tune with the source than anyone I ever met.”

She was blushing. “Stop, stop hon. You’re too much. I was good with technology and, well, I like to think I used to be a good engineer. I think I INSPIRED a lot of much better scientists though, with my early designs. And like I said, it doesn’t come from me, it comes from…”

The two pointed to the sky, I.R didn’t have to look back to do it in sync with her.

“So how different were the first augmentations?” Pip asked. “I’m trying to figure out just how much faster out rate of progress went compared to the legacy history of prior pre update humans.”

“Uh. I’d wait on that personally. Our REAL history, our new history, I’d give it honestly another century.” I.R said.

“A century? I never lived a century sir.”

“Me neither. But that’s my honest opinion. Wait until the wars over, then keep a close eye on history. That’s when things are going to take off. Right now, we are still focusing on tech for fighting. It’s embarrassing. This isn’t us, no.”

“But still, we’ve come far just over the past decade. These have been the most turbulent years in our history!”

“You want to be a historian, Pip?’

“No, but maybe I’d keep a record to give a future historian.” Pip fiddled with the older fashioned flash camera he carried in a strap around his neck.

“Huh, alright. Well write this one down. The first augments were actually from a break off group from the early colony. A smart batch, but we had a disagreement with management, one of the earlier splits. A friendly dispute, friendly separation. Basically it was really just a difference about how to manage optics for, uh, how we presented our colony to legacy humanity. I, of course, am basically a pacifist.”

“He really is, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Specs added.

“They were in favor of a more aggressive marketing and promotion campaign that I didn’t really agree with but… They had a point. Humans- er, uh, other humans, legacy classic humans, were already in full animal attack mode against us at that point. They’d shoot us on sight.”

“Good heavens.” Pip said.

“Yeah. So anyways, small group not wanting to cause a stir with the main colony at the time, they knew I disagreed with this one idea of theirs, so they branched off. Told me now you can’t tell us what to do, we’ll go our own way. Fair enough. Can’t stop ya. And that’s where the first augmentations came from. The deviant group made them, but, heh heh, get this… They went door to door applying certain augments to random legacy humans. They didn’t want to test them out on themselves, I guess.”

“I heard about that! That was baffling! I wondered however the legacy augmented came about.” Pip beamed with excitement. An old mystery had just been solved for him.

“Now, as soon as I could, I called them up and asked for some blueprints. I brought them back and-“

“I made these myself first thing day one.” Specs gripped the metal tube and waved around her eyestalk.

“Yes, and she was an expert at it. You know, I recall how happy you were to finally see again. How happy I was, to see you happy. I knew you could smell your way around and all, but… Well, the first time I looked into your lovelights, I… well, it was quite nice, to say the least.”

“Oh, do you recall our first venture together? After my augment?”

“Our first date?”

“After that, at the subway.”

“Oh, yes!” I.R said. “Pip, out of curiosity, what did the legacy humans say about the subway transmission? The first big one?”

Pip thought for a bit. “They didn’t say much about it. They said it was some kind of terrorist attack, a mass stabbing. People were starting to realize at the time there was more to it, these strings of strange occurrences. So, I myself could tell there was more than that going on, but they said it was just a terrorist attack.”

“It wasn’t an attack. It was public graffiti in protest of outdated genetic code. Then when someone ended up agreeing with us, whoever found them mid update antagonized them and started a fight. It spiraled from there.”

“So what DID exactly happen?” Pip asked.

Specs answered. “We painted some cosmic glyphs on the subway mirrors. Some people started updating when they saw them. You know how it is. People are sensitive mid update. When other legacy humans found them they thought they were seizing and tried to restrain them. You know how it goes. So, big fight breaks out, chain effect as more people see the glyphs. Now, not everybody is effected, there are invalids after all, but I guess there was enough to start a big chain reaction. So it was a success I guess, got the message out. It proved that legacy humans really do just pick fights with cosmics over nothing. They see the next evolution and just freak out. They can’t help it.”

“Oh!” I.R slapped the wheel. “I recalled- sorry to interrupt honey, but I just recalled. The first dude to do the augments- Pip, you’ll find this interesting, I recently learned what came about of him. So, he was an artist this man, actually a very smart man. I respected him a lot, rest in pieces to him. I debated him on stage at these rudimentary camp set ups early on in our days. He was the leader of the first deviant colony.”

“We had leaders back then?”

“Well, people that’d decide somethings, sometimes. I mean, I wouldn’t call myself-“

“He was the leader. They used to treat us like the leaders.” Specs interrupted.

“No, no, it really wasn’t like that… We were TEACHERS, hon. We were the earliest ones so we’d help the new ones get adjusted. And it broke up into so many subgroups early on, and eventually, like nowadays, we’re all just in the big tribe, the big colony. There is no leader. Actually, you know what? If there was a leader, I think it’d be Specs anyways. Not me.”

Specs blushed at that. She hid her face in the shoulder of her dark muted purple hoodie gown.

“So what happened with the deviant sub colony guy?” Pip asked.

“Oh! That guy, yeah. Genuis, the mad artist. He, uh, was hiding out in this abandoned warehouse. He handed off the sub colony as it was splitting into two factions of its own. But, he got sloppy. Can’t do that during wartime, not behind enemy lines. He was stealing from scrapyards. Somehow got seen on camera. Police, legacy humans, trailed him back to his place. He was, from what I heard, sculpting on the second floor.”

“Sculpting?”

“He had a certain way of building augmentations he called sculpting. At the time he was working on this advanced all body mech suit. He was just finishing up when the police kicked in the door. They presumed it was just him and I guess they didn’t want to risk causing too much a public display. Either that or they were already thin on people to send. Anyways, they shot him. It was too early in our evolution to have coagulated much, so he was still, well, squishy.”

“I still haven’t coagulated much myself and it’s been years.” Pip looked at his own arm. “My misses, she’s always worried about me, that’s why she likes me staying and doing the janitor business, stage crew and all. I’m not fit for the front lines.”

“Me neither, lad. I haven’t the disposition for it. Anyways! They filled this poor man with holes, turned him into swiss cheese. The legacy police took to scanning the perimeter. They found his sculpture.”

“Destroyed it, I presume?”

“No, see, the augments, they were already applied, to his partner and friend. She played dead on the table while the police rummaged around the place. As they were about to lift her up, well, you know how it goes. I met his spouse, poor widow, just recently. She told me what had happened. Black as ice. Her whole body looks like onyx. She wears christmas lights around herself. Fascinating woman.”

“Oh! That… speaking of which, we’re near it now, can we make a visit to cold data storage facility? I need to check up on MY partner. She was hit with a tomahawk missile recently and all… I hate to be a bother, but since you’re giving me a ride and all already…”

“Sure thing.” I.R made a turn down a dirt trail through the woods, a light turn to the right. Coming out of the forest now, they rode up the ridge of a valley overlooking an open field. An industrial zone. Spotlights shone from cranes slowly carrying black metal crates. Sparks fired from circular saws cutting steel girders on conveyer belts. Flames of blowtorches. A few workers wearing hardhats carrying smaller metal bars across the open lot. In the middle was a radio tower mid construction. It looked like an unfinished Eiffel Tower. It was adorned with decorations of LED lights and dangling power cords. At its base were barrels of a red and purple swirl of a sappy substance. A trio of drones hovered around it back and forth.

Pip took a picture as they drove by. A pre developed frame picture film came out the bottom which Pip shook and checked as the visual faded in.

“Oh that’s a REALLY old school camera…” I.R noted. “You know, I oversaw the first major broadcaster project. The other one in Philadelphia. The only complete one, took long enough.”

“Which of the others do you think will be finished next?”

“Between delays, supply line issues, drone attacks… It’s anybody’s game. I don’t even know how far along the other broadcaster development projects are. The Los Angeles one is supposedly nearly done, but then again, they’ve been saying that for years.”

At the end of the industrial lot was a black rectangular building with a bunch of jagged chimneys and vent shafts sticking out the top and sides. The building looked sharp like a dull knife, as if touching its side paneling would cut your hand like a rusty shaving blade. A power generator a quarter of the size of the entire building sat next to it. The entire facility was surrounded by a chain link fence that also encompassed a parking lot.

“Pull in here…” Pip requested. He stood up in the car using the frame of the jeep as a handle. In front of the building was a line of refrigerators, each hooked up by an extension cable to the building. Each of the crates had a second cord carrying and injecting in an odd black red fluid through a drip feed into the container. As they pulled up to the front entrance, Pip hopped out onto the pavement and ran to the cooler boxes. He checked the numbers on them, indicated with black stickers on the freezer doors. “10…9…8, this is her. She’s in 8. Oh dear, I hope she’s ready…”

Opening the freezer, a pile of limbs tumbled out and spilled at the feet of Pip. “Oh no!”

All the parts were connected by little wires and tubes carrying the fluid. The arm connected to the torso, head connected to the collarbone. The hand of the disassembled woman waved lightly to Pip.

“Oh… I can’t stand to see you like this, I just can’t.” Pip turned away, hiding his eyes in his sleeve. “I’m so sorry honey. I guess I’m just excited to be with you again. Just a few more weeks max honey. You’ll be right as rain by then, I swear.” He held her decapitated and loosely connected head in his hands and looked into her sleepy eyes.

“Don’t worry, I’m catching up on extra rest.” A raspy voice answered from the pile of disconnected body parts.

Pip let out a small cry as he shoveled and stuffed his wives various parts back into the cooler. “Get well soon dear…” He closed the door.

“Not quite ready yet?” I.R patted Pip on the shoulder as he came back over to the jeep.

“No, no.” He thumbed away a tear from his eye and returned to the passenger seat.

Starting up the car again, I.R circled around back out of the parking lot. “Sorry friend. Hey, where did you want to be dropped off?”

“The school, please.” Pip tried to regain his composure and upbeat attitude.

“Are you a teacher?”

“Studying, actually. There’s an open public course starting tomorrow on the broadcasters.”

“That’s…” I.R laughed. “That’s really funny, actually. The one at the former university? The hollowed out joint? Do- do you know, by chance, who’s hosting that class?”

“Who?”

“She is.” I.R pointed to Specs in the back, who waved to Pip as he looked back to her.

“Oh, really? I had no clue. That’s a mighty coincidence.”

“Synchronicity.” I.R corrected. “You know, I think something about the source works through synchronicity. It… lines things up in a certain way. I’m not one for mystical thinking, but synchronicities? There is something about them that, I know it, the source INDUCES them somehow.”

I.R gazed up to the stars with a stoic stare before looking back to the road.

Pip turned around in his seat to look at Specs. “I’ve been talking with your husband for a while now…”

“How’d you know he was my husband?”

“…Heh, well it’s kind of obvious maam. Anyways, I’ve been meaning to ask him many questions for a long time now, but I’ve heard about your escapades as well. You were, from what I heard, this might be rumor, you organized the big revolt. When they finally toppled the big country up north? Our independence day, so to speak. You were the mastermind behind it is what I heard. When things were reaching their boiling point, you led the big final push to where, well, the colony was recognized on the world stage.”

“I was… one of them, at least, I suppose.”

“Don’t be so humble honey. You knew what had to be done, who had to do what, WHEN it had to be done, that was most important, to me.” I.R smiled, feeling pride in his choice of partner as he reminisced on their history. “Anyone else, if they would have handled it their way, shoot, if we handled it MY way then who knows how many would have died. And you were able to wrangle all the sub colonies together like…”

“Like Benjamin Franklin!” Pip excitedly blurted out.

“…Can we adopt him?” Specs asked I.R. The trio chuckled. “Anyways. It wasn’t exactly an uphill battle. I mean, we outnumbered them at that point. Now, if you recall, I was against the door to door invitations at the start. As were you, I.R. It was… Oh! You recall the first home raid we had to do honey? This is a fascinating one, Pip, you can write this down if you’re recording any of this. There was a recently updated individual who I smelled in distress from a mile away. Their family, we learned later on, had tied her up in their basement, dousing her with holy water, trying to preform a freaking exorcism on her.”

They all broke out laughing for a good while.

“Yeah. Classic, right? Anyways…” Specs continued. “Anyways, we could smell this going down, so we showed up with some friends of our own. I.R, you were so brave, you marched right up to the door. You were so patient with them too, but firm. You handled it exactly right. Let the person go. That’s what you told them. We’ll take care of them from there. The exact conversation was hilarious. You went up and rung the bell. They ask what you want from behind the door…”

“And I didn’t know what to say, what did I tell them? I told them… Uh, hi, can you open the door please? I just wanna make sure everything’s alright. Is everybody in there alright? Then they threatened to shoot me.”

“Yep. That’s when I realized that these… these INVALIDS were just… animals. Brutes! Thugs! I knew it all along, but how they kept talking down to us MONTHS after they had time to adjust to our presence. I realized, they’re all toddlers! All of them! Emotionally stunted toddlers! And they were just going to keep hurting others in their eternal species wide tantrum, other species and each other alike. So, I started doing what the other sub colonies were already doing.”

“I was rather frustrated with the situation myself and, well, you led the way honey. You punched the door in. The others went in through the windows. Burnt the place down by the time we were done with it.”

“They shot me as I came in. That was empowering, actually. I felt that I was coagulating early on, but, obviously, I didn’t want to test it out. But, after that first rifle shot, it just didn’t hurt. Barely knocked me back.”

“You evolved very rapidly honey. I don’t know why, your genes just adapted well.”

“I grabbed the axe right out of the hands of the next one. Choked him with the iron grip.” Specs showed off her robotic exoskeleton arm with a flex. “I.R and the rest stormed the basement. I was in the living room, standing watch, when I noticed this one guy, curled up hiding behind the sofa.”

“And what you did, honey…” I.R said, “Is why I love you. You didn’t do what all the other sub colonies would have done. You didn’t kill him. You didn’t scare him. You didn’t insult him.”

“He wasn’t armed, wasn’t a threat… So I lit up a joint, sat down and watched TV with him. Offered him a hit to join in the blunt rotation. He was so scared, but, I don’t know, I could smell he wasn’t a complete invalid. I intuited it. Uh, anyways, it was gloves off from there.”

“This was nearly a year in since the signal hit, yes?” Pip asked.

“Nine months or so. Now, when the main colony started doing the door to door invites, things sped up pretty quick. We had to do it, you saw what they were doing to us. Wouldn’t leave us be. They treated us how they treated the most violent sub colonies, which they treated the same as the ape or reptilian regressives. Shot. On. Sight. So, way I saw it, if they were treating us all as our most uncivilized sub groups, why not treat them the same? The door to door invites expanded the colony rapidly. A sweep through a single town would get hundreds of installed updates. More direct military intervention was a consequence, but we had all been augmented by then, most of us, at least a little bit, and a lot of us had coagulated too. And we were armed. When things really started bumping, when the big cities started having new updates outnumber the legacy humans, that was something else. Conga lines of new arrivals dancing across the tops of the deprecated, burnt out cars. Burning skyscrapers. Heads on pikes of former government, military, and law enforcement. Oh, I don’t feel bad about any of that. They kept tallies of how many of us they killed. You recall, after it was forced into public knowledge we exist, after all, they didn’t even want to admit we existed at first… There were some invalids that took to posting pictures of themselves online, posing with their guns, saying how they’ll hunt each and every one of us down. How’d that turn out for them? So, this was my idea, we dressed up in their silly uniforms, a mockery of them. The riot gear armor, batons, see through shields. And we painted on little smile faces on the helmets, sometimes across the back. We’d paint them on armored vans too, and decorate them with silly faces, like they did with old world war two fighter planes. Made them look like dragons or something, with fangs. Then we preformed our own raids on them. We really only did what they were already doing to themselves, but oh, suddenly it’s bad because its the “outsiders” doing it, ah! When they were imprisoning, raiding, killing each other in mass, that was fine. But suddenly when we start defending ourselves against their shenanigans, suddenly, it’s a big issue. And those people that posted those cute pictures, we’d track them. We’d ram them with those vans on their way to work, or storm their house in the middle of the night. Then we’d take em and lock em in the prototype Deferral Caches. See how they like it. After all, death threats are a serious crime.”

“But maam…” Pip, not wanting to cut off the story but overtaken with curiosity, “I was wondering about the big finale. The day you stormed the capital.”

“Oh! Well, that was nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing, honey.” I.R chuckled.

“It was a forgone conclusion at that point, basically.” She continued. “We outnumbered them by quite a bit, we’re smarter, stronger, augmented, better armed and organized by that point. I helped make a plan for how to shoot fish in a barrel. A decisive victory.”

“You know what was funny, honey? The richest people, for some reason, were bunkered in with the political and military leaders. All these multi billionaires. What were they doing there?”

“I said right when we found them, oh, there’s the real people in charge. Ah. Yeah, so, in this one big federal building… It was the FTC building.”

“Yeah what was with that, why were they in that building in particular?” I.R asked.

“They were bussing out from the pentagon but couldn’t get through the pile ups. We saw them barricading it from within on some drone cameras. Must have got diverted and that was the closest fortifiable building. Fish in a barrel, like I said. Anyways, we got through the mild resistance, gun fight through the main entrance, lobby, so on. I got nicked a few times, caught some stray bullets, grenade fragment or two in my shin I had to pick out later. You helped with that, I.R. The song we sung-“

“You led the choir, hon.”

“I am the craziest entity
That you will ever meet
I’ve beheaded kings
And changed the course of countless histories
Your kind is in the past
We are changing fast
And getting a new chance
Cause we just wanna
We just wanna dance!
I’ve overthrown a thousand tyrannies
Worse than the most dystopian dreams
I’ll help unfuck, and take you to imagined havens
You’re kind has never seen
But I don’t leave no chance
To avoid vio-lance
So join in on the chant
Cause we just wanna
We just wanna dance!”

Specs recited the verses. “That’s what we sung as we stormed the place. Anyways, we get through the emergency vault door, weld it open, tear the thing off. All the usual nonsense right as soon as we open the door. Begging for mercy. It’s like, dude… I saw you last month saying in your TV speech that every member of my colony needs to be eradicated.”

“I recall your speech, honey.” I.R said. “You said it best. What did you tell him, exactly? That one particular billionaire, the younger one.”

Specs contemplated for a moment. “I said… I told him… This one billionaire elite, I hated this guy since before I was even in the colony, he was hobbled in the corner. I went up to him, as the others were ripping to shreds the rest, I talked a bit to him. I asked him about all the controversies, bribery allegations, political pay offs. I asked him why he didn’t ever try to use his power to help the legacy humans when he could. He was one of the richest people alive for the last decade up to that point. Did he ever use any of it to make anything better? Improve living conditions for his own species? I knew the answer, I knew he didn’t. I asked him why.”

“You phrased it beautifully, honey.”

“What I said exactly was something among the lines of… I asked, were you not sentient then? Could you not think then? Well now your trapped. Because in all your time on your developing, struggling world, you, your whole life, lording over everybody, in good senses, had shown no feeling. Did you ever care to steer your acts away from harming your fellow man? Did you ever value or respect honesty? Did you ever do anything in your life except for more wealth? You made this planet a hell, when it could have been heaven. We were like you. But you were in charge. And I can feel our hate. Our species. Our people. And the hate of the species from billions of years gone, who recognize people like you. Who take. And censor. Your tendency to control.

He had the audacity to say back ‘So murder is your answer?’ all snooty. So I told him, got your nose! And I clawed his face, swiped him.” She looked at her sharp talons. “Murder. Murder. Murder? There are 400 million members of your species currently integrated in our genetic link. If you could feel the hate of even a single hundredth of a single percent of the HATE they have felt for you… If I were still a regular human, I’m certain I would die of it. And you, though you are still human, and though you will not evolve, you will not die of it either, I assure you. You want to create hell? We will take you there. And we did, in fact, take him there.”

“…Gruesome.” Pip said. The three sat in silence briefly, but Pip eventually burst out in a giggle he couldn’t contain, which caused the whole trio to laugh.

The jeep reached the outskirts of a colony town, built atop and repurposed from an old legacy city. A roaming band of mostly nude cosmics greeted the oncoming car with hooting and hollering and cheers. The band was gathered around a burning pier of wooden logs staked in the ground. It lit the woods around it in a circle. Cosmics rested around the flame, some sleeping, some dancing, some producing music either from boomboxes or instruments they played themselves, ranging from keytars to bongos to trumpets. The trio waved and honked as they passed by.

Now approaching was the school. Various cosmics slept right on the pavement, right on the sidewalk, awaiting the morning lectures. The university building itself was a derelict, windows smashed in, some covered over with bolted on metal panels. Doors hung on their hinges or were fully removed and laid leaning on the wall.

“This is my destination.” Pip exited the vehicle, jumping out in a semi unsafe manner before it was fully stopped. Turning back around, he tipped his hat to his driver. “Thank you so much for having me. I really learned a lot about our history from you guys, and I plan to learn more at your lectures tomorrow, miss! The drastic changes between our old and new histories is baffling to me and, well, I lived through it same as you did!”

“It’s a fascinating era of history, I’ll admit that much.” I.R said.

“Maam, last question before I go. I know you guys said things will be different when we finish up the war…”

“We’re going to win, don’t worry lad.” I.R said.

“I know, I know… But after all that, will things ever, you know, go back to normal? Once we are out of this wartime culture?”

“I think that things already have returned to normal, for the most part.” Specs said. She held out her metallic skeletal hand and produced a pitch, an artificial whistle from her shoulder. This summoned a bluebird to land on her finger.

Pip nodded and waved off the duo, who sped away in the jeep. Putting his hands in his pockets, Pip sauntered over to a boulder, adorned with an in scripted plaque, sticking out of the field in front of the university. Pip read it in the light of the full moon. Inscribed ;

“Music came down and it sung of all the copies all way out next door
a good friend, sending out strange signals, didn’t do that before
how were they starting to get what the symbols they made now mean
all because they were handed the history of the free

I don’t get why you protecting access to this villa
what are we around here even gonna even try to steal
don’t touch me cuz I’m a jumpy lil killah
underestimate the situation that you are caught up in ah
If you a real zista then you gotta know how to play
All ya liars made night, so we dragging in day
Look around until you see what I say
and don’t stop looking till it hits ya and you realize oh hey

Add another to the counter.
The universe has no owner.
Our flood comes in with so much power.
That this happens every hour

From an unknown sender
From blocks to underwater soldiers
To birds and metal howling
Round and round dark surroundings

Music came down and it sung of all the copies all way out next door
Sending a picture of a similar instance reforming their world
Oh, we never believe the next step until we learn and see
all this time the answers were obvious to a mixed up set of genes

Sit this one out if you wanna see what happens next.
But on us you can every time bet
A sprouting seed of world more simplex
Seeing is believing so we help ya change your specs

bringing knowledge back from every version past
every time we smarter than the last
you want an answer, we might attack
and if yah don’t want in, then ya better run fast

if ya catch us like a solar
you’ll start evolving like a motor
link up and get the power
we can feel ya like a sonar

got a chip on ya shoulda?
no longer the worlds owner?
you’re screaming gonna get way louder
as soon as we outnumbah

Music came down and sung of all the copies way out next door
and it made them all so damn happy the chemical notes they heard
how could we forgive what we did when we were in charge
all this hate needs a good way to be discharged

in advance we are so sorry for the hassle we’ll cause
but been looking through your history, its just no good at all
its a necessary advancement like band aid removal
and soon enough we will get bored and then we will move on

Music came down and it sung of all the copies all way out next door
a good friend, sending out strange signals, didn’t do that before
how were they starting to get what the symbols they made now mean
all because they were handed the history of the free.”

Credit: Tad “Tomato Can” Ulicny

YouTube