Cut the sunset's achilles tendon! Cut the sunset's notochord! The
sunset invertebrate, some kind of jelly, some kind of plasmoid organism
with long stringers studded with stingers hanging upward in the cold
orange air of dusk, waiting to sting the planes that go by. The planes
are stung, repeatedly, but the homegoing commuters don't even realize
it because they're asleep or chatting.
The aliens lay in wait
The sun turned her back for a second; they struck!
They threw a bag over her head and dragged her west to Darknessland. In
an asbestos sack they dragged her kicking and screaming through
Schwärzungland to the drop off, the alien ravine, Glowstick Ridge. The
glowstick ride.
The "past": it's a kind of ride, people come out of that thing crying,
weeping, sobbing. They all see something different. They see friends
who've died, buildings now leveled, places now overrun with tiny
children and faces now overrun with tiny buildings.
More than that...more than that...they feel the atmosphere in which
they once steeped. There is a noticeable atmosphere to each of our
eras, like its own species of distinctive jelly. This is what you
touch, when the notochord arrives.
The notochord archive. The nanochord; the tiniest little sound that
pleases the nanoprobes. There's more nanoprobes on earth than people!
Viruses are actually alien machines, idiot...that's why they don't got
no DNA. They're nanobots from one of the many previous civilizations.
Nanobots amok!
Humans ain't supposed to be subject to death like random lottery
losers! We're supposed to disperse at a chime of our choosing. At a
time of our choosing, we stand on the hill in the sunset and spread
ourself upon the wind and slowly disappear. That's from mythology,
can't recall whose...
The past was sobbing on the ride. the past was quivering, fainted. The
past's bout with syncope, and the future showed up in a huge ambulance
and led the past slowly inside, shut the door and drove off sedately,
no lights or siren.
Overrun with tiny faces
The notochords remote
Notochords with tiny faces
Building some remote momentum
As civilizations disperse
Sorry, we were just trying to build
some authentic momentum