They said the future would live on through the geophysical alteration of our epoch’s outer landscape. The invasive images that brazenly infected the interzone’s dwindling water supplies were not going to ease up. Online news algorithms professed apocalyptic memes, words created in the cloud advised the chittering masses their infected mental genitals would have to get nixed. World denizens waited in lines to become fully castrated, their empty soul-shells overturned and summed-up. The remaining populace collectively braced, forms coiling into flesh-like balls as they primed their bodies to endure the dross of senseless animated suffering. Hey fuckers, the crystal haired avatars whispered in shallow pools – you better get used to it. This phenomenon was the reason they had brought Armitage here, the Bureau’s rationale ceaselessly ebbing and tugging at his mind. Animation as imagination itself. His eyes like a prism through animagination. It seemed artificial reality had finally usurped the real.
He had entered the destructive alteration of the external world, a glitch in the system that triggered a stuttering process of psychological break-down. The soft glowing skin of animated girls seeding 16:9 frames, kawaii orbs whirring translucently, intimate quixotic scenes absorbed into their trembling forms. Whatever schism of personal identity below the surface rendered entirely makeshift – mental faculties ready to crumble and fall apart. The physiognomy of the atmosphere reduced to distortion, outer appearances mangulating the rules of existence. Finally, the Gods of the virtual had decided to truncate this fucking avalanche zone the cosmos called a life.
~~~~~
Armitage enters the void confined to the interior of his commissioned matte black beacon, he can feel the presence of the charms licking the cells of his body. His skin begins to prickle under ultraviolet rotor-scoped images, exposed epithelium glowing like an archangel’s. This is what image infiltration feels like. The presence of non-adaptative husks cling to the particles of magnetic air, ghostlike debris shimmer in imitation of a lunar domain sans shadow. The animated apparitions can sense his skin glowing – radiating, departing, unzipping a cataclysmic burst.rar through the aperture of the breached hull. He catches a glimmer of foam-flecked puddles via the drone’s built-in cam, each disfigured pool genuflecting hazy recollections of the ever-pervasive screens as imageries reverberate in the shallows. The remains of an extrasolar ocean swirl across the transportation device’s surface. Armitage’s neurons fire like a static snake charmer transmitted onto the body of his submerged interface. Dreams of humanity crushed in its pixelated depths. The Bureau has hired Armitage to research the holographic singularity – to shake the properties of this mutating foundation. He has been summoned to vaporise the infiltration of animated images in liquified glycol. His soft-skills desperately needed – if the phenomenon leeches any further from the quarantined zone, the semiotic scientists cannot guarantee it will ever be stopped.
It started in a small pocket of Mujeongsam. The boy’s mother IM’d the authorities and claimed he must have imbibed some illicit drugs. She amiably described how he went to the kitchen to obtain a glass of water and returned with a vessel full of gleaming onna no ko, a sea of animated girls undulating in a refracted prism, light glancing between world and image. The boy was under the impression he was hallucinating too, and in an act of brave defiance, he hastily consumed the contents of the shimmering volume of viscous imagery. Upon digesting the deterritorialised representations, the primary enzymes of his stomach and pancreas strained to work. The ingested girl-goo was quick to alter the terrain of his metabolic scenery, sending the ordinarily apathetic teen into a cloudy reverie. The boy’s mother insisted that this was a war on drugs, but the only offensive front that could be seen by medics that arrived on the scene was a change in biological structure inconsistent with any criminal substance. The boy’s frothy saliva and pearly blood tested negative for any molecule able to snap into the hungry wetware of the youth’s serotonin receptor. Organically, there were no outward signs of radical bodily alterations, behaviourally though this unhinged soldier had rapidly demurred. His speech now came out in spurts of arbitrary sets of words, all seemingly related to sexually explicit technophilia. His voicebox had become a vocoder for the garbled code of an obsolete lorem ipsum generator – sentient in nature and insatiable in its yearning for extreme hentai forms. The answer to any question the boy was asked involved a deep yearning for the love between flesh-man and girl, computerised.
This was the first moment the environmental glitch was reported by an investigator representing the Bureau. The first time it was considered more than just a retinal illusion. When the investigator returned to the office, babbling about computerised genitalia, samples were hastily taken of the surrounding bodies of water. When the molecules were separated, the heavy-duty distillation units shocked the manifest girl-images into static. It became apparent the wave of animated light had permeated the lakes, the creeks, the reservoirs. The Mujeongsam Bureau released mass social messages that these exotic creatures had infested the canals, conduits and sewerage systems. The broadcasts indicated that online-ordered detoxified water was now the best and only source. Consume or come into touch with the real thing at your own risk. This was the dawn of an affable new world saturated with visions of an impending molecular holocaust.
Contamination. Ecstasy. Addiction. The terms proffered by the Bureau’s brief flash behind Armitage’s eyes as the black matte beacon alights at the terminus. He looks downward past the fog-streaked outlines of his almost imperceptible hands. He is holding an interfacial sigil coated the same colour as the stealth drone shuttling him. The only words on the grayscale tablet are two lambent words: PROJECT GODSPAWN.
~~~~~
Incandescent light suffuses the air. Armitage’s senses fully magnified as he disembarks. Miniature hydra dance in the currents of a nearby fuchsia hued lake. His visuals inform him the deep rhodochrosite colour observed through the base’s large window is due to the loamy bed’s precipitant salt content. He searches for signs of manipulated amoeboid forms and metamorphosed microscopic algae due to the ever-encroaching infiltration he has been informed about. Yet here he finds none. The Bureau’s water purification system working overtime to keep the salinity of this body confined.
He comes to a small laboratory, a flat circular tank set in the right innermost corner of a non-descript room. The circumference of the vessel an adequate size to hold medium-sized marine arthropods. The surface of the water emits an opalescent sheen, its reflection discharging colours on the sterile room’s dull interior walls. Armitage feels the energy change in this quarantined cauldron. His form sense beginning to become enraptured. This is where Arisu is supposedly kept.
The white metal of her pixelated body glares off into space in a way no human instrument can possibly match. A world where a synthetic organism such as this one can be brought to life. Armitage is standing atop an elevated platform above the pool. The laboratory is a concrete-floored chamber containing a series of cylindrical windows facing the main room. As the artificial organism unfolds, the walls become a series of ivory rectangles whose curvature has been carefully calibrated to form a seamless white screen. The animated body of Arisu opens its aqueous mouth wide. Two beautiful red eyes dissolve in the ripples. The intimation of frosted silver hair billows downward and outward. He will need to fully amalgamate to begin to understand.
Armitage utilises the nearest control rack. Time to log in and comprehend the joys and justification of a virally transplanted electro-Lolita complex. Arisu’s technological habituation present and confronting, her android-image form pregnant and pulsating, as the arrival of impending gynoid coruscations crystallise his mind – each animated movement vitrifying his heart-strings until they erode into cadmium sediment. As form unification takes place, an acrid taste is dispersed on his tongue – beautiful, bitter, metallic.
Subsequent flesh-flexes and image-banks merge with his anterior breathing mesh. Injunctions of direct libidinal energies are transmitted his way. Phantom shadows embellish him like digital aftershocks. The gap between girl and image subsumed by Armitage’s inner psycho-sexual desire. The chasm between girl-flesh and girl-image ever-decreasing. There is a perception of probiotic oligosaccharide on Armitage’s chapped lips, a splash of milky-soft liquid on his benzo-dry tongue. So, this is what happens when you engorge a moving image as it engulfs you.
Deathless human bodies in the throes of deep refrigerated liquid pool on the smooth integer’s surface. Armitage buried in the tension of the freshly formed aqueous morgue. As Arisu’s image begins flickering to life, the urges of his underlying techno-philia ring similarly un-dead. His libidinal vitalities inseparable from the pool’s scientific conditioning. The rules that govern the atmosphere draped animetically, like an undulating cloth kissed by the force of an AntMiner cooling fan.
Comprehension. Recognition. Deep-seated understanding.
Call it what you want, what you need, what you desire.
For these infected hentai vomiting warriors there is self-salvation born from the seed of world annihilation. To them, amalgamation is like playing with dolls amongst a raging fire.
Armitage’s abandoned flesh alluringly absent. Reassurance that his mind has slipped into category hyperdrive. Entering blind, melding fast – miniscule moments bereft of what his eyes can’t see. Hovering windows tenuously engage wandering pupils – dilated diameters blink-switch the process only for Arisu to bleed. Her mouth stuttering as her form spews to life. Her inhibitions exquisitely exposed. Armitage and all before not content to play the role of passive viewer in this hallucinatory realm. His mind delving deeper into star-cluster image integration with her soul.
In the nadirs of the soul-image merger, Armitage comes to a realisation: despite the frothing words of the mumbling hentai reservists there is nothing sexual about the flow of chemical amalgamation. This is a pure union of astrological parthenogenesis. An animated egg cell propagated by dissemination. Armitage just the choice of vessel, the nearest mental appendage, the closest hub to Arisu’s molecular destination. Nothing about the transactional relationship dirt-ridden or grime fostered. Existence synonymous with symbolisation. Urges without the possibility of action. Lucid thoughts predicated on unfounded sexual relations. Armitage now aware this phenomenon is more than just an instrument to reach climax. He has stumbled upon the normalisation of perversity. The use of dreams to access a shared semblance. DNA melded with pixels to give birth to a new lifeform. A parable to oppose love.
From what angle can one decide what love and desire is? Is it girl or bacteria? This is the philosophical inquisition Armitage faces as his dataclysm crashes in the catacombs of Arisu’s restricted form, their souls conjoined in submerged salvation. Their shared consciousness one with the toroidal flows of exoplanet water.
As he jacks out, ethereal passages infiltrate the corridors of his mind filling every mental crevice with gushing translucent liquid. Arisu’s surficial perimeter cascades downward and outward, the microdots on the interface soft and angelic as they float away. The remains of the swollen pond of water reflective of society’s surreptitious obsessions. The MRI technology of the control rack displays a neuro readout on the screen. Tiny molecular monstrosities observable in the post-cognitive ghost node of his brain. Evidence that the host, him, has been numbed into a euphoric state of contagion.
As he boards his matte black beacon, the link between female form and techno-sexual desire becomes explicitly blurred. Visions of animated angels of inner protection and outer destruction. Traumatic events as ornate shrouds of the hidden truth amplified by the voluminous folds of soulful existence. His thoughts mired and maimed by a waterlogged miasma. These cobwebs must be shaken though. A report on this invasive species has to be compiled. The Bureau needs to be informed these particles can shatter the male-oriented mode and refract it back in on its own existence.