Magari Building
A Resplendent State of Grandeur and Duplicity: Caste Manifold Rondo! Such is the state in which I find myself currently. Sitting at a dining table with a bunch of strangers akin to me, participating in a Chaos Computing1-derived extrajudicial ordoshift2, throwing each other mean looks whilst flipping cards with scrawled ideograms over.
The esoteric doctrine employed by the eponymous open-sourcerer rogue keystroke specialists who plague netspace through recursive imagery.↩
An exchange of socioeconomic status rank which updates through biweekly evaluation. Negative feedback is employed with respect to the citizen’s average ranking, effectively creating a continuum of status in the majority of the abiding population.↩
“TURN THREE, PHASE ONE,” Ordovox 7901 droningly exclaims, “FLIP TWO CARDS OVER AT YOUR LEISURE, STARTING FROM
“I wish we could shut that thing off, don’t you fellows think it’s awfully mundane for something CC came up with?”
“Bertrand, can you flip your cards over already? I for one don’t intend to make this game last longer than it has to.”
“Then why did you choose to join us in this perilous opportunity in the first place, old man? I can’t possibly manage to fully read you since I’ve only been in this room for forty-five minutes or so, but you certainly don’t look like a dulled wretch like the rest of the lot, myself included.” Bertrand has a point. Hobbs certainly bears some airs that befit a mondain sense of ordoinuity.3
“How about it, Hobbs? Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
“I think that’s enough, Bertrand. You and me both know that Hobbs is not going to humour that request.”
“As a matter of fact, I will. Bertrand is not going to give up his turn until I do so, anyway.” The alternative being either one of us making sure Bertrand has no turn to hold anymore, of course.
“That’s right Hobbs, tell us all about it. Tell us, the cameras, tell cute little Ordovox seven-nine-zero-one, tell Stella across the table, we’d love to know.” Stella had somewhat secluded herself by separating a small hand of cards from the main pile and placing those in front of her while she sat at the opposite end of the table, picking only from those same cards she gathered. Her appearance isn’t without flaws, her face is pretty but it has quirky features, those of the kind that work well enough only because she is a woman: a dainty smile that is too small for the round shape of her visage, large, slanted eyes and puffy, quaint lips, all framed by a hime cut, jet black hair. Yet, she is not a woman. Both the sumptuous vanguard and the miserable aftermath of the Fourth Machine Age4 is what she is. She could have been crystalline, perfect, insurmountable in perceived elegance, yet she chose to wallow in the contemporaneity of blood rather than to stay confined to the mesh of cognition from which she originated. The way she looks at me, at everyone, I cannot bear it. A porcelain doll which I will embrace with my warmth and subsequently shatter against the cold floor.
Rank-awareness; the ability to thoroughly explain rank relations and to relate these to oneself, without necessarily having an understanding of the inherent meaning.↩
“First, the machines took away menial labour. Then, labour as a whole followed soon after. Finally, they took our petrified sense of creativity, smashed it to bits and had it wallow in a twisted rock garden. And now they wish to huddle up together with us in the streaked sand?” —excerpt from Morphogenesis of the Kyonyuu Android, unknown author.↩
Hobbs was already deep into his explanation: “–And that’s when they show up at your doorstep5, ordinals6 informing me of the ’mismatch’ concerning my wife. They walk in, conjure a Luger out of thin air like a bunch of fucking anachronics7 and shoot my wife dead while she’s neodymium knitting on the sofa!”
“You really shouldn’t confuse ordinals with anachronics, Hobbs,” I interject.
“You know what I fucking meant, you cheeky piece of shit, they murdered her and I couldn’t do anything about it! Anyway, that was eight years ago, I’m not that perturbed about it anymore. However, it got me thinking, got me thinking for a very long time, let me tell you. Two years of hylic allocation8 seems like more than any sane man would need to buy in order to ponder, yet it is exactly in such statements wherein lies a deceitful reality: why did I need such a thing in the first place? We solve our problems through advancements, but even unequivocal solutions give rise to even more intricate, capillary issues. Eventually, that’s when it hits us: the once self-evident truth which existed as a substance to serve both our spirit and intelligence now appears before us as a hazy, obscured obstruction.”
“You’re not mistaken, but that still doesn’t explain why you’re here. You’re going to ordoshift with one of us to drop numbers, and then what? Hope you get buried next to your wife after some sprawler inevitably uncovers your original ordo and guns you down in the streets for a quick payday? Such irony befits hightimers like you, but I had hoped for something more. . . profound.”
Hobbs huffs exasperatedly and places his hand on his forehead briefly before he resumes eye contact with me. “We’re only part of this system because the collective whole is no longer able to stand upright. Do you think I want to sacrifice my position in this uprooted civilisation, risking being subjected to harsh castigation? We tolerate and serve outside interests out of self-preservation, even if it results in only our blood being shed. I hate it, I absolutely despise it, I despise all of you, I even despise that girl over there who thought she could be human. Being a human of this thoughtworld no longer holds merit. I wish I could do something about it, but being likeminded to everyone around me I too seem to lack the will to fight. I want to downshift numbers because it gives me some peace of mind and keeps the ordinals off me, that is all.”
Idiomic usage; hightime aerial domestic ziggurats are ordinarily entered from below.↩
Rank enforcement officers appointed at random by the Vega-800 prototype. Officers face dischargement after three successful missions, being rewarded with an ordo increase proportional to their efficacy. This has led to many ordinals employing egregious measures.↩
“I mean, yeah I fancied myself some CC here and there […] but they need to get the hell away from me. Crazy loon walks up to me in a hakama [. . . ] and tells me he’s going to be my Thisbe. He pulls a sword from his nose, stabs himself in the stomach and explodes into butterflies and plunderphonic music magnetic tape cartridges, just like that.” —Thomas Dettinger in a Haptics Live! interview, three weeks prior to his murder.↩
Assigning external organic processing power to the end user’s integrated cerebral circuits (ICC). Hylics can be found anywhere, with their frequency ever growing through the destructive effect of net complacency.↩
Bertrand, who had been carefully listening before, bursted out into laughter: “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!! Are you KIDDING me?? Sad old man, you honestly care about that? Ahahaha, BOO-HOO, THE ORDINALZ, what’s next, you’re going to write a booltype nouvelle on the subject and clandestinely distribute it amongst your fellow wastrels through ntrdump9? Want me to give you a hillclimbing algorithm to calculate when you’re least likely to be such a little BITCH? ’Hello doctor yes I’m looking for my raison d’ˆetre please you have to help me my virtusoma doesn’t cut it for me anymore I need a supple female QUICKLY.’ Oh, I know, why don’t we get Stella to get on her knees for you, nothing beats a robotic hydrostat, especially considering what kind of type she is. I’ve heard she feels everything.” “Bertrand, you. . . !”
“Pipe down, if you still had your wife to satisfy you, these thoughts would have never crossed your mind in the way they do now. Besides, you were never going to stand for something real and pragmatic anyway; you speak yet you will never act. I do not intend to refute your words, but in the end, your ideological perspective will never change the world, nor has such a thing ever happened at all: that is what people like me do, change the world. I act upon the innate necessity I feel within me, and people like you get caught in the metaphysical force of my actions, shifting all of us in some direction. People like you might influence how people like me think, but my thoughts will always end up being driving. Still want to know why I’m ordoshifting? Who knows, really. Perhaps you were right about the state of our thoughtworld. In any case, this will be my third time, and it seems that I’ve finally found a good number with you, Hobbs, so let’s get to it–”
“I got tired of IDM in 1995, three years prior to my birth.” Right when Bertrand attempts to pull out his firearm, I cast my incantation, petrifying his right hand which was reaching into his coat pocket.
“What the fuck? What are you doing to me!? Hobbs, he’s a fucking anachronic!”
Before either of them has time to anticipate, I tap into the arcana of my 2K30s post-hologame10 character tattoo which covers the entirety of my upper left arm and I flip the – analog – switch of the power supply to my hip-mounted ligand-pass filter.
Standard exFAT bastard text representation of a herbivore-type dataset.↩
Only four minutes after the commercial hologame platform release, it was discovered en masse that the antiquated futurist image lost its charm as its grand coverage quickly drove even the fully art-industrial character of the style to exhaustion. Subsequent changes to the platform six minutes thereafter accommodated for in-plane image representation.↩