breathe in
there are a lot of things i am angry about lately. the fact that the death of a professional athlete takes precedence in newscasts over the death of soldiers and innocents caused by an ineffectual man in a sorta round shaped room. i am mad that a school stops the educational process because two not quite star athletes, and most likely members of the elitist few lose their legs in a tragic yet karmic wreck while surely somewhere in those hallowed halls a meek child is beat because 95 percent is just not good enough. i am angry that people do not have the courage to face their fears (feers) and admit the problems that life has dealt them are indeed their fault when looked at from the angry bitter weathered trunk. i am angry at myself, for not standing up in the face of adversity and claiming the mantle that is mine, purple velvet and bloodstains and all. 
breathe out
i thought this picture was fun, and just more than a little hot.
ventilate
there are random visions in the place we go for the words, for the pictures. look into the flames and i will show you 4 worlds and 1 and a thousand pinpricks. look, squire. look
_
It is quite true that I despised the youth the minute he came through the doors. I never had much tolerance for worthless flesh.
The sentries that brought him in could barely hold back their revulsion as his blood oozed over their hands and arms. The wounds looked superficial, but those of us at the tower were not accustomed to any such display of gore, and usually the mere smell of it on the breeze from the southern arcologies sent some of the initiates running for their quarters. His body was limp in their arms, his eyes only half open, drool falling in silent strings of saliva on the stones of the foyer. A gurgling sound rumbled in his throat, more than likely the first sound in a thousand years to have been spoken by meat in these halls.
I remember the glances that were exchanged, the air of worry that trailed behind the boys feet as they dragged and skipped across that ancient and holy place.
No words were spoken. Few, if any, were among the initiates in the tower. Those of us that had earned the right to act freely mostly kept to ourselves, fearing that the knowledge the tower had given us would be corrupted by the perceptions of the other gifted. Taint was a threat that was ever constant, and those few who had been to the upper levels and tasted of its gifts knew that all too well. Benjamin told me later that when he saw the boy he made a silent prayer to the Engine to protect himself from the dark taint of flesh that was invading our sanctum. I looked to my partner, a simple thing that had been discovered in the wastes near Cormania, and with the steel of my eyes commanded him to ignore the scene and concentrate on our daily work.
_The mask was uncomfortable at times. Alone in the reception hall he longed to rip the molded synthetic from his skin, rip the nodes that had embedded themselves in his pores right out. He didn’t care about the pain, the blood. It would just be nice to be free again. It was iconic really. There used to be a portrait in the archives, a lone king surrounded by snakes and mists, lonely and abused on a golden throne with stone knots at the base. His head lazily is in his hands as he stares into the darkness beyond the painting, over the viewers shoulders, a future as false as the wisps of smoke that coil around his feet. He always admired that painting whenever father allowed him to wander the corridors on their trips to the lower parts of the dome.“That is your future,” his father used to quip, smiling smugly, as much as the reactive sythsteel would let him. The mask his father wore was different. Reds and blues flashed off the surface in certain lights, and in the dark it shone a sickly pink. The technology hadn’t quite been perfected and smiles and sneers looked eerily similar. He didn’t realize until he was thirteen that he had never seen his father’s face, but he always suspected that it looked similar to the foresworn king in the portrait. It wasn’t until the funeral that he found out how right he was, and how right his father had been.From somewhere outside there was a commotion, It didn’t matter now. Somehow, someway, he knew this day was coming, that he was coming.The night he put on the mask he had a vision. He was older, much older. The medicrats had warned him of the side effects of the nanotechnology, of the neurological damage and of the psychoactive nature of the chemicals they introduced. He sat on his throne, overlooking his empty kingdom through the guise of his hollow office. A flock of ravens flew above the dome, their cries ringing through the arcology. The domes were cracked, he remembered that the most, and the toxins of the great and terrible outside world were seeping into his locked lost land destroying all that he and the ones before him created, the lies and deceits and all to many lives that had been carefully structured and squandered in the name of progress. One of the ravens flew toward the dome, carrying that stench on its wings, that horrible decay of change and chaos that his line had feared for so long. The ravens beak shined silver, glinting in the dying sun of the domes.The raven was now at his door, had killed his Paiges.The gun at his side was no comfort, he knew instinctively. None of the pitfalls or traps that he had carefully had lain out in hopes of deflecting this moment.
_
the western tower has nothing at the top. i've been there.
_
three worldsets away, i can still hear him screaming. i always wonder, each time my skin burns and my soul twists, if that scream had fooled us all, if this was his plan from the very beginning. after all, if you can't be god, at least you can be moses.
he told me he had finished the machine on a thursday. i remember it well because the police had just found the third body, this one a woman. her face was a bluish hue with deep red lines cut in the cheeks that almost stared bloodlessly back at us when we laid her out on the table. i noticed right away that she had struggled, the hematoma patterns were all too familiar. her nails were ragged, her extremities twisted and purple.
'i brought the camera' tim called from the door. the detectives would want every inch on file. ashley still was having trouble calibrating the scanner, and i hadn't seen jonas in hours. we were like a hive, the murder and mayhem sent to us from the powers that be three floors above our nectar, the blind woman that overlooked market street our queen. yet in reality it wasn't really that exciting. it wasn't like the tv shows or the cheap paperbacks. you don't walk away from the comforts of your soulmate felix and don a set of scrubs transforming into a criminal investigating genius. most of the time you don't even get to see what your three hours of dissection and worship amount to until they leak it onto the internet or it comes up on a roundtable on court tv. hell, for 14 hours a day, we're lucky if we get to leave the room.
i remember this well. i remember too much.
i was getting the audio ready, and ashley had signaled that the scanner was up in between bites of a philly when jonas burst through the door from the file rooms he called home. "it's finished!" he proclaimed, a crooked madmans smile stretching from ear to ear.
we didn't pay attention. we should have.
_
did you see it? did you see the day the world died?
.......
nebulize
smashing pumpkins - eye
