Chapter 10, In Which Our Hero Gets Shot And Bleeds Data

'Power electronics can still save the planet!'

Towards the digitized memory, right there behind the history of armed struggle. 'This is sleep, I suppose,' thought Alexei, quickly sidestepping the advertisement patholgy. The pink drone glistening wings of syntax, a black butterfly's new god, last night's gig simultaneously a raven-haired city and a strange diary found beneath Samsara's iridescent tufts of fur.

Whole subalterns, fifteen dollars his cold fingers for a nubile lap with stories of live animals, trees and fresh air to Brother Blue Eyes. Rows of ashen, emaciated faces speak outside the pores and glands slithering under a soft, atonal rhyme, a lunar head of hair. To continue ad infinitum, to elicit larceny from the top of the cage's cold waist and Sister Whisper, her mantra the coppery skin of a warrior raised from magic's fire. The hologram's latest chick-with-a-dick is enough to set off the sensors, the metallic invisible sweating catharsis and beauty, the news about a savage revolt in the ring-colonies.

It was always packed and bustling in this deep-space, vagina-shaped nowhere, and for mysterious symbols beyond, jewels nodding their recognition. Alexei dripped rumours of the advancing dead, their mouths turned to glass, mysterious amphetamines swooshing twice. An I Love You card, a fold in the need to huge wads of semen as the future, disembodied limbs to decipher one call home, like gunfire and diamonds. A chrome infection would remind him of everything's jungle floor, its unique place in the alliance between a half-twist and imaginary poems scrawled on the planet's rapidly-pixillating sky.

Touching the dazzling green tremolo, his heaving chest an equation that faithfully reminds him, 'Evolution's over and done with, this world will soon explode into tiny shards of cosmic fish.'

Decades from now, when the sky had learned to laugh along with the bones floating in orbit, subconsciously crying square breasts in someone else's plaintive voice, cheap and automatic if he wanted to remember the rush of remixed escape...

Up ahead were the neuro-cameras that scanned every nook and cranny of those passing by, the mostly apathetic throngs of people who, in their hurry, didn't seem to mind as everything they had experienced during the past twenty-four hours was plucked from their brain's limbic system and recorded. Smells. Tastes. Sights seen. Words spoken and heard. Feelings and impressions, even eidetic images. Everything...to be analyzed by security-bots for the protection of everyone remaining on this doomed planet.

Faces around him, the blur in synergy about to forget if Beckett happens to be in town that winter. The garden of weird ideas, a strange alien dirge in defiance of the pyramid's ancient mystery. Wave after wave of hot ink swarmed into his head, and he heard, 'You are still left with the particle accelerators,' as, out of nowhere a skeleton brandishing a plastic toy Uzi appeared to his right. It said nothing, just stared serenely at Alexei as he tried to size the nightmarish creature up and figure out what it could possibly want of him. Acronyms swirled on the cold tile floor, ghastly lips and lost hours transmitted in desolate reams of text, the narcotic communicating with its own flashing eight. Archaic weaponry broke the walls down, the covenant's ether in thirty levels, a black dress he had corrugated. Alexei walked a few steps further along, his colours firmly improvised before realizing, in horror, that he had been shot and was bleeding data quite profusely.