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#experimental fiction
mack-anthology-mp3 · 2 months
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Debbie Urbanski’s ‘After World’
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Debbie Urbanski's debut novel After World is an unflinching and relentlessly bleak tale of humanity's mass extinction, shot through with pathos and veined with seams of tragic tenderness and care:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/After-World/Debbie-Urbanski/9781668023457
I first encountered Urbanski in "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried," an experimental short story on Motherboard's brilliant Terraform science fiction portal:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwvgeq/an-incomplete-timeline-of-what-we-tried
"Incomplete Timeline" is a list of climate remediation steps "working back from human extinction," like "increased military fortification of national, provincial, and state borders," "the founding of several utopias," and "redefine the word wilderness."
These items begin with a climax, or perhaps an anticlimax: "The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus."
This is the jumping off point for After World, which expands this final item to the action of a wrenching tale whose backstory is the list's remainder. Sen Anon – the story's semi-protagonist – is 18 years old when the world learns that every person alive has been sterilized and so the human race is living out its last years.
The news triggers a manic insistence that this is a good thing – long overdue, in fact – and the perfect opportunity to scan every person alive for eventual reincarnation as virtual humans in an Edenic cloud metaverse called Gaia. That way, people can continue to live their lives without the haunting knowledge that everything they do makes the planet worse for every other living thing, and each other. Here, finally, is the resolution to the paradox of humanity: our desire to do good, and our inevitable failure on that scor8e.
And so the Earth is converted to a place of mass suicides, as people gurn and mug while boarding airplanes filled with explosives so they can go out in a literal blaze of glory. The food will run out soon, and the government makes sure everyone has a suicide pill for the day when the hunger grows too intense. Not everyone is lucky enough to get on one of the suicide flights, and, being eager to see themselves off before they harm the planet further, just hang themselves in the garage or jump off a roof. They are counted as heroes, but also nuisances, because disposing of the bodies is a lot of work.
But some people – young people – are given a mission to live on for as long as possible. These are the observer/recorders who are charged to spend the last days of the species closely watching the return of the natural world, the seeing off of humanity, and to write it all down in longhand in a succession of notebooks that are taken away by drones. This is part of the story humanity cooks up for itself about extinction being a noble choice, rather than a chaotic act born of desperation.
Sen Anon is one of these observers, and her mothers take her to a remote cabin to live out (and observe) the last of humanity's days, ensuring she is settled in and then killing themselves. After all, without them, Sen Anon's limited food supply – meagerly supplemented by drones in proportion to the quality of the observations in her notebooks – will stretch further.
Much of the novel takes the form of Sen Anon's notebook observations, countersunk with an omniscient third-person narrator who is revealed to be [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc, a software agent involved in the project to recreate all those dead humans in the Gaia metaverse.
[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very unreliable narrator, who reprograms itself through the course of the story, all the while muttering asides to itself about the theoretical basis for telling Sen's story this way. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc struggles with a supervisory AI that has been charged with overseeing all the [storyworkers], but which can't – or won't – rein in [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc as [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows more involved in Sen's life.
This experimental storytelling style (supplemented by found texts from humanity's dying, like a glossary of terms to be retired and new terms being created by a linguist who is starving to death as they complete their task) creates a contradictory narrative distance and closeness.
It's a curiously flawed omniscience that's allows Urbanski to capture the yawning, bottomless horror of the climate emergency of today and on the horizon. I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of sustained, deepening existential dread that After World created, chapter by chapter.
To sharpen this, Sen's mothers – scientists who were given exceptions to the no-child policy because their work was deemed essential to the now-abandoned project of saving humanity – are grimly supportive of the mass suicide project. When Sen's own horror creeps up on her, her mothers are sharp and often unkind, with only the smallest flashes of love and sorrow for their daughter escaping their facades, all the more vivid for their rarity.
In contrast, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows ever more sympathetic to Sen and the rest of vanished humanity. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very convincing alien with motives and perspectives that are profoundly nonhuman, and yet, the compassion and love are unmistakable.
Of After World's two protagonists, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc might be the more relatable. It takes an alien point of view to truly see humanity's flawed glory, irredeemable and irreplaceable. If you reveled in the nonhuman umwelts on display in Laura Jean McKay's 2020 debut The Animals In That Country, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc will stretch your brain and imagination in similar ways:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/27/im-a-backdoor-man/#doolittle
After World is a book that goes hard. Pitiless, merciless and relentless, it takes you to the darkest depths of climate despair and reveals the indestructible beauty at our species' core.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/18/storyworker-ad39-393a-7fbc/#digital-human-archive-project
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loneberry · 11 months
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I’ve recently read Ann Quin’s Three and Susan Taubes’s Divorcing—two absolutely brutal experimental novels by 20th-century “metabolizers of misogyny” who committed suicide (to borrow a phrase a reader once used to describe Alejandra Pizarnik and Amelia Rosselli). You will often hear hackneyed literary critics and intellectual blowhards utter platitudes like “experimentation with the novel as a form ended with Proust” (swap Proust with Joyce—same sentiment). These books lay bare the vacuousness of such claims, for there was no shortage of experimentation with form during the postwar period. It’s just that books like Three and Divorcing passed quickly into oblivion and found no readership after their suicides. Of course there’s a double standard at play here: experimentation by men is a mark of genius, whereas with women it represents incoherence or incapacity—an inability to deal straightforwardly with plot, character, setting, etc, rather than a conscious rejection of those formal conventions.
Perhaps one day I will teach a class on water suicides as a kind of sequel to my Water and the Imagination class…
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therainbowfishy · 1 year
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Small Press Roundup!
As I was making my silly little 2022 book gift guide, I thought I’d round up some (teeny tiny, small, and medium) indie presses to go support this season and beyond. Small press books make especially great gifts since your book-loving friends and family are less likely to already have read them.
Enchanted Lion Books - Beautiful, unique, and translated picture books for kids and adults with more experimental sensibilities. I recommend the Chirri & Chirra books and Sato the Rabbit, A Sea of Tea.
Candlewick Press - If you’re a fan of Jon Klassen and the hat books (or Mac Barnett or Carson Ellis--the group behind the Picture Book Manifesto), you’ve already heard of this publisher, but they do make outstanding children’s books.
Small Beer Press - Speculative fiction fans, run over to Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant’s incredible, weird, magic book factory. I recommend In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan for the fantasy fans or anything by Elizabeth Hand.
Two Dollar Radio - Their books are cute in trim size and weird in content--the ideal combination. You can also join their tattoo club and get 10 free books. Their lobby/HQ/bookshop/cafe seems like a dream.
Hub City Press - Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with a focus on promoting diverse stories and underrepresented voices in the South. Novels are more conventional and historical. Good, bleak poetry and thoughtful, specific nonfiction.
Night Boat Books - A bit more on the esoteric side. Their books would be great for academics and poets and anyone interested in queer studies or works in translation.
Wave Books - A poetry press with gorgeous books and lit crit. I recommend Bluets by Maggie Nelson (her other books are published by Graywolf, keep scrolling).
Dorothy - A tiny feminist publisher of fiction or about fiction founded by author Danielle Dutton (check out Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark or The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington for some surreal, dreamlike times).
Feminist Press - Books with a focus on gender, sexuality, and marginalized voices. (Margot Atwell, publisher/editor, has a newletter On the Books, for publishing nerds out there who want to hear a fresh perspective on what’s up with this convoluted industry.)
Tin House - Eclectic--both literary and commercial. I recommend Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett.
Milkweed Editions - Nature lovers, these books are for you. Milkweed is also Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s publisher. I recommend Bright Dead Things and her newest collection, The Hurting Kind.
Graywolf Press - Want more Maggie Nelson? Or Carmen Maria Machado? Or experimental printing like Telephone by Percival Everett with its 3 versions? It’s all happening in the Minnesota literary world (I’m serious).
Coffee House Press - Also part of the Minnesota book group. Their books are on the experimental and readable side.
Catapult/Counterpoint/Soft Skull - These presses are sisters. You’ve definitely seen these books around--they do hit the bestseller list and are stacked in neat piles at all the best indie bookshops. Danielle Dutton’s (founder of Dorothy, mentioned above) book Margaret the First is published by Catapult.
50 Watts Books - Surreal reprints of older books in stunning colors; the curation of their bookshop is also impeccable and unique.
McSweeney’s - If you have a lowbrow/highbrow sense of humor and enjoy satire, these books are for you. They also publish the creative magazine for creative kids, Illustoria.
Nobrow Press/Flying Eye Books - UK based press for comic and bright color lovers of all ages. I recommend the Hilda series by Luke Pearson and Hicotea by Lorena Alvarez. Katie Harnett’s and Simona Ciraolo’s picture books are also wonderful.
Pioneer Works - This is the book intersection for art, tech, design, music, and science. I recommend Notes on My Dunce Cap by Jesse Ball for (arts) teachers or anyone interested in pedagogy.
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anonymous-witness777 · 8 months
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Unfinished manuscript, author unknown. Found in parking lot of [redacted] Reformed Church, [redacted]. Transcribed by [redacted]. Size: 8mm x 5mm
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I am Caterpillar woman I dress red and black bear fuzz to keep warm in winter. I am writing book. I do not good grammar because I am Caterpillar please forgive. My friends are: Pastordavid and earthworm. Pastordavid has no eggs or wife. Earthworm has wife but she very small smaller than me. Pastordavid very large like pinetree and scary with loud very scary voice but he show me writing and bible so friend. I show him eat dandelion and teach him dandelion story because he thought dandelion bad animal before he learned. Earthworm can’t read
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I live in Sunflower. It is big town with only me and earthworm and earthworm wife. It is yellow and green. Pastordavid read bible in morning he try to quiet but voice very loud. He try he sorry. We say, this okay we like bible even loud bible. He read for the director of music of the sons of korah a Mask. It long to me but earthworm cry because it say unfailing love. Earthworm always cry when it say unfailing love. He cry from happy not sad. Pastordavid ask us what stood out to you? He always ask. I say when it say, Awake lord. Is lord asleep do I wake up him is lord same as god? Yes lord same as god. Then Pastordavid say, but he doesn’t need waking up heis awake already just sometimes it feels like he’s asleep sometimes it really feels like that and it okay to say we feel. I say okay yes it is okay it is okay because Pastordavid crying. He cry from sad.
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This morning very large animals large as Pastordavid very many near Sunflower. They come they go. It happened before. They very loud and many feet very scary. I ask Pastordavid he say church. They come he read bible. They sing bible. Pastordavid say they nice not bad animals. I say he teach me like I teach him dandelion. He say first pastor gone he second Pastor they come sunday but they not many anymore.
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I learned new Pastordavid story. He sad because egg die. Earthworm tell me.
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 I give Pastordavid yellow blanket because now I know why he sad and cry when he read bible. But blanket too small for him it only cover finger. He say thank you it is a beautiful flower petal. I say it blanket it come from Sunflower. You mop up cries with it so you know it okay and god lord not sleeping. God lord made Sunflower very nice not bad animal. God unfailing love earthworm tell me god unfailing love. Earthworm tell me god lord cry very much when you sad. Pastordavid just cry he not say anything. I say I am writing book and I write you in it you are good animal and teach about god lord it not end yet. He just cry he say he know god has plan but what is it? I say we learn after book done. He say yes he still sad though. Then he say thank you Caterpillar. He put blanket on his eyes to mop very gentle because face large. He say I love you Caterpillar. I say I love you Pastordavid.
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fffartonceaweek · 8 months
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Sean McTiernan's SF podcast (is great) :
SFUltra is a show about a guy who hated science fiction until 2022 convincing himself he actually loves it, one book at a time. It is going pretty well so far. It gets published every two weeks.
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
RSS
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SFULTRA #10 - Ice - Anna Kavan
special 2 eps: Motorman / The Age Of Sinatra - David Ohle
SFULTRA #9 - We Who Are About To… - Joanna Russ
SFULTRA #8 - I, Vampire - Jody Scott
SFULTRA #7 - Babel-17 - Samuel R Delany
SFULTRA #6 - The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin
SFULTRA #5 - Camp Concentration - Thomas M Disch
SFULTRA #4 - Rogue Moon - Algis Budrys
SFULTRA #3 - Electric Forest - Tanith Lee
SFULTRA #2 - Doloriad - Missouri Williams
SFULTRA #1 - High Rise - JG Ballard
SFULTRA #0 - Why Science Fiction?
Patreon :
Perfect Taste Forever is a recommendation podcast about everything that isn't science fiction. It often features miniseries on a specific topic, such as:
Decoy Octopus - the concept of roleplaying
Fuck You - underrated gay novelists
Murder House Sold - true crime
.
.
His previous shows have included lengthy examinations of horror (Hundreds Of Dead Bodies), thrillers (All Units), found footage horror (Hundreds of Pixelated Dead Bodies), whatever I felt like (The Wonder Of It All and Calling All Units) and even old time radio (Kiss Your Ass Goodbye).
As co-host : Live At The Death Factory (Scum Cinema), Bodega Box Office (rap movies) and Self Pity (self pity).
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All Units feed :
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chelmnik · 8 months
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J.G. Ballard, ‘Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.’ from The Atrocity Exhibition
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zillanovikov · 6 months
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Most Famous Short Film of All Time is one of the best books I've ever read. Period, end of sentence.
I can't tell you why. There are books that burrow into me and change me as I read them. Vita Nostra did this too. VALIS did, thought I didn't love it the way I love the other two, it still burrowed inside my brain and laid eggs. I am a different person because I read it, and I am glad.
I'm not telling you about the plot. Why would I do that? It's not what happened in the book. Sometimes what doesn't happen matters more. Sometimes an absence is something.
It's on for pay-what-you-can. Go. Read it.
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winterandwords · 1 year
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📖 [short fiction] SMOKE
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Audience age Adult Genre Experimental/literary fiction Length 999 words
Through a journey paved with fragments of break-ups and breakdowns, scorched earth and burned bridges, a heartbroken lover finds a way to breathe again.
☕ If you enjoy this story and would like to buy me a coffee, you can do that here
📸 Header image, edited and displayed under license, by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
SIX MONTHS AGO
You whispered through tears, “I love you.”
ONE MONTH AGO
I stood next to my car with you, experiencing the dawning realisation that this was going nowhere. I leaned on the door and shuffled my feet as you said you couldn’t have made it this far without me, but it was too painful to be with me now. I pulled you back to when life was bad and you needed too much. A cut-throat reminder that I was enough for only some things.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that little moment, that you took it home and wrapped yourself in it, feeling a swell of pride for having broken the unbreakable.
TWENTY-NINE DAYS AGO
I found your cigarettes in the bottom of my bag. The pack was crushed. I smoked them, one by one, all afternoon until I could breathe again, the skylight open above my head. I quit smoking a year ago, but that pack, that day, was not failure or relapse. It was catharsis. I was disgusted, as much by how I still wanted you to want me as by the now unacquired taste of burning tobacco.
Lying on my bed in a haze of smoke, I remembered your smile, your eyes, all those clichés. How amazing for someone who forgets most faces in an instant. But there I was, my own eyes red-rimmed and dark-circled, skin pale, hair wild and lips bitten, picturing your particular arrangement of features with painful accuracy. I pulled my sleeves down over shaking hands with chewed fingernails and tried to hate you.
ONE YEAR AND TWO MONTHS AGO
The day we met. At work. I overheard you explode into a rant about how films and TV shows now were nothing more than remakes, reboots, reimaginings, sequels and prequels, how the whole entertainment industry had given up trying to climb out of its conceptual rut.
I knew right then that we had to be friends, so I spun around in my chair, uncharacteristically interrupting your conversation with a bewildered colleague, and said, “No-one’s brave enough to do anything that hasn’t already been mass-approved a thousand times over. Nothing’s new anymore and I hate it.”
You raised your hands in a gesture of praise and appreciation, then pointed at me and said, “See? You get it.”
ONE YEAR AND ONE MONTH AGO
You stopped at my desk, handed me a cup of coffee, and said, “I’m going shopping at lunchtime. You should come with me.” It wasn’t an invitation as much as a statement of fact. So I went. Because of course I did.
I wriggled into a dress I never would have chosen for myself, but that you decided would look amazing on me, and while I scrutinised my appearance in one of ten available mirrors, you looked me up and down and said, “You look stunning. Seriously. Stunning. You should wear things like that all the time. You should definitely buy it.” So I did.
You pulled off the sweater you’d been trying on and I saw the scars. I never asked. You never told me.
NINE MONTHS AGO
We went out to a club, and I wore the dress. Maybe it did look stunning like you said, but everyone was staring at you. Everyone was always staring at you. We shared a taxi home and arrived at your house first. You kissed me on your way out of the car and walked away without even so much as a glance over your shoulder, leaving me in shock with your lipstick smudged on my mouth.
EIGHT MONTHS AGO
You quit your job. You showed up at my door at one o’clock in the morning and said in a rare expression of vulnerability, “I’m scared you’ll forget me if you don’t see me every day. I don’t want you to forget me.”
I invited you in and made tea and toast while you curled up on the couch and told me about a recurring nightmare where a strong wind blew down the trees in your front garden and the roots tore the house apart as they ripped through the ground. You said you thought it might have had something to do with feeling like the house shouldn’t be yours, that you only got it in the divorce because your ex-husband had enough money not to care and just wanted it all to be over so he could get away from you.
You spoke of a gnawing sense of nostalgia for a time and a place that you were scared you would never experience, and how you were sure there was a word for that, but you couldn’t remember what it was.
You told me about your ex-husband and your father and how history always repeats itself and people always let it because they don’t know how not to. Then you told me how much you admired my strength and wished you could be like me instead of living in a perpetual state of emergency. You turned your face away from mine when you said, “I can’t look in the mirror anymore.”
I didn’t know what to say because I might have been steady ground, but you were an earthquake and I was quickly becoming addicted to the sensation of breaking glass and cracking walls.
You lit a cigarette and asked if you could stay. I said yes. Because how could I not? And how could I not want you to?
That was the true beginning of the tempest, the vortex, turbulent and wild. Ships shattering, thrown against rocks in the darkness of a storm and lifeboats swallowed whole. A collapsing tower, a wheel with spokes on fire, a red sky at night. A warning. A warning I completely ignored. I closed my eyes and let go. I let myself fall.
THIS MORNING
I got a voicemail from you. It said simply, “I gave up smoking. I thought you should know.” I deleted it. I hope you can finally breathe.
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thedreadmachine · 1 year
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HEY! We publish weird stories for free. You should read this one, like, right fucking now. It's pretty great. It's not really a story, actually. It's more like a list. A Christmas list from an interstellar POW. Whatever--you'll like it. We promise. (And if you don't, that's cool too. It's not like you had to pay for it, right? Our site doesn't have ads, and we don't want your goddamn cookies.)
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bronsonoquinn · 1 year
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Still one of my favorite creations. I forgot it's all available, free, online because the only link is in my hand-made XML sitemap.
I kind of wish I had an InDesign license again to do silly stuff like this:
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mack-anthology-mp3 · 2 months
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made another uquiz
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faintpress · 2 years
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Hello everyone: I hope to continue designing and publishing more books for many years to come. One way you could support me (and any of my collaborators) is by buying a book, writing a review, or spreading the word. 
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kathylbrownwrites · 1 year
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The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World by Mark Miller: A Book Review
New Book Review at The Storytelling Blog: The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World. @MontagPress #absurdist #bizarro #fantasy
The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World by Mark Miller. An absurdist science fiction/fantasy novel from Montag Press. Last October, author Mark Miller visited The Storytelling Blog to share thoughts on writing and preview his upcoming novel, The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World: A Romance Hotter Than a Thousand Suns. The lady plans to make their grand entrance on 11-22-22 (get it?),…
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ospreywhite · 1 year
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The Intentionally-Designed Creature
Other Works - Ask Box - EPUBs + Ko-fi - Discord - Twitter
If the most decorated, educated biologist in history—past, future, or present—was given the power to play God for the sole purpose of creating the perfect creature, what would they create?
They would first start with the skeletal structure. With the bounds of evolution’s randomness shirked, they would surely give the creature four legs paired with a slender, sloping body that imitated the structure of a cheetah, or greyhound: lithe, muscular, well-balanced, aerodynamic, criminally quick on all four of its legs. Its joints would be able to move on a full swivel, back and forth, hinged like a bird’s, preventing any pulling. The human spine, in all of its verticalness, is a poorly-designed contraption that doesn’t know what to do with itself, giving most adults back problems later in life. This creature will not follow in our suit.
Of course, this change immediately makes clear the problem with quadrupedalism: no opposable thumbs. Speed was what was sacrificed in humanity’s lineage for the sake of hands, the articulated, sinful things. While evolution constrained every living organism to be branches off of branches off of branches of trees, forcing a dolphin’s flipper to look much like a flat hand and a goat’s ribcage to look similar to a lion’s, active creation holds no such restraints. Therefore, the purported biologist would simply adopt a centaurian approach, sticking an extra torso on top of where the head should be, minus the head itself. This torso would possess a curved spine, shoulders, overlapping, flat ribs, and a pair of long, human-like arms, perfect for grasping.
The hands on these arms would have four fingers, mirrored vertically to have two thumbs. While functionally similar to human hands, instead of nails, they would grow retractable claws, thick and cat-like. The feet would more resemble a wolf’s, padded thick with insensate skin, flexible and small in area for less time spent on the ground. The claws on these feet would also be retractable, though paradoxically too large to fit much into their sheaths. Never would the creature want for self-protection, nor fail at climbing or sprinting or slashing. It would be the ideal warrior.
On the topic of protection, it would possess a tail equal in weight to the headless torso, short and heavy with spiked chitin, simultaneously weaponizing it and preventing it from being easily snagged. That same thick chitin would replace most of the creature’s skin, leaving only the joint areas exposed, and would contain pockets of dicyclopentadiene that could ‘heal’ the chitin when cracked. Like any good carapace, the chitin would eventually be shed, but in the meantime, it would defend faultlessly against all forms of damage.
The scant parts not covered in armor would be coated in reasonable amounts of hair, insulating it better than straight skin. This fur would further be coated in toxins, which originated in the extraction of toxic materials from its food, its thick stomach lining and abnormally potent digestive fluids processing the normally-lethal substances with ease. This defense mechanism is not meant to kill, only to dissuade potential predators. For any unlucky predators that could manage to kill one of these after a costly fight, its correspondingly-tainted meat would kill it to consume. The rare amounts of exposed skin would take on an amphibious quality, releasing UV-fighting melanin instantly, as opposed to after damage could have already been done.
The creature’s muscles would contain lower amounts of myostatin, and possess enough fast-twitch fibres to put a cheetah to shame, giving it a combo of strength and speed that few could beat. Much like felines, its nearly-perfect hunting predecessors, it is nimble, durable, and flexible, which extends to its head—yes, its head. The head, set upon the previously-headless torso, has only a long neck and a powerful mouth, filled with teeth that grow back when fallen out, far superior to the mammalian method of losing them forever. This head would much resemble an eyeless moray, with multiple jaws, to boot. All the best for grasping onto prey.
Its other senses of smell, sight, and sound would be a bit trickier for the alleged biologist. The nose could be made plural, with nostrils evenly placed along the skin. Rather than be limited to one set of each, its eyes and ears would be numerous, located all over its body in the spaces between its chitin and bones, thus giving it full coverage in all directions for accurate location of external stimuli. These eyes would be like an octopus’s, yet as sharp as a hawk’s, and those ears would be adorned with cones for enhanced range.
As could be comprehended, multiple sets of eyes and ears require multiple brains to process. A flaw of typical Earth brains is that they are centralized, meaning that if the head is detached from the body, the rest of the organism withers, dies, and rots. A better system would be to decentralize the concept of a brain, similar to how the internet is a connected form of various databases. All along the nerves of the creature would be nodes of brain cells that correspond to organs local to it. Each node would control a portion of the body in tandem with the other nodes, and in the event that a limb is cut off, the surviving remainder would be unaffected by the loss. No phantom limbs would ever haunt the creature until its advanced tissue regeneration replaced the lost appendages, a feature that would further leave a possibility for the creature to continue to function while missing most of its being.
This creature would not be a non-sapient animal, but plenty intelligent, its nodes hardwired for high memory retention. Its biggest nodule would not be in its mouthy head, but in its protected middle, hidden behind walls of chitin and muscle. This nodule would most resemble the human brain, yet be bigger. It would never forget a single thing it had ever seen, yet would also bypass the headaches hypermemory gives the unwashed. Furthermore, the creature would not have the capability to assume: about itself, about others, about the true, about the false, about the unknown, about the known, about the universe, about math, science, literature, and so on.
Everyone knows what is said about assumptions, everyone knows what is said about pride. It is that which divides and deceives, so why not remove it?
When it comes to talent, there is nothing this creature cannot do, easily absorbing all subjects and replicating them to their fullest. While it would be a strange-looking doctor, indeed, it could still be one, as well as an architect, writer, and barista all in one. There would be no such thing as finding an innate talent—to this creature, it is already innately talented at everything.
With its wisdom must come balance. Humans are naturally egotistical and prideful, something that is their eternal downfall, so this creature would be wired to be altruistic by nature, possessing no room to turn evil. Its emotions and thought processes would not quite work like how a human’s might, nor would its morals adhere to what a human’s would be. Things that had served humanity in its ancestry would be culled, all the pride and cognitive biases weeded out, leaving the scattered mind of the creature more open. To further the goal of this altruism, the biologist in question could let the creatures give off pheromones signaling their emotions; it would be impossible to ‘other’ others, then.
Psyches have inborn differences; that is true amongst all living beings. The mutations, variations, and endless recombinations of genetics are unpredictable, and unpredictability breeds possible undesirability. Since this creature would already be biologically perfect—any good biologist would not purposefully introduce defects into their creation’s genetic code—there would be no need for recombination, due to any subsequent mutations being likely to end up disadvantageous. Traditional two-party reproduction would therefore be thrown out the window, with asexual reproduction promoted in its place. After all, the children would have the same flawless genome as their lone parent.
The rest of their internals would also have to be rearranged. The creature could breathe while it ate, eliminating the possibility of choking on regular food. All of its blood vessels would be in duplicate, for safeguarding. The immune system would always properly gauge what is appropriate to defend itself against, never self-destructing over mere peanuts nor attacking the very body it inhabits. Due to being actively designed, that system would know of all possible diseases, and how to act accordingly.
With everything in order, the perfect creature would be whole. But would it be finished?
The biologist in question would ponder over this design. With the power they had, the creature would certainly function. But would it be without flaw? Would it be perfect?
They had the power to create, so why not continue to tweak it, as more ideas, things overlooked, design flaws come into their mind? This would not be left up to random chance, but with their own hands, after all. They could adjust, upgrade, throw out, alter, redo, enhance, rethink, add onto, remove, change, fine-tune… all ad nauseum. Never would they be done with their ideas, never would they sit back and relax, never would they shrug their shoulders and say, “This is as good as I can make it.”
Perhaps they would walk around in their day-to-day, realize flaws within themselves that they wish to fix, and then do so on their creation, thus living vicariously through it.
Perhaps they would do this infinitely, to the end of their life. They only have the power to make one new creature, after all; there’s no eternal life or anything like that.
Perhaps they wouldn’t name this being until they were completely satisfied with it, ready to release it into the world.
Perhaps one person looked at the creature they were making and critiqued it as ugly, an abomination. Now the biologist is afraid to unleash it as-is, becoming obsessed with refining it until it could not be critiqued at all.
Perhaps their vision would twist. They had sacrificed beauty for functionality before, but now they sacrificed functionality for beauty, then grew unhappy with that and sacrificed beauty for functionality again, then hated the design and did the reverse yet again, then reversed it again, then inverted it, then subverted it, then turned it upside down, doing this over and over and over and over again in an endless, vicious loop.
Perhaps there is a reason no one sapient has the ability to design reality just quite yet.
What a daydream it is, to create—or to be—the perfect being.
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matyas-ss · 2 years
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Le sang d'un poète (1930) Directed by Jean Cocteau Cinematography by Georges Périnal
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